Where Next?

With the beginner mini-series of Trucking Digest posts completed, I have to decide where my gaming posts should venture next. Posting about the Visual Novel game Winds of Change is a no-no. It would quickly hit the issue of spoilers and I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone who does decide to give the game a go. I can post about The Hunter – Call of the Wild. Although there are story missions in each of the reserves, it’s much more likely that I would be talking about the hunting on a particular map and sharing some nice screenshots. So that’s one possibility and such posts would see a return of the Birdshot series. Hold that thought and I’ll share a screen shot from a reserve I’m currently hunting on…

…Another possibility is a return to FS22 – I started a story but changing out my gaming pc rather messed that up. I know at least one of my readers likes the farm tales, so I will restart that series although I may need to rewrite the first post to adjust it for a different crop as the chances are that there will be something other than Sunflowers in Field 17 when I buy it. I should be able to replicate the basic farm buildings and layout ok though 😎 Unfortunately, I’m unlikely to be as lucky as I was in that play through – you never got to see the second-hand harvester that Monsieur Armand had secured for me…

There is a part of me that is itching to go back into space. Sadly, I think my Elite days are in the past – Introducing RNG mechanics into the performance of ships was a step beyond what I’m happy with, especially when you have to travel one of a few very select locations to roll those dice and hope that you might get a performance improvement. If it could be done on any station I might have been less disenchanted with the idea. But I still feel that Elite is very much a Space Trucking Simulation and simulations shouldn’t have random elements in the core mechanics of vehicles. Imagine if, in Truck Simulator, visiting the truck dealer in Berlin allowed me to tune my 460HP engine and get an increase in power that gave a random result somewhere between 500HP and 1000HP. That would be unrealistic. On the other hand, if I could buy a chip kit that boosted the power by a specific amount from any maintenance facility, then that would be realistic as such kits exist in the real world. I’ve used Euro Truck Simulator as an illustration and I hope you get the picture of why I have lost my mojo when it comes to Elite.

There are other space games on the market. Ignoring games involving the Star Wars and Star Trek universe, along with those that are really first person shooters like Destiny and Warframe, I’m really looking for something a little like Elite but perhaps with a little more company and fleet management style of play. There are a few of these around. Perhaps the most well known is EVE Online. It looks stunning and has a lot of possibilities in variety of play. There is one limiting factor – the cost. If you want to progress to the better ships then you have to pay a monthly subscription either through real cash or though a form of in-game currency that is equivalent to cash. Now you can buy a Training Boost Bundle and I understand that the long term players are not happy about it – EVE was always very ‘Pay to Win’ but that has really set the seal on it and, frankly, I want no part of it.

I’m currently looking very seriously at X4: Foundations. This game seems to sit somewhere between EVE and Elite in terms of gameplay It has the possibility for building and operating fleets – which is not a part of Elite gameplay. You can sit in and pilot your ship which is not something you actually do in EVE. One major difference between X4 and the other games is that it doesn’t have a Player v Player element. That doesn’t bother me too much. Both EVE and Elite have their share of gankers – players that hang out in groups where new players spawn and kill them for fun. I know that in Elite, some vigilante groups came into being to hunt down gankers and kill them in an effort to discourage the practise. There were other groups that would fly to the rescue of anyone out of fuel and stranded in the galaxy. PVP often brings out the worst in gamers but sometimes it can also bring out the best! In my time in Elite I always played in the PVP world. I was never killed by another player but I did get to make a couple of good friends along the way 😎

I do have one ‘Space’ game that I have already re-started, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, so I will probably post some screenshots from that one soon. But it’s a very claustrophobic space – imprisoned in a dockyard area, dismantling old ships. There are no grand vistas here 😓

So that’s where I’m at – hurrying through the Winds of Change story, driving my trucks, preparing to do some farming, cutting up some old vessels and looking seriously at another space game – Variety, as they say, is the spice of life 😂