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A review of sorts, and parting thoughts.
As I let my subscription lapse on VO for the second time, I thought I'd share my thoughts on why in the event they might prove useful to the developers.
I am leaving VO for several reasons, not all game related. However, the game related reasons have had the most influence.
I started playing VO because I loved MMORPGs and wanted to play one set in space. EVE would have been my first choice, but lucky for VO I had a powerPC mac. So VO it was. Right off the bat I noticed how awesome the flight controls were. I use keyboard/mouse-based controls, and was very impressed with the handling and realistic physics of the game. I was also impressed with the huge, limitless expanses and detailed back story (though to be honest I didn't read it all). However, equally as quickly I noticed some unimpressive qualities, such as: the HUD graphics which seemed like it was out of some BASIC game; the soundFX, which also seemed dated (particularly the energy weapons sounds). I noticed other things too, of course, but I remember those things striking me the most.
Nevertheless, I continued to play. I was lured primarily by the possibility of gaining levels and access to new ships and weapons, thinking that while the game play might be fairly dull at the time, future upgrades might actually offer a really exciting level of game play. Not too long into my quest for XP, did I realize that mining was incredibly boring and uneventful. Flying around giant swaths of space to scan asteroids seemed worse than torture to me. To this day (2 years later-ish) I think I've done less than 10 prospecting missions. I also realized that it was going to take FOREVER to get my weapons and combat XP up to anything decent enough to get better ships. I had no interest in flying around shooting bots for hours/days/weeks/months in order to get to level 12 of whatever. Then one day I discovered border patrol and was fast tracked, quickly getting the XP necessary for any ship I wanted. If it weren't for Border Patrol, I'd probably have left the game early on.
Then I noticed pirates and/or griefers kept killing me, despite my having good fast ships. I also noticed there were several nice ships offered elsewhere, but I didn't have good enough standing to access them. Thus I began my quest to get POS universally, which, while somewhat boring, was not nearly as dreadful as mining. Purposeful trading across the universe offered some enjoyable gameplay for two reasons: 1) fear of getting killed since I was in a slower ship with cargo I didn't want to lose (and the resulting glory when I made a run successfully) and 2) the fact that I got something for my efforts at regular intervals (higher faction = more access). Whereas when mining you can do so with relatively no fear whatsoever since pirates/enemies don't patrol good mining sectors, also you don't get things at regular intervals (basic miner II for heavy miner?, III for mkii?). Anyway, getting back to POS: once I got my universal POS, I was at a standstill. I didn't have to do anything else to attain access to any upgrades I was interested in. Sure there was the Heavy Miner and some Rail guns I didn't have access to, but I wasn't interested in them seeing as though I didn't like mining and I also didn't like fighting with rails.
Anyway, the point is that once I got my XP levels up to the highest level needed for access, and POS across the board, there seemed like nothing else was left in the game except PVP and doing group coordinated activities. The remaining missions seemed to offer nothing of interest, especially not for the effort required to complete them in some cases. Personally I enjoy the occasional PVP, but it's not my main interest (certainly not my strength). And the group activities (by which I mean doing organized activities with other human players) seemed few and far between, given there were only about 30 people on at a time across the nations.
That details the basic life of my VO experience. After I reached the standstill above, I let my subscription lapse. A year later, I decided to pay 10 bucks and see if the improvements during that time had made VO a better game to play.
Some things had improved slightly, but overall it was the same game. But I needed something to kill the time, so I kept my subscription up for about a half year and now offer my final comments regarding this game based on my cumulative experience here:
VO is quite obviously the hobby of a few people. I know you state this in your introduction, but I think this is not as much of an asset as you purport it to be. The nature of the gameplay tells me that it's still a work in progress, and, though past "beta" testing, it truly is still in a state that most big gaming companies would consider not even ready for beta testing. Also, while in some respects the LUA based programming that allows for user-configurable plugins is AWESOME, it is only awesome for people who understand how to write the plugins and/or who can figure out how to install the plugins. My gameplay did get MUCH better once I had access to certain trade and ore databases, as well as targetless and autojett and cargolist, etc. But it's not very user friendly to install. And what's more, it gives certain astute programming-minded individuals great advantages over those without such knowledge. This is fine if you don't mind that your user base is small in number. But when people play an MMORPG, they expect not only expect the possibility of massive amounts of players, but the reality of it. I think the highest player count I ever say on VO was 78. I'm sure the record was higher than that, but I wouldn't think it has ever gotten over 200. And in a universe as vast as VO is, 200 barely even wets the bottom of the glass.
