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Let's talk about the 1.0 lore rewrite

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by Guest0241525, Sep 24, 2017.

  1. Nibolas O Anelbozas

    Nibolas O Anelbozas Spaceman Spiff

    I like your cynicism towards the florans u_u bias of me? yep!
     
  2. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    Oh, I like Florans now, I think they're far more charming and fleshed out in general. I hated them back in beta, but they had became much more likeable, while not losing their identity as hunters. Details such as Florans being asexual beings or kept in order by plant-manipulating Greenfingers also make them feel more fleshed out, I suppose.

    Especially now that their characterization doesn't come in just two variants of "ssstab sstab sstab everything made of flesssh until there'sss no flessh left" or "act all deep and vague and mysterious".

    Hope that's satisfying enough? :nurutease:
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 23, 2017
    STCW262 likes this.
  3. Sparklink

    Sparklink Ketchup Robot

    There are three fossils of old races, the Mysterious Skull, The Unidentified Humanoid, and the Avioscale. I think they should have covered these things with just a touch of lore at least. I am interested to know why the Avioscale shares a similar name to the Avian homeworld Avos.
     
  4. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    That'd be the subject better suit for the theory thread, but my personal guess would be that Avioscale is an evolutionary ancestor to Avians.
     
  5. Nibolas O Anelbozas

    Nibolas O Anelbozas Spaceman Spiff

    guess that's the source of my raci-i mean...my non preference of florans...uugh, plant freaks.

    But i Guess my contribuition for this thread is over, wake me up when the subject is Avians again, thanks, bye!
     
  6. YellowDemonHurlr

    YellowDemonHurlr Ketchup Robot

    The old lore was fragmented and I have a sense that a lot of the mysterious vagaries were more to mask stuff the devs hadn't actually come up with than to be proper mysteries, but it felt like we were in a living world. It felt like there were things out there waiting to be discovered (even if there weren't). The new lore just feels... flat. It's focused around the main story, which would be okay if the main story wasn't incredibly bland. I mean, the central idea of uniting all the different peoples to fight an enemy that's out to destroy anything that isn't itself is an archetypal story and can be very powerful (especially given the current worldwide trend toward political isolationism). But do we get to know any of the peoples? Do we learn who they are, what life means to them, and use that knowledge to win them over (and perhaps improve ourselves in the process)? No. We run around randomly generated planets scanning furniture and then fighting tangentially related bosses.

    I mean, the bosses could have worked. The Erchius boss shows the human admins that they've been ignoring important events in favor of pursuing the bottom line. A raid on the Hylotyl Grand Library makes them realize they're not as great as they thought, and they need help from the other races just as much as the other races need them. The Kluex avatar puts down the heroes' attempts to recruit the avians with a screech of "FOOOLS! THE AVIANS ARE THE CHOSEN PEOPLE, WE SHALL NOT ASSOCIATE WITH YOUUUUUU!"

    The Big Ape boss was a mistake. Big Ape isn't a battle hologram, or even a person. It's a dictatorial force, a concept by which to squash individualism and dissent. You never see Big Ape.

    Oddly enough, the Floran Hunt kind of works. It makes perfect sense to win the florans over by proving yourself in battle.

    And who is this cult we're fighting, anyway? We don't learn hardly anything about them, we don't see what makes them tick, we don't even get to see them be remotely threatening. They're just vague generic enemies who are ostensibly our opposites, but never really demonstrate that.

    Anyway... even if the old lore wasn't that great, the new lore is just... bleh. It could have been so much better.
     
    Nibolas O Anelbozas likes this.
  7. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    I strongly disagree, that's definitely not how it felt to me.

    There's something about the old lore that felt like there wasn't even any room for the player character to make any impact in the world - the lore was entirely disconnected from the universe that we were exploring, like it was a static thing. It felt like we were just supposed to read about the grand schemes of all those great untouchable villains, while our own existence was restricted to that of a preset backstory. As @M_Sipher said, it did not seem like anything that the player would ever have anything to do with.

    I suppose the thing with gathering allies is that we don't gather entire peoples, but rather, individuals who decide to join us on their own. We don't get multiple Floran tribes, we just get Nuru. We don't get the entirety of Hylotl imperial guard, we just get Koichi. We do get Lana Blake's assistance, but it seems to be more akin to her wanting to return our favour and see our quest through on her own volition, since the rebellion itself is busy fighting Miniknog.

