In this post i want to give some constructive feedback to Empyrion team, this is in no way intended to be criticism, recent updates really did make the game much better and it shows, for one the gunplay is much smoother, even with my frankly abysmal lag, i actually find it useful to carry a pistol now, where it was once just a weapon that was kinda there but nobody bothered with it, now it is actually a decent long range weapon to snipe people with. I also wholeheartedly approve of introducing new ores, and i hope this trend would continue, one may think making the crafting system more complex would be bad but in a game as expansive as Empyrion giving a player more reason to explore is always a good thing, though loot tables seem to require some more work. But there are still some major issues with the questlines. Now i understand a lot of this is due to the shoestring budget, but i still think i would bring it up. For starters there are some blatant grammatical errors, on at least one place completely wrong(but similar sounding) word is used, i am not sure where the bulk of Eleon devs come from but it looks very much like the story was somewhat clumsily translated from a foreign language, i would strongly suggest, even if you can't afford a professional, to at least have the text examined by a native speaker(which i am not, but even i can catch this discrepancy, and a native speaker would probably catch a lot more. Apart from grammatical errors the text itself could use some work, at many places unnecessary things are spelled out, it is quite obviously work of amateur writer. Again, i understand professional writers are expensive, but i would advise whoever is writing the story to have a look at some online resources on how to improve their writing, there are some really simple tricks that can help make the it much better. Again, i know it's tough, i tried my hand at it a few times myself, but one thing i didn't have that Eleon does is wealth of readers to evaluate and provide feedback. All that said the story is a lot better then when i first went trough it, it's just that there is plenty of room for improvement still. Last point, i fully understand the reasoning but having all the NPCs only communicate via text kinda takes you out of the story. I know voice actors are incredibly expensive and Eleon probably can't afford them, but there is a neat trick that could be used here, seeing as how majority of the characters happen to be aliens, a few lines of "alienish" speech could be recorded for each faction and then looped, with subtitles explaining what the character is saying. This method was used in KOTOR and KOTOR 2, now you will eventually hear it all, but if the language is unintelligible enough(like Selkath from KOTOR 1) it's less noticeable, and in any case it's better then silence. Again, i understand that a lot of this choices are almost certainly due to constraints the devs work under, this is just my attempt to provide some constructive feedback on the issues i noticed and hopefully some useful suggestions on how they may be solved.
If they really wanted, then given that they are aliens, one could get away with some kind of machine sounding text to speech code library with the simple explanation being that it is a universal translator you are hearing and not the alien. Even wit humans, this would make sense if they spoke a different language.
To the language: The Text was originally written by not native English speaking Devs. Afterwards a renowned Streamer and YouTuber offered a rework of the same Text. He IS a Native English. So, I suggest to address @Hummel-o-War with the Text Passages that you think are wrong. About Aliens only "talking" in text: Its your IDA that shows you the Translation of what the Alien says. You remember R2 sitting in his Socket behind Luke in his X-Wing? He sent all his messages in TEXT on a tiny Screen.
Seems like most of the grammatical errors were fixed in the latest versions, still, i think there are parts of the text that could use some work, for example, in one of the Titan logs there is a sentence that goes something like this: "Where is commander (player name)?" "He is arriving here via a shuttle" So what's wrong with this you may ask? Well the whole "via a shuttle" is completely redundant, even as exposition. At this point the player already knows they were on a shuttle before they were pulled into Andromeda, and UHC personnel would presumably also know that they tend to use shuttles to move between ships and stations. When was the last time you said that someone was "arriving via a car"? This part could have easily been replaced with something like "he's in transit" without loosing any context. This is a common mistake first time writers make, thinking they have to spell out everything. If you really wanted to specify that the player character is taking a shuttle(as opposed to being teleported, which in and of itself seems redundant, since you can reasonably assume teleportation was just not an option for some reason, you can just say "He's taking a shuttle" or "He's on a shuttle", again, no need to spell out where the shuttle is going, since you already know, from the same text, that your character was part of that ship's crew and that all the crew is returning to the ship. There are more examples of this especially in those logs, a lot of instances of some character breaking the flow of conversation to give out information that seems redundant or irrelevant for understanding the context, off the top of my head the part where one crewmember says there are fighters stuck on the outside of the hull(why specify they are stuck on the outside of the hull, we all know SVs in Empyrion can do it, but the bigger issue is it was not worked into a conversation, it seems like the character is breaking the 4th wall to explain to the player that the fighters are stuck to the hull) and that part where the same character says there are 2 battalion of marines on the ship(again, it was not worked into a conversation, but rather it feels like the character is telling you there are 2 battalions of marines, which is in and of itself completely irrelevant to the story, but would not be so jarring if it didn't feel tacked on to add context). As for your second point, i get that, but even R2 gives audio feedback with his bleeps and bloops, even if it's unintelligible(as alien language presumably would be) you can add a lot of context by just manipulating the pitch and speed of the audio feedback. For example a panicked character could talk loud and fast, while a someone troubled could talk slowly and deliberately. Since Empyrion NPCs are static, with no visual feedback, having that extra bit of context is even more important.
Maybe the Devs do something about additional Sounds in the future in Beta... You may place your Ideas in the Suggestion Area too. One thing is sure - ELEON has no Ben Burtt
