1. If you're looking for help-related things (for example, the key rebinding tutorial), please check the FAQ and Q&A forum! A lot of the stickies from this forum have been moved there to clean up space.
    Dismiss Notice

Feedback Space exploration is great, but

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by tehcavy, Jun 9, 2017.

  1. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    One thing this game isn't good at overall is actually explaining its new systems. I know people whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine about tutorials as if all games were the same goddamn thing because they saw that one Egoraptor video and don't get little concepts like context, but in a game like this with so many different things to do NEEDS some more guidance. You can explain systems without railroading players.
     
    kittentamer, STCW262 and Xylia like this.
  2. tehcavy

    tehcavy Ketchup Robot

    Chucklefish tutorials suck, that's a fact. I discovered the brakes accidentially when I tried to press Space to go up. And Horn button (F) when I was just randomly pressing every available button.

    Still, 9 times out of 10 you can simply scream past enemies on a Rocket Spear without as much as a scratch, unless you ran out of energy and faceplanted into an asteroid with Twigun and a Heavy Droid nearby or something.
     
  3. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    ^^
    THIS!

    Everybody says how today's games are "watered down" with "hand-holding tutorials" ... but yet, you know what? I'd rather have a short (10 or so minute) tutorial that tells me how to actually control my character than to have this game that tells me nothing and dumps me in a world, when I know nothing about how to actually play the game or what's expected of me. Older games used to do this and it was obnoxious.

    Take Skyrim vs Morrowind for example.

    Skyrim starts you off with only being able to mouse-look, and then introduces the ability to move after some dialogue and a cutscene, and then, finally once you do some moving, your literal bindings are removed (you were a prisoner, afterall) and the game pops a small dialogue up that tells you what button(s) draw your weapons, etc. You're instructed to get and put on some equipment, and then you gotta fight a couple very easy bad guys with some help on your team (it is literally impossible to lose this fight even if you are struggling to figure out the controls). Then a little later they teach you about how potions are and how to use them, the guy has you picking a very easy lock to show you that lockpicking exists and how to do lockpicking, there's a spell book in that same cage that you pick the lock to, and the game pops up a window about how to cast spells, there's a refresher course about melee combat when you get attacked by a few more guys, and then at the end of it, the guy says "hey wait.. there's a powerful enemy up there. We could sneak past or you could shoot it with the bow." and he hands you a bow. So you are taught about ranged combat AND sneaking at the same time. Then you leave the cave and he shows you the Standing Stones (constant buffs you can choose one of). By the time you get to the first town, you pretty much know everything about how to play Skyrim if you were paying attention.

    Morrowind, however, has you start out in the deck of a ship. It tells you how WASD and the interact key works, and a guy tells you to pick a class (or make your own class), without telling you what the skills are, how they affect your stats, or how levelups even work (it's VERY complicated!). If you happen to pick up the dagger, or some food, then MAYBE the game tells you how these work. Once you get your papers signed, and you step outside of the Tax Office, the game basically says "You should take the package to Balmora. Good luck, have fun!", gives you a slap on the rump and that's it.

    You're left scratching your head because the game tells you..... pretty much nothing. Some people complain that the Skyrim tutorial holds your hand too much and it's "too long" or "too slow to get started", but hey. Some of the best novels ever written started out slow. Some of the best masterpieces of film history started out very slow with very little action.

    So ya, give me more tutorial, please. Oh, and another game that is awesome at teaching you how to play it without outright holding your hand? Final Fantasy XIV. Tutorials come in two forms in that game: subtle and popups. Subtle tutorials is the game only unlocking features at periods throughout the gameplay, for example the ability to change jobs don't come until Lv10 IIRC... at Lv15 you learn how to dye equipment, etc. And there's usually popups when you run into something new, that have screenshots and a brief explanation of how the feature works. You can close this popup instantly or read it, depending on your needs.
     
    STCW262 likes this.
  4. Roskii Heiral

    Roskii Heiral Heliosphere

    Are you using the definitive elder scrolls game as a negative example? Sorry, I chuckled at that a bit. There's a reason the game still has an active community today and every subsequent game in the series has had morrowind modded back into it. That sense of being an (almost) directionless nobody in a brand new world is priceless and hard to replicate.

    Am I saying the lack of tutorial was the key to morrowind's success? nope.

    Am I saying it was a great game that did waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more right than wrong? yep

    Am I saying that the lack of tutorial was something it did right? uh huh.

    I love that feeling.
     
