Great Engine. Skeptical about Flavor

pickaxes and melee weapons do not equate to fantasy. At most they imply medieval, which is not the same thing at all.

 

Pickaxes and melee weapons don't imply a medieval age at all. It would be more of a less technology advanced time frame, seeing as "melee" weapons are still used, and pickaxes were used for a good portion of the 19-20th century.

 

Starbound is already a huge disappointment for me for sci-fi (imma ridiin' around in ma spaceship an' cuttin' trees down wit ma stone axe...)
It will need a huge conversion mod for it to be what it should be.

 

However, using soft metals such as gold, silver, and platinum for weapons and armor screams fantasy trope.

 

I heard inter travel events are planned later. Perhaps one could be your ship crashing where by the only thing you can make is basic primitive tools like the pickaxe/axe/hoe ect.
You make these to survive long enough to get off the planet only.

Not sure, that's just a very rough basic unfinished idea, but I can't help but feel the game would feel better without the primitive tools.

But...then again, it's hard to say what's appropriate for the game, since we aren't dealing with a unified technology curve.

Humans could be somewhat advanced, Apex even more so, but what about Florans or Avians? They appear to be much more of a primal race and still find use in spears and melee combat.

Maybe your starting tools could be dictated by your race?
Start as a human and you have the drill, but a Floran/Avian and possibly Glitch would have a pickaxe?

 

That just makes advanced races broken as fuck and basically discourages any use of less-advanced races except as a self-imposed challenge.

If the devs weren't willing to have racial abilities built-into the races for fear of picking favorites, why would they ever be in-favor of lopsiding race balance even more by offering different races superior starting tools?

 

To be off topic for a bit, I cannot underestimate the need for you to excise the use of Tvtropes from your vocabulary. It's cancerous by nature and it makes it rather difficult for people to take you serious when you use such a niche vocabulary. I'm not even going to get into justifying things via that site's entries.

Now, to the topic at hand. While there's nothing wrong with melee weapons or other low tech options in a science fiction setting, there needs to be a good, or at least creative, justification for using it. Often, the weaponry is hyper advanced- Lightsabres are comprised of pure energy and are capable of deflecting blaster fire. A Chainsword has adamantine teeth and can chew through durasteel or chitin with contemptible ease. Power Fists use hyper kinetics to send targets flying. Psionic Blades are an extension of the body and can be used to deadly effect. Of course, it has to be realized that it doesn't matter how powerful a gun is if you can't get a shot off. Melee combat offers advantages if you can close and engage. Just, not if you're using an iron broadsword against modern alloys.

There are other ways to justify the use of archaic weapons or tools, though. Culture can play a big role in deciding a race's armament. The Elite's carry energy swords due to their proud warrior heritage and Orkz never go anywhere without a choppa because they're hulking primitive brutes.

It would just be aesthetics. They'd be equally powerful, but they'd have different aesthetics- the fluff reason is that Glitch and Floran are strong enough to use melee weapons and primitive tools to the same effect as more advanced Apex/Human/Hylotl/Avian gear.

 

Nah, that just screams "video game".

 

Usually sci-fi video games will stick to some sort of unobtanium-esque resource that's supposedly super-durable so as to avoid the dreaded "Gold is not very durable in real life" problem. Fantasy games just presume that value = strength, hence why you'll see gold armors being paraded around by super-baddies.

 

I don't equate lower tech to fantasy, swords, shields, bows, furnaces, etc. were used in the older ages of human history, and are certainly not fantasy. The only reason I could assume swords/armor/shields of the low tech kind are thought of as fantasy things, would be due to the fantasy genre having them or something.

 

Cept gold is used all the time.. in electronics. I admit we shouldn't be using gold on pickaxes. Make that steel and move on.. silver should be iron.
Copper sorta is bronze and since there is no bronze (unless we smelt it.. ideas!) Platinum I am not sure about, I don't know enough about that metal to say if it should be used in mining (drill tip or whatever).

Diamond though makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense is diamond .. ore.
Diamond should be smelted from coal, at a ridiculous conversion ratio. Worse than the wood ->coal one.
So I am more for a metal based progression of whatever dig tools we end up with.
Let's see.. Someone else around here mentioned making our ship a broken husk that barely functions. Calling the matter manip broken, and get us off on making whatever craftable mining apparatus we can.
That would start us on stone picks, then copper picks (or bronze if we need to make it tougher), then Iron picks followed by Iron drills .. no more pickaxes past this point. Iron drills->Steel Drills->diamond tipped drills that make it go from 3 by 3 to 6 by 6?, titanium drills-> whatever other metals are out there , with depleted uranium tips to replace diamond tips then we get into LAZORZ. Bla bla that would require going back and getting stacks of the OTHER ore, silver->gold->so on so forth.

