Game News Colony Ship RPG Update #1: Setting, Character System

[DwarvenFood]

Great news. Looking forward, although may be a while.

How big can a colony ship be? I never read any books featuring these. Guess I should!

You should.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Long_Sun

Is this related to the Book of the New Sun, about to finish that one..

 

[GloomFrost]

Okay, as a developer I understand your desire to inflict your story and characters on players, but I like playing games and creating my own story.

What story would that be? Me and these five custom-built murderous mute clones went adventuring? I have nothing against creating your own party in a game like IWD or Silent Storm but we are going for a slightly different experience here.

A big part of the fun for me is creating MY character(s), not being stuck with your idiotic talking heads that spout gibberish that makes me want to kill them.

I'm not a big fan of party banter either.

Now, what you are doing with this extremely flawed design is forcing the character I design to be the high charismatic social guy.

If you want to have a full party that follows you everywhere because you are that fucking awesome, yes. If you want to have a single companion or two, no.

I really like the inclusion of feats and more equipment slots, but that doesn't balance the scales of wackadoo Bioware bullshit you are aiming for with the rest of the game design.

I'm aiming for choices & consequences not party banter.

The consequence of your poor design choice is a game that is not nearly as good and enjoyable as it could be if it was designed in the non-Biowarian fashion.

RPGs are about my making a character or characters and making my own story. ToEE, Darklands, Realms of Arkania Trilogy, Wizardries, Gold Box Games, Buck Rogers, M&Ms, Dark Suns, etc, aren't about "Me and these five custom-built murderous mute clones went adventuring?" It isn't about me. It is about characters that I make and I decide their personalities and motivations, not you. You provide the setting, scenarios, and backdrops, I make the story for my characters.

Lets look at the games with recruitable NPCs and see if they had good combat or not -

IE games - nope, not even a little
Kotors - nope
Drakensangs - nope
Arcanum - nope
Jade Empire - nope
Dragon Ages - nope.
Fall Outs - nope
PoE - nope, probably the best of the actual rpg RTwP offerings.
Everything else - nope, besides the one blatant exception to the rule (and the only RTwP game with actual good combat) Aarklash legacy, which didn't really have recruitables, but characters if forced you to take, and isn't a real rpg.

There has never been any game with recruitable NPCs that is known to have good combat, or memorable combat.

So, it seems you want the combat in your game to not be good. Why? Why spent the time and resources including it then? Just take it out. Make the game story mode. Have text combat that just says "You Win!" and give the players loot.

Or, if you want combat to be good, let me make my own party and build encounters around an actually efficiently built party made by non-retarded person.

When you think of a game that has combat worth playing, that you would be proud of saying you designed, do any of them have shitty ass, inefficient recruitable npcs?

IE games (espessially IceWind Dale) had good combat. Also you could recruit NPCs in TOEE.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Okay, as a developer I understand your desire to inflict your story and characters on players, but I like playing games and creating my own story.

What story would that be? Me and these five custom-built murderous mute clones went adventuring? I have nothing against creating your own party in a game like IWD or Silent Storm but we are going for a slightly different experience here.

A big part of the fun for me is creating MY character(s), not being stuck with your idiotic talking heads that spout gibberish that makes me want to kill them.

I'm not a big fan of party banter either.

Now, what you are doing with this extremely flawed design is forcing the character I design to be the high charismatic social guy.

If you want to have a full party that follows you everywhere because you are that fucking awesome, yes. If you want to have a single companion or two, no.

I really like the inclusion of feats and more equipment slots, but that doesn't balance the scales of wackadoo Bioware bullshit you are aiming for with the rest of the game design.

I'm aiming for choices & consequences not party banter.

The consequence of your poor design choice is a game that is not nearly as good and enjoyable as it could be if it was designed in the non-Biowarian fashion.

RPGs are about my making a character or characters and making my own story. ToEE, Darklands, Realms of Arkania Trilogy, Wizardries, Gold Box Games, Buck Rogers, M&Ms, Dark Suns, etc, aren't about "Me and these five custom-built murderous mute clones went adventuring?" It isn't about me. It is about characters that I make and I decide their personalities and motivations, not you. You provide the setting, scenarios, and backdrops, I make the story for my characters.

