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v1.0.13 from Good Old Games.
In no particular order:
"It's" is a contraction for "it is" or "it has" (cf "that's" as a contraction for "that is" or "that has").
"Its" is a possessive pronoun meaning "belonging to it" (cf "hers, yours, ours, theirs" all indicating possession by the pronoun and none of which have apostrophes).
Please understand these significant differences, then run a grep on the string-table for "(?i)\bit\W?s\b" and check each occurrence to see if you are using the correct homophone. For example, these are all wrong:
It's not wrong ubiquitously and consistently. For example, here "its" is correctly used as a possessive pronoun with no apostrophe:
I am surprised the translation team porting the string constants to other languages didn't flag these for failing basic spellcheck.
In the following screenshots, "millenia" (ie with only one "n") is not a real word (I don't think even foreign dialects spell it like that):
Please search the string table for variants (millennium, millennial, etc.) and ensure they are all corrected to the standard spelling.
"Adjacent" has a second "A":
"Coalesce" has a second "C":
Separate has a second "A":
Some is missing an "E":
"An" is generally only for words starting with a vowel (although "heirloom" (and in exotic dialects, "herb")) are exceptions - not words like "novel" which begin with a consonant:
Was this meant to be "a sudden and unexpected"?
Was this meant to be "noises at the team breaking up" or "noises as the team breaks up"?
"understanding of this principles in this technology" sounds pretty awkward; probably "the principles of this technology" would make more sense.
"Curved" should be "covered". Also, I wish those glyphs cooperated with the graffiti:
Evil Overlords with a speech impediment are an established trope (The Life of Bwian, Team America World Police) but it really undermines the antagonist's ability to appear imposing and intimidating when they exhibit they've clearly lost a battle to a basic dictionary. Up until this screen, Eos was sounding pretty intimidating and sinister. A singularity-level AI capable of time-travel! We have no chance to survive make our time! But suddenly it's looking pretty comic and naïve instead. Previously when I rescued Lobstriches a crew member had lectured everyone on the importance of rigorous testing; I'm sure they'd be mocking Eos IV if my entire crew hadn't been wiped out by red fungal spores:
"Fold" might have been intended to read "hold" or "told":
While "top them" is idiomatic for killing them, I think you probably meant "stop them":
This signal contains three packets. While the first "is" this and the second "is" that, the third "was" in past tense. Please keep tense consistent:
Phenomena (plural):
"to" cycle through:
"Their" is a possessive pronoun and homophone for "there":
"The only sign ... buildings atop" (ie, two errors):
Is there a reason why "cosmic background radiation" is abbreviated to CMB?
Kite Station has 3 Talking Heads identical to Space Pirates And Zombies:
Scientist Dr Pilman's dialogue and the log brought up by pressing "Q" display the token female as named "Commodore" but Kite Station displays the token female as named "Commander" instead. One or the other of these is wrong. Just pick one and use it consistently. I only realised something was wrong when Dr Pilman told me the Commodore had already shared my survey data with him. My immediate response was that I have never even encountered a Commodore yet it somehow has obtained access to my survey data? It wasn't until I searched the log for Commodore that I realised it was a bug in which one of the Talking Heads had been renamed at some point but some references had been overlooked.
This should probably be "at fifty metres" without the extra "a":
"Be a 1000 Astrals" should probably be without the extra "a":
To be or not to be... I think there are too many beings in "being not being":
Delete "has" from "has allows":
It would make sense to say either "if a living specimen exists" or "if a specimen still lives". However "if a living specimen still lives" is tautological; it must still live for it to qualify as being a living specimen:
The Hermit hides from the Gortanu due to a life-threatening speech impediment that inserts extraneous syllables into "Now I carry the truth alone."
"They" or "it" but not both:
Something around "behaviour and lack tools" doesn't flow here:
Additionally, "definition of sentient race" should either be "definition of a sentient race" or "definition of 'sentient race'." Furthermore, the fact that they are interacting with the landing crew proves that they are indeed sentient. They might not be sapient, but that's a completely different word altogether.
This same planet tells us that a group of "creatures begins"; while it is syntactically correct that the "group ... begins" to surround the rock, it does sound a little awkward due to how many words separate "group" (singular) from "begins", weakening that association.
"Should ask" is around the wrong way:
"But have unable" is missing "been":
"For find" should be "for the find" (or "for the discovery" if you are the type who is wary of gerunds):
This paragraph is odd. It starts off in present tense "after X, the team finds" but it finishes in past tense: "was treated to a spray" and "managed to remove most". There's also a word missing. Either of these reformulations would work better:
"Unlikely to be naturally occurring."
