Hello Galactic Survivalists!
In the last blog we teased you a little with the story arc that would be concluded later this year. This is still a bigger project, but we can update you on some other stuff in that regard.
Those of you that are with the game for a while might have played through most of the story missions already several times. Some of the major updates changed things here and there, due to the technical possibilities changed as well. We are trying to take advantage of every new addition that helps storytelling. Be it planet design, mission feature or dialogues.
That being said, with 1.5 the content team finally found the time to achieve most of the badly needed rework of the first six story chapters. These once existed individually, were joined together later but were lacking a lot of consistency - not only in the information they give to the player. This has now been improved to a merely pre-final state and will be ready for testing in the upcoming Experimental phase.
Without too many spoilers: the initial missions on the starter planet have been revamped a lot. The following missions have been spread in the starter system and do NOT take place in the same starter orbit anymore. Also: as we hope these are now in good shape in terms of story content, the missions are now following a certain progression of a literal story LINE, although most of them will NOT activate automatically anymore. Instead you will be given enough info on where to find the next story tidbit and how to activate it.
The question if this setup works and if the information is given in an adequate way, is of course to be answered with your feedback we hope to see a lot in the upcoming Experimental phase. ːsteamhappyː
Last, but not least, there is one open topic which is a quite delicate one: the ingame tutorial. For 1.5 we have re-added an improved ‘Robinson Protocol’ for everyone starting out in the galaxy of Empyrion the first time.
As always the tutorial can be skipped at game start for those that do not need it, but for all the others it should offer the most basic training for the most basic things you need to know about the game.
This is, again, a question that we hope to answer with your help in the upcoming Experimental phase. Although those participating in the Experimental are usually not new to the game, we hope you can help us to answer the question of the tutorial steps will help a new player to survive his first hours and be specific enough to give valuable info, but not be too annoying at the same time.
There is one addition to this topic, which might be quite important for those helping out on that topic: When playing the tutorial, most of you might still find it quite linear. It is still very linear, that is true, but the goal for 1.5 is to track down which elements are really necessary for a new player.
As we wrote in the first paragraph: we aim to include any new technique the game code allows us to use. While we develop version 1.6 and 1.7, new technical features will be added that shall allow us to leave most of the linearity behind and improve to a point where the presentation of the necessary lessons will feel more like an “inline explanation” than following a guide. Not only for the tutorial, but also for mission design.
Which of the current game story missions did you like the most? Which do you think needed improvement because they were too hard or confusing? Anything else you wanted to say on this topic?
Let us know - we still have time to evaluate your feedback. ːsteamhappyː
Have a great day! Read you soon.
Empyrion Dev Team