Combat game or trading game? You decide.

[Wildeblood]

I've alluded to this on the BB before, but more than a decade ago, so... yeah.

I'd just like to raise a point which Cody made to me over the phone a year or so ago: mission OXPs seem not to have been very popular. They seem not to generate much discussion on the BB compared to other OXPs, and some masterpieces (eg. Svengali's) languished with hardly anybody trying them out. And look at all the issues which Mr Flibble unearthed in GalCop Missions back between February-May this year. But the OXP dates back to 2017!

The original attraction of Elite and similar is supposedly that they are open-ended sandbox games. The very concept of quests/missions seems to be at odds with that. My perception has always been that there are two kinds of players: ones like Reval, who think it's a trading game, with pointless combat interludes that must be endured to get to the next trading opportunity; and ones like Capt. Murphy, who think it's a combat game, with a pointless trading side that must be endured to raise funds for bigger weapons.

Its broad appeal is based on the initiation ritual effect: I endured so much to get in to this club that I love this club, even if it's a boring club. Far from being pointless, the running of the gantlet from witchpoint to station acts as an initiation ritual which must be passed to gain entry to the next trading opportunity. The sameness of the trading would soon become boring, without the combat interludes. And similarly, for players who believe they just want a combat game, the sameness of the combat encounters would soon become boring, without the boring trading aspect. Counter-intuitively, making it more boring makes it less boring.

Quest-mission things don't really fit into this type of game.

---
There are two kinds of people: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.

[hiran]

Exploration! What about exploration?

An explorer would set out to visit all the systems and endure both trading to equip/maintain the ship, endure combat just to travel on on a higher order mission.

And finally be able to tell what all the systems across the galaxies have in common or what makes them special.

[Cholmondely]

There are two points I consider significant about Wildeblood's insight:

1) "The original attraction of Elite and similar is supposedly that they are open-ended sandbox games. The very concept of quests/missions seems to be at odds with that."

Rather than focus on terminology ("open-ended sandbox") and the ensuing consequences resulting from that definition (the game must be like this in order to be defined as "open-ended sandbox"), I'd like to propose a different approach.

To me, Elite etc. are trying to simulate Real Life™. If I am born in Haiti with a car and a small wallet of dosh, I can decide what to do. I can drive around doing business. I can work as a taxi driver. I can try and fight the gangsters. I can go elsewhere. Et cetera. Now, if somebody offers me a job (= mission), I can also decide whether or not to take it. As in Oolite. I don't have to take any of the GalCop Missions - or Long Way Round, or chase the Constrictor.

All the missions oxps do (for me) is simulate Real Life a little more by offering more structured opportunities which I can choose between - or ignore. As I do in Real Life.




2) Wildeblood's main point:

I was explicating the psychological mechanism that maintains player interest in the vanilla game. Because it works the way it does, it has little use for quests. (Where "it" is an anthropomorphized mental representation of the game's computer code, assigning to "it" agency which - I hope - it does not actually have.) Therefore it has few resources in its code to facilitate quests. Therefore there is not one "official" correct way to author a mission, using the provided resources.

In particular, there is not any central register of story elements - persistent characters, quest-able objects, locations, etc. Everyone who creates a mission OXP has to create separate data structures, and hope their story doesn't collide with other OXPs.

I find this an interesting insight - and have been ruminating about it.

I would suggest that it is definitely true at the outset of gameplay. And (presumably) throughout the vanilla game.

But not "later on" in the OXP'd game. What can you spend all that money on once you have fully equipped your ship? Apart from buying another, what can you do with it? And where is the impetus to keep on trading once your coffers are bulging with dosh?

This surely is where the missions come in. Combat with a point. Things to do now that one is relatively invulnerable. (Some people will want these things earlier, without needing the grind to outfit one's ship). I suspect that the various vanilla game contracts operate in this fashion, too.

I've noticed that Cody, for example, has over the years here on the BB, written on the one hand of the massive contract payouts which he worked his way up to - and then on the other hand, of his various fights.

I also notice that there are OXPs which prolong the process of "outfitting the ship"
*buy a more expensive ship (eg. a 1,200,000₢ Caduceus)
*Ship Configuration OXP (Oodles more varieties of equipment)
*Hermitage (equip your Rock Hermit)
- and also Home System which provides something to do with extra dosh: note that these mostly seem to be from Phkb's stable).

