/quote]
By combining multiple elements and/or parameters, therefore invoking exponential growth. If you have 10 variables and each of them can have 10 different values, that's 10 billion possible combinations. Variety of uniqueness comes easy with procedural content generation. The hard part is actually programming that variety to to work in a way that's meaningful and interesting to a human player, as opposed to a bazillion functionally identical missions with different graphics.
Millions and billions and trillions.... now, where have I heard this before????
OH Yeah...the hype that was "No Man's Sky" a friend of mine fell hard for.
And found: yeah, not that great.
Though I do believe I have a few animals named after me....somewhere in that game.....
"Spend your life doing strange things with weird people." -- UNK
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
/quote]By combining multiple elements and/or parameters, therefore invoking exponential growth. If you have 10 variables and each of them can have 10 different values, that's 10 billion possible combinations. Variety of uniqueness comes easy with procedural content generation. The hard part is actually programming that variety to to work in a way that's meaningful and interesting to a human player, as opposed to a bazillion functionally identical missions with different graphics.
Millions and billions and trillions.... now, where have I heard this before????
OH Yeah...the hype that was "No Man's Sky" a friend of mine fell hard for.
And found: yeah, not that great.
Though I do believe I have a few animals named after me....somewhere in that game.....
Random idiocy sometimes makes cool stuff, soemtiems complete garbage.
If a big part of exploration is Discovery, they just gave us the Lockbox Discovery. You can discover the awe and mystery of what's in the box.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Millions and billions and trillions.... now, where have I heard this before????
OH Yeah...the hype that was "No Man's Sky" a friend of mine fell hard for.
And found: yeah, not that great.
Though I do believe I have a few animals named after me....somewhere in that game.....
You cant blame something just because the company behind it is stupid. No Man's Sky could have been a total jewel, but it was the opposite, sadly. Only because the company behind was clueless about what they were doing. If a company is decent, and they put efforts and INTEREST in what they doing, you could make an amazing game with the premises of no mans sky. Of course this cant be applied to cryptic, so, in any case, who cares lol.
Really? I don't see how you can judge a game based solely on what "it could have been". It seems to me like the creators of No Man's Sky tried to make an interesting exploration only game and failed.
/quote]
By combining multiple elements and/or parameters, therefore invoking exponential growth. If you have 10 variables and each of them can have 10 different values, that's 10 billion possible combinations. Variety of uniqueness comes easy with procedural content generation. The hard part is actually programming that variety to to work in a way that's meaningful and interesting to a human player, as opposed to a bazillion functionally identical missions with different graphics.
Millions and billions and trillions.... now, where have I heard this before????
OH Yeah...the hype that was "No Man's Sky" a friend of mine fell hard for.
And found: yeah, not that great.
Though I do believe I have a few animals named after me....somewhere in that game.....
Right, that's what I meant. It's easy to make endless variation, but hard to make that variation relevant for gameplay. No Man's Sky failed, despite being entirely designed around the concept.
Millions and billions and trillions.... now, where have I heard this before????
OH Yeah...the hype that was "No Man's Sky" a friend of mine fell hard for.
And found: yeah, not that great.
Though I do believe I have a few animals named after me....somewhere in that game.....
You cant blame something just because the company behind it is stupid. No Man's Sky could have been a total jewel, but it was the opposite, sadly. Only because the company behind was clueless about what they were doing. If a company is decent, and they put efforts and INTEREST in what they doing, you could make an amazing game with the premises of no mans sky. Of course this cant be applied to cryptic, so, in any case, who cares lol.
Not really. It's amazing to a certain kind of player, but not to somebody who's expecting story-based gameplay like you have in Mass Effect, KOTOR, or STO. No Man's Sky is a fine game for what it is (i.e. a variation on Elite), it's just not what the hype wanted it to be.
See, I came to STO from that same genre of game, the space combat/trading simulator (mainly Egosoft's X series, more recently games like Rebel Galaxy and Space Pirates and Zombies), and pretty much every one of them all the way back to Elite has more or less the same core gameplay. You don't go in expecting to be wowed by a bajillion unique things you can do in the game, because the programmer can only write so many fluff variations on "deliver 10 tons of stuff from X planet to Y planet" and "destroy X ship(s) that's been bugging Y group". Instead, you go in expecting to invent your own story and to find some way to have fun in the world (X3: Terran Conflict has a significant corporate fleet management component to the gameplay that I found compelling), or you get bored and stop playing. And that's true whether the game world is procedurally generated or (as in X) with a manually-built baseline level design and an engine that can alter what's there dynamically, and whether the game has its own story or not (X comes with gameplay modes that disable the storyline).
