New planet level mechanic discussion

May I forward you to this thread? I'd like your opinion. Seems not many people make their way tot he suggestion boards to view suggestions people have compiled.

 

Being honest, ya...i miss the old lvl system (ignoring the armor pen, i dont mind about that), the only problem with the old lvl system was, if you dig your way to the important ores of each tier, you can litteraly progress in one 10 minutes to the next 20 tiers, which is wrong, i think that we should need specific pickaxes for certain ores, and make the weapons inside the instances a lot more stronger than the mini boss's weapons and chests weapons, so we can dive into one base thinking that we are going to get something as reward, not just crappy weapons from the npcs...

 

If you were guaranteed an awesome weapon in those instances, then what's the point of exploring more areas?

 

Why don't we just make mining a side thing? Okay you need some steel bars. Why not also need some animal ectoplasm? And some stuff from an apex lab? Or maybe some volcanic rock as well?

MINING should be mainly for decorations, and furniture, and fun equipment stuff.

EXPLORING should be for armor, weapons, progression, and rarities. What's the point of a flying avian ship if there is nothing but 3 chests and a vendor? Or a sewer? Or a prison?

 

I may quote myself from the post on the first page : "A solution for the dig-down-and-loot-everything-you-can-exploit: Make the dirt/ground/soil only mineable with proper equipment e.g. tier 4 planets require a gold(=tier 3) pickaxe to be able to mine anything." - Or as you said, at least for the ores, but this would still mean that you could loot underground chests (we need a lockpick system that requires specific tools) on much higher-leveled planets or exploit sand.
The armor penetration system was just.. not intuitive enough. Now we would have very high dps numbers, which is what they wanted to prevent by armor penetration. Maybe they can create a better system, using dps, armor penetration and critical strike chance to flatten the damage-number curve.

Edit: @Plystire I will have a look at that suggestion!
Edit 2:

Of course, there can be underground dungeons as well ^^ but plz, then let us have an underground scanner for unnaturally big caves like they do in real life. Digging blind for underground dungeons is... bääh
And I agree again, this game should be more about exploring, not mining. Still you need ressources, but mining should not be that essential.

 

Mmm, actually minecraft have random mini instances underground and theres nothing that lead you to these places, and thats the point, the rarity of these place, so is a real acchievement if someone find one of these dungeons, in minecraft 1.8 i was incredible exited about finding one stronghold, cause there was only one per world and was completely underground, so was about impossible find one, but once you manage to find it, is an awesome acchievement, then they added the ender eye which lead you to the strongholds and the mysterious was gone and they are not special anymore u_u, so if minecraft beind a 3D infinit sandbox game is possible do that, why not here? which is obvius that is way easier.

 

To be fair. Minecraft's stronghold spawns 700+ blocks away from where you do in the world.. there's actually a few, and the eyes lead you to the nearest. I think the eyes were necessary because without knowing the exact spawning mechanics the game had in place for it, it was likely players would never discover it without above ground suggestions.

I agree there's no need to point them out, though. Starbound is 2D, and caving is pretty straight forward. If something's down there, you'll find it in due time if you cave around enough. No need to give people a tracker on where the large caves/underground events are. Though I think a scanner to give the player a basic idea of what they can find underground would be a good idea, especially if they (hopefully) randomize what can appear on a planet (save for coal and other fuel sources, because balance) and in what quantities.

 

I'm going to echo the sentiments of many, and do so in my own words.

What is the point now?
Everything in one sector is now the same level. Each planet is basically nothing but a reskin with a couple more chests to find and superficial points of interest. There's no variety to explore, no powerful items to seek after, and no challenge to look for. One planet is all I need to do anything and everything. Just spend hours of mindless mining and then beat a boss. Travel to new sector, rinse and repeat. one planet per boss till you hit end game, and then what? Explore everything you've completely outgeared? There'd be no challenge there anymore. Build a planetary base? There's no benefit to it. Collect 'em All Furniture items? Building a base doesn't give you anything, you'd be simply exercising idle amusement.

The progression is too linear, straight up. What Starbound needs is Sideways progression. With sideways progression you never run out of things to do, and everything remains a challenge and something fun to try. With a vast universe at your fingertips, there are innumerable variations of challenges that don't require the same formula of "stronger armour and stronger weapon requires stronger monsters."

Remove threat levels and tier grinding
Dispense entirely with the threat system - focus on linear progression only causes problems for sandbox games. Instead, make the whole universe available at the start (assuming enough fuel to travel there), with high and low danger planets intermixed. Then, make different planets about facing different Kinds of challenges rather than just whether you can out DPS a different colored monster or not while surviving with it's higher damage output (bor-ing).

