Game is not balanced yet, it still has many placeholder models, foot combat suffers against aimbot AI with lack of animations and lack of cover mechanic, no stealth, etc. Making scenarios now is risky, it may require a main rework after a main update. Even building too "tightly" around actual rules is risky, if the past of the game can be any indication of its future. We should have learned the lesson by now. There can hardly be "one way to go" against any POI in this type of game, unless making senseless restrictions against player's freedom. In an open world, sandbox context...
How about, instead of death, fail could be called "incapacitation." This would make a good rationale for some of the suggestions I see above. Don't have respawns (except through technology elsewhere), but make the "recovery" at very near the same spot. Death actually cheapens survival games. If I suffer too many deaths in a game, I lose interest. Actual death should be very rare.
If you get in the habit of scouting blocks with the multi-tool, trap doors have much lower hp than the surrounding blocks and can be shotgunned or otherwise destroyed with regular weapons. Also, you can use the jetpack and/or sprint jumps to avoid those areas.
My tactics for clearing POIs is: kill NPCs on a certain level, then use my drone equipped with the multi-tool to scout the room before I go walking across the floor. The multi tool will reveal each block type you are likely to walk on and will reveal the trap doors. It can be a slow process but it is effective. In no way do I endorse the trap doors used in some of the POIs. I find them pretty demoralising to be honest hence my cautious approach.
I detest the death trap mechanics. Aimbotting enemies I can deal with, but bullshit floor traps dropping you into crowds of bots, Zirax, and beasties supported by plasma cannons with coverage over 90% of the room is why if I can't blow a hole in the side of the POI, I completely ignore it. I do not negotiate with terrorists and I do not play a zone that's rigged for me to lose over and over and over. I'll explore an unfamiliar place and fight poorly designed enemies and blind corners but the first death drop trap I encounter I return to my vehicle and I finish the job with rockets or artillery.
I think trap doors are fine, if they aren't instant death and there's a way to get out of the hole and back to where you came from. Dropping you down into a couple of spiders or a sentry turret, fine. You can kill them quickly enough unless you were already low on health (in which case that's your fault). Dropping you down into a main base turret, probably not fine. There's not much you can do then.
It's all about skill challenges. Any given encounter is there for player to apply their game skills, usually combat and block recognition skills in Empyrion. When it works, the player solves the challenge, has fun, and gets a reward. If the challenge doesn't have a discernible solution, the encounter has failed, and the player becomes frustrated. The solution for an encounter might not be discernible for a lot of reasons. Usually the player is just not properly prepared, which is a known and expected eventuality in a free form game. Sometimes solving the challenge might call for obscure or esoteric knowledge most people would have to go Googling for. The player might be too distracted by ongoing combat to think about solving other problems (an nasty issue with puzzles to stop respawning enemies). In some circumstances, players have picked up habits from some POIs that prove detrimental to solving challenges in others, like never ever trusting switches because they seem to always trigger traps. This isn't small potatoes stuff. Level design is one of the big pillars of game development. You don't get Portal puzzles, World of Warcraft raid bosses, Zelda dungeons, or Mario levels without inspired masters of the craft shaping them. It's not really fair to expect the same level of fidelity from amateur POI builders. I expect the most egregious problems to be addressed by an adult in the room, and generally, this is what happens.
And in Empyrion level design is especially difficult. Unlike a standard shooter, the base is destructible and can be changed on the fly by the player. You can't take into account every possible way a player could approach any given POI when you're designing them (unless you use an admin core and even then not always). Also since Empyrion isn't a straight shooter, a lot of people play this game who aren't necessarily the best at shooters, and the expectations are different. Applying proper level design techniques into POIs is important but it's also harder to do. Player knowledge and skill are all over the place and POIs exist in the physical world and can be dismantled or broken into instead of being stand alone, self contained, non-destructible maps like in other shooters.
