LordNothing, on 09 March 2025 - 09:54 AM, said:
did star citizen ever turn into a game? seems they tried to do what elite dangerous did better at launch, and i didn't even play that (i bought it though). at the end of the day space sims have been ruined for me by kerbal space program.
I never downloaded it to check it out, but I really liked the idea behind it. Based on looking at wikipedia it seems to be a working game, but also still being developed.
I believe there is at least one other game in development with a depth and breadth (don't ask the name, I forgot what it is), but blending aspects of multiple genera, without forcing people to play all aspects, is a real winner IMHO.
Real world building, especially if you could add the aspects of games like Eve Online (which I have also never played).
Battletech has all necessary aspects in it's lore, with hundreds of books to glean source material from, if a true sandbox was made available it has niches for everyone.
And since Battletech books cover many many decades (200 years or so?) there is enough room for a nice progression, with plenty of room for inevitable power creep, (and even a hard reset, with dark ages), so it has enough "progress" to keep new and old fans going with new material able to be introduced several times per year and still last a decade of play time (at least a decade).
IDK the best way to handle something like building a character and then that character literally dying, either through combat or old age... but that is an aspect one could consider putting in a future "MW2".
Why? Games like Eve Online (which I have never played, but I've read a fair amount about) have real life consequences to game events, and it even has a real life economy tied to it, with lots of actual real life money being traded for in game assets.
Verses games like MWO or WoW where the character or mech essentially has infinite re-spawn and no consequences to player death/defeat.
In playing MW5 there have been many times where I had to seriously consider replaying a battle because one of my special builds (i use a lot of mods) got destroyed and I lost components that were hard to come by even in late game. Imagine if MW2 was essentially a live server and imagine how salty it could get if our battle choices had real life consequences at the level of Eve Online. Or even at a small fraction of that level. What if losing a match actually translated to losing a mech, for good, or even just needing to rebuild/repair it with in game (or even real money).
I know that's a big project to even think about, probably not in the scope of what anyone at PGI (or the new parent company) wants to deal with, and it's a much bigger risk... but with bigger risks can come bigger rewards. That level of world building isn't a task for a small studio, but on the other hand that big of an effort (with more play style niches for many different types of game aficionados) could pull from a much larger audience that the current crop of die hard grognard cockpit junkies.
Having hung out occasionally with people who actually play table top Battletech but not MWO/MW5, I know there are niches that are not currently being explored. Frankly, one of the biggest limitations in the current game is that piloting a big stompy robot actually takes a lot of skill and practice to do even moderately well, and making good tactical decisions in a fast moving battle is also a very niche skill, being Tier 3 in MWO is IMHO a lot harder than the average First Person Shooter. It's more on the level of flight simulator, I mean seriously, well over half of the keyboard can be mapped to a function and even basic play is a big challenge to map to a typical console controller without cutting significant corners. I'm sure the average Tier 4 player on MWO has a pretty high skill level just to stay in Tier 4, compared to an average first person shooter, and IMHO our top Tier 1 guys are surely on an entirely different level above any other FPS game's "top tier" players.
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