The Star Citizen Thread V10

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Its not hard to write 150 words x 7, or build up a bank of stories that bring in aspects of PP, its leaders, megacorps, superpowers at all levels, not just he said / she said. FD have a giant lore bible, why not actually use it?
Or maybe it's hard to do that all the time consistently? You know, people give you "great ideas" all the time. Usually they are ideas for a week or two and then they are out of them and struggle (props to those exceptional writers), especially when it has to aim to somewhere and not anger the players for various reasons you cannot predict (like failed marriage).

I wouldn't want to do it and I think I am a pretty good writer and thinker (I managed a DnD world session and progress for few years), because it's a massive pain in multiple different ways - in Elite as in SC.

EDIT: Also regarding that "he said / she said" part - have you ever looked at the news? May said this, Trump said this, your country's president said this... normal news are rarely about stuff actually happening on big scale.
 
Or maybe it's hard to do that all the time consistently? You know, people give you "great ideas" all the time. Usually they are ideas for a week or two and then they are out of them and struggle (props to those exceptional writers), especially when it has to aim to somewhere and not anger the players for various reasons you cannot predict (like failed marriage).

I wouldn't want to do it and I think I am a pretty good writer and thinker (I managed a DnD world session and progress for few years), because it's a massive pain in multiple different ways - in Elite as in SC.

EDIT: Also regarding that "he said / she said" part - have you ever looked at the news? May said this, Trump said this, your country's president said this... normal news are rarely about stuff actually happening on big scale.
I did like the way Elite rolled out the Thargoid plot. I hope Star Citizen do something similar. I'd probably just end up buying Squadron 42 though. The thing Chris Roberts is famous for is his plot-led games. I don't think Wing Commander 3 would have been as popular if it didn't star Luke Skywalker
 
Or maybe it's hard to do that all the time consistently? You know, people give you "great ideas" all the time. Usually they are ideas for a week or two and then they are out of them and struggle (props to those exceptional writers), especially when it has to aim to somewhere and not anger the players for various reasons you cannot predict (like failed marriage).

I wouldn't want to do it and I think I am a pretty good writer and thinker (I managed a DnD world session and progress for few years), because it's a massive pain in multiple different ways - in Elite as in SC.

EDIT: Also regarding that "he said / she said" part - have you ever looked at the news? May said this, Trump said this, your country's president said this... normal news are rarely about stuff actually happening on big scale.

So you are saying then, that a professional dev studio can't write (in a week with an ongoing game penned for 10 years) a side of A4 each week (minimum)?

That, plus having the Lore Bible™ to back you up which knows everything that will happen in the game (so you can prepare things ahead of time, especially since most of it is not player guided)?

You have multiple threads to draw from, the Club, cults, megacorps, powers, superpowers, aliens- mix that with real world inspiration from the real world via talkshows, news broadcasts, official statements. Maybe FD need to go to Oxford and have a chat with Rebellion and take inspiration from 2000AD about writing.

Take the recent nuclear cult- why not create some genuine impact and have the bomb be detonated? That then creates drama for players who can then help out. What if it was only the start of some sort of crazed insurgency? The potential is enormous.
 
If backers keep pledging he might be able to start his own real space company.

Can you imagine the clash of egos between Musk and Roberts?
Would be worth it for the videos promising Warp Drives, Transporters, Energy Weapons and finally the campaign to sell plots on Mars would've been epic.
 
The backstory to ED has pretty much been thrown in the bin, whatever it was. Lore has been recut to a point where a lot of people simply don't care about it. We get 3 stories a week with massive gaps, no backstories on important corps or people.

Original Elite had an amazing instruction booklet and a novella to go with it. This put some pretty epic context in to what was a relatively limited game (due to technological restraints).

I... have kinda given up on what ED is doing now, but I think that this is partly due to the MMO components. It's very difficult to apply lore in an ongoing format as new mechanical changes to the game can break previous lore. A single-player game has a start point and (usually) and end point so an actual story can be written.

