As far as the million maps thing goes, the Diablo series of games makes random maps for every level and never makes one in error, like a dead end or one unable to finish the level. Engine differnt Yada yada yada but they get it right every time. With a little design you and your staff could as well.
As a former Diablo 2 modder I can shed some light on how that works. (It's been years so I might have forgotten a few details.)
D2 never had fully randomized maps. The maps in D2 could be fully static, partially static, or mostly random.
Each map had several parts that were preset. Special locations related to quests are a good example. The tree you need to find out in the wilderness in Act 1 always looks the same. Map entrances/exits are usually the same each time, this will often go so far as to have the entrance always the same angle, but not always. The village that is the social hub for Act 1 has a fixed interior layout(Charsi's always in the same spot, etc...), but the perimeter varies, and the side of the village that is the exit varies, also there may or may not be a river next to the village.
Maps also have a variety of preset assemblies as decorations. An example of this is the cottages that you find scattered around the outdoor maps in Act 1. The placement is random but the layout of the cottages is not, there are several presets of varying sizes and layouts, but no real randomization of shapes. Interior maps will often have preset room assemblies, such as the treasure chambers in the dungeons leading up to the Act 1 boss. Another good example are the underground temples in Act 3. They consist of several randomly placed room assemblies connected by hallways. They're kinda small with only a few rooms each, but that's by design since you need to search several of them for a quest. Preset assemblies vary in size considerably. Some are only a few tiles, others..... well the biggest I can think of is the infernal cathedral set in Act 4. That thing is bigger than one of the social zones.
Maps were constructed by placing the fixed features, drawing paths connecting them, filling in the gaps between the paths, then decorating the map. Deciding where to place the fixed features, well that had rather complex logic behind it in some cases, some maps had fixed features that would always go on the same side of the map, such as the gate leading into the castle that the Act 1 boss lives in.
Oh and no, it DID have glitches. occasionally there would be randomly placed (but unimportant) hallways or rooms that you had to teleport to get to. but the glitches typically were just cosmetic stuff that didn't really matter, sych as a small hallway that doesn't connect to anything.
maybe you should watch some TNG, TOS, and VOY, a number of the missions they took part in had no combat or fairly little. the aspect of exploration isnt just scanning rocks, but diplomacy and exploration of the human condition. perhaps you forgotten what the original message of what star trek was about to begin with? if you have, reconnect with star trek and find imaginative idea for exploration for STO.
solving puzzles to unlock a deeper mystery on a map, finding a way of building a bridge across a lava river and saving lives, general dicsussion and political ramaifications that leads to a potential encounter with another random exploration, and one that may have nothing to do with the other, helping out saving a world from a virus, dealing with an intelligent lifeform one doesnt understand at first and learning to understand it. solving the problem of a geological instability on an inhabited world that threatens to destroy itself...
surely your telling us you dont have enough imagination to come up with some really good exploration?
You're not talking about exploration, not really. Pursuant to another post a few pages back, people are really asking for more fully fleshed-out story content. Exploration is only the means by which you would access it - the difference is that these missions wouldn't get slotted in to the main story progression line and you'd have to go find them on your own, which also calls into question just how much effort you'd want the devs to spend on making content that players might not even seek out. I'd be interested to hear from the devs on how long it takes to build the average storyline mission.
People want exploration missions, and ask for randomly-generated replayable content out of one side of their mouths while asking for tightly-written meaningful story content out of the other side.
If you want meaningful content, there's a finite amount of it that can be produced before you blow through it all (just like with every group of new missions they release). If you want randomized content, you're not going to get anything close to tightly-written and engaging stories.
I think you bring a very good point to the table. Whats actually wished by, I assume the majority, those who clicked "exploration" in the poll is an actual exploration system; a game mechanic. Having a 6 Mission story arc that is called the exploration of X which involves the exploration of a certain planet & its inhabitants while probably entertaining is *NOT* exploration; its new story missions about exploration called exploration.