And that's never what Star Trek has been about. At best, Star Trek uses literal exploration of space as a way to get the cast to the actual story about people. There's a great scene illustrating this in DS9, where Bashir meets up with his Academy classmate Dr. Elizabeth Lense off the USS Lexington, who was off on this nifty deep space exploration mission. She's jealous of him, because he's getting to do all kinds of exciting stuff at the nexus of the Federation, Cardassia, Bajor, Ferenginar, and the Gamma Quadrant, whereas her job fixing the odd scrape and bruise because some goldshirt stubbed his toe exploring Empty Rock #257,525 is mind-numbingly boring.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Semantics. "Exploration" is just a Trek term to mark a gameplay mode, just like "Admiralty" does indeed not interact with the game at all, it just launches timers. I'm not trying to be annoying or anything, but the discussion doesn't go anywhere with people repeatedly splitting hairs over what the mode should be called, rename it "patrols", "surveys" or "tour of duty" if you will. It is clear what the mode suggested in the quoted example could look like and you know exactly what sophlogimo is going for, don't you?
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Anyone remember the opening of TNG
-Encounter at farpoint where the crew unexpectedly encounters Q then the creatures at farpoint?
-Then the naked now where the crew arent fitting anyone but an unkown phenomenon on a science mission?
-Then Tin Man on a first contact type of mission?\
-Then the survivor where the crew encounters a desimated fed outpost where they find only a tiny patch survived but later learn it was another being?
-Then Q-who where they encounter the Borg for the first time?
-Then the best of both worlds where they encounter the phenomenon created in three timelines but have to solve the cause?
So many ideas that can be implementedJust from the series and that can be rotated at random to keep it fresh while exploring the map..It doesnt have to be only space patrols..The current map has the clusters and systems in place but needs the exploratory mission which can be done at random..
I think the way foundry missions appear at systems was cryptics answer to exploration. Personally I havent played a lot of foundary missions but on occasion i just pick a star and "go", then try out the foundry missions there. This satisfies my need for a sense of true exploration in sto.
I suggest the foundry be made much more dynamic with more functions for gifted authors. Also have two modes in the foundry: basic & advanced.
This way new foundry authors can selevt from basic pre-fab story lines and customize the characters and sets and text.... Or in advanced more the author can really let loose.
Give us a new sector known as "the frontier" Wherein the best foumdry missions appear randomly as well as the old exploration procedural missions pop up.
This should give us the best of both worlds. And for incentive; make the completion of said frontier content a big dilithium reward... This will encourage players to venture out and play community content.
Oh come on, it's not hard to see how a miussion generator could work.
Of course not. But it is hard to make one actually work. I've certainly never seen a game with procedurally generated missions that didn't become tediously repetitive after a while. And it's surely not because nobody ever put any effort or interest into the subject. PGC can make beautiful maps, but storywork needs human creativity.
And as for simple "kill X enemies" missions, the game already supports randomly chosen enemy in a premade map. No need for complicated generators that probably would amount to the same thing anyway.
Semantics. "Exploration" is just a Trek term to mark a gameplay mode, just like "Admiralty" does indeed not interact with the game at all, it just launches timers. I'm not trying to be annoying or anything, but the discussion doesn't go anywhere with people repeatedly splitting hairs over what the mode should be called, rename it "patrols", "surveys" or "tour of duty" if you will. It is clear what the mode suggested in the quoted example could look like and you know exactly what sophlogimo is going for, don't you?
But people always complain that Star Trek Online is too much about fighting and not enough about exploration. If the first four mission templates someone suggests for an exploration system are all about fighting, the whole exercise here seems pointless to me.
If people really just want Space Patrols, they shouldn't name it exploration. That isn't nitpicky or splitting hairs, it's a fundamental problem. I am okay with also having a space patrol system, but you have to realize that's what is being proposed here, and it will not satisfy people that want something that feels like exploration.
Exploration to me suggests either involving at least the trappings of exploration (e.g. doing a lot of scanning and probing of things), ideally more than that, like actually finding "new" stuff and seeing how after you have explored something, you actually found something new and have a feeling of progres . Maybe that there is now a place behind you that you have explored, and something new in front of you that still needs exploring. Maybe that you have a database entry for something new you haven't had before, something you can look back on as your "discovery".
