Making the narrative of the game broader and more involved (taking Thargoids as an example)

[cool_lad]

A big complaint with the narrative of Elite is that it feels a little too detached for most players. Unless you're there and actively participating, it may as well not be happening at all.

A prime example of this is the Thargiod invasion. What's supposed to be a massive and important event has turned into little more than a series of missions that you actively have to seek out and a bunch of signal sources that you can ignore. What should have been a big event turned into something really underwhelming.

However, I think that this can be easily changed even within the existing mechanics of elite. These are the ideas I've had:-

1. Make the various factions across the galaxy actually care about important events. Take the attacked stations for example; factions across the galaxy could offer missions to transport relief supplies to the stations or materials to help targeted systems prepare themselves.

2. Make related missions more common. For example, Thargoid killing (and other related) missions should be offered by all faction in affected systems instead of just the AEGIS megaships (which should also jump to the latest systems pointed out by Eagle Eye instead of staying in one place all the time).

3. Make factions actually care about events. Thargiod affected systems shouldn't just continue on with business as usual. This would create dynamic missions as people flee areas where Thargoids have started appearing and factions put aside their differences and try to fortify the system against Thargoid assault.

4. Make related activities both more prominent and better paying. Outbreak systems or famine systems (and systems around them) should have factions actively contact pilots to source relief materials for rep and rewards. Attacked stations should generate missions where nearby pilots are contacted by various factions with requests to head to the affected station and aid in relief efforts. All of these activities should also pay very well in order to indicate that these are things that the factions actually want done urgently.

5. Make relationships matter; factions on good terms with pilots should contact them of their own volition with requests to come and help with narrative related stuff; this could be anything from a combat pilot being called in to help defend the system from Thargoids or a trader being called on to help provide materials for damaged stations.

 

[Misty_Dark]

I like these suggestions, and that it should be doable using existing game mechanisms.

 

[Strangepork]

A big complaint with the narrative of Elite is that it feels a little too detached for most players. Unless you're there and actively participating, it may as well not be happening at all.

A prime example of this is the Thargiod invasion. What's supposed to be a massive and important event has turned into little more than a series of missions that you actively have to seek out and a bunch of signal sources that you can ignore. What should have been a big event turned into something really underwhelming.

However, I think that this can be easily changed even within the existing mechanics of elite. These are the ideas I've had:-

1. Make the various factions across the galaxy actually care about important events. Take the attacked stations for example; factions across the galaxy could offer missions to transport relief supplies to the stations or materials to help targeted systems prepare themselves.

2. Make related missions more common. For example, Thargoid killing (and other related) missions should be offered by all faction in affected systems instead of just the AEGIS megaships (which should also jump to the latest systems pointed out by Eagle Eye instead of staying in one place all the time).

3. Make factions actually care about events. Thargiod affected systems shouldn't just continue on with business as usual. This would create dynamic missions as people flee areas where Thargoids have started appearing and factions put aside their differences and try to fortify the system against Thargoid assault.

4. Make related activities both more prominent and better paying. Outbreak systems or famine systems (and systems around them) should have factions actively contact pilots to source relief materials for rep and rewards. Attacked stations should generate missions where nearby pilots are contacted by various factions with requests to head to the affected station and aid in relief efforts. All of these activities should also pay very well in order to indicate that these are things that the factions actually want done urgently.

5. Make relationships matter; factions on good terms with pilots should contact them of their own volition with requests to come and help with narrative related stuff; this could be anything from a combat pilot being called in to help defend the system from Thargoids or a trader being called on to help provide materials for damaged stations.

Employ a writer?

 

[CMDR Kyle Donovan]

Employ a writer?

This. Or, to expand a bit: A writer who can work within the limitations of the game engine AND the limitations placed by the higher-ups.