"They report the most wondrous artefact":
"Gradually spread across the surface":
"stillsome" needs a space:
"That this used to be":
"This is a deep space":
Even after I had found the sunless planet directly West of the green eye (it's right by a nexus that really draws attention to its location on the galactic map) subsequent planets with temples to the fallen gods told me I still had no clue where that planet might be - despite having already surveyed the Hidden Redoubt. It seems like some branching logic about what text to include/exclude is checking the wrong variable here. After touring a lot of the temples I was able to complete the survey of the Sunless Redoubt, but still, it was strange being told I didn't know where it was when I did.
It was encouraging to see the Lobstriches settlement acknowledge my efforts to repair several of their ships and set them back on their course. Only one ship was a lost cause. Is the quantity of research points awarded to the player proportional to how many ships were saved?
During my travels, I landed on a red planet. The crew sent out a drone and collected a sample of ooze using it.
I then returned to Kite Station and talked to Dr Pilman. He said he would need a sample of ooze.
However, there was no button I could click to say, "I've got one right here, pal". This was quite confusing. I went back to the planet, but it said survey complete already and I could no longer land and collect a second (redundant) sample. This was quite frustrating. A long time later I landed on the Phage homeworld and found some research data and took that to Pilman and was able to complete this mission. This was quite aggravating.
If he asks for a sample, he should accept a sample. Even if he then follows up by saying, "Hmm, I have so much pottery to stare at, it will take me a long time to research a catalyst to break down red ooze. Let me know if you encounter any shortcuts!"
At least that way, the player knows what they are looking for and doesn't wonder if they broke a fragile quest by accidentally interacting with something earlier or later than the developer expected.
I was kind of expecting buggy text since GOG exhibited a screenshot of "extra the data" in the product page.
Although bugged at the time the incriminating promotional screenshot was taken, it had been fixed by the release of v1.0.13:
Even so, every time I encountered text that didn't make sense and had to reread it two or three times to work out what the author was trying to say, it disrupted flow and broke immersion.
The Saurids ask you to locate and demolish a Chitik outpost. Once you accumulate enough technology and resource to do so and identify the station they mean, you do the deed. Thereafter, every Saurid you encounter pays you tribute:
This tribute keeps on flowing until you enter the Dyson sphere and unleash the Lumae.
The Araona reward the player with Adamantine for completing a mission (below). The reward from this mission is just a one-off, not a recurring tribute. Is this intentional? Should the Saurids only pay once; should everyone pay each time you encounter them; or is a difference in mission outcome all part of the heterogeneity of the galaxy?
At several points in the game, you are told a new waypoint has been added to the galactic map when it hasn't:
Where is this "encoded gateway destination"? It's clearly referring to the Dyson Sphere but that's pretty far away from any nexus that I have found...
Where is this "set of gateway coordinates"?
Where is this "Nexus Gateway"?
Whatever the case is, the game has set a precedent for breaking the fourth wall by assigning absolute and constant Cartesian coordinates to stellar bodies subject to orbital mechanics. That being the case, simply expose the coordinates of these destinations right there in the dialogue as they are discovered. That way even if the star map fails to highlight a destination, the player can still extract the coordinates from the log and fly there manually.
Being able to save everywhere (rather than just autosaving on planetfall) is a big convenience improvement over Escape Velocity / Endless Skies when it comes to long-range exploration being interrupted by dinner time and not a planet in sight. Thankyou.
If the player points their ship into the void and toggles turbo on while they do the washing up, it's got a good chance of revealing a bunch of distant stars previously unseen. After some such exploration, the player might save the game and plan to investigate those systems more thoroughly when they have more time next play session. Upon loading the game, the Fog of War has concealed all those stars again. This is very frustrating. It seems like the player ship must go and survey a planet in a system for it to be toggled as visited and protect it from being concealed by the Fog of War. Is there any way you can make this algorithm more lenient so that a star that has been drawn on the star map (but not actually visited) remains drawn on the star map after a save and reload?
The Sentinels have several superstations. In my playthrough I blew a couple up in the East spiral arm and when I encountered more of them in the South East I decided to leave them untouched as a weapons test reference point; that way future ship loadouts can jump to the nearest nexus and test how long it takes them to annihilate the superstation to give me a good idea of how that design compares with others. I found that loading such saved games removed the Sentinel superstations entirely; they were just not reconstructed by the load game algorithm. In contrast, if I were to damage or destroy a module or two of the station before saving the game, the station did seem to save and reload. The Zoar Guild Outpost station seemed to always load up (although I only managed to destroy it once when Lumae were besieging it). Can this be changed so that loading the game faithfully restores the playing field to how it was at the instant the game was saved?
