Space with realistic proportions -is it still empty?

[X2-Eliah]

So, let's assume that you've read the part about the highways and how you can leave them mid-flight, and that the space will be much larger.

I'm sort of wondering, is that space between the station clusters / highway intersections - the open middle space, is that filled with, say, nebulae, dense asteroid clusters (e.g. Freelancer asteroid fields, with thousands of rocks in a cloud), derelicts and anomalies - will that be the case, or will the focus be on the station-clusters and zones around them?

Now, naturally I love the fact that it's possible to do interceptions and combat in the highways, but, well - exploration is still of interest, imo, and it'd be a bit of a shame if there was nothing to really explore.

[Skeeter]

I duno. It would be nice for procedurally generated unique items scattered throughout the zones spaces so lets say you were going from one system to another and decide to hop out of the highway mid travel then its either empty space or a ship there or station or some anomoly you can scan (star trek lol).

Be poor if leaving the highways during vast distances to not have anything. Sure half the drop out points probably nothing there but there should be a decent chance "something" might be there that is unique and you have found it and its special otherwise theres no reason to drop out and explore "that" spot of space duing point a to be long distance travel.

Be hard to do it manually if the spaces really are huge but a generator of sorts that did it per new game so its never in the same place twice would be awesome.

About these highways and dropping out whenever you fancy it. It would be awesome to pirate stuff this way by someways of a special weapon that you fire at a ship and its computer goes crazy for 20 seconds or somit and it ship loses control and 50/50 chance it moves out of the highway and drops into normal space where you can privately kick the crap out of it and hopefully get some loot or somit that makes piracy worth while.

All nicely out of the way of local law enforcment ships (which i bloomin hope they added in this game cos i really want a very strong police force in a space game so i cant do what i want 100% of the time without risks of being chased by massive amount of ships with big ass sirens on hehe.

[Seon]

Something I think would be cool in this aspect is to just be flying along the highway, leave it to explore, and then see a massive Xenon fleet or something building up a foothold in that location. Could be a nice "Oh shi-" moment. Or maybe random battles between races.

[X2-Eliah]

Hm. Actually - I don't think there will be 'races' as we know them, so.. might be not right to think of things in these terms

[Skeeter]

God forbid the split and borons are allied and merged into one empire in this new game.

Tho i have a 99% feeling that some races have merged to create a new hybrid empire/alliance of sorts. Not sure which yet but im guessing either split or the paranid the 2 races that really never got much screentime in plots might be one of them that merges if not they probs got rid of em.

They better keep the teladi tho as their my favourite race. So funny how they talk. Especially from Xbtf not so much from the later games as they kinda changed too much i feel.

[greypanther]

the highways could be either very good or very bad, I think I will be optimistic for once!

What do you mean there won't be races as such? I would imagine there would still be different species, ( hopefully some new ones too, please! ) just that the different governments may not be organised along racial, boundaries?

[Skeeter]

Hope they get rid of the khaak as they were a big failure imo. They just felt like a annoyance rather than a threat. Really hope for a more face to face bad guy/race this time.

Actually if the khaak are in this game i wont buy it out of protest.

[Deeparth]

Split humping Boron? Somethings...fishy...

[Scoob]

Hi all,

I guess by it's very nature a lot of space will indeed be very empty. Maybe there will be some gameplay mechanic whereby the player can discover "interesting" places to hop off the highway early...or indeed be dragged out by pirate activity.

I *like* the idea of having my own base hidden in an un-charted asteroid field off the main highways...say in the middle of an old X2 style scanner inhibiting nebula for example...

So, empty space, of course. Points of interest, I'd certainly hope so. Maybe if there's a form of "bbs" or just random converstion chances in the bar at stations, where hints can be given to sites of interest that'd suit me. I think Freelancer did many things right in that regard...

I wonder, if our little base off the beaten path becomes a successful trading hub, could we maybe get the contractors in to build us a highway?

Cheers,

Scoob.

[Rednoahl]

Now, naturally I love the fact that it's possible to do interceptions and combat in the highways, but, well - exploration is still of interest, imo, and it'd be a bit of a shame if there was nothing to really explore.

In my opinion - and I'll admit it sounds daft, but over the years I think that the rewards for exploration got worse in the X games even though the universe got bigger. At least in X2 you had nebulae and (imo) a prettier backdrop in a lot of unexplored sectors which was some reward, but the X3 unexplored sectors were meh imo. The other problem is that nearly everything (not an asteroid in other words) was on a flat plane - there really wasn't incentive to go up or down. Having played the SMP games of X3TC, I've seen a number of players just gate hunt and not explore the systems at all.

I expect that most exploration will be done by drones to be honest - the ship you actually pilot won't be the fastest thing around, so I doubt ES would force that on us unless there really isn't that much to find out there. I am hoping that there will be things out there to find that I'll find exiting - experimental subsystems, potential crew candidates etc... if it's just more rocks I'll be peeved.

As I understand the "race thing" I think that has more to do with getting rid of racial stereotyping. Teladi just being about profit and the like was dumb imo, although it did serve it's purpose well to introduce the races. I think todays X players will demand a more well rounded race types with individual personalities. I do expect a bit of a backlash once the game comes out though since there are a lot of people who roleplay in the X games - I expect that some of these roleplayers will be disappointed.

[X2-Eliah]

In my opinion - and I'll admit it sounds daft, but over the years I think that the rewards for exploration got worse in the X games even though the universe got bigger. At least in X2 you had nebulae and (imo) a prettier backdrop in a lot of unexplored sectors which was some reward, but the X3 unexplored sectors were meh imo. The other problem is that nearly everything (not an asteroid in other words) was on a flat plane - there really wasn't incentive to go up or down. Having played the SMP games of X3TC, I've seen a number of players just gate hunt and not explore the systems at all.

Yep, I fully agree with that That was, in fact, a big part of why I wanted to kick up a discussion about this.

[nielsw]

I completely agree about exploration being super important.


Whether its Gates or Highways, if you just keep traveling from village to village, it gets extremely old fast.


There should be worthwhile stuff, even a way to put a station into weird places etc...

Randomly generated things would be best...

[Tycow]

I'm sort of wondering, is that space between the station clusters / highway intersections - the open middle space, is that filled with, say, nebulae, dense asteroid clusters (e.g. Freelancer asteroid fields, with thousands of rocks in a cloud), derelicts and anomalies - will that be the case, or will the focus be on the station-clusters and zones around them?

I really do hope there are things to find off the beaten track a la Freelancer. It was always a great feeling when you found a derelict full of codename weapons.