Make Follow-On missions useful and special in some way or don't have them

[Quantis Trap]

90% of the time for me, follow on missions are only worth a laugh, because they are completely random and not at all special in any way.

Most of the time, Follow-On missions are as special as if you busted your butt on a project and turned it in ahead of schedule and your manager says good job and since you did so well, I'll let you get me a coffee, oh and empty my trash on the way out.

Please make them more special and or related to the mission you just completed or remove them.

Thanks

 

[thelion]

Fully agree.

They do lack any compelling reason to complete them and are usually worth peanuts anyway.

 

[Arioch]

I had high hopes when chained missions were first introduced - I though they might be like doing small side-quests as per other games, a small story playing out over the course of a few missions.

The first one I got was like, “Thanks for delivering that stuff for us, now we want you to go and massacre all these people” - U wot m8?

 

[aRJay]

The fact that most follow on missions are rubbish or inappropriate sort of ties in with my view of missions. Why would these people be hiring in commanders like us to do this work rather than have their own employees do it much cheaper? They have to be trying to distance themselves from the activity which is probably unsavoury or illegal or dangerous or any combination.

 

[Stabby_Dave]

Also, follow up delivery missions pay peanuts and always seem to be 100kls away.

 

[Fake Newts]

When I first heard about follow-on missions I assumed they meant supplementary steps added directly to your comms panel in-flight, the thing is if you're going back to the station anyway a follow-on mission is then functionally identical to just... taking another mission? Especially if the rewards are the same/worse.

 

[Chaparral]

I am grateful that we have them, it is a step in the right direction. An unfolding personal story is a good thing in a sandbox.

If they offered tips on mat caches, or weird things like fat reputation boosts, or ship bling - I'd feel like an insider with the mission giver. I'd be smoozing everywhere.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

There was briefly a time when there were multi-step missions on the board, and then they largely got separated out into these optional follow-on ones.

Were the multi-step ones just not popular?

 

[Quantis Trap]

There was briefly a time when there were multi-step missions on the board, and then they largely got separated out into these optional follow-on ones.

Were the multi-step ones just not popular?

That and buggy I believe.

Several other competing space games (current and past) have must better mission systems! Of the current ones, X4 and NMS have must better mission systems for instance. A much better mission system is something I like even more than having an FPS in the game.

 

[RamirezKurita]

In their current incarnation, I don't quite know what they could do with the follow-on missions without simply rewriting half the mission generation algorithm.

Specifically, missions (and particularly the chained missions) suffer from a very "top down" development approach where the system was made to just churn out missions ad nauseam without consideration to why those missions exist. There's no reason behind the missions, no grand conspiracies, no story to be told, they are just missions. This follows through to chain missions, as they can't have any particular nuance to them as they can't continue a story that hasn't even been started.

In order to make chained missions actually tell a story, they first of all need to significantly improve the foundations of the BGS in order to give a "why" to every mission and occurrence. If a faction is issuing a mission for pilots to source a commodity, why are they doing that and why couldn't they just rely on the commodity markets? For a pirate massacre mission, what's going on that would require a mission rather than simply relying on normal bounty hunters; is there a particular set of pirates who recently escaped justice or has there been another faction financing pirates in the system?

Ideally, chained missions wouldn't even need to be made explicit as there should be a narrative connection between them. If you are tasked to source some synthetic reagents to a station without being detected, then asked to clandestinely deliver some nerve agents to another station, then it wouldn't take a genius to put two and two together. These implicitly chained missions could even come from different factions, as then another faction in the nerve agent receiving station could offer an urgent source and return mission to deliver advanced medicines to counteract the effects of a "local terror attack from an unknown source". These missions could then be made branching for the player via some kind of in-game communications, as they could tip off local authorities as to the source of the attack, or even just hand over the nerve agents to the station's authorities, all with different potential outcomes and effects on the BGS for various factions in the system.

 

[Schmack]

I feel like some of the chained missions were left out of the consideration meetings when raising the rewards. I don't recall ever taking one while enroute even though they have been offered. I'd like to get a request that causes me to change my plans. I'm not going to steer away from a 40m Cr pirate hunt to run down someone for 1.2m.

 

[Several Puffins]

That and buggy I believe.