In almost all games, the player can name their save game file so that if they later discover they need to reload from an earlier state, they can quickly identify that juncture. Starcom: Nexus provides this, but it is pretty clunky to execute:
There has to be a more streamlined workflow you could implement.
The player can quickload during dialogue. On a number of sandy planets, the landing team have to excavate the lander from a sand dune using the cafeteria stirring spoon ellipsis ellipsis ellipsis. It is faster to just hit the quickload hotkey and get back on with the game than wait it out. However, quickload only partially restores the game state from the save file; it does not clear the current dialogue from memory / display. It should.
Ever since the days of receiving multiple AOL CD-ROMs in the mail each week lobbying us to try out the Internet using Microsoft's recently acquired Spyglass software rebranded as Internet Exploder and integrated into the AOL eWorld spin-off, the F5 hotkey has meant "Reload". F5 means reload in all web browsers across all platforms; in file managers across multiple Operating Systems; et al. F5 is universally recognised for reload. You use it for the opposite function (quicksave) and have a different key for quickload. After 25 years of GUIs consistently training everyone that F5 means reload, your program coming along and hoping to hold back the tide by redefining F5 as save leads to plenty of frustration as the game does the opposite of what the player expects from that key. Even after fixing the keybindings in the Preferences so that F5 results in quickload, the loading screen tips continue to promote the wonders of pressing F5 to save the game. This ain't gonna fly.
If autosave is enabled and quicksave is used, plenty of save points accumulate. If you exit the game to the launch menu and enter the Load Game screen, you can delete the latest save games. You can then load what now is the latest remaining game. If the player then quickloads, they expect the latest remaining game's state to be reconstructed. However, instead the state of a later, since deleted, save game entry is reconstructed and presented to the player. Since the player intentionally deleted this entry, this is just bewildering.
When trying to diplomatically manoeuvre a battlefield without Havok (sic) modules aggressing Neutral allies, it is strategic to save at certain times. When saving from the menu succeeds, an icon of a floppy disk flashes inconspicuously in the top-right corner of the display. When saving from the menu fails, a text message flashes inconspicuously at the bottom of the display. Neither of these are modal. Both of these are very easy to miss. Since they are very far away from each other, it's entirely possible the player is looking in the wrong spot when they flash up and vanish again, not noticing them. I would suggest that every time the player intentionally saves the game, a modal dialogue box appear confirming success or presenting an error string if any part of the process failed (in combat, disk full, read-only filesystem, etc.)
This concept of module placement / rotation on a hexagonal grid (up to a specified number of tiles intended to throttle progression) closely resembles that of Space Run: Fast and Safe Delivery (2014). While that's a decent model on which to build, it would have been good to see more innovation to distinguish construction in Starcom Nexus.
When saving a blueprint, the content of its Name and Description fields must be manually typed in. Their content persists from the previous time a blueprint was saved in this encounter with the Shipyard but a save / load cycle wipes the fields. If the player only made a few minor modifications to a blueprint now they have amassed enough minerals to fit a desired module, for example, they need to manually re-enter the text for those fields before saving over the top of the previous version.
When saving a blueprint, it is inserted into the array of existing blueprints at an arbitrary position. It might make sense to order blueprints by name, by module count, by total tech level required, etc. but I don't see any pattern to where blueprints end up based on their content. It would be even better to allow the player to sort the blueprints by name, module count, etc. using clearly labelled textual buttons or a dropdown / combobox type widget.
The player unlocks the ability to construct the built-in blueprint
named Dreadnought once they research the Dreadnought Behemoth
Class hull.
The Behemoth Class hull supports ships consuming up to 55 modules:
Nevertheless it goes ahead and allows the player to load the Dreadnought blueprint, build it, launch it and fly around in it without complaining.
Once the player researches Dreadnought Class hull, they can construct ships with up to 65 modules. However, the built-in Dreadnought blueprint consumes 67 modules:
The game still doesn't notice or care that this layout is illegal and permits its construction and disembarkation. I suggest:
For that matter, perhaps trim the Galaxy Explorer built-in blueprint so that it consumes only 36 modules:
NPC ships can lose modules in a way which would fragment the vessel, yet does not:
Do they perhaps have a different technology from Hull Integrity?
