Certainly true, but how interesting will trading be? How good of an AI? The game will have it, but it doesn't mean that, all alone, these parts will be fun enough to carry a game on their own. Josh is but one man, and he's a very good man, but he can't make a game that is everything to everyone. Some parts of LT will be awesome. They will exceed our expectations and we'll find them great fun. Other parts may be disappointing, and they won't be as great as we hope.Cornflakes_91 wrote:except that the whole principle of LT builds on the AI and trading simulation....MyrddinE wrote: All this is dependent on a flexible AI, rich trading simulation, powerful project API, and deep hooks into all of this from the mod side... all things that Josh has discussed, but we can't know will exist. Version 1.0 may be missing some or all of these. None of these are easy. So don't get your hopes up.
Until it's released it's all speculation and hope. I hope that the economic simulation will be interesting, approachable, and fun. But it might not be. The reason it could be sub-par might have nothing to do with the simulation... maybe the interface makes it tedious and annoying to find good deals. Maybe it is so random that it's hard to predict which trades will be profitable. Maybe the AI will be so efficient at trading it's hard for an inexperienced player to compete. Maybe there will be a strategy that is boring but nets massive profits eliminating the challenge of the subsystem.
So many things can go wrong. I'm not saying they will... I just don't think it's appropriate to count your eggs before they hatch.
My main hope for LT is not that 1.0 is an amazing perfect game. My hope is that LT is an amazingly moddable game with amazing tools to enable us to expand upon the initial release from Josh into the game we want it to be. I'm not going to expect LT 1.0 to be awesome because Josh hasn't proved he can make an awesome game. But I am going to expect LT to be an amazing collection of tools for us to polish into an awesome game, because I think that Josh has demonstrated genius when it comes to creating flexible systems. That's his forte, his milieu. He makes amazingly flexible, elegant systems and tools, and the way I look at it he's building the best single player space trading game toolset ever to grace the Internet.
I can't wait to play with these tools. But I'm not going to expect the first game made with these tools to be perfect.