Patch Fury

Hello there, and welcome. I recently looked at the patch notes for the next patch, and was shocked and appalled by some of the preposterous changes I saw there. I think the following changes are ludicrous, and I will provide a reason why for each.

1.NPC Spawners, Building Logic: This change is irredeemably silly. While it sounds good in theory, you are essentially wasting your hard earned pixels and items on a merchant you may very well never see again or accidentally kill with your uber sniper rifle. Also, it keeps the merchants in the same problem area they were in before: Merchants of EVERY TIER sell the SAME STUFF. That's ludicrous. A tier one could fill a merchant's home with stuff he gathered from the rest of the town, and if it was nice enough, get better stuff than a tier 10 player. Why not just make merchants of higher tiers sell better stuff? The world may never know.

2. Planet Scanner: Now this is more for me than anything, and bundles in with a few others. The Idea of a planet scanner that tells you what dungeons and inhabitants are there SEEMS nice, but in reality it takes away severely from the sense of adventure and exploration the game provides. I want to go to a planet and be completely caught off guard, I want to be whisked away in the experience and adventure of exploring the whole surface in order to realize it's nothing but an Avian Town planet with a few floran houses. I want to BE there, GET the loot regardless of the structures. I know that, for me, anyways, if I know that the planet doesn't have cool/worthwhile locations or inhabitants, I'll skip it. I'll never go there and I will forget it even exists. I will not adventure into the vast unknown, I'll sit on my ass and eat Cheetos while skipping across the sector hunting Apex facilities. I'd never see a Floran or an Avian town again, and that's truly a sad, sad thing.

3.Ore Generation. Nothing much to complain about here, really, but the fact it took this long to implement seems a bit of an oversight.

4.Story Missions. Combining Boss Monsters and the Story seems good, just like the Planet scanner, but why would every race focus on these 5 creatures? The story should be about actual LORE, not some big nasties from space. The Hylotl should spread peace with words, not with a bullet to the brain of a jelly beast. The humans should find habitable, friendly lands with their ships, not with axes and swords. The Story should stay about The Story, and leave the bosses as a different quest tree.

5.Smoother Difficulty Curve: Also sounds good, but it's bad for the same reason as the Planet Scanner: No one will go to planets that are too tough, or atleast tough-er, when they could instead go to a slightly easier planet and get the same loot. Players can coddle and nurse themselves on cheap, easy ore and food and then rocket past the higher level planets in the sector for their loot.

6. Racial Armor.
Ho boy, sit yourselves down cause this is my BIGGEST problem with any patch ever so far.

Racial Armor is great. Racial armor is cool. It sets apart the races through lore and culture and appearance. But having the racial armor be the actual conduit for the racial ABILITY?

Man, that's just wrong.

This change strips Racial Armor of it's coolness factor entirely, making it more like god d*mned power armor from Warhammer 40k or something than a real unique thing. One minute I could jump like an apex, only to get to the top of the mountain I was climbing and then slip into some Avian duds for a quick ride down, plopping into some water with a Hylotl suit for a quick underwater romp. And with this system, it reduced the Races to aesthetics, rather than an actual choice. I could be a human and do what any of the other races could do, because if the Armor gives the abilities we're all the same stat and ability wise, we just look different. It ruins the uniqueness of choosing a race, and it even interferes with Lore. The Hylotl state (it's very, very, quite heavily implied) that they live directly IN the water, without armor of any kind. They can just breathe there. Because that's their RACE. The Apex can jump higher and stuff like that because they're Physically Superior to the other races, because it's their RACE. Floran can absorb the sun's energy because it's their RACE! (I mean, they're plants, for crying out loud!) If I wanted I could just learn how to make a different race's armor or weapons and voila! I am now a sun-absorbing glitch, or a water-breathing apex, or a high-jumping Floran. They aren't even RACIAL abilities anymore, now they're just Armor abilities. The whole idea makes me sad and angry.

7. Finally, the Star Chart: Also another idea that sounds good on paper but effs it all up. First, Fog of War is preposterous logically. There's no fog in Space. That's stupid. Second, with the sectors limited, it limits gameplay for all but the hardest of the hard worlds. No one wants to live in constant danger in a world where they could potentially die whenever they step foot outside. That's idiotic. The idea of limiting how many planets are in a sector removes a HUGE amount of potential gameplay.

If you agree or disagree with any of my points, feel free to comment. I'd love to rant more about how awful these changes are.

 

I can't tell if you're serious about the fog thing or not. Yes there is no fog in space, but the fog represents stuff you haven't explored.

