Rare Fiction Drops: Books in Space! (In a manner of speaking.)

[eloquentmess]

So over at reddit.com user /u/Starfire013 posted an incredible piece of fiction, and I suggest you all read it, then come back and finish reading my idea here.

I assume you've read the story by this point, so if you haven't, you're to blame for any spoilers that might come from what's next.

I think it would be awesome if there were an occasional rare drop or looped message that was a kind of "audio recording" (in text format) from a ship's databank. In the case of this story, it could be the audio recording of the man's final day, and it could be found in an abandoned or derelict ship.

In Skyrim there are books scattered all around with all different kinds of fiction. I think it would be awesome for building lore within the galaxy if we could write little "books" to be found in Elite, and it would be really awesome if the fiction were crowd-sourced. Maybe hold regular competitions for new recordings. I don't know. But it would be a great way to get the writing community involved in the game, and get more people reading about it!

 

[Amaze]

I like this idea!

 

[Danneh]

Awesome idea, and I'd expand it to most, if not all of the cargo drops you get from USS. For example, picking up a black box would give you an audio recording of the pilot's last moments, complete with ship warnings, missile impact sounds, the lot. Rebel transmissions would *actually* be rebel transmissions, and picking them up would give the option to hand them back to the rebels, helping avoid the chance of their incursion being stopped, or hand them in to the ruling faction to help intercept the plans. Similarly for military plans with the empire and federation. Rare artwork could come with images.

Implementing this would only take a little creative writing and modular design, similar to mission generation. The audio files can be generated fairly easily, would just require some voice acting assets. Pick from hull breach, under attack, out of fuel -> hull breach logs would end with the pilot slowly asphyxiating, under attack logs would have preset exploding, damage, laser fire, system failure sounds inserted randomly, out of fuel logs would be similar to hull breach logs, i'm thinking similar to the monologues in the film Gravity, almost philosophical in nature.

Activating (listening, reading or viewing) these could be done easily as well, in the cargo bay, just stop them stacking, so each is unique, and selecting them brings up an extra option "play" above jettison. Listening to a pilot's final monologue as I cruise away from the ship wreckage would be eery, and make me feel like the universe is still inhabited by real people, and not just spaceships.

Rare artwork would be a bit more difficult, because obviously rare artwork isn't rare if you find the mona lisa at two wreckages 100LY apart, so it'd require a lot of assets, but still doable IMO (crowd-sourcing anyone?).

Making these objects rarer (in non-mission play, i.e. only 1 rebel transmissions, not 6 - would also solve storing and handing in totally irrelevant rebel transmissions for other missions) and more expensive would reduce the development cost without nerfing the credit rewards.

So many little ideas like this would flesh out the game and get away from this notion that there's nothing to do but grind - and for relatively little development cost compared to creating truly explorable, functional planet landings and walking about ships/stations.