My point wasn’t actually on resource gathering. Building factories to get materials is fine. I want there to be a more tactical aspect to the game instead of just capture and control. Make it so players make shipyards, and munitions plants, things like that. A simple capture and control game would be boring. It won’t take days or even hours unless it has unnecessarily long timers on things. And over inflating timers is just going to make people leave until the timer is up or leave and not come back.
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Perhaps player owned/built NPC miner fleets delivering materials to factories to be intercepted?
I’ve been away from this for a while now, so bare with me. Has the ambition that was Infinity: The Quest for Earth, been abbandoned or is IB just a proof of concept? (like DayZ for Arma 2 was)
I don’t believe DayZ has been abandoned, they wanted to make it a standalone game based on their new engine.
As for Infinity, the plan is that IB funds the development of the engine and what was I:TQFE. Getting the engine released publicly will offer a potentially more reliable revenue stream if it attracts developers’ interest, and IB would essentially be a tech demo of that. It still sounds like Infinity is still on the roadmap though, providing they raise the funding necessary to complete and launch it.
I:B is about getting the tech stable and building out the foundation for the team and company infrastructure we need to really tackle as something as big and complex as the MMO we want to build. The plan is to build the MMO after I:B if possible.
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I think you’re underestimating what can be done with 1-type-does-all factories when there’s an entire solar system to hide them in.
Lets say we implement a simple risk/reward mechanism to encourage a certain playstyle that is deemed fun by the majority of players. For example, we decide factories are solar-powered and thus generate resources faster the closer they are to the system primary (or another source of bright light), that long-range sensors are designed to detect variances in the unubtachyons produced by photons coming into contact with matter, that player characters respawn thanks to magic, and that said magic also generates enough resources to build the cheapest available fighter.
Now, if you put factories in a direct, low orbit around a star (or another source of bright light), they produce resource points at a high rate but every enemy player in the game is immediately aware of the fact that there’s something large and not friendly there (or at least their radar will be).
If you put factories in orbit around a planet, they’d be able to hide in the sensor-shadow of said planet on long-range scans but would be further from the star and spend part of their time in the planet’s shadow.
If you put factories on the surface of celestial objects, they’d be practically undetectable up to a light-second or less, but average resource production would be lower than any orbit due to the occurrence of nights and a potential atmosphere. Oh, and if your entire team is forced to start spawning there, chances are enemy players would arrive within scan-distance sooner rather than later.
So, do you go all-in to defend a bunch of factories in low solar orbit for just a few minutes? Do you spread them through the orbits of every planet in the system to provide a smaller payoff but high security (and a nice distraction to the enemy team)? Do you fortify a base at the dawn-terminator of a mercury-analog, and hope to finish the game before night arrives and the enemy team starts pulling away? Do you spread out your factories amongst hundreds of comets in the outer reaches of the system and hope to make up for the cost by zerging the enemy fleet with dime-a-dozen ships whenever they find one? Do you skip factories altogether, make do with the default spawn location, and try to end the game in a single big charge? Do you mix and vary your tactics as the game goes on and various players join and leave the fight?
I’m not saying that the above system is how I:B will do it. I hope they don’t, the idea of scattering respawns through the Oort cloud sounds like a terrible way to play the game and one that most new players and trolls would use repeatedly. I’m saying that with any sort of risk/reward system, including one I literally thought up over the last few minutes, it’s possible to turn a single one-type-does-all factory/space station into a complex tactical and strategical element. Chess only has 6 different pieces. You don’t need separate factories for ships and munition to have fun.
Anyway, a few other things I wanted to clarify from posts made earlier in this thread:
So… just to clarify… you are going to have hundreds of players, on the same server, in the same area, blowing up each other in a game several billion times larger than Earth… and only after you’ve done that are you going to start building a massive game?
So in addition to having the losing side get steamrolled (which is going to happen at the end of a game no matter what if Keith’s idea of having the final objective be to destroy every spawn of the enemy team), you want them to go grind for a while in a literally off-the-map area?
And you expect this mechanic of grinding for resources to be more fun than just losing the game?
If you want a last-ditch comeback mechanic to actually be fun, look at how DotA does it: Divine Rapier, adds 300 damage to auto-attacks (which is a lot in that game) but is dropped on death. Cost is comparable to most other end-game items. If your team has one, especially on a fast-hitting character, you can pull back from the brink of defeat - or you can get stunned, killed, and wiped out a whole lot sooner than would’ve otherwise happened (which is actually a good thing, if you think about it).
Maybe something like Risk were the lousing side might have a chance to win with some luck.
(* ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° *)
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mech warrior is slow and boring which is why people dont play it long term
I actually thought MWO was awesome but their ridiculously excessive use of DoF, their inability to properly balance missiles, and focus on trying to get people to buy stuff over polishing the game finally caused me to quit.
The core game is fine (I like it at least). But the people who handle it, and the way that it’s handled…not so much.
