I love the fact there are thousands of minor factions.
Wouldn't 20 minor factions with a lot of depth, make more sense than thousands with no depth
Give us a few more months. We'll get there sooner or later.
Sincerely yours,
Communism Interstellar
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Rarity doesn't offer depth, neither handcrafted but copy pasted missions. Stop looking for WoW, it isn't here.
Deleted member 147460
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Having less minor factions would allowing Frontier to provide more depth the those factions in the way of a more detailed description at the very least. Right now, the minor factions get two sentences or so worth of background information. I'll use one of the Democratic govt. minor faction descriptions once again, "Members of this group are actively engaged in the promotion of a democratically approved political agenda." Now, what is that agenda? We don't really know because the game provides no further description. And what happens when two Democratic factions affiliated with the same major faction go into an "election"? What are the political issues? Who are the candidates? No one knows because the faction descriptions are so shallow. Given so many different minor factions have the exact same two to three sentence description, there is already a "beigeification".
In Star Trek, the Federation governs hundreds of different worlds, in Star Wars the Galactic Empire rules approximately 1.5 million different worlds. In sci-fi (or the real world for that matter) it is perfectly reasonable for factions or governments to have a huge sphere of influence.
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When it comes to procedural generation, there's no difference between the workload for creating 200,000 vs simply creating 20. The problem isn't the number of factions, but the minimalist BGS that doesn't produce enough detail in said factions. In fact, it could be argued that with more factions in the game, the procedural generator is more likely to throw out a few extreme edge cases that produce the variety that people are wanting, while having fewer factions doesn't give sufficient rolls of the dice to produce this variety.
Deleted member 147460
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I tried my best to follow your main point(s) so I could address it but I mostly give up. My argument is quite simple, having less minor factions that are hand crafted (there is no need for procedural generation if you only have 20 or so) would allow Frontier to provide detailed descriptions for those minor factions, thus giving the player more potential motivation to support one over the other. That's it.
It has occurred to me that what I may really want is just a bunch of major factions and to do away with the minor factions. Of course, the Devs can't even be bothered to provide a detailed description of the major factions in the game either.
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There may as well be 20 as 200,000, for all the difference there is between them.
The US has rather more than two political parties - at least five that I've heard of from the UK, probably some more localised ones which don't make the news over here. Many people support none of them, of course.
It also has a *lot* of big corporations. Remember that they count as minor factions too.
Several major and minor religions, for some theocracy factions.
Some prisons, so there's the prison colony minor factions.
etc. etc.
If you map the USA to Elite Dangerous you get:
- two *superpowers* (the Democrats and the Republicans), to which thousands of minor factions are affiliated either directly or indirectly (plus a whole load more independent minor factions)
...or alternatively you could look at it as...
- the Federation, with two Powers (Hudson and Winters) with control spheres encompassing a range of minor factions and some Federal minor factions outside the power control spheres.
Deleted member 147460
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If I may, in the U.S. you can find out the values and ideology of all of those minor factions, in addition to the policies of various corporations and such so one can decide which one you want to support, if any. In Elite Dangerous, you can do no such thing. You get a two sentence description, that's it. This is the problem in my view.
Handcrafting content very much goes against what ED is all about though. Even going back to the original Elite, the entire galaxy was actually procedural as there wasn't space of the cassette to actually hand-craft everything, so DB had to code a minimalist galaxy generator instead. ED's entire premise during kickstarter was all about the power of procedural generation, combining a high budget, modern understanding of procedural generation and the sheer power of modern computing to create a massive game world, taking those concepts that DB pioneered back in 1984 and escalating them up to what modern code and hardware are capable of. ED's premise was never about creating a galaxy, writing a story or crafting characters, it's about creating a vast galactic generator to do all those things, with the players being variables to contribute to the writing and evolution of this galaxy.
The problem is not procedural generation itself, the problem is that the generator is minimalist and/or incomplete. If you want to see what a procedural generator is capable of, I'd suggest that you look into Dwarf Fortress. DF is a game made by a single developer which is quite notable for its in-depth world generation, which goes all the way from plate tectonics all the way through to simulating the lives and histories of notable individuals, with conflicts happening due to personal differences of leaders or simply ethical differences between the empires. Many players enjoy simply generating worlds and reading up on the stories contained within them, creating famous tales such as Cacame, the Elven King of the Dwarves.
Deleted member 147460
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There is plenty of hand crafted content in Elite Dangerous. The Major factions are hand crafted, several notable discoveries on planets are hand crafted, the alien sites and ships are hand crafted, etc. That said, if it were possible to have thousands of procedurally generated factions that have the depth I am looking for, I would be fine with that (I'm highly skeptical). The heart of my gripe is indeed the lack depth to those factions. How it is achieved I don't actually care that much.
For now, whenever I read "Members of this group are actively engaged in the promotion of a democratically approved political agenda." I will continue to wonder what that agenda is. Do you know what it is? No, no you don't and neither do I.
For now, whenever I read "Members of this group are actively engaged in the promotion of a democratically approved political agenda." I will continue to wonder what that agenda is. Do you know what it is? No, no you don't and neither do I.
Absolutely agreed there. At the moment the government types affect:
- which trade goods are legal
- which outfitting options are available
- what types of conflict the faction has [1]
- if the faction is Anarchy type, other legal matters
- what missions are offered
... but when it comes down to it one Federal Democracy is much the same as another Federal Democracy. Twenty would be too small, but you could probably cover every combination of government, economy and superpower with a few hundred.
A Dwarf Fortress-style procedural paragraph setting out the aims of each faction - and ideally tying it to particular inter-faction alliances and enemies, minor adjustments (e.g. this Dictatorship really likes Coffee, that Theocracy bans Geological Equipment, a Democracy which has better than normal outfitting for Power Distributors at the cost of being slightly worse at everything else, etc.) and so on ... that would be really good. [2]
Player minor factions might have to assemble their paragraph (and therefore pick their unique factors) from pre-built components, to avoid giving Frontier a mass of extra translation work for free text.
