That's why it should be an option before you even start the game. Star Control 2 was a fairly hardcore game, I'd be sorely disappointed if I came in to the reboot and everything was handed to me on a silver platter, but at the same time, there should be concessions for the casual players if they indicate that that's the experience that they want. HOWEVER I don't think my previous point was clear enough: if there's a super secret reward that's incredibly rare, the player playing with hardcore conditions should have a higher likelihood of acquiring the elements necessary to complete it. Hard work should be rewarded with more than just "bragging rights".

Those bragging rights are pretty big, though. That's what drives people to play the hardcore modes. There's no extra incentive to play Hardcore Diablo (permanent player death) other than to say that you did it. I had major respect for players that could clear Diablo 3's Belial on Inferno as a glass cannon Demon Hunter class, and I have double respect for those who did it on Hardcore. That battle was riddled with instant death!

Bragging rights (and the achievement to prove it) are a powerful thing. Do you need more than that?

 

My counter to the "higher effort/higher reward" is that you have to be careful about what that reward is. If you make the reward too great, then you've just coerced me (a completionist) into playing that mode. 

If Stardock were to add a hardcore mode with timed quests and incentivize it by having it unlock the original SC1 and SC2 aliens being in the game, you can be sure that EVERYONE is going to play that hardcore mode. (Or everyone will cheat.)

 

EDIT: Full disclosure... I cheated on Star Control 2. I memory-edited the counter keeping track of my stardate and froze it in place. It made the game much more enjoyable for me. 

Yes that is a good idea. Have the timed mode as a hardcore mode to unlock a special bonus!

Would give you Karma for that great idea but alas you had to cheat in SC2 !! Sacrilege! You have sinned! No good Karma for you!!!!! 

Well, that backfired on me...

I was actually arguing that if you give hardcore mode a special bonus, people who wouldn't normally like hardcore mode would play hardcore mode just for the bonus. They would get frustrated and stop playing the game altogether. Not everybody wants to put 20+ hours into a game only to fail it.

That's coercion. I don't like to be coerced into playing a harder mode. Let me choose hardcore mode because I WANTED to have the challenge. Beating the challenge should be its own reward.

Just wait 'till you hear that I liked parts of SC3 better than SC2 . . .   }:>

 

So play it again. I've put literally 3k+ hours into Fallout 3/NV, way more time than I care to admit in WoW, (I'm only at 113 hours in Fallout 4 right now). If the game isn't compelling enough for you to want to do well, what's the point of playing it?   For clarity, I'm not trying to be hostile, I'm legitimately curious.

Actually, just a thought, would you be okay with being able to buy the Hardcore mode rewards? I'd be willing to compromise like that. You either earn the rewards with hardcore mode, or buy them for like $5.

I know you're not being hostile. Neither am I. We are founder allies.

 

I do not like to replay games, especially back-to-back. I already know the story. I've encountered enough of the content to make going back a chore. The thought of 10% new content that I'm blocked from experiencing is not enough to get me to slog through the remaining 90%.

This is also why I do not complete games that block me from finishing. I would equate a quest timeout as the same level of disaster as a corrupted save or a glitched quest. (I'm currently stalled midway through Divinity: Original Sin EE because I'm stuck in a rut of not liking any of the armor I'm finding. I haven't touched the game since last week.) Once I put a game down, it is very difficult for me to pick one back up.

Does that help you understand my mindset?

 

Also... What is "doing well"?

To me, doing well in a nonlinear sandbox RPG is exploring every nook and cranny (and then picking up a hint book to make sure I was thorough). Also, I am compelled to pick every pocket and steal anything not nailed down to amass a fortune. A good game compels me to search.

 

(You really were able to put 3k+ hours into FO3/NV? Didn't the fact that everything looked the same get to you after a while? It did me. "Here I am in ANOTHER vault, which looks like the last vault, only now the lights are red instead of green." Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the games. But not 3k+ hours. Or even 400 hours.)