Empyrion is not a shooter game. Its a survival game. The AI and controls are too basic for a shooter game. Players who play shooter games will be disappointed with the basic lack of controls, like not being able to crouch behind structures. If you wanted to compare Empyrion with another game then I'd have to say its more like 7 days To Die. You shoot the enemy, build, loot POI's, build vehicles & fight off enemy attacks. As I've said in the past, the good thing about 7 Days To Die POI's is that you can take them on whichever way you like. You are not forced down the 'corridor shooter' route like some of the POI's in Empyrion. This gives you more options and therefore better game play. What would be good, and has also been mentioned in the past, is for Empyrion POI's to be smaller and have more of them. All without Admin Cores.
I dunno what to tell you. Adding the "Shooter" tag or not doesn't change the fact that there's a lot of on-foot small arms combat in Empyrion. Same goes for calling it a flight sim or block builder. I think the best practice is to just roleplay within the rules. Let's say you're a Zirax commander-in-chief of a drone base. You've got a whole planet to surveil and keep pacified. You've got some drone squadrons and cloned troops you can send out for trouble shooting, but by and large your assets are busy with other tasks. You were managing to keep the local Talon and Polaris in line when these Terrans showed up to throw an intergalactic kegger. They're pulling ships out of thin air, striking outposts and outlying depots, undermining fortified positions, and stealing the resources you're charged with defending. How do you respond? You're already doing everything you can for the most part. Drones are covering as many mineral deposits as you have numbers for. You're sending raiding parties against Terran bases to keep the pressure on. You've got patrols all around your own installations to deter incursions. You've got rapid response teams ready to deploy against Terran attacks. What could you be doing differently? Well, undermining is a problem. You might need to start work on a new drone headquarters built above ground on large structural pylons to minimize blind spots in your defenses. Since the Terrans are so keen on eliminating your heavy turrets, it might be more efficient and effective to construct watchtowers instead and assign rocket and sniper troops to man them. If you can trade for a few of Polaris' combat androids through unofficial channels, they would be reliable defense in your most vital secure areas. Assigning drone support to your response teams would make them more effective. You doubt you could convince High Command to send the local OPV down to handle the Terrans once and for all, but maybe you can get some small vessels to fly planetary patrols. You could also have your engineers investigate the possibility of operating small vessels on drone control software. The above ideas aren't brilliant. They're not as effective at challenging players as spawning human troopers at the bottom of an alien ruin, or putting an admin core and endlessly respawning soldiers in an otherwise civilian-looking space station, but they are far more diegetic. They follow the rules of the Empyrion universe, not just the rules of the Empyrion game.
Call for backup. The Zirax lore wise have a homeworld and an emperor, just Eleon hasn't had the time to code them in yet. The Zirax Emperor could send bounty fleets if you kill enough of their troops. They would always spawn in at the Zirax home system when created, but track down the player playfield to playfield. These ships would have the strength of OPVs but also capable of entering a planet's atmosphere. These fleets are capable of spawning many drones and can spawn dropships when in an atmosphere. They destroy any player structures or vessels they come across when trying to hunt you down, and will only stop after they kill you at least once. After killing you they retreat (a.k.a. despawn) and your notoriety decreases. If however you manage to defeat the bounty fleet, your notoriety will increase and the Emperor will send a higher level fleet to kill you. The first fleets will be low level lightly armed fleets of corvettes with the later ones being filled with dreadnoughts and carriers. The max level fleets will have interdictors that prevent you from warping out of a playfield until you either defeat the ship or get killed. Should the Emperor send a bounty fleet your way there would also be ways of avoiding detection. Each fleet is led by a flagship that contains a Zirax admiral/naval officer with a certain skillset depending on the fleet's level. The officer would have skills such as an ability to detect you. You lower your detectability by staying on certain planets (swamp, jungle, plasma, radiation) as these worlds lower your radiation/EM signature by masking it. You can also lower it by staying in bases or vehicles with stealth plating, a new block made to lower your detectability on radar (also has the