These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Player Features and Ideas Discussion

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
 

Dust 514/Legion/Whatever FPS Planetside EVE Game You Want to Make
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Omid Hakuli
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#1 - 2016-01-28 02:45:38 UTC  |  Edited by: Omid Hakuli
Aww, Dust didn't work. Legion won't either. I hate to break it to you, CCP, but them's the breaks. The reason why is that you made something beautiful and then you failed to duplicate it's core mechanics, and based on what I'm reading about Legion, you're going to fail there, too. I'm going to focus on talking about Legion because Dust is already ******.

Industry
The first thing you're ******* up with in Legion in that you're going with a Diablo-like loot based system. This is wrong, because the reason EVE is what it is lies on the back of the industry. The PVP is great, the space ships are great, the sov systems are great, but none of that would matter without the industry system.

You need to make the majority of items created by players, and not only that, but you need to directly rip the crafting system from EVE online. Not you should because it's easier, you absolutely have to, in order to really hope to see any true integration of your games one day.

Legion players should be able to craft spaceship modules, just like I should be able to craft Legion stuff, and before Legion comes out all of the craftable items should have blueprints that EVE players can get their hands on. This way, we can start seeding the markets with them and producing them before the game comes out and their economy will be balanced to our own from the start. What this does is prevents any weird Isk-exchange rates, leveling the market's playing field.

Legion also needs to give players the ability to focus on, and perform activities, that are not at all based around shooting other players, such as crafting, mining, transporting goods, and so on. This is actually the place that Legion needs to integrate with EVE first, long before we worry about air strikes and capital ships crashing into planets: Legion players should be making contracts with space haulers (playing EVE) to move things between planets, stations, and every combination thereof, and they should have some method of moving things around on planets themselves, I'll touch more on that later.

Market hubs also need to be shared between games. So if a group of Legion players want to by or trade, they should find a way to get themselves to Jita or their nearest market hub.

Levels and Travel
This also means that Legion should not be an instanced combat game. It needs some open-world elements, that allow players to go hunt down other players mining operations, stage attacks against factories, and so forth. I think that it should still feel something like an instanced combat game, however.

To begin with, players should start in high-sec planetary hubs, and these places will function exactly like space stations except for planets. This should look like walking in stations does now for Legion players: you'll be able to see your character walking around in the station, and EVE pilots will be able to switch between this view and the ship hanger, as is normal. For this reason, character creation should work the exact same as it does in EVE online. This would come in handy if you guys ever finish Incarna, but you won't, so that doesn't matter. However, if you do, you'll regret it if you don't follow that advice. These places will have services that function the same as those in EVE, except instead of ship fitting services they will offer infantry fitting services. EVE players will be able to access these hubs, trade inside of them, and so forth, however when Legion players 'deploy' they will be sent on the ground outside of the hub, while when EVE players 'undock', they fly back up into space.

Planetary hubs could be populated either through the systems the same way that space stations have been, with the same frequency. Some space stations could even be removed from EVE and transformed into planetary hubs instead, if you guys want, with your normal grace period (both the hub and station will be active and share a market for X amount of time, then the station is gone, and all items inside of the station are teleported into the hub) giving people time to fix their insta-docks and insta-undocks. Obviously if you use that system you should be careful which stations you choose, because whatever stations you do that with will likely become minor market hubs due to the market being accessible in two different places for a time. Nullsec players can also build planetary hubs in their BFE planets as can wormhole players. In nullsec, activity on planets and in space should increase the indices on that area for both games, so lots of planet side industrial activity should increase the indice for both Legion players in the area and EVE players in the area. Or, another simpler option is to say that all stations are connected to a planetary hub, and they share markets with one another. This latter choice might be the better one because it allows for the smoothest transition.

Legion players can then choose to deploy directly outside of the hub, however nothing very exciting should be here save for some form of transportation gates similar to our jump gates that they can use to move around the planet. Each gate will take them to a different terrain type, so for a barren planet, they will find procedurally generated bits of rocky crags behind one gate, sand dunes behind another, etc, for a temperate planet there will be jungles, fields, maybe even tropical islands… you guys get the idea, rinse and repeat for different planet types.

[CONTINUED]
Omid Hakuli
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#2 - 2016-01-28 02:46:07 UTC  |  Edited by: Omid Hakuli
[CONTINUED]

More experienced players with connections should be able to communicate with EVE pilots and have their troops transported to other planets, allowing them to move and travel a bit faster than troops on the ground. This could give some Legion players a much needed advantage to route other troops and stage an ambush while they are en-route from place to place. Of course, this does put them at the mercy of the pilot not to simply self destruct their ship and fly home in a pod, so they'd have to make these choices wisely.

