Separate the identity of the ship and the person.

[royfalk]

Skyrim has a couple of interesting ideas that we could consider adopting.

One is the concept of guilds. You join the Confeds, or Pirates, etc. But in Skyrim, the end result is always the same - you become the Archmage, leader of the thieves, etc. This is probably less likely in the case of the Confederacy.

In any case, if we want to play Pirates, we need someway to make this believable. Separating the ship from the person is one way. You fly to a pirate base and switch to your pirate ship. Then, every ship is hostile. More accurately, you inherit the Pirate faction relations.

[BenjamenMeyer]

We'll probably run into something this way when we start really doing multi-player later where we may want to allow users to create their own factions and join together as groups.

No reason we couldn't start doing some of that now - we have a Pirates faction in the game for the game; but then you allow them to create their own faction and be the leader of it. The faction could be a military competing with the Confederation; a pirate faction; a zealot faction; merchant guild; but it would probably need to always be separate from the official storyline factions. We'd have to have some way to be able to hire/recruit AI/NPC characters into it for single-player mode (and eventually expand that for multi-player mode).

[BenjamenMeyer]

For the storyline mode we may have to require you leave - or take an absence from - your faction.

[BenjamenMeyer]

The core concept in the game right now is that you are the pilot and you can own your own fleet of ships. I don't think we can break that model.

However, adding a ship ➡️ faction registration could make for an interesting concept. But we would probably need to provide some UI functionality to sort the ships by their faction registration then or to only show ships by a certain faction.

Any how.. an interesting concept...certainly worth exploring how it applies to the VS styles of games, and how it would interact with the various games. Is it something that is Game Assets side only? Or we need some engine support and Game Assets have to opt-in? Or do we force all Game Assets to use this feature? (Personally I think it should be opt-in.)