What about some specific missions with a storyline, maybe Friendly NPCs flying and battling with us and some RPG like options in the powerplay for example? And around the Thargoids too. Just to make the things a little more "alive'? Don't know if anything like this alread was discussed, i'm new in the foruns; but i tough that it was a valid idea to mention.
Story missions?
- Thread starter jambock
- Start date
LOL CGs.
Just more cargo missions with a quota. And then POOF, the stuff is done. You get A or B, or a new toy somewhere.
If they were building a station or megaship somewhere, I'd expect to see the said object in various phases of construction or completion as the CG milestones were passed.
But no.... it's just sending stuff to a station and looking at the CG progress on a page in the station's status screen.
They don't even have a variety of missions for the CG other than delivering items A, B, and/or C to location X.
Yeah. Stories.
More like one page of text and description.
What exactly should a story mission be? In my mind a story mission is a handcrafted story, where a person or a group is hiring the commander for a intricate personal agenda that spans over several missions, like for example:
example// "Commander please find my daughter, she run away. I think she has hid on a passanger ship set to Harma. The ship has just taken off, please bring her back to me!" First possibility would be to chase the passanger cruiser and use hatchbreakers to extract the cargo, where the girl was hiding. Second possibility would be to chase the ship until Harma and find a contact there, that has seen her being captured and sold to a surface base. You then would have to rescue her by raiding a base and hacking the terminal for the prisoner cells. Once the girl is freed, she has her own agenda. Next to being chased by pirates, the girl tells you about her sotry and another adventure would open, until this is solved and the story can be concluded.//
I get that it is a problem to seed a lot of different handcrafted storylines accross the bubble, since the bubble has far over 5.000 different factions in it. Either the storys where copy/paste and that wouldn't be exactly "immersing". Or it would create to much inbalace, since systems (or factions) with story missions to them would be overrun by commanders. This could impact the BGS in unwanted ways I guess.
But there still could be story missions linked to the navy progression, since these would be personal missions not affiliated with any specific faction or location. And there could be sporadic story missions generated from your crew. Those could be procedual generated and pretty random littel storys taking part in random parts of the bubble. This wouldn't throw balance off to much I hope.
example// "Commander please find my daughter, she run away. I think she has hid on a passanger ship set to Harma. The ship has just taken off, please bring her back to me!" First possibility would be to chase the passanger cruiser and use hatchbreakers to extract the cargo, where the girl was hiding. Second possibility would be to chase the ship until Harma and find a contact there, that has seen her being captured and sold to a surface base. You then would have to rescue her by raiding a base and hacking the terminal for the prisoner cells. Once the girl is freed, she has her own agenda. Next to being chased by pirates, the girl tells you about her sotry and another adventure would open, until this is solved and the story can be concluded.//
I get that it is a problem to seed a lot of different handcrafted storylines accross the bubble, since the bubble has far over 5.000 different factions in it. Either the storys where copy/paste and that wouldn't be exactly "immersing". Or it would create to much inbalace, since systems (or factions) with story missions to them would be overrun by commanders. This could impact the BGS in unwanted ways I guess.
But there still could be story missions linked to the navy progression, since these would be personal missions not affiliated with any specific faction or location. And there could be sporadic story missions generated from your crew. Those could be procedual generated and pretty random littel storys taking part in random parts of the bubble. This wouldn't throw balance off to much I hope.
ED is not that kind of game - arguably (hand crafted) story missions in themselves generally tend to make the games feel stale after a while if done in the traditional RPG fashion. Story based missions are overrated in a product like ED.
That being said - all missions are arguably story missions as they are in general in support of and in response to the BGS. There are chained missions (identifiable by the link chain icon) which are generated in response to completing some other missions and thus in essence form a kind of story that you may be able to follow (lack of mission giver faction rep can hinder participation).
There are (and have been) various events of varying significance organised that we can participate in - Community Goals/Interstellar Initiatives are the most common and least frequent versions of this.
Ultimately, the efforts of a single CMDR are not in general that significant and the lack of significance and pace of change is a necessary compromise due to the single shared universe state.
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There are a few places in this game where some story based mission would fit The main places where these would make sense is Imperial and Federation naval rank. As as you progress the "missions" to gain more and more ranks, we get a story told as we progress...
I am also aware that several players do not really care for this sort of things, so simply let them skip all the cutscenes where the story telling part is happening, and we store these cutscenes in the codex for later viewing.
Then we have other big stories to tell, all the Powers in Power Play and how they got to develop their own specific powerplay modules/weapons.
These story mission would be as optional part as the current mechanics to unlock this stuff, meaning, you only have todo these if you want to unlock it.
This would also give options to actually bring the player around to visit systems that you have unlocked etc, visit tourist beacons etc.
Confining story mission to these kind of stories removes the issues of procedural generation.
Tip of the hat to all those mentioning a Naval career, what I’ve wanted since SLFs have been in the game is basically Elite’s version of the X-Wing/Tie Fighter campaigns - sign up with the Navy and off you pop in the style of multi crew to do some exciting story stuff. The amount of conflict regions in the bubble would mean handcrafted missions could just have their area names changed to fit, so even though we would essentially be playing the same missions, they’d still be a bit customised.
Higher ranks would mean flying with wingmen and eventually, if you wanted, moving into big ships.
An old game called Starshatter: The Gathering Storm did this really well.
Higher ranks would mean flying with wingmen and eventually, if you wanted, moving into big ships.
An old game called Starshatter: The Gathering Storm did this really well.
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