Please, I beg of you bring back the difficulty spanning of monsters and planets. without that, there is no reason to even leave the planet you are currently on, exploration is pointless and invalid unless you literally strip every last resource of a planet, it takes away the notion of "go out and explore, there might be something else out there" and turns it into "stay right here, everything is the same out there, why bother". Please man, I am begging you as an explorer don't do this to me. Don't do this to us.
I disagree. Even with the old system there was no reason to explore other planets other than if you ran out of our or wanted to hunt down something. It's only semantics really. Plus I think they planned on breaking the planets down into easy, medium, and hard here in a few patches.
You know the old way made it VERY hard to balance thing's right? So they droped it from 100lvs to 10. That still isn't a reason to not go out and explore! Before you also could very well stay on the 'home' planet and do nuthing but mine. You can get up to the first boss on such a world. But other worlds may have better tech, more loot and better weapons, fun and exciting dungeons to explore, or a fun biome to run though! Plus then the underground biomes you can discover. I found an underground tomb on one world that held some crystal torches. You have the same amount of reasons to go off and explore as you did before, as well as the same reasons to sit tight and stay on one.
It's not semantics, though. The easy/medium/hard label is a necessity along with the threat level to determine plenty of things each planet offers. Infact, if each sector just continues to add 1 threat level then it might aswell be abolished. Just turn the new Easy/Medium/Hard to threat level since that's what it really is. It will allow for more than 3 increments in difficulty too. The most important reason to include a more detailed sort of tier system is to allow you to actually progress. Let's say you start on a Threat 1 planet in the Alpha Sector. Your travels should be like so: Easy tier planet - Scan planet for chests/dungeons/facilites - Gain weapons/items of that tier -> Travel to a Medium tier planet - Scan planet for chests/dungeons/facilites - Gain weapons/items on tthat tier... At the moment, everything in the Alpha Sector has a Threat level of 1 until you unlock a new sector. I don't know which planet is worth travelling to for; slightly harder monsters to get more pixels each kill, better chance for rarer ore, slightly better weaponry loot and harder NPC mobs in facilities.
What I was saying though is yes, it needs to be labeled better than it is now, however, it doesn't necessarily need to be the old way. Though doesn't it defeat the purpose as a space exploration game to have everything laid out. I mean there should be a chance of going somewhere and finding something awesome while going to another planet and finding all of jack squat. I think if anything it should be hidden from the player until they upgrade their ship. It just seems silly that at a glance I know the value of a planet without setting foot on it.
Yeah the whole threat level thing shouldn't even be visible. I'd rather jump on a planet, explore it, then come back to it if I cant handle it yet. Not have some number tell me if its dangerous or not. Ruins all excitement and exploration.
To the OP: So your arguement is that taking away information about a planet kills exploration? Doesn't that seem a little oxymoron-ish to you? I'm actually in favor of a system that gives you zero information until you actually travel to a planet and scan it with on board ship scanners. They could even make it have an upgrade path that would allow you to scan entire solar systems, or provide more in-depth knowledge about the planets makeup. Would make more sense thematically too.
It's not about having information before you get there, it's the fact that in a given sector, every planet is of exact same difficulty. You don't need to explore or even think about it, in sector A every planet is a level 1, and the only changes are basically cosmetic. (Same monster difficulty, same ore rarity, same kind of gear etc...) you don't need to explore unless you like to take pretty screenshots of different planets. I love the idea of having to travel to the planet to figure out the threat level, but with the current system, there's no need to do so since it's the same in the whole sector. The previous system was broken, it was either getting one-shot by monsters or one-shoting them, unless you happened to be just the right level and it took a couple hits either way. The way I'd play the old system was: 1. I get to a planet, 2. try to kill stuff and be killed, 3. have trouble at it, 4. explore the planet, 5. get better weapons from the planet, 6. maybe craft some better armor, 7. then I start to one-shot monsters, 8. and decide to move to another planet a couple levels higher 9. so I can find better gear. 10. And if I've reached the max level on this sector, it's time to move to the next. repeat 1 - 10 With that system you'd need to explore 3-5 planets per sector and you get to pick the type of challenge you want. The actual system is more like: 1. get to a planet, 2. fight your way through monsters, 3. find somewhat better gear, 4. craft somewhat better armor, 5. make the fighting a little easier, 6. wonder if you should move to another planet, 7. decide to move and notice there was no point in doing that 8. move to the next sector for a challenge, 9. explore only one planet before the next sector repeat 8 - 9 This feels much more linear and you don't get a challenge until you beat the boss and move to the next sector. The armor piercing stat was forcing an almost binary situation of crush monsters or be crushed, but it was also challenging, rewarding and it encouraged exploration. The new system makes the combat way more fair, but eliminates the need for exploration within a given sector, the global experience being somewhat dull. We need a balance between the two (easier said than done) where you have some challenge, a sense of progression, and variety within a given sector. I made a suggestion called "THREAT (PLANET) LEVEL VARIETY WITHIN A SECTOR" related to this very subject feel free to upvote/downvote it.
There need to be variations by tier instead of all planets in alpha sector being the incredibly nondescript... 1.
We're on the same wavelength. I don't want the old system, I'm in favour of a more detailed tier system. Planets do have different difficulties but have no label to tell you right now. I have no gripes with having zero information about a planet either. If the system created scaling progression so each jump to a new planet raised the risk/reward slightly that would be possible. With the current system it doesn't. At the same time, I don't want to be in the Gamma sector and stumble across tier 1 enemies with no interesting loot. So, I think having some sort of difficulty level labelled is needed. Having to scan a planet from your ship beforehand to determine the risk could be cool. With more dangerous environments like meteor showers, signs of humanoid life and a whole other bunch of stuff implemented I think it could be a lot more interesting too.
