This week’s update is going to focus on another new mission features that I’ve worked on the past week. Keep reading to find out more!
This past week I finally got to the Deep Space section of the Nexus. As I was going through the missions there, I came to the first mission in the Augmenter Tweaking chain. It requires that players find a Minor Docking Augmenter. This isn’t that big a deal outside the Nexus, but inside that’s a very, very specific request for a new player. Ultimately, I decided to move Augmenter Tweaking (and Focus Selection) outside of the Nexus, but it left me wondering a few things; mainly, why don’t we have missions that can take items from categories?
That thinking led to a new mission goal I have been working on, the Egg Carton, or a mission goal that lets you turn in any combination of items (or easter eggs) from a set of items. With this mission goal content developers will be able to flag items with a set, for instance, Minor Augmenters, and then specify a ‘collect item’ mission goal that will accept any items from that set. This will let us reduce mission bloat a lot for turn-in type missions and make some earlier missions, like the Augmenter Tweaking one, a whole lot easier for new players to finish. A very good example of where this could be extremely useful is in Lyceum. Between the Honorary Mention and Diplomas, there are over 50 turn-in missions. With this new mission goal, I can reduce that number to 2, and offer the added benefit of mixing and matching blueprints!
This mission goal has a few turn-in options as well. If you try to complete with exactly the number of items from the set the mission requires, it will take all of them. If you try to turn in with more items you get two options provided via a pop-up menu. The first lets you pick which items you want the mission to take. The second lets the server automatically pick the items until enough have been taken to fulfill the mission requirement.
Finally I needed a way to let players know what items belong in a set. For that I have my first solution, which is to put a colored field in the item tooltip as in the example image above. However, that is not finalized and I would like to get player feedback on that. I could change the tooltip text to be reliant on having the appropriate mission to be visible, or put it as part of the general tooltip text so it doesn’t stand out as much. Player feedback on this is definitely appreciated so I can come to a final decision on this.
So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update, but until then, please post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!
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