No mention of a living breathing universe besides "Economy"?

[lostProfitssssArrgh]

...text is cheap to implement...

Er, no, no it isn't.

I stand corrected.


(
Here are a couple of links that were meant to be added as an edit :

http://www.samplereality.com/2013/01/08 ... computing/

this one has its references listed in one of the few pages available:
https://books.google.fr/books?id=cpwGCA ... &q&f=false

links are to illustrate the complexity of implementing a dynamic response system beyond the underestimated amount of work for good first-level narratives.
)

[RodentofDoom]

Having a station blow up doesn't give life or flavor to the universe. It's just another entry in the spreadsheet where things get blown up all the time. And without some sort of news dissemination, the player might not even notice it, well, unless the player did it.

And you'd get a different 'flavor' depending on who did the reporting. An Argon station gets blown up and the Paranid shout HOORAY!, while the Argon start making threats against the culprit(s). This is the kind of thing that makes a universe feel alive, not some entry in a spreadsheet.

Depends what the station is producing .. if it's vital commodities theres suddenly a massive drop in supply in the offing.

My understanding of the devspeal is that the AI will react to those changes.
A station won't magically pop into existance when the player isn't looking, it's going to built from scratch. which will take time, and resources from other stations.



This is what I was refering to by my station's can explode comment.

[Killjaeden]

Instead of lengthy BBS, maybe only do a BBBS - bulletin board buzzfeed system^^ Just headlines and maybe 1-2 lines outlining what happened...
It would be a compromise between old fluff BBS and nothing. Just enough to bring the info across with a small fluff wrapping.

I liked X3R BBS (my first X game). All the fluff i know about the X series came from these articles. If it wasn't for these articles i likely would have never gotten so deeply into X and would have never felt the same connection to the races. So count that as you will...

Stellaris also has a large amount of events. With every DLC they release more. And user generated events can be easily added. If the creation and distribution of user created articles in X would be easy (which it was not in X2 and X3), we would see a lot more of it - maybe not in official game, but certainly as popular mod packs.

[Nanook]

Having a station blow up doesn't give life or flavor to the universe. It's just another entry in the spreadsheet where things get blown up all the time. And without some sort of news dissemination, the player might not even notice it, well, unless the player did it.

And you'd get a different 'flavor' depending on who did the reporting. An Argon station gets blown up and the Paranid shout HOORAY!, while the Argon start making threats against the culprit(s). This is the kind of thing that makes a universe feel alive, not some entry in a spreadsheet.

Depends what the station is producing .. if it's vital commodities theres suddenly a massive drop in supply in the offing....

Which is all part of the spreadsheet.

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant by 'flavor' and 'life'.

Instead of lengthy BBS, maybe only do a BBBS - bulletin board buzzfeed system^^ Just headlines and maybe 1-2 lines outlining what happened...
It would be a compromise between old fluff BBS and nothing. Just enough to bring the info across with a small fluff wrapping....

The biggest problem with the X2 BBS was the intermixing of informational topics with mission topics. You often had to tab through a bunch of fluff just to find a mission. Sometimes you wouldn't even find a mission, but still had to go through all the fluff just to find that out. The solution is to separate out missions from other information and let the player select what they want to see.

[RAVEN.myst]

The biggest problem with the X2 BBS was the intermixing of informational topics with mission topics. You often had to tab through a bunch of fluff just to find a mission. Sometimes you wouldn't even find a mission, but still had to go through all the fluff just to find that out. The solution is to separate out missions from other information and let the player select what they want to see.

Yes, good thinking. I also remember going through 17-odd articles, pausing to quickly check each for relevance or to recognize a repeated headline before moving on, only to get to the end and all that time was wasted - sure, on each occasion it's only a minute or two, but add them all together...

@Killjaeden: Here's a sad fact for you: if you first encountered the BBS in X3R, then you (in a sense) first encountered it in X2 without even having played X2 - the whole thing was just cut-and-pasted over (there may have been a couple of additions, possibly, but if there were, I don't remember them.)

