Elite Online dreaming

I played Earth & Beyond in late 2002, and stopped playing before I started this blog, so I never talked much about it here. In many respects E&B was quite a nice game, one of the best space flight games I played. It had interesting combat, and a very interesting system of having separate combat experience, trade experience, and exploration experience. The main reason I didn't like it was the static trade system: NPCs bought and sold goods at fixed prices, and trade consisted of shipping always the same goods between the same points. It soon became clear which "runs" were the most effective, and then everybody found himself on the Somerled - Fenris run ad infinitum.

In 2003 I played EVE Online, and that was even less satisfying. The trade system was much better, but getting ganked in PvP and losing much of my progress pretty much ruined the game for me. Being ganked in PvP by itself is bad enough, but when you can potentially lose your cargo, your ship, and a significant portion of your skills from being shot down it gets downright unplayable. And while trading was nice, the economy was based on the mining of asteroids, which was very, very boring. Solo it wasn't very effective, and in a group you'd get assigned a specific job, and did for example firing your mining laser at asteroids for hours, throwing out the ore in cans to be collected by somebody else. *Yawn*

But while previous space flight MMORPGs have been mostly botched, I do think the genre has much more potential. The great thing about space flight games is that they have concepts of distance and transport and trade which are missing in the fantasy teleport weightless-inventory MMORPGs of today. What I would like is an Elite Online, capturing the great single-player experience of that game and making it even better as a MMORPG. The game would need to have a dynamic trade system, either similar to EVE, or based on NPC brokers who change their prices based on supply and demand. To make transporting goods from A to B interesting there would be the chance of being attacked by NPC or player pirates. But even if they got you, you wouldn't lose your ship, not more than a fraction of your cargo, and certainly no experience or skill. I'd rather have more encounters with a smaller negative impact than an all-or-nothing system where nothing happens most of the time, and then once in a while you lose everything. Resource gathering wouldn't involve hours of asteroid mining, but maybe harvesting stations which would have to be relocated regularly, like in SWG. Crafting would be a game by itself, with the quality of the resources and your skill in combining them affecting the result. Besides trade there would be quests for both combat and exploration, similar to E&B. And all that with a triple-A budget, and not some dinky browser-based 2D interface.

Alas, there is no such game, it's just a dream. If you transplant the concept from space to sea, Pirates of the Burning Sea is somewhat similar, but of course not quite as perfect as a dream game. :) Being a realist at heart, I'll probably just play that one until WAR comes out. Because waiting with your breath held for Warhammer Online is probably even less productive than dreaming of the ideal game. I wonder what Startrek Online is going to offer, but that one is even further away, and not sure to have a trade part at all. Maybe one day somebody is bringing out a well-done space flight game, but I can't spend my time waiting for it, I need something to play now.