New Jumpgate Evolution Details 37
Hermann Peterscheck, lead producer for Jumpgate Evolution, sat down with IncGames for a lengthy interview they've split into three parts. In the first, he talks about the scope and feel of the game, and how they broke the vastness of space down into usable, "logical chunks." He goes on to confirm that there are no classes, and he provides some basic information about the game's economy and how Jumpgate Evolution compares to other MMOs. In the last segment, Peterscheck discusses the lore and some of the thought process behind developing the story, noting how happy they were to own the IP from the original Jumpgate.
Re:Finally (Score:1, Informative)
Your describing it as an MMORPG clarifies how little you must actually know about it. Its quite substantial, and some interesting progress has been made already.
Please go troll somewhere else, like the stargate mmo forums...
Re:Unboring "space" (Score:3, Informative)
Well, Eve has ships that can open their own jump holes.. so in a way it is more like Babylon 5.
But still, if you're going to start complaining about "realism" in space sims, it's a case of be careful what you wish for. Space is big and boring. These games (especially Eve) are already too big and too boring. And as much as I like to think I would enjoy a game where you have to take orbital mechanics into account, I bet it would get tiresome real quick :)
And it's not just games that have this "bunch of systems linked by hyperspace" mentality. Although Star Trek gave the impression of there actually being some "travel" involved in getting from system to system (to nebula) there was never any plot points that happened in interstellar space.
The only exception is Star Wars.. where the Imperial fleet was often marshaled out there in "deep space". A hyperspace jump had to be plotted so you didn't pass near any large gravitational bodies like a star or a planet or a black hole. Star Destroyers were so big that they could pull a ship out of hyperspace.
Re:Unboring "space" (Score:3, Informative)
Orbital mechanics could be the bee's knees, if it was done right, like for example in Sins of a Solar Empire, where it's basically taken care of by the ship's computers and you can just move faster toward the sun than you can away from it. It would add "terrain" tactics to the mix, which is always a good thing... provided it's done right, of course.
Re:Unboring "space" (Score:3, Informative)
That's exactly what the previous poster was talking about when he said that space was "so fucking big it doesn't fit into the human mind". You might be able to set up a minefield around a planet (you could use half a million mines to set up a 200,000 km barrier around a planet, giving each mine a 1000 km x 1000 km area to defend).
But even going to solar system levels, things get totally ridiculous. A minefield of the same density as above in a sphere roughly encompassing Neptune's orbit would require more than 250 trillion mines.
Re:Unboring "space" (Score:3, Informative)
"The bottlenecks are a source of fun, not a detraction from it."
Which reminds me about the problem of all MMO's: Too much time is wasted travelling, in every MMO almost, almost all waste an enormous amount of time making you travel at slow spaces and limiting things like warping, etc, which causes the game and action to drag. In space this problem is MUCH worse and anyone suggesting the idea of "infinite space" is asking for enormous gameplay problems with herding players in the right direction. If you play ANY game in which large levels and open spaces are a part, the contact between players is more infrequent and the time between events is more spaced out, and this ends up being boring and a waste of players time.
This is the reason why good level design and the best levels in games manage the flow of gameplay and events over time so that you don't get totally bored out of your mind by poor design and lack of interesting things to do or events to engage in.
Many people who complain about games have no understanding of what makes game fun to begin with, and I think if they actually were forced to design the levels and have to endure the wrath of end users they would think twice about their 'perfect level' or 'perfect world' of 'open-ness', open worlds have severe drawbacks in that interaction between users, items, npc's and events becomes longer in time and spaced more far apart. Most people hate travelling, this is why people pay good money when they travel around the world for the fastest flights. The same applies to games : People don't have infinite time and reducing time spent doing menial and boring tasks is something all game designers need to be aware of.
In my opinion one of the cardinal sins of MMO's is the backtracking of gameplay to try to force users to waste even more time in their worlds as they collect money over the months. MMO's have been a real setback IMHO in terms of gameplay for RPG's and games in general in a lot of ways where the business becomes about breaking gameplay for profit, which is the exact opposite of why games became great in the first place.