Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[inteuniso]

They said that there will be lots of missions during the travel. So, traveling to Mars might take a few months, but you will be able to do missions such as repairing a computer, or making sure a radiation shield is in place. Judging from Moonbase Alpha, they have a good setup.

[TheBronzePickle]

Hopefully not literal months. All the mission minigames in the world wouldn't be worth waiting 3 months just to be able to continue with the main game. Maybe a few days at most.

[Saint]

Hopefully not literal months. All the mission minigames in the world wouldn't be worth waiting 3 months just to be able to continue with the main game. Maybe a few days at most.

Agreed, no one is stupid enough to make it that realistic though.

[Sensei]

Even in multiplayer, they can say "the flight takes three months" and drop you off (at the cost of implied synchronicity). I can see the delays if it were a management game, but it looks like a lot of this consists of running around and doing things oneself.

[Shadowlord]

Hopefully not literal months. All the mission minigames in the world wouldn't be worth waiting 3 months just to be able to continue with the main game. Maybe a few days at most.

Agreed, no one is stupid enough to make it that realistic though.

If you build it, they will come.

[Sensei]

I think Desert Bus falls into the "ironic" category.

[Saint]

I think that maybe in space travel mode you'd move maybe 1 hour per month or something and have minigames to go along with it.

[inteuniso]

Alright, Space travel is NOT going to be abstracted. Advanced engines will crunch the time down to about 80 days, but you're still going to have to wait.

There is, however, their form of a workaround.

Now my idea was to have avatars of avatars in the game (it was in our pitch document).

Again, so you put on a helmet, and so do 3 of your friends. You head to a moonbase. On that moonbase, you open your eyes, and see your friends, and they see you. If astronauts put on a helmet, they see you too, but there is a slight time delay.

This delay gets larger if we consider Mars. It could be minutes.

So even if future engines take 80 days to get there (instead of a year), what can we do with the time? Besides having your avatar selves hop around magically - you can take control of robots sent ahead of time.

Well we build - we build - the delay gets easier when we get closer [Edit: NB That is when you're flying in a spacecraft to a destination.].

tl;dr you get to control robots on the surface of Mars and Deimos while waiting to get there.

[Saint]

Genius, While we wait we can build our moon base so we can just get right to work!

[The Mechanical Man]

Alright, Space travel is NOT going to be abstracted. Advanced engines will crunch the time down to about 80 days, but you're still going to have to wait.

While 80 days might be much faster than normal, it gives me hope that all aspects of this game are at least moderately realistic. Clearly this means they are not catering to the average Call of Duty player, which also clearly means they won't have to worry about simplifying the game.

[Saint]

Well maybe have a day being 24 hours, 12 hours ingame per 1 hour real life like most games with a day/night cycle or so. That means you have 160 hours or only 6.6 days real time to pass 80 ingame days.

[BloodBeard]

How they deal with time will most likely make or break this I think. Because it's multiplayer, speeding up time so that days are reduced to hours or minutes only works if you make it universal, whether your flying in space or not. I don't see how that would work without looking really silly for the things that don't need any time compression. So yeah, the only alternative would be unrealistically fast ships.