S Park Finner
Guardian Solutions
DARKSTAR ARMY
210
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Posted - 2013.08.19 02:09:00 -
[1] - Quote
Noc Tempre wrote:... Actually it was an open ended question. I'm far more interested in what you think DUST is supposed to be than anyone's analysis of what it is today, because that is a beaten to death topic. Is a game with guns that says CCP somewhere in the credits the sum total of what it means to be DUST 514 to you? Or is there more to it than that, even if the original promises are gone? To this point, and even though it's shown up in other posts...
Eve has this mini-game, Planetary Interaction, where players build networks of structures on planets that allow them to mine resources that then feed into Eve's economy. While it is not a big part of the game and arguably has problems of it's own it is established in EVE and the people that do Planetary Interaction care about it.
My vision was that the facilities that PI folks put down on the planets would be the things Mercs could fight over - that they could capture them for EVE players, capture them and hold them hostage, or be the defenders for Eve players or when they captured them themselves.
The "facilities" would first be the PI structures themselves and they would be augmented by more military facilities over time.
Since there is a "layout" system in PI I saw them expanding it so the EVE players could lay out the "battlefields" and the DUST 514 players would fight on them. The EVE players that made good maps would get more DUST 514 players to play them and find it easier or harder to hold territory based on the quality of their maps. Resource constraints (cost of building facilities) would keep the EVE players from going too wild with their designs. Initially DUST 514 level designers would kick-start the facilities and would always develop the components the EVE players would mix-and-match in their designs.
Pickup games would grow out of lobbies where the EVE players set up ISK rewards for attack or defence -- if no defence reward was put in place a facility would be open for random attacks.
There are tiers of facilities in PI (some are higher level facilities or more costly) so there is ample opportunity for higher level strategies when planning attacks.
So that's where, early on, I thought it was going. I was wrong -- but to the OP's point it's where I'd hoped it would and I still think it's a pretty good idea.
And as an aside -- I don't think it would have worked that way without a credible FPS experience to back it up. But at least we would have had a lot of maps -- even if a most of them were terrible -- and we would have had built-in impact on EVE -- even though a lot of folks in EVE would have raged at it.
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