    Our fight against the Ruin is a fight with limited resources, and if we did actually go around convincing larger factions to join us as part of the story, I think we'd actually see complaints about how forced that is, probably from me as well. :nurushock:
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 23, 2017
    Nibolas O Anelbozas likes this.
  8. Nibolas O Anelbozas

    Nibolas O Anelbozas Spaceman Spiff

    To be fair, i've always felt bad for not having real temples in the game, i mean, we had the towers where the guys instantly attack you (and i liked the crystal guns skins), I mean, the Stargazers are supposed to attack only defiers or trespassers, so the Great Sovereign Temple was like the perfect temple, it really felt like a temple and the traps and all were put only after the area you were no supposed to be in. and as Sligneris said, now the lore is more imbuid in the aesthetics as well, now we have stargazers village aside the grounded one. And in fact, the floran villages now are way nicer to see as well, with one chief at each tribe.
     
  9. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    the old lore was not a story it was a background for a sandbox in which you could make your own story. as much as Starbound was a sandbox game and still is. Now we have a streamlined good and evil declaring boring standard movie plot which doesn't fills a 25minute cartoons playtime. And all you can do is go through that plot like playing it exactly on the given rails (which is a very sad result for a sandbox game at all). So not even any tiny choices were given.

    Thats why the old lore was better and lore =/= story/plot. a good story is one you read because youw ant to know how it ends, low brain consumer stories are the one where you know how it ends before you even read/watch it, and god was enything in starbound 95% ropedicatble. Bad story in my book. The worst part was the recylcing of "scan object fo race X" implemention. A good story would have been soemwhat bound to lore and makle the player do missions around the lore and story. But instead of preparing said rebellion against big ape, just scan stupid objects like for all other prerequirement missions. That really made crappy story. can't see where the story was actually good. It was lower then average at all. And thats before even judging all the broken parts of the story which make no sense. After this it's just a minimmal viable "we added a story and missions" job that chucklefish did.
     
  10. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    Do tell me what kind of story could be built on the old lore that can't be built using the current lore. Do tell me how any of the characters from the beta were of any use in any fanmade stories.

    Because conversely, I can tell you plenty stories that couldn't be told back beta. I've conceptualized a good number of such stories in fact, and I can tell you with full confidence that the current lore gives me a solid foundation for my ideas, while back in beta, it was all vague and shaky and mysterious. It was useless, that's what it was.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 26, 2017
  11. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    and I could tell you plenty the current can't.

    But the current lore is still streamlined, full of logical holes (due tot he fact someone tried to explain nonsense) and not providing much material for interesting lore fitting stories.
     
  12. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    It's good that it was streamlined. It makes everything fall into place, rather than lead player involved in the setting on vague mystery quests as it used to, where all I could do in an attempt to understand the setting is to make bloody guesses. Where the lore was all about characters with absolutely zero narrative worth. Where you had flip everything on its head, just to be able to make a nuanced story at all.

    Now everything makes much more sense, and you can understand exactly what kind of civilizations you're making your story about. That's an improvement in my eyes.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 26, 2017
  13. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    You also fail to understand that the missions are the way they are because it is a sandbox.

    Preparing a rebellion would very specifically and directly define you as "heavily involved in the Apex rebellion", which is the kind of thing that should be avoided in a sandbox game. Rather than force an exact alignment besides just the Protectorate, the storyline sends you off to explore that sandbox to begin with, with the universal goal of not wanting your universe to be destroyed.

    Starbound being a sandbox where you make your own story is why individual racial backgrounds were scrapped - because they were restricting who your character could've been in the past.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 26, 2017
  14. Polecat

    Polecat Phantasmal Quasar

    I'll weigh in briefly here. I don't think the old lore is 'better' or 'worse' than the new lore, but I do think the lore appeals to completely different people.

    The old lore was exactly that: Lore. It had no bearing on the player, it was window dressing, a background for the universe the player was finding their own way through. But then remember too, the old Starbound had no 'end boss' either, just a few boses you encountered for very specific reasons. But this made the universe feel very large. There were stronger people doing things you'd never even see... sorta like real life, TBH. Were we making a difference? That wasn't the intent, we were doing things our way, which was the intent of the old lore. It was a backdrop to a sandbox, little more.

    The 1.0 'new' lore was streamlined heavily and put everyone on a rather basic GoodvEvil storyline that is designed to encourage story over exploration. This sort of design and story functions far better for those who need a story motivation to move from place to place. There is a string of encounters, a purpose to move through, and a difinitive 'end' when you beat the Ruin. This is both good and bad, IMHO, as it encourages people to play, but removes a lot of the sandbox and exploration elements that are truly the core of the game. The game does try to encourage the sandbox/exploration aspects with the storyline (scanning stuff by randomly finding villiages), it doesn't really go very far, and I imagine a lot of players were dissappointed with the Ruin battle because they view it as the 'end' of the game.