So whatever the brain-father of the "Exploration Missions" wording meant in that poll should not be a new story arc; not be something that is only exploration by the choice of flavor words in the mission text.
Somebody at Cryptic has to actually produce this content. There's no magic space-hamster that's going to conjure a mission out of thin air just for you to play.
Within the confines of a video game made by some dudes sitting in an office somewhere, there's really no room for "discovery" of any kind.
Somebody at Cryptic has to actually produce this content. There's no magic space-hamster that's going to conjure a mission out of thin air just for you to play.
Or Foundry authors... unless you consider foundry authors to be magic space hamsters, which I guess could be true...
that's an interesting idea since it gives a reason why we can't go back to where we were yesterday.
They coud even turn a few into mini events where the Wormhole in a particular place could be stabilized for a week or so to give a repeatable mission for a worth while reward. With Wormholes having no ties to the current timeline, they could even create some missions that take us into the past or even into the future.
Other than creating the missions, it doesn't seem like it would take much work to add some randomly appearing Wormholes in sector space that work in a similar way as DSE's did. You approach it, enter, and you are taken to a new map. For special content that would be available for extended periods of time, a pop up could happen when you enter the sector giving you a mission to visit a stabilized anomaly. To stretch them out, they could even have them appear only on Tuesdays as an example. Best of all, they could be used to return missions like Deja Q to the game without feeling the need to tie it into any story lines.
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Outsourcing exploration to the Foundry authors would be neat, but sort of a niche thing; my favorite foundry missions are the longer ones, and several of the ones I really enjoyed turned into entire series.
Let's suppose for the sake of an example that they put the old exploration clusters back in, but now the 'hooks' you get which used to lead to the old-style exploration missions now lead to a database of Foundry missions which have been flagged as "exploration" or somesuch. So, you pull up to the 'unexplored system' and the game goes and retrieves one of those for you. You play it. Yay!
You'd have to keep them short and sweet; although plenty of missions on the Foundry fit that bill. You'd just have to make sure that the designers were writing them in keeping with that idea; you wouldn't want a guy looking for an exploration mission to draw a Foundry mission about saving the Federation from mirror universe Klingons in the core Sirius sector.
I'd be fine with that idea. It links more directly into the Foundry, which for the longest time has just sort of been hanging out largely ignored off on the side. The spotlight missions list hasn't changed in as long as I can remember.
But from what I'm seeing in this thread, people don't want those standalone missions that fit the sort of 'adventure of the week' format. A number of people posting here want some kind of procedurally-generated galaxy to literally explore and find cool new things that nobody had ever seen and nobody else would ever see. I don't see that happening given the constraints of the game we're actually playing.
Another significant drawback would be that you're relying on people who aren't being compensated to prop up this whole mechanic. If the flow of new content stops, that's it for your exploration. To say nothing of the wildly-varying quality you're going to get since it's not being held to any sort of standard without oversight, either from authors themselves or Cryptic. Then there's always the chance of drawing the same mission twice, which would really break the 'exploration' immersion, right?
I didn't mind the old system, for what it was. An amusing diversion from the main storyline stuff. It wasn't exploration, not by a long shot. It was more like 'here's some stuff that you and your crew did that wasn't cool enough/interesting enough to merit an actual mission.' Routine stuff.
They coud even turn a few into mini events where the Wormhole in a particular place could be stabilized for a week or so to give a repeatable mission for a worth while reward. With Wormholes having no ties to the current timeline, they could even create some missions that take us into the past or even into the future.
Other than creating the missions, it doesn't seem like it would take much work to add some randomly appearing Wormholes in sector space that work in a similar way as DSE's did. You approach it, enter, and you are taken to a new map. For special content that would be available for extended periods of time, a pop up could happen when you enter the sector giving you a mission to visit a stabilized anomaly. To stretch them out, they could even have them appear only on Tuesdays as an example. Best of all, they could be used to return missions like Deja Q to the game without feeling the need to tie it into any story lines.