  5. scaper12123

    scaper12123 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Good god, they do? If they do then I haven't noticed. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference. (I have both on my ship. Given the length of time it takes to come across crewmembers that is a rather unreliable way to upgrade your ship speed.)

    It's good that they normalized that. Now if they could normalize going from high orbit to low orbit around a planet, that would be grand
     
  6. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    The difference is small, but there. 10% or something like that? When you are counting something that's 10-20 seconds long, that 1-2 seconds shaved off really doesn't make much noticeable difference.

    @Roskii Falfeather : We'll have to agree to disagree, then. I am currently playing Morrowind, and I bought the game a loooooong time ago, a year after it came out in fact, and I could just never get "into" it. It was too vague, didn't teach you enough, and even now I find myself sitting here going "hmmm. what should I actually DO next, though?"

    That's never a good feeling to have. You should always have at least some idea of something you could do to progress next. I'm not saying for the game to strong-arm me into what I should do next, but having at least some kind of goals would be nice, and no, grinding should never be the goal. But yet here I sit, unable to progress in either Mages or Thieves' guild because of my stats being too low, Blades won't give me MSQ either because my stats are too low... so..... grind it is? *sigh*

    The only way I was able to "get started" (I'm Lv6 with like 3 towns worth of mages/thieves guild done) only because I found an online "How to get started" guide, lol. I should not need a wiki just to get comfortable in the game world. Sorry, but nope. That's not good game design. A game should stand on its own without the need for wikis and junk.
     
  7. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    Well, the recent thing with games seems to be: implement something grindy, make along beta stage and still bring it live too badly designed and buggy.

    It is seriously sad to see that more and mor egames go that direction. Not sure why probably to keep completionists playing their game, but extreme randomness is a bad game design concept when the randomness is the deciding factor for enetering any features of the game.

    feels like all the game designers left the industry, something new and truly entertaining nto based on grind or RNG seems to be harder and harder to find.

    And about mehc visuals, those were a fail too, lots of parts, most will stay unised because visuals are tied to their performance, which makes 90% of them useless in the later game. and with how fats you go through the tiers most of them are ueseless at all.
     
    Last edited: Jun 13, 2017
  8. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    After doing some more mech content in Moderate stars, the grind for upgrading mechs isn't as bad as I initially thought it would be. It is still a grind, yes, but instead of saying the whole thing is "terrible" or "bad", I'm just going to go with "it needs some tweaks".

    Good idea, just needs some tweaks to make it a little more rewarding with a more reasonable time-frame. Same thing goes for space stations. I'd say a 20-25% reduction of costs would feel a lot more fair.
     
  9. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    I got my second-version Golem body after only a few runs of Anomolies, since the only thing I hadn't already gotten a bunch of was the obtain-in-space-only Proton Limiters, and 10 for a mech body certainly doesn't seem too much.

    I just wish at least the body had a vanity slot. Arms don't need em since their function and visuals are pretty directly tied together. Legs? Eh. Boosters? Sure but not strictly necessary.
     
  10. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Yeah, the body only requires 10, but did you look at weapons? 20 proton limiters each. boosters/legs? 20 each IIRC. To upgrade one mech, you need a total of 90 Proton Limiters. That's assuming you only do 2 T2 weapons.
     
  11. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    I guess it depends on what bits you find in chests and whatnot. If the higher-tier salvage parts are only obtained in combat, yeah, that's not great. If you can find them in crates in enemy ships in higher threat levels, not so bad. (I feel you should probably find them even in friendly stations, but that's me. Maybe just not at a very high rate.)

    Of course, this does beg the question as to how often you're really gonna be creating/swapping parts. Legs seems a pretty low priority in any circumstance, I prefer my mobile melee style on planets so odds are I'll rarely-if-ever bother with mechs planetside. I'm probably not gonna change out my drill til I get a better drill (it's a pretty nice defensive weapon), assuming there's a better drill (I haven't really looked at the wiki's lists on this, this weekend has been pretty busy). I've found an arm combo that works and I'm not terribly convinced I'm gonna change it anytime soon, even given the staggered discovery rate of new mech parts.

    An of course, these numbers are tweakable, so we'll see. I just want to keep my junky Golem body as the main visual.
     
  12. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Well, to give you an idea, I spent an hour last night doing 5-6 Anomalies in a Moderate system. IIRC, I got ~15 Limiters.