    in my opinion, I think the 1.0 lore was a nice try, but is honestly abysmal. It's written for a 10 year old saturday morning cartoon, with threadbare elements that are, frankly, completely uninteresting. I found it genuinely boring and totally predictable. It only missed Asra somehow stealing the Macguffins from you at the end and beating you to the Ruin to be a carbon copy of many MANY adventure style cartoons I watched as a kid. As someone who does some writing, I would be embarrassed to write something so rudimentary and basic. Further, I found turning the humans into yet another Federation, of Star Trek fame, to be the real downer. The USCM was hardly the best, but they had some color to them, and showed Humanity was NOT the 'good guys', but every bit as flawed as the other species in the universe. Now they are painted as basically BETTER than every other race, who just can't survive without the protectorate the humans set up. That, more than any other part of the story, raises my ire the most. The protectorate SHOULD NOT EXIST, period. It was a horrible story conceit. Everything makes 'sense' now, yes, but that's NOT a good thing. The world around us doesn't always make sense, why the heck should the universe be any different?! We NEED mysteries to explore, things we don't understand... and things we can never explain.

    So, TL; DR version. The lores of Beta and 1.0 serve two very different purposes narratively. While the beta lore was fragmented and, frankly, in need of an overhaul, the way 1.0 lore was handled was abysmally bad and shouldn't have made it out of the 6th grade creative writing class it came from.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2017
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  15. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    oh and directly beeing part of the apex rebellions assault and takign out that instance of big ape SOLO is not beeing heavily involved? can hardly get more heavy. And thats the big issues, with this decision made they already choose the feature the sandbox should avoid. BUT if they do that anways they could at least have made that a better and more proper story. But now they failed to deliver both, the Sandbox avoiding this AND the good story. And given that the Protectorate.

    Also readng the boosk about the protectorate doesn't really justifies that rather agressive assautl on big ape as this isn't exactly what the code says to do. So the lore doesn't goes well here with the story.

    And i heavily disagree with your last sentence, the old lore gave you PLENTY more options who your character could have been. Now you ARE (no matter if you want or not) a member of the protectorate. And in fact the protectorate and their code (which you as a graduate surely have to agree with to even get graduated) would limit who you could have been and who you even can be. Because surely if you want to be an evil space pirate (or pretent to have been) there is surely no way the protectoorate even would have accepted your application nor graduated you.

    The old lore made you just stranded on another planet with a ship, free of ANY background. The current lore forces background on you. So where is the old lore restricting you exactly?

    if they had extended that current Lore at elats into more complex more mechanic utilising missions this would have been working.

    basically like something of:

    Earth is broken, we need a new home, gather some people make a settlement (utilises the housing feature and connects some idea of the protectorate)
    Supply the apex rebellion against Big ape by crafting various weapons and armor as well as medical stuff or even building a base. (urtilising various features of the game)
    .
    .
    .

    They could have implemented the lore and game mechanics MUCH better into the story makin the "story" feel a lot less like micromissions with like 1hour sidecontent (and more it seriously isn't if you exclude the RNGsus of finding the to be scanned objects). That would have put a whole adventure into the Sandbox. But now it feels like "we said we do it so we did it but didnt cared"

    They wasted a lot potential by doing so.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2017
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  16. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    You aren't there to be part of the rebellion against Big Ape, you're there to recover the artifact. That difference of goals is important.

    While Protectors are clearly trained in combat, as shown by their weaponry... it indeed is likely that Protectorate itself didn't seem to directly oppose the Miniknog through the force of arms. While they probably did covertly support the rebellion by providing them with supplies, starting an open war would be too huge a declaration for such an organization. However, the important thing to note is that Protectorate itself is no more. The organization became defunct with Earth's destruction.

    You are acting on your own, on a quest to collect the artifacts and open the Ark. That's action taken out of necessity, not because it's a "Protectorate" thing to do.

    No, you are simply wrong. You had your background forced on you.

    As Avian, you had to be a Grounded.
    As Apex, you had to be part of the rebellion.
    As Glitch, you had to be an Outcast.

    If you tried to ignore the starter books and act like you weren't any of those, then your character would constantly contradict you whenever they opened their mouths, as part of the inspection dialogue. As someone who did try making characters that weren't any of those, it infuriated me to no end. There were no other options at all.

    Skip the intro mission, and instead come up with a backstory - then all that's settled for you is that your character was on Earth, and that they found a ship and a Matter Manipulator during their escape. Then if you do the story, it also means that they don't want the universe to end. Congratulations, you just made a non-Protectorate character, who gets confused for a Protector because of their Matter Manipulator!

    It's like you weren't even trying.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 26, 2017
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  17. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    if they had extended that current Lore at elats into more complex more mechanic utilising missions this would have been working.

    basically like something of:

    Earth is broken, we need a new home, gather some people make a settlement (utilises the housing feature and connects some idea of the protectorate)
    Supply the apex rebellion against Big ape by crafting various weapons and armor as well as medical stuff or even building a base. (urtilising various features of the game)
    .
    .
    .