Lets look at the games with recruitable NPCs and see if they had good combat or not -

IE games - nope, not even a little
Kotors - nope
Drakensangs - nope
Arcanum - nope
Jade Empire - nope
Dragon Ages - nope.
Fall Outs - nope
PoE - nope, probably the best of the actual rpg RTwP offerings.

Clearly, the problem is the recruitable NPCs.

 

[Goral]

There has never been any game with recruitable NPCs that is known to have good combat, or memorable combat.

Try Desperados. You recruit members and it has better combat than anything I know. It's not RPG though.

 

[quasimodo]

If you do have a rotatable camera do a better job of it. The camera wrestling minigame was the worst part of AOD.

 

[Vault Dweller]

We did our best with Torque. We're planning to give Unreal 4 a try, hopefully it would work better.

 

[likaq]

Roqua confirmed as combatfag.
Which begs the question:
Why would combatfag be interested in this game in the first place?

Also:

what the fuck are you even smoking, cause I want that.

 

[Excidium II]

Why would combatfag be interested in this game in the first place?

Isn't this by the same team as AoD? That game famous for having excellent and brutal combat?

 

[vean]

Generation ships are cheesy syfy nonsense. You would need a massive amount of material to keep humans active for generations - and for what? What's the benefit? It just doesn't make sense.

If it ever happens, the ship will be autonomous, with the humans either in cryo or cloned after arrival.

But hey we're on a forum where the state of the art is a game where radiation turns people into immortal zombies.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

We did our best with Torque. We're planning to give Unreal 4 a try, hopefully it would work better.

Torque is definitely interesting. How much did you have to customize the engine itself to get the results you wanted? I remember having to do a ton of that before I just gave up.

 

[Shin]

Generation ships are cheesy syfy nonsense. You would need a massive amount of material to keep humans active for generations - and for what? What's the benefit? It just doesn't make sense.

If it ever happens, the ship will be autonomous, with the humans either in cryo or cloned after arrival.

But hey we're on a forum where the state of the art is a game where radiation turns people into immortal zombies.

Just because it doesn't make sense now doesn't mean it would never make sense, especially with VD's elaborating about jesus freaks and all. Men of god work in mysterious ways.

I kinda hope the story links up with AoD in some form. I like shared universes.

 

[felipepepe]

There has never been any game with recruitable NPCs that is known to have good combat, or memorable combat.

The Gold Box games had recruitable NPCs, just not a lot of them. Jagged Alliance had recruitable NPCs. Really, though felipepepe is the man to field this kind of thing.

Yeah, not many good examples out there... mainly due to shitty combat design, which would remain shitty even with full party creation. Jagged Alliance did it right by giving each recruitable characyer unique characteristics, preferences and requirements. Their personalities affect gameplay, it isn't just a choice of who's backstory you wanna find / who you wanna fuck.

What VD is doing (or what I'm imagining) can be awesome depending on how interesting the NPCs will be. Apparently the game will be more of a "hard sci-fi", but I would love an over-the-top Fallout 2/Gamma World/anti-Sawyer kind of vibe. Maybe there's a mutant three-armed guy that's the best combat character in the game (and can have 3 weapons equipped at once, instead of just 2), but he's half-insane, hard to recruit and you won't be able to get any other party member to join you unless you spent a ton of attribute points to max your charisma.

This is the kind of choice I find cool in RPGs. if I ever made an RPG, it would be like Planet Escape: Tournament, where every companion is unique - but would give a crazy downside to each of them. Recruiting someone should be a careful choice, not a no-brainer cause your party ins't full yet. Games like Wasteland 2 suck in this regard - either you have a huge party of 7 or you're being sub-optimal.

Also, I have little interest in recruiting an average guy just like the one I could have created, unless he has some REALLY GOOD writing. And almost none of them ever have. Even then, I feel kinda "hostage" to their story. Like how PoE's Grieving Mother is a cool character, but I'm already playing a Cipher, so I'm forced to get a redundant character just to see her story... would be way better if she was something I could never have myself otherwise.

 

[Lurker King]

I actually prefer rotatable cameras.

 

[Excidium II]

 

[SwiftCrack]

Generation ships are cheesy syfy nonsense. You would need a massive amount of material to keep humans active for generations - and for what? What's the benefit? It just doesn't make sense.

If it ever happens, the ship will be autonomous, with the humans either in cryo or cloned after arrival.

But hey we're on a forum where the state of the art is a game where radiation turns people into immortal zombies.

