Let's talk about the 1.0 lore rewrite

Like I more or less said before, "didn't take the effort to make it good" is somewhat subjective. I'm sure that developers themselves would say that they put plenty effort into making it what it is, and that they've done plenty refining.

Current story is, playthrough-wise, set up to do the number of things. It sets up the conflict against the Ruin with the starting mission, in which it destroys Earth. Then, it gives us a mission per each progression tier, as depicted here. It also gives a themed mission and boss for each of its races. Don't tell me that you didn't feel the least bit impressed by grand dungeons such as Ceremonial Hunting Cavers, or Grand Pagoda Library, or Great Sovereign Temple.

Additionally, in each mission we meet an unique NPC, who joins us by the end. Before you do each of the racial missions however, you're driven to explore their villages and dungeons, to meet them in person, to find their codexes, and to scan their furniture to find out more about them. At the end of your journey, you have a final confrontation with the game's recurring antagonist, and then you confront and destroy the world-destroying monstrosity, concluding the story.

I'd say that works perfectly for a sandbox game. It drives you to explore the sandbox to begin with, gives your travels and your in-game actions a sense of purpose. It's what Terrene Protectorate sets up as well. Your regular gameplay, such as building housing for people, aiding them by doing quests - before it all felt somewhat disconnected, but now it feels like exactly what a Protector would do.

 

I suppose it does drive you to explore and connect the various gameplay aspects, but if they did put a lot of effort into it, then it was wasted effort because what they got is more of a story outline than a story itself. Dungeons are fine, and the design of the dungeons is fine, but impressive architecture isn't enough to make a story.

 

I'm sure that they didn't want the story to feel needlessly overwhelming. There are three ways in which anything is ever said by characters as part of the story.

• In a cutscene, which includes larger exposition points and crucial events (Leda Portia's speech, Esther's story, opening the Ark, and defeat of the Ruin)
• Spoken by an NPC before you're able to progress to another segment of the mission (Nuru in the Caverns, Koichi's holograms, Tonauac before a number of doors, Lana before tunnel hatch, Baron before and after the siege, each of the previous characters at the artifact altar and Asra before her fights)
  
• Radio message (usually involving Esther and SAIL, but others also comment as they join, especially in Avian mission, Glitch mission and the final mission)

There are other elements, such NPC lines said unprompted (any merchant when greeting you, anyone during a fight) or when interacted with (any non-hostile NPC), but those are easily missed and not crucial to the story. And then there are codex books, which don't take a direct part in the story, but they add detail to the setting - plenty of them are 'general' racial codexes, but there are also some specifically related to missions, NPCs, or space encounters.

Those are ways in which the story manifests in Starbound - do you think something should be added to that?

 

Yes, actually. I think there should be story NPCs that can follow you and fight with you. All the current story NPCs just stand around, so it never feels like they're participating. That can be excused for folks like Esther and Koichi, but Nuru and Lana should be there with you. And the ones back at base playing mission control should be analyzing your situation and providing information, more than they currently do.

In fact, fighters may not even need to follow you into combat. They just beam them down with you and send them to take care of a different task off-screen while the protagonist focuses on finding the boss. Just make them feel involved!

However, I still say that they could have made the story a lot more interesting and refined without adding new mechanics or making things overwhelming. You just need better writing.

For example, one of the problems of the 1.0 story is that the tasks you're given don't tie in to the theme of the story. Instead, we go around scanning furniture and then go through a dungeon to find a macguffin. Wouldn't it be better if we had to grain the trust of villagers for each race (probably in some way other than the standard quests, because those would get annoying. Expand their village or something) to get them to tell us the location of the dungeon, and then prove ourselves by helping them solve some problem (probably via killing a boss), and then they give oyu the artifact and pledge themselves to your cause?

 

i haven't checked if is still like this but I don't get the florans and hylotis dislike on novakids and the reasons given for why the novakids are disliked by the florans and the hylotis make very little sense.

Supposedly the floran thinks they are blindingly annouyingly glowing also ugly. and the hylotis complains that their glow are hurting their eyes also calls them ugly too.

Well for a plant and fish race those reasons makes little sense seeing that plants always seeks light and can't live without it also it looks like they have the same protective layer(don't remember the name) on their eyes that many animals have for protection from direct or powerfull sun rays (not completely by the way) seeing that they are completely black without any white like birds seals and polar bears have (prevents seals and polar bears from going snow blind from the reflection on the snow and ice and birds from being completely blinded while they fly)
Also if i remember right(not sure by the way might be that i am mixing up with another game seeing that they are savage plant people) that florans love fire if i remember right that is, i am not sure so sorry if i false informating anyone.

