Elite: Dangerous has a great deal of lore and history to it, but you wouldn't know that when you play it. The systems have bare bones descriptions but no sense either of the history of the systems and worlds, or their place within the political context of the Galaxy.
This is a shame because there is obviously a commitment to the lore in terms of the regular updates on Galnet. It certainly goes a little way to bringing the galaxy to life, which is what the game ought to do. But the systems can seem very similar after a while.
It would be nice, then, to have a bit more information about some of the systems. There are 400 million so it would of course be very difficult to create stories for each of them.
But we already have some lore. There is a timeline here, written in 1992: http://www.dream-ware.co.uk/frontier/books/gazetteer/ and it gives details about several systems that we can see in game. For example, I could currently visit Anlave without any idea that it was founded by a team of experimental horticulturalists, or their story. The info pages for Lave, Zaonce and Leesti etc give the same two-liners from the original game but there is space for so much more.
So I propose a few things that would be reasonably easy to implement without redesigning the game (I imagine).
1. Use existing lore resources such as the descriptions of systems from previous games to expand the relevant INFO pages in the Galaxy Map. This would need to be a precis of some of the information and should be no more than 200 words long so that it fits in the space available. This would simply mean amending the text file and I really can't see why it would cause any coding problems.
2. Add a 'System History' menu tab within the Starport Services option for selected systems. This would contain the full version of the history of the system and it would be a reward for players who had actually bothered to visit the place, encouraging explorers.
That in itself would be a quick way of adding significant content to the game which would help bring the universe alive. There is something to be said for making that information relatively scarce - if only a few places have detailed descriptions then it makes them seem more special, and encourages players to visit those places.
And this should also be done for the official Elite fiction that is on sale. I would suggest you get the authors to write entries for the systems they use in their novels, with the added bonus for them of a name check for them and their novel - few authors can turn down the prospect of a bit of self-promotion.
But it would be nice to generate further content, more histories for more systems so that somewhere like LHS 1663 or BD+69 58 C1-27 could feel more alive than places that have been randomly generated by a computer.
You could hire a writer to do this - I'm currently available - but you could also do this by crowd-sourcing the content. I'd suggest that after all the existing material had been incorporated into the game, you hold a competition among the player-base to find a dozen or so historians who can deliver copy of a high enough standard so that it can be fed into the game. These players could be paid 100 credits a word to deliver 250-word Info descriptions and longer 'System History' entries, along with the kudos of a credit at the bottom of the entry. Naturally someone at Frontier would need to act as editor but that's a simpler task than generating everything yourselves from scratch.
This is a shame because there is obviously a commitment to the lore in terms of the regular updates on Galnet. It certainly goes a little way to bringing the galaxy to life, which is what the game ought to do. But the systems can seem very similar after a while.
It would be nice, then, to have a bit more information about some of the systems. There are 400 million so it would of course be very difficult to create stories for each of them.
But we already have some lore. There is a timeline here, written in 1992: http://www.dream-ware.co.uk/frontier/books/gazetteer/ and it gives details about several systems that we can see in game. For example, I could currently visit Anlave without any idea that it was founded by a team of experimental horticulturalists, or their story. The info pages for Lave, Zaonce and Leesti etc give the same two-liners from the original game but there is space for so much more.
So I propose a few things that would be reasonably easy to implement without redesigning the game (I imagine).
1. Use existing lore resources such as the descriptions of systems from previous games to expand the relevant INFO pages in the Galaxy Map. This would need to be a precis of some of the information and should be no more than 200 words long so that it fits in the space available. This would simply mean amending the text file and I really can't see why it would cause any coding problems.
2. Add a 'System History' menu tab within the Starport Services option for selected systems. This would contain the full version of the history of the system and it would be a reward for players who had actually bothered to visit the place, encouraging explorers.
That in itself would be a quick way of adding significant content to the game which would help bring the universe alive. There is something to be said for making that information relatively scarce - if only a few places have detailed descriptions then it makes them seem more special, and encourages players to visit those places.
And this should also be done for the official Elite fiction that is on sale. I would suggest you get the authors to write entries for the systems they use in their novels, with the added bonus for them of a name check for them and their novel - few authors can turn down the prospect of a bit of self-promotion.
But it would be nice to generate further content, more histories for more systems so that somewhere like LHS 1663 or BD+69 58 C1-27 could feel more alive than places that have been randomly generated by a computer.
You could hire a writer to do this - I'm currently available - but you could also do this by crowd-sourcing the content. I'd suggest that after all the existing material had been incorporated into the game, you hold a competition among the player-base to find a dozen or so historians who can deliver copy of a high enough standard so that it can be fed into the game. These players could be paid 100 credits a word to deliver 250-word Info descriptions and longer 'System History' entries, along with the kudos of a credit at the bottom of the entry. Naturally someone at Frontier would need to act as editor but that's a simpler task than generating everything yourselves from scratch.