additional side benefit of lowering OPV detection radii). Raising your detectability involves attacking more Zirax POIs, going into Polaris trade stations (Zirax spies exist among them), buying or selling stuff without using cash (Zirax can doxx you because they have hacked the galactic credit network), or get too close to another player that has friendly or higher rep with the Zirax. If the bounty fleet officer has a detection skill level that is higher than your undetectability rating, then the fleet will know where you are and move from playfield to playfield until they reach you. Fleet admirals would also have an admiralty skill that would determine how intelligent they are. Low levels of admiralty are basically Ziraxians straight out of the academy and pilot nothing more than a corvette as their fleet's flagship. They would be stupid and essentially just beeline straight to kill you. High levels of admiralty would basically be the Zirax version of Thrawn who would pilot a modified dreadnought, cruiser, or carrier as their command ship. They would be intelligent enough to know if they cannot detect you, then they would draw you out by locating bases and vehicles that belong to you or your faction and proceed to destroy them. The final ability fleet admirals can have is the spite ranking. This determines how wrathful the admiral is and how much they want you to suffer for daring to defy the Emperor's will. If it is high enough they simply will not accept killing you before retreating. Instead they will attempt to locate a certain amount of your vehicles/bases to destroy before killing you. In this case they can kill you multiple times as you try to protect your stuff but won't consider any of your deaths a proper kill until they have first destroyed that certain amount of your things they want to destroy. After destroying what they wanted in order to rub salt in your wounds, only then will they kill you one last time and retreat. This makes these particular fleets the absolute worst and will encourage the player to actually defeat them instead of cheesing it by sacrificing themselves to protect their stuff. The only way to stop the bounty fleets is to either allow your notoriety to decrease by getting killed by enough of them, or make peace with the Zirax Empire (Yeah Right!). To eliminate them for good you will have to keep defeating fleets or POIs until you have maximum notoriety. Then you will have to defeat twenty max level fleets in order to exhaust the Ziraxian Empire into a cooldown effect. When this happens the Emperor will be unable to send bounty fleets for one week's worth of real time since you have basically eliminated the majority of their navy and they have to spend the rest of the week rebuilding the fleet. It is during this window of opportunity that you will be able to travel straight to the Zirax homeworld "Zirax Prime" and kill the Emperor. You will be unable to do this at any other time since the empire will easily be able to choose a successor to the Emperor and he'll just respawn. However because you have defeated the Empire's navy the Ziraxians are now politically unstable during the rebuilding process and moral towards fighting you is at an all time low, so it is now possible to actually kill him without a legitimate successor to the throne. Once you make it to Zirax Prime you will have to storm the Imperial Palace kill everything and the Emperor himself in the final room. However it is not completely over, you'll have to get the Empire itself to surrender to you. To do this you'll have to attack and destroy multiple military POIs across Zirax Prime, completely annihilating the cityscape below through bombardment or actual ground assault. After these POIs have been cored and the capital city devastated enough, the Empire will be too demoralized to fight you any longer. And without an Emperor to rally behind, you will receive a message that proclaims that the Zirax High Command surrenders and will be given two options. Either accept the surrender and you will be proclaimed the new Emperor and your faction will be merged into/replace the Zirax faction. All Zirax POIs, OPVs, PPVs, ground troops, and drones across the galaxy will flip to becoming part of your faction. You will now be able to go into any Zirax POI and open all the loot containers anywhere without any repercussions and can either dismantle everything for scrap or convert them to usable HQs for your faction. Or you can never accept the surrender by which you will always remain an enemy of the Zirax forever and raze them into extinction wherever they are. They will be unable to build bounty fleets anymore and you can now endlessly attack and farm their respawning drones, troops, and vessels for loot without ever having to worry about being tracked down again.
I am pleased to report that I have never been caught in a death loop. Mods for life! My solution is combat steel like flesh with 5000 hitpoints and 0 seconds for the backpack in case I get tempted to go get it when I do still die.