I had a suggestion for the Gnosis which would have ticked every box:

1: Don't jump it to cone. Misjump it to the nebula that the Distant Stars Expedition went to. The one-way trip that required neutron double-jumps, with no way back. This fulfills the "Cone's closed, Moose out front should've told you." requirement. This would have also given explorers a region that they could have all gotten their names on. It's not too terribly far from the bubble in galactic terms, so combat ships could have made the trip back.

2: Fill it with thargoids. This keeps the AXI faction interested, and attacks on the ship could have continued.

3: Do NOT make it a CG, but DO make it an event that everyone had to pitch in on. Mining, surface prospecting, exploration to find sites and caches from the last expedition, and harvesting Thargoid biotech in a desperate effort to reassemble some kind of one-shot FSD to get home. The Gnosis is then stranded where it is, unless a proper repair effort happens sometime in the future.

All criteria fulfilled. An adventure. A time crunch. An event that nobody else in the bubble gets to participate in. Cone isn't touched, AXI and explorers alike get what they want, a new community-building adventure occurs. And NO new technology or coding is needed. Just some copy/paste assets for Thargoid and maybe Guardian sites in the region. And that's not hard.

Please... Find someone who can understand the technical and the lore alike.

 

[howmanymexicans]

All great ideas from the OP. I often read through the suggestions section and think to myself "some of these ideas are SO good I literally cannot believe they have not been already implemented in the game"

Also yes, I agree with Kyle that sometimes the narrative could have been better thought out. in hindsight of course.
Considering these two ideas together I can only suggest that Frontier communicate with at least some of the community a little more before they partake in a big event. I understand They (frontier) often don't want to spoil the secret, but We (the community) really do have some fantastic ideas, and feedback, and we also make the best game testers (bring back beta testing! woot).

I am also a big advocate of some better narrative, although as Obsidian Ant points out, the exact definition of 'narrative' is a little sketchy. personally I would like to see some work put into chain quests, making them into mini story-lines that commanders can get involved in, and increasing in difficulty towards some final last mission with a special reward.

 

[ZeroAi]

A big complaint with the narrative of Elite is that it feels a little too detached for most players. Unless you're there and actively participating, it may as well not be happening at all.

A prime example of this is the Thargiod invasion. What's supposed to be a massive and important event has turned into little more than a series of missions that you actively have to seek out and a bunch of signal sources that you can ignore. What should have been a big event turned into something really underwhelming.

However, I think that this can be easily changed even within the existing mechanics of elite. These are the ideas I've had:-

1. Make the various factions across the galaxy actually care about important events. Take the attacked stations for example; factions across the galaxy could offer missions to transport relief supplies to the stations or materials to help targeted systems prepare themselves.

2. Make related missions more common. For example, Thargoid killing (and other related) missions should be offered by all faction in affected systems instead of just the AEGIS megaships (which should also jump to the latest systems pointed out by Eagle Eye instead of staying in one place all the time).

3. Make factions actually care about events. Thargiod affected systems shouldn't just continue on with business as usual. This would create dynamic missions as people flee areas where Thargoids have started appearing and factions put aside their differences and try to fortify the system against Thargoid assault.

4. Make related activities both more prominent and better paying. Outbreak systems or famine systems (and systems around them) should have factions actively contact pilots to source relief materials for rep and rewards. Attacked stations should generate missions where nearby pilots are contacted by various factions with requests to head to the affected station and aid in relief efforts. All of these activities should also pay very well in order to indicate that these are things that the factions actually want done urgently.

5. Make relationships matter; factions on good terms with pilots should contact them of their own volition with requests to come and help with narrative related stuff; this could be anything from a combat pilot being called in to help defend the system from Thargoids or a trader being called on to help provide materials for damaged stations.

+Rep

Great suggestions.

I've thought about a related topic quite a bit, and I'm mostly leaning towards FDev is unable to create a "personal narrative" using the current Elite engine. (not sure if this also effect creating a galaxy wide one?)

I mean, I think it should be do-able! But then I look at the Ram Tah mission that came in Beyond Chapter 1 and:
- The video could not be put in the game
- The four week mission expired in a week or less due to a bug
- And while the GalNet article had helpful links to the first three sites, they forgot to mention that you should first pickup the mission from Ram.

