Drox Operative

[madcow]

From the diablo thread I know there are some fans of Din's Curse, and well I didn't want to derail that thread anymore (plus its on the very deep inevitable discussion about big-name developers/publishers "are they evil or not"). But sorting through Din's curse I saw stuff about Drox Operative from the same company, and its on beta now - with beta access if you prepurchase.

So the question is, what do people think so far. It looks very interesting and is tempting! Anybody given it a go?

[keith.lamothe]

Since AVWW 1.1 deployment was most of yesterday and didn't really involve me, I spent a fair bit of time on the Drox beta. It just became available yesterday, so it's the very first public version, but it's already very fun in general.  I've run into a situation at the end of my first sector where I need to make an alliance with one more race and it's dragging a bit because either there aren't particularly fast ways of getting relations up in that situation or I just haven't found them yet

And I'm figuring the Dryad race (which is now swimming in credits because it's colonized like 90% of the sector) wasn't supposed to have just now gifted me more money than I could have made in a month solid of adventuring at this level, but hey, beta

[Mánagarmr]

I have so far heard only good things about Drox and I've followed Shadow (the dev) on Twitter during much of the development and it seems to be a fairly deep game. Once I get some more time on my hands I'll definitely look into it.

[Castruccio]

I played a whole bunch yesterday and the game is awesome.  My only real gripe at the moment is that the movement speed of your initial ship is too slow, but I think he may tweak that in a future patch.  I also think he is going to do some more to differentiate the races. 

[Wingflier]

Are the different factions constantly battling each other?  That's pretty cool if so.

[keith.lamothe]

Are the different factions constantly battling each other?  That's pretty cool if so.

If they're at war they send attacks against each other's planets and eventually someone gets wiped out (or they make peace).

In my first game it felt like the Dryads were playing MoO on easy as they quickly colonized about 80% of the galaxy, but everything was pretty peaceful.  Right about the time I reached the highest level systems in the sector a bunch of declarations-of-war flew around (some against my one little ship) and I had to flee back to Dryad space.  Didn't take long for the Dryads to kill everyone except the Lithosoids (their allies) and my main remaining task was building up relations with the Lithosoids so we could all be allied and I'd win the sector (alternatively I could have provoked the Dryad into killing the Lithosoids which might have been faster but if I'd gotten caught bad enough to make the Dryad DoW me I'd have been up a creek without a ramjet).

In my second (current) game the RNG also put me in the Dryad's starting system and I've helped them by exploring planets and sending them the data (which makes them like me a lot) and they even asked me to do the actual "run the colony module over" phase of a couple of their colonizations (more +relations).  I was figuring on encouraging it to play out the same way as the first game but this time the Hive colonized a system right in the path of the Dryads such that they only had two systems to work with; they could just split the next system with the Hive and moved on but I wasn't sure it would work out well.  That and the Hive were real jerks to me in the first game by demanding that I DoW their enemies and getting really mad at me (and eventually DoW'ing me) when I told them no.  So I allied the Dryad and DoW'd the Hive.  The other two races that I've not even met also attacked the Hive then and I think we might win, but it's kind of hard to tell.  If the Hive gain the supremacy I've probably lost this sector.

[madcow]

Wait, its possible to provoke races into war with each other? That is awesome! Are there a lot of options for new game settings, either currently or planned?

[keith.lamothe]

Wait, its possible to provoke races into war with each other? That is awesome!

You can do diplomatic proposals with any race you have contact with at any time, and one of them is "declare war on... (pick race)".  Another is "make peace with... (pick race they're at war with)".

Those won't work generally if they have really good (or bad, respectively) relations with the target race and/or not-great relations with you, but you can use the "start rumor" action to try to improve/reduce their relations with another race, and you can give them stuff and do a lot of other things to improve your relations with them.

In my case the Humans eventually took out the Hive, so now it's just the Dryads (who are my eternal allies at this point, basically), the Humans, and the Drakk.  So:
- Asked the Dryad to give me contact with the Humans, and they like me so much they were willing to for free.
- I'd already killed a lot of bosses that the Humans were worried about so there were like six quests I'd inadvertendly done for them that I was able to turn-in all at once upon contacting them, popping me up a level due to XP and making them like me pretty well (hopefully getting my foot in the door to stop a war between them and the Dryad if one happens).
- I learn that the Humans are at war with the Drakk and are a bit on the rocky-relations side with the Dryad so I bought contact with the Drakk from the humans and then gave it to the Dryad and asked the Dryad to declare war on the Drakk. 

Presumably the Drakk can't survive all that, so then my main challenge is either keeping the Dryad and Humans from killing each other long enough to ally each other and get the humans to ally me (winning the sector) or build up the Dryad enough and get them to DoW the humans and kill them all... wait, (*checks which planet he's playing the game on*), that might not be good

Are there a lot of options for new game settings, either currently or planned?