Other than creating the missions... which was the hard part of creating the old exploration missions.
found myself playing Mass Effect 2 last night... there is a fair amount of exploration in the ME titles, while various sections wouldn't work with STO there are still some areas that could be mined for ideas, such as dropping into orbit over a world and performing a scan, find an anomaly? Send an away team or probe(depending on the planet type and anomaly type). While this would(and does) get old if its the sole means of exploration, these ideas could be used in conjunction with others mentioned in here.
So, how do you propose we "explore" the universe, without having to make a million custom maps/missions?
What would actually be enjoyable to do, that doesn't involve fighting. Scanning rocks and trees is going to get old.
Indeed.
Even the series never actually focus on exploration, but instead on the 1% of exploration which results in something interesting.
I don't believe the players asking for exploration have any concept of how complicated a system it would need to be to remain even mildly engaging.
Doing it right would probably necessitate it being the core of the game.
"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." - Aristotle
How about a system like the fleets? Where certain players can come together and make their own alien race? And thus make their own foundry missions for the encounters? It would be like a Star Trek Sim City. Just a thought.
Ok, so: there are 4 main ways I can see them doing "exploration" content:
A) episodic missions that are actually *about* exploration (good stuff, but take a long time to make and once you have played them you know the story, so probably wouldn't feel like "exploration" the second or third time you play it)
randomly generated content (remember the old star clusters? yeah. Not really "exploration", but at least you didn't know what you were going to get. The main problem with these is that when you randomly generate components, you wind up with a story that makes no sense, aka the Borg Third Dynasty)
C) adventure zone (New Romulus. This is the closest thing to "exploration" the game has, specifically the scanning the various flora, fauna, and relics. Of course, this is pretty light on story and pretty heavy on running around hitting "F")
D) the foundry (create a new sector, call the exploration sector, and ask authors to create missions for this sector which are all about exploration. The flaw, of course, is the subjective quality of foundry missions and the lack of any official support for problems)
There is a thread that I can't seem to find atm, maybe you can work some dev. magic to locate it ([I]or maybe the OP will show up[/I]) - it was basically a thread about exploration ideas and it had at least a dozen of pages of some seriously good suggestions to pick from. Maybe that can be usefull for inspiration.
One thing noone can deny is that this community is thirsty for exploration content, the outrage following the removal of the clusters has shown that and this current poll is on it's way to show that as well.
If you are talking about me, the thread is linked in my sig. I still stand by what's in it; even though most of my ideas were technically about expanding the old clusters.
Just had to chimed in when OP brought up "conflict".
Stories are about conflicts. The misconception is that all conflicts must involve violence of sort (fists, weapons, and such). Conflicts drive the story.
A conflict is when you want something/someone want something and something is in your way or preventing you from getting that something. The antagonist may be out to stop you, or just simply is in your way because his want happen to make his path cross with your path.
Just clarifying that conflict isn't about "pew-pew" or "fistfight".
On the topic of exploration I can why they removed the exploration clusters with the addition of the sector space revamp. The game now feels like one massive exploration cluster.
Let's review...
In the old exploration clusters you enter a secluded section of empty space. You fly around looking for unknown worlds to visit or anomalies to scan for mats. The missions were pretty subpar as we have all joked about (kill 3/3 of this scan 3/3 of that).
Now, flying through a single quadrant of open space you still fly around but now you can see the stars/suns/planets. Patrol missions resemble much of the Genesis created exploration content. The new revamp has added anomalies to scan for mats that show up randomly through space. You can harvest mats from patrol missions and other missions. The Top 3 foundry system has made additional mission easily available and now with the new revamp their are a ton more doors for foundry use (each planet in a solar system is now fair game to start a foundry mission).
There are adventure zones and featured episodes to take part in. STF's. Updated enemy encounters. So they actually removed content to make way for a better version of that content.
There is still much work to do (I would add more enemy encounters and more random mats then open up ALL patrol missions as level specific missions. I might even add a sprinkle of the original exploration missions back to some of the worlds to add to the variation).