So, as mentioned above, with such a low active player count, there is rarely any interaction of interest between players outside of the occasional fighting in Sedina B8 (and that's only of interest if you like fighting). I would offer that many people get turned off from this game simply because they rarely ever see another soul flying around their part of space.
Regarding the physics and realism of the game: There is a great imbalance in physic and realism. On one hand you have seemingly exquisitely tuned and detailed ship handling physics, never-ending sector space and appropriate weapons damage. On the other hand you have asteroids that heat up but never get smaller, get destroyed, or move (rotating doesn't count) for that matter, you have very limited ship configurability, and you have missiles and rockets that run out of ammo with reload being required in station or in cap ship, to name a few.
Obviously everything can't be real in a game, otherwise nobody would play it (for example if you die, you never get to play the game again). But if an asteroid you are mining never gets smaller, what's the fun in that? How hard would it be to make asteroids not only reducible via mining, but also destructible? When I saw the devs were working on the asteroids skins, and then in making the sectors in Deneb with the dense roid fields... I was bewildered. Who cares about what the asteroids look like, or how many there are? The functionality of the roids is what needs addressing before any of that. If you want more subscribers you should make the parts of the gameplay that suck more interesting, and I think the very first place you should start is with mining. Yes, some people find mining a comfort; a peaceful activity. But these people, bless their hearts, are very small in number. Most people HATE mining because it's incredibly boring and has very limited rewards.
Regarding weapons: While the realism of ship flight affects gameplay positively, the realism of running out of ammo has a negative affect. I don't really understand how it came to be that missiles (rockets, rails, mines) were not reload-able in the ship, other than some extreme clinging to realism. This is an area of gameplay that, if you changed it, I think would make VO exponentially better. There are plenty of suggestions for expendable ammo reloading on this forum, but my suggestion would be to make all relative weapons infinitely reload-able in flight, but with a reloading time appropriate to the weapon itself. Also, weapons with extreme properties add a chaos element to gameplay that appeals to a very wide audience. I recall hearing at one time that one of the devs was against weapons like this for whatever reason. But I appeal to you to consider greatly varying and developing your weapons choices (I have a post on this forum relating to this, if you haven't read it yet).
Regarding ships: Perhaps adding new ships is extraordinarily difficult, and is why we have a Warthog MkIV rather than three other visually different-looking ships with similar properties. But this is another area where VO could use some more variety. Indeed, extreme ships would offer a nice element of gameplay to VO just like it's weapons version mentioned above would. The possibilities and suggestions for ships like this are limitless. I know capship owning has been a wanted feature for sometime, but honestly I think wanting capship control is a symptom of just wanting more ship variety. To be limited to ships only of sizes that can fit in docking bays, to me, points towards the first solution: change the docking bay size. Additionally, it seems absurd that the only things we can customize on our ship are the limited number of small, large, and energy ports (and nobody uses the turrets, btw).
Regarding content: Make your HUD more visually interesting (and by HUD I am referring specifically to that which shows the PDA, SHIP, COMMODIITES, etc). Include a ship computer that does all the basic tasks one would assume you could do with space age technology (i.e. smart nav plotting to avoid roid fields, integrating Targetless as a feature of the game and not a plugin, keeping track of commodity data, etc.) Get your NPC AI in order, because it sucks. We also need more things to do than just mining for mining's sake, trading for trading's sake, and killing people for killing people's sake. The new conquerable stations seem to be the start of a good idea, but right now they just exist to be conquered. I understand they were placed in game because a majority opinion of online players at the time thought it was a good idea to do so rather than running them on the test server first. But if I want to just sit in a station I can do that anywhere. And if I want to make rare weapons with tons of random cargo from all over, that exists in the game as well. There needs to be something about conquerable stations that is not offered anywhere else in game.
