Satori, on Apr 16 2005, 09:30 PM, said:
The plugs i mention tall take place in the EVC univers but add new stuff... NH and Pale were near-total overhalls, but still retaining quite a bit from EVC while James Fond and FFB just added new ships and missions and changed one spob each.
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One of the best plugins ever released was called 'TOPS Mods' by 'The Old Professor', who members of the old EV Developers discussion list will remember. It contained no new graphics, and, as far as I remember, no new outfits or ships. But it did subtly tweak pretty much everything to create missions which were way more challenging than anything ever before seen. His ethos was 'as much game-play in as few kilobytes as possible'. And the total size really was just a few kb.
However, I think part of the problem with EVO and EVN plugins is that EV was a much more neutral universe. The governments really weren't that different from stuff that happens in our own world. If you wanted to take it in a cheesy direction, you could -- James Fond -- if you wanted to go 'art', you could do that as well -- Clavius and Beyond. If you wanted old-fashioned rip-roaring adventure, that fitted in nicely as well -- Eye of Orion. If you wanted alien races in the grand old space opera tradition, that was fairly easy to write in -- Angels of Vengeance. Or if you just wanted more missions, bigger battles, all that stuff, you could do that as well.
EVO and EVN occupy much more of the creative space.
Personally I don't like endless alien encounters. I prefer Asimov, Ursula LeGuin, Philip K Dick and Blake's 7, over EE 'Doc' Smith and Babylon 5 (that's not saying I didn't enjoy them). Building on EVC, I can go in my own direction. Building on EVO, I either have to live with the alien races or write them out of the scenario.
Likewise, my personal vision of what the future will be like is basically like the present, but with vastly more amazing technology. I suppose I'm a hard-core SF person -- I don't really want science-fantasy elements like psionics. But with EVN, a lot of those decisions are already made for me.
For me, personally, the advent of EVO meant I either had to change everything in the new game to stuff that fitted my vision, or stick to EVC and be a fairly anonymous plugin. At the time EVO was getting all the attention and I guessed (wrongly) that EVC would lose its support base.
I personally would never release an add-on for the EVO or EVN scenarios, because I can't get my head round them. On the other hand, I wouldn't be averse to sitting down for an afternoon and writing another fifty missions as an additional plot thread to EVC.
