Now, OP, you're talking about expectations for a game that was being developed by a different company. THAT game obviously isn't THIS game. Cryptic has developed STO with a different vision. While your ideas are good ones, I don't think it's something that we're likely to see with THIS game. Which is why I proposed something that would make use of something we already have/had, as I think it would be much more likely to happen given that it already exists.
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There's some obvious problems with an exploration system. The most obvious is "What do you do?" That problem is what led to the Doff system. In the old pre-doff system, you basically went to a planned instance and scanned for materials. It was arduous, and you weren't exploring so much as picking up rocks you found on the ground... in space.
While I like missions like Sunrise or Echoes of Light since they feel like actual exploration, those are still carefully made and require a lot of time and planning. That's not going to translate to an exploration experience the developers can make, either.
When I think of that kind of exploration, I think of the start of the Romulan episodes. You move slowly, so there's a need to scan long range (so no warp 30 slipstream; remember how slow you move at the start of the game?.) After that, a lot of scanning individual areas, looking for specific star types, followed by flagging those planets as habitable worlds, curiosities or so on. And then after that, some form of interaction or colonization.
But that becomes stale after a while. Even if you're generating low-content areas that don't require tons of developed resources, there has to be a reason why players are doing it, and there needs to be a way to make the generated content continue to feel engaging. Even if there's some sort of global Exploration XP bar, are you just grinding to make that bar go up? One of the problems with the admirality and doff systems is that they take you out of the game and force you into doing paper work for literally an hour, if you have too many characters. I eventually stopped doing both just because it was ruining the game for me, having to constantly fret about upkeeping a rotation of text clickables that do nothing but grant timed resources.
The Cluster Doff missions feel slightly more like what exploration would be in a random system, in the sense that you're establishing colonies, setting them up to provide resources, and then moving on. (Or farming them every day...)
But if you go into deep space to generate a custom seed for the player, do you really want them to stay in that one seed forever? That defeats the purpose. So even if you do colonize a world, make it nice and pretty like an MMO house, isn't it then time to move on to keep the system active?
There's a lot of issues with a possible generated exploration system, and most of them come down to it becoming a boring grind instead of actually discovering things you get excited about. I imagine finding an M class world in such a system would have to feel a lot like opening a lootbox and getting that 0.5% drop ship. Something very valuable that you're actually on the hunt for. But what do you do with it beyond that? And why is it important?
Well to all the people stating the game is what it is. While it was bad the game HAD exploration.
No, it didn't. The game had something they CALLED exploration, but it wasn't. It wasn't even "bad" exploration. Here was what the star clusters were:
1: fight KNOWN enemy(not even some new species) in space
2: fight KNOWN enemy(not even some new species) on the ground
3: scan anomalies in space or on ground
And guess what? You can still do every single one of those things right now. Nothing in the old star clusters was actually "exploration", despite what they called it.
The only thing that made them slightly cool was there was a random mission draw. You had played them all before and they weren't adding new ones, but you weren't sure which one you would get each time.
But "random" is not "exploration". People need to learn what words actually mean.
To me, the main thing that kept it from being actual exploration was the simple fact that you could never revisit any of those random locations. What kind of explorer forgets where they were charting things?
Well to all the people stating the game is what it is. While it was bad the game HAD exploration.
No, it didn't. The game had something they CALLED exploration, but it wasn't. It wasn't even "bad" exploration. Here was what the star clusters were:
1: fight KNOWN enemy(not even some new species) in space
2: fight KNOWN enemy(not even some new species) on the ground
3: scan anomalies in space or on ground
And guess what? You can still do every single one of those things right now. Nothing in the old star clusters was actually "exploration", despite what they called it.
The only thing that made them slightly cool was there was a random mission draw. You had played them all before and they weren't adding new ones, but you weren't sure which one you would get each time.
But "random" is not "exploration". People need to learn what words actually mean.
To me, the main thing that kept it from being actual exploration was the simple fact that you could never revisit any of those random locations. What kind of explorer forgets where they were charting things?
For me it was the thought-free errand checklist nature of STO missions. I just can't see myself as "exploring" something when the game is telling me exactly what to do all the time.
It felt like all this stuff I was scanning (or whatever action was written on the interact button) had already been discovered by someone else and I was just sent in to do the manual labor like some duty officer. So replacing the system with actual doff assignments always made perfect sense for me.
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While I like missions like Sunrise or Echoes of Light since they feel like actual exploration, those are still carefully made and require a lot of time and planning. That's not going to translate to an exploration experience the developers can make, either.
When I think of that kind of exploration, I think of the start of the Romulan episodes. You move slowly, so there's a need to scan long range (so no warp 30 slipstream; remember how slow you move at the start of the game?.) After that, a lot of scanning individual areas, looking for specific star types, followed by flagging those planets as habitable worlds, curiosities or so on. And then after that, some form of interaction or colonization.
But that becomes stale after a while. Even if you're generating low-content areas that don't require tons of developed resources, there has to be a reason why players are doing it, and there needs to be a way to make the generated content continue to feel engaging. Even if there's some sort of global Exploration XP bar, are you just grinding to make that bar go up? One of the problems with the admirality and doff systems is that they take you out of the game and force you into doing paper work for literally an hour, if you have too many characters. I eventually stopped doing both just because it was ruining the game for me, having to constantly fret about upkeeping a rotation of text clickables that do nothing but grant timed resources.
The Cluster Doff missions feel slightly more like what exploration would be in a random system, in the sense that you're establishing colonies, setting them up to provide resources, and then moving on. (Or farming them every day...)
But if you go into deep space to generate a custom seed for the player, do you really want them to stay in that one seed forever? That defeats the purpose. So even if you do colonize a world, make it nice and pretty like an MMO house, isn't it then time to move on to keep the system active?
There's a lot of issues with a possible generated exploration system, and most of them come down to it becoming a boring grind instead of actually discovering things you get excited about. I imagine finding an M class world in such a system would have to feel a lot like opening a lootbox and getting that 0.5% drop ship. Something very valuable that you're actually on the hunt for. But what do you do with it beyond that? And why is it important?
My character Tsin'xing
It felt like all this stuff I was scanning (or whatever action was written on the interact button) had already been discovered by someone else and I was just sent in to do the manual labor like some duty officer. So replacing the system with actual doff assignments always made perfect sense for me.