So, those are my thoughts, for what they are worth. Take them or leave them... I don't care. Just thought it might be interesting.
I am leaving VO for several reasons, not all game related. However, the game related reasons have had the most influence.
I started playing VO because I loved MMORPGs and wanted to play one set in space. EVE would have been my first choice, but lucky for VO I had a powerPC mac. So VO it was. Right off the bat I noticed how awesome the flight controls were. I use keyboard/mouse-based controls, and was very impressed with the handling and realistic physics of the game. I was also impressed with the huge, limitless expanses and detailed back story (though to be honest I didn't read it all). However, equally as quickly I noticed some unimpressive qualities, such as: the HUD graphics which seemed like it was out of some BASIC game; the soundFX, which also seemed dated (particularly the energy weapons sounds). I noticed other things too, of course, but I remember those things striking me the most.
Nevertheless, I continued to play. I was lured primarily by the possibility of gaining levels and access to new ships and weapons, thinking that while the game play might be fairly dull at the time, future upgrades might actually offer a really exciting level of game play. Not too long into my quest for XP, did I realize that mining was incredibly boring and uneventful. Flying around giant swaths of space to scan asteroids seemed worse than torture to me. To this day (2 years later-ish) I think I've done less than 10 prospecting missions. I also realized that it was going to take FOREVER to get my weapons and combat XP up to anything decent enough to get better ships. I had no interest in flying around shooting bots for hours/days/weeks/months in order to get to level 12 of whatever. Then one day I discovered border patrol and was fast tracked, quickly getting the XP necessary for any ship I wanted. If it weren't for Border Patrol, I'd probably have left the game early on.
Then I noticed pirates and/or griefers kept killing me, despite my having good fast ships. I also noticed there were several nice ships offered elsewhere, but I didn't have good enough standing to access them. Thus I began my quest to get POS universally, which, while somewhat boring, was not nearly as dreadful as mining. Purposeful trading across the universe offered some enjoyable gameplay for two reasons: 1) fear of getting killed since I was in a slower ship with cargo I didn't want to lose (and the resulting glory when I made a run successfully) and 2) the fact that I got something for my efforts at regular intervals (higher faction = more access). Whereas when mining you can do so with relatively no fear whatsoever since pirates/enemies don't patrol good mining sectors, also you don't get things at regular intervals (basic miner II for heavy miner?, III for mkii?). Anyway, getting back to POS: once I got my universal POS, I was at a standstill. I didn't have to do anything else to attain access to any upgrades I was interested in. Sure there was the Heavy Miner and some Rail guns I didn't have access to, but I wasn't interested in them seeing as though I didn't like mining and I also didn't like fighting with rails.
Anyway, the point is that once I got my XP levels up to the highest level needed for access, and POS across the board, there seemed like nothing else was left in the game except PVP and doing group coordinated activities. The remaining missions seemed to offer nothing of interest, especially not for the effort required to complete them in some cases. Personally I enjoy the occasional PVP, but it's not my main interest (certainly not my strength). And the group activities (by which I mean doing organized activities with other human players) seemed few and far between, given there were only about 30 people on at a time across the nations.
That details the basic life of my VO experience. After I reached the standstill above, I let my subscription lapse. A year later, I decided to pay 10 bucks and see if the improvements during that time had made VO a better game to play.