The so-called "havok" (sic. did you mean havoc?) module auto-activates when threats are detected, and this aggresses Neutral allies. It is also ineffectual against the missiles of Lumae. The only scenario in which fitting "havok" modules is helpful is when mining. The point-defence turrets mow down the nearby asteroids and debris without the player needing to target anything, ready for the tractor beam(s) to retrieve resources.
The anti-social ramifications of fitting a "havok" module make doing so prohibitive. It isn't worth the small benefit mining for the large penalty and inconvenience of antagonising Neutral allies. The Shield can be toggled on and off. If "havok" point-defence could be toggled on and off, it would be a viable module to fit to ships.
Flying through the nebula depletes Shields. It would be nice if I could toggle off half the Shield modules to let them recharge while sheltering under the (diminished) protection of the almost depleted other modules; then swap the fully-recharged offline modules for the online ones and let them recharge. As it is, fitting multiple Shield modules does not allow me to do this. Either they are all on or they are all off. This is clearly not the same design we bought from that colony; they can't afford to vent their entire atmosphere every time they need to swap the batteries.
Crew die from combat or flying too close to a star (prior to researching Shielding technology), from missions, and from donating ambassadors to the red ooze. It is not clear how to restock crew. Researching Expanded Command (which increases maximum crew by 5) did not top off my crew population. Undocking with a habitation ring module, however, did. Thereafter, whenever my crew was getting low, I would need to:
This process is awkward.
The GUI gives the impression that maintaining crew population is part of the resource management minigame (along with drones / missiles in stock, axial charge, shield level, energy reserves, and hull integrity). It is substantially more challenging to maintain crew because crew deaths are only briefly and quietly displayed in the bottom-left corner and instead of a bar representing what proportion of the crew capacity is filled there is an inconspicuous numeric counter that easily changes without being noticed.
At one point, a fungal spore infection killed all my crew and I flew around conducting surveys and completing missions with a completely vacant survey lander. This didn't seem to have any drawbacks. Events like landslides or collapsing towers described situations where crew would perish but no further crew were deducted / abducted below zero. Every time I restocked crew at Kite Station they would soon die of fungal spore infection so I didn't bother.
Since crew count is substantially irrelevant, I would suggest removing this mechanic altogether.
Maybe change to "rings need space" (not "needs"). Except that they don't really - see above for a layout where habitat rings happily intersect.
The skirmish algorithm does not have NPC ships considering cross-fire.
If the player's trajectory passes on the other side of a neutral party who gets caught in the NPC's cross-fire, that neutral party will retaliate against the hostile. Instead the hostile should cease firing when weapon trajectory detects a collision and resume once the lines of sight are clear once more.
If the player's trajectory passes on the other side of an antimatter debris phenomenon, the hostile NPC just recklessly blows itself up by continuing to fire regardless. This can be exploited to engineer the demise of nearby allied alien ships the player wants technology to drop from but does not want to aggress directly themself.
When a secondary weapon target is destroyed / wormholes away / is deselected due to the player pressing the secondary weapon retarget hotkey, a new secondary target is selected. In a large skirmish, there are many potential foes to select next. The closest? The one at lowest health? The one doing the most damage to the player ship? The current algorithm seems to pick its next target at random, often selecting a ship well out of weapons range or even off the screen entirely while disregarding nearby vessels actively engaged.
When multiple ships have been destroyed, there are many resources (or potentially blueprints) sitting in space waiting to be picked up. In time, they expire. Neutral ships in the vicinity also collect them. It is in the player's interest to collect them as efficiently as possible however the player cannot directly control the tractor beam(s). These could prioritise the earliest destroyed vessel (its debris will despawn soonest) or the nearest vessel (its debris can be reeled in rapidly due to having a short distance to travel) or the highest value (blueprints followed by minerals ranked by how many Titanium they exchange for on the market). The current algorithm seems to pick its next target at random, often selecting distant minerals that take a long time to reach the ship while disregarding nearby high-value assets, leaving them vulnerable to Neutral ships or expiry. This is aggravating.
NPCs reel in dropped minerals. Do they also reel in dropped research data fragments?
Dynamic lighting from stars, engines, projectiles, et al. is fantastic. The flat light present in Endless Skies is the one area where I really thought that game could be improved. However, CPU usage of Starcom: Nexus seems consistently really high. Even when in the Escape Menu so the game is paused, nothing is changing, and nothing needs recalculating, the fans are going full pelt trying to keep up. This is with Graphics Level set to Low.
