Following up from ideas mentioned by FormalMoss, cuisinart8, and Talvieno in the EPIC mode thread, I (personally) think it'd really be worth pursuing the idea of having a long-term objective of getting from point A to B, which are sufficiently distant, in the universe. I think to make such an idea fun and executable you'd need more than just a "I'll run vanilla LT and set a personal goal to travel X distance" idea. So I wonder if it would be possible to make a mod out of it instead, considering some basic factors to keep it implementable and fun. I don't know if this is better suited to being in S&M, but I don't swing that way.

As a basic template for ideas, we could consider the mobile game called Out There, or perhaps just FTL.

Here is the basic idea: start a game with a prompt that just said you're stranded in the middle of nowhere and your goal is to get home. The actual location of home is unknown. The goal is (a) to find out where home is, and (b) get there. To make these tasks more difficult, the universe is *generally* quite hostile to you. In addition, you may also potentially have to consider consumables such as food or fuel in your travels. We could consider a dead-is-dead component.

So, in a universe that largely hates you, find home, and get to it, surviving on the way.

Finding home
Although the universe is largely hostile to you, it isn't totally so, and there may be pockets of friendliness. This means that it would be possible to talk to people who would be able to sell you information. Of course, bad guys may also have information, and you could consider getting that information from them by whatever means you deem worthy.
So, distribute information-packs about your home system among the universe population. This information need not contain the entire information about your home system, just bits e.g. dominant culture attributes, trade attributes, that sort of thing. You could maybe even include locational information like "an unknown distance on the other side of Srbobuscant prime", but I imagine it would be harder to implement.

An obstacle to this would be finding an in-universe justification for people somehow having information on your home system if you're so far from it.

Alternatively, or maybe in addition to the above, you could have a certain type of research which, if you follow it far enough, will successively give you more bits of information about home.

Getting home
Just finding where your home system is won't be enough, since you'll still have to find some way to get there. Now, you could just avoid all the baddies on the way there, jumping system to system, but I think that would get tedious really fast. Instead, you need some way to keep you and your crew (if they exist) fed, or perhaps you can only do a limited number of jumps before you have to refuel. In this way there can be a degree of constant urgency, much like a survival game. There could be many stories that result!

This need not be a solitary endeavour - you may establish a migrant fleet, much like the Quarians in Mass Effect, or simply BSG - which, as a unit, attempts to get home. In this way, the "play how you want" aspect of LT is preserved while maintaining, for those who want it, a long-term goal.

Thoughts/criticisms?

It sounds like a very fun gamemode and I would personally love to see something like this implemented at some point. It might require some suspension of disbelief (why does everyone else know about your home system but you do not?), but that is a minor concern compared to how fun it would be. First person Homeworld, anyone?

+1

So essentially you want missions / a story in the game.

If LTSL is even half as capable as Josh says, that is doable.
It's a lot of work, though, and requires more than coding. A good story needs to be written first. =)

Essentially yes, but that's like saying that FTL has a storyline: the story is, as with the rest of LT, what you make it. This is more of a framework than a story per se - not too sure that in its basic function it would need any kind of writing.

FTL does have a storyline.

Katawa wrote:FTL does have a storyline.

But the stories that make FTL great are not explicitly part of that storyline. This is my point: a story in FTL is what the player makes it. The "storyline" is more of a narrative framework which sets the scenes for stories.

Dwarf Fortress has a storyline, but a lot of Fun arises from stories that are not explicitly part of that storyline.

Dwarf Fortress doesn't have a storyline.

I should specify that I agree that placing yourself in the game and letting events drive immersive story is a thing you can and should do in any game you play. In FTL for example growing attached to a mantis slave you rescued just to have him die when he runs out of air protecting your engineer from boarders while the engineer desperately works on the air supply. The pilot watches it all on the monitor, ashamed at his own inaction, but what could he do.
But it still has a full story for people who aren't as inclined to form their own.

Your contrariness is charming, Katawa.

It seems we've made the classic debating mistake of not defining our terms, so we're talking at cross-purposes about what it means to have a storyline. By the way, I agree with you that FTL has a storyline, and I never really meant that it didn't - it just seemed to miss the point of FTL to refer to that rather than the narrative emergence for which roguelikes are well-known. I thought this opinion was more widely held - I don't know of anyone who appreciates or considers FTL in terms of the presented storyline as more defining of the game than its capacity for generating a wonderful narrative.