On that front, we might need a GENESIS like map generation system that populates the map with "kitbashed" alien flora and fauna (intermixed with more or less standard flora perhaps, so the unusual parts stick out. And a system to record what you have found, and maybe allow you to revisit it. Maybe a way to create a trophy/decoration for your ship interior out of it.
Next cool step would be something like a server-side persistence of this, that the database is shared among players, so that a specific ship and crew will be known for having found
"Base-Type: Arachnoid; Type 6 Head; Type 7 Body; Type 4 Legs; Type 6 Mandibles; Primary Color DarkGreen; Secondary Color Blue; Color Pattern: Denobulan 2; Player-Chosen-Name: SpideyMcSpideyFace; Discovered By: U.S.S. Rainbow Power under command of TheRealMCcCoy@angrytarg"
or
"Base-Type: Tree; Crown Type Palm 9, Trunk Type Corkscrew 2, Fruit Type None; Primary Color Blue; Secondary Color: Yellow; Fruit Color: None; Color Pattern Nausicaan 1; Player-Chosen-Name: Worf-Palm; Discoveryd By: I.K.S. No Gravitas under command of Ephraim@mustrumridcully".
Maybe each such discovery also gives you "Discovery Token" for the Exploration Reputation to buy the rep gear.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Oh come on, it's not hard to see how a miussion generator could work.
Of course not. But it is hard to make one actually work. I've certainly never seen a game with procedurally generated missions that didn't become tediously repetitive after a while[...]
That's just a matter of how many variations you build into it. If you have, say 100 story templates (surely a small number compared to all Star Trek episodes in existence), with a random generation of NPC's that allow for 10x10x10 NPC faction combinations, you end up with 100,000 possible missions, not counting map variations and individual NPC variation. If you need 30 minutes for each of those, you'll be busy for 2,000 days, non-stop.
I would say once you've seen one example of a template, it becomes repetitive. If the mission is scan Y, kill X, it doesn't matter how many Y or X you can insert there, it's still Mission scan Y, kill X.
And 100 story templates would still be the equivalent of 100 missions to make, except you have to design them to work with all possible variable combinations, not just Tzenkethi and Artifacts of the 3rd Dynasty.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Oh come on, it's not hard to see how a miussion generator could work.
Of course not. But it is hard to make one actually work. I've certainly never seen a game with procedurally generated missions that didn't become tediously repetitive after a while[...]
That's just a matter of how many variations you build into it. If you have, say 100 story templates (surely a small number compared to all Star Trek episodes in existence), with a random generation of NPC's that allow for 10x10x10 NPC faction combinations, you end up with 100,000 possible missions, not counting map variations and individual NPC variation. If you need 30 minutes for each of those, you'll be busy for 2,000 days, non-stop.
That's exactly what the cluster missions did and while there obviously wasn't 100 base templates, the 10 or so that there were were immediately noticeable as the same mission as soon as they repeated. It didn't matter one bit if the "scan 5 things" template was on a brown planet or a green planet, if you were scanning trees or rocks or if it was the Klingon Empire or the 3rd Borg Dynasty copypasted in the <insert faction here> spot of the explanation texts.
You don't get a new story just by copypasting in different names and places. Even if there had been 100 templates, people would still have noticed as soon as they repeated and the reaction would still have been "Oh, it's this again." The more detailed the story is the easier it is to spot the copies.
Completely storyless strings of mission objectives would be easier to generate, just combine basic actions. Go somewhere, fight someone, pick up some item, solve some minigame puzzle, go somewhere else, fight someone again, and so on for as long as the mission should last. There are entire games built on no more story than "go throught the level because it's there," "kill the enemy because they're trying to kill you" and/or "get the item because you can" and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. But it's not very Star Trek is it?
There could be plenty to do. Yes the old combat missions. First contact could also of been fun. Or hell exploring a pre warp civilization A la Archer and your rewards is how well you study the civilization without influencing it. Establish a new colony and protect it as a long running mission or the creation of a new deep space starbase.
Plenty of things that could of been done. But alas the devs won't do it.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
Any chance we could expect a return of exploration missions anytime soon?
I've seen an ingenious method other scifi games have used, in that you talk to an exploration science non-player character and set the parameters of your exploration which can sometimes have waves of enemies but isn't always the case. Once you setup what you want to do you are loaded into the instance in your ship.