That doesn't make Elite a bad game, but it does seem like it is not able to handle a personal narrative.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

1. Make the various factions across the galaxy actually care about important events. Take the attacked stations for example; factions across the galaxy could offer missions to transport relief supplies to the stations or materials to help targeted systems prepare themselves.

2. Make related missions more common. For example, Thargoid killing (and other related) missions should be offered by all faction in affected systems instead of just the AEGIS megaships (which should also jump to the latest systems pointed out by Eagle Eye instead of staying in one place all the time).

3. Make factions actually care about events. Thargiod affected systems shouldn't just continue on with business as usual. This would create dynamic missions as people flee areas where Thargoids have started appearing and factions put aside their differences and try to fortify the system against Thargoid assault.

Yes. At the moment the Thargoid invasion is detached from the main BGS. I can see complications with integrating it (because of how states work) but it is probably necessary.

The AEGIS megaships do follow the invasions around, though.

4. Make related activities both more prominent and better paying. Outbreak systems or famine systems (and systems around them) should have factions actively contact pilots to source relief materials for rep and rewards.

5. Make relationships matter; factions on good terms with pilots should contact them of their own volition with requests to come and help with narrative related stuff; this could be anything from a combat pilot being called in to help defend the system from Thargoids or a trader being called on to help provide materials for damaged stations.

This is already somewhat in place - if you hang around in a system for a while the local factions will send you mission offers in deep space. You're more likely to get these offers if you're allied, and they do fit the outbreak/famine states of the system and nearby ones (to an extent).

 

[Ian Doncaster]

This. Or, to expand a bit: A writer who can work within the limitations of the game engine AND the limitations placed by the higher-ups.

Those are important limitations - but I also think the player base also wants to place further impossible demands on that writer.

The biggest problem, I think, is that players (not necessarily the *same* players for each demand - but major collective demands from large groups) simultaneously want:
- a good story
- the ability for their actions to make a difference
- the game to "respect their time" by not wasting their time preparing for A when actually B happens
These are three contradictory requirements [1].

A good story conventionally requires a plot with a beginning, middle and end. It requires characters who drive that plot forward. It requires the ability to surprise the reader, for the end of the plot not to be entirely predictable from the beginning.

Allowing player actions to make a difference to the story means the possibility that the planned end to the story will become impossible. Finding a different satisfactory ending can then be extremely difficult since the earlier stages have already been written and published. The more points at which player actions can make a difference, the more complex it gets to plot the story out in the first place.

And whether the 'twist ending' to the plot was designed in by the writer or forced on them by players doing something not predicted, the players who wanted the 'obvious' ending will be disappointed.

...

If we look at the Elite: Premonition story ... it had a beginning, middle and end. Player actions were incorporated into the story, but only once - right at the end - were they allowed to really affect what happened rather than details of how it happened. The player-caused ending disappointed a lot of people who wanted the other option. And then the forums exploded.

Or if we look at Jaques' misjump to Colonia: the plan to refuel him was player-initiated. Players contributed to the CG to do it. A few players then UA-bombed the station, making the original planned plot implausible ... a new series of events were written ... but there are still people bitter that he never reached Beagle Point.

Or there's the called-off (so far?) Duval-Rochester wedding. Just read the posts of people saying that whole storyline was a waste of time because the wedding didn't happen exactly as originally announced. How can you plausibly write a plot in which anything interesting happens if you have to honestly and fully pre-list all the events of the rest of the story in Chapter 1?

Or, not that it's a story - but arguments over whether players should be able to affect the experience of other players (Lockdowns, UA-bombing, government changes, etc. - I don't mean by directly shooting at them since that can be opted-out-of) are pretty much constant.

...

There's a challenge in telling a story through Elite Dangerous - it mostly has to be done indirectly: you get a few thousand words of Galnet articles, maybe some visuals, maybe some scannable beacons, and maybe some more indirect things like where and how stations are placed. A lot of it has to be done in subtext, which is tricky because a lot of people will miss that.