And you might consider the hylotis reasons to be logical seeing that they used to live at the bottom of the ocean, until you realise that most deep ocean fishes uses bioluminescence light to fool and charm fishes and a large number of fishes are drawn to light for the same reason as moths (But i am not sure if its like that for the water salamander that the hylotis are based on don't remember the name but its pink and looks like a hyloti and breath both water and air),

Also since they used to live in those underwater citys where there only are almost only fluorescent light to light up everything which are damaging to the eyes over a long over a period of time and they have live there for thousand of years (which may exsplain why many of them needs glasses)


humans and avians love them though, humans because they looks cool and avians because they remind them of the sun which are holy for them which makes sense. but i guess they couldn't be liked by too many races at ones i guess.

 

There's no such thing in the lore though...?

Floran reactions to Novakids vary, from calling them bright and pretty, to considering them to be dangerous due to their resemblance to fire. Hylotl are mostly intrigued by their peculiar nature, or calmed by their light.

Hahahahaha, no. You're remembering very, very wrong. Fire is very bad news for a Floran.

... Honestly, how could you possibly mix up basics like that? They comment on it basically every time fire is involved. You'd think that plant people not taking kindly to flames should be common sense.

 

hmm looks like they have changed the dialog after all. when i played on my novakid for a month or so ago then they would often criticize the glow on my character or asking him to leave even those i did quests for.

Yeah i was pretty sure i was mixing up with another game but i wasn't sure so sorry for that.
But i clearly remember that the Florans and hylotis where criticizing the glow and calling them ugly because i made a thread about it. anyway it looks like its changed now and why there aren't anything about it on the wiki i don't know.

 

you constantly bend the given lore with "made up things" but thats not how lore works. It has hardly any point speaking about lore with you as you cannot even properly differ between lore and story or even have enough experience of many other existing lores and their stories. Thats quite visible in all your messed up talking about how things "could be" But fanfictions isn't lore. And proper fanfiction is made within the lore and not bending the lore to the fan fictions need. Thats the point when a story created turns from a good story in a bad one.

And a lore created is considered weak when the lore itself defeats every most simple internal logic. Especially in games with some sci fi setup you can't simply make this up with soem handwavium, but to oversee the l. Yes youc an ignore all this issues but that doesn't mkes the stories or lore better than it is.

 

This is a bit off-topic, but while I agree that you can't use fanon to defend cannon, I think it's okay for fanfiction to modify canon as long as it maintains internal consistency. In fact, while I don't read much fanfiction, all my favorite fics take the source material and go in a different direction.

 

Didn't I end that point with, I quote:

I'm just pointing how, hypothetically, CF could implement larger colonies if they wished, with minimal inconsistencies with what was already established. There's nothing to rule out a larger, distant colony missing the census, despite the fact that this is not what's implied in the lore.

But it's a moot point here. Personally I don't consider humanity having few large-scale colonies at the time of Earth's destruction to be "weak lore" at all. In fact, I believe it's sufficiently backed up and adds impact to the loss of Earth. Nothing about it contradicts "internal logic" - that's just a fancy way for you guys to say it contradict with the expectations that you formed based on our reality, or with what you'd have wished to be the case.

I was just entertaining a way in which your ideas of larger human expansion could've worked, nothing more.

 

@Sligneris I remember, in another thread, you talking about some kind of large secret that Tiy mentioned. I wonder if this secret is that Novakids are actually the Ancients. When ever you examine an ancient object they seem a little melancholy, as if the object may be siring lost memories. Novakids live for eons and have short memories it is also possible that your character themselves could have lived in the time of the Cultivator; additional proof of this is this picture below. You may also notice that some brands resemble the ancient runes, slightly (at least in my opinion.)


Looking at the ancient tablets, Ester's story, and other things I have figured this. When the Novakids have a goal to work towards they become unified and their memories will be retained. The Novakids saw the Cultivator and they all wanted to reach it. Working together they eventually managed to get the Cultivator's attention. The Cultivator told the Ancient Novakids of the Ruin, so the Novakids built vaults to preserve life and left tablets detailing their legacy. After the Cultivator seals the Ruin away he gives the Novakids the six artifacts which the Novakids then gifted to the six races. The Novakids built the Ark and left warnings for other races to prepare them for the Ruin's return. And once the Novakids were all done their unifying goal faded and so did their memories.

 

Novakids aren't Ancients.
Novakids are remnants of the Cultivator, created when it shattered into pieces.

In the final cinematic Cultivator mentions that its fragments, "ancient and wild" spread out across the universe and became something new, and that what remained of it stayed to watch what it had left behind. It's also been confirmed by devs that Novakids didn't exist at the time when the keys were given out.

