Dec 16
My latest distractions
People look at me funny when I tell them this, but I’ve always had this strange, irrational desire to play a game where I got to pilot a properly huge capital ship. Something like a Star Destroyer from the Star Wars universe; something that takes a good three to five minutes to turn around. And I don’t want to turn the ship by clicking on a UI element that instructs an auto-pilot to turn the ship around, and then perhaps speed up time to make the auto-pilot complete the manoeuvre faster; no, I want to be able to have direct joystick control to the ship’s thrusters.
I occasionally think about making such a game myself, some day. But it seems like a lot of effort to go to for an experience that nobody but myself would likely be interested in. Or rather, anyone who might be interested in such a thing is probably playing Eve Online.
Instead, I’ve been playing around with Independence War a bit, which is a game from way back in 1997, and which was kind of halfway to what had been in my head. Of course, it isn’t pretty by modern standards (or even by its contemporary standards). And it’s not accessible at all — it positively requires reading the manual to figure out what’s going on, and the difficulty curve is all over the map (I was stuck on the first combat tutorial level for the better part of a week, for example, because the training opponent kept absolutely steam-rolling me).
I-War is pretty squarely focused on combat, rather than on exploration or.. well.. anything else at all. but its deep simulation of a large starship, its component systems, and the mechanics of piloting it in a frictionless, zero-gravity environment are intriguing, and I keep wondering whether something more interesting than “…and they fight!” could be done with such a system.
I realise that this probably dates me horribly, but I’ve always felt that games such as Elite were made a lot stronger and more compelling by forcing the player to learn non-combat skills, such as learning to dock their spacecraft manually, learning to trade goods on their economic markets, figuring out how to navigate from place to place, and so on. These extra things to do just made the world larger and richer than the exclusively-combat-focused games which followed.
I missed I-War when it first came out. Recently I picked it up from GoG but I haven’t gotten very far into it yet. I’ll have to give it another go. Would you say a joystick is a necessity? I got rid of mine a few years back when I was purging.
The Star Trek/Wars visions of starships are heavily based on World War 2-era (or earlier) naval ships, aren’t they? Lots of people, lots of oral communication. Touring old battleships always amazes me with the quantity of manpower that was involved in running them. Modern ships pare that back a lot. I’ve read a fair amount of fiction that follows the navy model as well (David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, for instance, or Elizabeth Moon).
You could have some fun with the Kinect, I think, making a starship captain game with voice recognition and pointing.
I still have my old joystick, but no longer have a PC which I can connect it to. It’s a very old Thrustmaster HOTAS setup, which used an ancient PC keyboard port for its throttle. Modern PCs don’t even have the ports necessary to plug it in, so it just sits on a shelf, unused.
But I found that I can mostly enjoy I-War using a 360 gamepad and keyboard. And playing it at a ludicrously high resolution through a glide wrapper takes a little of the sting away. But I’m sure that using my old joystick would be infinitely better than the gamepad. If only I could plug it into my current computer.
As for using Kinect to give commands to crew members, I’m not convinced that the tech is quite ready for that level of interaction, yet (particularly across languages and accents) But it’s only a matter of time, and it’ll certainly be a killer app when someone does work out how to make voice commands as flexible and reliable as a physical interface. I think that Apple’s new “Siri” system on the iPhone 4S demonstrates both how amazingly far we’ve come in this regard, and also how tremendously far away we still are from achieving a truly usable system.
I fired Independence War up again last night and figured out how to get a Glide wrapper going on it. Now to acquire a 360 controller for my PC. I’ve been intending to do that for a while.
Maybe you’re right that voice control isn’t quite there yet. If the interactions were fairly codified with a specific vocabulary (“Permission denied!” “Engage!” etc.) it might be tractable in the near future.
Thinking about non-combat space gameplay: I wish somebody would evolve trading beyond the buy-low/sell-high model. I haven’t got any solid thoughts on it yet. Maybe if the assets were not easy to value relative to each other (more of a barter model, in other words, as opposed to a model where everything can be liquidated to cash). I’d love to see a game built around negotiating deals and writing contracts (as opposed to just buying and selling stuff in markets). Also maybe there’d be a model where the high-margin markets are inherently limited in volume, so that as you rise in economic prominence you move through distinct niches of service. For instance, you might fly diamonds through blockades when you’re small, but as you get bigger you lose the ability to do that and have to switch over to hauling commodities in bulk for less margin. It’d be sort of like the RPG experience-per-level curve.