When traveling to systems with changing security status, you should emulate the system that you have in EVE. You're already on top of that but you're doing it via Diablo-like loot system rather than having people go after resources themselves. Basically better things to mine and gather exist only in lower security areas. Concord, in high security areas, should respond in the same way that they do now. Their Concord ships enter orbit, do a precision strike on whoever is ******* **** up, and that's the end of it.

Travel from planet to planet could be done through planetary gates similar to star gates from SG1. Due to the fact that each system has multiple planets, I'd suggest that this work via either a planetary jumpgate in which takes you to another system, and also separate planetary gates that will take you to each planet in the system. This means that travel from place to place will essentially work as it does in EVE, except there will be a lot more 'systems' because of the number of planets in EVE, so this will take some pretty badass servers to manage just due to the sheer number of planets. Of course, the planets will be smaller than the solar systems so.. I'm not entirely sure how that would all work, but I'm sure it could be done.

Wormhole travel stumps me a bit. I guess players could find, or generate, planetary wormholes? It seems like wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff to me, but you know what, I bet there's a method.

Any planet that currently has active planetary interaction by an EVE player should function as a kind of target. These facilities should be given, when Legion is released (or whenever the EVE market is seeded with Legion stuff), some basic default defenses that should be able to fend off level 1 starter Legion guys, however as they get better, capsuleers should look into updating their defenses as well, and offering contracts to Legion mercenaries to defend them. These contracts could work like courier contracts, without collateral, where if the contracted place is successfully defended, the group is payed. Obviously they should have timers of some kind as that system works really well in EVE and shouldn't be abandoned.

Eventually, with this procedural generation, every place that people bother to create will eventually be mapped out places with familiar terrain without you guys having to painstakingly create the entire world by hand. The generation will mess up and make dumb things occasionally, and you guys will have to step in and slightly modify levels after x number of complaints, but it's the best method of making something viable for a world this huge. Each time it messes up and you guys make something new with a level, that will be a chance for you to improve your generation program and eventually you won't have to intervene much at all.

Resource Moving
Obviously, players can just move things themselves from planet to planet via a convoy thanks to the jumpgates. However, this should be a bit slower than having an EVE pilot do it for you, especially with large amounts of stuff. That way, you're encouraging some more interaction with EVE and Legion players, and because it just seems to make sense to me that if you want to move things to faraway planets you'd hire a space transport, not convoy it through a much larger amount of gates. In order to access EVE transport pilots, players should need to have to transport their selected resources from where they get it to the planetary hub. This means that somebody moves a vehicle, and while they can decide to simply run back and forth without any defenses, other players can choose to attack these vehicles, so in some situations you'll want escort your goods. Once they arrive at the jumpgate back to the hub's area of the planet they them must move it to the planetary hub in question, which will likely be their most dangerous trek, as that's where the Legion version of high sec gankers will nest. Otherwise, if you need to move it to a different citadel, station, or planet, you'll need to create a courier contract for an EVE player to move it to the desired location. EVE haulers than fly to that hub, pick it up, and transport it as normal to the target planetary hub, citadel (be that a planet side or orbital citadel) or station.

Of course, Legion players can choose to simply use that planetary hubs services to refine, craft, and so forth, they should also be able to construct their own citadels planetside (that I've been mentioning) and use those, and so forth. Legion players should also have access to things like jump clones, their own version of bridging with jump fatigue (if you guys don't decide to just finally get rid of that) etc.

tl;dr Give me eve, but on planets and with guns.

Okay, I'm off to play Planetside 2 and pretend my dreams came true, but I hope you guys like this idea, because I think it'd pretty cool. One last note: I know this will cause some interesting changes in EVE's economy. I know that people will fumble around if the market is seeded with legion **** blueprints, not knowing what will be actually valuable and what won't be, before the game comes out. I get that there will be bumps in the road, but if you really want to integrate these games, if CCP really wants to keep to their word about making the largest, most complete sci-fi world that ever existed… this is how it will be done.
Scipio Artelius
Weaponised Vegemite
Flying Dangerous
#3 - 2016-01-28 02:49:40 UTC
Omid Hakuli wrote:
... based on what I'm reading about Legion, you're going to fail there, too. I'm going to focus on talking about Legion because Dust is already ******.

What are you reading about Legion?
Omid Hakuli
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#4 - 2016-01-28 02:55:13 UTC
Takari
Promised Victorious Entropy
#5 - 2016-01-28 14:23:48 UTC
This is all old news.. very old news.. No one's heard from Project Legion in a year or more.. We can't even be sure it's still a thing.

"Roll the dice, don't think twice. This is the way of things. Welcome to EVE." ~ CCP Falcon

"Good luck, shoot straight and don't back down." - Serendipity Lost