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Topic: TW-ligt plot (Read 40848 times)
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GeomanNL
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I'm sorry but the point about the Gerzillion is that he's a mystery.
I ask, no emplore, you to keep it like that.
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« Last Edit: May 16, 2005, 06:16:03 am by GeomanNL »
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Deus Siddis
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"The player never gets arrested. He didn't actually break any laws. But he gets kicked out of Star Control, and loses his rank. The humans don't trust a captain who would sell crew. You keep your ship and fleet because you built them technically as a Pkunk captain. So alliance bases no longer do business with you, and you are unpopular with many of them."
I think that's good. The alliance would never try and kill/imprison the dude who just saved their sorry asses.
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Bekanor
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How about this - once the Framed scenario unfolds, a new module becomes available for the Salvation - the Stunner (or similar pseudo-scientific ray-beam gun), which is a gun that, if it is the sole weapon used to defeat an enemy ship, will simply disable the crew and vessel in a nice, pacifistic way. However, this gun is weaker, shorter ranged, and burns more power than a regular weapon. No one ever said being a nice guy was going to be easy.
On the other hand, if he engages alliance forces with conventional weapons or his allied ships (incidentally, what happens to allied ships of the Utwig, Orz etc. when he is declared evil?), then the ships he defeats are Dead, with Nir and Talana tut tutting in the background. However, the races he fought will remember this shoddy treatment. For example, if he razes a few Blades during his crime spree, the Supox, even after his name is cleared, will be disillusioned and thus will require more RU to gain crew.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Urgh, no. Please no sudden switch of main-character POV. This is the sort of thing that, when playing an uber-linear game like Final Fantasy, jumps out at me in my chair and screams "YOU'RE PLAYING AN UBER-LINEAR GAME LIKE FINAL FANTASY!!!"
Solutions:
1) Zelnick has been released on bail, and has promised to return by date X, at which point there will be a trial. One of the quests is to gather the necessary data. Unfortunately, this does not have the effect of pushing him away from the home quadrant.
2) Zelnick was held on house arrest on some planet somewhere, and then he was abducted by Wu'bi. As long as they're inside the Alliance spheres, he has to hide.
3) Or the entire game could be played from Talana's perspective...
4) Or the entire game could be played from the perspective of some vast consciousness (e.g. Arilou), who provides subtle psychic suggestions to the characters (outside of combat, of course). This would even provide a mechanism for conversation options (these are the four easiest things to make this character say). It allows manipulation of the roster like Final Fantasy, but by being explicit about it, it isn't so cheesy.
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Art
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I still feel any "Stunner" weapons are unnecessary. And as far as punishing the player for killing allies goes, sure, make him feel bad about it, but it should still be pretty clear, after he wins, that Saving the World really was so important that it at least made it potentially necessary to kill allies.
Solutions:
1) Zelnick has been released on bail, and has promised to return by date X, at which point there will be a trial. One of the quests is to gather the necessary data. Unfortunately, this does not have the effect of pushing him away from the home quadrant.
Bail? Enh. Given that he has access to a really far-ranged ship he's probably a flight risk. At the very least if you release him on "bail" he should be under some kind of probation that makes the Old Arm an unpleasant place to be.
2) Zelnick was held on house arrest on some planet somewhere, and then he was abducted by Wu'bi. As long as they're inside the Alliance spheres, he has to hide.
Well, make him *escape*. I do agree with the original idea -- giving the player his own initiative when escaping, as opposed to having him suddenly be abducted by another set of good guys, is important to keeping this plot from feeling on rails. If he's abducted, he still has the option -- if he's a really law-abiding citizen -- to go turn himself back in like a good citizen should. You have to give him a *reason* to not be a good law-abiding citizen -- and I maintain the game is a lot more interesting if he *does* have a reason to break the law, if you force the player to put the greater good ahead of being a goody two-shoes.
3) Or the entire game could be played from Talana's perspective...
Talk about massive structural shifts. We ought to have a guiding policy that we *don't* massively rewrite the whole rest of the plot just to solve one tiny plot discontinuity.
4) Or the entire game could be played from the perspective of some vast consciousness (e.g. Arilou), who provides subtle psychic suggestions to the characters (outside of combat, of course). This would even provide a mechanism for conversation options (these are the four easiest things to make this character say). It allows manipulation of the roster like Final Fantasy, but by being explicit about it, it isn't so cheesy.
