Feature Creep: Prison Blues

So imagine with me in the misty future where you’re a smuggler in Star Citizen, and you have just broken a blockade. You got a nice pretty payout running guns to the rebels on the planet, but you didn’t get out clean. Then in real life your son has a poopy diaper that requires your attention so you leave your hapless mariner of the stars spinning in space for twenty minutes to take care of business.

When you get back your character is in the inside of a Bounty Hunter’s prisoner stasis pod. Said Bounty Hunter is talking all kinds of smack about catching a lifeless puppet, and all you can see is the floating option to stay in the pod and wait for rescue or jump straight to prison. Annoying, especially since you don’t have any friends handy for a rescue, and you really hate the prison gameplay loop.

What do you do?

We’ll, my less than moral entrepreneuring spacefarer, I have a proposition for how to improve our little imprisonment issue. This is only the first iteration of the prison gameplay loop, and it shows. I went there recently. I can confirm that you're down to mining, escaping, or sitting on your thumbs in a drab facility with not so interactive NPCs. Not the best of starts.

To be fair, this is Alpha stage so they probably only want to iron out the escape and mining options right now as well as the length of sentences to make the loop flow properly, but unfortunately I have to say I find it boring. Yep, boring. That’s death for a video game in my book so let’s all imagine how CIG might improve things with future iterations.

Let’s go back to your hapless smuggler stuck in the bounty hunter pod. You know that you’re pretty far from civilization where he caught you so you know that your smack talking hunter has quite the trip ahead of him to turn in your hapless stasis ridden body. A few friends might be willing to crack your pod if you act fast, but there’s a problem. 

You’re a busy man. This is your only hour or two you can play Star Citizen for at least the next few days. Work in real life is brutal, and toddlers don’t hold back their punches. Do you really want to waste that last hour sitting in a lifeless pod as you wait for your friends to track this bounty hunting cad ship? No, of course you don’t. But what if the pod wasn’t so lifeless?

What if you can access the electronic access game with the game modes from inside the stasis pod? If you choose to wait you can play the game just not the main game as you wait on rescue or the inevitable incarceration. 

This is a simple yet effective way to solve the pod dilemma. It’s still a risk sense you might be even longer from your glorious smuggling ship, but at least you can still enjoy the game itself while still be taken out of the PU persistent action which is what prison is designed to do. 

Now let’s say you didn’t have any friends to save you, and opt to jump right into the slammer of malcontents and bad boys. Why not allow you to play the electronic access games from prison too? They could even craft an activist group in the lore that pushed for game access for criminals. Their crooks not animals! Or something equally as silly.

But why stop there? How about making this a method for earning merits, and shortening your sentence as well? 

The way I see things right now only one career path can continue to act out their career in prison albeit in a limited way that instead of enriching themselves shortens their sentence, and that’s mining. I like that idea. Let’s take it all the way, and work on virtually every career path receiving the same love.

If people can still play the gameplay loop they enjoy even in prison while being put in timeout from the main game I think we’ll have a winner here. Sure, there should also be prison gameplay unique to prison which we already see in the escape root, and more planned with the boxing ring, bounty’s on rebellious inmates, and other prison missions I think it would be beneficial for the game to remember that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

You may say, “Then don’t do anything illegal bad boy,” and you’re right, but we have to be practical. If someone who usually just does salvage wants to explore a different gameplay route, and gets landed with a five hour sentence in a gameplay loop they find they hate that player might just shut the game off. Permanently. I know I’m tempted to just play another game rather than deal with my sentence. 

That’s why catering to every play style is important. Everyone will probably get tempted to or even accidentally get a crimestat at some point in their Star Citizen run so let’s cater to what they want to do. If they’re more combat orientated, but not so into the shanking kind of combat you get in a prison scenario we have the electronic access game modes.

To make it interesting, how about making prison tournaments on these gamemodes where the winners can earn merits, people can bet merits and currency on the outcomes, and prison escapes can be set up through shady chat rooms and hacking options there in. This would go a long way to keeping prisons in their assigned purpose while making them more enjoyable.

This post is long enough, but I might revisit the topic later. Maybe we’ll explore a Mad Max style racing track like their building in Grimm Hex that allows the more racing orientated types to earn merits through violent racing cups. It play into salvage as salvage players could earn merits by cleaning up the debris left after the races, and medical types earning merits for first aid. See how it all flows together? Here is hoping that CIG takes a keen interest in our less than scrubbable play styles and prison in particular.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter @RPGrizzly1 and Infogalactic @RPGrizzly !

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