Muh vidya isn't based on the grimdark reality of 2016.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Er, it would be unusual in a scifi game for the gods to be real.

It wouldn't be strange for a game taking inspiration from Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

Is this related to the Book of the New Sun, about to finish that one..

The Book of the Long Sun and its sequel The Book of the Short Sun are distantly related to The Book of the New Sun.

 

[MRY]

It would be awesome if VD's fantasy setting had high tech and no gods, and his scifi setting had low tech and God. Cue riots.

 

[Andhaira]

Sounds great Vault Dweller I will likely buy this on day 1, and will resist buying the beta/early access so I don't spoil the experience. A party based, turn based game by you & your team is what I have wanted from the beginning instead of AoD. I wish we could create an entire party from scratch, but I guess this is less a dungeon crawler in space and more a story based game.

One thing: Any chance for Psionics or the like? I really hope you put this in. Psionics doesn't have to be magic in space, so there is plenty you can do with this. I would suggest using SYstem Shock 2's psionic powers as a starting point, those were quite flavorful and fitting, yet low powered.

 

[Tigranes]

Vault Dweller have you considered making every party member a nonstandard character in gameplay terms? That is, none of the NPCs could ever have been rolled by the player, in the same way you could not roll Nordom in PST. This obviously means you couldn't design 10+ companions, but I think it fixes a lot of the issues and makes things a lot more interesting.

Consider the typical issues where you have a primarily skill-based character system and parties without party creation. Nobody wants Jack the Rugged Sniper to be so good at sniping that the PC feels inadequate when rolling a sniper - but people also get frustrated by lugging around Jack the Blind Sniper with suboptimal stats. Furthermore, as you say so yourself in the update, symmetrical party members means it is far too easy to cover most/all skills. Even if we gate party members with CHA, it just becomes really tricky to balance; it'll be easy to have situations where CHA becomes a must-have stat and people run around with a party that can do anything.

But what if the kind of NPCs one recruited were unique mechanically? Not just at the level of Minsc has only 2 quick slots, but built in ways that the PC simply cannot be. Morte has his own unique skillset and equipment, such that he's never quite the same as a second fighter TNO. Obviously this is part of PST's JRPG influences, so that you can look at FF9's Quina, whose ability to learn and reproduce enemy skills is unique. Of course, the characters would have varying levels of mechanics overlap - so that maybe one guy has a unique weaponset but can learn many of the PC's non-combat skills, etc.

Obvious downsides are the effort involved and that the lore may forbid sufficiently interesting ways for the characters to be unique. But after the delight of AOD, I would hate to see the colony ship become like WL2 where it really doesn't matter wha5t the skill check is because every party has every single skill imaginable.

 

[Lady_Error]

How are you guys going to handle zero/low G combat/exploration? I mean there oughta be some holds where whatever generates earth-like gravity doesn't work anymore right?

I figure the ship itself can rotate to create it:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a8965/why-dont-we-have-artificial-gravity-15425569/

Also, a constant acceleration of the ship can create gravity. Then at some point it can turn around and go into braking mode for the rest of the journey, which will create gravity in the same direction.

I'm also one of those who really disliked the rotating camera in AOD. I think it actually destroys immersion, since your focus is removed from the story and instead you have to deal with UI mechanics.

 

[Roqua]

IE games (espessially IceWind Dale) had good combat. Also you could recruit NPCs in TOEE.

This is why I need my crpg subforum, so I don't have to learn all these rascals every time I make a true statement.

All the IE games had combat that I could click and watch. 90 to 98% of the fights in all the games was just filler, no thinking, no input needed. I literally clicked and watched. The only input needed by me was ensuring the ranged people kept on fighting after the initial target died. That isn't good. Combat that doesn't require me to direct it, or think, or do anything is not good. It is very bad. It is awful. Good combat requires me to pay attention and need a strategy and react to circumstances and, you know, do something other than watch while I'm bored out of my mind.

 

[Roqua]

There has never been any game with recruitable NPCs that is known to have good combat, or memorable combat.

The Gold Box games had recruitable NPCs, just not a lot of them. Jagged Alliance had recruitable NPCs. Really, though felipepepe is the man to field this kind of thing.

Pretty much every game I listed had recruitable NPCs including ToEE, Wiz 8, Buck Rogers, etc. The only ones I think didn't were the Dark Suns and Darklands. So we can have a theory that any game with full party creation and Dark in the title does not have recruitable npcs.