I think microtransactions have gotten a bad reputation. In some cases, it's well-deserved, especially when you're only buying one or two things, or buying consumables. No, what I'm referring to are transactions for packs of ships that aren't enough content to be called dlc, but too many to be considered a microtransaction. Does that make sense?

 

 

(Yeah, 3k+ hours. But only 1000 were vanilla, the rest were with gigantic mod suites :P)

I understand what you are saying. Though... The ships would still be called DLC. I think you mean "not big enough to be called a DLC Expansion".

 

Let's say that Stardock creates some exclusive ships as DLC. They offer to sell this DLC for $5. They also make it so that you can unlock the ships by playing the hardcore mode. There are a few problems with that.

1. It irks me to pay to skip part of the game.  (I would rather "cheat" or borrow a save to unlock the bonus content than do this.)

2. Stardock would face some reputation damage. Paying to bypass content = pay to win.

3. Stardock would lose out on potential revenue. Why pay $5 when I can just cheat or play hardcore?

4. When would the ships be made available? After beating the game in hardcore mode? No. I've already played the game long enough and am looking to move onto the next game.

 

I'll start a new thread about the DLC....

 

Back to the timed quest topic... Do you NEED it to have an extra reward? Would you play SCR in timed quest mode just to make the world feel more alive?

I just feel like with no sense of urgency, I don't feel like any of my actions really have any impact. I have the feeling Stardock will find a happy medium, though, based on all of this feedback.

Just to chime in, I think there's other ways to create a sense of urgency than timed quests, and I think they're best when linked/combined with the direct mechanics of the game. For example, in System Shock 2 you were pushed to move forward quickly, as your energy would slowly run out, so you'd have to periodically go back to your "home" to recharge (there were issues with this, like getting trapped and repetition, but just as an example).

I haven't thought about it in any depth/about the problems it might have, but off the top of my head, for an SC2-like scenario you could:
Have a running tally of planets enslaved/burned by the Kzer-Za/Kohr-Ah, messages of "Pkunk Planet 'X' was turned to slag last night, with millions dead" and their zones of influence shrinking (but, not disappearing/preventing interaction - or maybe once a threshhold is reached it would disappear and they'd flee to a planet in Sol for interaction).

For the hardcore/speed players, the final story/score would indicate the difference you made to the galaxy, on top of the effect of a slower run.

Crew could slowly become more expensive as days passed (with a max limit), and be reset to the lowest price every time you got a species to join the League (reflecting deaths and new influxes of personnel).

 

Hell, thinking about the above now, I'm really hoping the toolset we get is versatile enough to handle things like that.

Well going the System Shock 2 way SC2 already had another timed factor and that was the fuel. In the beginning I remember saving the game so that I could measure the mileage and exactly calculate how to best make use of the fuel to reach as many stars as possible.

 

I suppose fuel in itself is already a timed constraint. But perhaps there should be 2 kinds of fuel (or 2 different kinds of warp drives). The normal fuel (or drive). And a superfuel (or superdrive) that allows you to travel much faster. The other superfuel or superdrive can only be used sparingly perhaps with a recharge rate and quick depletion. Maybe it recharges fuel/energy by collecting dark matter. So not only do you have an emergency drive that you can use in case you need to get somewhere fast (due to a timed quest?), you cannot use all the time.

 

But as I mentioned in an earlier post. Timed quests would be fine if they implemented a "going back in time" mechanism (that can only be used a number of times) to complete timed quests. Perhaps the "time-warp drive" could also be a recharge item. Every day not used is one more day you can go back in time.

 

Anyway, it is possible to have timed quests and have a fun method that is part of the gameplay to complete them.

 

The QuasiSpace portal spawner in SC2 was basically a second type of drive that allowed the player to do exactly what you've described. Effective use of QuasiSpace made all the timed quests very easy to complete, sometimes ages before their deadlines.

 

That is true! I totally forgot about the quasi space portal!!!

