Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Moving forward... new purpose ideas for Bio-Eng in 2004
Germaine wrote:
How about letting us create subcutaneous implants for PCs that can semi-permanently increase a player's HAM stats or substats buy a modest amount?
Excellent idea and it ties in with the one Scorus made about increasing our range of tissues. What artisan (or BE for that matter) wouldn't want something like that which would boost their mind stats to help with sampling? The trick will be to determine a rate of decay that ensures a reasonable repeat market without having people feel they are being exploited.
Well, I think you're raising some good points here Tal, but we both know this stuff is "pie in the sky". It took our dev 6 months tocome out with what we've got now, and that's probably it for us for a long long time. This is kind of our day in the sun right now as they are moving on to some other professions (Chef and droid engineer as far as crafting professions go) that haven't gotten even a fraction of the attention we've gotten so far. So my guess is that no matter what cool ideas we come up with, what we've got now, minus a few bugs, and plus a few new bugs and nerfs is probably what we'll have 6 months from now.
Your synthetic materials idea is interesting, and would be cool, but of course we already have big time problems with the database, and if anything we need to reduce the number of possible resources and increase stackability. I think your idea would cause an exponential explosion in the wrong direction with regards to that.
I think the "buffs" area of the game is already extremely overcrowded. We have doctors, entertainers, chefs, and foraged items all buffing. I don't think we need another there. They know what they have to do to make us viable in that area anyway, just by making chef a viable profession and our bio additives attractive to them.
Weapons? yea, I could see us playing a role there. Perhaps some new bio weapons (new types of poisons etc)that would support say the combat medics would be a welcome change both for them and for us.
Also there is certainly a lot of room for support of the image designer class. Being able to make products for them that would allow humanoid hybrids and stuff like that. That would probably be a big challenge for the Art team of SWG, but it would be a wecome addition.
Tal-N wrote:
when the space expansion is added your going to see all other crafting professions but us getting involved.
I'd be glad to know where you put Chefs, Tailors and Medics in there...
A BE is not in competition with a CH for pet SUPPLY. A BE can make superior pets at ALL levels. Yes, its difficult at low levels, but if you get the right combination of low level DNA you can make a NON-CH mount/extra attackwith a range of resists, decent health and maybe even a special attack. And a BE can make pets at all level ranges (though getting an exact level is hit and miss), providing a supply of pets TO CH's. With the new CH system, levels increment more slowly so CH's will be looking for pets across all levels, instead of just 15, 25, 35,... you get the picture. Before CH's had1 line with +5 or +10 to level of control at each step, now they have 4 lines with +2, +3 or +5. Example, CH 0/0/0/0 has 12 for their max level of pets, CH 1/1/1/1 has 20 for there max level. They're likely going to want a new pet ever 2-3 skill boxes, at least, to maximize their experience.
Ideas for pets
Non-CH mount/mini tank. You can't get high HAM, but any little extra resists or special attacksyou can fit on the mount is worth it for the non-CH to use a mount instead of a vehicle. Ranged attack if possible, so the pet tries to keep range from the target instead of taking hits and dying fast.
CL 30-35 CH tank/mount. Ranged attack and poison. CH's don't like non-cat bodys because of their speed, but if their mount has good armor and specials, they can use their mount as fast transport AND1 of their 2 MCH pets.
FortunoFiasco wrote:
Tal-N wrote:
when the space expansion is added your going to see all other crafting professions but us getting involved.
I'd be glad to know where you put Chefs, Tailors and Medics in there...
If i was to fire a shot I'd say chefs will simply feed into the new pilot profession (yes there has been confirmation that piloting will be a seperate profession with perks when flying since well before pre-release) the medics have always been about healing so they simply get to operate on ships as needed, the potential for mobile medical centres is a start and tailors.. well, pilot uniforms and such spring to mind.
I'm willing to bet that the space expansion will be transparent to non-expansion players. Added skill point system for 'space' professions, not impacting the current skill trees.
