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Topic: Why did the Precursors build the Mycon? (Read 8916 times)
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Deus Siddis
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I agree, we should sue the precursors!
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Art
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Where does it actually say that the resources are huge piles of things lying on the ground? There most certainly aren't great huge piles of pure uranium lying around on the surface of Mercury, or piles of pure iron on Mars. The idea that big lumps of stuff lie around on planet surfaces is kind of ridiculous. (Well, many many other things about it are ridiculous, like finding antimatter or neutronium lying around on planet surfaces, but this is *unnecessarily* ridiculous.)
I always took the lander thing to be the most reified, abstracted part of SC2; it seemed obvious to me that it *has* to be a really simplified way of representing a few weeks of flying around, drilling into the ground and mining mineral-rich ores. I like the suggestion someone made that the lander *does* find relatively pure sources because it can scan and drill very deep, which explains why there are so relatively few sites it can reach on a whole planet, and why, for example, the Spathi never mined those veins of uranium on Spathiwa.
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0xDEC0DE
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Oh dear, not this again.
I will now point out that the blaster on the lander (which only stuns living beings, mind you) is capable of completely destroying up to 20 kilotons of whatever mineral it hits in a single shot.
In other words, try not to think too hard about how the lander/mining/cargo system might work, because the priority was "fun above all else". As such, there's stuff to shoot at, stuff to NOT shoot at, stuff to touch with the lander, and stuff to NOT touch with your lander. Trying to map it to a real-world metaphor is an exercise in lunacy.
According to some of the chatlogs, planetfalls were originally designed to be a lot more complex. There were specific objectives for each planet, and you could assign "captains" to the landers from the various races you'd allied with, and that would impact how the mission turned out; e.g., a Spathi captain would be bad at completing the mission objectives, but excellent at bringing everyone back alive. Ostensibly they removed this aspect from SC2 for the same reason they removed the starbases-as-something-you-could-fight from StarCon: it just wasn't as fun as they thought it would be, so they pared it way back to what they thought would be the most fun, and here we are. I only wish more game designers would be bold enough to drop game elements that don't work, some games would benefit greatly from that kind of ethic.
But we're getting pretty far afield here, aren't we supposed to be discussing crazy mushroom-men and giant space cows? 
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"I’m not a robot like you. I don’t like having disks crammed into me… unless they’re Oreos, and then only in the mouth." --Fry
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Deus Siddis
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"But we're getting pretty far afield here, aren't we supposed to be discussing crazy mushroom-men and giant space cows?"
Nope, we already answered that question, the Mycon were built by the Precursors to, for lack of a better word, Terraform uninhabited worlds.
With that out of the way, this thread's only chance of survival is to mutate into a discussion about something else, as it is doing.
About the lander, I really think they could have done a lot more with that, as was done in Starflight. It may have been taken more seriously, if it also had some kind of physics, much larger planets, more weapons (like a point defense laser), and more things to do in general on the surface.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Why, certainly, they COULD have. Would it be fun? I suspect not.
I think there are lots of fairly nifty things that could be added, but completely changing the shape is not a great idea.
Incidentally, my deep-scan deep-drill idea was just having fun trying to suspend my disbelief over the black hole that is the lander experience.
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Deus Siddis
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Planetside
« Reply #35 on: February 25, 2005, 01:22:24 am » |
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I don't understand, if you don't like the original lander, and you don't like the idea of adding anything to it, what do you want out of the surface exploration?
I personally believe that SC2, being a copy of the Starflight model should have had a much bigger and more interesting planetside experience. Starflight put a lot into its surface exploration, though it was a much older game, so they had less resources to work with (hence no sprites).
Anyway, I suspect that the future efforts of us freewarers, and/or the glorius return of commercial game development to one of our beloved classic titles, will make a quantum leap in the areas we are discussing now.
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Art
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I don't think a different lander experience would've been bad, but making the actual task you had to complete any more complex than driving around and scooping up dots on the map would, I think, have hampered the game. Certainly the whole simulationist bit of picking different races to lead the lander crew and such would have struck me as more annoying calculations to do.
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Deus Siddis
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Well, Starcontol 2's faster pace and less realistic, more arcade like design separates it from Starflight. So I guess an advanced planet surface engine might have slowed it down too much. But there is no real way to make the current lander thing any better, without completely redoing it. Maybe Starcontrol is not about exploring planets at all. But planetary exploration is a good thing for a game if you do it right.
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Mormont
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Well, let's not forget what happened with SC3's planetary exploration. Making landing more complex could be interesting, but only if it's done properly and remains fun.
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Deus Siddis
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Perhaps the question is, was it fun to begin with?
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