Quests and storyline

[Iranos]

Hi all.

I was found that this game need more fun moments for SP or MP games.

I think that the game must have a prologue on the separated 1st map -> this will be "new tutorial" when new player join the game.

After that, the player will be on a planet in town on the main and the biggest shipyard. There could be more rooms like classrooms, docks, cantina with some NPC in body (not ships or blocks!). By the way to the spaceship from trading guild you may learn all, what you want to or need - in the classrooms, etc.

And when you reach the spaceship and open the core, this will be end of prologue and the game is starting -> you will be respawn in the normall game area near the first shop on the map ("spawn").

On planets or on the spacestations, there could be towns etc. with population and these people can give you some quests (for example: Destroy 5 pirate ships, Give us 50 harned hull black, etc.).

By the way with the quests, which containe a part of story, you may found the story items or places and you will learn something else.

The story can be like:

2012 - on Earth, we made new spacesuit for living in space with no problems.

2015 - 1st space cowboys leave our Earht for settling Mars.

2016 - on a laboratory on Earth - our scientists created new space engines and weapons too - laser canon.

2021 - Laser canons aren´t very strong. Scientists made new generation of weapons - antimatter canons, which was, and are, the best weapons with energy cells.

2030 - Mars want to be free and have their own hiearchy and freedom - the Earth don´t want to lost Mars for his source - this was the first step to the "1st Space War"

2086 - "1st Space War" ending with no winner. Earth and Mars was completly destroyed. All populations leave their planets and every rase escape with new way.

Mars population becames "Pirates". Earth population was separated to "trading guild" and "army men"

3122 - The Pirates was invisible for us, we don´t know exactly what they did, but we know, that our new home, planet "Terra" was our new homeplanet, where we must train new pilots for defending our planet. Pirates still attacking us, because they need all what we have got.

3205 - We found that pirates are not together. They are separated and they live on spacestations, because they don´t know, how to make planet habitable fot them. We need find all of these stations and destroy them.

3211 - Pirates were regrouped to an enormous fleet, which attacked us. We survived. But since this moment, we opened new chapter of history - "Space conflict" - because we will fight in the space, not on planet. Everyone can be with everyone. We destroyed fleet and made factions. We hope, that our pilots will be very serious about this to defend us.

3212 - ...you were recruit to Space conflict...

etc. like this

This will be more funny, than the game is now. I glad you like this. I´m sorry, if this suggestion is duplication - I don´t know it. The topic "an improvement for planets" is mine and I don´t think that this is the same.

 

[fire219]

Starmade is supposed to be a sandbox game, like Minecraft. It\'s up to your imagination to decide what happened and happens, no storylines to get in the way of it.



(My feelings about it, at least.)

 

[Iranos]

Yeah, but I think that this game, Star made, is so much better than MC and I think, that this can be one of more things of the game, which will be for fun for everyone as part of game. I think... And after storyline and quests, players can do all, what they are doing now. It is only for much funny moments.

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

This would be kind of obnoxious for players who start new games frequently. I\'m okay with side quests, but in games like this, main storylines just don\'t quite make sense.

 

[Iranos]

OK, no storyline, but what about quests? It is not too bad, eh? I think that it can be good with some small rewards etc.

 

[BP_Merc]

It may be a sandbox, but even the best sandbox needs content. Content is obviously this game\'s biggest weakness right now but I don\'t think a storyline is a good idea. Side missions are definitely a good idea. Exploration, (travel to XYZ and scout the area for us) Science, (scan planet X/ take samples) trade, (rush these supplies to station Y on time for money) action, (meet up with fleet Zeta for pre-emptive strike on pirate asteroid base/ insurgent population on a planet/ strange alien fleet movements) crafting, (take contract to build a station/ factory/ ship design for corporation X) etc etc



But first and foremost there should be a couple of additional NPC factions flying around with different agendas. Aliens with alien hull bits on their ships to loot and make use of, some rebellious humans, corporations who build things etc.

 

[HadrasVorshoth]

I feel stories can be worked into a sandbox game like this, in the vein of the kind of missions there were in other space sandbox games such as privateer, vega strike, or that iOS game of a similar style I forget the name of.

Let\'s break down what could be put in the game without much \'lore\' as such to confuse the issue.



Mission Computer: a functional block placeable on ships and stations, which, when rightclicked, has a list of available missions chosen from the general categories. Missions accepted are saved into the Player\'s Mission Log menu, which saves a list of all missions that player has bound to their name on that world.

(I would also suggest that all missions are in an editable \'mission language\' (it\'ll make sense what I mean by that in the examples below) so servers can actually add custom mission types to the Computer\'s random lists, thus allowing people to make it fit their particular lore should a server have such a roleplaying-ly lore going on)

Pirate Takedown Missions

\"PLAYERNAME, pirates have been harrassing ships recently, we need you to defeat RANDOMNUMBER of the pirate vessels spotted in coordinates RANDOMUNLOADEDSECTORCOORDS. You can keep whatever you can find on their ships, just render them useless, for the glory of our people!\"

This encourages exploration of unloaded sectors, gets people fighting pirates, and is sufficiently loose enough that it can fit just about any kind of setting the player imagines. Upon reaching the coordinates specified, the game will actually read the mission the player has and actually spawn in pirates there for the player to take down.

The only downside to this is I can imagine clever players getting this mission then leaving it unfinished, essentially giving them a ingenious way to spawn in pirates in certain sectors, ready for them to use to raid someone\'s base should it be built in the future.

