So I have the admit I love this game and playing it waaaaay too much since go live… but whilst this is the best iteration of Elite to date, I am starting to worry whether there are enough hooks to keep the interest of a lot of players – myself included - going for more than 6 months or so ( aka ‘there isn’t enough to do’). Personally for me chief and first among these is the impression that outside of building up credits and rankings, there’s not much I as the player can do that will make much difference to the persistent galaxy itself. The second is the nagging feeling that a lot of the features we have to date generally need more depth to them. Someone said somewhere ‘that it has an ocean of breadth and an inch of depth’ and that sums it up for me too.
Ships at the moment is one of these areas; at the moment it feel like one long grindathon to get the credits needed for the next biggest ship. All of which are IMO fairly impersonal. Reading the forums lots of others have expressed this too, so rather than spend this thread on what irks either myself or others might have in particular about the ships, I’d like to instead suggest a way of creating an end goal hook for the ships themselves to address both my concerns above.
Provide ship museums.
Ship museums that collect the best player ships out there and host them as collections.
Create one ship museum per faction and have them compete to get the best collection going… as happens in real life.
In short, each ship museum would house halls of ships by category (trading / fighting / explorers / pirates / miner etc) and a best overall – the best of the best.
Plus one hall unique to that faction for ships that did the most for that faction i.e. ‘Defenders of the Empire’.
BENEFITS of having ship museums:
- Ships museums would give a focus to ship ownership by trying to keep a players ship in one piece long enough to get the status needed to get it into a museum. That kind of long term goal for a ship can only help build attachment to them… and yes we also need to be able to name them too, the day I named my chickens was the day I lost the ability to dispose any of them for the Sunday roast!
- Getting your ship into the museum will also give you serious reputation points, because a famous ship doesn’t exist without a famous pilot. It also gets you some decent money as the museums will pay you for ships of the quality they want (if you qualify for multiple museums then even more as one trumps the bid of another).
- Gives us something to do as tourists when Frontier implement the ability to get out of our ships and walk places. At the same time it adds depth to Tourism worlds by actually having a tourist attraction you can go and see, including a meet up place for PvP interactions that isn’t a bar…
- Finally - and hopefully I’ve saved the most important benefit to last - it has the potential to modify the ways people play the game (probably in more good than bad ways) in that you can no longer treat ships like cheaply insured confetti when you are aiming to get into a museum. Why? Because ships museums would add rogue-like mode of play to the game. You can personally ‘die’ as many times as you like (one ‘immersion killer’ that is utterly essential) but if your ship dies then that’s it – start again.
Museums would give the extra dimension of a rogue-like mode, but with two bonuses over most pure rogue-like games; one, you can take a break from it anytime (by storing the ship and switching to a ship you not trying to get into a museum) and two, cash and reputation you earn from it carries over after you either get your ship to a museum or your ship dies… it’s not start from the complete beginning again.
And it’s a rogue-like mode that’s an entirely optional addition, not just the whole game! If you don’t want that style, don’t do it!
So it’s a rogue-like that could turn out to be one of the best rogue-like implementations out there.
So if the concept is good, a couple of high level ideas on how-to-implement.
1) The museums would be ‘relatively’ (and I appreciate being an ex-developer myself that I am asking for a major new feature here! :)) simple for Frontier to build as they can be built as extended stations. Take the existing ship docking drum from the existing station designs, and put several of them into one structure - one hall per drum, plus the normal drum for people to land as per current. That will help create enough slots that it won’t become insanely hard to qualify too quickly as the museums become filled up with Isinona’s ships!
In terms of getting out of our ships to walk around the museum, if the museums are implemented as drums then I’d imagine the normal docking drums are already on the list of things we will be able to walk around… if so then that’s pretty minimal extra effort on that side.
Put these extended space stations into Service / Tourism systems (e.g. Sol for the Federation) and you have museums up and running pretty quickly without needing to wait for the planetary landing expansion.
2) Regardless of how its done, the ships themselves need a running total needs to be stored for the major categories that a museum for e.g. total kills for the ship, total profit made by the ship.
These are used for the purpose of determining if and when the ship has done enough to qualify for one of the museums.
3) ahem... “A ship is for life, not just for ever”… make the ships *mortal* (apologies to the RSPCA).
One of the specific things that does irk me about ships that they are technically immortal. Shoot them up as much as you want and with one mouse click they’re not just as good as new, they ARE new!
They hold 100% of their as-new purchase value.
This for me *is* an immersion-killer – all ships in reality have a finite air-worthiness lifetime; the stresses of flying fatigue the air frame to the point performance may be affected until its unsafe to fly and it can’t fly anymore. And then it breaks terminally like an overworked Battlestar Galactica.
The immortal ships we currently have mean we don’t really treat them as proper ships in that sense, it just encourages us to treat them as cheap disposables. Right now I certainly don’t care one iota if my ship is lost, I only care about the credits I need to pay to renew it. In fact I care more about the cargo lost than the ship itself which is the wrong way round.
Now whilst you *could* put museums into the game with the current immortal ships setup, what will happen is that:
A) It will simply take longer and longer to get a ship to qualify for a museum to the point where it acts as a deterrent to trying (which bizarrely cheapens the achievement in my view).
B) You lose the timer / clock effect of planning to reach a level within a certain time limit – the life of the ship. Knowing every jump and every battle counts tightens up the gameplay when going for a museum slot. It makes for a tighter game experience overall than an open ended no timer limit.
So consider the below as all being optional, but to do museums justice, ships should preferably be mortal where the following are all possibilities:
- The ship frame ages a small fraction with every jump.
- The airframe ages a small fraction (a larger fraction than for jumps) with damage taken.
- You can put a ship in for an optional major refit 2-3 times in the ships life for a significant cost. Refits would restore a %age of the airframe – extending its lifetime (similar to the Hubble refits that extended its life).
- Ships lose a %age of their sale value as the frame ages.
- At the end of its life a ships could lose some performance during the poor state of the ship frame – which would make the end part of getting a ship up to the level needed for the museum a bit more interesting! Basically the ships computer would throttle back its handling and thrust – a bit similar to graphics card throttling during overheating.
- As per real life a ship destroyed that is old would cost more to replace on insurance than a newer ship (a simple sliding scale for this).
- Old ships with fatigues air frames damage slightly quicker than new ships.
- When the ship is at end of life a sell for scrap option appears where you can sell for scrap at a minimum value, BUT
- If the ship has achieved enough that it qualifies, you can sell to the museum it qualifies for, or auction if it qualifies in more than one (generally the museum that needs it most would bid more). The final mission for the ship then is to get it physically to the system of the museum to receive payment… of course losing museums may put out a large bounty to anyone who stops you on the way!
Obviously the game needs to be balanced that players can make more than enough money to keep buying bigger ships so it may bring the cost of buying ships down a bit to compensate. And just how long should a ships lifespan last? It’s up for debate and ‘your mileage *will* vary’, but in flying time (not docked time) about 30 hours +/- 5 could be realistic. I’m not too hung up on that, I’d be happy with whatever Frontier would think best.
But all of these ideas add depth to the game around ships, and can be considered by Frontier even if you don’t want to do the museums.
These aren’t exhaustive either, there’s s a bunch of other implementation ideas I can think of, but these two are the most important for now, and I need to get some sleep!
But in closing I’d like to make one last case for ship museums – the game itself was launched in a ship museum - namely the Imperial War Museum at Duxford!
If ship museums are important enough to be used as the setting for the actual launch, surely their future equivalents can be added into the game itself? :)
CMDR Martens Out