When playing a video game, you want those experiences where you feel like a God of War. That's why I've personally navigated away from purely PvP games in the past many years. It just doesn't feel particularly good to get owned over and over before hardly getting a round off. I personally love PvE and co-op PvE because those games are geared towards making you get that adrenaline high while buffing that all important gamer ego.
I truly think that SC has a pretty good gameplay model:
- For ships, you have master modes where you can choose between speed and offensive/deffensive capabilities. I just wish that you could pop chaff and flares while in navigation mode. This would allow you to more easily get that gaming high by escaping a tough situation. In my mind, it comes down to how effective/balanced missles/countermeasures are. Once ship armor is incorporated into the game, this can also provide a new and exciting element to gameplay.
- For avatars, you have will basically have light, medium, and heavy armor sets that may be optimized for different situations. Maybe you need heavy exploration armor to provide you with just enough insulation to locate a lost relic on an ice planet and get back to the safety of your ship before freezing to death. You may have light, medium, or heavy combat armor with varying levels of dexterity/armor protection to compliment your play style. You may, otherwise, have a flight suit to give you benefits with handling Gs in a dogfight.
Star Citizen is straddling a difficult gameplay style by incorporating PvE, co-op PvE, and PVP in one open universe. So, how do you give players the God of War feels while maintaining balanced gameplay for all? Do you somehow separate PvE and PvP gameplay areas/systems/planets? Or, do you have a purely expansive galaxy who's size alone will limit random PvP griefing - encouraging that "I'm the King of the World" feeling (until you just aren't)? Maybe players just need to suck it up, practice, and get better with the gameplay they find interesting?
Perhaps a lot of this might come down to the degree of bullet sponge for ships and avatars? I love games like Ghost Recon series where you have more realism with 1-3 shot kills, bleed out, and crippling effects. I'm also fine with quite a bit of bullet sponge like The Division series if it makes an exaggerated sense of reality with things like armor thickness. It just comes down to balancing how effective ship shields, ship armor, and avatar armor/clothing is for the specific role you want to accomplish. If you don't have a helmet on, one bullet to the head should kill. If you have a heavily armored helmet, it might take 10 bullets to the head.
If you had the keys to CIG, how would you encourage a gamer 'high' for all in a PvE, co-op PvE, and PvP gameplay world? What degree of bullet sponge is acceptable to you?