I don't know, ask the developer   My guess is yes; I saw a lot of new options pop up in Din's compared to what was available in its first beta version, and there's a very strong sense in which Drox is "Din's in space", though the actual gameplay is really different (diplomacy wasn't really a part of Din's, for example, though it was in DoP).

[madcow]

Keith, you're a good salesman of other people's games  .

It sounds like these sectors are less "epic sized" MOO galaxies are more like the towns as in Din's Curse (I played the demo of that one at least). In terms of level scale/time of competion, is that about right? What I mean is, a game is divided up into sectors that are similar in scope to a Din's Curse town, rather than a huge galaxy map.

[keith.lamothe]

It sounds like these sectors are less "epic sized" MOO galaxies are more like the towns as in Din's Curse (I played the demo of that one at least). In terms of level scale/time of competion, is that about right? What I mean is, a game is divided up into sectors that are similar in scope to a Din's Curse town, rather than a huge galaxy map.

You can set the sector size; I'm playing on small and it's giving me about 12 stars per sector.  And yes, sector is analogous to a Din's town in the sense that you win or lose a sector and then move to the next (with the details of the previous one being gone from the game's memory).

It's different in that each race (and to some degree each inhabited planet) is sort of its own "town" in that it gives its own quests, can be taken out individually, etc.  Even on "small" sectors each individual sector is probably taking me 3x as long as an average town in Din's.

Playing a really large sector might be interesting, I dunno if it would bog down or not.

[Wingflier]

How's the gameplay/visual feel aspect of it?  The depth and ideas are definitely there, but at least with Din's Curse, the gameplay left something to be desired.  Do you really feel like you're fighting huge epic fleet wars in space, or playing Diablo 2 on a black background?  Making it feel realistic and immersive is half of the fun of it for me.  It's not enough to just be deep.

[keith.lamothe]

How's the gameplay/visual feel aspect of it?  The depth and ideas are definitely there, but at least with Din's Curse, the gameplay left something to be desired.  Do you really feel like you're fighting huge epic fleet wars in space, or playing Diablo 2 on a black background?  Making it feel realistic and immersive is half of the fun of it for me.  It's not enough to just be deep.

The visuals feel more appropriate to the genre than Din's did to its genre (though I honestly didn't much mind the visuals in Din's).

The gameplay itself doesn't feel like huge epic fleet wars in space, no, it feels like:
- a space adventure game
- in a dynamic world where it really matters what you do with your time (and whether you succeed)
- with a critical-to-your-success diplomacy system
- and an amazingly interesting gearing system (the interdependencies between stats, equipment, slot count, power-load, etc are ground-breaking, I think)

So a lot closer to Diablo 2 in space, so probably not what you're specifically looking for.  When there's a demo I strongly suggest giving it a chance, though, because there's some truly new and innovative stuff being done here that's a lot of fun.

[eRe4s3r]

So whom did you bribe to get into that early not-beta? Because when that is even remotely like you describe it I want to test it, you know my judgments about games can be very accurate sometimes, and when it's released, it'll be too late for anything if you just read my rant on why game X sucks because of reasons Y, Pony and Z. And you all know there is gonna be a reason PONY in there somewhere. Not seen a single Indy game that did not have a fatal flaw in control or gui design (please by the heavens, do not make the GUI yourself, DIN's Curse GUI is even more atrocious than SOTS2 (Which I admit, nowadays actually got a lot of fixes..)

Hehe That said, even if the beta remains out of reach, it sounds Interesting, but I'd need to see how combat is handled before I give a "hyped or not hyped" verdict.

[keith.lamothe]

So whom did you bribe to get into that early not-beta?

The pre-orders started a few days ago when the beta started, and include beta access

There were a few private-alpha players, but I wasn't one of them.

[Wingflier]

So whom did you bribe to get into that early not-beta? Because when that is even remotely like you describe it I want to test it, you know my judgments about games can be very accurate sometimes, and when it's released, it'll be too late for anything if you just read my rant on why game X sucks because of reasons Y, Pony and Z. And you all know there is gonna be a reason PONY in there somewhere. Not seen a single Indy game that did not have a fatal flaw in control or gui design (please by the heavens, do not make the GUI yourself, DIN's Curse GUI is even more atrocious than SOTS2 (Which I admit, nowadays actually got a lot of fixes..)

Hehe That said, even if the beta remains out of reach, it sounds Interesting, but I'd need to see how combat is handled before I give a "hyped or not hyped" verdict.

Yes Eraser, please spend your money for the good of the herd.  I want to hear your opinion first before I try it