In my last 4 blog posts I talked about how I think the background setting in our upcoming space action RPG Drox Operative is really interesting because of how the races, economy, monsters, and environment all work and interact with one another. The important question though, does all of this effect the player or is it simply background material? For anyone that has played Depths of Peril and Din's Curse, you know we like very dynamic games and Drox isn't going to be an exception. All of these background things are going to impact the player to various degrees. Instead of explaining too much I'm going to give a bunch of examples.
Races: The different alien races are scouting, colonizing, and warring with each other to conquer the current sector of the galaxy. They might ask for something simply like scouting a planet for them or they might ask for something pretty drastic like attacking another race that they at war with.
Economy: With a real economy in place you might be asked to bring some food to a starving planet, deliver some minerals from a rich to a poor planet, or even break a planetary blockade.
Monsters: We have a few "monster" races in the game that pretty much don't like anyone and cause problems for everyone. They can cause wars, attack planets or entire systems, fling asteroids at planets, and can even wield doomsday devices to do really nasty things like cause a star to go super nova. You will frequently be asked to destroy the instigators or if it gets too far clean up the mess before it gets even worse.
Environment: Even the environment seems like it is out to destroy everything. There are asteroids, killer plants, plagues, mutants, volcanoes, and even civil wars.
I've mentioned this before but part of the interesting thing about all of the things that are going on is sometimes you might purposely decide to do nothing. If an asteroid is headed towards a major planet of a race that considers you an enemy, what do you do? Do you let the asteroid hurt the enemy or do you save them and try to make them a friend? If there is a rebellion, do you help quell the rebellion or do you help the rebels and hope it leads to a civil war that eventually splits the race in two? Or do you play everything straight and try to save everyone from their problems? The choice is going to be yours.