With environmental challenges, you can still have a form of progression, First in building sensors for your spaceship to detect hazards and planet attributes from a distance rather than having that information available before you choose to travel there. Second in building up to special suits that would be required to explore certain hazardous planets. And Third, in improved efficiency equipment such as mining, farming, and building.

These things will need to be added eventually anyway, or everyone who hits end-game will quit afterwards - what's the point in exploring a planet I've already outleveled? By keeping all the levels/tiers/gear relatively equal, having each ingredient useful from start to finish and making variation in the type of challenges to be faced on different planets instead, you make the game less about grinding for the next tier gear, and instead open up a fun sandbox for people to play in and build with at their leisure immediately after installing, with challenge for those who seek for it, and ease for those who desire ease as well.

 

I suggest the suggestion board for suggesting things in such explicit detail. Just a suggestion.

 

It's already suggested in much better detail in the suggestion forum, I was simply adding my voice to the dissent and stating what I would prefer.

I'll assume this is ability was due to straight shaft mining? (which I never did) I actually explore the underground caverns and stuff and it takes me hours to get what I need. If people care only about getting to the next tier ore- besides that being a stupid game to play - I don't see why adventuring playstyles need to be nerfed to prevent people from exploiting mechanics for the highest mining efficiency.

I could agree however on certain pickaxes for mining certain ores, or for mining through certain blocks, and for buffing the adventuring playstyle with dungeons for cool gear.

What's the point in exploring any areas when none of the drops will be better than the one you just found?

That's why a variable threat system needs to come back in some form. With variety in the search for greater power, comes exploration. Once the highest power has been achieved however, variation looses much of it's motivating factor, and when power vastly outweighs the variation, variety is thrown to the sidelines and all scramble for the power instead.

If one believes they've attained the greatest power already, they stop searching that area. They may seek in a different area however, but that area may not be in the same game.

 

Something about the new system just isn't that good to me. Its too plain. Every planet is pretty predictable as far as its enemy difficulty goes now. And once you get the best stuff for that "tier" (like you get decked out in tier 2 gear, tier 1 planets are no longer a threat, which means the entire alpha sector is your bitch), making it less fun. I liked the old system where I knew I could just hop onto a higher level world and run the gambit of more dangerous enemies if I wanted. But now I kind of know exactly what to expect within a smaller pool of difficulties.

 

Wait a sec... you have a problem with predictability of difficulty, yet you want the ability to predict where you should go for difficulty? I don't follow...

Fair enough.

How am I guaranteed the best drop the first time? With the current system, you need to actually look for decent drops, taking your chances along the way. With the old system, nothing you found on a lvl 2 planet is going to come close to what you would find on a lvl 10 planet. What's the point in going to a lvl 2 if it's never going to be better than the one you find on a lvl 10?
I agree variety in difficulty is nice, but I did not like how straight forward it was about everything. And as Tiy said, this new system will have variable threat, but it won't be labeled as lvls 1-10. so I don't see a problem here. It's going to be variable, but it's not going to be threat levels.
And I believe your point regarding finding power and stopping the search is counterintuitive to your position. Wouldn't they just go to the highest threat level in order to obtain that highest power, and then stop?

 

My biggest problem with the old system was that it heavily encouraged you to just go from high level to high level planet, hoping to luck into a nearby chest with an amazing weapon. Then all planets lower than that were one-shot wonders, where both you and the enemies one-shot each other, even with armor.


Copy/paste of something I wrote elsewhere:

In the post concerning the updated combat system it was said that there were now ten levels (1-10) and three difficulties for monsters (easy/medium/hard). I would like to see the weapons and the planets both reflect this new system.

I would like each planet to reflect this new system with some sort of "Threat level: easy/medium/hard" system, though with more colorful words used to describe each. I would also like to see the weapons that we can craft at each tier scaled to between the easy and medium challenge level. The idea being that we start out on an easy threat level 1 planet, hunt for resources and craft a new set of weapons for ourselves. Those weapons are really good, and can two or three shot an easy creature, three to five shot a medium creature, four to six shot a hard creature. The weapons (with recipes?) you find on medium threat level planets should be for weapons a bit better than that, and the weapons ( with recipes?) you find on a hard planet can one or two shot a hard creature and we're back to three to five for an easy threat level 2 creature. Heck, you could have the planets labeled level 1-10, and have that reflected in how common the easy/medium/hard enemies are.

