Post
Thu Apr 03, 2014 1:32 am
#20
by Flatfingers
With 70 votes in so far... I have no idea what to make of the results.
Some options, Numerous options, and a completely Ludicrous number of configuration options are essentially tied in popularity in this forum, with Very Few a distinctly less popular choice (though still favored by nearly 9% of voters).
Maybe, if anything, this suggests that what might work would be player profiles -- large-scale settings for the kind of game you want to play that adjust the available gameplay, world expressiveness, and configuration options.
"Quickstart" would pretty much lock down the game to Josh's preferred defaults for everything, with NPCs constrained to basic behaviors and only the most basic options (like keybinding and essential graphics/audio). Most of the gameworld stuff would be turned down to the essentials to provide easy support for dogfighting mode. In this mode you could play Limit Theory as a kind of open-world shooter.
"Director's Cut" would set everything to Josh's preferred defaults, with a few options available for tweaking game startup modes. One of those startup settings would be to choose what kind of gameplay you want to enjoy: combat, commerce, diplomacy, research, exploration, etc. The features for that gameplay would be emphasized throughout gameplay, and the other things would be minimized except where needed to support the selected style of play. This mode would be good for getting a full but tailored play experience.
"Power User" would expose all of the regular options and open up all the supported ways of playing the game for the player to choose. The game would still be running in "normal" mode, which is to say that NPC personalities would make sense; their actions would be appropriate for their personality and the situation; the things in the gameworld itself would be pretty much as expected. No big surprises in the world with this profile setting, just a large fully-functional place that makes sense and lets the player sample all the ways of playing in it.
"The World Is Yours" would expose everything that makes sense as a configuration option (i.e., it wouldn't include things that make more sense through the node editor). All NPC and social behaviors would be tailorable, including a "random" option; and the controlling parameters for world behaviors would be fully frobbable. In this setting, you can make the world work pretty much however you want, even if that means some parts go completely off the rails. This would be the mode for the player who wants to push on the edges of what Limit Theory can do to see what happens.
Does this notion of profiles make any sense? Is there any point to trying to support different preferences for configurational power? Or should Josh just pick a level of configuration settings and implement that for everybody?