Let's talk about the 1.0 lore rewrite

Honestly I don't think the game has the ability to do that. I'm not much of a settlement builder anyway; I'd rather go explore and find stuff.

Anyway, I agree that it could have been handled better. Despite my ranting before, I don't think it was a bad idea to tweak the lore going to 1.0, but I do think it was handled poorly, and contradicted the sand-box nature of the game by shoving the story down our throat. Heck, you can't even SKIP the cutscenes! Before, you had the option to ignore it, as the starting options were wonderfully vague, being of the "you're of X sub-faction, now go!" variety, and letting you find your own way. I remember people in beta figuring out how to progress as farmers through much of the game. That was their perogative. The 1.0 game forces us to follow the whole Ruin thing, regardless of our desire to. You can try to ignore it, sure, but it looms over the entire game as you play.

 

Let's face it, if one setback toppled governments with greedy, manipulative, consumptive members willing to sacrifice their population for their own gains using a blowhard, poo-flinging figurehead who plasters his name all over everything and dominates the media...

 

...would backfire horribly?
Wait. Is Big Ape shown to fling poo at some point?

 

Not to my knowledge, no.

 

Yeah, but even those people feel flat. They never do much of anything, they just kind of... stand around. It doesn't feel like they're really involved in this quest you're on, so it doesn't work as a show of unity. There's sort of half an attempt to have them participate in the battle at the keep, but they're not involved as much as they need to be to feel like they really stand with you. And if we're running on limited resources... it doesn't feel like we are. We're not stretched thin trying to deal with better-equipped enemies, we're a one-man army who stomps Ocassus throws at us using weapons and armor we literally find lying around.

Another thing that maybe influenced how I felt about the old lore is that it was in the background. You learned it through codices and inferred it from the world around you, so the holes and shortcomings weren't as obvious. The new story is plonked in front of you every single game and you can't help but notice the flaws. Maybe the old lore has as many or even more holes, but they didn't shine through like the new lore because you knew there was stuff you didn't know.

 

I feel like your post was somewhat overlooked, but I really enjoyed your take on both stories =3

He was trying to conflate Big Ape with Trump.

 

They might not feel very involved, but I wouldn't say they feel flat - they're a charming bunch and I think they have some pretty unique designs and personalities.

Similarly I'd disagree with @Polecat on the Protectorate. I feel it brings out the best of humanity, really gets across that "fallen glory" situation that humanity finds itself in, giving it a past to feel nostalgic about. Before that, humans felt just so strangely bland and generic, like they're just there. Most sci-fi tends to treat humans like an eternal underdog, so it was nice to see them as a notable influence in the universe, even if their homeworld and all that they stand for is devastated within the first minutes of the game.

When I talk about the current lore, I primarily refer to the information contained within the codexes found in the game, which are also listed in the Lore section on the wiki. Inspection lines also qualify, as long as they're not outdated. It might be bold of me to say, but as far as worldbuilding is concerned, I do not actually see any shortcomings.

That being said, I don't really share your complaints with the story either. I feel it's good for what it is, and I did enjoy its charming simplicity. Imposing some unrealistic expectations just doesn't feel healthy to me. It just ends up with everyone being jaded and/or disappointed.

Please don't make this any more political, politics tend to needlessly alienate peopleee--!!

 

Yes, thank you. Plus it'll just lead to more poo slinging, and no Big Ape in sight to blame.

 

This is probably our maind core of disagreement, to be honest. Most sci-fi I've read pictures humans as either the 'galactic standard' (ie: Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and far too many to name), or as the 'plucky underdog' (IE: Titan AE and Independance Day come to mind). Rarely do you see humans depicted as being 'just another member of the galaxy', or 'really not all that nice'. That's what made the original version of the humans work for me. It was less idealized, and we as humans were NOT the heroes/good guys. That improved things immensely for me. Honestly, given I tend to play Avians (if not a modded in race) I get sick of being hit over the head with 'how great we humans are' from the uninspired (and uninspiring) Esther Light.

 

Oh, I think humans aren't quite the "standard" in Starbound either. I wouldn't really like it if they were just the heroes, or just a generic species. To quote myself from elsewhere...

Humans are ambitious with their drive to pioneer, and while they have been largely successful prior to Earth's destruction, at the core they're really just reckless, happy-go-lucky folks.

While they're capable of great things, it also includes great evil, and also great capitalistic opportunism, as shown by Occasus and USCM respectively. They're not exactly always a shining example, they just get the right ideas sometimes, and are able to go through with them if they really put their minds to it.

Their portrayal in Starbound is just incredibly refreshing in every way for me.