The GUI refers to itself in the settings as merely a generic "UI". I have not encountered a CLI, TUI, web-based interface, API or any other presentation of the program. I believe the only UI this program is equipped with is a GUI. This would be like referring to Dr Pilman as a generic mammal rather than a human. While it is no less true to claim Dr Pilman is a mammal, it's bizarre to use the generic when the specific is more obvious. Likewise while it is no less true to refer to the game's UI, if the GUI is the only UI available, it's bizarre to use the generic when the specific is more obvious.
Tooltips sometimes have extraneous orange placeholder code at the bottom:
I usually encounter the mathematics as a plural noun encompassing geometry, arithmetic, algebra, calculus, etc. (hence the abbreviation "maths") but I see that some cultures do flatten it to a singular form (hence "my math (singular) isn't as strong"). This form certainly seems unfamiliar and exotic to me, but if it sounds normal where you're from, keep it!
The ability to add bookmarks at arbitrary coordinates holding arbitrary content is fantastic. Thankyou.
I'm so used to dragging scrollbars around that dragging the fabric of space itself in the opposite direction to where I wanted to go (ie, if I want to look North East, I would need to grab the map surface and drag it South West) took quite some time to get used to each time I sat down to play. It works. It's just unusual. My natural inclination was to zoom out until I could see the spot I wanted to focus on, then place the cursor there, then zoom in. This usually works, in my experience. This didn't work.
It seems the star map is composed of superimposed layers. The main spiral-arm galaxy is one layer;
inside the Dyson sphere is another layer; the utopia Eos-IV engineers is another layer; the end-game
battleground between the Lumae and Kite Station Transformer is another layer.
This is evident because bookmarks created on one layer (for example, the spiral-arm galaxy layer)
remain visible on the star map when the context changes (for example, entering the Dyson sphere).
For a more immersive experience, have the layer-change algorithm toggle visibility of bookmarks
linked to its layer visible and all other bookmarks hidden.
Normal experience with game maps is that pressing the Esc key exits the map and takes the player back to the game space. Even after weeks of playing Starcom: Nexus, I was still pressing Esc and being surprised and frustrated that this popped up the menu instead. Definitely popping up the menu is an important and desirable response to the Esc key in the normal game space but within any nested interaction such as a dialogue, trade, map, mission log, menu, etc. pressing Esc should take the context one step closer to the normal game space. If the player wants to access the menu from the map, they can either press Esc twice or explore the map GUI until they discover the tooltip for the green Stop sign is secretly a shortcut to the menu.
In the top left of the starmap are words; this is excellent. In the top right of the starmap are words; this is excellent. In the bottom right of the starmap are words and graph bars; this is excellent. In the bottom left of the starmap are nameless icons; the player doesn't even realise they are interactive elements (none of the other features of the starmap are) for a long time, and then they need to hover their cursor over them every time they want to find the function they are looking to use. They would be better off as buttons displaying clear words. Above these nameless mystery buttons is an event log containing words; this is excellent. It would be even better if there were a scroll bar beside it so the player can scroll up and down and realise they lost crew, picked up a repair swarm, etc.
Icons are often used for information hiding.
The Mission Log header says "Show" followed by 7 cryptic sigils. Hovering the cursor over each one reveals a tooltip of the meaning of the icon. Every time the player wants to filter the Mission Log they must again go and hover over all these glyphs until they locate the one that has the effect they want. Just delete all these icons and go straight to representing the concepts with the words themselves. It will result in a cleaner and more efficient workflow.
The minerals each have their own icon. Well, most of them do - two of them share the icon of a pale robot head on a dark background. Modules in the shipyard only record how many of each mineral they require by icon, not name. The Trade exchange GUI lists icon and name. Mission rewards list icon and name. Artefact bazaars like Entarq Citadel and Zoar Guild Outpost list name and not icon. My personal experience is that the icon adds nothing useful and just introduces an unnecessary intermediate step in figuring out what's needed. Words have far more readily accessible meaning than a picture whose meaning is isolated to this specific context and needs to be looked up every time it is encountered.
The Trade GUI has major bugs.
Sometimes the insertion point does not stay in the field where the player has clicked. Instead it shift-Tabs itself back through the fields (perhaps twice per second). This prevents the player from typing in any numerical count for desired exchange greater than one digit long. Beyond that needs to be painstakingly approached using the spinner arrows.
The header tells the player that "The [race] use [mineral] as their reserve currency so any excess costs or profits will be deducted from or added to our [mineral] supply." This isn't strictly true, however; sometimes the alien is embarrassed to admit they don't have adequate currency reserve to conduct the exchange proposed. You only find this out after having planned your trade and hit the Execute Trade button. If the aliens have limited funds, it would be helpful to display their available funds rather than claiming any quantity of that mineral required will be supplied to make sure the trade goes ahead.
