Yes oh yes. Please do put a good effort into the universe, lore and most of all, the actual plot. I’m really looking forward for a story which is meaningful, realistic and immersive. I’m hoping for well written characters and races, exciting plot twists, tough decisions along the way and above it all – an ending that leaves you with a tear in your eye and a longing for more.
What little we know of the reboot, the story so far: It’s an alternate universe. 250.000 years ago interstellar excrement hit a galactic class fan meaning no more Precursors. Everything we knew from SC2 is non-existent. No familiar races, no Ur-Quan(!). Let’s fast forward to human year 2112 and our story begins. First Contact is made.
With this basic setting in mind, here’s my two cents focusing on the story side.
LIVING, VAST UNIVERSE
Nothing is more disappointing than a streamlined adventure where you simply click 'next' to whichever sidequest or homeworld or scripted event you're supposed to go like reading a virtual book with added flashy colors.
Ideally, I’d like to see a realistic, living, ready universe doing its own thing. The quadrant would be filled with races with an agenda of their own, trade circles pursuing their personal benefit, millennium old wars between sworn rivals and so forth.
You, as a starfleet commander would just stick your own spoon into the interstellar affairs representing your own point of view and interest. Travel where you wish, ally with who you see fit and exploit what planets you desire – all in the name of humanity, freedom, science, democracy, peace, love and [enter noble sounding quality here] of course.
CHOICE & CAUSALITY
As previously noted game-changing choices enforced upon the player are a great thing which would fit an adventure-y game like this for two major reasons. First of all, they give a feeling of control and importance to the player; you’re in charge of the events. Secondly, they add a lot of depth and replayability to the game as players can explore different options and their consequences.
Tricky situations like a choice between answering a rescue call or joining diplomatic meeting as a mediator. Ignore the call and the homeworld of some race gets bombed back to stone age. Ignore the meeting and you're looking at a civil war within the ranks of your most powerful ally.
Plenty of choices can be made up in similar manner.
-Race A & B have a deep feud for each other. Ally with one, get an enemy from the other.
-Take a powerful artifact from a recently scanned moon and risk the wrath of locals who happen to worship it?
-Do you wish to open communications with a known mind-controller race who appear initially friendly?
-Somewhat shady rumor tells of massive riches and high-end technology in a far-away location, do you risk a foolhardy quest to retrieve the possible goods while spending precious time and fuel?
-Race A speaks ill of X while race B speaks highly of X - who do you listen to when X proposes to protect your flank in a greater battle?
PLOT TWISTS
I long for that feeling of spontaneous 'oooh didn't see that one coming' when things get to a completely new stance because of interference of unexpected forces. Preferably in a way you couldn't anticipate.
Maybe the prime antagonist is actually doing a favor for the galaxy (see below)?
Maybe your best friend backstabs you at a critical moment (yeah trust a mercantile race)?
Maybe that research conclusion was horribly wrong (it really didn’t look like a bomb)?
Maybe that transmission was badly translated (*dance* didn’t mean having fun)?
Maybe that artifact has two different uses instead of one (the big button boosts shields and activates location beacon)?
Flip the blatantly obvious plot line. If there's like this cruel race of uh, Kohr-Quan just seething Evilness and bombing planets to massive chunks of dead rock, reveal halfway through the game that they're actually doing that to stop the spreading of a galactic level plague that threatens all life as we know it. Ok, so a few races got obliterated in the process but hey, at least a dozen more got saved because of it. So everything looks cool.. until you realize that the plague was actually artificially created to stop the expansion of Real Bad Guys who are now breeding like gene-modded rabbits and shit really hits the fan!
SHADES OF GRAY
In a realistic world there’d be no real good or evil but rather various shades of gray. In the end, most races probably work to make life comfortable for themselves in whatever way they see fit according to their culture and physiology.
If humans come and clean out complete planets for minerals to build starfleets and get stinking rich in the process, surely freedom, science and democracy will benefit - but the local rock-eating Rockaloids probably won't see it exactly the same way.
If we'll see a primary antagonist race(s), let their evil and horrific ways have a meaning. Something the player can relate to in a way. SC2 nailed it, among many other classics like Starcraft 1 or Baldur’s Gate. These plots felt realistic. Here's some random ideas beyond the beaten-to-death Evil for the sake of Evilness:
-'For the greater good' concept that'll call for massive sacrifices in order to preserve/achieve even more. For example there could be a kind of energy wave heading towards the quadrant that'll destroy everything it comes in contact with but is weakened by bio-energy. So in order to save sentient races at least partly, some decide to enslave and use the weaker half of the quadrant like a kind of bio-shield in order to save themselves.