For myself (lousy combat skills), I trade so that I can upgrade my ship. So I'm avoiding combat. Weapon Laws OXP makes this upgrading more of a challenge and an adventure. SniperLock makes combat more possible. But once my ship is equipped, I start to loose interest in trading and become more interested in combat and missions. I've several Jamesons created to try out various missions but which were "given up" as they just needed too many kills (unenjoyable grind!) to start the missions. I enjoy kitting out the Cobra the most, I think. (I'm currently building up yet another one so that I can try out DGill's latest "Feudal States Inamorata 1.0"/Feudal States v.3.8.0?).

[Cholmondely]

Exploration! What about exploration?

Alas, I feel that one needs a heavily OXP'd game in order to be able to enjoy worthwhile exploration.

There are the OXPs to "hide "things so that they can be found/explored/discovered, and then there are the OXPs to add in some goodies to find. Or there is SOTL Exploration (unfinished but good).

And really, we would want a raft of OXP designers to add in more and more stuff for discovery (Daddyhoggy: "Teorge"! Myself: "Digebiti"! Wildeblood: "Vetitice"! Captain Beatnik: "Riredi"!). And to finish off some things (Amber Moon Chronicles, for example).

In G1 we have a mere handful of systems with explorable goodies (Lave, Tionisla, Tianve) and a handful in the other galaxies (G2 Cebior, G3 Aqualina, G6 Veisin, ... Littlebear's proposed rejig of The Assassin's Guild may eventually make G7 more interesting than G1!).



Question: are there other games out there with good ideas as regards exploration?

[hiran]

Question: are there other games out there with good ideas as regards exploration?

I enjoyed Starflight. Not so much into trading - you'd collect/mine minerals and lifeforms on planets and sell them in the base. Use the money to maintain/equip the ship and train the crew. Once in a while artifacts are to be found.

But during spaceflight you bump into other spaceships. Not all of them just fight. You can have conversations and figure out different species have different goals, worries or hopes. And if you act wisely you can even unite them against the big dangerous ones.
Quite complex for a playthrough. But:

You only engage in such encounters once you do not fear to survive yourself. So this roleplay keeps Starflight interesting for a much bigger period of time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

Set in the year 4620, the game puts players in the role of a starship captain sent to explore the galaxy. There is no set path, allowing players to switch freely between mining, ship-to-ship combat, and alien diplomacy.[3] The broader plot of the game emerges slowly, as the player discovers that an ancient race of beings is causing stars to flare and destroy all living creatures.

Oh, look at that:

Starflight is often cited along with Elite, which appeared two years earlier with similar gameplay, as early open world space exploration games.[7][36][31] Dwarf Fortress's forgotten beasts were inspired by the procedurally generated lifeforms within Starflight.[50]

[Nite Owl]

As to game play my take is similar to that of Capt. Murphy. Combat (which can get boring if you Uber up your ship too much) interspersed with Boring Trading. The game in my head is that of a Bounty Hunter with a Heart of Gold. More like the Boba Fett of the TV series then the Boba Fett of the movies, with a bit of The Mandalorian thrown in for good measure. The majority of my "Dosh" (quoting Cholmondely here) comes from Trading. Bounty Hunting is not nearly as profitable as say Parcel or Goods Contracts. My lone Commander (begun back in 2018 and still in play) is currently roaming about Sector 7 with almost 13 million ₢. Have yet to complete a full 8 but that is more up to my being a completionist who attempts to visit as many systems as is practical before moving on to the next Sector. A long term goal is to visit every system in every sector but that will wait until my second swing through the 8. Also plan on running every non bugged mission that can be run. Have done most of them up to Sector 7 but plan on completing a few on my second swing through the 8. Have been in Sector 7 for a few weeks now and have noticed a marked increase in Major Thargoids Incursions. In the previous 6 Sectors there have been a few Major Thargoid Attacks but here in Sector 7 they seem to occur in almost every other system visited. In the previous 6 Sectors have killed maybe one or two Thargoid Queens per sector. In Sector 7 have already killed 4 or 5 and am not even close to being done here.

