Oxygen, Food... adding these is different from making it so that your cannons require power. If I want a big cannon, I'm restricted by the need for more power, and the need for more resources. I want A, and so I must do B and C to get there.
It's an example that certain restrictions are necessary. I believe that both lasting and temporary ones have their place, though.
Oxygen and Food don't add a cool new feature, they add an omnipresent concern.
But that's the thing - we do need lasting concern. And for many, indefinitely ensuring that certain ongoing necessities are being provided, that they do good job by 'staying afloat' - is a cool feature. Currently whatever undertaken, once certain basic prerequisites are achieved, is completely dull, with no lasting concerns or things to be put into consideration. And most goals, if they aren't of the 'let's build something great, detailed and cool' variety - are achievable very quickly, leaving a player without any reason to go anywhere, do anything.
Even more, even those more ambitious goals, once achieved, rarely provide the player with anything to go against besides, on some servers, other players with other such ships they have to look for. But if they aren't into actually looking for something to shoot with their ship, that's it - their project finished, no game to play left. They stop playing or move onto building something else.
If anything, lasting concern will add to satisfaction. Their more ambitious projects achieved despite whatever hardships had. And let's be honest, aside from the time spent currently making stuff, there's not many of such posing a challenge. Credits are easily achievable with nowhere else to go, no maintenance on anything is required and enemies interrupting a project are more of a hearsay and a thing that happens rather rarely and only in certain places more than a lasting concern. But that's another topic.
I understand some want just the shipmaker application and arena to present it against other ships. But there are players, quite many of them from what I've seen, who want a game, with lasting challenges, intricaties of smart ship/station design and potential uses and ventures whatever they'll have will be used in - adding worth to their final accomplishments after all's said and done. I suspect that some builders who saw their construction being actually used - for whatever reason - instead of being an eye-candy soon forgotten, know the satisfaction of that and understand what I mean.
Sure, lot of that can be provided by new challenges one chooses to take on, but I do believe there should be a challenge on the way to completing some task, not just as a final test after the work is finished. I want to see some struggle and risk vs reward choices that sometimes will be forced upon the player, instead of making him just some entity unrelated to the world and situation around him if he won't decide to take part in it.
But you also don't want to add these PvE survival elements that detract from seeing who can build the coolest ship, the strongest ship, the smallest effective ship by making it so that these people are too busy scooping up oxygen or food to do any of that.
Yes, actually - I want to add survival elements so the game won't be just about "seeing who can built the coolest ship, the strongest ship, the smallest effective ship". I want the game to be much more than ship maker, an actual adventure, a sci-fi space opera as I've called it above. With the opportunities, concerns, challenges and gameplay where one carves their own place in it, instead of just existing in the limbo, with little to regard or work with if they won't provoke/make it happen first.
But I raise concern about importance of making such features ones that may add more challenge to building and piloting ships
exactly so they won't on their own destroy the potential for building whatever ships - that's what I meant by making it a lasting challenge, not dull, repetitive interruption. And I believe that while hard, there are ways to achieve it.
Oxygen, for example - I wouldn't want it to have to be scooped. I always imagined life support as having oxygen generators/ducts spanning the interior of the ship or a station, generating 'there's breathable air' effect in certain range of rooms closed from space - thus allowing perpetually breathable 'indoors' necessary long-term for both players and NPCs, but also things like basis for hull breach points (during explosions, accidents, collisions, what-have-you) threatening them and difference between going EVA with limited oxygen and helmet on - be it through venturing into space shipless or after landing on some alien worlds - and having proper, safe environment. Currently, one will survive everywhere, anyway, with no preparation, as long as they're not in active combat against something able to harm them - and that is disappointing. No challenge, no dangers in exploration, venturing far from safe stations and depots beyond some other ship which can most often be avoided.
Food and potential issues with it as not a lasting challenge but a dull interruption I already regarded above, together with what direction nutrition should take to be the former without being much of the latter.