    Even if you subtract 20 for ignoring the mech legs (which I will likely do in all honesty), that is still 60. You're talking ~4 hours of farming, just for the Limiters. That's NOT counting the ore, or the other parts (some of them require upwards of 40 and they drop less often!). Now obviously, you will get some of the other items while doing the limiters, but I think I got like ~10 or so Couplings, they seem to be the rarest. Last I checked, a T2 weapon is 20 Limiters + 40 Couplings + 20 Violium.

    40 Couplings...... lawl.
     
  13. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    some tweaks? the entire mech thing entirely breaks the basic idea of Starbound in its execution, thats why it is "BAD".

    So we have procedural generated weapons, which can visually and effect wise be unique. yet mech parts are bound by stats and visualisation. This is enitrely the opposite, people won't build their Mechs towards style, they will build it towards usability. Why have they not made emch parts procedurally? why not give us an option for performance and viasuals to choose form to make a new part? Because lazy design. and that youc an't "tweak" that you have to entirely redo. also with the experience of past "grindy" impelmention you can bet it will be tweaked as much as those Tarrafarming dungeons.
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2017
    Blevruz likes this.
  14. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    Frankly, procadurally-generated weapons were, in hindsight, a bad idea. The end result is that there's a lot of weapons, but most of them are mechanically identical, to the point that the only real difference is that some may look different...But there will be lots of weapons with similar stats.
    In terms of not having vanity slots for Mechs, how would it be possible to tell what weapons is a Mech using if they existed?
     
  15. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Well, to be honest, the body part and boosters could have vanity slots. The weapons, no. You can't vanity a weapon on your character, so there's no reason why one should be able to vanity a weapon. I'd say legs could also be vanity'd.

    Give them time; enough requests they might do just that.

    @LilyV3 : Maybe they wanted to get this content out sooner, so they decided that they'd worry about vanity and more variety later? Plenty of games and updates do that kinda thing. Release a new mechanic, get it all tweaked and THEN, in a future update, release more of that mechanic when all the issues have been ironed out. They can only test so much in-house, until they need our help.

    I don't think you wanted the Mech Content to sit on Unstable for another 3-5 months while they continued to tweak it and listen to feedback from a very small portion of the playerbase willing to play Unstable.

    So, they released the core mech thing now to get Everybody's response on it... so perhaps next update, there will be more weapons and equipment, maybe even vanity slots, available then.

    As for random weapons, I would have to echo @STCW262 's response. Random-gen weapons are boring and uninteresting. There's a pool of generic secondaries, and elements that it slaps on the weapon, and then it picks from a pool of graphics (a lot of them look bland) and slaps them all on a weapon and bam. weapon.

    Very few of these secondaries I find myself actually caring about and almost all of them have such high and ridiculous energy costs that it tends to not be worth it. In fact, for example, broadswords..... the only 3 good secondaries I've seen are the Spin Slash, Super Spin Slash, and that one that shoots a projectile straight in front of you. Guess which one is the only one that appears on random-gen weapons (or at least that I've seen)? It certainly isn't the two that are actually cool and usable abilities.

    I don't know why all melee weapons dump your entire energy bar (or very near it!) in one use of their ability, but it makes them simply unusable for me. I almost never use random-gen secondaries unless I get lucky and find a sword that's got the forward projectile.

    But yet they removed a lot of cool-looking unique weapons (the racial ones). Some of them looked rather cool and they were all unique. They watered down the crafting list so that you only get 2? 3? broadswords in the entire progression path that are craftable for example, so you're left hoping a random-gen broadsword will drop in-between the crafted ones. They should have just kept the racial weaponry, they had all the assets, the weapons were balanced.... why oh why did they remove them?

    And don't get me started on how freaking wimpy most of these weapons are. Of course, since we go by a rarity system... most of everything you find is white-quality and is just vendor trash. Greens are "meh" and if I see a blue, it is almost always the wrong weapon type (the game loves blue daggers, axes and hammers.... sigh). The randomgen weapon system just doesn't make the game feel very good because there's too much RNG involved in trying to find a decent weapon for your tier if you're in-between the craftables.

    But thankfully I don't have to worry about that, because I play FU. There are actual craftable weapons that don't suck in FU.
     
    STCW262 likes this.
  16. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    I ebtter wait 5 month for a properly implemented feature than sticking yyears of forever with a half decent makde one.

    also why should weapons not have vanity? theres a lot cool looking rocket laucnher,s unfortunately the good oens I find always look shitty. We can't even paint them.

