Story rendered useless...

Discussion in 'FAQ & Feedback' started by WhiteFire, Jun 4, 2020.

  1. WhiteFire

    WhiteFire Ensign

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    And not because of the content, but because of the presentation. It is presented in extremely long chunks of slow dialog, and triggered in such a way you either have to view it RIGHT THEN, or never. You can't move. You can't defend yourself. And you can't abort it and go back to it. Once stopped, it's gone. At least as far as I can tell.

    Today I started fresh to see what was done with the story missions, got into the long drawn out description of your escape from the station.... and got attacked by a bug. No idea how that story ended. Nothing in this so-called log. Zilch.

    As someone who likes story and lore this is insanely frustrating. Enough I got off my ass and created a forum account just to post this.
     
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  2. Khazul

    Khazul Rear Admiral

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    Everytime I see those awful dialogs I kind fo get the urge to type something like 'go n', or 'kill dragon' or whatever :)

    TBH, I cant even be bothered to do missions at all in their current presentation (which I think is awful). Its a shame, I'm sure someone put a lot of good effort into them both in the game and in custom scenarios.

    They really needs to have a look round some decent mission/task driven games and get some ideas for how to manage this. I noticed they tried to polish it slightly, but you cant polish a turd.
     
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  3. ravien_ff

    ravien_ff Rear Admiral

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    It's not the dialog system itself. The dialog system is AMAZING and a ton of things are being done with it on custom scenarios. But it's not good to have long dialog in places where players are in danger, or needed dialog that can't be accessed again. Those are issues with the way that particular mission is set up.
     
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  4. Khazul

    Khazul Rear Admiral

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    I am not talking about what is under the hood. I can see they have done some great work there. It is the whole user experience around missions that I think is awful.
     
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  5. ravien_ff

    ravien_ff Rear Admiral

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    Around these missions maybe.
    There's no reason why you can't have short, simple, repeatable dialog in a safe place, with optional lengthy story segments, and the ability to go back and forth and open and close it at will by speaking with the NPC again.

    Like I said, the dialog system is very powerful, it's up to the individual scenario author or server admin (or game devs) how they make use of it.
    The mission system is amazing now. Could still use some additions of course later on.
     
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  6. Khazul

    Khazul Rear Admiral

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    I think you are misunderstanding me. I mean it LOOKS awful and the interaction model is awful.

    If you are saying that it is up to mission authors to make something useable because the underlying system doesn't provide support for this, then I take back what I said about under the hood - that needs reworking too otherwise there will be no consistency, or there will be a massive burden on mission authors just to not have hideous interaction.

    I appreciate that what you have access to have improved hugely (though the ONE thing I wanted to use it for - I cant see a way to do - unlocking technologies as a reward).

    I don't know what you are used to, but this is almost like something from the 70s, early 80s.
    But then we are talking about people who cant even get a simple text editor to work, so perhaps user experience is not in their vocabulary.
     
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  7. ravien_ff

    ravien_ff Rear Admiral

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    It seems fairly standard for most any RPG game I've seen.

    Do you not like it because it takes up the whole screen instead of a portion of it?
    I'm just not understanding your criticism of it beyond "it looks awful". Going to need more than that so they can look into improving it.

    What would you change about it?
     
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  8. Khazul

    Khazul Rear Admiral

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    In which century?
     
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  9. ravien_ff

    ravien_ff Rear Admiral

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    I'm making extensive use of dialog so I'm interested in any ideas to improve it.

    Comments like that aren't helpful to anyone.
     
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  10. Cpt_Beefheart

    Cpt_Beefheart Captain

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    My only idea for improving the dialogue would be that the dialogue exchanges not require user input to advance to the next line. 'Personally' I found it so annoying to be locked into a long exchange of nonsense between myself and the IDA when trying out one of the missions for the Titan pieces. It honestly turned me off from wanting to engage in any other missions moving forward so I could avoid that aspect. Drones circling overhead and I have to spend 5 minutes advancing through dialogue of my IDA having an existential crisis of some sort? No thanks. I couldn't even find a simple way of canceling out completely from a mission, I had to do a checkbox for every single exchange.


    This is my opinion and not meant to offend anyone, but wow, one of the most single frustrating experiences in a game in a long long time.
     
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  11. ravien_ff

    ravien_ff Rear Admiral

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    Most people have said the opposite, that they want a "next" button so they can read the dialog at their own pace.

    You can also fast forward with right click (hot key hint shown on screen).
    And yes the dialog system is fully customizable pretty much so they could change the specific missions.
     
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  12. Cpt_Beefheart

    Cpt_Beefheart Captain

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    Interesting, though 'most' does make me wonder about qualifying what percentage of the player base has tried them. As in, if it is most people out of 5% of the overall. I only tried a mission after 2100 hrs of game-play so I'm admittedly in the perhaps smaller camp that is here for building and shooting things so any story stuff is going to be a hard sell and needs to be quite seamless and painless.
     
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  13. The Salty Snake Chef

    The Salty Snake Chef Captain

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    I just want the story to have at least the UCH as an active alive faction instead of the "ghost" presence that the UCH has as of right now. Unless they changed that of course. Still love your scenario Raven. ❤️
     
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  14. Brimstone

    Brimstone Rear Admiral

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    I think that's going to happen in later chapters as you work your way to finding them. I'm thinking "Sectioner32" is either Mercer or Alex but leaning to Mercer
     
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