Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
1170
   |
Posted - 2013.10.12 17:41:00 -
[1] - Quote
The recent threads about open world stuff have gotten me thinking about how we can get away from the lobby shooter feel. The big advantage Dust has is the connection to New Eden. Even if other shooters have superior fps mechanics Dust will thrive as long as when you play you feel like you're part of New Eden. It's an entirely unique idea in the fps genre at the moment. Notice that I'm not talking about a connection to Eve, in particular. Just New Eden. I don't expect to see anything like this in the game for at least a year, or maybe two. I think the kinds of things I'm going to talk about are important for the long term future of Dust, but with the current state of the game it would mostly be silly fluff. I'd be a little disappointed if I heard that CCP stopped work on making PC interesting and development of new SIs etc to make this idea a reality.
I'm going to start off with a quick rundown of how I see clone tech working in Eve / Dust, so that things will make more sense. We're all clones, and when we die we get downloaded into a new body. That's how we manage to wake up on the other side of the battlefield after dying. In Eve you can do this intentionally without dying but using what's called a jump clone. When you visit a station, if the owner likes you, you can have a clone of yourself made and kept in storage. Then once per day you can jump into one of your stored clones, as a way to quickly get around the universe or get a different set of brain implants without losing the ones you're currently using. I think when we deploy into a battle we use a similar process. Our bodies stay in the MQ and we're transmitted into military grade clones on a barge. We can do this because the corporation making the contract has a giant pile of clones ready for us to jump into and the facilities to make the transmission of our conscious mind possible at that location.
Right now we're all stuck in whatever starting system we were dropped into when we made our characters. There really isn't any sense of location at the moment though, it's only there if you really look for it. I've checked it out in Eve, and the type of quarters you have does actually match up to the racial style of the station you're in. We need to be able to move around within New Eden, and we need a reason to do so. Moving around is kind of pointless if you're just going to sit in your quarters all the time, so what I would do is start by making a station environment for each race that will act as a common area for the mercs in that station. If there's too many mercs around you could instance it to keep the framerate up, but you'd still be in the same local channel. I envision it as something like the war barge, but larger. You'd access a tram system from the door of your quarters and get dropped into a concourse, which would have windows allowing you to see the star and nebula for that system, as well as whatever moon / planet the station is next to. This concourse would have storefronts / offices (I'll get back to this in a bit), and basically be a way to travel between two functional areas.
The first area would be similar to the war barge we have now or the event horizon lounge on PS Home. This is where you get to run into the other mercs in your station. The barge has some control panels that access screens on the neocom...you could put these in here too but it doesn't really matter. The purpose is social. This is where. as a new player, you meet other mercs and form squads for the first time. But this isn't enough. This bone needs some meat on it - enter the PvE.
Every station in New Eden is owned by a corporation. In nullsec these are owned by player corporations (mostly), but in the rest of the galaxy they're owned by the NPC corps that we see on the scoreboard when we run instant matches. We could start to introduce mission agents into Dust, who (as in Eve) you interact with by visiting their station and talking to them. These could start out as rogue drone infestation things, but I'd like to see some more variety eventually. Things like plant a bomb in this structure, defend a convoy from pirates etc with very few clones available to us to respawn with. Let us fight humanoid NPCs that aren't genetically engineered like us. Puny normals, who attack us in droves. Make us feel like the super-soldiers that we are. You can attempt to run these missions alone, but it'd be advised to have some friends meet you in the station and help out. You could even tie Eve players into it - make some missions happen on a district in that system and allow an Eve player to provide strikes to clear out entrenched forces. As you run more missions for a particular agent / corp they like you more, give you better missions and eventually allow you to install a jump clone there.
[continued] |
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
1170
|
Posted - 2013.10.12 17:41:00 -
[2] - Quote
Back to the offices. In Eve a corp can rent an office in a station. Create a Dust version of these offices (the rents in Eve are astronomical sometimes, and we couldn't afford them with Dust isk). These offices would be visible on the concourse and display the corp logo / name. If your corp owns an office in a station, you can instantly jump to it in order to regroup with your corpmates and run missions together.
So we've talked about social environments and a use for them, and using jump clones to get around. The missing part now is travel, something that CCP has been very wary about implementing for us. Part of the problem is that through our access to the local channel we can spy on Eve players and tell people hunting them where they are. Letting us jump around the galaxy willy nilly is a problem. Attached to the concourse we have...a shuttle bay. Every day you can go in there and book passage to another station. If the station is in the same system you travel to it instantly. If it's in another system, the shuttle departs at downtime (you board automatically  ) and arrives when downtime is finished. Or, hire an Eve pilot to move you as often as you like.
What I like about this idea is that it increases the sense of immersion in New Eden and opens up the possibility for more interactions with Eve. More importantly, it can be broken up and delivered in small chunks. First the station environments. Then the travel between stations. Then the PvE component, which can start out very small and be expanded on indefinitely through the addition of new game modes.
Obviously we won't see anything like this for a very long time, but I think it's an interesting idea to discuss. |
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
1202
|
Posted - 2013.10.13 14:30:00 -
[3] - Quote
Yeah, you could spend a lot of time on this kind of thing. But that's part of what I like about it...it lets you start extremely small and then expand when sprints have extra development time. So lets say that they create the station environments. At first all we can do is walk around them. Then they add in the Dust only side transportation (no Eve involvement yet). So we can move around, though there isn't much of a reason to do it other than you want to do it. Then...start the agent system.
And that could start out as simple as dude in every station giving out missions to clear rogue drone hives from a local planet. Rewards could start out as simple as giving isk, but you could start to work in features like loyalty points to the different corporations. We're apparently getting these for FW at some point, so the basic guts of that will already be built. It's a framework for them to deliver new content on in a way that is interesting and pulls the player into New Eden. |