Alci wrote: ↑Sat, 24. Nov 18, 20:47
that's what you get if you subscribe to Elite news
except half of things are about players and their plans, not just some semi tailored random messages that can't really be on topic while not repeating themselves in dynamic universe
The furthest I would go is short (one sentence) news on running texts on stations telling me "curiosities" like undergoing attacks/conflicts, commodity shortages, and such. That would be nice.
Commodity shortages were a great immersive way to find trade opportunities in X2. But while curiosity messages would be a good baseline to prevent the board from ever being empty, I think you can do much better than that:
- Rumors about difficult to find illegal missions or special loot appear 2-3 sectors away from where the mission or loot can be found.
- Chronologies of articles that appear in a timed sequence and never show up again in this playthrough. Think typical mission chain, but that auto-advances after player has read the article and/or some time has passed and/or player has travelled X distance.
- Story chain example: a series of news articles about the Argon elections.
- Story chain example: a mysterious hacker wielding some Xenon tech posts a series of messages or threats in the middle of regular news articles all over the galaxy.
- More advanced version of the above: the story chain plays out, but when certain steps are active they make some missions be available and some special map activity happen.
- Story chains can have a "full version" which you get if you are in the right system with access to the right news sources, and several "rumor versions" that are distorted by word of mouth and local perceptions - this way you can get the Paranid, Split, Corporate or Pirate take on news from other factions, which should be pretty funny and immersive.
- Articles about the player's actions, i.e. if you get reported to the police a lot you can read a PR speech from the police saying "we're working 24/7 to catch criminal <you>". The speech can have versions according to your wanted level. Those while repetitive will get old less since it's always fun to see your actions be responded to by the game.
- There can be multiple newspapers or space-websites, and you don't have access to them all depending on which factions you're friend with. But you can steal some articles to get some insider info with hacking.
The most important is to have the stuff that might get repetitive either appear once per playthrough, or be controlled by a good algorithm that takes note of when the player read an article, and takes care to wait a while before reintroducing it.
