A friend of mine recently purchased a copy of 'The Ship', and was
showing me how the game is played. The basis of the game is that each
player has a character and that all these characters are on a cruise
ship together. When a round begins you character is given another
character as their target. Likewise someone else is also targeting you.
The goal is to eliminate your target and not get eliminated yourself
during the round. Meanwhile your character has needs much like The Sims,
sleep, eat, drink, wash, excrete, and so on. . Now since the game has
all these elements like searching for tools, weapons, disguises, food.
and the like its obvious that it was intended to be a slow paced kind of
game. This is especially true considering you can't eliminate your
target whenever you want. If the ships crew sees you with a weapon or
you are caught on a security camera, then you will fail. You must wait
until your target moves to a location where you can eliminate them
without being caught. So you have to wait until they, for example, go to
the bathroom since there are no cameras or staff in the bathroom.
Now here is the problem since this game is hosted much like a game of
counter-strike, where players can host their own servers with their own
options. Because of this players are able to adjust things like round
time. It seems that the majority of the servers that have more than two
or three players have all set the round time to something incredibly low
like 2 or 3 minutes. Its hardly enough time to arm yourself, let alone
find your prey and hope they move somewhere unsafe. As a result the game
plays much more like counter-strike in that everything is rushed and
very 'twitchy', instead of the slow placed sneaky-stalker game that it
seems was envisioned. Basically as it is the short rounds are a much
poorer experience in my opinion since you spend the first minute
frantically running around to find a weapon, then the second half of the
time running around to find your target, by which time you are out of
breath and can't catch them. So if you run, then you will be too tired
to kill your target, If you don't run, then you have no weapon, but can
also easily outrun the player targeting you.
I would argue that impatient players have ruined game play on many of
the servers. There are a couple of servers that have a longer round time
but they are sparsely populated and this causes a problem as well. If
there are only three players on a server you can simply kill the first
player you see without taking the time to identify them. since there is
a %50 chance that they are your target. Since there is no penalty for
killing the wrong player (so long as you don't get caught) then even a
game with longer round times can't be played as designed.
has anyone else seen/played this game and have any thoughts on how one
could push the round time back to longer times on popular servers,
(aside from the obvious patch the server so rounds can not be shorter
than X). I don't want to punish players that want short round times, but
I think players who want the longer round time as the game was designed
should have the opportunity to play that way.