LATEST CHATTY HEADER
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
New to Shacknews? Signup for a Free Account
Already have an account? Login Now
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
I've had action space sims on the mind recently (TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, etc.), and I'm even playing Freespace 2 now. These games were great, and I want more of them. And I want them better. Plus, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person whose childhood wasn't at least partly consumed by spaceships shooting at each other with lasers.
So I'm going to ramble for a really long time about the awesome game that I think somebody should make. Because I started and couldn't stop. And maybe other people can share their thoughts on the subject.
BTW, this is pretty much the definition of TLDR.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 28 replies.
Some other stuff that sucks:
* Wingmen. Managing AI players is typically a pain in the ass, and in this case doesn't do much except add more keys to deal with. Either your wingmen are stupid and need to be guided through the game, or they're smart enough to be doing what you were going to tell them to do already. You typically can't count on them to do anything really complex anyway. So do away with them or make them basically automatic.
* Instant death from colliding with larger craft. Sometimes it makes sense, like if you smash into something head-on. Otherwise, I think it's pretty plausible to have the player's craft glance off the other craft's hull with *some* penalty that stops short of instant death.
* Too much resource management. Kind of goes along with the wingmen thing. Spending too much time dealing with the power configuration of your shields, weapons, and engines isn't all it's cracked up to be. Do away with it or simplify it into "all power to (engines)/(shields)" sort of deal.
* Getting stuck with baggage from existing sci-fi universes. Yep, this would mostly be Star Wars. It's a lot more flexible to stick with something that won't have outrage people if you do things a little differently.
* Newtonian physics. It's a game, people want to have fun, Newtonian physics aren't.
On the topic of multiplayer:
Pretty much sucked in every space sim game that's tried to do it, in my personal experience. You get a missile lock and try to fire all your shit off before you get blown up by somebody else's missiles. Other players are too evasive to hit with lasers. There's not much in the game that really benefits that substantially from teamwork. A lot of problems. Now, some of this can probably be addressed with more interesting weapon mechanics that let you deal with fast-moving targets, but you've still got to figure out what's going to be fun. I doubt deathmatch has a lasting appeal if you're still basically just flying around in space killing each other. Team-based goals make more sense, but in a free form environment you're still presenting a pretty complex challenge for people who aren't pretty well-coordinated. If anybody were going to try to do this it seems like it would make more sense to try to build a game with content that could automatically adjust to more players in a cooperative mode. They'd need to push the randomized variables part a bit harder if they were going to get this to work well.
The core problem is that the low-level mechanics just weren't fun enough in previous games, so multiplayer felt repetitive. They'd need to deal with that.
So I'll wrap it. Here's the context that such a game would be developed under: It's been a hell of a long time since any serious contenders for this type of game have been released (X-Wing Alliance and Freespace 2 are probably the most recent "popular" titles, and they both came out in 1999). There's a somewhat limited market for this type of game compared to a more generic action game that follows a hero character around while he bludgeons things to death with heavy objects; the fact that it almost requires a joystick kind of makes it even more limited.
On the bright side, if they can make the control scheme work for consoles without over-simplifying it too much, then the market gets a lot bigger. And technologically, we're at a point where the hardware can really make it look good. So I hope they do.
Also, I hope Black Prophecy is good.
The post has been reported. Thank you!
You must be logged in to post.
You must be logged in to post.