Explore, Land, Survive.

    Joined
    Dec 21, 2014
    Messages
    3
    Reaction score
    0




    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.

    //

    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.
     
    Last edited:
    Joined
    Nov 27, 2013
    Messages
    41
    Reaction score
    13
    Like the idea Keeping a random generation as well as this would be a grate a idea
     

    Ithirahad

    Arana'Aethi
    Joined
    Nov 14, 2013
    Messages
    4,150
    Reaction score
    1,330
    • Purchased!
    • Top Forum Contributor
    • Legacy Citizen 8
    Agreed... But shouldn't damaging planets from orbit be a little harder in general? I mean, currently there's no point in doing anything on a planet until you've stuck ungodly amounts of shielding underground. Also, destroying storages, at least on stations and planets, should just destroy them, not break them open and allow all the loot to come flying out. That way, you have to actually board a station to get the loot rather than just nuking the section that has the loot chests.
     
    • Like
    Reactions: CyberTao

    Snk

    Joined
    Aug 30, 2013
    Messages
    1,186
    Reaction score
    155
    • Legacy Citizen
    • Top Forum Contributor
    Agreed... But shouldn't damaging planets from orbit be a little harder in general? I mean, currently there's no point in doing anything on a planet until you've stuck ungodly amounts of shielding underground. Also, destroying storages, at least on stations and planets, should just destroy them, not break them open and allow all the loot to come flying out. That way, you have to actually board a station to get the loot rather than just nuking the section that has the loot chests.
    http://starmadedock.net/threads/how-to-fix-planets.4847/

    +1 to OP
     
    Joined
    Jan 1, 2015
    Messages
    923
    Reaction score
    292
    • Community Content - Bronze 2
    • Purchased!
    • Thinking Positive
    Alien creatures is something already planned for Starmade. Certainly they will spawn on planets. It would be nice if were possible to set them to spawn on stations and ships as well (admin commands I suppose).

    Explorable ruins and planetary facilities could easily be incorporated while still keeping the rest of the planet random. If building random terrain around predefined constructions is difficult, at the very least a planet plate could be predefined while the rest are random. Best would be if there were a simple system to be able to import alien constructions for planets and have the game randomly place them in the universe when it generates. Metadata defining a construction as common, rare and unique would be extremely useful (ideally with a much greater range than just the three I mentioned).

    It would also be helpful if we could prebuild entire planets complete with alien creature data and save/load them in similar fashion so a new universe can use them the same way. (Load NPC faction, generate NPC faction ships...) "If you go to Z'ha'dum, you will die."
     
    Joined
    Feb 5, 2015
    Messages
    67
    Reaction score
    10
    All in all a great idea but maybe a bit too early for starmade, lets give the devs more time for fixing bigger problems ;)
     
    Joined
    Jun 21, 2013
    Messages
    71
    Reaction score
    16
    Why stop at monsters that spawn, why not genetically mutate them. Capturing creatures to "harvest" for specific DNA traits to build the perfect monster. to balance it, the more you mutate it, the more unpredictable, chaotic, and nightmarish it becomes.

    Imagine, scientific stations overrun with not natural monsters, but genetically mutate monstrosities. Imagine a group of players attempt to capture them for a war, but little did they realize what is right behind them.

    In conclusion, I really want to be able to mutate creatures using DNA, I know that the devs plan to create a program(?) to allow players to make creatures, I want to do more in war and make amazing creatures, And plus, it's something that you could put on stations other than docking.
     
    Joined
    Dec 21, 2014
    Messages
    3
    Reaction score
    0
    Damn I was busy, totally forgot about this thread. Well I will respond to what I think needs responding to.


    Anything can be too early, but ideas like this could be months early, or could not be implemented for even a year, but putting it on a road map means it becomes physical and reinforces itself into the foundation. Design is essential, placing down things you will do now and will do later on is important in a lot of ways, specifically because for a lot of us, the more unique an idea is - the lower the chance of you remembering that idea later on when it comes time to use it. But here is something to acknowledge, right now - Starmade is basically just ship building and that's about it. When it comes down to it, all we ever do is build things - we don't explore, the most exciting thing you can do is basically blow up another ship(Which is so rare it's not funny, because PvP occurs as often as grand parents using the word "YOLO.".). So then you might think mining is an alternative to building, but it's not a fulfilling alternative to building, it's just something you do before you build - because you need to mine in order to craft, in order to then build.

    Exploration is cool and I've worked with a lot of mods that incorporated survival and exploration that was Space Focused or Sci Fi - it was always great. Think of Europa Report or just - any space movie where you saw this amazing wonder as you tried to piece together what is happening and what makes this specific place so unique. Exploration should be a lot of nothing, lots of regular planets and regular derilects - and then suddenly, you find something that isn't like everything else. This piece of wonder out in space, this derelict ship or unique planet that holds treasures you could not dream of, an opportunity to better your Faction or yourself in massive ways.

    For every risk, there is usually an equal reward, mining is a repetitive easy operation and it's success always depends on your ship and it's modules. But exploration, of a derelict or an underground facility on a planet is different, there's unpredictability, there's an uncertainty about if your weapons will be able to deal with whatever might be inside this area, there's a question of if you can do this alone or if you need other spacers with you to do this. There's a confusion of what you might face or if there's anything here at all and a hope that somewhere in this area, you will find loot that's worth the risk you are taking.

    Starmade should do this, because it's the only place that can give you the wonder that a movie does. Games like Mass Effect are great, but they are predictable and you generally know what's going to happen and once it's happened, replaying it is like watching a movie again but with slightly different outcomes that all come to the same conclusion.

    With Starmade there's an opportunity to create scenarios that are completely unique to the person who's involved in them at the time, to actually create real fear of death when exploring and a sense of wonder about if something will try to kill you at all and if what you are looking for is worth all this trouble. If you improve on exploration and work hard on it, you could have something really - really fun for people to do and modders could have a blast with it if you set up the foundations for something that could spawn server mods that would allow amazing amounts of explorations.

    If you - the developers lay the foundation for real and proper exploration, your community could create mods that would give such wonder to the game that people couldn't find themselves playing anything else. It would even attract a different audience of people who aren't specifically interested in building amazing structures, but people who want to bring movies to life, people who want their very own Europa Report or Prometheus. It's your choice though, you can do something simple and just put hostile mobs on a planet and no one will really care about them, they'll become annoying or ignored at an eventual state - or, you could do something more, something... risky.

    "Nothing ventured. Nothing gained."

    - Relative Quote #42