What kind of mission design can we expect for the PU? Will there be a linear design (go here; do X) we have to follow or can we chose how to progress in a mission?asked by The Snowman
TL;DRMissions will combine economy-generated jobs, some scripted multi-part missions and player-created jobs, with several taken at once, though abandoning missions hurts your rating with those who hired you.
The Persistent Universe is going have a combination of a whole bunch of stuff. So one is the procedurally generated stuff that comes out of the economy... A factory needs goods, and you take to mission to bring the goods from the planet to the factory... Or the factory could be asking for someone to protect the shipment of goods... Or the local law enforcement authority could be putting out an "ambert alert" or a bounty on a certain criminal, and you could take that mission. So there's a lot of missions that will be generated by the economy and created in reaction to what the NPCs are doing and what the players are doing in the universe.Then also in addition to that we'll have some more sort of scripted linear missions sprinkled in there for flavor and character, and those ones will tend to be maybe multi-mission ones where there's two or three parts to the mission and... maybe you have to track someone down, and you go to a place and get some information on where he is, which will take you somewhere else, and eventually you'll track down your target. Or smuggle some information from point A to point B.So we're gonna combine some scripted missions with procedural generation missions. And then also we allow our players themselves to create jobs or missions for other players. So I think between all that it should be pretty vibrant and interesting missions, and then it's kinda up to you what you want to take. So you don't have to do this thing first and then that thing afterwards. You could have maybe two, three or four missions on the go. Of course if you take a bunch of missions and you don't complete them that would knock your rating with the people you took the missions with, so they wouldn't necessarily want to hire you down the road. So you have to juggle all those things, but I think there's going to be some pretty... errr... a lot of options, let me put it that way.