To put this in perspective, Russ Bullock admitted, about a week and a half ago, that there is no one dedicated to maintaining the game, meaning that people are constantly pulled from working on the game to make sure that it doesn’t stop working (technically speaking, at least).
Which helps explain why they’re so bad at balance and so bad at keeping to dates, which is why there’s nothing there to keep people from playing long term.
MWO’s only positive elements were those directly ripped from MWLL, the award winning extremely high quality mod for crysis that was developed in the gap after mw4 was growing very wide. MWO was an attempt on a quick cash in on the community that had survived despite it all.
Once MWO started failing to make as much money as they want, they forced MWLL to shut down continued development by threatening the employment of ex-MWLL mod team members who had since become employed at crytek.
Anyways, MWLL had very fast paced elements playing as BA, aerospace, vtols, light mechs with actual breakneck speed, fast hovercraft, and more. People dont just “not play it long term” because its “snow and boring”.
I hope gameplay is like C&C renegade but instead of troops you are ships.
While this sounds great, it can make fighting even more meaningless.
Say you’re coming on to play an hour or two one day that week, in a battle that lasts a week. What if all that happens is you get a few kills, you die some, and you see “Mission Progress” has moved from 31% to 32% in your favor, and that’s it? You’ll need to have a way to feel like you are accomplishing something and influencing victory/defeat in something that you had such a tiny part of.
It also makes losing especially negative feeling if you did spend 30 hours in the battle over a week just to lose. Especially so if you seem to be helping to win each time you’re on, but then you come back to see that everyone else has been, well, awful in your absence.
Guildwars 2 WvW matchups last for a week, and it can get pretty competitive and crowded at times, especially around 4-5pm. It really depends on short term vs long term objectives, and how it’s all carefully implemented.
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What are you, five?
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6 and a half, that is.
Guild Wars 2 did this brilliantly, and I had fantastic fun doing it during the beta.
If you’re unsure what GW2’s WvW is like, you basically have 3 servers going against each other across 4 maps, one “central” map and 3 “border” maps controlled by one of the three servers. In a good matchup, each server will be trying to contest every other server’s map, but also the “central” map.
Typically, the servers’ commanders are the ones that’ll lead the assaults, as they’re visible to allied players across the entire map. The trick however is that you cannot easily see what the situation is like on any of the other maps, so in one respect the battle most people will try to fight in a single sitting is over one map.
However, there are a few different tiers of outpost to try and capture. The Supply camps are generally the easiest, and can often be taken out by a “natural” level 80 or a small team. However, the towers can only be taken out by small teams with siege equipment, or larger teams without. Then you have larger keeps, that can take a sustained offensive to penetrate. Finally, the big daddy of them all is Stonemist Castle (iirc) in the central map, which if fully repaired will hold out against a considerable offensive for a time without any players defending it, thanks to having at least two layers of defences.
I only ever got involved in one siege involving Stonemist, during the beta, but it took our server and another server waging a massive offensive on opposite sides to finally crack it, resulting in a lag-ridden (it was a beta, the server was US) melee in the very centre. It was fantastic, but the next day the playing field had changed, and a week later (well, the beta ended at that point, but regardless), we would be facing new enemies.
So, when you do it like that, you can feel accomplishment at the battle in your map, in your little skirmish, that lasts a day and contributes to your side’s score, even if your side gets thrashed in the longer term campaign. If IB is going to take place across a solar system, then I’d definitely consider this achievable, providing that there’s something compelling to fight over at each planet you visit.
Whao. I just came back to see what the first reply to my first post giving some constructive criticism is. “What are you, five?”
That’s pretty sad.
But anyway, look at Planetside2. That game became dead rather quickly due to the pointlessness of it.
I could have made the same post I made here, giving constructive criticism about that idea Planetside 2 has. Someone might have replied “What are you, five?” And look at Planetside 2 today. Dying game that’s constantly pestering players to spend more money because it’s not a good enough game to be popular enough to make the money they wanted with the budget they had.
I never said it was a terrible idea in itself, though. Here’s what I said:
You’ll need to have a way to feel like you are accomplishing something and influencing victory/defeat in something that you had such a tiny part of.
I just said that it’s going to have to be done carefully to work for it to be something that more than a small niche is going to like. It’s going to be difficult to make a sort of gameplay work that hasn’t really worked to well in the past. I didn’t say it’s impossible or “it’s a stupid idea, and you’re stupid for liking it”.
Talk about being five.
Guild Wars 2 did this brilliantly, and I had fantastic fun doing it during the beta.
Did GW 2 do it brilliantly, though? Because despite costing many times more (15 times or so) more than the original did, it’s sold much less well. Maybe it’s cash shop brings in a lot to make up for that, I don’t know.
Guild Wars 1 was a brilliant game. Fairly small budget, small team, millions and millions of sales, and they made something that many people are going to remember forever while GW 2 seems to have largely faded except for getting a bit of a boost by going F2P.
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