Comments
D2 never had fully randomized maps. The maps in D2 could be fully static, partially static, or mostly random.
Each map had several parts that were preset. Special locations related to quests are a good example. The tree you need to find out in the wilderness in Act 1 always looks the same. Map entrances/exits are usually the same each time, this will often go so far as to have the entrance always the same angle, but not always. The village that is the social hub for Act 1 has a fixed interior layout(Charsi's always in the same spot, etc...), but the perimeter varies, and the side of the village that is the exit varies, also there may or may not be a river next to the village.
Maps also have a variety of preset assemblies as decorations. An example of this is the cottages that you find scattered around the outdoor maps in Act 1. The placement is random but the layout of the cottages is not, there are several presets of varying sizes and layouts, but no real randomization of shapes. Interior maps will often have preset room assemblies, such as the treasure chambers in the dungeons leading up to the Act 1 boss. Another good example are the underground temples in Act 3. They consist of several randomly placed room assemblies connected by hallways. They're kinda small with only a few rooms each, but that's by design since you need to search several of them for a quest. Preset assemblies vary in size considerably. Some are only a few tiles, others..... well the biggest I can think of is the infernal cathedral set in Act 4. That thing is bigger than one of the social zones.
Maps were constructed by placing the fixed features, drawing paths connecting them, filling in the gaps between the paths, then decorating the map. Deciding where to place the fixed features, well that had rather complex logic behind it in some cases, some maps had fixed features that would always go on the same side of the map, such as the gate leading into the castle that the Act 1 boss lives in.
Oh and no, it DID have glitches. occasionally there would be randomly placed (but unimportant) hallways or rooms that you had to teleport to get to. but the glitches typically were just cosmetic stuff that didn't really matter, sych as a small hallway that doesn't connect to anything.
My character Tsin'xing
You're not talking about exploration, not really. Pursuant to another post a few pages back, people are really asking for more fully fleshed-out story content. Exploration is only the means by which you would access it - the difference is that these missions wouldn't get slotted in to the main story progression line and you'd have to go find them on your own, which also calls into question just how much effort you'd want the devs to spend on making content that players might not even seek out. I'd be interested to hear from the devs on how long it takes to build the average storyline mission.
People want exploration missions, and ask for randomly-generated replayable content out of one side of their mouths while asking for tightly-written meaningful story content out of the other side.
If you want meaningful content, there's a finite amount of it that can be produced before you blow through it all (just like with every group of new missions they release). If you want randomized content, you're not going to get anything close to tightly-written and engaging stories.
Somebody at Cryptic has to actually produce this content. There's no magic space-hamster that's going to conjure a mission out of thin air just for you to play.
Within the confines of a video game made by some dudes sitting in an office somewhere, there's really no room for "discovery" of any kind.
Or Foundry authors... unless you consider foundry authors to be magic space hamsters, which I guess could be true...
Captain Ariel Trueheart Department of Temporal Investigations
U.S.S. Valkyrie - NCC 991701
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Either way, it's story content and it's not going to be random/procedurally-generated/whatever.
Somebody sits and builds it. It's designed content. People want that, but they don't want it - at the same time.
They coud even turn a few into mini events where the Wormhole in a particular place could be stabilized for a week or so to give a repeatable mission for a worth while reward. With Wormholes having no ties to the current timeline, they could even create some missions that take us into the past or even into the future.
Other than creating the missions, it doesn't seem like it would take much work to add some randomly appearing Wormholes in sector space that work in a similar way as DSE's did. You approach it, enter, and you are taken to a new map. For special content that would be available for extended periods of time, a pop up could happen when you enter the sector giving you a mission to visit a stabilized anomaly. To stretch them out, they could even have them appear only on Tuesdays as an example. Best of all, they could be used to return missions like Deja Q to the game without feeling the need to tie it into any story lines.
