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Aighun
Zumari Force Projection
Caldari State
896
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Posted - 2014.06.14 00:04:00 -
[1] - Quote
Project legion... what are the ground rules? Basic guiding concepts that will help shape game design?
I remember watching a presentation on Dust 514 where CCP laid out some simple ground rules for that game. No Jesus features. Dust and EVE would be connected but not dependent on each other. Unfortunately the EVE player delivered Orbital strike became something of a Jesus featureGǪ Anyway, ground rules and guiding principles are good things to have. I would like to propose two simple ground rules for sandbox gameplay that will help make project legion a much better game than Dust 514 as we knew it.
No lobbies.
No timers. |
Aighun
Zumari Force Projection
Caldari State
897
|
Posted - 2014.06.14 15:23:00 -
[2] - Quote
Maken Tosch wrote:Aighun wrote:Project legion... what are the ground rules? Basic guiding concepts that will help shape game design?
I remember watching a presentation on Dust 514 where CCP laid out some simple ground rules for that game. No Jesus features. Dust and EVE would be connected but not dependent on each other. Unfortunately the EVE player delivered Orbital strike became something of a Jesus featureGǪ Anyway, ground rules and guiding principles are good things to have. I would like to propose two simple ground rules for sandbox gameplay that will help make project legion a much better game than Dust 514 as we knew it.
No lobbies.
No timers. I agree about the first one. I don't agree about the second one. Let me elaborate. ...
I agree that nice to have something that encourages players to gather in the same place at the same time to do battle.
And disguised timers that cause a delay between when players first start an attack on a big important facility or asset and when they can destroy that asset is one way of making sure that everyone has a chance to get to the fight.
But it would also be interesting to imagine what the game might look like if we stick to the proposed ground rules. It would even be good for EVE Online to imagine how that game might work without timers.
Does sandbox (as opposed to competitive arena) legion really need to guarantee player vs. player battles that take place at scheduled times?
One of the things I really liked about what I imagined Dust would be was the idea that players would deploy things like AI controlled gun emplacements. And PVE is going to be a major focus for the sandbox portion of Legion. It would be great to put a ton of different offensive and defensive deployables in the hands of players. Let those deployables affect how long it takes between the time you first receive notice that an enemy is encroaching on your territory to the moment that they are blowing up your space elevator.
Deployables could be shield generators, shield generator bunkers, shield generator relays, mobile defense drones, stationary defense turrets, sensor arrays, siege drones, mobile clone depots, clone jump relays, clone jump signal boosters.
You could either have your siege drones blapping the shields for 6 hours until they fail and hope the other guys are all asleep, or send a team of mercenaries to the planet's surface to scout out the location of a hidden shield generator relay bunker and hope you can find it, disable it, and get out before you attract too much attention.
PVE and PVP become a much more seamless experience. Your PVE is whatever the other players have set up for you to encounter on the districts you are trying to attack. If they have good intel and decide to say hello and shoot you in the face a few times so much the better. If members from 2 or 3 different corporations all decide to show up at that same district when you are in the middle of your stealth infiltration mission, so much the better. But if the bots and the AI are decent, you really wouldn't ever need to have other players to fight in order to play the game. And they will have to be decent, no matter what, if CCP is going to do any sort of combat focused PVE at all.
In a way, what I am imagining that legion could be is something like Mario Maker. FPS sci-fi Mario Maker with always on multiplayer. You can go anywhere, shoot anything, at any time, as long as you have the means to do so, and anyone else can join in, at any time, to help or to hinder, as long as they have the means to do so.
At this point CCP have already burnt the game to the ground. They have the chance to start over and the sky is the limit. |
Aighun
Zumari Force Projection
Caldari State
902
|
Posted - 2014.06.17 00:26:00 -
[3] - Quote
Fox Gaden wrote:Without timbers of some sort you would wake up in the morning to discover that all your districts are gone.  Or, maybe you would get third party app that would text you when your district is under attack, but it would likely happen during a business meeting or while you are having dinner with your in-laws, or something.
