X3 + Mass Effect +StarTrak Bridge Commander, could be a nice combo :)

[Summer.Rain]

What do you guys think?
Why cant thay take the idea of 3 games and combine them into 1 big game?
This will surley be the game of the year...
And if thay will be able to add some sort of multiplayer this will take X3
to a whole new levels.

Emagine controlling battles passively like in StarTrek Bridge Commander
while you can walk around in stations like in Mass Effect and play the
game as a space sim like X3...

[Demolisher 2]

What do you guys think?

Why cant thay take the idea of 3 games and combine them into 1 big game?
It would be time-consuming, and the end-result would be based on a years out-of-date engine. Just like Elite IV.

This will surley be the game of the year...
No, normally GOTY is reserved for more mainstream titles.


And if thay will be able to add some sort of multiplayer this will take X3
to a whole new levels.
Please don't talk about multiplayer. We have discussed this here too many times to count, and the outcome is always the same.

Emagine controlling battles passively like in StarTrek Bridge Commander
while you can walk around in stations like in Mass Effect and play the
game as a space sim like X3...
EMagine? Is this some kind of Internet based virtual reality software ? It would be fun to do the things you say in a single game, but I prefer my genres to be seperate, each one perfected in it's (limited) scope. Download the game "Universal Combat" (it's free), this is an example of what you are suggesting. And I have no doubt an effort from Egosoft would turn out just as bad.

My two Cents.

[Ares23]

Controlling battles passively? Sure, set ship to Attack all enemies, and voila, you're done.

Walking in space stations? Err, for what purpose? Waste of time imho.

I'm not big on combining different genres into one game. Tends to strip all the depth and leave shallow, and totally unforfilling game.

[Summer.Rain]

Controlling battles passively? Sure, set ship to Attack all enemies, and voila, you're done.

Walking in space stations? Err, for what purpose? Waste of time imho.

I'm not big on combining different genres into one game. Tends to strip all the depth and leave shallow, and totally unforfilling game.

Have you played StarTrek Bridge Commader? if not then you dont know what im talking about, imagine you sitting in a large room with your crew sitting around you, you giving them orders in real time such as, "full shilds forward" and such and can manage energy from shilds to weapons and back, while in the same time you can see the target on the "big screen" and if you want you can order to shoot it or to shoot it manualy.

[maphys]

For me the game is about flying. I'd prefer to be the only person on the M1 with a hundred robotic systems handling the dull stuff. Maybe I am odd in this but I like "Me against the universe. Including all my purely strategic temporary allies!" style of play. You can go too far with reality too, imagine it - you line up to eradicate a Pirate and your first mate quits because it was his brother-in-law...

Probably why I liked R so much - you could play a vanilla game there and be in an M3+ all the way. The larger ships feel more like handling a river barge than flying!

M

[Gazz]

Emagine controlling battles passively like in StarTrek Bridge Commander
while you can walk around in stations like in Mass Effect and play the
game as a space sim like X3...

Right now you already have one of the key features of Mass Effect - the unchangeable level scaling.

At low combat rank you'd get a station defense mission with maybe 1 M8 and a couple M5/M4.
At a higher rank you might get 20 M2.

This will surley be the game of the year...

I'd go further and say it would be the game of the century.
The next century.

[Ares23]

Controlling battles passively? Sure, set ship to Attack all enemies, and voila, you're done.

Walking in space stations? Err, for what purpose? Waste of time imho.

I'm not big on combining different genres into one game. Tends to strip all the depth and leave shallow, and totally unforfilling game.

Have you played StarTrek Bridge Commader? if not then you dont know what im talking about, imagine you sitting in a large room with your crew sitting around you, you giving them orders in real time such as, "full shilds forward" and such and can manage energy from shilds to weapons and back, while in the same time you can see the target on the "big screen" and if you want you can order to shoot it or to shoot it manualy.

Yes I played bridge commander, I still have it in fact, but honestly, other then the "feel" of being on the bridge and controlling the ship, I don't miss much else from the game. Clicking on the individual crew members to issues commands was a waste of time, and if you wanted to be good you'd learn the shortcut keys to those commands anyways so you could issue them faster. And in fact you can do most of the things from Bridge Commander in X3. You can order your ships turrets to fire on a specific target, or you can let them pick their own targets. You can set the ship to fly itself while you jump into any of the turrets and fire manually. Or let the AI handle the firing while you do the flying, or you can just let the AI do everything.

The only thing that I might be interested in seeing is the ability to manage systems energy, like you said transfer, energy to shields from weapons or something like that. It might be an interesting addition.

[lLongshanks]

You should go for combat like Xwing not x3. Combat in this game is pretty abysmal. I like they way you make things in Eve a whole lot better. Walking around in stations does not sound like much fun to me.

[NeverSnake]

Probably why I liked R so much - you could play a vanilla game there and be in an M3+ all the way. The larger ships feel more like handling a river barge than flying!

M

You say that as if handling a river barge is no fun.