Well get Exploration Mission return at the same time we get the replacement 'wrapper mission' for Foundry content that was promised as 'in the works/coming soon by Zeronious Rex back when the existing Foundry wrapper mission was removed.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
That's exactly what the cluster missions did and while there obviously wasn't 100 base templates, the 10 or so that there were were immediately noticeable as the same mission as soon as they repeated. It didn't matter one bit if the "scan 5 things" template was on a brown planet or a green planet, if you were scanning trees or rocks or if it was the Klingon Empire or the 3rd Borg Dynasty copypasted in the <insert faction here> spot of the explanation texts.
You don't get a new story just by copypasting in different names and places. Even if there had been 100 templates, people would still have noticed as soon as they repeated and the reaction would still have been "Oh, it's this again." The more detailed the story is the easier it is to spot the copies.
Completely storyless strings of mission objectives would be easier to generate, just combine basic actions. Go somewhere, fight someone, pick up some item, solve some minigame puzzle, go somewhere else, fight someone again, and so on for as long as the mission should last. There are entire games built on no more story than "go throught the level because it's there," "kill the enemy because they're trying to kill you" and/or "get the item because you can" and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. But it's not very Star Trek is it?
This style of writing is especially challenging as you need to make the writing meaningful, yet vague. It has a dual function of telling the player what they're doing, but must do so without going into too many specifics, which, doesn't really convey much story. But hey that's what the exploration clusters were infamous for. They didn't have any storyline relevance.
What I wish we could do, but probably never will get a chance to do is to build a fleet colony on one. But that's the sort of thing that would use a Foundry-esque interface but crucially NOT the Foundry, and thus it'd need a lot of work to build, and realistically, art assets is the only part you could re-use.
(...)
There is so much one can do with that approach, and the Genesis Engine, however crude it was, was originally planned to grow and become a true mission generator.
Do you have a source on that? Because I think this is a rumour. Multiple devs have said over the last few years that GENESIS was never meant to be a core part of the game, it was a generator to quickly inflate the mission count to fit the deadline. All of those maps needed to be hand-picked and rounded out and remained as a fixed map in the game. The generator never created random sets when you entered a cluster and I think it was never meant to be.
Still, what we had I liked and would have loved to see it evolve.
This is correct as far as I remember it, but I ALSO remember that Cryptic very dishonestly pre-launch implied that the Genesis system DID generate missions on the fly, so the possibilities would be infinite. They changed their tune 180 after game launch on that detail.
Like you, I wish Genesis worked they way they initially claimed it would, or that it evolved to deliver that. Exploration was fun for some quick random-ish fun, but there were a lot of maps with mobs spawned underground or in walls that made a lot of missions impossible to complete. I don't miss that part at all.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."
/quote]
By combining multiple elements and/or parameters, therefore invoking exponential growth. If you have 10 variables and each of them can have 10 different values, that's 10 billion possible combinations. Variety of uniqueness comes easy with procedural content generation. The hard part is actually programming that variety to to work in a way that's meaningful and interesting to a human player, as opposed to a bazillion functionally identical missions with different graphics.
Millions and billions and trillions.... now, where have I heard this before????
OH Yeah...the hype that was "No Man's Sky" a friend of mine fell hard for.
And found: yeah, not that great.
Though I do believe I have a few animals named after me....somewhere in that game.....
Actually what I am proposing was already in a major game before No Man's Sky was thought of and the systems in use for this proposal is already in the design of the game's original code. They could just add a ui to it and allow us to choose our favorite scenarios.
Foundry as replacement to an exploration system is a lame excuse. Foundry missions can be great, but very, very few of them even try to simulate exploration in the "going to the unknown" sense.
Is that so?
Why would the players themselves not create exploration missions, if that's what so strongly desired?
Because it's far superior to have real star trek scenarios in the game that give proper rewards such as reputation gains and experience boosts towards skill points.
It's also superior for the devs to change currency rewards as needed or add currency reward weekends. So far I've not seen that.
Some people clearly have their nostalgia glasses on when talking about the "exploration" system. Some of the descriptions by the "I miss it" -crowd have little basis in reality.
Not missing the old system, demanding a new system that's already been tried and worked well in a sister scifi mmo game.
Comments
Millions and billions and trillions.... now, where have I heard this before????
OH Yeah...the hype that was "No Man's Sky" a friend of mine fell hard for.
And found: yeah, not that great.
Though I do believe I have a few animals named after me....somewhere in that game.....