    @STCW well, vanity would give a reaosn to throw away less of those near equal wepaons, also if they kept the old wepaons with more bullet mechanicxs and stuff we had a lot more variety in wepaons, they just had to tweak the more useless ones. The random wepaon generation wouldn'T be bad if we could find more wepaons or had actually a true crafting systems or tenants that create crafted wepaons or vendors specificied for wepaons armor etc instead of al mixed stuff. This is just another of those half done and kept for years thing of CF: They had all the chances to make every aspect of the game great, yte most tuerned out just beeing "somehow done".
     
  17. Blevruz

    Blevruz Phantasmal Quasar

    The mechs are pretty ok in my opinion.
    Space combat is fun, part-crafting is a good incentive to do the anomalies, and the dungeons can be interesting.
    Kind of sad there's no vanity slots for mechs, or procedural parts.

    The new dungeons, ships and space encounters are quite nice.
    Like other dungeons, their main flaw is a lack in diversity however.

    The new weapons are fun, if gimmicky.
    I adore the new instruments, and am having a lot of fun with the new panel blocks (even though they glitch with water, which I don't think Chucklefish will ever fix).

    On the other hand, while I don't care much for space stations (too expensive and not customizable enough), I'm pretty saddened by the changes to asteroid fields. Building in there isn't an option anymore. I want a way to get gravity in closed space :v

    The few space monsters added do the job, but I would've loved to see procedural space monsters - more incentive to travel from system to system.

    What little lore was added was kind of interesting, but can't close the gaping wound caused by the retcon of pre-release lore.


    All in all, it has its moments, but also some pretty big flaws. Most of it can be fixed by mere addition of content, however.


    P.S.: concerning the procedural weapons all feeling the same, I'd say it's due to a lack of different parts, skills and such.
    With more of these, along with a weapon assembly station, I feel like procedurals may very well be as unique and memorable as Unique weapons.
     
  18. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    Well, procedural weapons DO become more memorable with FU, which seems to make most guns have most secondary abilities that can be found in guns (Even some that are actually mains, such as Spread Shot), so adding more secondary weapons, specially in the case of Rocket Launchers, (And definitely more weapon types, such as automatic shotguns or laser guns) would work.
    As for mobs, the unique weapons could use variations, such as adding a Spinemine variant that shoots shrapnel upon exploding, or giving Heavy Drones a pool of weapons, and allow them to have any combination of two weapons (Similarly to Mechs, as Heavy Drones are easily the closest thing in the game to hostile Mechs right now)...
    As for planetside monsters, procgen attacks should come back (After all, getting killed by rainbow vomit was priceless).
    Space Encounters should also have more varieity in terms of each kind of encounter. For instance, it's a bit repetitive to see that almost all ships are the same 2 kinds (Specially when it comes to the generic "bandit ships" that always pop up instead of, say, an Occasus ship). Another way to add vareity to them would be to give them more unique furniture (For example, there should really be more Occasus furniture. Right now, they apparently took the care of painting their ships, gave them custom doors...but for some reason didn't decorate the rest of the ship, so it looks like they just stole it from some space bandits and didn't bother to decorate).
     
    Last edited: Jun 14, 2017
    Blevruz likes this.
  19. Blevruz

    Blevruz Phantasmal Quasar

    Concerning FU's weapons, I feel like the main reason Chucklefish hasn't added such stuff is because modders have done it before.

    I'd love for CF to add more weapon parts, and restore racial weapons through racial parts and such.
    Perhaps bind caracteristics to parts of the weapon, so that tearing them apart to build new ones would make sense ?

    I wholeheartedly agree with the need for procedural creatures to have more diversity.
    Be it through projectiles, special attack patterns (ex: capable to make you levitate and attack you in the airs) or other characteristics (attack in groups, have glowing parts...) that would make them more interesting.

    The rest I agree with and have no relevant comments to make.

    I'd love to have missions involving attacking massive space ships invading a system.
    Even more so if they include procedural mobs and cool weapons.
     
  20. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    At least Defense Turrets were originally a mod, so it's not like it makes much sense to not add something just because it's already done by a mod (In fact, that mentality just means that mods are expected to do the devs' job).
    It would be somewhat difficult to implement racial weapons again in a way that isn't bland (Just like the sprite swaps of old); but that could be done by giving each race recipes for specific weapon types. An old thing that could be brought back in this case would be to make blueprints obtainable by buying them, just like how the lower-tier racial weapon blueprints could be bought.
     

Share This Page