Development Cycle Archive

Well here are some things I thought would be cool. Some of these I posted on a thread several months ago...but not sure what happened to the thread.

I like the idea of having hologram is the game. You see them in nearly every movie, yet I have yet to see them in game. I always thought it would be cool to have an R2 used as a hologram projector. And I like the idea of recorded music and dancing that people can make recordings off and sell or distribute to play in R2s for wound healing or fatigue healing at a reduced rate. I think using the disks that can be found like the imperial plans and such could be used as the art asset for holding the info. I always thought it would be cool to have various quests scattered throughout the galaxy that you could find these disks and dro them in your R2s storage module and he could generate various holograms...maybe of a dead jedi, a message fragment intercepted from an imperial communication...schematics for a star destroyer or various vehicles. Those are the kind of things that would make me go on missions for NPCs. If I could get those disks then load them up in my R2 and then maybe set the R2 to cycle through them in my house. Something else I think would be cool along these lines is if these quests for hologram disks were all pieces in a game you could play in the game. So you could collect data disks for various vehicles and ships and people and then use those to play a board game like chess or something like heroclix or mageknight. I think using an R2 to show holgrams of merchandice would be great. Its a pain to go check out what a certain style of house or sturcture looks like, but an R2 could project a 3d image of it that could rotate and also reveal the interior room layout. That way the consumer can make more informed purchase decisions.

I think a way of taking orders would be a great way to make thecrafter to consumer pipeline smoother. I know emails work, but having a droid or vendor that could list what you have available to orderand at what price could make it so that people could ask for things not on vendors and help the craftsperson gauge what is in demand. They would lose fewer orders by people trying to find what thy want on other vendors, and consumers would have to spend less time searching to find a place that actually has stuff for sale. A gripe of mine recently is that so many people have stopped playing or caring about their vendors that they don't stock them at all anymore. Last night while looking for harvesters I hit at leat 20 empty vendors before I actually found a single one with anything on it. I thought there were issues with the vendor database or something until I finally checked mine and found it came up fine. Something needs to be done to remove the advertisements and/or thevendors from the game when they are empty and serving no purpose other than to frustrate potential customers. Another issue I don't like is when you look at vendors listed from the overhead map(not world map) the names all overlap each other, so unless there is only one there or you can deceifer what the words say it is really worthless to put these names onthe map only to make them unreadable.

Some things I would like to see change involve the way crafting works. Right now only a master crafter is worth buying from. They have the most experimentation and all the schematics. It is pretty much worthless to be a non-master, for everyone involved. I think that you could change the way the system works and it would help the economy and make it possible for people to actually play as a hybrid crafter that fills a niche without producing an inferior product. I think crafters could conceivably get all their experimentation points at the novice level, but fewer shematics to play with. A novice weaponsmith could make a component of a weapon as good as a master, but couldn't put the component in as high a weapon. So a level 1/1/1/1 might be able to make low end blasters, rifles, melee, and such. He could make all the components necessary to build those low end weapons completely and have them be as good as a master level. This allows him to specialize in either producing components for sale to master weaponsmiths or he could specialize in a certain line of weapons. You could make the master level gain the schematics for the most sought after weapons...like the T21, republic blaster, elite carbines...and so on. A weaponsmith could conceivablygo up one tree though to just specialize in melee weapons, minus the best stuff...you could have like a heavy weapon tree, small arms tree with the pistols and half the carbines, rifles tree with the higher end carbines, and a melee tree. In the end I just think you could spread out the schematics so that a tree gave you a specialization that allows you to compete on a quality level with masters, but not as much variety. So the penalty for novices is not that they can't make as good a product and thus will never sell anything because all their products are inferior to a masters, they sell less product because they have less selection, but it is just as good as masters stuff. I think that helps out masters who don't won't to have to produce every subcomponent of everything because now they can buy that off a non-master and it doesn't mean their product is worse for it...the non-master stands a chance at actually making sales because they sell good stuff that servesa purpose, they just don't have as much of it. I think that makes it easier for novices to break in and makes it so that non-masters actually have something worth selling instead of making the march to master purely a grind and a waste of time.

I don't see much point in the GCW right now. Perhaps there is going to be some changes to this in the future, but here is an idea, good or not...just an idea. The battlefields have been worthless so far, why not make battlefields into a zone around placed bases. That way when a group goes to lay siege against a base, its not just 40-50 people attacking some base with no support, the attackers could use their faction points to place their own turrets or portable siege warfare to help them. This would make it so that once I person goes to clone they can't run back in to resupport the defense or offense. Only doctors could keep you in the game on the field. Imps could call down At-Ats or At-sts, Rebels could call down air strikes or place turrets. Either way the attackers and defenders could actually use their faction points to make a viable difference in the defence of their base. Running faction missions would become important because people would need to keep their factino points up in case of attack or for raids. This would make battles feel like battles, instead of clone wars and the people were strategically picked off and got zapped and are sore about it aren't coming back over and over to grief and belittle people. I just would like to see base defense and attack become more epic.

I would like to see missions specific to professions that help teach your profession and give xp bonuses for doing them well. Such as a rifleman mission that requires you to pick off all the animals from under cover. You could just blast through the whole thing, but if you do it with using cover you could get through riflemen with less grind because of bonus xp and you understand the fundamentals of how to get there better. Maybe you could just call these training missions, with no monetary reward but an pretty decent increase in xp reward or bonus xp received for completion and could be given out by the appropriate trainers.

There are some times I think that cybernetic enhancements would be great. I mean Lobot from TESB had them why can't we? It could be fun for a Droid engineer and bio-engineer to make cybernetically enhanced attack pets, or impants with bonuses to various stats, or reprogrammable ones so that you could change professions and change your desired modifiers. Flashable memory perhaps. You could even tie this into the disks mentioned earlier. Only people with cybernetic implants could access the playback without an R2.

Well I am sure I could think of more things, but thats all I am up for right now.