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
My character Tsin'xing
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
My character Tsin'xing
Not really. It's amazing to a certain kind of player, but not to somebody who's expecting story-based gameplay like you have in Mass Effect, KOTOR, or STO. No Man's Sky is a fine game for what it is (i.e. a variation on Elite), it's just not what the hype wanted it to be.
See, I came to STO from that same genre of game, the space combat/trading simulator (mainly Egosoft's X series, more recently games like Rebel Galaxy and Space Pirates and Zombies), and pretty much every one of them all the way back to Elite has more or less the same core gameplay. You don't go in expecting to be wowed by a bajillion unique things you can do in the game, because the programmer can only write so many fluff variations on "deliver 10 tons of stuff from X planet to Y planet" and "destroy X ship(s) that's been bugging Y group". Instead, you go in expecting to invent your own story and to find some way to have fun in the world (X3: Terran Conflict has a significant corporate fleet management component to the gameplay that I found compelling), or you get bored and stop playing. And that's true whether the game world is procedurally generated or (as in X) with a manually-built baseline level design and an engine that can alter what's there dynamically, and whether the game has its own story or not (X comes with gameplay modes that disable the storyline).
And that's never what Star Trek has been about. At best, Star Trek uses literal exploration of space as a way to get the cast to the actual story about people. There's a great scene illustrating this in DS9, where Bashir meets up with his Academy classmate Dr. Elizabeth Lense off the USS Lexington, who was off on this nifty deep space exploration mission. She's jealous of him, because he's getting to do all kinds of exciting stuff at the nexus of the Federation, Cardassia, Bajor, Ferenginar, and the Gamma Quadrant, whereas her job fixing the odd scrape and bruise because some goldshirt stubbed his toe exploring Empty Rock #257,525 is mind-numbingly boring.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Semantics. "Exploration" is just a Trek term to mark a gameplay mode, just like "Admiralty" does indeed not interact with the game at all, it just launches timers. I'm not trying to be annoying or anything, but the discussion doesn't go anywhere with people repeatedly splitting hairs over what the mode should be called, rename it "patrols", "surveys" or "tour of duty" if you will. It is clear what the mode suggested in the quoted example could look like and you know exactly what sophlogimo is going for, don't you?
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-Encounter at farpoint where the crew unexpectedly encounters Q then the creatures at farpoint?
-Then the naked now where the crew arent fitting anyone but an unkown phenomenon on a science mission?
-Then Tin Man on a first contact type of mission?\
-Then the survivor where the crew encounters a desimated fed outpost where they find only a tiny patch survived but later learn it was another being?
-Then Q-who where they encounter the Borg for the first time?
-Then the best of both worlds where they encounter the phenomenon created in three timelines but have to solve the cause?
So many ideas that can be implementedJust from the series and that can be rotated at random to keep it fresh while exploring the map..It doesnt have to be only space patrols..The current map has the clusters and systems in place but needs the exploratory mission which can be done at random..
Adu-Uss Firefox NCC-93425-F (LVL 65 FED AoY ENG) UR/VR MKXV Fleet Intel Assault Cruiser (July 2016)
Jean-Uss Seratoga Ravenna (LVL 60 FED Delta ENG) UC/R MKVI Bajoran Escort (April 2018)
Dubsa-RRW Mnaudh (LVL 50 FED allied ROM Delta ENG) Warbird (May 2018)
Marop-IKS Orunthi (LVL 50 KNG Delta ENG) BoP (May 2018)
Kanak'lan-TRIBBLE (LVL 65 DOM Gamma ENG) TRIBBLE (June 2018)
I suggest the foundry be made much more dynamic with more functions for gifted authors. Also have two modes in the foundry: basic & advanced.
This way new foundry authors can selevt from basic pre-fab story lines and customize the characters and sets and text.... Or in advanced more the author can really let loose.
Give us a new sector known as "the frontier"
Wherein the best foumdry missions appear randomly as well as the old exploration procedural missions pop up.
This should give us the best of both worlds. And for incentive; make the completion of said frontier content a big dilithium reward... This will encourage players to venture out and play community content.
And as for simple "kill X enemies" missions, the game already supports randomly chosen enemy in a premade map. No need for complicated generators that probably would amount to the same thing anyway.
But people always complain that Star Trek Online is too much about fighting and not enough about exploration. If the first four mission templates someone suggests for an exploration system are all about fighting, the whole exercise here seems pointless to me.
If people really just want Space Patrols, they shouldn't name it exploration. That isn't nitpicky or splitting hairs, it's a fundamental problem. I am okay with also having a space patrol system, but you have to realize that's what is being proposed here, and it will not satisfy people that want something that feels like exploration.
