Buckle up guys, I've had a wall of test worth of stuff to say building for a while, but have been procrastinating about putting it on the forums. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I have not actually played on any multiplayer servers, so I feel like I have a really good idea of how well the game explains itself rather than a veteran player explaining on its behalf. I really like this game and it's one of 2 or 3 I return to again and again. My favorite thing is building and creating things, and this game absolutely excels at that, giving me tools that most other game only offer in glitchy mods. Other similar games (that I won't name) had interesting systems, but were so poorly optimized every server allowed you to build essentially a single small fighter that once easily destroyed was gone forever. This game has shareable blueprints, easy to find and gather resources, and shops.
However, just about everything else is very difficult to learn and has a very slow reward process. I am an technically minded person and enjoy puzzles and challenges but I may have given up on this game entirely if I hadn't gotten into Twitch and the folks that stream there. It's a very polar game, either something is really easy or it is really hard. If it's easy it's generally because the game has allowed most construction to take place in what other games would call a "creative mode" while still requiring resources and leaving the player vulnerable. It is also easy because everything is tradable for credits and even the most simplistic of ships function well. However when it is hard, it is rarely due to the challenge of mobs, or the difficultly of design choices, but figuring out the options available and testing systems.
Thus, as a player who loves this game for it's building aspects and multiplayer focus, I will try to address where the game is too easy to the point of being boring and where it is too hard to the point of being overwhelming. After all the criticism, I'll try to offer my briefly considered, likely mediocre, solutions.
- Too easy: A lot of the process of resource gathering feels repetitive because there is no challenge to it once you have a few salvagers installed. Sure, you need to find a trader or a planet with the right rarer resources to build your custom ship, but those resources are only hard to find, not to gather.
Soln?: Now, if some planets or centers had hostile mobs or turrets (Alien Military Caches anyone?) or even could be claimed by factions who could them farm and sell those resources that would be amazing. With custom fleets, factions, and NPCS, the opportunity to create a more casual and creative EVE-like experience is there. It's just hard to produce.
- Too hard: The controls are a nightmare where everything is set up like a file system (think linux) instead of a visual based system (think iPhone). I've used professional sim suites and the learning curve feels similar. Now, that's not to say it can't be done, but a new player is unlikely to put in that kind of effort unless there is some big payoff of excitement or progression early on. The UI is confusing, with multiple thin colored lines that show ship systems. And this is for a single ship, not a fleet of ships or a faction of fleets. The tutorial videos help, but completely skip over things like cargo, scanning, cloaking, etc.
Soln?: Ideally, within an hour of starting, the new player gets a couple of achievements showing learning and progress, has killed something, and built something. From my experience, that's about how long you have before impatience sets in. The achievements could mark things like "gathered basic resource", "killed a thing", and "built a ship (including at least 1 thruster, power, and core". If the empty achievement list appeared at first logon like the tutorial menu, so much the better. Then building ships over a certain size, or finding some lost alien artifact, defeating a pirate station, or salvaging a derelict ship core could all be achievements which grant at least some significance to experiencing the universe and let players know they are on the right track.
- Too hard: Systems like power, shields, and weapons have almost no way to isolate them once they are buried amidst each other inside a ship. A redesign of almost any system involves removing all the blocks, coming up with a new plan, and placing them all down again. While it's interesting how power gen, cap, weapon systems intermingle, if I don't like my ships performance, it tests my patience to tear everything apart and put it back together again.
Soln?: A tab in build mode that said (Ctrl for advanced options) in a decent font size would be nice, and then some big vertical tabs for general, armor, weapons, power, shields, thrust would be AMAZING to help show where things are and what they do. Get all that crap out of the main wheel menu and a gray box of tiny white text and into a single accessible place where it belongs, a build menu. Each tab would highlight the corresponding system blocks throughout the ship, and perhaps offer the ability to edit only those blocks. Weapon blocks of all types could be replaced with a 3 blocks (primary, secondary, and effect) which could then be set to the right type in the weapon tab of the advanced build menu with a button for an entire highlighted section at once. Perhaps this last bit is too much, but yall get the idea.
- Too easy: Defeating pirates. While this can be adjusted by giving the pirates access to player-made blueprints, the base pirates don't have anything of note. All the other factions are big and expansive but neutral. Once defeated, the pirates don't have any significant rewards for capturing their ships or stations as they must be purchased to get their materials.
Soln?: Pirates will not just destroy, but capture ships, stations, and planets and build moderate defenses on them. Is this hard as hell to code? Likely. A easier version would to just have pirates "capture" resources. Now, giving the pirate faction a dreadnought with the hyper aggressive AI could be a terrible idea, but if that dreadnought went and squatted on something worth having (like a rare asteroid) and only had short range weapons, that could be an amazing and engaging find. Most of these require that resources be in at least some way renewable, which could be done with respawning asteroids, minable planet cores, or certain blocks that respawn in an area over time. Perhaps a new type of multiblock generator creates the resource, who knows.
- Too hard: Bug Reporting. I don't know if there's an easy system in place, but my less-than-observant self certainly never noticed one in game. For a game this ambitious with innovative mechanics, this feature seems like a must.
Soln?: A link from the escape menu to the bug forums would be fine.
If the game were to add scriptable missions, the community can create stories, lore, and an ultimate final mission. Someone is going to have talent in writing, and that's all that will be needed to give StarMade a good, final goal.
Sure, the dev team could build their own goal mission without giving the community access, but then you'll never have an evolving storyline. The static final mission will be explored endlessly, and hints, tips, and solutions will be posted online, making the final mission easy.
If you have a community-accessible mission system, then you have any number of "final missions", including brand new ones, so that the end cannot be so easily "cracked". At least not until interest in the game falters, and then nobody scripts new missions for it anymore. Then the true final mission will be exposed and given the walk-through treatment, pushing the game into "completed" state, as nature intended.
First, a little background.
Long long ago I got into quest building in minecraft, but the skillcap was so high and the demographic had become so young it was a very frustrating experience. Particularly annoying was how poorly anything worked in multiplayer. It was actually fairly easy to make a one-time-through single player quest world, but my goal was always to apply those skills to a server. I actually had a good prototype working when Microsoft bought Mojang and crushed plugin development for servers. So, with the sudden updates of the game, all the plugins broke and I couldn't fix/re-code them AND design a questing server so the project eventually was abandoned.
However, I think with the introduction of factions, a few more NPCS, and then some basic stage mechanics then Starmade would from an administrator perspective be a "build your own MMO in space" game which sounds like one of the greatest things ever.
That said, while letting the community design a lot of the questing content, having a few things to discover or explore would be very very useful to allow NEW players trying out the game to have something to do even in single player mode for a while. Perhaps just some captain's logs in derelict ships or alien notes on strange planetary structures would be good. Maybe some information on leaders of the trading guild or why the Scavs learned to work together. Do the outcasts have a history? Is there a way to learn it at their stations in the game? That kind of thing would be great.
Well I've gone on long enough, if anyone made it this far, good on you. Anyway, hope this helps,
Joe
