Victor Tombs wrote: ↑Tue Jan 23, 2018 1:43 amFlatfingers wrote: ↑Tue Jan 23, 2018 12:51 amLT sounds more like -- Theory Time! -- it will be something near to "Freelancer without stories." It will offer all of Freelancer's freedom to explore and trade and fight and do basic missions, but Freelancer's story content is replaced in LT by a blend of RTS/4X goals that are achieved by engaging with LT's simulation/procgen features.
Yes, that's how it sounds to me, Flat. And as I'm not really a fan of RTS/4X I'm probably going to need some good mods to help ease my pain.
This got me thinking again about story in Limit Theory. Now hear the Word of Josh from the LT Kickstarter:
Limit Theory will not offer a story, a campaign, or a guiding direction of any sort. You are unique, so isn't it best that you craft your own unique story, rather than live out a pre-fabricated one?
Ooooookay, so no story from Josh, then. Got it.
On the other hand, he's also (as far as I know) not planning on fully implementing a multiplayer mode, yet he's said he's interested in providing hooks in the LT code that enterprising modders could use to themselves build some kind of multiplayer mode.
So why not hooks for storytelling?
By implementing the components of the LT universe so that they can be stitched together in a story, with exposition (some of it directive) and characters and plot and maybe even dialogue, Josh would allow modders to create a version of LT that offers more of the guided fun of Freelancer.
I expect this is not as trivial as I'm making it sound. In particular, Josh's aversion to spawning events just to try to match what the player's doing suggests that objects (including characters/ships) are not intended to be static objects, guaranteed to exist, and thus not guaranteed to be available for a story. So there may be some significant technical rethinking necessary to be able to insert dynamic objects of a specified type into the appropriate slots of a narrative framework when needed.
Still, we've explored some ideas for how something like this might be done:
- Emergent multi-part missions, quests and epic stories -- linking missions
- Storyline generation -- scripting with randomization
- Combinatorial Narrative Generation -- procgen for storytelling
It's been a while, though, so I thought I'd throw this back open to see if it's worth discussing again, maybe with some new forum members.
What do you think? Is the idea of providing "hooks" for scripted storytelling worth considering at all? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me given that the idea of hooks for multiplayer play is OK... but I'm sure I'm not seeing all the difficulties and the possibilities in this concept.