Novakids weren't "destined to not remain" - they remained and continue to thrive, after all. They also wouldn't consider themselves "not the hero type" either. I'd say that it's fairly clear that Novakids and Ancients are two different kinds - and that the vague memories Novakids have from back when they were all part of one.

There was a large discussion about this over here.

 

Starbound story and discussion? Oh boy, I love picking at ultimately inconsequential parts of video games! ...No, I'm not being sarcastic. It's fun.

I think that the biggest flaw in the story is a general lack of motivation on Asra Nox's part. Or...TOO much motivation, given how little reason there is to be motivated. I mean, what; her parents were killed by space pirates? I mean, wanting revenge for something like that makes sense, but deciding that the universe must be cleansed of all non-terrestrial life might be taking things to a bit of an extreme.

As unthinkable as it would be, and as many spacemen as it might offend, I think there should be some actual secret anti-human agenda going on. Obviously, not every member of every non-human race needs to be an evil space monster, but I think it would create a far more interesting conflict if there was some kind of conspiracy among the higher-ups in at least a few of the other races to exterminate or subjugate humanity because...I don't know, envy, or fear, or something.

Esther and Asra both end up uncovering this secret somehow; both are shocked, but each comes up with a different solution. Esther decides that the secret needs to somehow be leaked to the masses on both sides in a way that doesn't paint the entirety of the alien populace as villains, while still making it clear that the evil regimes need to be overthrown. Asra initially goes along with Esther, but as time goes on and no progress is made, she starts losing hope. She begins having increasingly distorted flashbacks to the murder of her parents in her dreams; they start out being more or less accurate, but after a while she begins dreaming that the pirates killed them specifically because they were human, each time with more vicious and hateful mirth, and each time with more and more aliens participating in the act, until eventually she has nightmares where her parents are being chased by literal entire planets. Sooner or later, she starts going mad with fear at the prospect of being overrun, outnumbered and overwhelmed by an innumerable alien horde, and comes to the conclusion that the only way to save humanity is to kill off the aliens. She doesn't tell this to Esther, of course; until they uncover the Ruin texts, that is. Instead of essentially looking upon it as a god, though, she'd just see it as a weapon; a weapon which would need to be destroyed after it had done what she wanted it to do, but a weapon that would be needed nonetheless.

And heck, they wouldn't even need to change the actual game much. The peasant-level alien NPCs who you actually meet down on planets wouldn't be in on the conspiracy, so they'd still be mostly friendly. You'd still need to stop Asra Nox, you'd still need to kill the Ruin, you'd still need to make friends with a member of each species (heck, it would actually be MORE important to strengthen relations and spread understanding if there were an internal agenda to turn the populaces of these races against humans,) and most importantly, you'd still be the sword-swinging, gun-toting, brick-laying, furniture-scanning hero of the universe. It would all just be a bit less...silly.


Also, it would open up the possibility for an entire second act to the game. Sure, the Ruin's dead, but you still have the space-illuminati to contend with. And let's just assume that, in the time it takes you to explore tens if not hundreds of planets, become an unstoppable one-man army, and kill an eldritch abomination from a higher dimension, Asra has found a way to leak the agenda. Now you have to find trails of clues strewn throughout the universe, follow them to the hidden battle stations of the evil elite Big Fat Meanies(TM), and murd- I mean, bring justice to them in the name of interstellar peace.

 

I mean, racist people as a rule don't really have reasonable motivations. Unreasonable goals pretty much never do. Using space-illuminati as an explanation would be kind of cheap, to be honest.

 

Somehow I'm not sure if that would really work well.

I believe Asra is intentionally characterized as driven by rage born from deep-seated resentment, possibly intensified by Ruin's influence. She does have her reasons for feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that her hatred should be validated by making others actually target humanity. Just as I don't think we should be really coming up with reasons to make deliberate genocide seem justified in any way at all.

No, I really don't think that this is what we should be going for.

 

I suppose it all scalates too quickly, perhaps if we the game took more time to develop Asra and all the missions we could have something more interesting. but again, that would take time and some people don't want to have to sit through 8hrs of campaign gameplay in a sandbox game, maybe in the first playthrough but you get me.

 

Yeah can't say I'm keen on presenting racists as not delusional assholes.

Because they are.

Delusional assholes.

 

Nobody said they wouldn't be delusional assholes even if there were some kind of conspiracy.

And ultimately, if you don't think that would end up going well, I would implore the community to suggest other ways to improve the story from it's current state. It's not awful, per se, but it is rather limited. For those of us who want a deeper story to go through (which is many players, I believe), it's not currently there. More content is always better, isn't it?