Furthermore, "perhaps" should be capitalised:
The algorithm behind the Trade GUI seems to perform like this:
The upshot of this is:
It also eliminates scarcity:
Although validation is negligent when it comes to performing the actual Execute Trade transaction, validation is militant when the player is balancing values in the buy/sell fields:
Due to rounding, several values will result in the same effect. Whether the player offers to sell 51 Titanium or 70 Titanium they will still get exactly 1 Adamantine for it. Likewise, whether the player seeks to buy 51 Titanium or 70 Titanium, they will still have to pay 1 Adamantine for it. If you have the GUI step the spinner to the next value that actually makes a difference to the sale (on the side of the boundary condition that favours the player) then salami slicing to create minerals from nothing is easy (though mitigated by the tax paid for performing the exchange). If you don't, then the player is losing fractional units of the more valuable commodity every time they exchange goods (compounded with the tax). Maybe that's intentional.
The Vanderi keep coming up to me and spamming me for technology. I'm sure I've handed over to them the same research on multiple occasions. I'm sure I've had nothing to offer them on several occasions only to have options reappear on subsequent encounters with them. Having researched the entire tech tree except for the Hopper module (I didn't see any point in an inertialess surge in the direction you're already facing after a delay in which the missiles hit you anway... if we had the ability to replicate the Araona panic button that immediately teleports the craft to a random location within range, that would be worthwhile) I (a) should never run out of technology milestones I could offer and (b) should not be expected to remember how deep in the tech tree any particular technology mentioned in a dialogue response is. The tech trade GUI could be improved significantly by including a list of all the technologies you have offered in the past, along with their depth, and also include depth in the response buttons. I have no problem trickle feeding the Vanderi technology even if they are buddy-buddy with the Lumae and only ever give me in exchange a half-understood algorithm and a brainwashing implant. I just want to know more about what it is I am teaching them.
Some listboxes work normally. Some work normally when you drag the scrollbar to the top but go into a seizure when you drag the scrollbar to the bottom. Some strobe like mad when a mouse scrollwheel (if present) is used when the widget is already at the very top or very bottom. I don't know what is causing this but it looks very strange.
The event log in the bottom left corner records what has happened recently. Its contents are ordered normally (chronologically). This is excellent.
The Mission Log accessed by pressing "Q" is backwards. Instead of appending new content to the bottom so that the narrative is read from top to bottom like every book in standard English, each individual entry is written top to bottom but the entries themselves are ordered bottom to top. Therefore to read events in chronological order one needs to scroll down through a specific entry while reading it, then scroll up past the start of that entry to the start of the subsequent one, then scroll down through that entry while reading it, then scroll up past the start to the start of the following one. This is really confusing and unwieldy to track.
The Load Game screen lists saved games in backwards order too. It would make more sense to list them in chronological order and scroll the view to the bottom when the screen appears.
The Load Game screen lists the in-game datestamp of every save entry twice (albeit once with a hyphen and once with a fullstop). I don't immediately recognise any benefit from doing this.
Exposition via exploration unfolds nicely.
However the end-game has me totally confused:
Quite apart from all that, Commander Price hopes the authority I have over the Sentinels can be used to turn them into pizza delivery couriers "to give us lift". Where I come from, lift is a brand of lemonade. I very much doubt that Price wants droids to deliver lemonade but even conceding that that isn't the intended message, I am at a complete loss as to what it is Price is trying to say here. Is this "lift" an adaptation of the "Rising thermals!" greeting we've heard so often? Does she want to go out drinking and have the drones drive her home safely afterwards? It makes absolutely no sense and just adds to the overall confusion. Behind this dialogue box, Commander Price and the player and the allied aliens are busy battling the followers of the banished demigod so the story clearly isn't over yet.
When one finishes the main storyline in the Escape Velocity games or Endless Skies, the player can continue to explore and build ships and trade and amass wealth and demand tribute from planets, etc. etc. etc. but by Starcom Nexus removing all the systems and transforming Kite Station into a ship you can't dock with, this locks you out of playing the game further. If there were still plot threads you wanted to pursue (is there anywhere a cure for the "Strange Jungle" red fungal spore infection that has kept your crew at zero for the past months?) you can't at this point explore those story arcs and find closure. You're just stuck at the end of time with no crew and nothing but a planet with a signpost telling you the end.
Up until the epilogue, the game was rocketing along nice and smoothly. But the epilogue has me really scratching my head.
