They still feel static and "fake". They seem utterly intert, with no interaction between them. Whenthe UHC station is boarded, you don't see any UCH soldiers fighting. There are no ships guarding it. The Talon and the Zirax have no interaction either. I've never seen them fight. There should be Zirax and Talon fighting (on ground). There should be security and troops actually defending stations. Missions are downright silly when you are expected to defeat entire armies alone, since local turrets don't work and there are NO local troops whatsoever (both the TOP Distillery defense and UHC/GlaD base defense). You should actually be able to run into UHC ships. You still feel utterly alone, with everyone feeling like a cardboard cutout that only responds to you and you alone.
NPCs will fight each other but their AI seems a bit off while doing so and only certain factions fight. Would be great if this was improved and used!
Even with two factions that are set to fight, they frequently don't fight at all. It's probably related to how the mobs frequently just stop moving from time to time as if their AI randomly gets switched off over and over. It feels like nearly everything that was added in 1.5 was only half implemented and nowhere near ready for the stable branch.
On a parallel topic ... all the faction building being done by players and submitted for inclusion, allows for greater variety in the game but does not allow for player-inclusion in those factions. What I mean is that with no faction a player can join or ally to (beyond the friendly/honoured status) they will always be alone other than in multiplayer servers. I guess this is a consequence of being a "survival" game; the genre of which seems to always be that the player is alone or isolated and must survive that lonliness as well as the environmental, wildlife, and hostile elements parts of the game world. it would be great if there were "coalitions" that the player could join and gain meaningful, yet minor, benefits ... just to add to the feeling of having progressed beyond basic subsistence survival. I know there's a little of this in the second set of 5 chapters in story mode - it would be great if that could be a trigger to open it out into the sandbox side of the game too.
Not entirely true. Take for example a great game that doesn't follow that pattern: Planet Explorers You start along and gather more survivors, eventualyl building a base and assign each a role (guards, farmers, miners, etc..) and build a colony Look for example a base I made:
Besides how clunky it looks and how broken the audio and framerates were staggering, I have always liked the features Planet Explorers had in their game. Although I wish they had a better end product and didn't abandon it