The basic idea is, I want to be able to craft a decent weapon, but I also want to feel like weapons that I find out in the world might have some value to me. As it stands they're almost universally throw-aways. However, I don't want this to become a game where I rely exclusively on dropped/found weapons, and want to feel like I can craft something worthwhile, so I'd like to be able to find recipes or learn new recipes from finding a weapon that gives me either a slightly better version of what I found (incentive to use my resources!).

With a system like this, I think that we would have a nice combination of exploration being worthwhile, and your starter planet being able to get you ready for the next tier right off. If you really want to go straight to the Beta sector, there's nothing stopping you from making good armor, making a good bow, and taking on the first boss. If you want to explore, there's a risk/reward system in place, and a slight increase in ore density on the medium/hard planets can work with the improved weapon possibilities to represent the reward aspect. Just add in the ability to mark a recipe as obsolete (have a way to see a list of obsolete recipes), and it won't result in needless clutter.

 

I very much agree with the baseline of this thread. Exploration should be rewarding, otherwise there might just as well be only one randomly generated planet per tier. Progress through the tiers should require a mixture of different activities to get the required resources/items to progress. Many biomes and materials have unused potential as of now, take tar for example: there is a certain other 2D sci-fi sandbox game where tar plays a huge role as a resource. In Starbound, it currently only serves to show that your mother made a terrible jell-o (as a human character).

Planets definitely should have different stats such as ore distribution, requiring you to travel to several planets to assemble the next boss item, lethal planets might require special gear to visit etc. I remember seeing a mock up on the road map which shows a planetary map complete with stats on gravity, weather and ore deposits. Nifty.
In fact, the as of yet unimplemented quest system should also be integrated into the whole tier progression thing. Need that gravity generator to survive on a high-G planet? The Avian airship captain can sell you one cheap - if you help him smuggle a cache of Elysian nose powder into the USCM penal colony (wait, what?!). Or stuff like that.

If this or something like it happens, travel becomes more worthwhile again and progression becomes much less grind-y.


Oh, and I had this idea of a method which lets you beam up structures you have built into a kind of "transporter buffer" to be beamed down again on a different planet, so you don't have to leave behind your architectural masterpieces everytime you shift sector...

 

These are all good points.

As ive said previously Beta is Beta so i can understand if some things still need ironing out and aent representative of the final product. The many good suggestions for more variation and differentiation of planets are probably a bit closer to what we would see in a much later version should they ever occur, HOWEVER regardless of whether this is beta or not, the changes to the level system really do seem like a step in the wrong direction, backwards :/

My worry now is when the next wipe occurs, unless certain things are address its gonna be a pretty rough grind that many may not see the point of if its just gonna be a repetition of this instance.

 

Perhaps not awesome, but at least a higher chance of something that didnt have a name like 'poop tickler' and did less than your starter weapon...

 

This is really the problem in a nutshell, right here; there's no real permanent progression,
no real sense to do anything but mine, bossfight, advance, mine, bossfight because all you need to survive any planet in the game is an appropriate level of DPS and armor. It's very binary. And since you can only use one tech at a time there's really not a huge incentive to look for one once you have a decent one (I took Dash from tier 1 to 10).

But the problem in a nutshell is that the game on a tier 10 planet is the exact same game, with the same abilities and difficulty and capabilities as the game at tier 1. It's just got different colored monsters and your weapon damage has a few more numbers after it. You have access to new biomes... which are populated by yet more completely random creatures with random abilities. The game itself is so random, it's not random anymore, if that makes sense; every planet is just like every other planet, just a hodgepodge of random creatures and random settlements that you ignore so you can get to the next tier anyways.

Frankly, there's not a lot of gameplay experience gained going from Alpha to X sector, except that some planet biomes aren't in the early tiers. The game really needs some sort of upgrading and acessorizing system for gear rather than just 'it does what your old sword did, but level-appropriate for this tier".

 

Yep.

I remember the devs said something about each tier adding a new gameplay mechanic to the game. Personally I haven't advanced beyond Beta sector yet (no time), but I wonder if these gameplay mechanics are already implemented, or rather what they are going to be.

 

very interesting read guys thanks for your constructive posts. no one can deny the worlds need tweaking again, a more diverse variety is needed imo, because after spending yesterday traveling the surface of dozens of planets in all the sectors looking for a village/city i feel iv seen all there is to offer, i cant see how the devs wont rework it. we just need to wait a few more updates i guess.

 

I hope you're right; I'm not saying the devs are evil people who eat babies and steal our money, I just want to point out how dis-satisfied I am with the feature in it's current implementation and want to see potential alternatives discussed and explored.