Let's talk about the 1.0 lore rewrite

I do pay attention, thats exactly why I complain, I am absolutely amazed by what you call "researching" a culture with those shallow not even culture related texts you get form scanning the objects.

maybe these other people play a different version of Starboudn we are excuded from, because I seriously don't see the cultural stuff, in fact most is just "cpt obvious" level of depth.

 

These seem to be human descriptions, so let me check human descriptions for major Hylotl clue objects...

Vintage Library Poster - "This old hand-painted poster describes a vast Hylotl library. It must be important for someone to have taken the time to make it."
Ancient Library Codex - "This book has a record of every single Hylotl book in the galaxy. Keeping track of them all must be a headache."
Hylotl Library Model - "This delicate model of a library even has little bookcases inside. I'm almost afraid to touch it in case it breaks."
Pagoda Aquarium - "This is a very impressive fish tank. I wonder if the model island is based on a real place?"
Decorated Music Box - "There's something very tranquil about this little music box."

It seems more insightful than you'd imply. Other six races also have lines of their own, which might occasionally tell you more than that. Let's see Hylotl descriptions of some of the items you found...

Traditional Bookcase - "A bookshelf rich in Hylotl history. Other species flock to our grand libraries."
Small Ornate Bookcase - "A bookshelf rich in knowledge."
Ornate Bookcase - "An assortment of poems and prose line the shelves."
Large Ornate Bookcase - "It's not the size, it's the contents of a bookcase that really counts."
Quill and Ink - "Hylotl practice calligraphy from a very early age."

Well, these are simple items, and yet we still find out more about Hylotl libraries, and their early education.
There's quite a lot of lore to discover through item descriptions, especially about the race you play as. As another example, what other would races see as just "cute bunnies" actually has some cultural significance to the Avians!

Bunny Altar - "The rabbit symbolises beasts of the soil. This altar is a warning to tomb raiders from other races."
Bunny Jar - "The ash in this jar is the remains of an Avian that died in shame. The rabbit marks the Avian inside as one that will never obtain wings in the aether."
Bunny Sarcophagus - "A sarcophagus for criminals and heretics. The Avian inside will lose their wings in the afterlife."

There's tons of valuable details within the inspection lines, coming from both Esther and the player character that are pretty intriguing on their own, which really flesh out the setting once you get into it.

 

that's funny because with the avian character you always get interesting insight on things, even on other cultures, perhaps the PC hylotl is supposed to be more nerd like, with not much interest in other stuff

 

Those were human descriptions, not Hylotl.

 

Thing is, you specifically picked and chose items to show descriptions for, as well as including descriptions from another racial viewpoint. It's not representative of what you actually encounter as a player, which is why I did what I did rather than just looking things up on the wiki. Also, for completeness sake, let me list the last two items I encountered before the quest ended:

Bridge painting: What a nice painting. If this bridge was real, I'd cross it again and again.
Traditional wave painting: I'm pretty sure we had this exact same painting on Earth.

Very enlightening.

And while there are some important details in the lines you cherry picked, a big chunk of them aren't. I'd say 1, 6, maybe 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 are actually useful.

Either way, scanning descriptions aren't enough. To actually get to know a culture you need to get to know its people, and in this case those people are just window dressing. They're bland one line NPCs who send you on randomly generated quests. They're not characters, and you need characters to get to know a culture. We do have a character from each culture, but with the exception of Nuru and possibly the Baron they're all pretty flat.

When real anthropologists want to learn about a culture, they actually go and live in it for a while. They don't go stare at the culture's furniture for an hour (archeologists do, but only because they have no other choice and it takes them years of schooling to get useful insight out of it. Most players aren't archeologists).

 

And you're taking the items that provide less points towards the quest, which reflects the descriptions. And why isn't it representative? The Player can run into said items at any time, and they're not restricted to play as human characters.

 

If low-point items are more common on my list, that's because they're more common in the world. Looking back, I can see that I didn't make this clear, but I actually did the scanning quest and those are the items I encountered before the quest completed. I wanted to see what one player, reading the scan texts once for the items the quest shows him, would see. Why? Because Sligneris said...

I did the quest and read what my character was saying, and I still didn't get the feeling I was researching anything. It was mostly Esther divining the location of the Grand Pagoda Library from wobbly lamp posts.

Scanning furniture isn't enough. We're the last Protector! We're supposed to be bringing disparate peoples together to fight a common enemy, but we never really connect with the people we're collecting. We just breeze through like a tourist with a tight schedule.

There's one exception: the florans. I feel a lot more connected to floran culture because a) the player actually got involved in it and b) Nuru is the only character who really worked with us, rather than just standing on the sidelines. I suppose Koichi kind of did because he opened doors and stuff, but it's not really the same and we never got involved in Hylotl culture.

 

some people have a very selective perception, mst description are plain out bad and free of any specific information at all.

 

How is not every object having a detailed description a problem at all? Yes, there are many with relatively plain inspection lines... which is a problem, why exactly?

You extract useful information from the ones that do provide useful information. That's it. There's simply no need to attach lore dumps to every single piece of furniture. Unless you seriously expect some extraordinary insights from a hecking microwave, and are going to devalue everything that we do learn from other objects if those expectations aren't met.

It's getting somewhat absurd if you ask me.

 

Could you rephrase? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Your previous post implied that if the player took the time to read the item descriptions presented in the scanning quests, he would get an adequate feel for the culture of the furniture he's scanning. I did the quest and read the item descriptions, and I did not get an adequate feel for the culture who made them. I suppose technically speaking, what you said was that the player would get a sense that they were researching the culture, but I didn't get that either.

While there are a few superficial insights to be had from scanning furniture, it's not enough and, as you point out, it can't be enough. You can never get to properly know a culture from looking at a microwave. The scanning quests are next to meaningless. Yet most of the time and effort a player spends working on the story is spent here, tracking down villages and trying to find items to scan. It doesn't work.

 

you claimed these items help to undertsand the culture. And getting the ifnormation of a bookcase having books stored in it, wow yeah thats very much givign deep insight into their culture. I probably should take out my soskcs form, mien, looks like human culture did it wrong all the time.
The onyl information you get about them is the yknow what a book is and store them in proper shelfs made for books. nothing more nothing less. but thats not a real insight into culture for a spac travelling one.