It's still quite cheesy. It's cheesy because it feels utterly alien to the Star Control universe -- at the very least, if such huge omnipotent entities exist, it feels really weird for us to *be* one. Also, it's cheesy because it starts conflating the way the game's universe works and the way the game's actual user interface works in a mimesis-smashingly convenient way. (Ooh, our massive extradimensional intelligence can *also* record "universal states" in its extradimensional memory, at certain points where the timeline branches, and jump back to them if a timeline goes wrong by "loading state". Bleah.)
I still hold that the simplest solution to the problem is to allow the Captain to run away from battles with Alliance members, and use that to push him toward the New Arm and keep him there until he can finish the Framed! plot. Battles with Alliance members *shouldn't be that big a part of the game* -- once he realizes Alliance members are treating him as hostile he should just bail to the New Arm, and the game can keep moving. We're talking like the player's going to spend all day cruising in and out of Yehat space trying to make nice, over and over again -- which is something only a stupid or perverse player would actually do.
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UAF
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Actually the purpose of the "framed" quest and its likely result is to keep the player in the Old Arm until it's solved.
The player is much more limited without the NAFS to back him up, which is why he must clear his name as fast as possible.
He can't get any NAFS captains besides Yehat and Pkunk captains (as opposed to having access to 7 races that he'll have after clearing his name, not including the Chmmr that he think he'll have before returning).
He can no longer approach new races as the representative of the NAFS so his abilities to ally with them are limited (they won't ally with a private person after all).
The player must clear his name to reinstate his mandate to make alliances and work in the name of the NAFS, and to be able to complete the quests that require things from NAFS races.
Anyway, that was more of an FYI 
Back to the point:
I agree with what Art said here, so I won't repeat after him.
Seems to me that my last suggestion - The Chmmr was planning to assassinate the player + their strange actions that appear like preparations to war force him to escape arrest - solve most of the problems here.
There will be no stun ship/module/improvement and the player just needs to escape battles.
Killing alliance ships instead of escaping will result in high crew prices and other annoyances (thanks Bekanor) later on, the loss of some optional quests (the Supox expedition for example) and the promise of a trial after the current problem is solved (after the game).
It'll be made clear that it's a bad idea to kill alliance ships, and sometimes you'll be able to avoid battles using dialogs.
Anyway, what I ask now is that you'll start telling me what's wrong with that idea and what can be improved about it.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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So, you want to have Zelnick stay in the Home Quadrant? Easy. His bail was contingent on having a restraining implant. Basically, he can't go outside a (large) sphere based on the range of an encrypted beacon, or his heart will go explodey. If desired, this could have some flexibility for emergency cases like signal disruption... this flexibility could provide another self-consistent plot device, where we have time pressure, in which we will be going into a hyperwave-disrupting area and so will have to be done before the implant decides Zelnick is on the lam. The only reasonable example of this I can think of is Quasispace. This could prevent Zelnick from visiting Faylaralfali
It's very 'convenient' for the plot, but it would be highly reasonable form of ensuring his return for trial.
Also, I didn't make myself clear on the Wu'bi 'abduction'. I just meant that it should look like an abduction, and whether or not the Captain had any role in it was a detail we would work out later. Perhaps he had hinted such an idea in Talana's direction during a conjugal visit...
Also, here are some other related ideas for Framed:
The captain DID sell slaves, but they were all Syreen-captured Mycon. The Mauler itself was always crewed with Mycon transferred from the Syreen, so furnace use wasn't so horrible. One of the points of Zelnick's defense may be to demonstrate the subsentience of individual Mycon crew.
The captain bought a Mauler, and its captain survived the final battle and is here a continuing character. There are lots of interesting character possibilities here. Remember that this is the captain that the Druuge were most eager to get rid of, so he (or she) may not fit their stereotype well... may hate trading, may be empathetic, may not be ugly. One idea I had was that the captain would be female, and would on occasion be mistaken for Talana (purple skin, glowing eyes, most people have not seen both Druuge and Syreen, female Druuge may lack horns).
Some of the evidence that clears the captain may come from her. Or she could have broken down under some sort of duress and helped frame him, and making her recant would be a major advance in his defense.
