Player Features and Ideas Discussion

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Planetary Interaction Sandbox (Pea-Eye-Ess)

Players and CCP, the following ideas are here to jog your creativity, nothing more!

With the removal of Dust 514 looming, many wonder where the franchise will lead in the future? The valuable art assets and IP from Dust just get thrown in the wastebin? What if there were wonderful posibilities of low operation costs, high gameplay value procedural content? Many ways to increase revenue exist for creating a PC version of eve land content. Dust 514 was ill planned to be free-to-play on a console, a market that hasn't really thrived.

Planetary Interaction Sandbox comes into play replacing the current PI setup from the customs office down. The customs office will remain as the low cost meathod of integrating the two economies. The current PI map will remain, but it will be to provide landing zones for players to land any cruiser class or smaller ship on the planet. The player will also scan the planet to find a spot that has resources. When the player lands he will be presented with a procedurally generated Dust 514 style world. However he will not only be able to shoot his gun, but build simple walls, gathering devices and much more. Fallout 4 has an excellent example of this type of sandbox building style.

EvE PIS Interface

The customs office and orbital assault interface could stay in place to allow interaction from EvE and PIS. The customs office gantry would allow the players on ground to send the normal PI goods back up into space. Ships could perform orbital assaults on areas designated as battlezones.

The physical rendering would be performed with an updated version of the DUST engine. It would also be set up for virtual reality, as the future of gaming may rest with that.

The Sandbox Terrain.

The server generates a simple terrain mesh array with RNG and exports this down to the PIS client when a new landing is initiated. If players are only visiting the planet, this mesh and all the terrain generated will be deleted after a short time when the player leaves. However if a player finds a spot with resources that will be in positions he can make defensibl, he can anchor the world with his base. When he builds the command center console, and a power source, the area is saved under those coordinates for the player to always return too. This is now his instance. If he explores the surrounding meshes, they will be saved for a specified distance away from his command center, and beyond that will reset too.

The meshes will be populated with tree art assets and randomly generated grass and vegetation. Only near landing sites, there will be resources for the player to use for industry. The meshes could be either static, or modifiable depending on costs of implemenation.

The Constructions

With a very simple interface, the players could turn Tritanium into small wall prefab sections that simply snap together. There could also be weapons turrets, gateways, lifesupport for non terran worlds, planetary processing machines, and much more. These could be pulled directly from the art assets of Dust514 and recycled for maximum revenue.

More item should be added over time, much like Minecraft progressed, adding replay value. Aurum only cosmetic items could be very profitable, and will not unbalance gameplay.

The Struggle

Players should be able to initiate scans to find players command structures. However there needs to be vulnerability windows for each populated command center.

Perhaps, like in space, the bases have shields that have to be attacked with some kind of siege weaponry, and put into a timer. When the timer expires the defeding players would need to be in their bases for a PVP type battle.

The bases would be primarily composed of minerals and perhaps require other ingredients, so little will be lost if a base is destroyed or conquered. But emotions will run high and you can be sure pirates will now be landing their ships as well.

Incredible landings

On reddit there have been many artworks of ships landing on planetary landscapes. We could have this also be a part of EvE online by simply scaling the space ship models for the planetary environments. This will render them in epic grandeur and every landing will be a memorable spectacle.

On the balance side, there should be a hard limit of 1 ship per player on the planet, to prevent stockpiling. So when a player wants to enter PIS mode, he lands his cruiser or smaller vessel on the planet, and it will stay there until he leaves. Players would respawn on their ships if there was no base present.

A New Dawn

In summary, this recyling of assets could be a new dawn for space sandbox and virtual reality gameplay. Just like Fallout4 was able to incorporate construction sandbox gameplay, so can we. You will eventually have players who focus on their planetary pads, spend countless Aurum to improve and personalize their homes. There could be battles in space raging over a battle on the ground as well. This is what Dust should have been.

what better time to add a construction/industry/pvp sandbox! let the players create the content with that kind of sandbox

i played space engineers, I think its a perfect game for that variety.

im specifically suggesting that we have a simplistic building mode and have sandbox raids not FPS maps.

I build a base on a planet, its attackable and people can pull ISK/content out of that somehow.

And the building engine im suggesting is 100x less complex than space engineers, as i dont want to build ships, i want to build planetary bases and shoot other peoples bases too. and sit around with my eve online friends

i dont think we are entering competition. i look at it as broadening the potential for content.

also dust 514 was ill concieved as FTP console game.

as to your feelings about the setup not being interesting, thre could be the potential for an automatic set up PIS base that require little more control over that you ask for, an icon that you click, much simpler than the normal PI. But you could land and would see all the consoles in one simple prefab building, dirtside.