Reinvigorating Group Play: CG’s that play to the fanbase – Developing the Frontier (Part 3)
As we have evolved as a species, we have developed an innate desire to push the boundaries of the unknown. We wouldn’t be where we are today without those with adventurous minds…. The explorer. Space games, and this game especially, attract that type of person. There isn’t much left in the world today for the explorer… but there is the next frontier - space. Unfortunately for them, they are the middle children of history, born too late to explore the world, and born too early to explore the stars. For them, Elite: Dangerous will have to do
and all things considered, that’s not too bad. I don’t have to worry about actually asphyxiating. Right on!Normally I would say put more things out there to explore, up the content, etc. But I think Frontier knows that already OR is planning to do so. I want to point out here that there are certain CG’s or features that I know exist in part (because we have seen them in game... sort of) that I believe Frontier should focus on to tap into the explorer mindset of its player base. And it doesn’t actually involve exploring, but rather expanding the frontier, and giving a sense of a developing world.
Solution:
You have thousands of terraformable worlds in the immediate vicinity of colonized space. You have stations that can move themselves to new star systems. We have seen station construction already, Mercenaries Respite in the newly colonized system Sefrys is an example. I chose that CG, to build a new station because I believed it would inspire the player base.
It’s something the exploratory nature of the fan base calls for – build new worlds, new stations, and colonize new systems….. Even upgrade stations to be better ones! Develop a way for many of these to be running at once. It shouldn’t be too hard to make several templates, and once that’s done the appropriate systems are easy to identify. You could have many of these running at once.
Have segmented campaigns or CG’s so that there are several stages to building, upgrading or whatever. Lessen the grind of the CG, but spread it over several CG’s. I briefly mention this here. Colonized space will feel alive! I believe the community is far more interested in this than Frontier realizes. We’ve seen many of the other types of CG’s but few of these. I believe the player base would love these type of things, especially if it means something to their local area.
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