I want to put this in the gen. discussion area, because if I put it in the Foundry sub-forums, then only authors would comment. I wanted to read the reactions of the general players to this idea from the latest "Ask Cryptic."
The question asked by timjerrom was (summarized): Where is the exploration to seek out new life and to boldly go where no one has gone before?
Dstahl's answer:
We've poured significant resources into creating procedurally generated random space encounters and, unfortunately, they never quite feel like the Trek you are talking about. This is why we created the Foundry, so that players could author missions that are much more genuine and offer something new. The next step will be to marry the Foundry to a solid Exploration concept where you can be rewarded for exploring new sectors of randomly (but player created) strange new worlds. That is the basis of what we want to do with Exploration in the future.
I'm not sure if this is "the" exploration revamp that has been floating around, but it sounds like it if the Foundry is the "basis" for what "to do with Exploration in the future."
What are your reactions to this quote? What do you hope to see? What kind of rewards would make you willing to play randomly generated foundry missions?
Should there be a vetting process on what goes into that sector? How should it work?
Comments
I'm hoping that these would get randomly pulled out of a hat when going to exploration clusters. Basically, you set the entrance door as the exploration cluster and then when people are there and pull a random mission they might get yours.
My character Tsin'xing
But a system much like how we submit now for spotlights could be used for exploration. Just click 'submit for exploration clusters', and the mission will be considered and frozen in its current state. Maybe Brandon could outsource some of this approval to a wider community so they could fill the system up with dozens of missions.
I like the idea of foundry exploration because it's the only reasonable way to get a large enough number of missions to be truly exploring the 'unknown'. But I think the actual clusters themselves need to be updated a bit. The cluster sector map should have 3-dimensionality, with nebulas, pulsars, and other visible phenomena stretching through the space. Not just sprite nebulas or clouds, but something like flying your ship in between the 'pillars of creation'. This is not specifically required by the foundry-supplied content, but something to inspire wonder and perhaps even the missions themselves. It would make sense to see these things closer together because we're flying into a structure that can be seen and flown around in sector space.
Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I'm also excited, but I wonder if there needs to be a system of oversight. I'm not trying to sound elitist, but the top-rated and hot list are now cluttered with the likes of boff grinder, "Energy Credits" and missions like my own "Gladiator Rumble." I'm not sure that I'd like to just randomlly gamble on what kind of mission I'm about to play.
On the other hand, maybe that is part of the exploration, that you'll never know what you'll get. And anything would be more enjoyable than Cryptic's auto-generated content.
Also makes some criteria, for example length of the mission, diplomacy/fight.... etc.
It will avoid EC grinder mission and the like, since the creators would not add them as "exploration mission", and they would likely be unauthorized quickly.
Several things are missing to make awesome exploration mission. We need the author to know the gender, class and species of the player. Also, knowing his BOFF species, gender and name would be great. ST exploration mission, as seen in the show, use strong away team characters, and/or use the crew gender/species for some interaction (Riker on a matriarcal society, Worf and Klingon related episode...).
However, this news is exciting.
My character Tsin'xing
The idea is exciting -- Foundry can serve as the foundation to a WIDE variety of content, from player housing to missions focused on adjusting warp coil efficiencies to having unusual character back stories laid out in interactive form.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
What I DO NOT want to see is Cryptic turning the revamped exploration into another random mission generator, where it chooses Foundry missions.
Why? Because it's cheap and it's not exploration.
What I hope to see is that space be situated where players could effectively claim a planet or an area of space and build their own civlization by making multiple Foundry missions. That way it would be consistant where you get to know a race of faction and their enemies.
Furthermore, this would be enhanced where a group of Foundry authors could work together in building a whole civlization and storyline for that single world or an area of space. For instance, one group could dedicated in working on one side and another group their neighbors.
At the same time, in the Galaxy, Cryptic could save areas of space for canonical factions or known aliens.
For instance, while people think Xindi are part of the Federation, I view them in the area of space "North" of Federation Territory.
The Fen Domar (that alien race that killed 7 of 9 in endgame that has territory somewhere between Earth and the Beta / Delta Border).
V'gers people.
And of course the Cytherians on the north end of the Galactic Core.
Anything in between could be just some random occurance from pirate attacks, empty rocks, finding rare resources, or you discover by chance a new dungeon that the Devs made that drops a really rare piece of equipment.
This is how I want STO exploration to be.
That would be their version of exploration. There would be no stories. The only way you'll get stories is with ugc.
Think about it, it's impossible to make procedurally generated content with a coherent story beyond, go here>shoot/scan this.
This on the other hand allows for people to, as Kirk and Picard put it, "Explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisation, to boldly go, where no man/one, has gone before!"
My character Tsin'xing
1) Reputation with one or more factions, comparable to New Romulus and the STFs (but not with those factions).
2) Dilithium consistent with the above.
3) XP and loot consistent with the above.
If it delivers three of those things, people will do it. It's doing #2 and #3 now, finally.
One thing Cryptic could do is, once they flesh out the Reputation system to include every NPC faction in the game, have Foundry content award small amounts of rep with a faction related to whatever enemy you fight and/or ally you help. So, for instance, if you defend Random Aliens against Orions, then whatever faction wants you to fight Orions a lot gives you rep. On the other hand, if you're defending a lost Romulan colony against Random Aliens, you get New Romulus rep.
For this to happen, they'd have to give us more ability to create enemies and allies in the Foundry without having to resort to trickery like reskinning enemies like allies and vice-versa; we'd have to be able to actually say "these are friendly Klingons, and these are angry Feds" etc.