 

Anyone else want some form of telekinesis? For you magic haters, you could have it be done via some piece of tech, I guess. I never feel more badass in a video game than when I can start crushing people with nothing.

 

Not fantasy, just not realistic.

 

I'm just waiting for the inevitable Sci-fi-bound mod to come out.

The devs are never going to take the game in a more "hard sci-fi" direction. Which is cool, they really don't have to.

(Note that when I say get rid of all of the fantasy, I'm talking, "don't even leave the pickaxes in", because no pickaxe can mine the entire side of a mountain. Especially if the only thing powering it, is the atrophied arms of a guy who uses his matter manipulator to move everything heavier than a banjo...)

[Yeah, I'm one of those guys.]

 

There is still a huge gulf between "has a few fantasy tropes" and "is fantasy". Starbound doesn't even approach the latter, and even the elements of the former are very weak.

 

They are not fantasy in space. Star Wars is clearly Space Opera, which is a subgenre of scifi, look it up. Star Trek is Space Frontier. And they are both valid scifi genres. Maybe your prof compared it all to Hard SF. That's the one that has logical explanation for everything. If yes, then no please, I would not want Starbound to be Hard SF. Because it'd be boring as feck.

I assure you, the Bath'Leth is pretty effective. Especially if you take into account that most races run around in shirts pew-pewing with their little disruptors, it can be pretty shocking when you are cut in half. It might be just a "cultural" thing as well, but most main cultures have their melee weapons, just not the humans for some weird reason. The Vulcans have the Lirpa, and the Romulans the Tsunkate Falchion.

And Star Wars has much more then just light sabers, if you ever looked at the expanded universe, it's full of vibroblades as well, along with some other things.

As for the "why don't we have hi-tech gadgets from the get go" argument. Because you're alone, in a ship that's little more then a glorified escape pod, and just left destruction/certain death/annihilation etc. behind. I highly doubt that in a situation like that you'd have time to pick up a few hundred circuit boards, a few libraries worth of quantum mechanics, micro electronics, nanotechnology books. Or do you assume there's a "scifi gadgets for dummies" book in the Starbound Universe? If so then you'd contradict your own desire for hard SF. Because items like that don't happen by magic, and your average joe won't be building a flux capacitor or a laser rifle. Have you seen any facilities on your ship that would help you creating micro chips and batteries and the like? No? There you go, that's why you use sticks and stones.

 

The basis for your counter argument relies on the same story the devs have already written up for the game... The story would have to be changed if it were harder sci-fi, or there would be no story... The ship and your character being an "average Joe" isn't the reason why the story can't be stronger sci-fi. The story is the reason the story isn't stronger sci-fi.

That being said, OP and everyone else should just wait for the sci-fi mod. Expecting them to change the story now, is pointless and stupid.

 

He's actually right, it does scream fantasy. Gold armor being a better armor than iron or steel is actually something I tend to remember most in relation to old Squaresoft games, if anything.

Sci-Fi generally does this instead:

The oddball thing is Starbound technically does both of these things, which makes me think that it's not specifically trying to be fantasy but rather stuff like the pickaxe and armor made of gold is just a carry over from Terraria.

If it was my call, I'd probably have the player only using a pickaxe for the first tier, and stuff like the drills be made out of iron, steel and various unobtanium, but require gold or other various precious materials as crafting components. Gold is often used in circuitry, and both Copper and Diamond are good heatsink materials. At higher tiers you could get mining lasers which could use Diamond as a lens, even.

Silver is tough though... I don't know of too many practical applications for silver.

 

Funny you should mention Square Enix xD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Ocean_(video_game)

 

I think silver can also be used for circuitry, but don't quote me on that. Unlike gold, it can tarnish which would make it an inferior choice in any case.

While drills might be appealing, I think the Matter Manipulator is the way to go, period. Not only is it your starting tool, but it'd cut down on inventory clutter. Plus, you could have upgrades to more than just mining speed- like maybe having barren tiles have a small chance to drop ore or dramatically increasing dig speed in certain terrains.