 

I'm not saying Asra should sound "justified." I even went out of my way to explain how she spirals down into madness, and how extreme and unnecessary her plan is. What I'm saying is, I'm getting sick of all of these strawman sci-fi stories. All delusions are inspired by reality. In this case, Asra's delusion would be the idea that the aliens are evil, inspired by the reality that several governments, which happen to be alien, are conspiring against her species.

Science fiction is the absolute hands-down best genre for exploring very non-fictional concepts like racism and xenophobia, but almost every story I've ever seen try to tackle it squanders the perfect opportunity. Instead of taking a hard look at what makes it go and what keeps it going, it's almost always just a story about a guy who hates aliens for literally no good reason. I don't know, sure, there were probably some people in history who hated other races just because they thought that they looked funny, but that's not how it generally works. Hitler didn't just say "JEWS AND THEIR NOSES, AM I RIGHT?!," he exploited the various deep-seeded tensions between two civilizations with two very different cultures, digging his nails into the tiny cracks that divided them, pulling them apart until the tiny cracks turned into enormous fiery chasms. He played off of various grievances that the two cultures had inflicted upon each other in the past, which is how actual, real-life racism tends to come to fruition and stay in motion. Another thing that's almost always ignored is the fact that racism tends to go both ways; and if the victim goes on being resentful for too long after the perpetrator cleans up its act, it can actually lead to the entire process looping. In fact, it has the potential to loop endlessly if nobody is willing to swallow their pride and forgive. Grievances breed prejudice, prejudice breeds grievances, and grievances breed more prejudice. That's what makes racism so dangerous; it often intermingles with and camouflages itself as necessity and justice, it spirals out of control quickly, it's difficult to forgive, but it will continue to snowball until one side or the other DOES forgive and forget.

And then you have the recent Star Trek movie that I can't even remember the title of. And the villain is just like, "being united with the aliens is...um......making humanity weak........somehow. DEATH TO ALL XENO-SCUM! MAY ALL OF YOUR PUPPIES BE STOMPED!" Absolutely no tension between the other humans and any of the aliens. Absolutely no past grievances addressed or resolved. He just shows up on the space station to try and kill everyone, gets ejected into space, and is eaten by nanobots because he's a Big Fat Meany and he deserves it. That's about the level of storytelling and insight that Starbound is on right now. It isn't a story about racism, it's a story about a jerk who happens to hate aliens because racism is the hip trait to give to jerks. I'm sorry if I'm coming off as trying to justify or sympathize with genocidal space-Hitlers, but if we want stories that will actually alleviate hatred and give us insight into human nature, we're going to have to give up with the mindless burnings in effigy and dive into the nitty-gritty personal, psychological, and sociological reasons for why people actually hate other people. That isn't justifying the problem, that's searching for the source of the problem so that we can begin to shut it off. Oversimplifying it into a matter of "Ass-ra Nox wants to stab aliens because she's an asshole" isn't doing anyone any favors in the long run.

...I mean sure, a cartoony open-world sandbox building space exploration game may not be the ideal medium through which to explore such concepts, but if that's the case, then it shouldn't try to explore such concepts. Leave complicated subjects to games with complicated stories. Hamfisting delicate work is far more destructive than not doing delicate work.

 

I can quite relate to everything said here.

Within the lore of the avali (which I'm sure everybody is aware of by now, we're so obnoxiously prevalent ), it's quite clear that they're not the most fond of humans due to their past as a race: more specifically, their first contact. The benefactors/malefactors found the early avali in a technological rut. When the locals interfered with trade, the -factors tried to enslave and even exterminate, but the predatory little space raptors had had enough. They took up arms and fought as best they could, eventually overwhelming the -factors and forcing the oppressors to abandon their surface operations. Keep in mind this all happened several centuries ago; YellowDemon's amazing machinima dates it to our early 17th-century, though that is not reinforced by the canon at all.

There's just one problem: the benefactors are described as being quite similar to humans in their appearance. This has caused much of the avali populace to harbor an undeserved grudge against the distant and alien human race.

And finally I get to my main argument. While in canon this is limited to a common yet minor grudge, in-game avali dialogue towards humans is much more often than not borderline hostile, almost sounding like these people would have no problem with an intergalactic war. Where did such hateful feelings come from: propaganda? I have reason to believe this dialogue stems from the modding days of Ryuujin, the creator of the avali race and its canon, leaving the existence of said dialogue potentially just being an inconsistency or otherwise odd enigma.

Case in point, it's an inconsistency in the avali presence in Starbound. While Starbound avali aren't totally in line with canon avali, a difference this large is not brought on by engine/game limitations and is therefore quite unwarranted. I feel as if Nox and her posse are in largely the same boat currently; not enough background/backstory is present to justify such behavior.