Role for artisans?Since they indicated the space combat will be about the human player skill, not skill points, I don't see where terrestrial artisans would fit into this. It won't be a battle won by the guy with the 'uber super experimented, sliced Krayt tissue X-wing', all the ships will be the same within their respective models. The only place I can see terrestrial artisans getting involved is building ships/ship systems, but the construction will likely be like the first TC rideable vehicles, resources didn't matter, they all had the same stats. Under the current economy I can't see how ALL Space ships would be built by terrestrial artisans, the drain on resources from the economy would be worse than the Hologrind drainwe see now. The space ships would remove resources from the terrestrialeconomy and thespace economy (if there is one)would have nothing to return to the 'terrestrial' economy. I'm more inclined to believe that if there are 'space' artisans they will work off space stations/ship yards, resource collection will be on a larger scale (asteroid mining) to supply resources for ship building, with no impact on the terrestrial economy. Initial ships might be built by players using terrestrial resources to 'get off the planet' but once in space a larger scale resource collection for space construction would be possible.
The profession needs to be fixed before new stuff is added.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they ban you for 3 days. Then yer at it again
Well the space expansion is going to be a recreation of the kind of X-Wing and TIE fighter games we have been playing for years, the controls are nearly identical too. What you have is basically those kinds of games in a persistant universe, you'll have missions as normal where you fly across the galaxy. Shuttleports will probably only be needed to move around on a planet while your personal spacecraft can be used for planet hopping. I don't think they'll be able to allow you to land your frieghter on the planet, theres no feasable way to make parking space for every player so i think they'll limit it to spacestations that you dock with and then take a shuttle down to the planets. Think of it like a way to enforce customs laws by ensuring everything passes through security when entering and leaving the planets.
Ok so thats not very starwarsy but it'll work. It would have been nice to land on the planets yourself but I personally can see alot of graphical challanges with that plus the afore mentioned parking space issue.
To be honest, our cloning was our biggest independent feature. (By independent, it was a final product of crafting that is directly used by other players, unlike tissues, which are just sub-components used in other player's crafting of items.)
I can live without being able to make non-ch clones (of any sellable quality), but there's not a huge market for CH pets (you'll sell them, but there's nowhere near the demand of weapons, armor, clothes, etc). So we fall back on tissues. Now, unless it's a tissue requiring milk or some other rare resource, people want cheap crates of the stuff, and most of it sells to tailors. (Soon Chefs also, or I hope, given the changes they'll soon have.)
So we're left with a pretty niche market for selling items, and a cloning system that still needs a few fixes.
To be honest there are professions that are worse off, but there are ones that are far better by comparison.
I like the idea of synthesizing flora food, or perhaps improving the stats on organic resources. The problem is where do you put a limit in? Why buy regular flora food if BE's can make stuff much better. If you put limits in, how do you stop the limits from making the ability useless?
It's very difficult to improve on BE's without taking something away from another class. It would be nice if we had more varied tissues, rather than improvements on lower-tier items. One side note might be to give us something unique for our clones. Perhaps a certain special attack or two that only BE's can put in pets, or perhaps Pet Enhancers that add temporary bonuses or buffs to pets?
Fellstaff wrote:
I'm more inclined to believe that if there are 'space' artisans they will work off space stations/ship yards, resource collection will be on a larger scale (asteroid mining) to supply resources for ship building, with no impact on the terrestrial economy. Initial ships might be built by players using terrestrial resources to 'get off the planet' but once in space a larger scale resource collection for space construction would be possible.
Ack, I just had this awful flashback to when I was beta-testing EVE. There's a reason why it's known as "Mining in Space". 
Unless it's been drastically changed, it was one of the most mind-numbingly boring activities going (much worse than hand sampling here), with the added bonus that you could be attacked and lose everything you had gained.
If the developers have anything like that in mind, I hope they've looked at EVE for a lesson in how not to do it.
well...I am wondering where all of this is "going"...?? if space exploration is going to be nothing more than a foray into the x-wing and tie fighter series... feh... ..but where is this game going? what's next?...what I have seen posted does not make me that excited...especially with our non-ch pets most likely being replaced with combat droids...
sure, our cloning system has been given a booster shot...but really, without non-ch pets to sell... and a slowly-shrinking CH market... I really don't want to go back to making stims and tissues...(unless new tissues are provided to us)...
I can't see me staying with the game much longer..much less BE... I do know one thing..next fall, with the release of Star Wars Battlefront...I am out of here.....(imagine Battlefield 1942 only all star wars...)
tired of being jerked around,
Depressed BE on Kettemoor