Feature Creep: Space Camping
Oh the doldrums of delays and more delays! Out from the woodwork they come out to complain, and freak out about our lovely Star Citizen. Suddenly, it's a scam again! We’ll never see her completed, and on and on.
It seems that every personality involved with Star Citizen is either complaining or defending the project. Join me as we ignore all of them, and continue to dream up new features and solutions that we may play around with in future interactions of our favorite space game in the making. I think I do have something to say on the subject of the mad excess nerd rage against our spaceship blasting simulation, but I will wait for 3.10 to come out and the inevitable wave of positivity floods back into the community. When that happens I’ll write about the excessive criticism.
For now though, how do you feel about camping in space? You find that perfect green pasture on Microtech. You’ve ridden up in your Cyclone miles from your ship as you get carried away by the beautiful sights only to see the churning swirling clouds of death flowing over the mountains, and right for your pretty little head.
Worse, you realize you left your fancier suite back at your ship. Your current gear will not be enough to survive the tempest, and you’re in an open canopy land buggy too far from your ship to escape. What do you do?
Cry till your character freezes to death in a massive wall of death? No! Break out your portable shelter you brought along for this adventure, and wait the raging storms out. Complete with a comfortable bed to log out of, a connection to the remote access games, heating or cooling depending on your need, a few storage lockers, and life support for all your oxygen related needs. This camping kit can fit comfortably in one SCU of space, but there are others with less bells and whistles that can be carried in a ruck on your back.
You log out with confidence knowing full well that your character will be snug, warm, and ready for some more cosmic off road exploring when you get back from your day job. Behold the power of a sleeping bag in a game where you require a bed to log off.
With the addition of light survival mechanics in game we suddenly have a need for camping mechanics as well. Storms, starvation, and death by thirst are all reasons to start implementing some form of camp mechanics. You feel this the most in game whenever you escape from prison, and steal one of the Ursa Rovers.
Now you won’t die immediately, but you have no place to log out from before getting strafed by a bounty hunter. We have our first taste of death mattering more as well since if you die before you can escape the planet you will respawn back in prison with a longer sentence. Being one to both be the bounty hunter and the escapee I see a few ways to make this cat and mouse game more interesting.
This mechanic would really open up some interesting avenues. In the previous example you could throw down a quick sleeping bag in the back of the Ursa to log in later when a friend could pick you up or so you can continue your slow crawl to a facility to “borrow” a ship that came to trade. Maybe you want to do some extensive mining in a cave with some friends, but don’t have enough beds to go around in the ships. Throw down some high tech sleeping bags with built in life support systems, and you’ll all log back in ready to go rock blasting.
Add in various methods for gathering food and water, and you’ll have the start of some proper survival mechanics when far from civilization. In the future you could easily find yourself stranded on a planet, even a planet like Microtech with cities on it, and be too far away from civilization to hope to survive the elements before someone gets around to picking you up. Having a mobile campsite mechanic opens up options when death means serious loss.
Besides all that, people already like to roll around to enjoy the scenery in Star Citizen so it would be pretty awesome to have an Origin made campsite you could set up to enjoy a sunset in style. Add in more applicable features for more expensive campsites like inflatable habs, connection to Theaters of War and the like, food processing tools, water filters, emergency beacon, wildlife deterrent devices, maybe even a mini automated turret for defense, and they could really delve into some deep gameplay with this mechanic that would touch almost every profession in the game.
Heck I know I’d pay some serious in-game currency for a fancy futuristic inflatable Jacuzzi to set up in the middle of the deserts of Daymar or a barbecue on one of Arcorps' many towers. Your imagination is the limit, and nothing is too crazy with this project.
So gentleman, take my lead, and dream about laying out our sleeping bags under the stars in the mouth of a cave in a far off jungle planet hoping our power supply lasts as the turret keeps the ever encroaching scorpion monkeys at bay. Good times out exploring the verse. Or at least, it will be till the monkeys catch you.
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