The point I'm trying to make is in line with what you mean with the mantis slave - in its essential form, this idea does not require a "full story", only a "this is why you're here, this is where you want to be, get there" reasoning. Certainly the two aren't in conflict (e.g. XCOM).

I'm not saying a full story wouldn't improve on that. But I disagree with Gazz's comment that I want a storyline or even a mission - I want a framework.

Scytale wrote: The point I'm trying to make is in line with what you mean with the mantis slave - in its essential form, this idea does not require a "full story", only a "this is why you're here, this is where you want to be, get there" reasoning. Certainly the two aren't in conflict (e.g. XCOM).

I'm not saying a full story wouldn't improve on that. But I disagree with Gazz's comment that I want a storyline or even a mission - I want a framework.

I agree with this. There is no real need for a scripted story for this game mode. The story should emerge from the player's own struggles and journeys through the world, similar to the way FTL's story is presented as just the barest framework to give you a reason to fly around the galaxy. All there really needs to be is a destination that's sufficiently far enough away and enough clues to point you in the right direction.

These sound like awesome ideas for separate game modes. As long as they aren't part of the core sandbox mode imo. Mainly because I don't like ever feeling pressed or forced to act a certain way out of some enforced goal that is supposed to be important to me. For example in FTL the rebel fleet being in constant pursuit pretty much ruined it for me personally. The mechanics and the game were really fun, I just couldn't stand feeling pressed to win.

Sure - this would just be a mod. I feel the same way.

cuisinart8 wrote:It sounds like a very fun gamemode and I would personally love to see something like this implemented at some point. It might require some suspension of disbelief (why does everyone else know about your home system but you do not?), but that is a minor concern compared to how fun it would be. First person Homeworld, anyone?

Second that. I would like to play it too at some point. But like Gazz wrote there needs to a story. Not everything can be done just via algorithm because else the conversations / missions would get boring.

N-Joy wrote:

cuisinart8 wrote:It sounds like a very fun gamemode and I would personally love to see something like this implemented at some point. It might require some suspension of disbelief (why does everyone else know about your home system but you do not?), but that is a minor concern compared to how fun it would be. First person Homeworld, anyone?

Second that. I would like to play it too at some point. But like Gazz wrote there needs to a story. Not everything can be done just via algorithm because else the conversations / missions would get boring.

When I suggested it, it wasn't originally intended as a new gamemode... I thought of it simply as something that could arise from normal gameplay. You'd have to, of course, have the goal of getting back home - but that could easily be just to get back to the rest of your faction and fleet that you spent hours building up. The only difficult part would be, how would you get so far away in the first place?

And I wouldn't say everyone else knows about your home system. I would say a select few actually have information on it, but perhaps others knew that those individuals had information on the location of your home system and could point you in their direction. Perhaps it's a friend of a friend, even. Getting home could require some serious adventuring and sleuthing. Then there would be "why are you so far away"? Maybe you were transported in your sleep, but how? Perhaps a specific faction is at fault, and during your travels, you could eventually discern which faction it was, so you could take revenge on them when you made your triumphant return from beyond the intended grave. (That part would have to be a mod, as it wouldn't exactly arise during normal gameplay.) But the rest of it being normal gameplay? I like that idea. I'd like for Limit Theory to be able to tell a story on its own. Just because a story is procedurally generated, it doesn't mean it can't be rich and exciting.

I didn't so much mean for it as a game mode, just as a little mod/script to help things along a bit. Sure, the situation might arise naturally through gameplay, and that would be awesome, but it seems to me (using experience from x3 for reference) that getting from arbitrary point A to B is just too easy, especially if you have a general idea for the way back and if the universe isn't too hostile to you. But if you have to hunt for clues and traversing sectors tend to be like trying to punch through xenon fleets, that might spice things up a bit.

The basic principle of the idea as it's put here is really just to set up the initial conditions in the right setting. Adding a written story or story bits will add to that, but in my view it's just filling and I mean, filling makes pies tasty, so...