General topics about Barons of the Galaxy
Where do we go now?
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Vulpex Posts: 390
7/15/2018
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For those who don't know me I'm Machina - been around since Beta. Came back a few months ago - a health issue left me hospitalized and knocked me out of the game for a while but my mates at ARK finally convinced me to come back and see how things have been moving forward. (You have no idea the shenanigans they got up to get me to come back)
It has been interesting to play with the big city structures and see how the social dynamic of the game has evolved, seeing that the raiders are smarter and now pose a credible threat is also interesting and forces new styles of gameplay to counter this. But having been around for a little while and I am really curious as to where the game is going from here.
We've seen major changes to the economics of the game in the last few weeks - namely:
- Decrease in the funds you get when you salvage products.
- Change in the demand curve making it harder for products to reach higher demand (demand starts to slow down at 100) together with an actual clip in the demand of products in game.
- New requirements for the generation of new cities.
- Enforced hard cap of 100 million population per city (We expect to see this today sometime)
All of these changes have something in common - they are made to bring the game closer to Seren's vision of what the game should be. That is how things should be! But all of this raises two big questions for me:
1) What can we expect as a vision for the game in the future?
2) Endgame play - what will be the possibilities?
Barons has been live now for well over a year (YAY! Party!) and over the course of that time the game has changed and evolved - for the better I would say. It is fair to say that the game has reached a point where it is very stable (you guys remember how Obsidian used to break the game on a regular basis?) and it has a very solid underlying economy and combat system as the foundations of a strong political and alliance system, which players can use very effectively to build on - As we have done multiple times in the past and continue to do so now. (Charters all the way!)
But where is the game going to go from here? There are many interesting possibilities and it all depends mostly on Seren, his vision and availability to work on this project but I am sure others are having similar thoughts as well so here are some of the things that have come out from my informal talks with a few of you as questions on the future vision of the game:
- Economic Development - In a way it's all in the economy. The premise of the game is that the economy is so big and complex that no one corporation should be able to do everything on their own. This means in practice that in order to really be successful there needs to be a cooperation between different corporations. Unfortunately the options for cooperation are simply not great. In particular the transfer of materials and goods from player to player is cumbersome enough that it is used sparingly, usually in one off situations. I have very rarely seen any long term use of the recurring contracts in an effective way. This means in practice that working together means simply all piling up in the same place and kinda sorta divvying up the economy into sectors but it is very hard to have an effective integrated economy - I have never seen anyone who has been able to run in even the moderate term simply agreements like you provide me with water and I will provide you with basic woods. So... where is the economy going?
- Exploration - Space the final frontier!!! Well the exploration mechanic has been sorta uh... well it's there kinda but unfortunately due to a number of hiccups exploration got a bit out of hand at one point which resulted in it becoming much harder to open up new systems. It seems to be one of the questions which all new players have - how do we explore stuff? And it is a valid question! So... where is exploration going?
- Piracy - YARRR!!! - Ok yes surprised? Some people think I have a reputation for coming down hard on wannabe pirates... and to be fair I do. But... that does not mean I do not like pirates! The problem is that the options for piracy are few and far between and all of them are, well hardly worth the risk given that you will always get caught and well... bad things tend to happen then. The raid mechanic is again one of those great ideas which is very rarely used but I really do feel like there is something in there which is genuinely great we just have not been able to hit on it yet.
Of course I have my own thoughts on all of those but I would be really interested in hearing the thoughts from all of you and especially Seren. Notice that I did not include any big new shiny combat stuff in the list, there is a reason for it - The one area where we can really effectively cooperate is now in combat. Escort missions are a bit fiddly but they work and allow us to team up and really be stronger than acting alone (note - everyone I know though is really excited about the big bad doomstar so I guess there is that!)
Finally a few words on the endgame - for some players who have been around for a while you end up with a big pile of cash and huge battle fleets and wonder... ok so what next. Many of the changes which have been done in the last week have been triggered by players pushing the limits of the game during the endgame and those limits getting pushed beyond the vision Seren had for the game - but the question is what is the endgame supposed to look like? Sorta kinda look like? What options are we to have? This is an important question because without endplay the game will burn through players. I confess that I do wonder whether some of the problems which have been addressed in the last few weeks could not have been simply solved by having more players in the game (I know, easier said than done!).
I leave it here - and look forward to hearing your thoughts on all this.
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