    They could have implemented the lore and game emchanics MUCH better into the story makin the "story" feel a lot less like micromissions with like 1hour sidecontent (and more it seriously isn't if you exclude the RNGsus of finding the to be scanned objects). That would have put a whole adventure into the Sandbox. But now it feels like "we said we do it so we did it but didnt cared"


    no you don't you do it because granny says so and you do it the way the story says so. You can't simply go to the baron bash his head and take it. Or miniknog, you have to go through the story excatly how the story wants and in no other way and can't even try to reason about it with him. That count's for all the missions for retrieving the artifacts except the human one of course.
    And the protectorate beeign defunct? As organisation maybe, but it's ideals notreally. The mindset of the protectorate is by lore present in you and esther at least, so thats also a matter of belief to that haracter they gave you. They would lorewise be very bad at training members if that just entirely changes your mind and makes you throw away all they trained you for in the last 10 years.

    and so you could also ignore these starter books, but thats not working with the current lore, thats pretenting past the lore because you don't get a matter manipulator out of nowhere or the cloth. And doing so would mean the game now gives you only the choice to ignore the entire Story missions which will lead to restrictions in game features (like terraforming and upgrading weapons). or having to play these story missions and then pretenting they haven't ever existed. But the game will force you for full features to go through exactly these prescripted missions and it's story and connected lore, with exactly this given background.

    And further the "background" the books or similar is still even with the books gone, because as an apex you can now still not be "pro miniknog" and you can still not be "not selfaware" as a glitch because then you wouldn't be able to join the protectorate and violate the current lore saying the glitch went selfaware. So all these restrictions still exist or exist in a different form by the current lore but aren't named again.

    But in the old lore you could ignore that one book, while now you have to ignore an entire story line to pretent anything or if truly ignored face some lakc of game features. (which is strange since CF said they wouldn't connect progression to the story past some initual ship repair missions which since the terraforming was made an incorrect statement.)

    So you are the one not tryign at all, as the current game is just hidign thes einformations les directly but still having them AND mechanics now tied to it, which is more restrictive than ever. And if YOU say ignorance allows to do whatever one wants that coudl go for the old lore as well. So thats not even an existing point of argumentation when comparing the old and new lore if you ignore the lore by choice.
     
  18. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    Once the Ruin started destroying everything, it could be that the surviving protagonist picked up a fallen Protector's Matter Manipulator amidst the chaos.

    You seem fairly outraged by the idea of the player character acquiring the Matter Manipulator by chance, but didn't beta just spawn players in with the Matter Manipulator with no explanation at all? :nuruneutral:

    No, you couldn't, because it wasn't just those books. You need to pay more attention to what I'm saying before you just repeat something I've already pointed out to be wrong.

    Player character would constantly explicitly self-identify as Apex rebel/Outcast/Grounded in most inspection descriptions. You couldn't play the game without your own character contradicting your ideas. But currently at no point outside the intro mission you'll see the character themselves talk about their personal background or affiliation.

    While Glitch and Apex are unique case, in which the Glitch character is indeed self-aware, and the Apex character is critical of the Miniknog, there is still nothing that explicitly puts them into any kind of faction. Not only that, there's still room for the Apex character being aligned with the Miniknog in the past. All other races are left completely ambiguous and when it comes to their personal backgrounds, your imagination is the limit.

    Not every story you come up based on Starbound lore needs to be the story told in the game, not every character you design needs to be the game protagonist. There are other people and other events in the universe, and for those, the current lore provides a solid foundation. Which was my point from the start of this conversation, before you started whining that the main story that Chucklefish created wasn't the story you wanted.

    For all the talk about making your own story, you sure seem unwilling to come up with something on your own.

    Let me rephrase that. Opposing Miniknog is something that the Protectorate would do, they just wouldn't have done it ostentatiously as an organization due to the complications it would cause. Otherwise I don't think Protectorate was fine with the Apex government at all, and was quite likely offering the rebels silent support, a sentiment echoed by Esther during the Apex mission.

    Protectorate's ideals do live on, and I don't think that the protagonist taking direct action in times of need violates those ideals at all.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 23, 2017
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  19. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    (Also all you accomplish, Minknog-wise, is take out a single weapon system that's in testing modeled after a figurehead. You don't actually destroy the government. You don't End The Minknog Reign Forever. The Miniknog are still very much a force in control of the greater Apex population. It's pretty much status quo... which serves the needs of the game they designed.)
     
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  20. Guest0241525

    Guest0241525 Guest

    Yeah, pretty much.

    It's a pretty big step for the rebellion, but a single step nonetheless. It does strike a blow against the Miniknog, but one fallen stronghold does not overthrow governments.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 26, 2017

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