Indirect player involvement is fairly practical - CGs, or counting events in a more opaque manner as is done with the Thargoid attacks, or watching BGS events or aggregates. Of course, the scope of the BGS and related items means that much of the story needs to be highly insulated from the actual game to avoid constant derailing.

For what it's worth, I think whoever they've got doing the writing since 3.0 understands all of this and is doing a pretty decent job with the tools available. It's more in-game storytelling capabilities which are needed, not more writers as such. (Though, sure, more writers so we can have more stories on the go at once, that would be good too!)

[1] Frontier addressed this point directly in the Olav Redcourt Galnet articles, and made a similar point with the Andromedaries.

Don't jump it to cone. Misjump it to the nebula that the Distant Stars Expedition went to.

Interesting idea. I think there's problems which mean it would still have been a "forum exploder" - just different people shouting:
1) That nebula is quite some distance from Cone in a different direction. We've so far not seen any hint that a misjump or hyperdiction can send you that far off course. Similarly, when Distant Stars went out there they didn't find any signs of Thargoids ... so why should there be lots of them there now?

2) The consequences of the detention centre / NFZ issues would have been even more severe if you literally couldn't get back to it except in the very lightest exploration ship

3) Quite a few of the people on the original suicide exploration mission might well have felt disrespected if there was then an easy way to scan and hand-in data out there. I assume that's why the Gnosis *hasn't* been requested to go there already by players, even though it's perfectly capable of doing so in terms of range.

 

[space voyager]

I'm adding Obsidian's view on the topic.

https://youtu.be/mYF7xrn48Zk

As for my own opinion... I'd buy an expensive expansion that would add some sort of chained missions. I do not think Elite can have an overarching storyline for all to participate, but there can be a huge lot of short mission driven stories for us to take on. Those can have a lot of different mission types integrated into a single story, making the whole thing interesting and not repetitive.

The short missions can be linked to PP in some way.

Then there can be the stories for all. Similar to Ram Tah's missions, but involving several mission types that do NOT involve doing the same thing for 20 times. Those could reveal the game secrets, like Guardian scans do now, just in a more story-like manner.

 

[Sylow]

Yea. This is an aspect where FD really can use a lot of help. I like a lot of the game. I think they have really good coders. Unless many, I also think that their QA is not that bad. (Management might be another topic though, but that's not for this thread. )
.
But many things going on the the game could be so much better with some improvements on the storywriting. While many people look at the Gnosis now, I dare to say that CG, minor factions and especially regular missions, be they chained or not, could profit a lot from better writing. The current mission texts describe what you're supposed to do, but they carry very little agenda. All that's needed to get your bearings within the games mechanics is present, but live and feeling are missing.
.
So even just fleshing out existing game mechanics with some more narrative text would go a long way. And I don't even dare to imagine how the game would look like, if a more skilled writer would be included in design decisions, telling the development team in advance, which aspects they need to pay attention to and what things to give priority to when creating new content.
.
I believe that the game would be much better that way.
.

 

[CMDR Kyle Donovan]

Those are important limitations - but I also think the player base also wants to place further impossible demands on that writer.

The biggest problem, I think, is that players (not necessarily the *same* players for each demand - but major collective demands from large groups) simultaneously want:
- a good story
- the ability for their actions to make a difference
- the game to "respect their time" by not wasting their time preparing for A when actually B happens
These are three contradictory requirements [1].

A good story conventionally requires a plot with a beginning, middle and end. It requires characters who drive that plot forward. It requires the ability to surprise the reader, for the end of the plot not to be entirely predictable from the beginning.

Allowing player actions to make a difference to the story means the possibility that the planned end to the story will become impossible. Finding a different satisfactory ending can then be extremely difficult since the earlier stages have already been written and published. The more points at which player actions can make a difference, the more complex it gets to plot the story out in the first place.

