Feedback Are procedural monster special abilities gone?

This is just something I was wondering, but have special abilities been removed for procedural monsters?

It's been ages since I met a most that used anything else than a physical charge/ramming attack against me so I was wondering if their special abilities have been removed?

I might just be traveling around on planets whose tiers are too low, but I am starting to miss them. The new handcrafted monsters are nice, but once you are used to a species' "special trick" you know what to expect.

Procedural monsters with the occasional random special ability felt like it could occasionally be a bit of a welcomed unexpected surprise. It would be a shame if they had all lost the ability to do anything else than "run at the player" attack patterns.

 

They've been gone for way too long. On the Nightly, the hostile Glitch castles (new ones, not the ones we're used to) sometimes have "Dragons", and they have random breath attacks. They're just the large flying random monsters, but they pose a good threat up there.

Otherwise yeah, those special abilities are sorely needed. Random monsters are boring and worthless now, and only pose a minor nuisance that at best makes you yell "GET OUT OF MY WAY YOU WORTHLESS TRASH". I mean, I yell at my monitor all the time, but since they turned them into annoying bumper cars instead of monsters, they've been nothing but aggravating pests.

 

Okay, it makes me glad that at least they're not ENTIRELY gone even if it seems constained to situational stuff. Makes me wonder if the current state is sort of a temporary deal until they figure out a way to rework them engine-wise to make them truly more interesting again or if they really gave up on the idea.

I love the new reconizable "uniques", but there's a few cases(the "jumping blobs" enemies for example) where it feel they could easily have just been a new family of procedurals altogether with randomized "faces"/colors as ultimately they're as "simple" as the current procedurals with the only different being bounding movement pattern versus the procedurals' walking and running.

If anything, I feel like that if the answer to the procedurals was not neccessarily "more randomized ranged attacks"(I do recall the old rants about them and how hard or easy they made combat at varied times in development.... but that was also before the levels of knockbacks dealt to players and also the player's current invincibility frames against monsters they've just damaged)... it wasn't neccessarily just removing those attacks altogether.

If anything, I felt it would have been a widening of "special monsters traits" to include -more- than just attack stuff but instead also more indirect traits that could have also been IDed under the monster healthbar to further make the player aware of a breed''s unique traits.

I mean.... imagine how just a trait like "bioluminescence" would have helped one procedural breed to stand out compared to ALL the others breeds on that planet at night when you see this one breed of procedural monster that actually glow in the dark. I could imagine folk rushing to capture them as pets for this reason alone.

Or that one monster who, upon hitting 25-50% of it's health, suddenly activate a "rage" mode suddenly turning their color scheme red and buffing their damages while temporarily making them invulnerable. That could even come with an "explosive rage" variant where the monster starts flashing toward the end of their "rage" effect until they actually produces an explosion.

It feels like there was still a LOT of potential for these monsters if we had just moved away from a debate about special melee or ranged "attacks" to more directly talk about "traits" in general that could have been given to them or even just a better way of identifying their "stats" in general.
It feels like it would have helped them to make them more than just cannon-fodder... or at least help making them more interesting cannon-fodder.

I think case, I sometimes wonder if people didn't cave in too fast to players who were ranting too much about how the random abilities of procedural monsters made them feel too "random yet generic"

If anything, I do hope this is a sort of thing the engine will still be able to support for modding once the game is released as I'd love to see what modders could come up with for that system of the game.

 

I agree with this. This was a horrible idea that yet again made the procedural monsters unfun and boring. They're literall just annoying now, and if it isn't fixed in the next few updates I am definitely quitting Starbound.

 

Once upon a time a guy named Djak arrived on a X tier planet.

He saw midget cyborg monkeys with telekinetic powers.

He then almost died after getting launched in the air, up and down, during a fight with many other hostile creatures.

Djak then thought it was worse than Hell. But then he remembered the bloodpuker bird planet he met once. But that's another story

 

I think the only procgen monsters left with special attacks are the large flying types

 

I hope they're planning on adding that back.
That alone would justify exploring for an eternity.
Adding a good bunch of traits for procedurals to have would flesh the game up quite a bit, and make it more interesting.

 

Boring monsters are first trait of this game turning into 2d No Man's Sky