People are being negative about it because with the average game development features you can't develop the whole thing in enough depth to be worth playing, as can easily be seen from previous efforts. To make it fun you either have to abstract some of the features (like space rangers) or cut some of them out (like X3).

That said, if you're willing to fund a £100 million development budget and be or find a person with the leadship and drive to lead the massive project team that I reckon it'd turn out to be a fun game.

[weezl]

Probably why I liked R so much - you could play a vanilla game there and be in an M3+ all the way. The larger ships feel more like handling a river barge than flying!

M

You say that as if handling a river barge is no fun.

People are being negative about it because with the average game development features you can't develop the whole thing in enough depth to be worth playing, as can easily be seen from previous efforts. To make it fun you either have to abstract some of the features (like space rangers) or cut some of them out (like X3).

That said, if you're willing to fund a £100 million development budget and be or find a person with the leadship and drive to lead the massive project team that I reckon it'd turn out to be a fun game.

Just to bring a little fiscal reality to this discussion..

Assume end price of about £40 per copy of this humongous game.

So the developer is actually making between £10 and £20 per copy. We will go conservative, since prices for game titles fall pretty fast.

So.. for a developer to recoup a development cost of £100,000,000 they must sell about 10,000,000 copies (10 million x £10 = production cost). I can only think of one game with 10 million players, that is WoW. And I'm pretty sure their production cost was WAY below £100,000,000.

Remember, the developers have to eat, and want to have continued employment after this development cycle.. so we are just talking BREAKING EVEN here, not even, <gasp>, profit. And all game development is a risk.. you are selling to a notoriously X2 sagt Bussi auf Bauch audience.. so good or not, sometimes things just don't work out.

Leadership alone ain't gonna cut it here.. there a fiscal realities and business realities at work here that kill the idea before its even born.

Now.. just to be fair, I'll assume you meant 'a reasonably large team to create a large game'.. so lets go with reasonable numbers..

Average fully loaded pay per employee: £120,000
Number of employees: 50
Number of years development: 4

Total cost £24,000,000.
Total copies required to break even: 2.4 million.

Again, fiscal realities brother, fiscal realities. I'll bet Egosoft doesn't even break 200,000 copies (although I hope I'm wrong). And all the genre's you are mentioning are all niche markets with small audiences. Even combining those I'll bet you can't get upwards of 1,000,000 total potential customers.

Just my 2 cents.

[Fresshness]

Bridge Commander has/had 2 (at least) features X3TC can only dream of:

- you could target key individual components of your opponent's ship. This gave for some very interesting situations and added to the tactical aspect.

- damage on ship was realtime calculated on the ship models. Meaning you could break a ship literally in 2, not necessary meaning the ship is a total loss/destroyed.

[shireknight]

I would love to see a Bridge commander type interface on M6 and above ships -good thinking Summer.Rain

[NeverSnake]

Just to bring a little fiscal reality to this discussion..

I was aiming for a figure for what the OP wanted, essentially developing the equivelent of three full games with the extra framework to tie them into one game. From your figures it seems like it was pretty close in my estimate.

[Andaius]

Nexus: Jupiter Incedent Micromanagement you are wanting? I would have loved to see a X sized universe with that engine.....

[Fresshness]

Nexus: Jupiter Incedent

Forget Nexus: Jupiter Incident.

Have you seen the TechDemo of the sequel (never released).

That was a couple of YEARS ago and still top-notch imho. Vastly superior to anything X3TC has.


Jupiter 2 Techdemo (youtube)

[pjknibbs]

Average fully loaded pay per employee: £120,000
Number of employees: 50
Number of years development: 4

£120,000 pay per employee? Hey, I'll come and work for you when you start a game company paying that much!

Seriously, that's a massive over-estimate. Typical programmer salaries are in the £30-40k range, and that's for the top end guys who really know what they're doing; someone straight out of university might get half that.

[Summer.Rain]

Average fully loaded pay per employee: £120,000
Number of employees: 50
Number of years development: 4

£120,000 pay per employee? Hey, I'll come and work for you when you start a game company paying that much!

Seriously, that's a massive over-estimate. Typical programmer salaries are in the £30-40k range, and that's for the top end guys who really know what they're doing; someone straight out of university might get half that.

So it is possible Cmone Egisoft hive us a new space sim
the game of the centuary

[Andaius]

yeah I played that hoping for a IG 3 or what ever it was going to be before Nexus. I was really looking forward to a MOO sytle in that engine...With research, and trading and the whole sha-bang!

[Arcturas]

I like the dogfighting, and I don't want to sit in a big room giving orders, that's what my HUD is for, I prefer to dust my enemies and fight along side my pilots instead of hiding in some control room.

[Wolf-R1]

Nexus: Jupiter Incedent

Forget Nexus: Jupiter Incident.

Have you seen the TechDemo of the sequel (never released).

That was a couple of YEARS ago and still top-notch imho. Vastly superior to anything X3TC has.


Jupiter 2 Techdemo (youtube)

Wholly chit! That's awesome! I love the X3 series but as far as space combat is concerned it's still not up to what it could be. Hopefully Egosoft has the ability to go this route with their next game.