Psyk
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Posted - 2004.03.20 17:48:00 -
[1]
For me this has to be the lack of integration of the background story with the way the player races interact with each other. The situation between races has been described in the past as a cold war but there is no game content to reflect this at all. With skills, blue prints and any equipment for each race are readily available to those who wanted them, if you want your sworn enemies best battleship blueprint you can buy it and the skills to fly it without so much as a standings check.
It seems very strange to go the lengths of creating individual races and political differences within the game if the game as far as the player is concerned doesnĘt support them.
I think Tomb was asked about this before in a CSM and said it was down to keeping the game open to all. I canĘt say I know enough about game design to question his motives but - here goes anyway - initially limiting players to one race of ships shouldnĘt restrict anyone if the ship design included some cross over between the races. Each race could still specialise in a particular field, Amarr in lasers and Caldari missiles but there would still be occasions where one race would copy anotherĘs strengths, it wouldnĘt be as good as the original but it would give the player the option.
Actually if you read the descriptions for some of the Amarr frigates they do mention them being designed to combat and copy the strengths of the other races. So itĘs not too difficult to imagine that the other races would try this as well while keeping their individual style of shipbuilding.
Having the player base split up like this allows a real cold war situation to develop within the game and provide more player created tension between the races instead of the NPC running commentary CCP have already devised which doesnĘt appear to affect the player base to any real degree.
The main problem with this is how you police the game so people donĘt go off and kill lots of players from another race. One solution would be to have each empire surrounded by 0.0 sec space and have starting players on a minus standing towards all races except their own, each race would govern itself with their own NPC forces. A players standing to a particular race would determine if they would get attacked once entering a new region.
Of course if you decide to be a pirate, including pirating your own race, then you could end up with a minus standing in all the races and end up, like the game works now, stuck in 0.0 sec space.
IĘm hoping that once the story advances to the point where the races are at war and the game has been developed to support the story driven content then we may see some of the game I thought we would be getting on day one.
Psyk
Brain Leech
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