Removing player autopilots

I am going to post a message over on the INA to kick around the idea of removing player autopilots. Hop on over if you feel like it.

I saw it and the sole comment (so far). I would agree with the poster that ideally, this flight control feature would be a toggle-able option. I think that it might make a really fun gameplay approach for those times when the player felt like some more hands on space navigation. However, there are times when you just want to get to that next destination, so you can get busy doing the challenging things you need to do there. Imposing it full time might end up being just as annoying and possibly frustrating as the 'passenger-on-a-train' feeling is at times.

Also, gameplay aspects aside, from a realism point of view, I have a small problem believing that a society technologically advanced enough to travel between the stars and planets can only do so by fighter jockeying their ships around obstacles and manually pointing their ships at their destinations. For the time duration required to pilot a ship in this manner, an individual would have to remain ultravigilant (i.e. hopped up on super speedy drugs) for incredibly long periods of time just to avoid random rocks at sublight speed. There would probably have to be many pilots changing shifts constantly to make this work. Our brains and eyes just can't work fast enough to do this realistically. If making interstellar travel more interesting or involving is the goal, perhaps we should consider other things for the player to do. I liked your idea of making capsule space a real challenge to navigate...because in capsule space you can make up whatever stuff you want to make it more realistically human pilot task demanding. Or there's always the possibility of providing other distractions during the passive travel time intervals, like reading emails, providing story background or exposition, or making the ship corridors walkable and explorable (something I've always wished for) to make inspections/repairs/what-have-you.

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Hot4Darmat