In game options on first game start

[wellmadman]

What I mean is this When you first install the game and get it loaded, why not place a pop up menu, which has Game dev boxes all ticked.
Like game devs recamended play settings ->
Highways <on/off>
Jump drive <on/off>
Jump gates <on/off>
Ai trading with jumpdrives <on/off>
+ any other option you can think off <on/off>

For all the options in the game, and you can make some steam achiements linked to them, I hear a lot about ai jump trading making it really hard to trade so you make much less money, well maybe if you had ai jump drive on you need to make xxxx billion/trillion etc.

This way the devs get to make the game run how they wish, but people can turn on/off different modes/things they dont like or wish to add.

I think it would be a great ingame thing. Everyone would be happy as their game could be played their way.

I dont know what others think to this idea, but I seen lots people with different veiws on the game, and maybe this Simply menu for game starting could sort that out?

[X2-Illuminatus]

From a game design viewpoint adding so many options is a horrible thing to do, as you would have to test each combination of settings and would have to make sure that they all work properly. Quoting CBJ here, because as usual he wrote an elaborate reply to the "making it optional" argument in a prior discussion already.

Every time there is a discussion about a particular feature, you have three camps. There's the "I want this" camp, the "I want that" camp, and then you have the people who think they have a magic solution that will make everyone happy, the "make it optional" camp. The trouble is that it's not the magic solution those people think it is.

Creating a game that is fun and enjoyable is about making game design decisions, not dithering about it and ending up leaving the player to decide. While some players have strong opinions about a feature, most will just go with the default setting, and if you have dithered and not designed your game firmly around a core set of solid design decisions, then everyone's experience will be almost certainly be the poorer for it. Of course there are exceptions, particular features such as graphics settings, where giving people options doesn't detract from the game's core design, but for something fundamental like the cockpit it is almost always better to make a decision and accept that it won't please everyone than to dither and give people two different options, neither of which can be fully followed through because you have to take into account the possibility that people may choose the other option.

And that brings me to the second point, which is that making something optional costs more than making a design choice even in the case where one of the options is simply not having that feature. Why? Well, because not only do you have to develop the feature (or in the worst case two different versions of the feature) but you also have to set up the option (additional menus, translations, etc.), and then you have to test the whole game with both options. The more things you make optional, the more different combinations you have to test; up to twice as many combinations, in fact, for each thing you make optional.

It gets even worse if the option is as fundamental as something like the cockpit. Even if the cockpit were just eye-candy, you'd have to make sure that all aspects of the game worked and performed correctly with both a full-screen view of space and a partial view. But of course in this case the cockpit isn't just eye-candy, it's an integral part of the game, with the parts of the UI built into it. Making that optional would require the game to function with two separate interface paradigms, significantly increasing the cost for design, development and testing.

Why should you care about making things optional being an expensive way of doing things? Well, cost and time are pretty much the same thing in development tems, both of which are finite, so those resources would, by definition, be prevented from being used on other game features. Worse still, for any given player, at least some of those resources would be wasted, because they would be spent on an option that they wouldn't be using; in fact in practice for most players, all the effort put into the non-default option would be wasted. In essence you are shooting yourself in the foot somewhat by suggesting that a feature you want should be made optional; you are asking for the available resources to be spent on a feature you don't want, only for you to then switch it off, instead of on features you do want!

And this of course brings us back to the first point, which is that it is almost always better to make design decisions than to try to please everyone by making everything optional.

[LittleBird]

I would doubt about the game design if there where so many options for mechanics that are fundamental different.
As if they devs have no idea how the game is meant to be played.