Nanook wrote:Actually, it wouldn't have to be that way at all. If the player didn't respond to the missions within a given time frame, or even if they did, the game (GoD?) could send in NPC's to fight the attackers, much like the old Xenon Invasions from X2 and X3R. There's no reason the game should depend on the player to do all these, but instead should give the player the chance to help with something that's already going on. In fact, these kinds of attacks already happen, and don't result in massive losses of factories.
In my X3R experience, if you left the NPCs to deal with an XI on their own it quite often resulted in the sector being wiped clean of stations. High-level (capital-spawning) combat missions in TC can have much the same result, even with the player on the field.
Of course, you could probably balance that somewhat better, but you'd need to be very careful not to completely screw up the economy.
"soon", "Off Topic forum of the new game" etc. Which means no one said it - yet. "if you'd make planetary landings, the in the Off Topic forum of the new game, a thread similar to this one would open", and there someone would most certainly say it.
Sorry for sounding defensive I didn't intend for it to sound like your comment was directed at me, I just wanted to be more clear with what I said previously.
I would be willing to bet that the majority of people wouldn't want to be able to get out of their ships and walk around, it would be a space sim after all. I'd also bet that even if there was more people supporting it than what I would expect, such a feature wouldn't get implemented anyway.
A nuke a day keeps the enemies at bay! - Golden Wisdom
There is a thin line between meaningful posts and spam... I like to think I walk that line everyday.
X3:TC can be sumed up in two words, "Too Many". I'll bring up three that's been eating away at me since TC was released.
-Too many sectors. Space in the X games totaly lacks that "Big and Majestic" feel since we're cramed into little more than a bunch of tiny boxes. Drop those sectors numbers down and make them far bigger. A sector should be a whole solar system and not a tiny confined part of solar system.
-Too many ships. Both in type and total population running around the game. This is an area where the "MORE! MORE! MORE!" style of thinking has been a disaster in the end. I only use a modest number of different types myself with the rest being ignored. Then you have the absurdly high NPC population of ships that does nothing but hog vital resources.....and blow up in collisions everywhere. It's nice they tried to make the game world seem "alive", but it didn't work out so well.
-Too many guns. Cut the number of gun mounts in half and double their power. Major preformance boost right there since the game needs to keep track of 1/2 the shots IS. Then there is the confuseing array of weapon types, with most again being ignored.
While I'm thinking about it giveing every AI instant hit weapons was the worst idea ever. Only reason why it was done ws to cover up how bad the combat AI was. The end result to it is M3 and M4 fighters became near useless in a instant. Why was it wrong to take on a Xenon P patrol in a buster in X3R? One mistake, or bad luck, and you're dead quickly. In X3:TC it's a sure thing you'll lose without exploiting the bad AI around stations.
I love X in general.....But it's time to rebuild the thing from scratch. Keep the back story and that's it. "More Sectors!", "More Ships!" and "More Guns!" isn't going to work for the next X game if there is one. In fact doing that will kill the game.
Whatever your personal subjective opinion, the fact is as a business opportunity CCP (the devs/publishers) have a massive success story. Egosoft can't compete with it (not now anyway). Got nothing to do with anything else, purely from a business point of view.
I know Egosoft has had problems finding publishers and such issues, I hope they can get better organised and find more resources for their future projects. More funds, more staff and so on.
On the subject of getting out of your ship I would love that ONLY in spacestations and limited to how much you could explore. Access rights or something to keep you from going to the main reactor and destroying it or something.
Landing on planets? Yes.
Exploring planets on foot? Limited take 'Mace Griffin - Bounty Hunter' for example.
Multiple docking regions on planets? Yes. See 'Elite 3 - Frontier 2 - First Encounters'
Reduce types of guns? Haven't played X3TC but I agree there needs to be a limit like in X3R that was just on the verge of making things too complicated.
Reduce types of ships? No way. How many varieties of cars are there in the real world? Take the Ford Mondeo (Chosen because I own one) you've got the LX, Zetec & Ghia varients each with their own amount of features. I have an LX (So what!)
Remove sectors? Definately take a page from I-War 2
Have sectors encompase entire solar systems? Novel idea maybe with a SETA Mk2 for near lightspeed travel to other planets or a jumpdrive capable of pinpoint travel within limits so not to be abused. There also must be a way of creating early warning satellites to detect enemy ingress.