But that was something you got about halfway through the game (if I remember correctly) and it was used more to cut down on the space travelling (like a warp drive) and remove the tediousness of having to fly from '0, 0' to '9999, 9999'. Of course it was quite a critical device if you had a slow start in the game and you needed to get places fast. But I think it was mainly designed to cut down on the tediousness of flying. Which is why it was timed to be achieved somewhere halfway through the game. Because by then flying in empty space (especially through enemy spheres of influence) encountering aliens could start becoming tedious and detract from the adventure.

 

A real space sim would have you taking REAL days to fly from one system to another and not minutes. And space sims that make actual flying in space tedious and boring are not very popular. People always complain why they don't add a warp drive or allow for faster flying (boosters and such).

 

But even with the quasi space thing you still had to fly from exit point to quest target and if you have timed it wrong could never make in time (because of all those annoying aliens ambushing you).

I'm not asking for a sim, all I'm asking for is for player failures to matter. If there's no REAL lose condition, you're just Mary Sueing with toys. Hard work should provide tangible benefits, and "bragging rights" are not and never will be a sufficient benefit. They're not tangible in any sense.   If you miscalculate your journey to save the Flipinoids from their impending doom, they're dead. Besides, from my understanding of the evolving sandbox we'll be playing in, no two campaigns will be exactly the same, since everything is random. All these timed quests do is add to the inherent replay value of the single player game.

Totally totally agree.  There must be irreparable consequences to your actions/in-actions in the game, timed quests or not.  No linear storylines, I don't want to play a movie.  I want to forge my own destiny in the SCR sandbox universe, good or evil.

Losing conditions, failing quests, etc:

Consider Fallout 2. There is no losing condition in Fallout 2 (other than dying in combat, etc), and yet the slideshow at the end shows how your actions led to prosperity or destruction. If you do nothing and let a town wither away under a despot, couldn't you consider that a failure? These kind of losses are meaningful. No matter what decisions I make or how I roll my character, I know I can still beat the game. But... I'm going to do it with some repercussions afterward.

 

Bragging rights & tangible benefits:

Most games that offer hardcore modes do not offer a reward other than an achievement. If bragging rights weren't a sufficient benefit, why do people play hardcore?

 

Random Sandbox:

No one has said that the game is going to be random. (Random quests, random galaxy, etc.) Do not confuse non-linear with random. SC2 was not random but was non-linear. No two play-throughs had to be the same. (If they did start dropping the R word, I'd start dropping the Q word. Q for Quality, because you can't have a completely random world AND a quality narrative.)

 

"All these timed quests do is add to the inherent replay value of the single player game.":

I challenge that statement. You can still have quests fail, and you do not need a time limit to make them fail. (Consider quests that, if not completed by a major story event, are marked as failed when that event occurs.) Timed quests may add urgency, but they frustrate the majority of players who want to play the game on their own terms. Take the words of Tim and Chris as doctrine on this.

Majority?

 

Showing is always superior to telling, and while slides can work well in terms of an ending, nothing beats seeing the game world itself respond to your actions. That tends to be more difficult to implement in more traditional RPG games like Fallout, but was handled very well in SC2 via the dynamic galaxy map and NPC dialogues. When the Pkunk decided to retreat back to Yehat space, you could see that gradually taking place on the map. Same thing when you sent the Ilwrath to duke it out with the Thraddash, when the Spathi disappeared begind their slave shield, or when the Suppox/Utwig attacked the Kohr-Ah. To be honest, SC2 is one of the few (narrative heavy) games I know of that really opted to show you consequences instead of just telling you about them.

When an alien fleet flew somewhere you could track it on your map the whole time, when the Yehat had a civil war their sphere of influence visually split in two, and even when the Kohr-Ah death march took place, you could see that giant black blob symbolically vanquishing races one by one. These were just very simple visualisations, and yet despite their extreme simplicity they managed to show what even modern AAA games impotently relegate to textual descriptions, still images, or at best, short cinematics.