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« Last Edit: May 17, 2005, 08:17:53 pm by Death_999 »
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Art
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So, you want to have Zelnick stay in the Home Quadrant? Easy. His bail was contingent on having a restraining implant. Basically, he can't go outside a (large) sphere based on the range of an encrypted beacon, or his heart will go explodey. If desired, this could have some flexibility for emergency cases like signal disruption... this flexibility could provide another self-consistent plot device, where we have time pressure, in which we will be going into a hyperwave-disrupting area and so will have to be done before the implant decides Zelnick is on the lam. The only reasonable example of this I can think of is Quasispace. This could prevent Zelnick from visiting Faylaralfali
It's very 'convenient' for the plot, but it would be highly reasonable form of ensuring his return for trial.
Erk. It makes sense, but it's... well... so gadgety, and so much less dramatic than having the Captain escape and be on the lam. Do you really want to take *away* the Captain's agency to the point that instead of escaping and defying the Alliance for the greater good, he begs them for release like a common criminal and is allowed to wander about -- literally! -- leashed by a hunk of metal? How ignoble!
It may, in some sense, be more "realistic", but at the cost of drama and excitement, and without actually solving any of the problems with this idea -- that is, it's *still* a plot bottleneck and it *still* massively inconveniences the player, but now it doesn't make the player feel like the exciting rebel hero but like a helpless pawn of the system. In a way it makes the whole plotline take a darker, more depressing kind of tone.
Also, I didn't make myself clear on the Wu'bi 'abduction'. I just meant that it should look like an abduction, and whether or not the Captain had any role in it was a detail we would work out later. Perhaps he had hinted such an idea in Talana's direction during a conjugal visit...
Also, here are some other related ideas for Framed:
The captain DID sell slaves, but they were all Syreen-captured Mycon. The Mauler itself was always crewed with Mycon transferred from the Syreen, so furnace use wasn't so horrible. One of the points of Zelnick's defense may be to demonstrate the subsentience of individual Mycon crew.
Umm... It may, in fact, be unwise to make it a critical plot element of the sequel to say that the player-character in the original game did something incredibly convoluted that didn't occur to most players while they were playing the game. (For one thing, I never pictured Syreen hypnosis of enemy crew as something that could last in the long term -- hence Syreen Penetrators always getting emptied down to the default level after a battle. For another, as someone else said, Mycon might not actually work very well for burning in a furnace. For a third, this is just something likely to make most players go, "Huh?" since I'm betting most players *didn't* sell any slaves, and the ones that did didn't think through the whole idea of selling non-human or Shofixti crew.)
The captain bought a Mauler, and its captain survived the final battle and is here a continuing character. There are lots of interesting character possibilities here. Remember that this is the captain that the Druuge were most eager to get rid of, so he (or she) may not fit their stereotype well... may hate trading, may be empathetic, may not be ugly. One idea I had was that the captain would be female, and would on occasion be mistaken for Talana (purple skin, glowing eyes, most people have not seen both Druuge and Syreen, female Druuge may lack horns).
An interesting idea, but I'd want to avoid reading back into the Captain's actions in SC2 as much as possible since that makes it harder for people who took a different path to identify with the Captain in the sequel. That's one of the things that bugs me about the Framed! plot, but it gets worse if we put in whole new characters whom we have no reason to necessarily believe existed in the player's original SC2 playthrough.
Especially if you make this be a pretty, empathetic, nice *girl* Druuge with a heart of gold who rebels against the cruel dictates of her culture. Mary Sue, anyone? (Or Mary Druuge, as the case may be.)
(Yes, I respect the desire to show that not all members of a species are identical, but we had it hammered into our heads so many times that the Druuge were evil, evil, evil that it stretches credibility to suddenly have a Druuge captain who's a totally decent person. Culture doesn't dictate everything but it dictates a *lot* -- I have the feeling that a very altruistic and compassionate person by Druuge standards would still be a heel by human standards, and it's actually more realistic and more respectful of the idea that alien species and cultures are truly *alien* to avoid having the One Good Druuge who holds the same moral ideals that humans do.)
(Also, it's a big friggin' deal that Syreen and humans look alike. It's evidence of genetic tampering. No friggin' way that a female Druuge looks attractive to human eyes. No *way* -- the odds are totally against it. It's just blatant fanservice to make it so that if there's a female character she must of necessity be pretty to human males.)