And whether the 'twist ending' to the plot was designed in by the writer or forced on them by players doing something not predicted, the players who wanted the 'obvious' ending will be disappointed.

...

If we look at the Elite: Premonition story ... it had a beginning, middle and end. Player actions were incorporated into the story, but only once - right at the end - were they allowed to really affect what happened rather than details of how it happened. The player-caused ending disappointed a lot of people who wanted the other option. And then the forums exploded.

Or if we look at Jaques' misjump to Colonia: the plan to refuel him was player-initiated. Players contributed to the CG to do it. A few players then UA-bombed the station, making the original planned plot implausible ... a new series of events were written ... but there are still people bitter that he never reached Beagle Point.

Or there's the called-off (so far?) Duval-Rochester wedding. Just read the posts of people saying that whole storyline was a waste of time because the wedding didn't happen exactly as originally announced. How can you plausibly write a plot in which anything interesting happens if you have to honestly and fully pre-list all the events of the rest of the story in Chapter 1?

Or, not that it's a story - but arguments over whether players should be able to affect the experience of other players (Lockdowns, UA-bombing, government changes, etc. - I don't mean by directly shooting at them since that can be opted-out-of) are pretty much constant.

...

There's a challenge in telling a story through Elite Dangerous - it mostly has to be done indirectly: you get a few thousand words of Galnet articles, maybe some visuals, maybe some scannable beacons, and maybe some more indirect things like where and how stations are placed. A lot of it has to be done in subtext, which is tricky because a lot of people will miss that.

Indirect player involvement is fairly practical - CGs, or counting events in a more opaque manner as is done with the Thargoid attacks, or watching BGS events or aggregates. Of course, the scope of the BGS and related items means that much of the story needs to be highly insulated from the actual game to avoid constant derailing.

For what it's worth, I think whoever they've got doing the writing since 3.0 understands all of this and is doing a pretty decent job with the tools available. It's more in-game storytelling capabilities which are needed, not more writers as such. (Though, sure, more writers so we can have more stories on the go at once, that would be good too!)

[1] Frontier addressed this point directly in the Olav Redcourt Galnet articles, and made a similar point with the Andromedaries.



Interesting idea. I think there's problems which mean it would still have been a "forum exploder" - just different people shouting:
1) That nebula is quite some distance from Cone in a different direction. We've so far not seen any hint that a misjump or hyperdiction can send you that far off course. Similarly, when Distant Stars went out there they didn't find any signs of Thargoids ... so why should there be lots of them there now?

2) The consequences of the detention centre / NFZ issues would have been even more severe if you literally couldn't get back to it except in the very lightest exploration ship

3) Quite a few of the people on the original suicide exploration mission might well have felt disrespected if there was then an easy way to scan and hand-in data out there. I assume that's why the Gnosis *hasn't* been requested to go there already by players, even though it's perfectly capable of doing so in terms of range.

To answer the last three points:

1: We have seen evidence of misjumping that distance and direction before. Jaques Station. And with the handwavium applied to a malfunctioning hyperdrive, you could jump it ten thousand light years and just say "oh, it operated way beyond its design limits and broke" or "There was an anomalous interaction with the Thargoid hyperspace tunnel." Just because we haven't seen a malfunction do something like that before doesn't mean it can't happen. Just means we haven't seen it fail in that method before.

2: The Detention center/NFZ issues were bad, it's true. But if you were on the Gnosis, you could submit a support ticket and get sent back to the ship.

3: There were lots of attempts to be the first somewhere. Everest, the poles, the bottom of the ocean, the Moon... etc. But sometimes it took improving technology and techniques to do it. IMO, it's not disrespecting the previous people that tried and didn't make it back.

Expanding on the third point: I find it similar to George Mallory: the explorer who quite possibly made it to the top of Everest far before Hillary and Norgay. He didn't make it back down. George Mallory's own son, John Mallory, who was only three years old when his father died, said, "To me the only way you achieve a summit is to come back alive. The job is only half done if you don't get down again"