Some things had improved slightly, but overall it was the same game. But I needed something to kill the time, so I kept my subscription up for about a half year and now offer my final comments regarding this game based on my cumulative experience here:
VO is quite obviously the hobby of a few people. I know you state this in your introduction, but I think this is not as much of an asset as you purport it to be. The nature of the gameplay tells me that it's still a work in progress, and, though past "beta" testing, it truly is still in a state that most big gaming companies would consider not even ready for beta testing. Also, while in some respects the LUA based programming that allows for user-configurable plugins is AWESOME, it is only awesome for people who understand how to write the plugins and/or who can figure out how to install the plugins. My gameplay did get MUCH better once I had access to certain trade and ore databases, as well as targetless and autojett and cargolist, etc. But it's not very user friendly to install. And what's more, it gives certain astute programming-minded individuals great advantages over those without such knowledge. This is fine if you don't mind that your user base is small in number. But when people play an MMORPG, they expect not only expect the possibility of massive amounts of players, but the reality of it. I think the highest player count I ever say on VO was 78. I'm sure the record was higher than that, but I wouldn't think it has ever gotten over 200. And in a universe as vast as VO is, 200 barely even wets the bottom of the glass.
So, as mentioned above, with such a low active player count, there is rarely any interaction of interest between players outside of the occasional fighting in Sedina B8 (and that's only of interest if you like fighting). I would offer that many people get turned off from this game simply because they rarely ever see another soul flying around their part of space.
Regarding the physics and realism of the game: There is a great imbalance in physic and realism. On one hand you have seemingly exquisitely tuned and detailed ship handling physics, never-ending sector space and appropriate weapons damage. On the other hand you have asteroids that heat up but never get smaller, get destroyed, or move (rotating doesn't count) for that matter, you have very limited ship configurability, and you have missiles and rockets that run out of ammo with reload being required in station or in cap ship, to name a few.
Obviously everything can't be real in a game, otherwise nobody would play it (for example if you die, you never get to play the game again). But if an asteroid you are mining never gets smaller, what's the fun in that? How hard would it be to make asteroids not only reducible via mining, but also destructible? When I saw the devs were working on the asteroids skins, and then in making the sectors in Deneb with the dense roid fields... I was bewildered. Who cares about what the asteroids look like, or how many there are? The functionality of the roids is what needs addressing before any of that. If you want more subscribers you should make the parts of the gameplay that suck more interesting, and I think the very first place you should start is with mining. Yes, some people find mining a comfort; a peaceful activity. But these people, bless their hearts, are very small in number. Most people HATE mining because it's incredibly boring and has very limited rewards.
Regarding weapons: While the realism of ship flight affects gameplay positively, the realism of running out of ammo has a negative affect. I don't really understand how it came to be that missiles (rockets, rails, mines) were not reload-able in the ship, other than some extreme clinging to realism. This is an area of gameplay that, if you changed it, I think would make VO exponentially better. There are plenty of suggestions for expendable ammo reloading on this forum, but my suggestion would be to make all relative weapons infinitely reload-able in flight, but with a reloading time appropriate to the weapon itself. Also, weapons with extreme properties add a chaos element to gameplay that appeals to a very wide audience. I recall hearing at one time that one of the devs was against weapons like this for whatever reason. But I appeal to you to consider greatly varying and developing your weapons choices (I have a post on this forum relating to this, if you haven't read it yet).
Regarding ships: Perhaps adding new ships is extraordinarily difficult, and is why we have a Warthog MkIV rather than three other visually different-looking ships with similar properties. But this is another area where VO could use some more variety. Indeed, extreme ships would offer a nice element of gameplay to VO just like it's weapons version mentioned above would. The possibilities and suggestions for ships like this are limitless. I know capship owning has been a wanted feature for sometime, but honestly I think wanting capship control is a symptom of just wanting more ship variety. To be limited to ships only of sizes that can fit in docking bays, to me, points towards the first solution: change the docking bay size. Additionally, it seems absurd that the only things we can customize on our ship are the limited number of small, large, and energy ports (and nobody uses the turrets, btw).