X-MMO? Nah! It's a single player game and it should stay so.
X-LAN? If it's free and you can play with up to 8, 16, 32 players then I'll happily do so. The saves for this though should be on the host machine in a separate directory to that of the single-player games unlike with the 'Neverwinter Nights' saga.
We are a greedy bunch as gamers. But as for the X-Saga ... may it live forever!
TBH I'm currently in these days Rainbow Six Vegas 2. A somewhat interesting feature is the coop where you play with one (or two? I don't know since I haven't tried it) human player(s) and by doing this you gain some benefits in the game (especially in multiplayer section, but never mind about this).
IMO it would interesting to play some scenarios with other human players: of course not everywhere (for the reasons I said in my first post here) , but - for example- taking part into a epic Kha'ak battle with allied humans would be nice.
-Too many sectors. Space in the X games totaly lacks that "Big and Majestic" feel since we're cramed into little more than a bunch of tiny boxes. Drop those sectors numbers down and make them far bigger. A sector should be a whole solar system and not a tiny confined part of solar system.
Agreed. However this would need to be done very carefully so as to avoid repeating the nightmare that is Aldrin. Travel times could be helped by having trans-orbital accelerators connecting different regions (maybe with a "space-highway" on the route between them, where the ships are going superfast. the player can still go whererever he/she likes, but wandering across a highway wouldn't be a good idea...). The real problem though would be the load on the CPU, look at what happens in Aldrin. I get very low FPS there...
CCP (the devs/publishers) Egosoft can't compete with it
CCP has (aprox) 250k active members and tons of multi accounts (which make the statistics look like there are 500k), whilst Egosoft has 325k forum members and at least this many players who don't register.
If Egosoft makes a game like EVE - you are right, it cannot compete with it. But if they make a game like a possible X-Online - it can compete. Why? Because it's different.
I think landing on planets and stations is a fairly good idea but I would much prefer to move around my own ship as well as say if I want to change ship you would need to go to the hanger bay on your ship via a elevator or teleportation pad.
I would like to see more manueverable ships such as ones you can do tricks out of to confuse your enemy.
Variety of weapons should be expanded on. It bores me seeing lasers firing all the time I mean mass driver uses ammo which is fairly different to most other guns.
Much more realistic universe is a must. I mean in were living in a recession and its hard to find work. So why not screw up the economy abit and make it 5x harder for the player to become rich from anything at the start. This will make players need to fight more to earn cash which sounds a bit realistic as in the UK especially I know the army is one of the only places accepting.
We should also have proper damage areas too. You get hit in your thrusters and shields are down then your thrusters should be badly destroyed. If you shoot where main power generator of the ship is then once you have pierced the hull and ruptured the generator the ship should blow up. If you shoot the cockpit or the bridge deck of a ship then it should be slowly exploding and performing with minimal orders such as abandon ship, charge the enemy and such.
Engine tunings that work on strafe speeds. Something such as a strafe tuning for the more advanced pilots, this would increase the speed of strafing.
A good bad guy. The Khaak was alright when they first came onto the scene but they sucked after X2. Why not have a bad guy which we can understand why they are bad this time. Such as the Argon and Split with their disagreements.
A decent sector defense is a must have. When you have a capital ship and 2 M2's you should still have an issue with attacking core sectors.
A galaxy that always changes is needed... stations that dont do too well should pack up shop and move to a better location. This would mean the player has to be on there toes with the economy instead of building a station watch it become stable and then leave it to never check back on again.
A more realistic enemy is needed too. Should the enemy jump into a sector where the player is... forget about what possesions the player has the enemy should attack because they think their forces is sizable enough to take on that sector. They should scout areas before they attack and once they do attack the defender should then reinforce there sector with that races police.
Lord_Dakier wrote:We should also have proper damage areas too. You get hit in your thrusters and shields are down then your thrusters should be badly destroyed. If you shoot where main power generator of the ship is then once you have pierced the hull and ruptured the generator the ship should blow up. If you shoot the cockpit or the bridge deck of a ship then it should be slowly exploding and performing with minimal orders such as abandon ship, charge the enemy and such.
There was something like that in X-Wing Alliance, where you could designate specific targets on bigger ships: in fact it was almost the only way to destroy the ISD or the SSD: first destroy the turrets, then the shield generators and finally you kick the hull. If you want to prevent the enemy from escaping you can also destroy their hyperspace engines.
