Feedback [Nightly] The story line saps some fun from it all

I found this from the official website.
"In Starbound, you create your own story - there’s no wrong way to play! You may choose to save the universe from the forces that destroyed your home, uncovering greater galactic mysteries in the process, or you may wish to forego a heroic journey entirely in favor of colonizing uncharted planets."

I dont know if this is false advertising or not,the description doesn't describe my experience or its original purpose.

 

Sounds like a personal problem

 

That describes the game accurately. You are not forced to do the story, save for the first few intro quests, but once those are done, you have free reign.

 

Yeah, you just have a pre determined origin point. That won't get stale at all.

 

It's sort of like an Elder Scrolls game in a sense, you can have all these diverse characters but for some reason they all start out exactly the same unless you tweak it with "alternate start" mods, which never fail to rise up due to losing it's charm after the tenth playthrough.

I'd like to see either story decisions or old style starts implemented as another option later, say I want to make a bandit or a cultist, they don't really fit in with the story right now. "friendly fire" with NPC's as a toggleable switch would help too.

 

So? Move past it and come up with another origin story. Problem solved.

 

That makes no sense. I'm playing a video game and you want me to imagine an aspect of the game? That's not an excuse for why it's not there.

 

You imagine plenty of things in the game already, so why is this time such a problem?

 

The problem with tutorial levels to fill in backstory in a sandbox game is more that A). they don't give you much of anything item/xp-wise, and B ). tend to be lengthy with lots of cutscenes, dialogue, etc, and C). People who play sandbox games usually start multiple playthroughs to try out a new playstyle, new type of playthrough, etc and aren't really interested in seeing that 10-15 minutes of story all over again.

That's why people tend to like to skip the intros in these kinds of games. Oblivion and Skyrim are particularly long and drawn out. Yeah, it's awesome the first time you see it but yet you know it isn't going to be like that through the whole game.

It's interesting to note that MMORPGs are just the opposite -- they have all kinds of origin stories usually, but yet the nature of MMOs discourages multiple characters, so a lot of people only see a couple.

Maybe they should find a way to swap, MMOs should have the "one origin story for all" and the sandbox games should have the multiple origin stories, lol.

 

That carriage ride in Skyrim... always freakin kills me, feels like decades. I don't usually skip the intro too Starbound simply because you can get a few special cosmetic armor pieces that you can't get otherwise without use of admin commands. I would really love to skip those cutscenes though.

 

What gets me in SB, is Esther's explanation when you first get to her, it's like "why is there no skip button arrrrrrgh"

And sadly it is 100% required, because you can't get to the erchius mining facility without it so you gotta cheat your FTL in, or talk to Esther...

 

I'm talking about gameplay mechanics. If people think that its gonna get repetitive with each playthrough simply because the opening is the only one you have , than its the devs fault. I've never imagined anything, I never made up anything, why would I imagine an alternative opening to the game?
That's a failure in game design and is not an excuse.

 

So what then? Should the game just dump you somewhere and say "Good luck, chump!"? That is poor game design too. Worse actually.

And havent imagined anything... sure. So you are actually warping between stars, and the NPCs on the outpost aren't erased every 10 minutes. If you activly thought of these things as you played, than how the game started would be rather moot. suspending disbelief here requires your imagination to fill in the holes and make the game world believable.

 

The game should have varying intros. I never said there shouldn't be an intro.
What you're describing is immersion not imagination.
If I have to make the world seem believable rather than it just being believable at the get go, it's a fault in world building. If I have to force myself to be immersed in game rather than just being drawn in, then its a failure. Its not my fault that I wasn't immersed or thought the universe I was presented with was believable.
Suspension of disbelief is essentially saying, "Enjoy the game by ignoring parts of the game."

 

So you want an ideal game with an ideal intro. Good luck with that.

 

I'm not asking for anything perfect.
Im just saying what it is. If I think a game is good I'll tell you how good it is and how well it did in any individual aspect, and vice versa.

 

Just beginning in the ship in space would suffice. The ability to just buy the Erchius crystal as an alternate mean, get rid of the protector blade for those who skipped the cutscene and finally, allow the scan option on the M.M available. There you go, complete story emancipation (apart from the big annoying gate made of magic-I mean science, there should be an alternate to that somehow) I mean really, just a small change in an array for shopping and 1 or 2 extra variable changes would do the trick. Decide your own past, gotta learn how to mod that.

 

You see you have to ignore the story in order to enjoy it.

 

Stop saying it like it's an objective unshakable truth that applies to everyone. It really isn't.

 

You can't say, "I enjoyed the story" when you ignored the story. Its simple. How are you gonna have an opinion on the story when you didn't pay attention to the story?

So what do you do? Pretend as if the flaws don't exist? It still exists. Making up an imaginary alt.Opening or just skip the intro as if it never existed isn't an excuse. Its about design.