Allow varying solutions for mission completion
Hi, been grinding through the intro a few times as part of testing some issues and I've noticed a couple things about the core way mission steps seem to be setup.
At a high level, the missions seem to be setup with a very linear set of steps to complete them. Many of those require 'go here' waypoints as the story handholds you through getting to orbit. In many cases, you can't move to the next step until you finish the previous one in the specific manner specified.
Example: You're presented with a step to fix the atmospheric ship. The next step is to ;locate ores; which wants you to go inside the cave, use the jetback, crouch, etc.
In my case, I found the ship, then went an salvaged parts off the drop pod, which let me fix the ship entirely, except for 3 glass. Rather than go into the spooky cave, I just went down to the nearby beach, used the new silicon-rich sand there and got enough silicon to finish the window. Ship fixed! It still wants me to go into the spooky cave and look for ores and crouch and do all that. I don't wanna. It's spooky.
The side effect of my phasmophobia is that the rest of the intro won't progress. In fact, while the hydrogen base is findable, I can't seem to locate everything after that, so the crashed ship isn't there, I can't find the hydrogen ship or anything. Those bases aren't in the game until you finish the previous steps. Not sure any part of the storyline will proceed or accept any other solution than the way the intro demands it.
I would suggest that you break the mission system up into 'primary objective' and then optional (walkthrough) method to complete it. In this case, the 'primary objective' is 'fix the atmos ship'. The quest shouldn't care int he slightest how you do that, raiding local unidentified signals for parts, stripping your escape pod or doing a hula dance while asking Clang to repair the ship for you. In that context, the primary objective should generally avoid 'go here' types of objectives, unless that destination is absolutely essential to the next step, such as 'go to vallation station' to unlock the mission console. Even that, I could argue is not needed as a 'required mission goal'. I think the message pointing out that that station is a place to go for more info, potential missions and spare parts should be enough for people to want to go there without making it a mandatory step to continue. What if I want to leave orbit and fly to Kemik and do missions there because I love 5 hours of space travel while I read a book. Game should let you do just that or it's not a sandbox.
This is true for most of the missions also, you generally provide one acceptable solution to many of the steps. Heck, the 'get this junk ship out of our shipyard' mission, my solution was 'okay I'll take the wreck home with me, shipyard cleared'. No, and the damn ship despawned anyway when I did grind those parts they wanted ground down.
I promise you, we're going to do very dumb things to try and solve your missions, please let us be as dumb as we want and engineer the <bleep> out of this sandbox.
I like this feedback
Did verify by strapping a rocket to the grasshopper that when it got into orbit and into Vallation station's sphere of influence, it did properly dump all the planetary missions and jump to the orbital one, as I suspected. Still feels weird, since the dialog just picks up in the middle like I'd done all the intervening steps and had all the arguments with my brother before abandoning them to go explore.
Did verify by strapping a rocket to the grasshopper that when it got into orbit and into Vallation station's sphere of influence, it did properly dump all the planetary missions and jump to the orbital one, as I suspected. Still feels weird, since the dialog just picks up in the middle like I'd done all the intervening steps and had all the arguments with my brother before abandoning them to go explore.
To the defense of Keen, the intro is a tutorial meant to show different aspects of the game.
If one does your steps instead, I give you that it should probably progress nonetheless, as you have "mined"/used the tool that you would have in the cave.
The crouch movement I never used again, or very little, but as it's the "down" movement while flying, one will eventually do it while on the ground and learn it's also crouching.
The jet pack needs to be activated, so it can be tricky for some people I presume. However, the game can easily monitor if you ever have used the jet pack... So yeah not sure how the progression mechanic works, but when the end goal is reached (fixing the ship) the progression should probably go on.
It's not a simple task to think ahead of the myriad of possibilities in these scenarios. As a functional analyst, I need to do such things for systems with much less probabilities and it still takes time. Sometime decisions have to be made in order to move on.