[RodentofDoom]

life and flavour ??

theres too much abitrary stuff in there for that
somethign i'd love, you'd hate (possibly)
something someone else thinks is awesome, i might think it's crap and ruins the game .. etc etc

any system they put into place also needs to have a safeguard against stagnation, which means by your metric there is no longer a semblance of life or flavour.

its a computer game .. of course it's all static DATA BASE TABLES in the background
there isnt a software developer alive that can do 'imaginative gaming' the way a human brain can, so yeah ... a computer game is always going to feel lacking in the life/flavour department .. it's a limitation of the medium.

[Morkonan]

...text is cheap to implement...

Er, no, no it isn't.

^--- This should be remembered, always.

I love the fact that Egosoft has such close relationships with its fans and customers. I like that Egosoft engages with its customers to discover "what they want to play."

But, gamers don't always know what they want to play... And, gamers, no matter their experience, aren't always qualified "designers." I like eating good food, but that doesn't mean my cooking skill rises far above "put it in the microwave."

And, how in the world would my eating experience allow me, on its own, to discover a new food that I really enjoyed?

"I think having to fly different ships is boring. I never want to fly an M1 or M2, they're too slow. I never fly anything other than xx ship. Being able to fly all those other ships is meaningless to me....", said a lot of gamers with really loud voices, who then later complained about the lack of an ability to fly different ships.

Gamers don't always know what they like or would like in a game. They can have some great suggestions, 'tis true, but there are often a lot of suggestions that aren't thought out well or suffer from the player's understanding of how a game's mechanics actually work.

I desperately hope Egosoft pays strong attention to this fact when planning their design. We don't want a game designed by a committee of what is largely non-game-designers.

[birdtable]

Best I can think of to expound the example of what the gamer wants is not necessarily what the gamer ends up enjoying..
There was a mod I tried out in X3 called "bribe a pilot" I think ... great I thought,, flew up to a Hyperion bribed the pilot and booof an Hyperion to fly,, an empty experience... when I finally managed to board an Hyperion in vanilla .. that was some great gameplay and satisfaction... What appears to be a good idea is not always so.

[Boringnick]

Anyone here tried the LIFE mod for X3?

https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=354571

One of its features is a newsboard with events being reported in realtime: So if a fleet was attacking a base, there's a news item that goes like "Argon strike Terran base bla bla in sector xyz".

Add a bit more fluff to it and there you have it.

[DaMuncha]

Im using a feature of Improved Races 2.0 that sends you a message every time a race conquers a sector.

[Kitty]

I think everyone that enjoys interesting characters, lore, or missions with a human touch has left this series a long time ago. I'm the only one left, surrounded on these forums by number-crunching semi-organic entities.

You're not alooooooone in the daaaaaark !

Or am I dead ? hm ? Perhaps. I'll ask Mr Presley next time I see him.

[RAVEN.myst]

But, gamers don't always know what they want to play... And, gamers, no matter their experience, aren't always qualified "designers."
...
Gamers don't always know what they like or would like in a game. They can have some great suggestions, 'tis true, but there are often a lot of suggestions that aren't thought out well or suffer from the player's understanding of how a game's mechanics actually work.

+1, and something I've also been saying for a long time.

This is a fundamental flaw in the illusion that is "democratic process" - while people are generally somewhat (but not always completely, and sometimes even not at all) competent enough to decide WHAT they need/want, they OFTEN aren't competent in determining the HOW. And things get messy because often one "what" is merely an aspect of another, larger "what"'s "how". Most people lack understanding of the interconnected workings of complex systems, especially those outside their own particular field of expertise (and yes, playing games only grants partial such expertise at best, because the perspective is biased to an external PoV without sufficient insight into the internal subtleties/complexities.)