 

They have quirks, certainly, but they're just stock characters. The bombastic bruiser, the shy librarian, the eccentric nobleman, the stoicly professional arma officer, the Obi-Wan, and... well, Tonuac is so passive it's hard for me to define what he is. There's no depth to them, no insight into who they are beneath the surface, no character development... they're just scenery dressing. And this doesn't work when the protagonist is a nameless, faceless, ageless, genderless character with no backstory (ie one you're meant to customize). A story where you customize the PC needs strong supporting characters who do things to carry the story, and especially needs a strong villain, which Asra is not.

I don't have any real beef with the Protectorate (aside from, as usual, being half-baked). It fits into the unity theme, though I think it would have been more powerful if the game started with the races divided and ended with the formation of the Protectorate. That alone elevates your actions from "maintaining the status quo" to "making lasting change." Unlike Polecat, I think that humans still have both good and evil components because Ocassus is human, but Ocassus is so flat that they might as well me automatons. There are complex social, personal and economic factors that drive people to join movements like that, and aside from a vague "Asra Nox lost her family to alien bandits," we never get any insight into Ocassus. They're just faceless card-carrying villains.

Simple stories can work, but they don't play well with epic quests to save everything. Simple stories work when they're focused, confined, and reflect deeply on the small-time people and events within them. Epic quests are broad--they encompass the whole country/planet/galaxy, and as such you need to delve into the complexities of that world because everything is linked together. They need depth of character, society, and landscape. Attempting to write a simple story about grand events will get you a shallow story.

Pre-1.0 we had a simple story: one person escaped some kind of catastrophe and made a new life. Simple. Open. Focused on the PC, but with enough lore-drops in the background to make it feel like part of something bigger.

Post 1.0 is also simple, but it doesn't work: one person escapes Earth, meets The Obi-Wan, scans furniture, goes to some flavored dungeons, fights some flavored bosses and some flavorless card-carrying villains, and kills some super-entity who wants to destroy all life. Using a sharpened piece of metal.

You can tell a story about either one. A story about meeting all the different races and uniting them against a greater foe can be powerful, but what we have is not powerful. It's shallow.

 

Care to explain how my comment made the thread more or less political? I was just answering their question by illuminating the meaning of the metaphor that was made. I didn't even make a comment one way or the other as to how I personally felt about it.

 

Shhhh--!!

I know, I just wanted to give a heads-up the moment it got name-dropped.

 

I genuinely have difficulty finding how it would be 'refreshing', given it's a stale rehash of the Star Trek "Federation" in every way but name and uniforms. But I'll let it drop here and simply agree to disagree.

 

Welp, I hoped that humans being reckless, optimistic dorks would convince you, but I guess not.

 

That's part of what the Federation is, that's why. Humans: reckless, optomistic, and somehow the saviour of the galaxy... oh, and other races either align with them, or are the 'bad guys'.
This is an exaggeration, but partially relevant, and extremely funny: https://www.tor.com/2016/10/17/the-answer-to-why-humans-are-so-central-in-star-trek/

 

But people are already so alienated that there's literal aliens..!

 

Well, maybe that's just me not having much to do with Star Trek related stuff, but... I guess I'm just fond of the way Starbound handled humans? It does feel somewhat different than Star Trek where humans seem portrayed somewhat as the "standard", whilst in Starbound they're scattered and vulnerable, with no major settlement to be found.

Sites like TV Tropes are a prime example that everything will feel "just like X" when you deliberately try to categorize every single aspect of a fictional work. But I don't feel like hunting for similarities is the best way to enjoy those works.

Didn't we already point out that organizations such as Occasus and USCM somewhat contradict that?

 

Which, in my opinion, is pretty dumb. Not being vulnerable, but... no major settlements? Really? The codices on the wiki say we've had space flight for thousands of years (and apparently haven't advanced our tech very far in that time), but nobody's decided to colonize one of the abundant garden worlds?

TV Tropes is about how works of fiction are built. It's useful for people who are building fiction, and for people who enjoy analyzing fiction. Tropers could be considered a the "connoisseurs" of fiction. The average reader will go "yes, this book is delicious!" which is fine, while a troper will go "ah, a rich Hero's Journey with a touch of Knight in Sour Armor, with a Rousseau Was Right aftertaste..." It's just a different way of enjoying media.

I think the problem Polecat has is that the story divides the races (and everybody else) into "The Federation" or "The Bad Guys." There's no middle ground. The Federation are the perfect good guys with no real flaws, the bad guys are perfect bad guys with no real motivation. There's nobody who's okay but doesn't want to get involved, or on the good guys side but has some issues they need to face, or is working with Ocassus but is doing it out of desparation, etc. It's all flat. And the USCM isn't really much of anything at this point.