The X-Wing games series still remains my favorite space combat series ever. Back in the day, it was one of the fastest and most realistic games you had on the PC, and the sheer scale of its space battles were sometimes vertiginous.
Mission types were also very varied; it went from intercepting fighters to patrolling areas of space to escorting rescue missions on space stations. There were dozens of unique ships available to fly and, in X-Wing Alliance, you actually took the instrumental role of piloting the Millennium Falcon in the second Death Star battle at Endor.
There was something, however, which would have been awesome: How great would have it been if they had merged the space battle simulation with a first-person shooter? So many times I flied cover for some commando transport, fending off fighters and having to wait a few minutes for them to capture a platform or a space station, all the while thinking "wouldn't it be great if those commandos, with which I'm in constant communication, were actual players?"
This idea is basically Eve Online, where you fly spaceships in an online world, with an added element of being able to switch into a first-person perspective inside the spaceship. Instead of docking a ship onto a space platform and having access to its services through an interface, you would have to switch over to your human avatar and physically walk into the platform and interact with the people there. In short, each spaceship, space station and whole worlds would be MMO worlds within another MMO world.
Each object would be owned by various players and groups of players, which would determine who has access to what. If you were part of a group of pirate, you wouldn't be able to enter an imperial space station. Each object in the gaming world would have a limit of how many people could enter it, which would make it possible for extremely fast-paced, peer-to-peer gameplay similar to games like the Battlefield series.
Each object would be accessible through gates, or entry points, which would be used by players to enter it on foot as their human avatar when two ships docked with each other. This is also how ships and space stations would be captured, as armies of players would penetrate through these gates to fight whatever resistance contained therein. As the players infiltrate the ships, they would need to reach the command centers in order to take control of them, making them switch faction.
As players fought to capture their objectives, they would fill in many roles:
- Commandos - These are the people responsible for charging in first and fight the players defending the ships. They are heavily armed and armored and carry various types of weapons such as assault rifles, explosives, sniper rifles and trip mines. They remain in constant communication with a squad leader, which in turns relays orders to and from a command ship.
- Pilots - These players see the action from space, as they fly around with freighters, starfighters and various types of war ships. They are responsible for bringing the commandos through open space to their objectives.
- Hackers - Commandos need the logistic support to hack open doorways, steal valuable information from command consoles and operate various types of combat machinery. The hackers fill in that important role.
- Commanders - Commanders see the action from space also, with the added element of being able to see everything from a different point of view and having access to the most information. They act as nodes between the commandos, the pilots and the hackers.
