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:Unboring "space" (Score:3, Insightful)
What I hate about all the spacefaring games I've seen so far is the way they divide space into "rooms". At the boundaries of each one you have to go through a magical door to get to another one, not actually fly really fast across vast distances like I always imagined.
Jumpgate has jumpgates, the X series has gates, EVE has stargates and so on. In fact EVE is a good example. In a game with such prevalent PvP what this philosophy translates into is all the pirates just camping the gates so they are bound to get fights, because everyone has to pass through that bottleneck.
I believe STO (Star Trek Online) will be the first to feature some genuine SPACE and the ability to fly from A to B without "leaving the universe" in between. Then there's Infinity, but that one's so far from beta it's not funny.
Anyone know any current (modern) space games without such a claustrophobic representation of space?
Re:Unboring "space" (Score:2, Insightful)
Thing is, space is big. It's so fucking big it doesn't fit into the human mind. Without forcing people to travel along certain lines there is no fucking way you'll ever meet someone. There are points of interest that would gather people (like space stations) but e.g. a planet alone is already so damn huge you wouldn't meet anyone randomly just by going into orbit.
Even just "warping" from one planet's orbit to another can already happen through so many possible routes that intercepting them is impossible unless you give the interceptor system some kind of magnetic attraction that pulls courses within several hundred thousand kilometers towards you. For travel between two systems that are lightyears apart there's so many routes that you'd need an even larger field that could lock down an entire solar system if deployed inside one. And that's just covering the direct routes, there's always the option to take a really tiny detour (nothing like 3x as long, given the distances in space a 1% deviation for half the distance would already turn into a HUGE distance without significantly impacting travel times).
Another problem is that you don't want people to move freely through the galaxy in a game with territory, with free flight there's no way you could ever be sure to intercept an invasion fleet since there is no way you could possibly cover the gigantic volume a territory of a few planets would include, you'd basically have enemies popping up anywhere inside your territory.
Also it doesn't make for very interesting combat to see literally nothing and only get computer feedback on whether you hit anything, even if you magnify the target it still won't give much of a connection since any weapon inaccuracies will be so far off that you won't even see the shots and the distance is so huge there won't be much of a connection between the magnified view and the sense of "here".
Now I'm sure there are simulation geeks who'd love simulated space combat at real ranges but most people want space dogfights like in the movies and the territory system would annoy everyone.