Regarding content: Make your HUD more visually interesting (and by HUD I am referring specifically to that which shows the PDA, SHIP, COMMODIITES, etc). Include a ship computer that does all the basic tasks one would assume you could do with space age technology (i.e. smart nav plotting to avoid roid fields, integrating Targetless as a feature of the game and not a plugin, keeping track of commodity data, etc.) Get your NPC AI in order, because it sucks. We also need more things to do than just mining for mining's sake, trading for trading's sake, and killing people for killing people's sake. The new conquerable stations seem to be the start of a good idea, but right now they just exist to be conquered. I understand they were placed in game because a majority opinion of online players at the time thought it was a good idea to do so rather than running them on the test server first. But if I want to just sit in a station I can do that anywhere. And if I want to make rare weapons with tons of random cargo from all over, that exists in the game as well. There needs to be something about conquerable stations that is not offered anywhere else in game.
So, those are my thoughts, for what they are worth. Take them or leave them... I don't care. Just thought it might be interesting.
Aye, bigger docks (or docks of different types, only compatible with different ships) would be a good idea, but we'd probably want a new 3D designer, first. And I fully agree with more ship and weapon variety (as I have been pushing for a very long time), for that we don't really need a 3D designer.
I always thought an EVN-esque version of mining (blow apart an asteroid and maneuver to intercept the smaller pieces) would be interesting in VO because, especially if some chunks went flying off in some directions at over 40 m/s, occasionally, that it might be a test of maneuverability and would give a new reason to use medium-maneuverability medium-cargo capacity ships rather than the current "bigger is better" philosophy in mining... I would also like to force Hortan to brutally demolish his girls with tools of death. That way we could get rid of mining beams altogether and, instead, have some mining variants of flares or somesuch... But I don't see any mining reduxes in the works so that might end up waiting 'til much after 2.0...
Also, soundFX... yeah... it sucks... except maybe the Gauss-esque weapons, that's ok. Would the devs accept user submitted soundFX if volunteers were to record their own effect? I.E. recording real popcorn for the Flechette cannon? :D
I always thought an EVN-esque version of mining (blow apart an asteroid and maneuver to intercept the smaller pieces) would be interesting in VO because, especially if some chunks went flying off in some directions at over 40 m/s, occasionally, that it might be a test of maneuverability and would give a new reason to use medium-maneuverability medium-cargo capacity ships rather than the current "bigger is better" philosophy in mining... I would also like to force Hortan to brutally demolish his girls with tools of death. That way we could get rid of mining beams altogether and, instead, have some mining variants of flares or somesuch... But I don't see any mining reduxes in the works so that might end up waiting 'til much after 2.0...
Also, soundFX... yeah... it sucks... except maybe the Gauss-esque weapons, that's ok. Would the devs accept user submitted soundFX if volunteers were to record their own effect? I.E. recording real popcorn for the Flechette cannon? :D
Go play EVE - you deserve it.
> How hard would it be to make asteroids not only reducible via mining, but also destructible?
this is NOT asteroids...doh!
the other things...some are really needed by the game, for example more ships.
The infinite missiles/rockets are just that: infinite stupid. They are good, and nice balanced.
aggreeing to the HUD.
IMHO the whole game should be more like it was described in the background story...shields and fast ships for ITAN, heavy armored ships for SERCO and strange ships for UIT.
this is NOT asteroids...doh!
the other things...some are really needed by the game, for example more ships.
The infinite missiles/rockets are just that: infinite stupid. They are good, and nice balanced.
aggreeing to the HUD.
IMHO the whole game should be more like it was described in the background story...shields and fast ships for ITAN, heavy armored ships for SERCO and strange ships for UIT.
Infinite in flight reload for flares? If there ever there was a single thing you could do to break VO combat, that might be it.
The rest of your post appears to boil down to "VO is boring if you don't like PvP". Yes, this is true of any FPS. What you're pining for, environmental, non-player content, takes big budgets and large teams to create, things VO simply doesn't have.
Tell you what. Win the lottery and invest a few million in VO. Sound like a plan?
The rest of your post appears to boil down to "VO is boring if you don't like PvP". Yes, this is true of any FPS. What you're pining for, environmental, non-player content, takes big budgets and large teams to create, things VO simply doesn't have.
Tell you what. Win the lottery and invest a few million in VO. Sound like a plan?