Exploration to me suggests either involving at least the trappings of exploration (e.g. doing a lot of scanning and probing of things), ideally more than that, like actually finding "new" stuff and seeing how after you have explored something, you actually found something new and have a feeling of progres . Maybe that there is now a place behind you that you have explored, and something new in front of you that still needs exploring. Maybe that you have a database entry for something new you haven't had before, something you can look back on as your "discovery".
On that front, we might need a GENESIS like map generation system that populates the map with "kitbashed" alien flora and fauna (intermixed with more or less standard flora perhaps, so the unusual parts stick out. And a system to record what you have found, and maybe allow you to revisit it. Maybe a way to create a trophy/decoration for your ship interior out of it.
Next cool step would be something like a server-side persistence of this, that the database is shared among players, so that a specific ship and crew will be known for having found
"Base-Type: Arachnoid; Type 6 Head; Type 7 Body; Type 4 Legs; Type 6 Mandibles; Primary Color DarkGreen; Secondary Color Blue; Color Pattern: Denobulan 2; Player-Chosen-Name: SpideyMcSpideyFace; Discovered By: U.S.S. Rainbow Power under command of TheRealMCcCoy@angrytarg"
or
"Base-Type: Tree; Crown Type Palm 9, Trunk Type Corkscrew 2, Fruit Type None; Primary Color Blue; Secondary Color: Yellow; Fruit Color: None; Color Pattern Nausicaan 1; Player-Chosen-Name: Worf-Palm; Discoveryd By: I.K.S. No Gravitas under command of Ephraim@mustrumridcully".
Maybe each such discovery also gives you "Discovery Token" for the Exploration Reputation to buy the rep gear.
I would say once you've seen one example of a template, it becomes repetitive. If the mission is scan Y, kill X, it doesn't matter how many Y or X you can insert there, it's still Mission scan Y, kill X.
And 100 story templates would still be the equivalent of 100 missions to make, except you have to design them to work with all possible variable combinations, not just Tzenkethi and Artifacts of the 3rd Dynasty.
You don't get a new story just by copypasting in different names and places. Even if there had been 100 templates, people would still have noticed as soon as they repeated and the reaction would still have been "Oh, it's this again." The more detailed the story is the easier it is to spot the copies.
Completely storyless strings of mission objectives would be easier to generate, just combine basic actions. Go somewhere, fight someone, pick up some item, solve some minigame puzzle, go somewhere else, fight someone again, and so on for as long as the mission should last. There are entire games built on no more story than "go throught the level because it's there," "kill the enemy because they're trying to kill you" and/or "get the item because you can" and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. But it's not very Star Trek is it?
Establish a new colony and protect it as a long running mission or the creation of a new deep space starbase.
Plenty of things that could of been done. But alas the devs won't do it.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
Well get Exploration Mission return at the same time we get the replacement 'wrapper mission' for Foundry content that was promised as 'in the works/coming soon by Zeronious Rex back when the existing Foundry wrapper mission was removed.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
What I wish we could do, but probably never will get a chance to do is to build a fleet colony on one. But that's the sort of thing that would use a Foundry-esque interface but crucially NOT the Foundry, and thus it'd need a lot of work to build, and realistically, art assets is the only part you could re-use.
My character Tsin'xing
This is correct as far as I remember it, but I ALSO remember that Cryptic very dishonestly pre-launch implied that the Genesis system DID generate missions on the fly, so the possibilities would be infinite. They changed their tune 180 after game launch on that detail.
Like you, I wish Genesis worked they way they initially claimed it would, or that it evolved to deliver that. Exploration was fun for some quick random-ish fun, but there were a lot of maps with mobs spawned underground or in walls that made a lot of missions impossible to complete. I don't miss that part at all.
Actually what I am proposing was already in a major game before No Man's Sky was thought of and the systems in use for this proposal is already in the design of the game's original code. They could just add a ui to it and allow us to choose our favorite scenarios.
Because it's far superior to have real star trek scenarios in the game that give proper rewards such as reputation gains and experience boosts towards skill points.
It's also superior for the devs to change currency rewards as needed or add currency reward weekends. So far I've not seen that.
Not missing the old system, demanding a new system that's already been tried and worked well in a sister scifi mmo game.
Not really up to par with actual exploration. Online facebook games do better than a AAA corporation, there is room to grow here.