from the steam forums:
Since it's now a single player focused game, I would hope that Haxus strongly considers adding NPC empires and faction commodity trading for the sake of longevity.
The game currently has pirate factions, but I'm talking much bigger empires of RNG aliens with varying levels of tech and hostility toward the player.
The end-game of the original online Shores of Hazeron was player vs player interaction, but now that is missing. Adding discoverable NPC trading stations where you could buy/sell resources for profit would really take this game to another level, imo.
seems like there's no trading or diplomacy with other empires in the game (they are always hostile towards you)
That post is from me.
You are correct, the NPC interaction is extremely limited. This game is primarily a space exploration and civ builder experience, not a space trader (a la Elite). Adjust your expectations accordingly. That said, I'm hoping the NPC experience gets fleshed out more in the future.
I don't think it's going to happen; it's more likely the MMO version but solo. He also never accepted help from anyone, and if he wanted to hire a team for this, he could have done so 20 years ago already. Without other players, it will certainly lose a lot of its interest, as it was fun to design a ship completely from scratch and land on other people's places to show them or level down their whole civilization. There was a certain old-school MMO feel with a lot of griefing. The first guy I met was a Brazilian who landed his warship; I chatted with him and became friends, but he confessed later that his first intentions were simply to raze everything as it was too close to his system. While some were building racing arenas on their ships, mine were min-maxed warships with a few inside turrets to prevent hijacking, as you could easily invade other player ships, bomb the hatch, and kill the crew inside. Without those player interactions and without AI empires, which I expect to be extremely unlikely to happen, it will lose a lot of its interest. It's already very niche because it's for gamers who go for stuff like Dwarf Fortress in ASCII or indie multiplayer games like Space Station 13. It's true gaming in its purest form and not for everyone.
Haxus has mentioned more than once that he would like to re-implement network capability at some point if interest is high enough in the Steam release. Here's what he said a while back. That said, the guy is extremely wish-washy, so who knows.
http://www.hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=2824
The servers are not being dismantled. It was too much work and too expensive to throw away. Instead they will go into hibernation in their little climate controlled room in town. The computer hosting my web and email servers will remain online.
That will cut my expenses by more than $2000 per month. It also eliminates a lot of stress from my world.
The code is structured such that little effort is needed to keep the server code alive. I’ll do that as long as it’s easy.
Each worker server only loads the portion of the universe assigned to it. No server loads all of the data in the universe; it’s too big. This makes access to some data complicated to acquire, by a worker, the server your client spends most of its time talking with.
Conversely the solo game loads the entire universe. All data is instantly accessible in the computer’s memory throughout the game. The temptation to cheat will be difficult to resist, especially when it comes to storyline. That will break the MMO but it would not preclude a single-server hosted network game.
I like the idea of keeping network playability. The game cries out for it. The feature would require a fair bit of coding and testing.
Then cold hard reality sets in.
Hazeron Starship is currently configured to sell for $9.99 on Steam. Considering the million plus dollars I’ve already put into this project, it might have to sell quite a few copies before I get interested in investing much more. 100 copies? Nah; I carry that much in my pocket for spending money. 1000 copies? Ho hum. 10,000 copies? Now I’m interested. I do not know what to expect. Many games were kind of rough in version one, sold a lot of copies, then got a major facelift in version two.
Yes, he said so, but sadly, he again has no clue about what makes a game successful; he's good at making a simulation, but that's all. A simple example: the city building at the beginning was just landing building blocks and drawing straight lines for roads; it was good enough. However, he redesigned it, spending time on stuff that was not necessary but neglecting aspects that would be sorely needed, like a reason to build all those ships and cities. There's absolutely no reason to optimize and get Q255 materials for a solo version as the NPCs were never challenging. Local coop won't do anything good; it needs a bigger community. It's a bit like RPG Codex; you need the jerks and the retards to make things fun; you need to band together with friends to protect your turf. For example, you had the Syndicate who were rude, retarded jerks, but it was fun to fight them, despite the lag. It's nice to have a good simulation, but you need human players; AI ones are still impossible for now to have emerging gameplay. Otherwise, it will be very dull very fast. Once you have launched a ship in shores of Hazeron solo, you have seen everything, i have no reasons to think it will be any different in hazeron ship. It's like being a dolphin in an ocean with no sharks...
I am harsh with indies, but I am telling the truth, not luring people into something that won't ever happen.
