Blog Banter #13: More Missions Please

Posted by prometheus09 on October 27, 2009

The Captains Log 27/10

 

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The first banter of this 2nd year of EVE Blog Banters comes to us fromZargyl from A Sebiestor Scholar, who asked the following: On the EVE Fanfest 2009 page are pictures of prizes for the Silent Auction that was held during the event. One of these photos was entitled “Design your own EVE mission”. My question now would be what kind of mission would you write if you got that prize? What would the mission be about? Would it be one using the new system of epic mission arks? What would be the story told by it? Feel free to expand upon his questions and put together your very own mission!

 

Before designing my own mission there would be several things I would do to improve missions in themselves. Currently, who pays attention to the story line? All missions come down to is grinding for ISK or standing. To fix this there would be several things I would like to do

1. Better Objectives and NPC AI

2. More immersion

3. More teamwork

Currently the objectives for missions revolve around one thing – blow up the enemy and if your really lucky bring something back. To make this even better the NPC AI is predicable allowing the player to run the mission without any critical thought.  Therefore it is necessary to introduce new objectives into missions and introduce the Sleeper AI into normal NPC’s.

Missions also need to be more immersive not just the current grab the mission (with out reading the story), blow up the rats, grab the loot and hand the mission in. So how can we make it more immersive? By having the agent open a chat with you during the mission and introducing new objectives that you need to complete before handing the mission in.

Further immersion can be obtained by introducing more teamwork into the mission so that players can fly them with other players.

 

So let’s put all this together into an example of a mission.

Mission: Medical Assistance

Background: Recent natural disasters in Ashab required immediate medical assistance so we sent out a medical transport to help with civilian injuries. However, en route it was ambushed by pirates. From the last transmission we received the transports escort was trying to get it out so we need you to go out and protect the medical transport ship.

 

Warping to the last known location of the transport ship will bring you to some pirates orbiting around some wreaks. Your agent then informs you to destroy the pirates and loot their wreaks to find a navigational log indicating where the medical transport went. You do this and find the log and warp the next location.

Once you land at location indicated by the log you see the medical transport is under fire with only a few of its escort left. If the medical transport dies you will fail the mission.

So you now have a few choices. You can try and destroy all the pirates before they destroy the ship. You could focus your fire on the pirates that have the transport pointed and hope you can kill them before the pirates doing the heavy DPS will destroy the transport. Or maybe if you have some friends along they can hop into a logistics ships and repair the damage being inflicted to the transport ship. Alternately those friends can all hop in combat ships and help you destroy the pirates.  Or maybe you want to utilise EWAR and jam the pirate ships that have the transport pointed. Bonus objectives could even be offered by your agent for destroying ships in a particular order. However, the actions you choose will influence what the tactics are employed by the pirates to destroy the ship. Bring in logistics ships will get them to agro the logistics ships and destroy them if they feel the transport is not dieing. Utilizing EWAR would get them to focus on the EWAR ships, thus needing you to use logistics to repair your EWAR ships. Furthermore, the pirates won’t devote all their firepower to one ship. If they see that they only need 10 ships to blow you up they will use 10 and have the rest concentrate on another target.

 

I thinking by adding these three things missions could be improved.

 

Other Blog Banters:

• Aether – Teach a man to fish…
• The Captain’s Log – More Missions Please
• Nukes Thoughts – Untitled
• Roc’s Ramblings – The Cave of Time
• The Wandering Druid of Tranquility –  It’s another episode of Design Star: EVE Style
• A merry life and a short one – Fatal Rabbit
• The Elitist – Guristas Invasion
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah – Mission: Tangled Webs
• Eve Trader – Missions with Player Adversaries
• A Starry Eyed Pod-Pusher – Wormhole EXTREAME