cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18182379
Guests:
- Kaan Cakir, Lead Level Designer
- Stephane Charre, Environment Artist II
- James Kay, Lead Content Designer
- Assistant Environment Art Director
- William Weissbaum, Assistant Narrative Director
- Antoine Fauville, Senior Level Designer
- John Lang, Level Designer II
- Kristofor McMahan, Associate Design Director
TL;DW:
- Pyro has 12 space stations in total.
- Pyro space stations are bigger than the ones in Stanton.
- Rough & Ready gang own majority of Rest & Refuel stations in Pyro.
- Ruined Station (one from Citizen Con) has been expanded.
- Hangars will have direct access to the Cargo Deck.
- Hangars in Pyro will have external freight elevators to allow for (un)loading of ships like Hull-C.
- “Win station will have something called Ghost Arena”.
- Contested Zones are like MMO dungeons
- Open space with loot.
- Easily accessible directly from the “normal” part of the station.
- Some routes are hidden behind puzzles, traps and key cards.
- Various levels of difficulty, various rewards.
- These are free-for-all zones.
- NPCs there are not linked to missions and will respawn on a timer.
- There will be Kopions running around, maybe more in the future.
- Boss fights are also planned, not confirmed for 4.0.
- Social parts of space stations are still green zones, no combat allowed.
- They showed clips with light-enhancement scopes.
- Asteroid Clusters are very different to the ones in Stanton.
- Asteroid Bases can be abandoned, used for missions etc. They also have loot, obviously.
This is a major communication issue. You cannot say X and then deliver game play of Y which is the opposite of X.
Touting a “cargo event” and then deliver a combat event is exactly what is going wrong here. Everybody sees, that you either a dumb human or a lying human. Not exactly a good choice to make.
Using PVP as a filler will become a big problem over time when your vast part of players is PVE oriented.
I’d love to believe the “they made all this stuff for Squadron 42, that’s why they focus on combat in PU for now” excuse but the truth is none of the discussion videos showed them having concrete enough plan for peaceful gameplay. Not enought to not make it sound hollow at least. It really feels like they have a problem imagining lack of combat being fun, I’m sorry, “having enough risk”.
I’d really like some kind of a big design update on where the game is going. It’s obvious that the original pitch is at least partially dead - the question is, how much is still in the cards. Or maybe I’m just out of sympathy for CIG and don’t see how all the current changes will morph into the game we all supported years ago, who knows.