The ICP lacked tactical combat or strategic gameplay elements, which is the one thing EVE actually has in its combat model. There is room for big picture combat in Battlescape, though. Assuming there is funding for it.
Herp. Wonders of foreign languages.
The ICP did great as a space dogfighting prototype. My point was that, just like Kichae said, it lacks the tactical elements I expect a game to have. Itâs not challenging to play on an intellectual level, therefore I find it boring. Once you get your few hours of fun, the phew-phew just becomes repetitive. Many of the current FPS games (be it traditional FPS or space shooters) suffer from this. They tend to be so proud of their âcustomizationâ and âprogressionâ, but when it comes to actually playing, all you end up doing is trying to be the guy that aims faster.
I did not meant to say that Battlescape (or Infinity) should be a strategy/eve like game instead of an FPS. Having an FPS core has nothing to do with gameplay depth. My biggest fear is that it ends up being just an(other) arena FPS. The huge system is nothing for combat players if fighting is simply done by trying to lead the other guy with your crosshair.
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The ICP ⊠lacks the tactical elements I expect a game to have. Itâs not challenging to play on an intellectual level, therefore I find it boring. Once you get your few hours of fun, the phew-phew just becomes repetitive.
As you pointed out, the ICP was just a prototype, therefore you shouldnât expect deep tactical complexity. It did however show how Newtonian physics could still be fun. I see no reason the ICP cannot be extended to add the necessary tactical depth.
Battlescape (or Infinity) ⊠My biggest fear is that it ends up being just an(other) arena FPS. The huge system is nothing for combat players if fighting is simply done by trying to lead the other guy with your crosshair.
Weâll have to wait to see what they plan for Battlescape, but IMHO it is basically intended to be an(other) arena FPS, just on a huge scale (and with very pretty scenery). If you want more than that, then IMHO you will need to wait (a long time) for Infinity.
And just to clarify: I also want more than that, so I too am likely to wait for Infinity (with Elite Dangerous to occupy me until then). OTOH, maybe their Battlescape Kickstarter will be more than I expect, so Iâm not ruling it out yet. Or maybe the chance to fly through atmospheres (and land on planets?), possibly before Elite Dangerous does it, might end-up grabbing me anyway.
Iâve been skimming over this topic and Iâm wondering why Eveâs tactical style and the current twitch style of combat have to be at odds? I believe a combined system would be much better. The smaller ships would rely on the pilots for a good portion of targeting. While the larger ships would rely on its bigger and better computer systems for targeting. Infinite could also go with the âAI is good but a pilot is betterâ approach.
Thatâs always been the plan, IIRC. The pivot point, if I remember correctly, would hae been in the 100 to 300 meter range.
I disagree with everyone here.
If you canât make it semi-realistic (different for god sake) and workable, and fun, there is only one group at fault and it ainât Newton and his rabble. Now the issue really is what your average forum peanut gallery member, ie. yall, finds to be fun. Some of you guys will whine on and on if you donât get a large, 3d looking, grouping of pixels as compared to a smaller, less 3d looking pixels. Some of you will go on and on about how you must have the absolutely smallest bit of flotsom for a space airplane because anything bigger than your car is too much to comprehend. Others will painstakingly run numbers and figures to prove why a red color ray beam is better than a purple color. And you know what the thing is, you are all right and all wrong. Right because there is no reason not to expect such stuff because you like it. Wrong to think that somehow your version is better than anyone elseâs idea .
Yes, everyone holds dearest the gameplay that they enjoy. There is also a problem that nearly every gameplay feature has many valid approaches of design and implementation. General consensus on what the best gameplay approach is, varies wildly from popularity of the person proposing it to how logical the approach is. My point is that the developer should follow their vision of gameplay, even if it is not the most popular or the most logical. I hope INS has a clear gameplay design in place for IBS, sure, we as a community could help iron out some bumps, but itâs their vision that should be made not ours.
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How much realism? As much as can be implemented. Implement a real world. Implement The Matrix. Then add stuff on top of that to make it fun.
Thatâs where FTL drives, robots, AI, wonder materials and such come in. Those are the add-ons. They make a realistic world entertaining.
Instead of taking a rocket to Vega and getting there in thousands of years, you take your super-duper FTL spaceship and get there in a few minutes. You donât pull the No Manâs Sky trick of moving the destinations closer together. Thatâs not a realistic universe. I donât care to see that.
Naturally, the add-ons need to be self-consistent and to define their own reality. They need to make as much sense as the reality that we already know. If I see a spaceship moving at faster-than-light speeds, I want to know why I canât take out a planet with it. What happens when I barrel into a planet at those speeds? That should be nothing more than a thought experiment by the game designers, but itâs one that could easily inspire them to compose the add-ons in a very different way, and inspire other gameplay. The game engineâs realistic rendition is undermined when the developers simply say that spaceships move fast and thatâs all that anyone needs to worry about.
So give me science fiction reality on top of reality, but definitely donât change reality.
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in reality we have computers that are better in aiming that we are. so for fun we should drop some reality aspects.
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[quote=âdrzerg, post:49, topic:554, full:trueâ]
in reality we have computers that are better in aiming that we are. so for fun we should drop some reality aspects.[/quote]
Thatâs not the reality I was referring to. The fictional world need not have 3GHz 8-core digital computers from Intel and AMD. Nor FTL spaceships. Nor Facebook (there is an upside to all this) The technology, the culture, the very species of the game characters in the world can be invented as freely as the game designers care to go. Just make sure that when something from the real world is depicted, it is depicted realistically.