I'm absolutely in favor of Exploration incorporating UGC, because kirkfat is correct; it's impossible for Cryptic to stay ahead of the content curve even if every mission they do is played by nearly all the player base. Nobody can do that, not even Blizzard with all their money. It would be ludicrious to expect them to be able to do it for content that only a fraction of the base will see, but they can put systems in place that let US fill the story content gap.
Random procedurally-generated content has its place too, but with their engine it can't be random maps, it can only be random text and enemies on pre-generated maps. Otherwise stuff will fall through the geometry.
BTW, if you reward Reputation from Foundry missions, it's got to be random selection; otherwise you'll get rep farming missions.
Perhaps give authors the ability to submit their missions specifically for this purpose. Otherwise, as it is now, we could be flying into the middle of someone's giant story arc without any warning or buildup.
I'd love to see what the Foundry authors could do with, say, a sub-30 minute time constraint. We'll see pretty quickly whether "kill 5 x, gather 5 y" remains the standard or not. It'll be a great creativity experiment.
If I remember Stahl's past musing correctly, I think the idea was to pull promising Foundry authors into a beta of sorts where they would be under NDA and given Kestrel's plot outlines for the Betazed/Ferenginar sector, in a special version of the Foundry with bonus assets and maps, which would be the major focus of the artists for that season. Authors would be given a few months to author missions with certain guidelines, Cryptic would test them, and publish them as official missions, with basically an entire season being devoted to official Foundry missions with extra assets, based on notes by Kestrel. Presumably, authors involved would be given something cool for the work and this might also be done for Klingon 1-20 leveling, enabling Cryptic to focus more on systems updates, mission specific rewards, Foundry improvements (I assume the content team would pretty much spend the season helping to make maps, doing bugfixes/remastering, and tagging Foundry assets), and a proper KDF tutorial.
The downside? It's technically amateur mission content. The upside? Dozens of new official missions all at once. Written by Kestrel. CBS approved. Crowdsourced to authors in a secret testing process.
Now, the big problem I can see there is whether:
A) Players will treat it as "real." (I think they would if Kestrel did the plots, it's CBS approved, and the rewards are unique.)
And that probably sounds crazy with my posting history but I really think interviewing crazy people for jobs pays off: look at John Layman.
So sorry for the Large File Size and it having some layers not being turned off, since I was using another program to read the .PSD file. And yes, that is the NASA Galaxy Map, which had some nice concidenses with the Borg Transwarp Network locations (Bright Green, Dark Green was an alternate possiblity of locations).
I'm not sure what Cryptic is planning on doing Exploration, but I hope they are mindful of the various things they have out in the Galaxy.
Might be fun if it still pops up in the Alpha Quadrant sometimes, but leading to a random destination. Do you dare travel through the mystery door, players?
You forgot the Path of 2409 where the Barzan Wormhole was stabilized.
I agree, and I really look forward to making missions like this, except that I only have 40 mission slots to work with. I'd love to make 10 minute first contact missions. But I've already burned through 1/4 of my slots.
My hope would be that if they are going to officially use UGC in place of dev-created content for exploration that the missions chosen would not count against the creator's mission slots. That might provide incentive to those interested in creating exploration missions.
It will be interesting to see how this project develops. If we are going to continue the daily with 1440 dilithium based on three exploration missions, then the missions will have to be short enough to satisfy that requirement in a reasonable amount of time.
However, I would like to see some more extensive storylines in exploration, including story arcs on a given planet or in a given system. I suppose an argument for not having arcs is that we are the first contact team, then we turn it over to Starfleet to continue the diplomatic process. But I think it would be fun to do more than one missions on a new world or with a new race instead of just a hit and run mission.
And I certainly do not want the "random" mission concept to wind up giving the same character the same mission repeatedly. That's already one of the complaints about the current system. Hopefully the new system will be able to "remember" what missions a specific character has done to avoid this problem.
I don't remember this and can't find it referenced.
There needs to be a real vetting process cryptic side tho, and has to have set criterions by cryptic on what can qualify as a "exploration" mission.
Coz apparently player policing isnt enough
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My character Tsin'xing
I wouldn't call it that, but I get what you're saying. The actual mission content would still need improved in that sort of proposal.
A persistent system of randomly-generated 'contacts' who have a changeable relationship to you could be interesting, and it would add context to the random save-the-power-grid or repel-enemies missions. But it wouldn't really improve the story of these missions themselves. Foundry exploration, though, would mean you'd get a chance to experience better story, combat, and map design whenever you warp to an unknown system.
In the end, I like the idea of adding a sort of 'living sector' where the aliens have different relationships to you, much like AI in a 4X game. But I believe the Foundry is the best chance to improve the meatier content beyond sector space. Perhaps both ideas can enrich the exploration system.
Conjoined, Re-emergence, and . . .
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Well, it does sound better, but I have to agree that it doesn't "really" sound better. It sounds way too similar to the existing clusters, albeit with lots of added complexity and variables. But it still reads to me like an auto-generated blender that creates half-baked reasons for a player to do a formulaic mission.
I want story, not content generated by a blender.
Players would have the ability to, using the Foundry, create their own Sector Blocks and missions within. Here's how it would work.
- The player acquires Sector Block slots through the C-store, for a moderately high price - say, 5000 Zen. An account can unlock up to five Sector Block slots.
- The player creates the sector block, lays out systems and gives descriptions, etc. They also indicate which sector block "border" it can be accessed from.
- The player creates a number of missions within that block (up to ten). They can form a chronological story arc like an FE series, or they can be simple episodic missions to chart the region - it's up to the player.
- Players approaching a border are prompted to either enter one of the blocks they've visited before, or enter a random block.
- Fleets can even build their starbases in these blocks. The player that created the block could create a custom "enemy faction" to attack the starbase sometimes, through the Starbase Defense missions.
I'd gladly shell out cash for this.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?