As to OXZ/OXP bugs that is not something that tends to get posted on the forum by me. My usual method is to converse with the creator of said creation via the board's Private Message service. Have done this extensively with both phkb and Wildeblood on several of their releases. Either method is more than acceptable. My take on this is of the why air your dirty laundry in public kind of a thing. Yes, we all make mistakes and there is no shame in that but personal choice leads me to do it this way for some reason. Followed MrFlibble in his quest to help improve Galcop Missions and found it most thorough and correct in his forum posting approach. It remains, however, not my preferred method of bug reporting. But Hey, that is just me and my own bizarro take on things. As they say: "to each his own" and "to they own self be true".

[Cholmondely]

As to OXZ/OXP bugs that is not something that tends to get posted on the forum by me. My usual method is to converse with the creator of said creation via the board's Private Message service. Have done this extensively with both phkb and Wildeblood on several of their releases. Either method is more than acceptable. My take on this is of the why air your dirty laundry in public kind of a thing. Yes, we all make mistakes and there is no shame in that but personal choice leads me to do it this way for some reason. Followed MrFlibble in his quest to help improve Galcop Missions and found it most thorough and correct in his forum posting approach. It remains, however, not my preferred method of bug reporting. But Hey, that is just me and my own bizarro take on things. As they say: "to each his own" and "to they own self be true".

Interesting approach. Not embarrassing the creators. Ethical - I like it.

But the BB approach has a couple of advantages.
1) It shows players that bugs are being fixed - even in the OXPs they are using at the moment
2)| It might show other bug-fixers how to do it themselves - or what bugs to look out for

IF we were a more adversarial community, I'd be firmly in your camp.

[Wildeblood]

As to OXZ/OXP bugs that is not something that tends to get posted on the forum by me. My usual method is to converse with the creator of said creation via the board's Private Message service. Have done this extensively with both phkb and Wildeblood on several of their releases. Either method is more than acceptable. My take on this is of the why air your dirty laundry in public kind of a thing. Yes, we all make mistakes and there is no shame in that but personal choice leads me to do it this way for some reason. Followed MrFlibble in his quest to help improve Galcop Missions and found it most thorough and correct in his forum posting approach. It remains, however, not my preferred method of bug reporting. But Hey, that is just me and my own bizarro take on things. As they say: "to each his own" and "to they own self be true".

This might be an appropriate point for me to interject some context, for anyone reading along at home. Hiran has asked how the process of creating mission OXPs can be streamlined, and Cholmondely - eager to offer support and encouragement - has replied that mission OXPs don't seem to be that popular, anyway. He cites as evidence the fact that bugs in mission OXPs can go unnoticed for long times. (So, we weren't discussing bug-catching - it got mentioned in passing (but we can follow that tangent, if anyone wants to).)

Eager to show off, I have noted Cholmondely's point and replied that I know why that is. Different styles of games use different psychological processes to "hook" the player, and "sandbox" style games are not simply games that don't include story-telling, but are fundamentally different in how they hook the player.

Cholmondely was somewhat offended by this, apparently feeling that all this psychologizing is taking the humanity out of computer games, and dared me to repeat it in public. Challenge accepted.

That's the way I'm telling it, anyway. That is "my truth".

[Wildeblood]

Exploration! What about exploration?

An explorer would set out to visit all the systems and endure both trading to equip/maintain the ship, endure combat just to travel on on a higher order mission.

If you dump the player object in the debug console, you see it only has about a dozen properties (one of which is player.ship), of which there are exactly five reputation axes: score (kill count/combat success), credits (money/trading success), and reputation scores for passenger, cargo & parcel contracts. Bounty is a sixth, but I think that's attached to player.ship, not directly to player. By contrast, the player.ship object has about 200 properties, several of which are complex arrays with many more sub-properties. In Oolite, it's all about the ship. If there's any negotiating to do, let your lasers do the talking.

So no, exploration is not a thing in Oolite (which is why the Explorers' Club OXP exists). Of those five measures of success I mentioned, the three contract reputation scores are (1) not part of original Elite (2) not explicitly shown to the player (3) not unbounded like the two main ones, there are just seven steps to more lucrative contracts. From the player point-of-view, there are just two measures of success.

Starting a game there is a distinct task and purpose: equip your ship to increase its survivability. And, that acts as a graduated measure of success. But, once the F5 screen is fully populated, the game is essentially over. By the time that happens players will have begun concentrating on either making the kill count go up or making the money count go up. I simply refuse to believe any player pays equal attention to both scores; I say you inevitably fall into one of the two camps I described earlier.

