Are there any plans for having an end-state for campaign metagame?
Playing the current campaign feels like it lacks a clear purpose. You build up a fleet, grind levels for your character, but all for what? Just to reset it?
The game encourages you to grow in power and size, but there is no real goal to do that for.
Then theres no persistency in the overall metagame from one session to another. You grow, become a god, then reset out of boredom and repeat the same cycle. It all feels unsustainable and uninteresting to play the game for more than a few playthroughs, mostly just to exhaust what content the game has to offer, making the action gameplay itself feel secondary and meaningless, when the focus is on a larger picture of growing big.
The reason why thats a problem is because it decides what stuff you'll even get to have within the action gameplay. I can't access plenty of things simply because they're arbitrarily locked out and don't appear until a certain time in the game. The game actively reduces the fun I could have with it.
My suggestion is a bit radical:
-Remove leveling and perks that make your ships or your piloted ship better. Infact, remove the whole leveling system all together. Just leave a character portrait and a name, nothing else.
-Make the metagame be played in beatable sessions, but the number of sessions be infinite. Basically your goal is to conquer the galaxy. The game starts off by generating a small sector of galactic space with planets, star systems, asteroids belts, other space phenomena and some random factions at random stages of conquest (only arriving with a colony ship to the area or already owning a space station or being completely in control of a star system). This sector of space is randomly generated every time.
Its like playing a relatively compact game of Exerelin mod with 2-6 star systems.
You build up a fleet, fight to conquer the tiny sector of galactic space and once its conquered, you keep the fleet, prepare it for a journey and then launch into the next sector to do the same. Each time you'll be facing different enemies, different set ups of planets and sectors. The point is, there is a bigger, overarching goal in the game about conquering the entire galaxy, with is unreachable, but the game provides with infinite amounts of randomly generated sessions which are like beatable campaigns in a common adventure game.
You get to keep your *** after each match, atleast whatever you choose to, and keep trucking from one starsector to another. Since logistics softly prevents your fleet from ever growing beyond a certain size, you'll be faced with a challenge with each new system regardless, although sometimes that challenge might be an easier one and sometimes harder, depending what kind of clusterbomb of a starsector the random generator cooks up for you this time.
The reason why this is good, is because it makes the game infinite replayable, but also have a clear goal to achieve within each session, making the game feel meaningful, even if its infinite, just by the virtue of presenting that infinity in chunks of finite sessions that can be beaten. The other good thing is that the players don't have to deal with grinding their character and fleets up to certain level before the game opens up for them, allowing players get into the fun and enjoy the game in its full glory without arbitrary gating. Persistence gives also a warm feeling for players to get more invested in their fleets and characters.
Also to mention, if a character dies (your fleet and flagship is defeated), then they stay dead. At this point, the universe experiences a small timeskip, allowing the AI to expand a bit without your interference, after which a new character you created with a new name comes back into the game. Additionally the characters that die, get written down into a memorial log that players can marvel and mourn at, when they remember the great battles they had with those characters or how they screwed up with him or her.
It brings a sense of continuity and while there is a small punishment for allowing the AI to become a bit more established for the new character to deal with, you can still get back into the action as you inherit whatever the last character had in terms of money and storage. (with a jokingly punishing small fee of 1000c for the last characters funeral).
And lastly, you get to focus on enjoying the game more for its combat and tactics, rather than trying to make an arbitrary number called "Level" go up and focus more on DELICIOUS COMBAT than EXPERIENCE POINTS GAINED.
Inb4 "ur suggestion is too radical man"