Buggy makes for unpopular. I never try those rescues any more.

X4 and NMS have must better mission systems

X4 maybe. NMS?? Ha, no, its mission system is a terrible, buggy mess, with the minor upside of having no penalty for abandoning a mission because, say, the person you have to hand it in to is 20ft under an indestructible building. Luckily, missions barely matter to NMS and it has a lot of other areas to recommend it.

 

[Vadim Kleitsin]

The 'Take 2-3 tons of this thing we produced with the 1 million credits you gave us' missions were pretty good in my opinion back before the rebalance. If you were in a good system, you could stack a couple of other deliveries with them and the 2-3 tons takes up some of the cargo space that otherwise would be too small to take another mission normally.

I've ended up doing massacres a lot and once or twice the pirates offer me an alternative contract: Kill a bunch of passenger liners for about half of what the other guys are paying me to kill them. This is before we factor in any bounties or manufactured materials as well as the non-mission targets I can also shoot up in a HazRes. Additionally, I've done a few massacres and gotten a follow-on assassination mission with the flavour text apologising for needing to send me out again but telling me that my actions led to the mission givers discovering the identity of a key pirate they need me to take out. This actually makes some sort of sense and I suppose the scan missions I never do also make sense as well.

 

[Vadim Kleitsin]

ignore this, screwed the edit, is there seriously no delete button?

 

[NMDGeist]

The mission system is really held back by this insane narcissistic fussing over credits per hour and how you're permitted to make the most possible. It doesn't actually matter, in any way shape or form. Period. There is no player economy and credits are completely and utterly meaningless for anyone but the newest of players, who at any time can just go into solo and get as many as they want risk free with enough time to invest. Frontier would be wise to acknowledge this and just start making missions rewarding proportional to difficulty. Maybe like the recent CGs award already engineered modules for long follow on mission chains. The fine details of which in regards to flavor can be worked out later once a good system is in place to get people actually wanting to do them in the first place so it isn't wasted time and effort developing them further.

 

[Several Puffins]

The 'Take 2-3 tons of this thing we produced with the 1 million credits you gave us' missions were pretty good in my opinion back before the rebalance

It was almost always biowaste. I felt like I had payed a million credits for someone to throw a party in my cargo hold, fail to find the toilets, then tell me that cleaning up after them was an opportunity.

I loved it.

 

[Sole Trader]

The 'Take 2-3 tons of this thing we produced with the 1 million credits you gave us' missions were pretty good in my opinion back before the rebalance. If you were in a good system, you could stack a couple of other deliveries with them and the 2-3 tons takes up some of the cargo space that otherwise would be too small to take another mission normally.

Agree with this statement, before the rebalance there was a reasonable financial incentive to take them on, now that they are only worth about 1 or 2% of their original value they are just a waste of time. I mean only 10,000 cr to take whatever 120,000 ls or more just isn't worth the effort, unless of course you're already heading that way.

 

[Vadim Kleitsin]

Agree with this statement, before the rebalance there was a reasonable financial incentive to take them on, now that they are only worth about 1 or 2% of their original value they are just a waste of time. I mean only 10,000 cr to take whatever 120,000 ls or more just isn't worth the effort, unless of course you're already heading that way.

Indeed. I was taking the donation missions to quickly grind reputation to get Federal Navy ranks and the 1 million credits I gave could often be recouped in the 1.2 million-ish payout from the follow-on delivery. Of course, not every donation leads to a follow-on mission. Though in hindsight I should have probably gone with the rep+++++ reward options.

(I was new)

 

[Jmanis]

When people asked FD for follow-on missions, i don't think they meant "do a mission, then get offered a similar mission back at the station... rather they wanted a "after you scooped the black box from salvage, get offered the opportunity to hunt down the pirate who destroyed the ship... or go recover the treasure cache this ship was looking for before it met its demise. "

We used to have missions which did that, but they were to a fixed template, and my biggest grievance was the wrinkles and extra bits only ever offer credits, not extra influence or rep or mats.

But with scenarios, all the mechanics are there to have procedurally generated content where you start with a single mission, and get a forking, procedurally chained set of events which offers rewards as each new leg is generated on the fly. That's what FD need to work on and flesh out.... (and why I'm unenthused by odyssey... since that's patently not going to give that experience)