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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The captain losing agency? Come ON, he's so important that even with the most powerful race in the alliance wanting him arrested, when any ordinary officer would be temporarily suspended from duty, he is commanding a battle group which basically doesn't answer to ANYONE.
Maybe we can ditch the restraining implant and just have the player have the option not to show up... but that will completely screw up the rest of the game.
And as for the druuge captain, this was NOT a Mary Sue.
Reread what I said -- (s)he (since you assumed female, I will stick with it from here) should be borderline competent, the first one the Druuge wanted to ditch. Any deviations from culture would be optional, but that is nearly necessary. Also, any cultural deviations could be learned behavior, adapting to her new situation. She could keep backsliding.
As for appearance, I said she did not have to be hideously ugly, that's all. As for the confusion with Talana, I was thinking mainly that this would arise if you were talking with Supox or Zoq-Fot-Pik or other races that are not humanoid. Actual humans, Druuge, Syreen, and Utwig should have no trouble figuring it out. She may be quite plain indeed, by our standards... but she might not drool and doesn't need to be a hunchback. Or she could have slept her way up to the captain's chain, and she'd TRY sex appeal, but fall on her face doing so, due to differing expectations.. Or we could find out that the Druuge are matriarchal and all the captains we saw in SC2 were female. (ok, not really)
I was originally thinking of such a character appearing if one were to do an SC2 animated series, where one MUST specify a particular path, so this character is a bit of a transplant.
On the other hand, how likely is it that a player will end up with a mauler? Well, suppose they get not one but two egg-cases (fairly likely). They will probably spend both -- one on the rosy sphere and the other on a mauler. So it's not necessary to trade slaves, which I agree is pretty unlikely for a player to have done in SC2. We can ditch that part with the Mycon, or just include it in the trial as a side-note concerning who was thrown into the furnace (as for whether mycon burn, keep in mind that the druuge furnace is probably doing mass conversion, not just setting on fire)
Anyway, to provide further context for the druuge captain idea, I was thinking there could be a roster (perhaps randomly generated) of captains who served under Zelnick in SC2, who you have in your game as characters, and this could be one of them. That is, there would be several slots you could fill, from among the various alliance races. Some would be common, such as Pkunk, Utwig, Supox, and Zoq-Fot-Pik; some would be a little less common, like Spathi and Yehat; others would be rare like Thraddash, Druuge, Shofixti, and Umgah. They would have a few canned parts of the story which did not depend significantly on their species... basically, they can be loyal to the captain through thick and thin, and otherwise not be very descript. How much they do depends on the engine.
If you ever played the B5 card game, they could be like when you got a non-unique character promoted to the inner circle.
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« Last Edit: May 19, 2005, 02:42:02 am by Death_999 »
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UAF
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Should I gather from the fact that everyone ignores my suggestion that it's not liked?
I was rather waiting to read Art's reply to it...
And Death_999 - we won't be making any major changes to the game like the ones you suggested.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Your idea is fine, actually... I just didn't see it.
As for how major that change is... Look. I don't know what the engine is. We haven't begun script-writing here. Maybe it was really easy and trivial to have a couple minor characters with no significant role added. Maybe they could be spot characters who only show up at the trial.
If it's not easy, OK. But there was no way for me to know that.
Or do you mean the other suggestion, with bail? You were looking for some consistent way of dealing with the charges. I suggested one. This was not 'throw everything out and start over.'.
Sheesh.
Anyway, if the objective is to keep the captain INSIDE the home quadrant, why make it hard to stay there and push him away? I'm confused.
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« Last Edit: May 19, 2005, 09:20:38 pm by Death_999 »
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UAF
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You can read what the engine will be like on our Wiki.
When I mentioned major changes I was mainly talking bout adding characters.
Adding characters means another graphic, another tune, and another dialog tree. Seems a bit extreme just to solve a minor problem, and giving them quests and stuff is defiantly even more dialogs.
Now if we were swimming in dialog writers and other personal then adding such things might have been easy. However we barley have any as it is...
Anyway, the objective might not be to keep the player inside the quadrant. What I mean is that people (including here) complained that such limits exist, and that they make the game seem more linear then it should be.
So I'm considering allowing the player to go to the New Arm when he's still framed. He still needs to clear his name in order to get the help of the NAFS races which are needed to finish the game, but it will a few more quests to advance in simultaneously (The Khar quest for example, can be completed before you even clear your name).
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