I believe the new SC now has the unique opportunity to do that again. You'd need to rework a whole city full of NPCs to show, say, a siege, in a modern RPG, and then impossibly rework it again and again if you want to show an outcome (or many) of that siege. Since in SC we're mostly dealing with a much more generalized, and perhaps symbolic representation of the universe, you can show these massive shifts and some of their consequences instead of telling the player "this is what happened next."

 

Only fail states that are instant unreactive "quest failed" dead ends suck. Consequences, on the other hand, are awesome, and can open up new possibilities.

 

 

Yup. You are in the minority.

That's why the mutant invasion timer was patched out of Fallout 1. (Tim & co. caught a lot of flack for adding the timer.) That's also why there are only a few single player RPGs where the main quest was on a timer. If the majority of gamers wanted sandbox RPGs with timers, the industry would drive toward RPGs with timers.

If SC2 was made today, the main timer might exist, but it would only start counting down after a player-initiated event.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I brought up FO2's slide deck because Volusianus wanted a "REAL lose condition". The game needs to be fluid and react to player choices. You provided some great examples of events.

The contention points, though, are...

• Whether or not one-time events should happen automatically (on a timer) without some sort of player input.
• Whether or not automatic events and timers should cause quests or the main storyline to fail.

I want outcomes, and they can be bad... but I do not want to be penalized because I missed an event while I was exploring the galaxy.

I can certainly understand the folks who are against a timer, especially a hard timer like FO.  I thought the timer in SC2 was really forgiving and you could push it back with ingame action.  I guess I never saw it as a problem.  I ran into it once and to me it was just a reason to try again from a different angle.

In my first attempt at playing the full game since it first came out, I didn't remember specifics of the plot/questline.  I had no idea I was even on a 5 year timer and just explored away until the game suddenly ended on me with the Khor Ah conquering everything.  I am not against timed quests, they add a sense of urgency that is part of what made the original game great.  But the player needs to be more aware that the timer exists.  I also agree with  the person who said a game ending timer should be triggered by the player in some way (likely completing a certain quest).  That way they have all the time in the world to explore if they want and can trigger the "end the game" timer when they want to.

 

 

Did you start over from scratch? Load a save? How much time and progress did you lose?

Started from scratch.  From your posts I think you and I have vastly different play styles. It seems that you like one long run where you can explore every nook and cranny. For me its more like "Losing and starting over?  Great, means I get to try new stuff."

Ok, but some of the events I brought up would be impossible if one insisted that every significant event wait for the player. The Pkunk returning to Yehat space was one of them. Their fleet moved slowly, but if you didn't head in their direction within the next couple of months and tell them to turn back, they would soon be gone. The only issue I could have with that is that there was no system to tell you something like: "Warning! Pkunk fleets on the move!" and as a result the player could have been late if he didn't check the map for a very long time. SC2 didn't just react to player choices, but required you to track and sometimes respond to sequences you had set in motion, but which resulted in an unpredictable turn. The only similar thing Fallout 2 did was the bugged in-game genocide of Deathclaws in Vault 13 (on a timer, no less). Epilogue slides wouldn't really make up for the world being static, or be any sort of lose condition IMO.

But, Star Control really has a lot of potential in terms of showing nice flowing sequences of events. Say you'd have something like this:

 

Onset of event [player is informed]->Phase A [6 months]->Phase B [6 months]->Phase C [Last Chance]

 

Lets say this describes an assault on an allied homeworld you have to stop. You could have variations to what the player encounters based on the phase, but if nothing can change without player input, that's a pretty significant limit in terms of what you can do.

I guess you could conceivably tie phases like that to other major story events, that's how things in The Witcher 3 seemed to work, but not without issues. It wasn't always obvious which quest would result in a change that caused another quest to fail. As a result I ended up saving before each story quest in case a bunch of "quest failed" notifications suddenly show up, because some significant NPC was going to be gone or dead (was also a bit of a spoiler tbh).

All in all, I guess that while I'm against the main storyline failing without the player, I can't say I'm in favor of the world effectively standing still while I explore, there has to be some sort of compromise.