03-05-2013, 01:44 PM
I think if I had the talent and the spare time, I'd like to try making a permadeath starship game.
Everything will be objective based. There will never be any reward for killing anyone other than it gets them out of your objective in permanent fashion.
Blowing up starships will be really difficult. Maybe they all have Battlestar Galactica style jump drives or something. Mostly you will blow up another ship only when it's such a close fight that both sides think they're winning and neither wants to back off of the objective. (Actually, the game FTL might be a good, extremely simple model for this. If you imagine FTL was a PvP battle, you would have a hard time really destroying someone's ship. You can focus on their drives and crew to make sure they can't jump but that means their guns are going. You can beat their guns and shields and they'll probably jump out, leaving you to the objective.)
Basically I think that right now it's too easy for a game designer to think, "What should the player do in this mission?" and the answer is always just "kill everything!" Alternative mechanics don't get the attention they deserve because "kill everything" is too easy of an answer.
And usually "kill everything" games have simple combat mechanics because if the game is built around killing everything, it's easier to create complexity by throwing more enemies at you than by actually thinking about the combat mechanics themselves. If the game is built around fighting but NOT built around killing then we're forced to think a lot deeper about combat mechanics and what the player is actually supposed to be doing.
A "kill everything" game doesn't really need politics, diplomacy, stealth, suspense, intrigue or any of that. You just kill everything. Take that away and all that energy and attention will have to be built into other systems in order to keep the game interesting.
Everything will be objective based. There will never be any reward for killing anyone other than it gets them out of your objective in permanent fashion.
Blowing up starships will be really difficult. Maybe they all have Battlestar Galactica style jump drives or something. Mostly you will blow up another ship only when it's such a close fight that both sides think they're winning and neither wants to back off of the objective. (Actually, the game FTL might be a good, extremely simple model for this. If you imagine FTL was a PvP battle, you would have a hard time really destroying someone's ship. You can focus on their drives and crew to make sure they can't jump but that means their guns are going. You can beat their guns and shields and they'll probably jump out, leaving you to the objective.)
Basically I think that right now it's too easy for a game designer to think, "What should the player do in this mission?" and the answer is always just "kill everything!" Alternative mechanics don't get the attention they deserve because "kill everything" is too easy of an answer.
And usually "kill everything" games have simple combat mechanics because if the game is built around killing everything, it's easier to create complexity by throwing more enemies at you than by actually thinking about the combat mechanics themselves. If the game is built around fighting but NOT built around killing then we're forced to think a lot deeper about combat mechanics and what the player is actually supposed to be doing.
A "kill everything" game doesn't really need politics, diplomacy, stealth, suspense, intrigue or any of that. You just kill everything. Take that away and all that energy and attention will have to be built into other systems in order to keep the game interesting.