The best way I can see to solve that particular issue is by having all missions on the mission computer be on a timer, say... 3 IRL days in-game. Long enough that it can take a long time to expire, but short enough that if someone wants to play regularly they cannot easily use it as an exploit for extra firepower for raiding.

Cargo Runner

\"PLAYERNAME, we need your ship to deliver RANDOMNUMBER of RANDOMBLOCK to any Trading Guild shop. They\'ll get it to our client, but we need you to deliver it. You can take the credits the Trading Guild offer you as your reward for this job, and let it be known that there\'s more jobs where that one came from.\"

This one\'s a simple milkrun mission, designed for any ship with at least one inventory block to be capable of doing. This kind of mission does have the issue of \"what if the player just... doesn\'t deliver?\", but again, a time limit to deliver it, and a x3 bonus on the credits the shop will give for that particular item whilst this mission is active should incentivise people actually doing the mission and not simply just using their cargo for their own selfish purposes.

That\'s the best two I can think of right now for missions, essentially though, I want to say I like the idea of there being missions in Starmade, but it needs to be pretty careful to avoid putting too much restrictions on what the player feels the lore should be.

 

[AGmukbooks]

with Xrebirth coming out this game is in dreadfull need orf some sort of quest system or even side misions. hell even jut receivi g a message from the trading guild needing some help whould make my day... its so boring where i live in the starmade universe (100,234,600) and frankly every server i got to i go to these coords as im stuck around noobs and people wholike to destory your shiz and not give a fu@# about it i usually stay in signe player because of this and sadly im runnning out of things to do since the pirate only come every three weeks (quite litterally) and expanding my universe size only leads me to finding the same thing over and over again planets and stations that all look the same and even the most brilliant of planets (the purple ones) look the same to me too... this kind of thing whould fill me with glee but to be honest any kind of cool feature whould be awesome in retrospect as well

 

[Jargon]

Personally, I\'d prefer to have a system in place that allows players to create their own storylines on their servers - placing NPCs, building bases, writing quests and so on.



Instead of restricting the entire playerbase to a single story, each player creates his or her own which can be shared with the rest of the world - in line with the sandbox philosophy, no less!

 

[Iranos]

Yeah, it can be like HadrasVorshoth said. I think the same.

Jargon, I know and I said \"OK, no storyline,...\" etc. It can be, but it don´t must be a part of this suggestion. But quests are the most important thing here.

Yeah, building bases etc., but what if in the game isn´t something like \"sign\"? There is only a log-book (if I remember it correctly), but there is no something to make a way for it, when it is in a storage box.

If this will be in the game, everyone can write his story in the game on a station/planet/etc. and it will be OK = this part of my suggestion will be closed/removed.

But I am still believing, that the quests are very good idea and it can be in the game soon. If you, as a player, will accept it.

 

[squib]

The story you have described may not be the best or only option. But some thing you can pickup and draw you into different sectors and different interactions.

@ Hadras Mission computer or communication terminal - great idea +1+1+1

As for people who restart often. Just have an opt in/out tutorial system (as it is now). Start game (check box to turn on tutorial.

If you are not into a story, Select hide story missions in the Coms/Mission terminal. Could still pick up side missions as desired.

I think this game will be more fun when more life exists in the stations and on planets... It feels very barren at the moment.

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

I know I said storylines don\'t fit, but I think something like that would be great! It would allow for all sorts of cool roleplaying servers, and wouldn\'t fix someone into one linear plot.

 

[z1967]

It would be interesting to have \"random events\" that can affect gameplay. One might be that you find a small escape pod styled ship with a logbook that tells you what happened to the ship it came from. Events could be engine failures, pirate attacks, trade deals gone south, and whatever else one could think of. Random events should also be disable-able by an admin or add the ability to add and create new ones.

Just some ideas.

 

[Xylomain]

All great ideas! Here is another suggestion: As was mentioned above, a \"mission computer\" should be implimented. If one is not in a faction the missions come soley from the games equivalent of \"Star Fleet\". Once one is in a faction however, they then get missions from the factions higher ups. A faction Reputation type system could also be implimented giving you bonuses for doing faction quests. Ranks would still be decided by the higher ups, this Reputation would be just a number to identify those that help the most, and those that are just hanging around.

 

[Zyrr]

A good idea for a mod, but I don\'t really support that for vanilla, sorry. I\'d rather be in sandbox, having the ability to create my own mayhem. However, if there were a few more AI factions that had complete fleets, and said factions did fleet movements...



Lets just say, I\'d be interested.

 

[kiwionthemoon]

This topic (space expolration) tends to fire off a lot of fantasies, because currently space is relatively unkown to us so it gives us space (no pun) to dream of what we want. I think that is part of the magic of the game. You can do what you want and there is no limit.

The intro u sugested sounds cool, and so do quests, but no storyline because like i said its part of the game to make your own story and i dont want to have to abide by somebody elses dreams of space.

-just my ideas

 

[markscott142]

The idea of a story line, would be a bit like having flying space pigs. not because the idea is bad, but because it would be such a big change from what players are already use to. The idea of having a new introduction to the game would be pretty intersting but instead of having one ship core, you may need to have TWO. one that allows you to go into a fairly populated server that has a reasonable ping, and the other which allows you to go straight into a single player game.

now if you were to impliment a Story Line, you would want to have an option to turn it on and off, the big problem is that if you were to have a storyline on a PVP server [multiplayer] then that means that everyone would have to abide by that story, so my accumulated ideas have ponted out that you can only have a storyling on a single player game because everyone will be at different parts in the stroy and would also give Trollers a great way to camp at the main storyline objectives and attack people without provoction like a Pirate.

Just a few of my compiled thoughts.