I suggest inserting a frame of text immediately after the Eos IV dimensional ripper which tells the player, "Due to your incurable red fungal spore infection, you have gone mad. Autopilot returns you to Kite Station while you foam at the mouth, clutching a sweaty sock that once belonged to a member of the now deceased landing party, reciting classical poetry through a blocked nose while staring intently at the dust gathering on the spotless wall. Dr Pilman shoots you up with a veritable cocktail of potent barbiturates. As your glial cells curl up at the edges and your neural pathways pack their bags for the afterlife, you dream of undocking once more in an experience bound to make no sense..."
That would segue nicely into the epilogue while still giving the player some closure.
Several times, the player has the option to hand over a bulk of rare minerals in order to accomplish an effect. But the GUI does not tell the player how much they have in total, out of which this amount will be taken and therefore how much they will have left afterwards.
I would suggest using the informative Entarq Citadel format (below) for all such dialogue-based exchanges (gambling, paying Araona owls for a licence to fly in their zone, negotiating with shady traders, buying Shielding technology with Adamantine, repairing a Titanium radio telescope dish, buying artefacts from the Entarq Citadel and from Zoar Outpost, etc. etc. etc.). Just use the one format consistently and make sure the format chosen is information-rich.
Certain planets you can loot multiple times.
Other planets appear on the map to be unsurveyed until you approach and then they redraw to show there's nothing left to see.
Something in these planets' attributes is not representing their stored state faithfully or is failing to store state changes properly. My save games show planets apparently unsurveyed with bookmarks near them noting they are bugged and the Ship Log shows other planets visited multiple times when this seems unintended.
When pausing the game (by looking at the Ships Log or in the Escape menu) the last few samples of sound loop constantly until the dialogue is closed. When in vacant space, that's fine, but hearing a cacophony of missiles and plasma explosion soundbytes layered ontop of each other for even two seconds is unbearable. Pausing the game should mute the sound (possibly attenuate it first) even if it continues to play the music.
This reminded me of both the Homeworld soundtrack and Bladerunner. Nicely done.
When a vessel yaws, it inexplicably rolls in the process. This makes no sense; the only reason aeroplanes do this is their wings generate lift in air that can contribute centripetal force — but in space, that's not the case. Boats on water of course tilt the opposite way due to their keels — but in space, that's not a factor either.
Maybe this is done to highlight that the elements of the game world are 3D models rather than 2D sprites, but it does look strange. If yawing resulted in rolling, that would indicate the craft's (retro)thrusters' centre of thrust does not align with the centre of mass which would be a critical design failure rendering the craft extremely difficult to keep under control and keep out of a spin.
If you activate a nexus gate and teleport while missiles are inbound, they teleport with you and continue their advance in the destination system. Is this intentional?
I didn't encounter a follow-up to this transmission omen. It'd be nice if there is one.
After I authenticated with the Sentinels and told them to stand down, and authenticated with the Hermit and found a lot of heretic cruisers abandoned in space, I went back to see the Wrae to let them know that the Sentinels no longer posed a threat to them and they should consider themselves vindicated. The game didn't seem to support me doing so. It'd be nice if this were possible.
It looked to me like the Wrae wrecks often left behind green glowing seed-pods which meshed nicely with the discovery of deep space swarm probes getting hit by or taken over by lumps of space mould. My working theory was that Wrae are fungal in nature and their spores often collide with swarm probes and infiltrate the chassis where they then go on a tour of the galaxy, inevitably winding up back at the nebula much later as a seasoned adolescent who has been around the galaxy, can report back to the community what's going on outside the nebula, and thereafter recruits minerals etc. to augment the swarm probe chassis until it has its very own Wrae cruiser.
Some swarm probes report colliding with "space seeds" rather than mould. I think these seeds most likely seem to be from Ygdiras.
I likewise had hoped to return to the Biungulates and reassure them they no longer needed to live in fear of alien abduction and can go ahead and rebuild their city now. But that wasn't really an option since the planet survey was complete.
On one planet you discover "exotic" fish but no opportunity is presented to investigate where those fish had once been native and why they were artificially introduced to this planet. It'd be nice if this were possible.
Working my way clockwise down the Eastern spiral arm I encountered a monitoring station and found that raiding it destroyed the data I were hoping to salvage from it. So I reloaded. After authenticating with the Sentinels and Hermit and exploring a lot more, a Ulooquo story reminded me to investigate the Sentinel storm world. I waited until the storm subsided and turned the antenna on and waited until the storm raged to power it. I enabled two relay stations that conveyed the signal into the nearby wormhole. I went through the wormhole to the monitoring station and checked what it would give me with all my ducks in a row. But it gave me the same text as when I had accessed it with Storm station unsurveyed and relay stations untouched. It'd be nice if this side-mission could be embellished.
