Heheh... that's a lot of thought put into a game that didn't even need a back story.
Always good to have something in mind, I guess.
Some people get hooked when there's a roleplay element, however small it may be.
*cough* me *cough*
I suppose it's all got to be centered around the explanation for why your ship can just respawn and continue play... which the "Game" ideas both cover. A grittier option that doesn't fit the current cartoony graphics would be that we are all warlords sending our minions in one by one. Each time our ship gets destroyed, we reclaim the stuff from our ship that we can and send in a new soldier to try again. This sounds more like a grittier dystopian "earth was destroyed" kind of story... that again doesn't fit the graphics but would make for a better background if I ever go 3D and more realism in a space sim.
My major gripe with the whole war thing is... people don't normally wage wars in arenas. I think the games suited for
that kind of dark backstory have a more open environment, like EVE online or something. I mean, I'd just nuke the arena and be done with it if I were one of those warlords. xD
Really, you could make any design style work so long as it ties into the story. If you go 3D and still want the fun, gameshow feel, do something to remind people it's all fun and games. Clean paint jobs and fireworks go a long way.
The game show angle is an interesting one. I'd originally thought of it more like deadly paint ball but that doesn't cover the gambling aspect which would certainly have some kind of organized gaming commission. And I suppose even then it could have a more brutal back story tongue-in-cheek style... like the old Smash TV video game (lots of arcade fun there).
Either way, one could easily imagine some kind of cheesy plastic-faced game show announcer.
Teehee, I have a simple solution for player death. The ships themselves seem to be fairly compartmentalized, so it made me thInk of those suits in laser tag arenas. If you get shot, your gun is disabled. I figure that the pieces to your ship could simply disengage when they detect damage to the ship's ablative armor(Which can be damaged via intense heat or an impact).
With the power of holo-tech, you could create "explosions" when a ship is 'destroyed'when really, the user is ejected in a pod back to a nearby station, and the ship parts disperse for collection and reconstruction by a net around the arena. During the disengaging process, an upgrade may have their systems reset and be free for collection or be destroyed by asteroid collisions/actual damage from the laser.
I've been mulling over energy shields alot, too. I guess the best way to do it irl is to create an electromagnetic shield(meaning your ship would have electricity arcing around it and stuff). This would also repel asteroids if the surface of the ship is the same charge as the asteroids. Most asteroids have no charge irl, but the arena barriers might zap asteroids that come in or something. The reason why the shields would work on the lasers will be explained in the next paragraph.
You could explain why lasers are blowing things up and going slower than the speed of light by explaining that the laser cannons create a high temperature bose-einstein condensate. This explanation would necessitate the creation of an element X(because only supercooled gasses can do this, normally), but would probably get you some brownie points with science nerds. It'd probably be a
really heavy gas, too. But hey, a tank of this element X(Tardiluxium? Literally: slow light) would last a LONG time since it wouldn't take much to fire your not-so-safe plasma/laser/gas-cannonball hybrid. Make the gas a negatively charged ion, and you have yourself a 'slow', shield susceptible laser that would have actual force to destroy asteroids with.
Reconcileable fiction has been made here. These explanations are better than the Mass Effect explanations. Use at will. Or don't. I just hate it when people say "yay, lasers!" without telling us why or how, so yeh. Give those shields a storyline! Give your lasers a storyline! Everything deserves an arc in the game! Blarghh! xD