The rhythm of alternating combat scenarios and trading opportunities is established. A player who just wants a trading game considers the gauntlet run on entering each system to be a "grind", but by forcing them to deal with it every time, we distract them from noticing that the trading is also a grind. We should be cautious of anything that disrupts that rhythm; that is why I very deliberately described SEX Drive as a "cheat script" and never once called it an "equipment OXP".

I've previously boasted that Explorers' Club, by providing a third measure of success, causes an instantaneous 50% increase in playability. But, I'm also aware that if anyone takes the challenge seriously, and tries to "collect them all", it will disrupt the normal rhythm of game-play in the same way that a mission OXP does.

[hiran]

Thanks for the elaborate explanation. I did neither know about the internals of Elite which just counts money and kills nor Oolite adding the contracts.

Yet as a player I just don't care. I'm not playing for scientific historical reasons but for having a good time.
It would be nice if some further plot could be identified just by playing long enough - similar like I mentioned in Starflight.

And this does not even have to go into the core game - we are just talking about mission OXPs.
Going back to the original topic it was not even whether missions are necessary but how to make mission creation easier. After all I believe we might have better and more complete missions if it were easier.

[Cholmondely]

Thanks for the elaborate explanation. I did neither know about the internals of Elite which just counts money and kills nor Oolite adding the contracts.

Yet as a player I just don't care. I'm not playing for scientific historical reasons but for having a good time.
It would be nice if some further plot could be identified just by playing long enough - similar like I mentioned in Starflight.

And this does not even have to go into the core game - we are just talking about mission OXPs.
Going back to the original topic it was not even whether missions are necessary but how to make mission creation easier. After all I believe we might have better and more complete missions if it were easier.

Re The Collector,

Norby is a good programmer and would have programmed whatever Mossfoot gave him. I suspect the problem was with Mossfoot.

[hiran]

Re The Collector,

Norby is a good programmer and would have programmed whatever Mossfoot gave him. I suspect the problem was with Mossfoot.

Is this one case example or the majority?
Plus I do not like to blame anyone - the two did a great job. Sad it ends so abruptly. And noone felt like taking over and completing it.

[Wildeblood]

[Edited to remove suspect javascript.]

I suspect I'm not the only one with literally dozens of started, but never finished, OXP ideas littering their drives. So I enthusiastically support anything hiran does to streamline the process. I'm just saying, I wouldn't necessarily start with "mission" OXPs. It's like that old joke about the driver lost in a rural area: he stops to ask a farmer by the roadside how to get to such-and-such a place, the farmer thinks for a moment then says, "Well, I wouldn't start here."

[Cholmondely]

You use Display Reputations, don't you? This has been languishing in my computer, apparently since March 29th; just open the script.js file and paste this over version 1.3:

Code: Select all

"use strict";

this.name    = "display_reputations";
this.version = "1.4";

this.startUpComplete = this.shipExitedWitchspace = this.reportScreenEnded = function () {
    this._setReputations();
}

this._setReputations = function () {
    let title = expandMissionText("display_reputation_title_word");
    if (player.passengerReputation >= 0) {
        let passenger = expandMissionText("display_reputation_passenger_" + player.passengerReputation);
    } else {
        let passenger = expandMissionText("display_reputation_passenger_minus");
    }
    if (player.contractReputation >= 0) {
        let contract = expandMissionText("display_reputation_contract_" + player.contractReputation);
    } else {
        let contract = expandMissionText("display_reputation_contract_minus");
    }
    if (player.parcelReputation >= 0) {
        let parcel = expandMissionText("display_reputation_parcel_" + player.parcelReputation);
    } else {
        let parcel = expandMissionText("display_reputation_parcel_minus");
    }
    let ws = worldScripts["Explorers Club"];
    if (ws) {
        let explorer = ws._playerRank();
        mission.setInstructions([title, passenger, parcel, contract, explorer]);
    } else {
        mission.setInstructions([title, passenger, parcel, contract]);
    }
}

But does not Explorer's Club already do this?

Systems visited..., Rank...,

[Wildeblood]

But does not Explorer's Club already do this?

No, I took it out of Explorers' Club back in February, when I twiddled the version number to 1.4.6.

Apostrophe after the s.

By the way, Cholmondely, aren't you always claiming not to understand javascript? You seemed to have no difficulty immediately recognising where 1.4 differed from 1.3, and what it did.

#JustSaying