Exploration isn't something that really happens too much in Starmade, especially since with the map - you know where everything is and everything is pretty much the same. I was thinking that could change - if you're up to it.
Now think about this, you land on a planet that's fixed, something that doesn't randomly generate it's terrain due to the fact that it's holding one of a few random facilities that are used for exploration. This fixed planet you land on by shuttle holds something you know of quite well, treasures within it's outposts, within the underground metal caves known as a research facility. But with the loot you find underground, this amazing stuff - you face a threat, which comes in the form of alien life forms(Probably should make the planets indestructible so that people don't just blow them up and take everything that falls out of the containers).
Like in many alien horror movies and shows, aliens are your common enemy, the things you dread about in space - creatures of horror that can mean the difference between a dead crew and a live one.
In any case, deadly aliens being underground in abandoned facilities creates a few things, it creates a reason to explore, it creates a new element of fear that does not currently exist in the game and it takes away this feeling of being safe behind a giant wall of lasers when you have to trek on foot through a facility. It also allows there to be a reason for hand held weapons as well as advancements in these weapons, like the option to buy heavy weapons and even more so, possibly AI or other players could accompany you, the PLAYER - underground on these treasure hunting missions.
The point of it is, it creates something different and I know a lot of games do let you do this already, with Dead Space and all that. But it's all scripted, nothing's better then actually landing on a planet out of your own decision and prepping your own team to go down into a facility you don't really know, for an objective that could be anything. You will face unknown entities and you will have no idea if you all die or not, it could be easy or hard - but it's not scripted and there's no fake jump scares, the fear you have is your own. The exploration is real and everything is in a sense real, you did this - you came here, you are risking your life to explore this planet.
It's the beauty of non linear games with a large universe, often things that happen to you aren't just happening simply because the director behind the decided it'd be cool. It's happening because you are at this particular place at this particular time, it was all chance and now you are dealing with it. It makes fantastic moments with giant gun fights and explosions amazing, because it's not fake - you and the other people involved created this moment that is impossible to recreate again, it's unique to you. This is a bit of a ramble, but the point is to remember our childhoods and all the movies, games, TV shows we watched about humans arriving on planets or abandoned stations and dealing with horrible alien entities behind the premise of either just surviving or finding something worth the endangerment to their lives.
This will also make people stop thinking of hand held weapons as useless things you only use to blow up faction modules on ships that you manage to sneak into or as a tool to make your ship look all woobili when you hit it's shields. I think you get the point, combat becomes real, exploration becomes a reality, 'treasure' hunting comes into play and finally - fear becomes a unique sub system within starmade.
Now that I think of it, why limit it to planets? Why not add abandoned stations, large structures that bear the same elements of a research station? Imagine Event Horizon being recreated in a way, not the demonic ship part - but a crew coming onto a ship/station, finding it completely empty and devoid of life, then being massacred one by one, by an unknown entity.
Sounds hard, but anything worth doing is always going to be hard, like diets and exercise, or learning to code. All things are hard to do, but in the end it's worth it - I'm hoping as devs you don't scratch this one off as something you don't want to do, due to it being something you can't accomplish or do.
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Forgive the horrible grammatical mistakes, I was reading through Steam Announcements and re-read the GUI update for Starmade and wondered to myself, at an ungodly hour why Starmade isn't really pushing any boundaries or making any major pushes towards the game. Yes it's fun now and a lot of people are fulfilled with it, but will it be long term? Ways to make a game long term isn't just to add tiny blocks to it, but to create new things that can be explored, things that aren't like the main block of the game - options for people to take when they get bored or want to do something else. Because after a while, mining and building can get tiresome, while ship combat is an option - people rarely get involved in ship battles. Generally because it's less of a test of your skills and more of a test of if your shield regenerates faster then they can damage you.
So to me, out of everything you could add, instead of adding lots of miniscule things that would eventually stop being interesting, do something big and cool, that would keep people wowing at the game for a long time - therefore possibly extending the games shelf life. Because, you know - I imagine you guys like money.
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