Rover at the Barn - Make it part of the story
The unfinished rover at the Barn was a great idea, and neatly introduces a newcomer to the building and use of rovers. I think you could improve on this idea. Make the rover a useful and intended vehicle for the tutorial/early missions.
Verdure's terrain is a bit problematic for rovers because of its uneven surface and large mountain ranges. The starting area near the Barn is no exception to this. However, we can fix this with the same idea of how to make the rover part of the tutorial/early missions!
- Make the "Energy Generation" and "Conveyor" contract mission locations explicitly placed grids instead of random spawns. Put them quite near the First Station and the Barn, something like 2-3 kilometers away in suitable locations.
- Use voxel tools to create dirt roads leading from the First Station to the rocket launch platform and to the energy station. The roads give the player a good access to those locations, and let him use his rover in a meaningful way within the story. If you want to be fancy, you could even put the mission locations on the mountain ridge and have a serpentine road going up the mountain side.
- When all the facilities are reasonably close to each other, and connected by a visible road network, that creates a feeling that the place is indeed a real settlement, helping to bring the colonization story alive.
--> The player can have fun by finishing the rover build, and then actually using it in the missions in a way that is helpful to him.
This setup also allows you to later add new things to this "First Settlement". For example, when you add water to Verdure, you could add a hydrogen manufacturing facility at the shore of the lake/river that will be on that gorge near the First Station. Add a connecting road to that, too, and you can then have a tutorial/early mission for it, that can be accessed by the rover as well.
I like this feedback
Just noticed that this also means the initial "crash site" mission needs to be modified i.e. where the player character repairs the damaged grasshopper after exiting his drop pod. Instead of a flying vehicle, it needs to be a rover. Many ways to do that, but as an example, could be like this:
- Backstory: A previous engineer was trying to setup a new mining facility in the "crash site" valley, when his rover met an accident.
- Setup: There's a dirt road connecting the valley to the First Station to make it a little easier to drive a rover there. At the crash site there's a small cleared area with a shipping container and perhaps some half-built structure to give an impression that it's what the engineer was doing there. There's also a *very small* and *very basic* scout-type rover there, that is also damaged in some way and missing devices.
- Mission: The player character needs to repair the damaged rover fixing the damaged components and adding the missing ones needed to make the rover functional. To that end he can use stuff from the shipping container and/or from the half-built structure, or mine from the ore deposits. The crash site valley has plenty of ores available so should not be a problem even for a new player, and the valley being rich in ores also makes it fit quite nicely to the story that the engineer was there to setup a mining camp.
- Goal: When the rover is working, the player can drive it to the First Station using the dirt road. That avoids neatly all the "rover problems" that come from Verdure's naturally rough terrain, and thus doesn't frustrate a new player. He also gets a nice scout rover he can use to drive around. Here we need to make the rover purposefully very small and very basic so that the player quickly realizes its deficiencies in off-road driving, and thus gets an incentive to upgrade his vehicle by finishing the half-built rover at the Barn.
Just noticed that this also means the initial "crash site" mission needs to be modified i.e. where the player character repairs the damaged grasshopper after exiting his drop pod. Instead of a flying vehicle, it needs to be a rover. Many ways to do that, but as an example, could be like this:
- Backstory: A previous engineer was trying to setup a new mining facility in the "crash site" valley, when his rover met an accident.
- Setup: There's a dirt road connecting the valley to the First Station to make it a little easier to drive a rover there. At the crash site there's a small cleared area with a shipping container and perhaps some half-built structure to give an impression that it's what the engineer was doing there. There's also a *very small* and *very basic* scout-type rover there, that is also damaged in some way and missing devices.
- Mission: The player character needs to repair the damaged rover fixing the damaged components and adding the missing ones needed to make the rover functional. To that end he can use stuff from the shipping container and/or from the half-built structure, or mine from the ore deposits. The crash site valley has plenty of ores available so should not be a problem even for a new player, and the valley being rich in ores also makes it fit quite nicely to the story that the engineer was there to setup a mining camp.
- Goal: When the rover is working, the player can drive it to the First Station using the dirt road. That avoids neatly all the "rover problems" that come from Verdure's naturally rough terrain, and thus doesn't frustrate a new player. He also gets a nice scout rover he can use to drive around. Here we need to make the rover purposefully very small and very basic so that the player quickly realizes its deficiencies in off-road driving, and thus gets an incentive to upgrade his vehicle by finishing the half-built rover at the Barn.
Solid feedback, I found it really tedious when I got to the barn, built myself a rover and got tasked with going 20km+ to complete a task (Was before the rover was added to the barn). In the end I just built an atmo ship to get there instead and the rover became redundant immediately. Would be great to have some use for the rover, especially now it's been added to the barn. At the start of SE1 i used the rover for days, even had drills on the front and was using it for mining but in SE2 it seems like the player is pushed to reach space as quick as possible.
Solid feedback, I found it really tedious when I got to the barn, built myself a rover and got tasked with going 20km+ to complete a task (Was before the rover was added to the barn). In the end I just built an atmo ship to get there instead and the rover became redundant immediately. Would be great to have some use for the rover, especially now it's been added to the barn. At the start of SE1 i used the rover for days, even had drills on the front and was using it for mining but in SE2 it seems like the player is pushed to reach space as quick as possible.
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