The moment that inspired this question:

A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.

The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.

One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”

I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.

… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.

I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.

  • TWeaKEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    Playing Elite Dangerous a few years back, I bought this little jerry-rigged thing called an ED Tracker. It’s an Arduino with some accelerometers and a magnometer, basically the same sensors as a Wiimote, and it tracks yer 'ed. Much cheaper than TrackIR or other commercial solutions. Strap it onto some headphones or a hairband and with some software it models itself as a joystick, so I could look around the cockpit and target things I looked at, as well as look to the side to pop up ship and navigation menus. But the best bit was flying around a station with an orbital ring. I matched my velocity and pitched down slightly, then looked up at all the habitat areas. The graphics weren’t perfectly amazing, but the sensation of just flying around in 3D and seeing everything was so overwhelming I actually had to stop playing for a few minutes. It was the kind of thing I’d dreamed of video games letting me do since I was a small child.