What brought me to SC was the chance that we’d see emergent gameplay- players taking bounties on each-other, persistent bases, player convoy operations etc. There has been work in the development of ‘events’ and other (imo) non immersive repeatable gameplay on rails. Are these things going to be the primary gameplay loops or can I expect to see players running their own events as a more ‘primary’ or ‘core’ gameplay tenet that SC offers? I think some events are cool, but they are repeatable and on rails. They will get old fast. Also historically this type of feature creep is extremely time consuming and takes away from development that could be used to further enhance sandbox gameplay for real humans that can then go ahead and dictate what’s a valuable use of their time. Running an event x amount of times lowers the value of doing that thing because there eventually is no perceived risk since the event is automated and predictable. Player vs player gameplay never loses it’s gameplay value since the experience is almost always unique. Having an infrastructure that supports emergent player vs player & player + player gameplay will make this game extremely valuable from the perception of someone who is completely burnt from the on-rails, cookie cutter carebear experience that has plagued game development or has completely destroyed valuable well designed gameplay worlds. For example, I’d rather raid an org’s base, battle actual people, & steal their cargo stash. This sort of thing will never get old and will always be a different experience. There is real risk, and real reward. (real enough) Been playing these games since UO and I have more memories of emergent gameplay experiences in 1998 than I do with any other game that has come after. Everquest is a close 2nd, mostly due to the unforgiving nature of the game world which inadvertently made the game extremely immersive. There is real benefit to gameplay when you have death mechanics that are actually meaningful & undesired. Makes people way more conscious of how they play which enhances the entire experience. MUDS- Multi user dungeons (many game developers attribute these as an inspiration for some of the early mmo’s) Meridian 59 1996- D&D gameplay in a 3D online experience UO 1997- Open world Sandbox, full loot pvp/pve, persistent open world housing etc. This game arguably put MMO’s on the map. This ambitious project was the first type of ‘sim’ game. There was even a working ecology that eventually was removed. It was enough to make other developers open their eyes as they had a sub base around 200k. EQ 1999- Developed from people that were motivated by D&D, muds. No instancing. Challenging gameplay. Harsh death mechanics. Contested loot system. This game opened the floodgates in the dev world for what people thought was possible. Quickly reached 300k subs into a market that otherwise wasn’t heard of. Without EQ you don’t have WOW, as it was this game that motivated the ultimate creation of wow. Blizzard devs played EQ during wow development, and Blizz even poached some top guild EQ players for help designing WOW. EQ kind of set the ’model’ for many games to come after. Although people claim some games are WOW clones- they’re actually EQ clones. Wow is just a dumbed down version of EQ that offers a better on-rails experience. If you want a good guage on what people loved about the above games, just look online for their emulated servers. People have even chosen & recreated servers for the time periods that these games were at their peak. A few things all the emulated servers have in common is that the time periods being emulated are at points where the games were more challenging, had a high risk vs reward, & at points where emergence wasn’t hard to find. So will star citizen‘s gameplay structure be geared towards enhancing the emergent experience? Or will the structure be geared towards enhancing a packaged on-rails experience? Or both? Thanks