The term "fog of war" doesn't literally mean fog.

 

Apologies, I must have put it there on accident. My bad. And while it's obvious they didn't mean actual fog, we ourselves can see stars billions of lightyears away with the naked eye. Our super-futuristic, plutonium-powered hyperdrive spaceships should be able to get to more than just a few.

 

Racial armour abilities were planned from the beginning, so that's just what you will have to live with.
The fog is just designed to stop people from just going to the same 20 planets posted on the forums.

I agree, however, that high tier merchants should sell higher tier stuff.

 

Is this supposed to be serious?

 

I'm personally against the Fog of war, I like jumping out into random planets with the random button, It's fun I enjoy it. I also enjoy exploring Coords people post from time to time, Why? Cause it's bloody fun sometimes.

Racial armor is racial traits, as people said before if you got the traits the second you started the new character there'll be minmaxing.

 

1. No opinion
2. I agree the info should be limited to resources and maybe type of life on the planet ( assuming they tie specific resources to specific life forms at a later date), but if you really don't want to know what is on a planet, don't scan it. Just go!
3. It's been in beta for 2 weeks. Why in such a hurry?
4. No opinion. I'm waiting to see how the progression is going to work out. I'm a fan of having the game play out like Star Control 2. It was totally open AND had a story and main plot line that you built.
5. I think the planet difficulty should be hidden. Leave it up to the dice as too how hard it is.
6. I think racial bonuses should be built into the characters, but that's just me.
7. The fog is supposed to represent the unknown, and there is/should be alot of it. As for the sectors.... I refer to Star Control 2 again. It had sectors, but you could go into them any time you wanted to and they were controlled by different races. Similar to how Warhammer 40k's galaxy is setup, just more equal between the races... sort of. You'd have to check it out to see what I mean.

 

You mean coal powered . And the tech is not that advanced since none of these races seem to think of making a light that clips onto a helm or a shirt for lighting. Hell you can't even craft any guns without finding afaik rare as fuck blueprints, I got like 70 hours in starbound and have never found one craftable gun blueprint period. Its pretty stupid some of the crazy things you can make yet guns do not seem to be an option. Alot of these things are not coming in the next patch, try to read, this is planned things that may or may not come in the future, and these are only the ones that have been discussed openly, they probally have a trove of things behind closed doors they haven't said to anyone yet.

 

Source?

 

honestly i am liking just about everything in that list so... yeah...

 

the stuff tiy wrote about the future of the game arent patch notes for the next patch, it is a roadmap - these changes will come with time

 

SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, CHIEF!

#hardc0r3_g@m3r.jpeg

 

I agree about the armor abilities. I'd prefer if the races were different and had unique abilities, and swappable armor means every race can access every racial ability.

I disagree about fog of war, I actually like that idea. Right now, it's far too easy to just copy coordinates from the forums and gain access to all the "rare" treasures you could ever want. That destroys the fun of actually searching unknown planets for treasure, and the excitement of finding something really great.

For example, I found a Rainbow Cape in a chest a few days ago, and I was really happy about it. Then, while browsing the forums, I found a thread with coordinates to a planet with a Rainbow Cape on it. It made me feel less excited about my discovery. The fact that I could have easily just copied coordinates from someone else made my discovery less meaningful.

Fog of war will also, hopefully, restore a sense of distance to the universe. Starbound's universe is truly vast, but we don't experience that because we are always just 100 coal or less from whatever planet we want to visit.

 

This doesn't really address your points cause idc, but those aren't patch notes.

 

I agree with OP about most of his points.

I think that the reason why the game looks 'disorganized' is because of the way it was created:

I'm pretty sure the Devs thought about making a Terraria game first, and scale it up a notch.
Then they slapped on some lore. Then they probably realized that it was too easy to get strong armour and weapons (due to weak recipe components)
so they added a Tier system, which would be accessible by beating Bosses.

This is what causes the imbalances in the game in my opinion: the game was thought out in separate parts, then stitched together.

 

I think I agree mostly with point 6 that you brought up. Racial abilities can be had as well abilities and not armor based ones, it's not like they can't balance it out.

 

Just wanted to quickly point out that you point number 6 was addressed... years ago. From the point where racial armor was announced, it was stated by the devs that they were done so races would be purely aesthetic. They didn't want to put looks and functionality in the same racial package, so players didn't have to pick one over the other. I believe it should be left this way.

 

Them being aesthetic will most likely mean that one race will likely be chosen the least (not sure what race is chosen the least in the community though). I for one will always use floran, and care little about the other races, as I can do anything with the floran, as I can with any of the others.