I don't think JA 1 was all that good. JA 2 did have pretty decent combat. I haven't played an unmoded version in a long time though, my favorite version being Wildfire so I can't really comment on the vanilla game other than this is most likely an exception and the game was heavily, heavily developed with hiring mercs as a cornerstone of design.

 

[Roqua]

There has never been any game with recruitable NPCs that is known to have good combat, or memorable combat.

Try Desperados. You recruit members and it has better combat than anything I know. It's not RPG though.

I play crpgs almost exclusively. I will play a squad TBS is it has heavy rpg elements and a decent character development system like JA2, XCOM, and Aarklash legacy.

 

[MRY]

Dark Sun definitely had recruitable NPCs, but I don't think you had any control over them. I remember having a couple of them in the final fight -- a lady with a cape, I think, some other guy.

 

[Roqua]

There has never been any game with recruitable NPCs that is known to have good combat, or memorable combat.

The Gold Box games had recruitable NPCs, just not a lot of them. Jagged Alliance had recruitable NPCs. Really, though felipepepe is the man to field this kind of thing.

Yeah, not many good examples out there... mainly due to shitty combat design, which would remain shitty even with full party creation. Jagged Alliance did it right by giving each recruitable characyer unique characteristics, preferences and requirements. Their personalities affect gameplay, it isn't just a choice of who's backstory you wanna find / who you wanna fuck.

What VD is doing (or what I'm imagining) can be awesome depending on how interesting the NPCs will be. Apparently the game will be more of a "hard sci-fi", but I would love an over-the-top Fallout 2/Gamma World/anti-Sawyer kind of vibe. Maybe there's a mutant three-armed guy that's the best combat character in the game (and can have 3 weapons equipped at once, instead of just 2), but he's half-insane, hard to recruit and you won't be able to get any other party member to join you unless you spent a ton of attribute points to max your charisma.

This is the kind of choice I find cool in RPGs. if I ever made an RPG, it would be like Planet Escape: Tournament, where every companion is unique - but would give a crazy downside to each of them. Recruiting someone should be a careful choice, not a no-brainer cause your party ins't full yet. Games like Wasteland 2 suck in this regard - either you have a huge party of 7 or you're being sub-optimal.

Also, I have little interest in recruiting an average guy just like the one I could have created, unless he has some REALLY GOOD writing. And almost none of them ever have. Even then, I feel kinda "hostage" to their story. Like how PoE's Grieving Mother is a cool character, but I'm already playing a Cipher, so I'm forced to get a redundant character just to see her story... would be way better if she was something I could never have myself otherwise.

Sorry about all the posts but the quoting got messed up and hitting reply is a lot easier so fuck you all who are bothered by it. Just pretend it is one post.

I just reread some posts by VD and I have to say with the experience split this system may not be too bad. But I agree, if I am forced to take these idiots of his creation, at least have some other interesting tradeoffs beyond loss of xp and money. Like one guy is a big downer so he and everyone else in the party take a big hit to social skills or something. It would also make it better if, along with the negative feat everyone gets, there was also a positive unique feat everyone got as well. Kind of like the unique class aspects in Wiz8 where bards cut rest time in half and rangers have always on search. Make it an interesting choice with character building and game mechanic changes.

Nothing will ever beat me hand developing my own people with being able to pick their negative and positive feats myself, but I guess I could live with a system like the one described above as long as it isn't a fucking talking head blabbering about his fucking hamster with his ridiculously inefficient build in a game system that barely even had character building. It is almost impossible to fuck up the few skill selections a fighter got in the IE games, but those fucking idiot developers always somehow manage to make their characters suck really bad.

And I'd also like to say that when I used to post a lot and VD liked me and we were friends and he didn't just stab me in the back with his filthy lies I told him he was making a huge mistake going 3d from his 2d game. If he listened to me the game would have been better, came out three decades ago, and we would have played this Colony Ship game in 2013 before this kickstarter craze. IronTower would be a big time developer now employing Tim Cain, Leonard Bski, Jason Anderson, Linda whatshername from Sirtek as well as Bradley, and Guido Hinkelmen, the kung-fu dev lady from MMX, and probably the whole team that is TSI now.

The world would be such a better place with so many good games if people just accepted I am always right and they should always do what I say without question.