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Death in space, immersion, and solutions
sophlogimo
Member Posts: 6,507 Arc User
There are only very few things that really bother me about STO space combat. The vast majority of its features are somewhere in between of just cool and awesome.
However, one thing bothers me, and I wonder what the design considerations for that decision were: When you are defeated, you blow up, and are magically teleported back to the spawn. This is extremely immersion-breaking for me, and my observation is, for many, many people.
In ground combat, there is another option: Have one of your team mates (or simply another player of the same side) revive you on the spot. But actually, in ground combat, I could devise myself a reason why I am teleported back to the spawn, as long as my ship is in range: They just save me with the transporters.
There is no such imaginative solution in space. The immersion break is 100%. No explanation whatsoever will remove that feeling of "a moment ago I was a starship captain, now I am back to just a player of a video game" feeling which costs a lot of potential fun.
Yes, I am serious. It really annoys me, even though I actually don't die that often.
Could anybody tell me a good guess or maybe even inside knowledge (any devs?
) about why the ground combat options of "respawning or calling for help" were not made available in space, too?
Or what would be your favorite solutions to the immersion breaking problem?
However, one thing bothers me, and I wonder what the design considerations for that decision were: When you are defeated, you blow up, and are magically teleported back to the spawn. This is extremely immersion-breaking for me, and my observation is, for many, many people.
In ground combat, there is another option: Have one of your team mates (or simply another player of the same side) revive you on the spot. But actually, in ground combat, I could devise myself a reason why I am teleported back to the spawn, as long as my ship is in range: They just save me with the transporters.
There is no such imaginative solution in space. The immersion break is 100%. No explanation whatsoever will remove that feeling of "a moment ago I was a starship captain, now I am back to just a player of a video game" feeling which costs a lot of potential fun.
Yes, I am serious. It really annoys me, even though I actually don't die that often.
Could anybody tell me a good guess or maybe even inside knowledge (any devs?
) about why the ground combat options of "respawning or calling for help" were not made available in space, too?Or what would be your favorite solutions to the immersion breaking problem?
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Or show you blow up et al, then a transporter is used at a starbase to recreate you and your crew on an identical ship, which then warps back to where you were as a cut scene?
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Disabled Ship:
Looks like a ship wreck, a team mate can fly towards a ship 5km close, and can send a repair crew (this requires a few seconds and dropping of shield) the ship is 'revived' with full shields and about 10% hull. (requires X-amount of crewmen)
Destroyed ship:
In the same way a ground battle can see a person vaporised, a destroyed ship which takes a severe critical hit as its finishing hit is blown up and must respawn.
How this would affect pvp: easy it wont. you can still respawn as in ground pvp no one revives a fallen team mate, its better to let them spawn.
How this affected PVE: makes it slightly more workable in teams when a ship blows, but comes with a big risk, you have to have no shields for approx 5seconds and require a portion or crew.
It seems more player friendly
Though this power would be innately be more fitting to cruisers / high crew ships
Abandon ship ability should be renamed self destruct as your crew doesnt abandon jack they just blow themselves up. Abandon ship should be an ability to shorten respawn before death, like you know your about to die so you hit Abandon ship instead of a 2min respawn as example you get a 1 1/2min respawn.
Our ships exploding all over the place breaks immersian badly. In pvp i can see it, in pve nope. Space doesnt really feel teambased at all not even in STFs, in STFs the team is mostly split up into 1-2 people per side only focusing on bosses. There is very little cross healing done by players, no reviving.
Ground game is all about keeping your team up and moving, space is about blowing sh*t up or being blown up. PVP has players using teamwork but pve has very little of it.
Perhaps you prefer a cut scene where your ship blows up in a huge ball of fire forever lost w/it's captain and crew forever gone from the game?
Random Quote from Kerrat
"Sumlobus@****: your mums eat Iced Targ Poo"
C&H Fed banter
Unfortunately every time a thread on this starts up, one of the following seems to happen:
This especially bothers me with Borg Red Alerts with their instakill torps - which are worse than normal because, in the best V'ger tradition, they should kill you AND convert you into data. Frankly a lot of the time I just play through it after that with no finesse because I have a team relying on me, and end up quitting for the day afterwards. And I have often quit and restart missions after being destroyed since, well, I just exploded. Game over.
I can come up with a wide variety of ways to explain how one would survive this (including but not limited to quantum probability-based technological systems harnessing the "specialness" of your captain, and concepts as simple as emergency short-warp with the explosion being from a particularly large but non-fatal injury - see DS9 and the ship that destroyed the Valiant for an example of that). However, it is still very, very disruptive. Ironically, one "obvious" explanation - "Q did it" - is often used by people who don't particularly like their captain being special at all.