What it comes down to, I think, is that the original spec for the factions was as *background* - something to have some temporary states show up and add a bit of variety to the universe, something to vary outfitting and market data a bit - the idea that people might get attached to a name and a one-sentence description and try to support it just wasn't there. So adding all this on is going to require a significant change of direction ... which I would certainly hope happens.
[1] Strictly this is controlled by a separate variable, but for almost all factions (possibly all factions outside the Colonia region?) this is correlated perfectly with the government type.
[2] One tricky bit that might be less obvious: that sort of procgen text is really hard to also translate into multiple languages, because you don't just have to translate all the inputs, you also have to basically rewrite the sentence-writer entirely for each new language. And for 80,000ish factions it would require a *lot* of source text to make them properly unique.
As far as I know, the 20,000 factions were introduced to provide depth across the systems in the bubble.
You need someone in a system to run all these stations so the random name generator generated four factions per system.
From there, over the three years that the game has been running, the factions in a system have expanded and contracted as the BGS got manipulated.
These NPC factions provide something for the casual commander to interact with.
Frontier made the decision to allow Player controlled factions to be introduced to supplement the base build.
Player factions is where the uniqueness will come from.
Some factions will grow, some wont.
Some will head towards the centre of the bubble, others will head outwards.
Some will aggressively go after other faction territory.
It has definitely given me a hook into the game and something to work towards.
I think that the only change I would want Frontier to make would be to allow Player Factions to replace the lowest influence NPC faction already incumbent in a system.
Keep the volume, just change NPC to PMF mix
You need someone in a system to run all these stations so the random name generator generated four factions per system.
From there, over the three years that the game has been running, the factions in a system have expanded and contracted as the BGS got manipulated.
These NPC factions provide something for the casual commander to interact with.
Frontier made the decision to allow Player controlled factions to be introduced to supplement the base build.
Player factions is where the uniqueness will come from.
Some factions will grow, some wont.
Some will head towards the centre of the bubble, others will head outwards.
Some will aggressively go after other faction territory.
It has definitely given me a hook into the game and something to work towards.
I think that the only change I would want Frontier to make would be to allow Player Factions to replace the lowest influence NPC faction already incumbent in a system.
Keep the volume, just change NPC to PMF mix
I'd say they should go beyond simply adding in a paragraph for each faction, but also add in a half-dozen notable NPCs for each faction, each with their own personalities, skills and goals. These NPCs would then provide much more human faces for the players to get attached to (as a player could then be loyal to an ideal or an individual, not just to a faction), as well as providing the tools for further procedural developments for the galaxy as these NPCs can then begin to drive the story and alter the course of galactic developments.
Procgen text shouldn't require too much work initially, as initial setups for it will likely involve short, concise sentences to describe particular facts about the faction. This would be made much simpler because internally the factions are likely to be assembled out of a load of slider variables and the occasional tick box or multiple choice option, which lends itself well to basic descriptions like this.
They already have those - 6 for each faction as mission issuers, a few more for passengers, and I think a couple of other more obscure ones.
Now they just need a basic personality adding (though if they got to be 1-dimensional the Powerplay leaders might object to being outdone)
Even so, I wouldn't underestimate it. Doing it well - even at this restricted a level - I think could easily be "headline feature" levels of work.
I wrote a procgen galaxy generator once - basically inspired by the original Elite one and the Dwarf Fortress "history generation" style, to give unique(ish) descriptions for a few hundred systems. ... It took a week or so of programming and two weeks of thinking of interesting text lines - just to get one language, on a much smaller scale, without even thinking about the implementation and balance of the in-game effects.
And BGS changes need to be made cautiously. Lots of people are attached to their factions despite the thinness, and even seemingly minor changes can have substantial effects. It's only relatively recently got to the stage where it works reliably in its basic state.
The mission issuers are just a name and a face. Technically, they are NPCs like I suggested in the strictest sense, but there's no personality for any of them, they are just a mouthpiece for the mission generation algorithm. The tiered system of them, how the one you deal with depends on your reputation, would also be at odds with giving them goals and personalities, as sometimes a player might want to push the faction in a very different direction by supporting a particular character.
I agree that any real BGS work of this calibre could easily be headline feature level, on par with things like planetary landings. Despite the amount of work involved, I feel that it could produce much more actual gameplay than most similar investments, as it encourages players to think far more about what they are doing to the galaxy, giving both player groups and roleplayers much more to sink their teeth into. This would also help PowerPlay, as they could each have loyalties towards different powers depending on how closely their personalities and goals align with them and not simply based on superpower affiliation (although superpower affiliation would still matter, particularly depending on said NPCs loyalty to their superpower).
That few weeks work might seem like quite a lot of work, but from the sound of things you were working alone, and not necessarily on it for 30+ hours a week (it sounds like it was a hobby project from your description, but I could be wrong there). If there was a small team assigned to it rather than a single individual, working over a period of months rather than weeks, obviously the amount of content and code would be higher. I don't know how many coders and writers they have over at FD, but for a headline feature I'd expect a small team to be dedicated to it for several months. In fact, unless you are some kind of savant at coding, I'd say the fact that you were able to get something workable in a matter of weeks is a good sign of how possible it all is.
For altering the BGS causing problems, they could always roll out some changes silently and invisibly, where the variables are tracked and recalculated, but without having any actual effect on the game as it currently stands - effectively using the live server as a data input for their own simulated beta rather than having a proper beta for it. Once they are happy with how faction personalities are evolving, then they can place them into a full beta for testing the actual output side of it all.