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Tom_Holsinger -> RE: Role Playing (12/17/2009 6:13:46 PM)
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The responses by Wade and Joram show a classic conflict in these types of games. They object to the concept of a game having a “backstory” of events which occurred before those in the game. It is very difficult to role-play turn-based space 4x games without a backstory, so this is really an objection to the concept of role-playing such games, including in the eXploration phase where some games have important ruins, space monsters, etc., all of which involve the players discovering events which occurred in the game’s backstory.
The conflict is that it is pretty much impossible for the designer of a turn-based space 4x game to simultaneously satisfy the players who want role-playing and the ones who don’t. It is possible to split the difference, but that is generally done by letting players design their own ships, which lets them identify with their fleets in combat. Absent player design of their own ships, though, it is both difficult to split the difference and there is a non-trivial risk of just antagonizing both groups.
Armada 2526 has little role-playing, and this might be intentional. It will be interesting to see what kind of market success it has if patches don’t beef it up much in this regard.
Minor improvements in the eXploration and eXpansion phase, by adding more types of race-specific planetary environments, will boost role-playing only a little, and merit doing more because this is an expected feature of turn-based space 4x games than for role-playing reasons.
What counts more for role-playing per se are distinct differences in behavior between the various races, including as player empires, and it is the game's failure to do do so concerning technology which leads me to suspect that its absence of role-playing might have been intentional. As an example, the races with advantages in hyper-space and psychic research could have been been given some default technologies in those areas. Game play would certainly be different if the ground troops of race with a psychic advantage had the default ability to terrify the ground troops of other races.
In any event, the first code patch will be pretty good evidence as to whether the game's relative dearth of role-playing was intentional. If the first code-patch doesn't beef it up, the absence was intentional. If the first code patch beefs up role-playing, that will tend to indicate that Ntronium just ran out of time developing the game before the release date came up.
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