Not a bad thing, too bad it was poorly made. In fact you had to cicle through all the specific targets until you found the one you're looking for, and in order to do this you usually spent a lot of time (and waisting time near an Imperial Star Destroyer is not a good thing).
Whatever your personal subjective opinion, the fact is as a business opportunity CCP (the devs/publishers) have a massive success story. Egosoft can't compete with it (not now anyway). Got nothing to do with anything else, purely from a business point of view.
Personal opinions are always subjective.
Decisions shouldn't all be based on cold hard bottom line thinking. Theoretically if I wanted to make oodles of money I could work slave labour to death, it'd certainly cut down on labour costs. It'd be a morally reprehensible and blanket illegal thing to do, of course, but it makes sense "purely from a business point of view"
EVE certainly pays CCP's bills, but the owner of the MMO market is Blizzard, not CCP. Regardless of statements to the contrary EVE is a standard MMO with all the standard grind that comes with every MMO in order to keep people paying and playing and give them the illusion of achievement in order to keep them happy. It certainly isn't some magical ultimate space-sim MMO.
Lead me not into temptation,
For I can find the way myself!
Poobah wrote:Decisions shouldn't all be based on cold hard bottom line thinking. Theoretically if I wanted to make oodles of money I could work slave labour to death, it'd certainly cut down on labour costs. It'd be a morally reprehensible and blanket illegal thing to do, of course, but it makes sense "purely from a business point of view"
Slaves are not likely to maintain high quality.
Then again, if low quality makes the customer to buy more, that is "very good business".
And if I asked for personal color schemes for each ship???
I was visiting the official R-Type Final website (in Japanese!) when looking around I found the page "customize" where you could change the colors of your ship as you most liked. For sure you can change the body color and the cockpit one.
Another point. We all know that both X³ Reunion and X³ Terran Conflict feature many users-made addons, some huge some very small. Anyway, if it wasn't for Cycrow's PM it would be a nightmare installing most of them (unless having dozens of .cat/.dat files).
So, could the new game feature a more user-friendly interface which allows even less experienced players to operate?
Edit : And I agree (and asked for in I think my page 1 post) that the next game needs easier moddability (not just Mods, because I know that word here refers specifically to something other than "anything that changes the game" but script packages, or whatever) and suggested Morrowind / Obvlivion's very nice, easy and user friendly plugin interface in the launcher.
Lead me not into temptation,
For I can find the way myself!
Oh by the way I didn't like how in TC, when you went into a turret and put on mouse flight the whole ship autopilot disabled itself.
I don't know, there's something I really like about shooting from a turret, and I'd like to do it in TC where the corvettes are more survivable. But I can't because as soon as I start using the turret the autopilot disengages.
Reunion didn't have this problem, but you had to toggle mouse flight a couple of times to get control.
Just throwing another idea into the ring for ideas
A long time ago used to have a game called Colony Wars (cant imagine anyone here has heard about it as it was on the PlayStation 11 years ago), it had a couple of sequels (i actually enjoyed em but i'm easily pleased ), anyway in Colony War 2 they introduced the idea of specific target damage on ships (just capital ships in that game ).....and while it was crudely done i think it was an interesting concept....which could be applied far better by Egosoft.
It could go like this, a Destroyer (or any ship) would have certain area's you could concentrate your fire on like the engines....this would have an effect on its speed, so a group of M3 could slow a frigate down, or shield generators so if you managed to take these out you could drop the shields, communication arrays could be taken out stopping reinforcements, individual weapon arrays could also be targeted, it could take out the Bridge (and yes i am thinking of the superstar destroyer plummeting into the Death Star now) the reactors could be damaged resulting in a early destruction etc etc etc......
Sn4kemaster wrote:A long time ago used to have a game called Colony Wars (cant imagine anyone here has heard about it as it was on the PlayStation 11 years ago)
Can't think why, given the average age that shows up in forum polls. I certainly remember it .
anyway in Colony War 2 they introduced the idea of specific target damage on ships (just capital ships in that game )
It was also used pretty extensively in Freespace 2, iirc.
), anyway in Colony War 2 they introduced the idea of specific target damage on ships (just capital ships in that game ).....and while it was crudely done i think it was an interesting concept....which could be applied far better by Egosoft.
