Killjaeden wrote: ↑Mon, 13. May 19, 22:30
2 - No matter how well you sugarcoat the objective "go to place to get stuff" with narrative, it gets boring old quickly, because flying is not challenging, mechanically stimulating, visually interesting or interesting in any other way.
And the bad part about narrative in procedural missions is that it wears down extremely quickly / you see repeats very quickly. Plus it requires writers, or even worse, significant time for several voice actors. Your proposal would work well for a set of handcrafted missions. Missions where you can place something interesting for the player while doing the mission. It would not fare well as a procedural type of mission.
Heh, both of your very verbose answers (as a VERY long winded person myself can't help but praise you
) actually made me rethink quite a lot of the points I've made in the recent past about how to expand the whole "random encounters/exploration" thingy. But I still would interject a couple points:
1- Yes, it's true, procedural "events" all sooner or later boil down to repetition, and become boring. What keeps them viable for (relatively) longer are two factors:
A) how complex/scripted they are (which has to realistically be not too much, or we could just as well have a main plot back) and how many variations (substantial variations) of them are in the game (which has to be a realistically finite, relatively little number);
B) how varied is the environment you are traversing to look for / follow such events, and how many possibilities for unexpected gameplay developments it natively offers. You thoroughly explained why, for instance, Skyrim's procedural (so called "radiant") quests take relatively long before becoming boring and being avoided by the players, because to pursue them you happen to travel through a gameworld that can throw a lot of other random (or not so random) things at you to sidetrack you, from mobs or a dragon attack to that hand placed dungeon that you hadn't discovered before (or that you wanted to visit anyway sooner or later, so you might as well go in that general direction following a radiant quest while you are at it), plus the environment itself, its biomes, are varied and keep you interested. The proverbial "journey".
The B point really ties X's hands, the whole nature of such a space game works against this possibility, but A is limited only by a realistic resource/effort limit for an admittedly secondary feature. All open world games (heck, all games as whole, we could say) sooner or later fall into tedious repetition, but often they can be made or undone by how many types of procedural endeavours you can "choose" from. The stereotyped Ubisoft game that goes the extra mile and has a few more activities tends to be well received, the one with fewer ones fares worse. X4 - while still being a different beast that, as said, is even more limited in possible payoff - I'd say doesn't even try to do the bare minimum.
The so called "random encounters" that are in now are not just completely pointless - they don't add anything that couldn't and shouldn't happen everywhere else with no need to teleporting assets to you - they even are detrimental to the whole experience, as the teleported assets have no plausible reason to be where you find them, and they act completely "out of place". Why am I finding yet another lone HOP miner miles deep into Argon space and miles away from the nearest mining area, that does nothing other than try to get back to its current job task 4 sectors away, where it was brutally removed from? Sometimes a pirate/xenon/kha'ak is pulled as well, so you experience... just another little background shootout like you have experienced a 1000 times already without the need of artificially pulling assets to you. It's really just background noise, it's not even anything meant to be "procedural gameplay". It basically is just one "event", that's not unique, and you don't even have to wait the third time to find it boring, it already is the very first time. It's no wonder people even mod the game to remove the feature alltogether, cause it's not short lived, it just... isn't, really, it's just an annoyance, as it's also intrusive.
What we hope for is some uniqueness, variety and context for those encounters too. Yes, they will inevitably become boring soon: the difference here is, will they become boring after 3 hours of play? 5? 10? After all, every gameplay component will do sooner or later: how long before setting up trades or building stations becomes repetition and has nothing new to surprise or challenge you? How many samey "war effort" missions (that are just the same thing we are discussing here, another kind of procedural events) can we play before those missions start to lose appeal? How long before you've gone through the full width of the make money ---> buy bigger ship loop before having no more ships to try? Many of us agree X4 offers a bit too little in this very department, and having more ship variety I'd say would be beneficial. Why having more random encounters variety shouldn't be beneficial just as well (up to a realistic expectation still, ofc)?
