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

The biggest challenge in replacing the game's storyline, is mainly that making missions is hard -- you gotta make a huge dungeon, you gotta wire everything up to make it interesting, and then you need a good boss with some good AI. This isn't exactly easy to do.

And you wouldn't have to do this once, but several times if you wanted a main story that was any good whatsoever.

The rest is basically doing .patch files to tell the game to skip Esther's stuff and replace it with your own stuff.

 

Well that was sudden and out of nowhere.

 

I never said the whole game is mod unfriendly, I just said the story was.

I don't even want a main story. Why can't my character be their own story? Just a smooth way of making it to the outpost and just buying the crystals from Pete should be enough to avoid the story.

 

I think it would be a trivial matter to mod that in. You'd have to dump an NPC somewhere or even an item that starts a quest, that points to Pete's quest. It asks for 20 Erchius Crystals, right? Just add said Crystals to, say, Infinity Express. Go buy said crystals and it SHOULD finish Pete's quest without having to do the Lunar Base Mission.

Rather simple to do if you know how.

That way you can skip talking to Esther altogether, though you'd probably have to give yourself the scan tool with a console command, not sure what that command is. There surely is one, though.

-OR- you can go digging through the assets and figure out what exactly Esther's quest does, what call it makes, that gives you the scan tool and C&P that into a quest of your own. Could be just as simple as picking an item up that spawns in your ship locker.

EDIT: looks like the thing is an essentialitem called "inspectiontool". So you just give yourself the essentialitem inspection tool just like we used to do with the "beamaxe".

 

Might do that at one stage.

 

I hope this isn't technically necro-ing my own thread here considering the last post was a little over a month ago, but I feel like the dev team has done nothing but double down on this issue people percieve rather than doing anything to make their sandbox more of an actual sandbox.

"Here's some new content, but you have to finish the story to use it" feels very very wrong, especially when said content is just a slightly expanded version of the dungeons already in the game, that's sole purpose is being able to get things that let you build more. The biggest problem that people who like the story even have is the lack of anything to do after the story other than build, so adding content that's just more of the same, that unlocks something that's explicit purpose is to facilitate building then locking that behind beating the story doesn't at all serve to help anyone's issues at all!

It's just very sad in general and I do hope the dev team is actually listening to the concerns on this forum? It seems they don't actually actively look at the forums and only really do when they're asked to by the community moderators, which... doesn't seem like it's a particularly great way of opening themselves to the concerns & opinions of their audience

 

See, thing is though, before this update there was very little incentive for anyone to actually do the story missions, other than a buff NPC, and another NPC that sells augments, and perhaps a sniper rifle that I've heard is an OK weapon. And maybe the upgraded sword if you want that.

Otherwise, the story missions... once you get the scan tool, you don't need Esther and her story missions anymore.

Locking the dungeons and the terraformers behind the story gives more incentive to actually do the story, which I'm quite sure most people skipped after they've seen it once, and the story is probably a huge portion of work they put into the game. They want people to do the story missions they put so many man-hours into creating. They want people to fight the bosses that they made that surely took a good bit of coding to do.

If they gave you terraformers and the dungeons without gating it behind the story, then there'd be even less reason to do the story as you'd just hop on over to the dungeons as soon as you got your T6 armor and a couple T5-T6 weapons and that's that.

 

If people have no incentive to play the story, and don't like it/don't do it, don't you think the issue lies with the story and it's implementation itself, rather than the player base?

If people need an incentive to do the storyline rather than just... playing the sandbox game as a sandbox, shouldn't the devs be striving to make the story mode more engaging and better for players rather than arbitrarily punishing players for not doing the story by gating content behind it? Considering that the crux of the arguments in this thread from people in support of the current story is "You don't have to do the story if you don't want to" (Despite this being not true, and several features being locked behind missions you have to grind through) this argument that there needs to be more things gated behind story progress to force players into doing it when they otherwise wouldn't seems a little bit off, and not really in the spirit of good game design

 

Not always.

Some people are very reward-centered. Not enough reward, no interest.

Doesn't matter how awesome the story is, or isn't, or how fun the missions are, or aren't, if there ain't enough reward in it, people won't do it, period. I've seen other games, especially MMOs, have awesome stories, cutscenes, etc but you won't find people doing it.

Why? Because the reward was not good enough. Not enough interest due to lacking incentives. But yet people claimed they liked it, they thought it was fun, but yet they only did it once and never touched it again because there just wasn't any kind of reward for their time spent.

And how would you suggest they do this? They've tried to make the missions fun, they've tried giving as complex boss fights as they could, some of them having multiple stages, I just don't get what more you want, to make the story "good enough" for you to do without there being a reward. What more could they really do?

See, there's a mod called Frackin'Universe. It comes with a mission dungeon, that has a boss. I ran that dungeon quite a few times. Why? Because there are several treasure chests in that dungeon that have somewhat difficult-to-make crafting materials AND the boss drops stuff when it dies. Rewards. Incentive.

If it weren't for those, I would probably have done it once, and then never went back unless I got bored. Why? No rewards.

You can easily mod around the story if you so wish. But the devs don't really like people skipping the story that they put quite a few man-hours into creating, and I don't blame them. They put the work in, for people to enjoy and people just wanna skip everything, and then they'll complain about how the game "lacks content" when they wanna skip what content isn't there.

Then, you say that, and they'll go "but this story just isn't good enough for me" or "it's too cliche!" (like 99% of all other games aren't full of cliche, lol) or some other nonsense.

No matter what the devs do, they just can't win with the complainers.