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Let's suppose for the sake of an example that they put the old exploration clusters back in, but now the 'hooks' you get which used to lead to the old-style exploration missions now lead to a database of Foundry missions which have been flagged as "exploration" or somesuch. So, you pull up to the 'unexplored system' and the game goes and retrieves one of those for you. You play it. Yay!
You'd have to keep them short and sweet; although plenty of missions on the Foundry fit that bill. You'd just have to make sure that the designers were writing them in keeping with that idea; you wouldn't want a guy looking for an exploration mission to draw a Foundry mission about saving the Federation from mirror universe Klingons in the core Sirius sector.
I'd be fine with that idea. It links more directly into the Foundry, which for the longest time has just sort of been hanging out largely ignored off on the side. The spotlight missions list hasn't changed in as long as I can remember.
But from what I'm seeing in this thread, people don't want those standalone missions that fit the sort of 'adventure of the week' format. A number of people posting here want some kind of procedurally-generated galaxy to literally explore and find cool new things that nobody had ever seen and nobody else would ever see. I don't see that happening given the constraints of the game we're actually playing.
Another significant drawback would be that you're relying on people who aren't being compensated to prop up this whole mechanic. If the flow of new content stops, that's it for your exploration. To say nothing of the wildly-varying quality you're going to get since it's not being held to any sort of standard without oversight, either from authors themselves or Cryptic. Then there's always the chance of drawing the same mission twice, which would really break the 'exploration' immersion, right?
I didn't mind the old system, for what it was. An amusing diversion from the main storyline stuff. It wasn't exploration, not by a long shot. It was more like 'here's some stuff that you and your crew did that wasn't cool enough/interesting enough to merit an actual mission.' Routine stuff.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
Even the series never actually focus on exploration, but instead on the 1% of exploration which results in something interesting.
I don't believe the players asking for exploration have any concept of how complicated a system it would need to be to remain even mildly engaging.
Doing it right would probably necessitate it being the core of the game.
A) episodic missions that are actually *about* exploration (good stuff, but take a long time to make and once you have played them you know the story, so probably wouldn't feel like "exploration" the second or third time you play it)
C) adventure zone (New Romulus. This is the closest thing to "exploration" the game has, specifically the scanning the various flora, fauna, and relics. Of course, this is pretty light on story and pretty heavy on running around hitting "F")
D) the foundry (create a new sector, call the exploration sector, and ask authors to create missions for this sector which are all about exploration. The flaw, of course, is the subjective quality of foundry missions and the lack of any official support for problems)
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
If you are talking about me, the thread is linked in my sig. I still stand by what's in it; even though most of my ideas were technically about expanding the old clusters.
Stories are about conflicts. The misconception is that all conflicts must involve violence of sort (fists, weapons, and such). Conflicts drive the story.
A conflict is when you want something/someone want something and something is in your way or preventing you from getting that something. The antagonist may be out to stop you, or just simply is in your way because his want happen to make his path cross with your path.
Just clarifying that conflict isn't about "pew-pew" or "fistfight".
Let's review...
In the old exploration clusters you enter a secluded section of empty space. You fly around looking for unknown worlds to visit or anomalies to scan for mats. The missions were pretty subpar as we have all joked about (kill 3/3 of this scan 3/3 of that).
Now, flying through a single quadrant of open space you still fly around but now you can see the stars/suns/planets. Patrol missions resemble much of the Genesis created exploration content. The new revamp has added anomalies to scan for mats that show up randomly through space. You can harvest mats from patrol missions and other missions. The Top 3 foundry system has made additional mission easily available and now with the new revamp their are a ton more doors for foundry use (each planet in a solar system is now fair game to start a foundry mission).
There are adventure zones and featured episodes to take part in. STF's. Updated enemy encounters. So they actually removed content to make way for a better version of that content.
There is still much work to do (I would add more enemy encounters and more random mats then open up ALL patrol missions as level specific missions. I might even add a sprinkle of the original exploration missions back to some of the worlds to add to the variation).