Fortunately Dstahl has mentioned, during a chat that I attended once (and where I asked about this) that "damaged" ships in space was an idea that was being considered. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell when this will in fact happen - could literally be years, if ever. The mechanics for it are probably in there already, but hooking it together for player ships is another story.
So in short - yes, it bothers you, myself, and a number of others. Unfortunately it is unlikely that anything is going to be done about it in the foreseeable future.
As a final note, re: away teams - one way to explain it (aside from using one of those systems and mounting it in your captain's combat armor) is that everyone on the away team is equipped with one of the emergency transporters used in Nemesis. Hey, it's been decades since then, one would think that they've improved it by now.
That's pretty much what it is now.
Immersion goes splat when you're blown to smithereens in space. It doesn't matter if it happens less, if it's still in there, it's the same net effect.
Vaporization on the ground isn't pretty, either, I have to say.
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Most of the good ideas back then were also buried in the usual "omg gozer ruined the game, i quit" commentary too
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They have an orders list dozens of items long from PWE, a wish list hundreds of items long and a bug list thousands of items long. It is unsurprising that something like this would end up shuffled to somewhere in the middle, even though it seems (to me, having little knowledge of the internal architecture of the engine and/or game-specific code) like it wouldn't be too hard to add.
Further, there may be some game play aspects that they are concerned that this would interfere with. This is an understandable concern, I suppose, even if I strain to fathom what they could be.
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You'd have to ask them. If you'll read my somewhat spamtastic response earlier in the thread, I'm rather against the way that they do it and it destroys my immersion, too.
As I understand it (and note this is something I've heard third-hand since I wasn't even here when it happened) it was decided either in beta or very early after launch to do it the way that they do it now, due to player input. I am not sure if it was going to be more apparent that you got turned into space dust (maybe even lost your ship), or if they were originally going for a 'disabled' type of thing.
Its a game. Its fine as it is.
If u want it to be treu to nature, t his should happen
If u die space or ground, ur char gets wiped and u can start over at lvl 1..
( u lose everything. )
All c-store items should be char bound. ( Unless they make a family tree )
So char dies, u can rebuy the c-store item!
If a starbase gets destroyed in a fleet starbase mission, geuse what u can start from scratch again!
Or shall we do it like a game??!! AkA as it is now? !
I get what you guys are saying, but at he same time, I think you will have to admit you guys are going to be the minority if any proposal to change the death mechaninc in space involves having to leave the instance, sit at starbase for repairs, or anything else along those lines.
Space fight vid game = pew pew! after all, right?
I think the devs tried to find a middle ground when they added in ship injuries on elite setting. Sure, you still go boom and are insta-respawned just outside of the fight, but at least now there is a consequence you have to deal with.
It's called sarcasm.
Going kaboom may not be very satisfying to the guy getting blown up, but in PvP you're really looking forward to seeing those explosions when it's the other guy.
The status quo isn't very elegant in some ways, but it does have the virtue of being able to get back into play very quickly when you're in a solo PvE instance, and reasonably quickly in team play.
Don't know about the rest of you, but I really hated having to run back to a mission door from the hospital in that former Cryptic game. Worse yet if the hospital was the next zone over.
So yeah, this is a gameplay improvement over that, if less immersive.
I wouldn't mind the "Disabled Ship" option in Team PvE. It simulates the idea that a crippled ship is no longer a priority target. As long as the self-destruct option to respawn remains, then it would be workable.
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The problem is that you are asking for a more realistic mechanism, and being irrevocably destroyed is the most realistic mechansim, sarcasm or not.
Limp away damaged? Why would the enemy not finish you off, especially if facing Borg?
Wait for a rescue ship? How long a wait? Why would the enemy not finish you off while you wait? Why would they ignore the rescue ship and conversely, why was the rescue ship not helping in the battle? Where did it come from? And how would a rescue ship entirely rebuild your ship in time for anything?
If the current mechansim bothers you, write it off to time loops. Its not like they never happened over the course of the various series.
But why does that illusion work for you unless it feels more realistic to you?
And why would borg leave a ship 'seemingly dead?'
"Call for help" doesn't work if your entire away team is down. It doesn't magically summon a rescue team out of nowhere and it doesn't make your away team invulnerable long enough to recover you.
The developers probably looked at all the Dominion battle scenes in DS9 and based combat in the game mostly on that.