For example, If there are FTL spaceships with advanced computers, then I would find it jarring to have players operating weapons manually. That needs an explanation, and one that flows automatically from the way the world works. A hack is to say that âWell, the computers of the day are lousy at dealing with the vibrations, so we canât use them on weapons, but theyâre fine everywhere else.â A more elegant and interesting solution is to say that automation is universally poor. The state of computers is not advanced, and that society has tackled the problem in other ways. In other words, there are no computers as we know them, perhaps just MEMS - miniaturized analog computers. They can do stuff, but they canât process information faster than people. So everything remains fairly labor intensive. Thatâs just the way youâd want a game world to operate. If the developers come up with an activity for players that the fictional MEMS automation could clearly handle, thatâs a sign that itâs too simpleminded to ask of players.
Whatever the explanation, it should be a game-wide phenomenon, not some quirky hack that players laugh at and say âYeah, right, whatever.â The fictional explanation should have consequences across the entire gamut of gameplay.
For example, if automation is accomplished by MEMS devices, then the manufacturing arm should focus on the infrastructure for building them. Because MEMS devices are fundamentally different from digital computers, then the manufacturing should be fundamentally different. Perhaps they are grown instead of assembled. Perhaps all MEMS assemblies are based on 10 different basic components and are built in a hierarchy of assemblies until the final part (all of 2cm long) is ready. Does that pattern of manufacturing sound familiar?
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I suspect a fairly sensible approach to not having (fully) automated firing systems is that they pose a hacking risk. The last thing you want in the middle of a battle is your enemy hacking your fire control system and turning all your guns off. In that respect, Iâd expect everything to have some kind of manual override to allow a pilot or crew to take control away from computers if they start misbehaving.
That might also serve as an explanation why humans have to pilot the fragile fighter craft instead of simply having hoards of mindless drone units doing it instead?
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Itâs a nice approach, I just think that the developers need to be careful with how much fiction they sacrifice to the gameplay constraints.
IIRC, background elements on the old forum included that they distrusted making things like strong AIs and cyborgs (using biological sciences to fix people and replace limbs instead). I vaguely remember something about early androids (or rather anthropoids) turning amok at some point, but I may be confusing.
The thing is, if they got really nasty experience with advanced AI, it can have such an effect.
It doesnât even need to be strong AIs turning Skynet - Artificial Stupidity can be more dangerous than Artificial Intelligence. Between bugs, unforeseen consequences, hacking risks and software deterioration, they may very well have stopped relying too much on computers for the multi-billion-ton FTL-capable juggernauts blistering with dantean weapons you would normally see in interstellar military.
At least not after the third time you got battleships firing on your capital city for threat elimination because someone was detected with what may be a knife by a local police drone.
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There used to be an idea of lost tech in the infinity lore, iirc/ That would still work as a valid reason for no auto aim computers.
I donât see much of a problem with auto aim, the reason for it not being used might as well be that pilots are too proud to give such a job to a computer; or that that software is prohibitively expensive, has monthly costs or simply classified for military use.
If a player wishes to have auto aim, there is no reason to remove that possibility. As any gameplay feature it needs to be balanced so that there is not too much of an a advantage or disadvantage to using it, no need to rule it out by default.
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Itâs really not sensible. Commonly used, would probably be accepted by most, but why not just not put a wifi modem in your weapons computer? Or if you canât live without wifi everywhere, run the control system off hard ROM.
i can hack your computer using gravity waves to directly disrupt the electronic signals in your computer remotely, shielding for this is expensive and as a result only small, weak, low heat computers can be used. Luckily, organic brains are not vulnerable to this type of attack due to the ability for axions to store signal without having an active current.
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And that hacking module could, take up space, use ship power and decrease the stealth of the ship. It could also be only usable once in a while and be very expensiveâŠ
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Erhm⊠what?
I certainly agree that anything posted on a forum can be taken as an invitation to discussion but⊠all I was pointing out was that the scifi clichĂ© âcanât use computers to control weapons, they might get hackedâ really isnât sensible. You appear to be responding to this by explaining an even less sensible system (gravity effects all matter equally, canât be shielded by any known substance, and oh yeah people have been hooking up rat axons to electrodes for years).
Certainly a scifi system does not have to be sensible, as I mentioned the simple âdonât use it, they might be hackedâ approach would be accepted by most people as a good enough explanation to suspend their disbelief, but it is not actually sensible.
An example of a sensible explanation for no computer controlled weapons would be âshields are so strong that to have a meaningful effect on them youâll need a very large weapon; mounting such weapons on swivelling bases is entirely impractical except on capital ships, and as the flight computer does in fact need wireless connectivity for docking purposes it is physically disconnected from taking control of the ship during combat situationsâ (needless to say, any technology that might be used in gimballing the output of a weapon is already used in shielding and/or armour).
Thatâs one of those âhacksâ that I was talking about. Sure, it provides an explanation for the lack of computers in that one case, but it does nothing to explain why so many other aspects of gameplay donât involve automation. Done right, players shouldnât even expect automation in the game - because of the way the game presents itself. Steampunk sets expectations in players. INS should create a genre that sets the right expectations in their players.
The artwork would undoubtedly go a long way towards that end. If everything looks futuristic, then players will assume that everything is supercomputers and 3D printed carbon nanotubes. But if things look more steampunkish, players will know that this is not your grandfatherâs Elite clone. Iâm not at all suggesting a steampunk presentation. Instead, INS needs an art style that works for their games and sets the right expectations for their gameplay.
Yes, I know, this is far too late to have an impact on INS, and theyâre going to have stock spaceships of a style that wonât communicate any of this (worse: rockets), but the base post is asking for opinions, and thatâs mine.
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