SC has a ton of lore, but nothing to "actualize" the lore. Civilization in their universe was able to build a city-planet (ala Trantor/Coruscant) in multiple decades, yet they still have people mopping floors. In of itself, this doesn't have to be an issue. In many ways the Dune series or the Neuromancer universe also had many unrealistic components, but they had other things going for them. SC on the other hand feels like an a bunch of different concepts awkwardly glued together to maximize ship/JPEG sales.

Yeah, agree. Dune #1 was basically all lore and Neuromancer introduced a whole number of concepts (to a western audience at least). Whatever unrealistic components were consistent in-universe and this is what makes them believable.
 

Goose4291

Banned
Dune #1 was basically all lore and Neuromancer introduced a whole number of concepts (to a western audience at least). Whatever unrealistic components were consistent in-universe and this is what makes them believable.

I somehow suspect that If Chris Roberts had written Dune (and that was the lore behind SC) people in this thread would be pointing out the shai hulud sized plot holes and broken concepts the first book is based on.

And I say that as rabid Dune fan.
 
When ED started it had a 'spine' of lore that had a convincing story to it. With that, it had player submitted articles as a supplement. Then that went dark, and now the pattern is for small self contained Galnet articles that go nowhere at all three days out of seven. IIs have very little support from Galnet, and Galnet itself (the biggest tool FD have to give us information) is criminally underused. Stories are not funny, tragic, informative- they don't refer to earlier times except for the biggest of plot points, they don't fill in gaps in lore, they are two dimensional, directionless and paper thin. And when they do have something interesting they throw away any chance of coherence or interest by taking the most mundane route to finish.

Its not hard to write 150 words x 7, or build up a bank of stories that bring in aspects of PP, its leaders, megacorps, superpowers at all levels, not just he said / she said. FD have a giant lore bible, why not actually use it?
The problem with ED stories is that they dint reflect in the game world. Once too many times a story place would be visited and it was just another place like everywhere else. Story-telling is nice and all, but when you do it in a game context, it needs to exist in the game world too. So ppl just stopped caring - there is no point to it in the game.
 
The problem with ED stories is that they dint reflect in the game world. Once too many times a story place would be visited and it was just another place like everywhere else. Story-telling is nice and all, but when you do it in a game context, it needs to exist in the game world too. So ppl just stopped caring - there is no point to it in the game.

So what about the codex and rumours? If a rumour pops up after a Galnet story you know its legit, with an FD breadcrumb to follow. This is not hard stuff to conceptualize.
 
When ED started it had a 'spine' of lore that had a convincing story to it. With that, it had player submitted articles as a supplement. Then that went dark, and now the pattern is for small self contained Galnet articles that go nowhere at all three days out of seven. IIs have very little support from Galnet, and Galnet itself (the biggest tool FD have to give us information) is criminally underused. Stories are not funny, tragic, informative- they don't refer to earlier times except for the biggest of plot points, they don't fill in gaps in lore, they are two dimensional, directionless and paper thin. And when they do have something interesting they throw away any chance of coherence or interest by taking the most mundane route to finish.

Its not hard to write 150 words x 7, or build up a bank of stories that bring in aspects of PP, its leaders, megacorps, superpowers at all levels, not just he said / she said. FD have a giant lore bible, why not actually use it?

Mike Brookes used to wear the 'Head of Fiction' hat, as described in this old Meet the Team article (for those who have tuned in recently). I think his other role, Executive Producer, grew to take up all his time, and I'm not sure who wears the Fiction hat now.

It isn't hard to bash out 150 words at a time, as demonstrated by our many forums, but it is a full time permanent job to place them within a multi-year narrative and remain consistent, engaging and stimulate gameplay. Dunno if SC has someone in that role either.
 
Mike Brookes used to wear the 'Head of Fiction' hat, as described in this old Meet the Team article (for those who have tuned in recently). I think his other role, Executive Producer, grew to take up all his time, and I'm not sure who wears the Fiction hat now.