Alternatively a race could desire to reach higher states of being but unfortunately they need to feed on psychic energy of others to fuel up this ascension. It’s for the(ir) greater good, hey.
-‘Keepers of balance’. A race with a desire to preserve natural cycles of the galaxy. They’d see the actions of sentient races causing undesirable disturbances to this, therefore calling the destruction of all life. Player might see the antagonist initially as a bunch of amusing and rather harmless weird aliens. Add humor value with their bizarre way of life of ritual suicide practice to achieve liberating non-existance, yet keep birth rates up to keep the ritual practice going on.
Horrible intentions and the scale of their purging would see daylight somewhere later in the game when it's revealed that the energy released at death is just fuel for their super-weapon that'll allow them to fulfill their "salvation project" or whatever.
-‘A war that ends all wars’. Classic. Let’s unify the galaxy yeah? Unity and unification under the righteous rule of one rightfully righteous race. Needs some fleshing out as to why somebody would go to the lengths of ultimate war. Diplomacy gone wrong? Paranoid to survive? Fulfilling the order of gods? Warmaster race got fed up to the never-ending quarreling of other races? Psychics that foresee the dreadful future and work to prevent it? The basic idea is workable but needs some well-written reasoning.
-Super tech-race playing on wacky experiments. In the end they'd be creating;
a ) permanent QuasiSpace portals causing the collapse of TrueSpace or
b ) enforcing dimensions to overlap bringing Orz and buddies for tea or
c ) genetically modifying a random race creating a Zerg-like warmachine alien thing that gets out of control.
These kinds of events just for shit n' giggles. You know, "I wonder what'll happen if.." escalated, erm, slightly.
-No evil Evilness to begin with but instead because of some stellar/ dimensional phenomena, a powerful race goes haywire or gets altered in some way and starts to wreak havoc mid-game and onwards. Mix in Orz from the original and stir with a prophecy-believing fanatic race who begin to worship the new galactic nut cases as a dawn of a new era. All of a sudden we have the Hierar- uh, Hegem- um.. HELLIONS OF DIMENSIONAL STARS piling up against the player. *Jumping peppers!* *Many bubbles* will *dance*.
-The main bad guy is.. YOU! As you travel around and loot minerals and fight unfriendly aliens you’re building a reputation as the cancer of the quadrant bit by bit. Eventually you have to make a climatic choice to burn down your own race in order to save the world from greedy, breeding pigs who exploit everything they touch or simply annihilate everything that dares to cross your path - in the name of peace and freedom, that is. Alternative solution could be to re-engineer the human genetics to make bad traits of humanity vanish and become the true ‘good guys’ (or at least bearable).
-No baddies as is, but instead the complex diplomacy issues begin to escalate between the starfaring races due to huge cultural variety and eventually boils into an all-out total war. Great for including player-dependent choices on who to ally with and so forth. Possibilities for situations that leave the player wondering "how did it come to this? Was this possible to prevent?"
Building more on this, the player could actually be responsible for several conflicts without him acknowledging the severity of his actions in the first place. Like acting as a goody-two-shoes and rescuing a stranded Myco- er, Mungusoid sibling which'll cause the racial leaders to make a war declaration. The nerve of interfering with their personal issues, the nerve to rescue a criminal exile!
-With dark and moody, serious tone, paranoia and madness among the more powerful race(s) causes them to eventually crush all other beings in order to preserve themselves. Could be cool if story plays out right and the paranoia builds up over time causing pressure as things develop. Add a few innocent misunderstandings and a touch of inter-dimensional haunting voices (Androsynth did mess with this stuff in SC2) and the galaxy eats itself alive.
-Ok, this is kind of wacky but.. PLANETS ARE ALIVE! Gaia-theory stuff goes off the roof. Planets are a race that are gonna get traveling.. through WORMHOLES INTO ANOTHER GALAXY. Maybe they just get pissed at lesser beings for their constant resource-hoarding and decide to end the nuisance in one way or other. Maybe they just don’t care about your affairs and want to check out new scenes. Maybe they do it naturally like birds flying to warm countries, scale just differs. Convince them to stay? Force them to stay? Go with them? Build starbases and artificial planets to live in?
-Dimensional travel gone wrong. It’s all fun n’ games to explore other dimensions until you realize the dimension warps are altering the very being of travelers, the portals are messing up energies of your home reality, time gets twisted causing some hilarious and horrific outcomes back home etc. Unexpected events occur because realities get shifted in an unnatural way. Arilou did it right, you do not.
And so forth and so forth. Possibilities are practically endless. Just.. anything but "We are evil and crush you just ‘cuz we can MWHA AHA HAA! Now eat flaming plasma death wimp!"
Evil being Evil simply for the sake of Evil just won’t cut it. Sure it has a certain humor value but really, it gets old fast.