It would be nice to be more "open" in this regard tho.. If possible.
To the defense of Keen, the intro is a tutorial meant to show different aspects of the game.
If one does your steps instead, I give you that it should probably progress nonetheless, as you have "mined"/used the tool that you would have in the cave.
The crouch movement I never used again, or very little, but as it's the "down" movement while flying, one will eventually do it while on the ground and learn it's also crouching.
The jet pack needs to be activated, so it can be tricky for some people I presume. However, the game can easily monitor if you ever have used the jet pack... So yeah not sure how the progression mechanic works, but when the end goal is reached (fixing the ship) the progression should probably go on.
It's not a simple task to think ahead of the myriad of possibilities in these scenarios. As a functional analyst, I need to do such things for systems with much less probabilities and it still takes time. Sometime decisions have to be made in order to move on.
It would be nice to be more "open" in this regard tho.. If possible.
The point is mainly that the missions should be less specific location based and more accomplishment based. Any steps that do guide to a location should be instead optional so that they don't block further quest progression if someone does 'step' in a different way than specified. With mostly optional objectives in these missions, you can still be guided to the next suggested step, but the mission goal should always be something tangible and done in any number of ways. So the mission goal could be 'fix the atmos ship', with a bunch of optional steps (suggestions to new players) how to finish them, but if I choose to do it in a different way it should also count and the optional steps should fall aside since the ship is fixed.
It's a basic concept of mission structure I'm pointing out, where the missions by simple design changes on the backend could allow much greater flexibility and creativity in the solution space. Reward creative solutions, vs. here is a structured set of steps, do these in order for desired result. One provides more of a sense of accomplishment that really pulls you into a game, the other gets extremely boring quickly (since this behavior somewhat continues outside of the tutorial) as it's just the game telling me what to do next. At that point, take the player out of the loop and just make it a sims engineer game where we can just sit back and watch our little space buddy go step by step through colonizing almagest in exactly the way keen wants you to do it </sarcasm>
This also provides the potential for a game setting that would basically be 'turn off the optional guided waypoints in missions', which then dumps all the optional guided waypoints in a mission. You get stuck, turn them back on. So a mission to go fix a space base nearby, you get a waypoint where that base is, but the rest you need to go figure out yourself. It doesn't put a waypoint up for every broken or unfinished part on the base so you can't just fly to each waypoint, weld something and then boom you're done.
The point is mainly that the missions should be less specific location based and more accomplishment based. Any steps that do guide to a location should be instead optional so that they don't block further quest progression if someone does 'step' in a different way than specified. With mostly optional objectives in these missions, you can still be guided to the next suggested step, but the mission goal should always be something tangible and done in any number of ways. So the mission goal could be 'fix the atmos ship', with a bunch of optional steps (suggestions to new players) how to finish them, but if I choose to do it in a different way it should also count and the optional steps should fall aside since the ship is fixed.
It's a basic concept of mission structure I'm pointing out, where the missions by simple design changes on the backend could allow much greater flexibility and creativity in the solution space. Reward creative solutions, vs. here is a structured set of steps, do these in order for desired result. One provides more of a sense of accomplishment that really pulls you into a game, the other gets extremely boring quickly (since this behavior somewhat continues outside of the tutorial) as it's just the game telling me what to do next. At that point, take the player out of the loop and just make it a sims engineer game where we can just sit back and watch our little space buddy go step by step through colonizing almagest in exactly the way keen wants you to do it </sarcasm>
This also provides the potential for a game setting that would basically be 'turn off the optional guided waypoints in missions', which then dumps all the optional guided waypoints in a mission. You get stuck, turn them back on. So a mission to go fix a space base nearby, you get a waypoint where that base is, but the rest you need to go figure out yourself. It doesn't put a waypoint up for every broken or unfinished part on the base so you can't just fly to each waypoint, weld something and then boom you're done.
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