Official News - page 5

FROM THE POSTBAG: WHY DON'T WE GIVE PROPER DIRECTIONS?

by Junior Newsdroid Arrtew

We were contacted by a frustrated new player recently, who was having problems finding his way around. He knew that FedTerm's brilliant auto-mapping feature showed you the available exits (well, the eight compass directions), but he preferred using a different program to log onto Fed2, and so had to rely on the descriptions to tell him where to go.

Why couldn't we, he asked, do what other games do, which is to list all of the available exits in a standard format?

We guess the kind of thing he's talking about is this:

Hallway
Exits - E, W, S
You are in a long hallway with a door leading into a storeroom.

This isn't the first time this question has come up, and in the days BF (Before FedTerm) we used to talk about how we didn't want to make it too easy, you had to pay attention by reading the descriptions, rather than be given the information on a plate. The feeling was that you should have to work for it; no pain, no gain - all very puritanical!

Now FedTerm's auto-mapping shows you the way, it does give you the information on a plate, so that explanation won't do any more. Guess we'll have to come up with a new one!

In truth, it comes down to a matter of aesthetics. When Bella wrote the original planet descriptions for Sol, she tried to avoid the stilted feel that many earlier games had given to their text, and she decided she'd rather use proper English where possible, rather than list information in the form of a computer-generated table. As a result, the above description was rendered thus:

Hallway
You are in a long hallway stretching from the east to the west, with a door in the south wall leading into a storeroom.

It's a trade-off between literary merit, and ease of imparting information. Bella chose to lean in the direction of literature, and when she took over work on the Sol planets, so did Hazed.

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