I never did identify Canopus II. Blue star. Four planets (yellow, orange, magenta, cyan). Despite that, I hope there is something interesting prepared for those who do manage to track down Project Aviary.
Kite Station has 3 Talking Heads identical to Space Pirates And Zombies:
The token female is sorely underutilised. She only has three things to say to the player in the entire game:
Load my saved games and check the log (by pressing "Q") or go and talk with her yourself.
The laid-back male is even more underutilised. He only says:
The player's ship effortlessly glides past stellar bodies with massive gravity wells (planets, stars, a pulsar, and a Dyson sphere causing tremendous spacetime distortion) yet it collides with and takes damage from asteroids, stations and other ships. This boggles the mind and takes a lot of getting used to. If my ship's pilot can manage to steer the craft safely over a planet, I would think passing over a mere station on the Z axis is trivially easy.
The player's ship effortlessly glides past some interactive elements of the environment (such as nexus gates and wormhole gates) yet it collides with and takes damage from others (relay station, drifting artefacts and wrecks, etc.) This inconsistency is very confusing. If my ship's pilot can manage to steer the craft safely over a wormhole (which has a noticeable gravity well), I would think passing over a mere relay station on the Z axis is trivially easy.
Collisions also don't make sense. Comets (in contrast with what you'd expect based on stars and planets) do collide with the player's ship. You would expect if this happens there should be absolutely nothing left of the ship. However, they don't seem to do any damage. Collisions with NPCs occasionally strip half the hull health from the player's ship but more often they demolish the NPC's craft without doing any damage to the player's craft.
It takes a lot of play time to begin to build up an expectation of what the game is going to punish you for approaching versus what it isn't. This also introduces a frustrating number of QuickLoads when allied aliens turn hostile and open fire on your ship just because you've been going to survey an enormous planet and their tiny ship has rushed into your path and taken damage.
My first ship death and reload was when, having surveyed the planets around Kite Station, I was coming in to land, rotating 180° to begin the deceleration burn, and exploding on the rim of Kite Station. Welcoming the fresh player to the game by killing them on a trap they cannot see starts everything off on the wrong foot.
I don't remember any of the Escape Velocity games or Endless Skies exhibiting such a brain-bender.
An upshot of this mechanic is that the player can drag Neutral allies over a star where they blow up, without ever firing a single shot at them:
I would recommend making collision into a toggle. Realigning mass drivers needs collision and perhaps capturing a swarm probe might. For most of the game though, collision is inconsistent, unpredictable and inconvenient. It's probably clearer for everyone if the game begins with collision off by default but a tooltip explains to the player that if they do want to intentionally ram Kite Station for whatever reason, just turn Caps Lock on and they will collide with everything.
Discovery: Alien Drillbit gave me a good chuckle.
The planet of the Wild Geese from Escape Velocity made me really start enjoying the game.
The giant nematodes planet was very well presented.
The ancient sunken city of unsettling geometry was very nicely done.
The fishing trip to access the triple pillars was dry and wry.
The sandy planet shipwreck in which "the less well-off alien had nothing besides a few empty metal bottles" highlights how bottles of water are situationally far more valuable than gold in a desert.
The hovercraft-of-eels output of the Shady Traders was nice the first time, but there are so many of them it quickly got dull. Perhaps have their output being dynamically generated from a word bank each time the player interacts with such a planet.
Colliding at 1200 AU/sec into a trade-spamming Vanderi alien who only had time to say "We'd be delighted to trade technology!" (with no response options) while their craft is entirely obliterated behind the dialogue window made me laugh aloud. I am not really sure why their craft was demolished while mine was fine, but it was morbidly satisfying. If the energy shield protects from collision damage, I would expect it to rebound asteroids, ships, etc. at its perimeter rather than permitting them through to contact the hull; if the energy shield does not mitigate collision damage, I am at a loss to explain the asymmetrical damage sustained. The whole encounter with the binary adder and particle accelerator mass driver in the East was good.
One of the testers chose the handle "mistakes_were_made":
This seems unhelpfully passive-aggressive. Of course in any human endeavour, mistakes invariably are made, but it's what's done about them that's the important thing. If they are detected, reported, verified, recognised, corrected, republished, and re-tested then the project is better off as a result. Focussing purely on the negative fact that mistakes are inevitable is a poor attitude to start from.
