I was sitting here thinking and am wondering if the RPG style of Deus Ex could be applied to other non-FPS genre of games. If you don''t consider flight sims FPS, then imagine having a ground crew, commander, and wingmen talking about your missions with your reaction time increasing and decreasing plane jitter as you distribute more skill points to them. The harder the mission (ie more enemy threat points than allied threat points) the more skill points you get. Each mission would guarantee a few skill points, with the suicide missions bringing in the most. You''d not be alone as your wingmen would get better as they went along, and so would some of the enemy pilots who got away. Eventually, you would be of legendary status ala Red Baron and become the target of choice.

Did you ever play the old game Strike Commander from Origin? It didn''t have upgradable stats, but they definitely put story, character and RPG aspects into what was essentially a flight sim.

I''d be a little concerned with directly affecting the player''s skills thru status. For instance, I happen to think that things like control input shouldn''t be filtered, as lower or higher stats could lead to more sluggish or over-responsive game. (Does Deus Ex really do this?) Maybe you could have something like stats affecting amount of damage done for each hit, tho''.

This is always tricky, because it runs up against the dividing line between the player''s skill and their character''s skill.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Oh, that was just an example. I think your opinion on not liking filtered input would go a long way. Actually Deus Ex does filter input in certain ways - using the sniper rifle the target site visually wavers, using nearly any weapon it logically moves your aiming point (but in this case, not visually). However some input filtering, in the case of aiming the plane at a target will assist people with lousy joysticks who don''t have bucko bucks to buy a new one so minor wiggling might be a good idea.