It isn't hard to bash out 150 words at a time, as demonstrated by our many forums, but it is a full time permanent job to place them within a multi-year narrative and remain consistent, engaging and stimulate gameplay. Dunno if SC has someone in that role either.

With planning its not though, if FD use the lore bible it would paper over a lot of cracks. Having it would actually justify spoken Galnet which just sits doing nothing most of the time. SC will need a lot of lore to hold it together but if it has it, it will tie a lot of bits together that might otherwise be disparate.
 
I somehow suspect that If Chris Roberts had written Dune (and that was the lore behind SC) people in this thread would be pointing out the shai hulud sized plot holes and broken concepts the first book is based on.

And I say that as rabid Dune fan.
If Chris Roberts had written Dune, the series would have consisted of a 600-page introductory chapter that ultimately failed to introduce anything, and all of it would be a poorly ripped off mishmash of misunderstood ideas from Huxley and Wells.
 

Goose4291

Banned
If Chris Roberts had written Dune, the series would have consisted of a 600-page introductory chapter that ultimately failed to introduce anything, and all of it would be a poorly ripped off mishmash of misunderstood ideas from Huxley and Wells.

That wouldn't be Dune then, would it?
 
Take the recent nuclear cult- why not create some genuine impact and have the bomb be detonated? That then creates drama for players who can then help out. What if it was only the start of some sort of crazed insurgency? The potential is enormous.
This is what I meant by overblown expectations in my original post. Imagine the bomb gets detonated - now you'll have the game (forums, etc) flooded with people saying it should be visually and mechanically presented within a game, so suddenly you need to make changes in your game, engine, mechanics, have few devs on it, etc.

The same is with the failed marriage I mentioned - people didn't dislike it because it was boring news, they dislike it, because they expected it would give them goal (EDIT: As I can see even in your post, "players who can then help out"), create some galactic conflict, etc, basically change the sandbox game into a narrative game like Witcher or AC - but that's a huge load of work. Is it doable? Yes, but then we wouldn't get any game development, because there'd be no people left for it, so you'd get other players disgruntled that Elite gets no new content and "the game is dying".
 
This is what I meant by overblown expectations in my original post. Imagine the bomb gets detonated - now you'll have the game (forums, etc) flooded with people saying it should be visually and mechanically presented within a game, so suddenly you need to make changes in your game, engine, mechanics, have few devs on it, etc.

The same is with the failed marriage I mentioned - people didn't dislike it because it was boring news, they dislike it, because they expected it would give them goal (EDIT: As I can see even in your post, "players who can then help out"), create some galactic conflict, etc, basically change the sandbox game into a narrative game like Witcher or AC - but that's a huge load of work. Is it doable? Yes, but then we wouldn't get any game development, because there'd be no people left for it, so you'd get other players disgruntled that Elite gets no new content and "the game is dying".
Welcome to MMO games. Could have told them before if they had asked. Is not like it a new invention.
 
If backers keep pledging he might be able to start his own real space company.

Can you imagine the clash of egos between Musk and Roberts?
The sad thing is that with a Falcon 9 launch at <$60mil and Falcon Heavy at $90+ million - a clever set of payloads (not Orion or the Lunar Gateway) could have a Moon Direct (based on Mars Direct by Robert Zubrin) started and underway for the sums raised to date, or the unmanned precursors at least....
 
That wouldn't be Dune then, would it?
Nah. Dune is a cornerstone of 20th century sci-fi writing. Whatever Chris would produce would at most be a cornerstone in making sure your sideboard is temporarily propped up and standing straight until you can have the legs adjusted. Also kindling.
 
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Touched :D

I stayed away from their heretical tomes. :D

I read most of it, for my sins, and hated what I was doing to myself every second. I finally managed to break out of it, but I lost a hefty amount of sanity in the process. Needless to say: the knowledge that both hacks are involved in the newly commissioned "The Sisterhood" series that will accompany the new movie doesn't exactly fill me up with confidence...
 
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