Nareg Maxence
Gallente
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Posted - 2009.04.16 20:49:00 -
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Ok.. I am going to be bold and suggest what you may call EVE 2.0
Fundamentally a space travel complete revamp. I think there are some major issues with EVE's space travel game mechanics, which bores me to death right now, frankly. Wall of text incomming.
* Space travel is insanely repetitive. Undock-Warp gate-Jump-Warp-Jump-Warp-Jump-...-Warp-Dock, repeat ad nauseam. Even small gang PVP in 0.0 gets repetitive because most of the time you either just orbiting a gate somewhere or in 'travel-mode', which is more warp-jump-warp-jump synchronized to the commands of some guy who is falling asleep himself from boredom.
* Space is small. There is no free roaming inside a solar system, leaving you with a boxed in feeling. It kind of feels like you are flying your ship with handcuffs on. Now, I hear the devs mumble, 'but this would kill pvp, if people can hide 1000AU away'. I say, if you look at it differently, you can see a chance for making some very interesting gameplay where it is possible to hunt down ships hiding in a system.
* There are too few stages for PVP. It pretty much all revolves around the gate mechanics. Yeah, there is lowsec piracy, pos wars (I hear it's hillarious..) etc. Still you are confined to the box, there is no roaming.
So with this in mind here are some ideas I came up with.
First and foremost free warping. You and not the game should control your ship. It doesn't have to be twitch based, but you should be able to control the direction of travel both out of warp but also while you are in warp. (Simulator style, I guess, if you insist on making a comparison.)
No warping through celestial objects, add safety zones around them, so that trying to warp into them causes your ship to autonavigate away.
Dual monitor support. This is needed for your ships navigation computer. The navigation computer monitors your course, manages your autopilot route list, displays your position, heading, tactical view of current solar system and a condensed version of the star map adjusted to show your autopilot route, adjacent systems on the route and optional bookmarked systems with the quickest way there, if you decide to deviate from the route.
The navigation computer overlays navigation information on your main display in a hud, showing direction of the gate you are heading towards, so you can steer your ship in the right direction. The navigation computer should be in sync with navcomps in your fleet giving your FC control of your ship while in warp thereby allowing coordinated fleet warps. Autopilot should allow you to travel to your destination via some unoptimized bezier curve (to warp around planets), so manual warping gives you an advantage and encourages active playing just like today.
Limit the warp capabilities of different ship classes, just like today.
You need to be able to catch ships while in warp by finding them via navcomp, using probes whatever. Currently ships are warping extremely fast, so this is not feasable unless you slow down warp speeds significantly. (Like 1% of present speeds perhaps.)
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO SAY! It will take days to get from Jita to Dodi! Yes, we need to deal with that, so we need a complete rethink of the gate network so we get fewer jumps that let you travel farther. Every system could very well be connected pretty much as they are today, but with some additional gates for constellation and regional travel.
One solution could be to add a travel hub gate in every system. This travel hub gate should be positioned somewhat away from other celestial objects and should lead you to a regional travel hub, which is an area in selected systems, far away from the star and planets which have several gates that let you travel between regions.
Running out of space here, but additional ideas could be variable security rating within systems so flying to travel hubs might take you through small low sec zones in system. Add system wide asteroid fields, and so on.
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