Item Descriptions

So from June 24th's progress update, we learned that there will be a new examination mechanic: Your character will now comment on what s/he sees depending on the race s/he is. I am genuinely concerned about this feature because I am no longer my character. Something a lot of games do, take Half Life and Portal for example, is making sure that your character does not speak so you feel more at one with him/her. Give your character a voice you can't directly control and suddenly s/he's a whole new person. I want to feel like I am that robot/bird/fish/dude exploring the Universe, but with this new feature I feel a strong detachment with the character I'm playing as.
As a generic OP closing, how do you feel about this new examination system?

 

I'm confused by what you mean here. I doubt many people would even notice this feature until they had been playing for several days unless they read the announcement. The observation of the character would be based upon that character's world view or way of seeing the world. I personally think that this makes the character more unique and personal, not less, but I may be missing something.

 

funny item descriptions is a cool feature, but i agree with you about the character feeling...
i think we should be able to choose between race based or generic descriptions
with "generic descriptions" enabled, instead of "a banana worth the big ape", an apex character would only say "a statue of a banana"

 

Oh, no, I think OP means that he/she have his/her own personality assigned to the character that he/she plays, and having different item examination dialogue might give the character a different personality than the personality that OP assigned to the character. It ruins immersion, is what he/she is saying.

 

Well, it won't be some personal information, more of information that mostly intrests or is known to the race he belongs to. Unless you're planing to roleplay a human who was raised by Apex or some other character who should have completely different view on things than other representatives of his race, this shouldn't be a problem.

 

Star bound won't always be what you want, if it where they would have to rename it to Towwl Bound.

 

While I understand your concern (it has been voiced by others as well), I think it might still be okay.

With the races each having their own lore and our character having a (sort of)backstory, I imagine that the descriptions will play off of the already established facts instead of pushing personalities on the characters we play.

Or maybe I'm just being optimistic.

 

I would love that actually

 

So don't examine things while roleplaying. If it would really be that much of an immersion breaker for you, simply have a character set aside for roleplay who doesn't examine things.

 

You mean I'm not a 30 pixel tall bird-man exploring the universe in his adobe spaceship?!

 

I actually don't like the feature either. I was hoping the examination feature had more of a mundane scientific explanation behind things. Rather than "Ooo! A banana! I love bananas!" It would be "An expertly crafted statue of a banana".

Oh wait.. Err.. I agree with whatever is the bestest thing to agree with! I want to change my opinion to whatever is the most popular.

 

Was thinking the same thing, not everything will be how you like it. Either use it or not, you don't have to use everything within a game. And honestly I forgot about that feature since it's not a big thing for me, I rather just look at it and guess what it is myself before using a in-game feature.

 

I agree that it separates you from your character. Bioware does a good job of adding dialogue without making you feel separated from your character by adding choices with consequences, but most games that have character dialogue make you feel more like you're watching an interactive movie, not creating your own story.

For something like examining a statue you should really have a helper (see: navi in zelda) that chimes in with some helpful information about the object. You can still have race specific conversations because each helper can be race specific. It can be as simple as your Ship A.I. (think EDI from mass effect) who just chimes in from a communication device. A Human's AI will have less information available about an Avian statue than the Avian AI.

Just my .02

 

Haven't even noticed this, and I have to say I totally love this feature. In the "Magic" thread I mentioned the idea how we can have "magic" but not actual magic, by simply having different races view advanced technology differently. While this might not be the same, having cultural backgrounds affecting in-game descriptions is still neat.

 

Perhaps you could see it as instead of the descriptions being your own character's musings, they are the comments of a third party narrator.

 

I understand what you mean and agree with your views to some degree as well. I felt similarly to you when I first read about the feature. It takes away a bit of the immersion factor for some people, myself included. I would prefer what the character sees to have unique, amusing (but also detailed and informative) descriptions, perhaps even race dependent, rather than the character commenting on them directly. I believe a description works more like a third party narration of sorts, which means that the player still holds some level of individuality. However, character comments seems to be what we'll be getting. It will still be an entertaining feature, that cannot be denied, and if the comments keep some level of neutrality then it will not be so bothersome in regards to the player wanting to feel like he/she is the character.

This is something a lot of people don't care about, I understand that. Nevertheless, there are minor things such as these in games that have an impact on some of us.

 

Just never examine anything =D Problem solved.

/thread

 

And yet all modern day RPGs games use canned dialog responses to interact with NPCs. Some earlier games used keywords, which would allow you to type out a sentence as long as you had the correct keyword the dialog would advance. Yes, most of these games give a number of options to play your character as evil, good, or neutral.

If you are concerned about your character informing you about in game lore, I'd think you would be be more concerned that you have to control your character using a keyboard and mouse. Sorry, this just feels like your picking a sliver from someones eye, while ignoring the plank in your own. If you are hyper sensitive about being in character there are plethora of other immersion breaking items that far outweigh lore comments. Just my opinion though.

 

This is starting to get annoying.

 

I believe item descriptions to be an unnecessary hindrance to the development of Starbound, shouldn't they be working on server mechanics instead of... Item descriptions? It's been stated that there are 6,000+ or 7,000+ (Novakids) item descriptions, which are little more than FLAVOR TEXT.

This is just my opinion, and although it'll probably be shot down by hundreds of "the devs can do what they want!" I feel that it should be added post-beta, if not post-release, and be worked on in time when there is nothing more important to do.

I also feel that these side-paths that the devs have been going on recently, such as the sets of furniture, and these item descriptions, are just filler, because my view now is that there will not be a beta until at least the insomnia festival (late august).
Great job on the item descriptions, though. It sounded like a lot of writing.