If we break the problem into pieces we get: 1. "Death Loop" continues because the enemies stay there until killed 2. Corpse backpack is both a temptation and a frustration as it contains all your good stuff and there's a despawn timer. The enemies stay there because that's what they are programed to do. You stay there because you want/need to. --> Loop happens. My suggestions to break the above causes and fix the issue: 1. Just have the enemy *leave* at some point. For example, you could add an obvious and logical *in-game* reason for this: Assign the NPC characters, drones, and ships an actual ammo inventory. Instead of an infinite amount they are restricted in their capacity just like the player is. When their ammo starts getting low they want to retreat. Makes sense within the game universe. If the enemy is of a type that has a physical attack instead of a weapon then just have it lose interest and wander off after a while. An animal might want to eat the player's corpse after killing him but why would it stay there after that? Same with monsters: "target killed, back to doing what I was doing before this". 2. You loot the killed enemies. Why not have the enemies do the same? If it was a supposedly intelligent opponent (drones, robots, soldiers, etc.) then your stuff is added to their inventory. If you kill them you get it back in the loot drop. If they despawn before that then your stuff is added to the inventory of some random cargo box of their assigned "home" POI and made permanent (well, in multiplayer I guess "until POI regenerated"). Conquer the POI if you want your stuff back. However, this solves the despawn timer frustration *and* nicely gives you an incentive to go after the POI, and it makes sense inside the game universe, too. If the opponent is not intelligent then just allow the player to "wait out" the animals/monsters until they leave and pick his stuff. Optionally, some of the animals/monsters stealing your stuff might make sense, too. For example, spiders have nests so they might be assumed to carry your corpse along with your stuff into their home. Basically it's the classic DM method of improvisation: "if you encounter a system problem in the adventure, don't just fix it but turn it into a plot twist that makes logical sense in whatever context the problem happened, thus hooking the party into exploring further".
Death loops are caused by entering a situation that turns out to be more fatal then first assumed and losing all your abilities. They interrupt exploration and normal gameplay. They punishing players without purpose. Whether you finagle your abilities back through the loop or leave and craft new ones, the net effect is the same; you have to stop playing the normal game and do busy work before you're allowed to play again. Contrast this with Dark Souls, which respawns you with all your abilities and penalizes your progression instead. In that game, you are encouraged to immediately get back on that horse and try again. The Respawn with Toolbar Items option solves this problem pretty well. You can put your important tools and supplies on the toolbar, and keep loot in your backpack. Steps that make it easier to recover one's corpse box are simply a half measure. I'm still bothered by how effective death is at solving survival challenges. These days, though, I tend to think more carrot and less stick is the right answer. I understand players can now have "skills" that effect their equipment's performance. Perhaps something like a rolling buff that makes your weapons and tools more effective the longer you've been alive (up to a cap) would be sufficient incentive for people to avoid dying. An inverse health condition, if you will.
I believe subnautica utilizes a method where when you leave base, it notes what equipment you have. When you die, anything that you gathered while out is lost(maybe dropped? It's been a while) but anything you had when you left you get to keep. This prevents the loop of "I died. I lost my stuff. I can't get to my stuff, because I don't have my abilities anymore, so I keep dying trying to get it."
Yes, in Subnautica you only lose items you collected in your current trip. It resets when entering/leaving a "safe area" which usually means your base. That's actually a very simple and highly effective way of solving the problem. Well, you might argue it's maybe a bit *too*lenient but you have to admit it works and solves the problem. Personally, I'm fine with losing my stuff for dying. In the end the "loop" is a voluntary choice. You always have the option to simply leave and rebuild your lost equipment. However, if Empyrion added a Subnautica-like "lose only recently gathered stuff" penalty for death, that would be fine as long as it's a difficulty option similar to the other choices that are currently available there. This solution would probably be the easiest and least amount of work for the devs so might even be plausible to get it.
This is possible finally? If Empyrion devs were to add option where whole inventory remains on you on death i'd toggle that on immediately! Most people despise playing Terraria on medium- or hardcore too.