How many hours should such a feature keep you interested for at minimum before being able to say "ok, now it's become boring and I've nothing new to see, but it was enough, the game tried hard enough, it gets a thumbs up by me"? That could be debatable, of course, it's subjective, but that X4 currently doesn't reach that minimum would seem a fair and objective statement to me. As such, it needs to improve on that.
2 - It should also be stated that X4 has given up on some VERY important features, like the main plot, supposedly to dedicate those resources elsewhere. What is a main plot if not a string of scripted events? They are not procedural, they on average require more development effort (like you mentioned, scripting itself, writing, sometimes voice acting, etc), but that's what they are. Now, call me naive, but when I read X4 would have had no plot I was happy: I thought to myself "cool, instead of a main plot that's often just a glorified tutorial and would have kept me occupied only for my first playthrough for its 10 missions or so, now they'll be able to make at least as many - if not more - more emerging missions than usual that make the sandbox itself better, more varied". After all, X always really was all about the sandbox. Well, didn't really happen, did it? At least not as much as I'd (and I'd say quite a few other people) hoped. There's a bit in the aforementioned war effort missions, but it doesn't seem that much, I'd say we've lost much more content than what we got back elsewhere. So yeah, I'd like to see a bit more from war missions AND a bit more (more than virtually 0) exploration procedural missions/events.
Moreover, what we've given up with the plot, which is about hand placed content, I'd have expected to see translated into other hand placed content. Instead the X universe went full speed ahead into mostly 100% procedural. Hand placed content gets old quickly for different reasons, as when you've seen it once it's done, it doesn't have variations, but nobody ever complained about Skyrim because yeah, Winterhold is in the same place every game, or the Thieves Guild is always in Riften and not in a randomly chosen location every new gamestart. I wouldn't mind some more exploration that's about finding rare, unique content (even just breathtaking views, hell, a big asteroid with a navigable cave, whatever!) that was hand placed somewhere. It will surprise me only once, but at least it will surprise me... once! We hardly even have anything like that anymore, almost everything has gone generic, indistinguishable.
3 - Finally, you also seem to dismiss grind a lot, as you compare to it the procedural gameplay that has lost its appeal or that can't offer much given the empty environment it takes place in, and as such point out why such gameplay would lose its appeal, its thrust. I agree to a point, and I'm not a huge fan of grindfests myself, but... a lot of people do kind of like it, as long as at the end of the grind there's some unique rewards waiting? Remember how many hours people wasted from unfocused jump to unfocused jump just to find that goddamn Aran? It was just that, there was little to no fun to the unfocused jump after the fifth jump, you had already seen most of the variations you could see, but yet you kept going for that carrot, the Aran. Wouldn't be much different in this case, if one - or few - of these random exploration encounters was about finding a unique ship and/or ship variation (and maybe some simple contextual challenge in how to recover it: there's a hand placed Odysseus IIRC in the galaxy that already kind of does just this, although it's just another Odysseus, nothing unique). You'd have a reason to keep going through "boring" exploration until you finally trigger that extra rare encounter.
Grind is a very artificial, even blunt way to water down content, making you work for it so you don't see every asset the game has to offer too fast, I agree, so you can't go overboard with it, but to a reasonable extent it works. People keep grinding through the same mission over and over again in looter shooters just to finally get that legendary drop that only has some cosmetic or power uniqueness to offer, and yet as strange as it sounds... they are having fun doing it, because somehow the "work through the grind to get that reward" has an appeal in itself. It would be sub-optimal as a model in a game like X, I don't doubt it, but sub-optimal still is better than nothing. After all, the whole game boils anyway down to grinding already, we grind trading, we grind building stations and shipyards, we grind doing combat missions, all to earn "access" to the next level, the next tier of assets (or activities, self imposed objectives), why couldn't we also grind a bit to find some new assets or opportunities by exploring? Won't be for everyone, sure, but it will be for
someone. And isn't this what sandbox games are all about, a playground everyone can have fun in in his own personal way?
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