This is good. in the current incarnation of planetary conquest you can claim a district by manipulating timers and lobby matches. That is really all there is to it. Manipulate the timer and lobby match system to your advantage and a district can be yours.
So I think you hit on something that could be really important to legion. Ownership.
What makes a district yours? Why does a district belong to you, more than any other player or group of players? If a district is yours, how does someone else make it theirs? What if you remove lobby matches and lock out timers from the equation?
Say you own a house. If someone decides to set up a tent on your front lawn while you are sleeping, does that mean the trespasser suddenly owns your house? No. But maybe the house is not the best example.
Look at it this way. We'll start back at the beginning. What makes a district yours? If a district is just an empty stretch of barren craters in a desert somewhere that you happened to land on to do a quick mineral survey before logging out, is that district now yours? Say you were the first to travel to that district. Do you own it? Shouldn't any other player also have the ability to go to that district and survey it for, say, rare proto biological matter? What if your mineral scans show that the district has some very rare and desirable stuff to mine on that district?
So you have some ISK saved up and you decide to deploy a mining facility to the district before another player can deploy a biological research facility. Now it is starting to look like the district is yours. You built something there.
Allright, but doesn't this all sound a lot more like what you would do in EVE, mining and so on? Well here we are kind of going beyond what I originally intended to write about. What is the point of a district in legion, after all? Why are we all assuming that there sill be districts in legion and that legion players will be able to own them, somehow? So let's just assume that there are districts in legion. Legion players can do stuff on the districts. They can do anything they want besides set up lobby matches that are scheduled by timers.
Ok, where were we? You hate mining. Mining is a terrible waste of time and the worst possible thing any player could chose to do. Even if mining in legion is fully automated. You aren't going to deploy a mining facility, an adjacent refining facility, you aren't going to build a transportation network and a space elevator. None of that.
What you are going to do is build a weapons manufacturing facility so you can build your own tanks and don't have to buy them on the open market. Maybe you will even sell some tanks. Are you trying to tell me that you are going to set up a venture that could potentially make you rich and harvest more drone scrap than anyone else in the gameGǪ and not, say, protect it in any way? Just hope no one notices your little set up?
If you don't bother to protect your investment, why shouldn't some other players be able to take it away from you while you are asleep.
Sure, using crest you could rely on a third party app tied to an in game item like "planetary defense early warning satellite system' to send you texts. That would be one solution.
Or you could also invest in a good shield generator. Or a cloaking system that would hide your facility from scans. Or automated sentry drones. Or hire mercenary corporations run by players from different time zones to keep a look out for hostiles. Or EVE pilots to patrol the space around your planet on the look out for hostile ships, or anyone attempting to drop a string of clone jump relays from the nearest star gate to the district next door. When players aren't dependent on timers and lobby matches to protect their districts, an entire galaxy of possibilities opens up. Question is, what would you do to defend what is yours? Are you really going to put all that time and effort into owning a district only to let just anyone waltz in a camp out on the lawn?
Or are you the type of player that would much rather take what you want, when you want, no matter who it belongs to? And if so, do you really want to have to make an appointment to blow up mining operations every time you've saved up enough ISK to buy a really sweet covert demolitions kit? Wouldn't it be a lot more satisfying to sneak onto another players district while they were sleeping, plant the charges, escape the sentry drones, and detonate the explosives from low orbit in a cloaked ship you've hired for the evening? You don't own a thing. All you really want to do is see it all burn. |
Aighun
Zumari Force Projection
Caldari State
902
|
Posted - 2014.06.17 01:18:00 -
[4] - Quote
Maken Tosch wrote:Quote:
At this point CCP have already burnt the game to the ground. They have the chance to start over and the sky is the limit.
You make a very valid point up until the last sentence. Don't tell me that the sky is the limit when we already have foot prints on the moon and robots on Mars. XD
Are the stars in the sky... or are the stars in space? Either way, looks like you also need to have a talk with Sean Murray... |
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