Best I can think of to expound the example of what the gamer wants is not necessarily what the gamer ends up enjoying..
There was a mod I tried out in X3 called "bribe a pilot" I think ... great I thought,, flew up to a Hyperion bribed the pilot and booof an Hyperion to fly,, an empty experience... when I finally managed to board an Hyperion in vanilla .. that was some great gameplay and satisfaction... What appears to be a good idea is not always so.

Veritas!


EDIT: tagfix

[Morkonan]

.... Most people lack understanding of the interconnected workings of complex systems, especially those outside their own particular field of expertise (and yes, playing games only grants partial such expertise at best, because the perspective is biased to an external PoV without sufficient insight into the internal subtleties/complexities.)

Agree with all the post.

Gamers know if they like a game or not. They may even know what parts of that experience they like the most. They might even be able to extend that knowledge to make predictions about what games they are likely to like, even if they haven't played them.

But, largely, they don't really know "why" they like these things and few would even know "how" designers convinced them to like those things.

There are some elements in a game that, through no purposefully directed mechanic, gamers come to love. Those are surprises, emergent mechanics that, while surely purposefully put in the game to provide for the opportunity, weren't really elements that were designed around.

But, sometimes players latch onto these things and thing they'll be "better" if they were expanded upon, given more focus, made more important, etc.. Sometimes that's very true and really benefit future iterations, but usually only "up to a point", a point at which the game's design begins to get impact so much by the loud call to boost one, small, yet beloved, mechanic so much that the game becomes... something else - Something it wasn't designed, from the ground up, to be. And, then the overall gaming experience falls apart and even the gamers who loved that one little thing in the previous releases come to hate it and they don't know why, they just do. And, they hate it because the game wasn't designed just to support it and, if it really had been, they probably wouldn't have liked it as much anyway.

Change can be good, but taking certain game elements and making more out of them doesn't always yield a "win", no matter how much players say they liked it before.

I was just thinking about obscure little bits of experiences in games that were great, as they were, and would have suffered from being expanded upon. There are some even in X games, but that wasn't what I was thinking about..

Waaay back when, when the breakout MMORPG "Everquest" came out, there was this little gnoll in the Qeynos zone named "Fippy." Fippy did one thing, every ten minutes or so, without fail - He'd appear in the zone and make a mad dash towards the guarded gates of Qeynos, only to meet his death at the hands of the tremendously overpowered gate guards.

Every darn day. Every ten minutes or so., Fippy Darkpaw would appear with a loud shout, declare his revenge against humans and charge towards the gates on his Quixotic quest for gnoll justice.... Every darn day, every few minutes, death after death, Fippy persevered against overwhelming odds.

It was glorious. Fippy is a meme, for those who know him. Fippy is bravery. Fippy is justice. Fippy is truth. Fippy is Fippiness... AND, if they had ever changed him, had ever made that one little bit of gaming experience more than it was, they would have destroyed it. And, if it had been anything more than it was than when it was created, it wouldn't have become legend...

(Fippy is part of a quest and, back then, they hadn't really incorporated "trigger" mechanisms into the engine - Players had to walk both ways uphill in order to complete a quest. So, he was spawned every few minutes so a player with that quest had a decent chance to catch him... before the gate guards destroyed him.)

Note: Applying this to an X game, if there is ever a "UFO" that the player can follow to discover a secret UFO base, Egosoft would be making a mistake.

[Nanook]

....
Note: Applying this to an X game, if there is ever a "UFO" that the player can follow to discover a secret UFO base, Egosoft would be making a mistake.

Not if the base suddenly disappeared as soon as the player saw it, leaving no time for a screenshot.

"I saw it! I know I did!"
"Aww, you're halucinating again. Take a break and come back when you're sober!"
"But, but ... awwwww."

[vkerinav]

Not if the base suddenly disappeared as soon as the player saw it, leaving no time for a screenshot.

"I saw it! I know I did!"
"Aww, you're halucinating again. Take a break and come back when you're sober!"
"But, but ... awwwww."

:fg:

You make me wish we weren't in the age of rampant "Let's play" videos.