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What sort of limitations can we put in a Foundry mission?
I assume we can put in level / rank requirements for a mission, but can we restrict missions based upon Diplomatic ranks? ( Touchy negotiations, Ambassadors only may apply. )
Can we make doing a previous Foundry (or Cryptic-written) mission a pre-requisite for doing a Foundry mission? (So people see the story in order or don't spoil the story of other missions.)
Can we put in career path requirements? ( Write a series of missions that are custom done for an Engineer captain.)
Can we put in racial requirements? ( Write missions for Vulcan captains only, for example. )
Can we require the captain to be piloting a certain type of ship? ( Mission only acceptable for Science vessels. )
Basically what tools do we have to setup missions so we can write for certain assumptions about who will be playing them instead of having to write a mission generic enough that any captain could fit in the narrative and still have it make sense.
I assume we can put in level / rank requirements for a mission, but can we restrict missions based upon Diplomatic ranks? ( Touchy negotiations, Ambassadors only may apply. )
Can we make doing a previous Foundry (or Cryptic-written) mission a pre-requisite for doing a Foundry mission? (So people see the story in order or don't spoil the story of other missions.)
Can we put in career path requirements? ( Write a series of missions that are custom done for an Engineer captain.)
Can we put in racial requirements? ( Write missions for Vulcan captains only, for example. )
Can we require the captain to be piloting a certain type of ship? ( Mission only acceptable for Science vessels. )
Basically what tools do we have to setup missions so we can write for certain assumptions about who will be playing them instead of having to write a mission generic enough that any captain could fit in the narrative and still have it make sense.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Yeah, ithe existing Cryptic-written content has to be available to anyone because there is both a limited amount of it and it wouldn't have been an efficient use of their development time to write content that only one race out of many could play or one career path out of three could play.
But given that those of us who will be writing Foundry content aren't beholden to the playerbase at large, I'd really like to be able to write content that has a focused narrative written for just one category of players.
For example a Science captain only mission where they are invited to attend a symposium as part of a peer review for a paper published by the Vulcan Science Academy, it just wouldn't be their field of expertise or training if you were playing a Tactical captain and would make for an odd narrative.
I also would like this so that I'd be able to do things like write an Engineering based episode where the solution requires the player to use, for example, Orbital Strike (engineering captain ground power) to solve a puzzle or problem. It'd be better to be able to just make it an Engineer lvl 35+ only episode than to have players get all the way to the end of the episode only to find that they are lacking in the ability they need to complete it.
Also, if I am writing a puzzle / dialogue based murder / crime mystery series of episodes I want to be able to require people to actually play through them in sequence so they wouldn't be running into spoilers or find that the episode is made too easy by having the villain of a piece of it revealed by skipping ahead and finding themselves in the dramatic final battle before they've even done the episode where the crime was commited in.
I agree 100%.
I know I would leverage such functionality. Patrol missions for Escorts... Research missions for Science vessels... send cruisers into the unknown. And similar for ground/character-class. Just because Cryptic doesn't differentiate class all that much doesn't mean we can't! We might be able to make it actually mean something.
I like the idea of restricting missions by ship a little bit, but I don't think it would work. A lot of people are very fond of their particular ship, and restricting things based on that wouldn't be very fun. Not to mention it might get annoying to switch ships every time you want to do certain UGC missions.
I do like the ideas for branching dialog based on class etc. within the mission, but I think restricting missions based on that is even worse. At least you can switch ships - if what people consider to be the best UGC mission ever requires you to be a Benzite tactical officer, a very large portion of the playerbase won't be able to play it, and would probably be annoyed because of that.
To that I simply say "tough". Starfleet has many different classes because they have many sorts of missions and missions of varying caliber that require their ships to have certain characteristics.
You wouldn't send an aircraft carrier to eavesdrop on enemy shipping lanes--you'd send a submarine.
I'd love this. Bringing the right tool for the job adds a whole other level of complexity to the game.
Even if specific class requirements cannot be formally designated in the 2010 edition of the toolkit, what options do creators have to make their missions nigh impossible to complete without the correct ship?
(i.e. Requiring a number of stacked debuffs that can only be accomplished with a Science Vessel.)
That is EXACTLY what I mean and want to be able to do.
To write missions that are basically geared for one type of character / ship and focused on their strengths and aptitudes and interests vs having to write something generic and bland enough that anyone can complete it.
If I write a Science captain only mission, and 2/3 of the charaters who are Tactical and Engineer captains can't play it, then so be it.
For the (in theory) 1/3 that will be able to play the episode It'll be a more unique and more interesting experience and actually make the narrative experience of various characters stand out more distinctly from one another versus the present situation where the actual stories that every captain encounters over the course of their careers (within their own faction that is) is identical regardless of the characters background or career path or species.
I don't want to have to write episodes where your captain remains an unskilled stooge with their bridge officers telling them all the important information about what they need to do. Where the captains sole job is to flip switches that his BOffs tell him are important.
I want to be able to write episodes where a solo Engineering captain can be looking at an EPS conduit and figure out what it is wrong with it on their own, instead of having to have an engineering Boff tell him all about it and what needs to be done as in the current episodes.
Or one where a Science captain actually knows science terms and tools themselves, instead of needing a Sci Boff as a narrative crutch filling in all the details for their apparently clueless captain.
Being able to restrict episodes based upon career / race / level increases our ability as authors to fine tune a narrative to have more depth and be better fitted for the captains playing through them rather than having to write things to be generic and bland enough to suit any captain that comes to play it.
And this can be expanded upon eventually to allow us to have variants of the same mission for different roles, which would be awesome with mission chaining.
When the Deferi missions came out and people complained that their tactical captain was playing doctor, it was brought up that there could have been and should have been different tasks for different types of captains. With this pre-req concept expanded, we could write 3 perspectives of the same scenario, appropriate to the captain class.
Same with ship classes.
Maybe you have a multi-mission chain about a large fleet encounter. At one point in the chain you could get different objectives based on your ship class. If you're an Escort you're sent to flank the enemy. If you're a Cruiser you're sent head-long into the battle. If you're a Science ship, you're tasked to stay on the outskirts and scan for enemy flanking attempts.
It can really make missions more dynamic and replayable.
Absolutely brilliant!
I would love to craft a mission like this. It would certainly make me want to try it with all of my different characters.
These ideas are definitely very cool, and I get the vibe that the devs want to use them, not only in their missions, but in UGC as well.
I still don't think missions should be limited to specific classes. If we do get the ability to write different dialog trees depending on class/ship type, that would be plenty. Why limit players from doing certain things?
I agree that if dialogue trees can differ that, in many cases, will be plenty good-enough, but I still think there's the odd case where hard class restrictions would be beneficial. Yeah, it makes the mission a bit less accessible, but it adds meaning to classes. Restriction based on ship class is pretty lenient since anyone can change their ship to whatever class, but character class would be pretty restrictive.
Still... every MMO I've played has at least a few missions that are class-specific. A very small minority, for sure, but they're there.