Where are the colonists ?

2

Deon Beauchamp ●

I am asking for lore now, because NPCs and Co-op is on route.

So some new lore would be a good thing.

A busy colony will require communications, and lore should be embedded occasionally in that communication.

Reply URL

1

Al Kerb ●

for the finished game; yes. but i prefer some QOL improvements for alpha/beta first.

Reply URL

1

Deon Beauchamp ●

Do you really think that the questions would take that much effort to address ?

Writing lore in Alpha is as easy as picking up a pen and jotting something down, something that you could change anytime later. It is not hard coding, it is not a commitment set in stone. It could take 1 person and 20 minutes to frame a reasonable response, something that a committee and players could casually squabble over for months afterwards and change later if better answers were rationalised. It is only lore and a bit of fun, and games are meant to be fun.

URL

1

Al Kerb ●

i dint think that the devs and story writers are necessarily the same persons, so i could see some parallel work here. maybe i misunderstood but coming up with a good story arc background/lore/characters - i dont think thats a 20min task! Your questions sound to me like the invention of a game spanning universe/setting. sure, IF it already exists somehow could summarize it and post it here, but i doubt its completely done. How long do you think they wrote on the story for starcraft?

URL

1

Deon Beauchamp ●

Gosh, now where is my shovel.

I need to dig a hole for myself, and pretend I know anything.

Sure, Marek has a story, but these things need to be fleshed out a little, there is nothing wrong with ballpark ideas/numbers. Telling a story and providing fictional details for a game are not the same demands, certainly one inspires the other. I am playing here and now, trying to goad some lore out of the devs for everyone's fun including yours. If there is no response, well hey I tried.

As for Starcraft, if you mean the original game, I would guess the gameplay development came first based on red vs blue and the basic lore was bolted on to produce the initial artwork. Once it looked good enough to go further, I suspect more lore was needed for level design, the game intro, and marketing. Finally, follow up lore would be added with feedback from the early players, but I really know nothing of the Starcraft's development and could be completely wrong, who knows, I have not researched into any of it.

URL

1

Booth ●

1, I agree, MOAR LORE!!!

2, Starcraft was long before games were made with player feedback, and the story would have been flushed out long before they began development considering that it followed the success of the warcraft franchise. All of the mechanics and gameplay elements were there and only needed refining, the story is what made Starcraft different. This is coming from someone that played SC day one in 98 lol Honestly the only reason I'm even commenting is because you don't often get the chance to talk about the OG Starcraft anymore 😅 but +1 to the original post lol

URL

2

Semtex ●

Lore in SE?

Lore SE (1 and 2) is inconsistent and poorly thought out, made up of very poor clichés in the worst tradition of space operettas (not even space operas).

Reply URL

1

Deon Beauchamp ●

@Semtex, do own a pair of those sun glasses that were in the John Carpenter film 'They Live' where the glasses can reveal the truth of everything ?

URL

1

Semtex ●

I don't need magic glasses in a universe where Columbus sails to America to grab a hamburger at McDonald's and do his weekly grocery shopping at Walmart

By the way—your questions at the beginning are exactly about this...

URL

1

Al Kerb ●

Ok, well Starcraft imho is ofc a somewhat unfair example, since i think its pretty iconic, genre defining - and its beginnings (even whe the first engine was basically warcraft 2) out of the genius forge of blizzard north. but i wanted to point out how actually a very engaging story and chars can be made.

i wouldt set the bar so high for SE2, i dont anything abou SE1 - but yea sure, i would love a good story. i mean any story (operetta) is better than none, but if they'd invest and really made a great story (opera) along with long story/canpaign for single player survival, i would really like that.

in my former answer i just thought, if they would do that, they wouldnt get away the good cheese before release, but sure like movie trailers - or story-based game trailers, some kind of backstory, or story preview before release (also to get players exited as advertisment and ofc for us alpha plaers now) that would be awesome - i just thought, they are probably not there yet.

URL

1

Semtex ●

I find the “you’re the only one” story more appealing.

A space engineer arrives in a star system aboard a small ship, say, weighing 100 metric tons, because sending something larger on an interstellar journey at high speed is energetically unfeasible—an interstellar ship must not only be accelerated but also decelerated in the destination star system.

The acceleration and deceleration stages of an interstellar spacecraft are jettisoned to conserve energy and fuel, so that in the destination system, aside from the spacecraft itself, at most only the last jettisoned braking stage will remain. It might be found.

The mission is simple: survive, find a suitable planet, build an interstellar transmitter, begin terraforming, and finally build a stargate.

Exploration, resource gathering, and basically everything else is part of fulfilling the main objective.

There may be ruins and space wrecks—a previous attempt failed, and the space engineer perished, unable to respawn.

NPCs? ok...

The space engineer can create assistants—robots and androids. He may even have some on his ship; they kept the ship running during the long and tedious interstellar flight lasting decades, perhaps even centuries, while the engineer slept in a cryochamber. Or perhaps he didn’t exist at all and was only created upon arrival at the destination star system. After such a long time, the robots won’t be in “top condition,” and repairing them could be part of a side quest.

Colonists and similar nonsense will only appear once an interstellar ship arrives through the stargate.

Reply URL

1

Nigel Haslock ●

The world of the eldar scrolls has a monstrous amount of lore but it has been around for a looong time and has had books written to give more substance to the lore. The big difference is that it defines a series of games and and both the devs and the fans work on staying true to the known lore.

SE1 has very little consistency across scenarios and SE2 in starting in a whole new system with new planets, new moons, rings and drifts of asteroids. Almagest is too far removed, in time and distance, from the world of SE1 for any lore to cross over. Even so, if it is to be credible, and not just graffiti, someone needs to have a grand plan and to make sure that all lore (except for the graffiti) supports that plan.

Reply URL

1

Semtex ●

The TES universe is “old.” Daggerfall (“the buggiest game in the world”) was released in 1996. The lore of the TES world has gradually changed and evolved, but in a “natural” way—the same stories are told differently at different times and in different lands. But even in Daggerfall, the lore was quite extensive—and generally consistent. Personally, I had a lot of fun reading the “literature” in the TES games; some of the stories were really entertaining. The story “about apples and the Khajiit who defended the castle” really stuck with me.

The lore in the SE is inconsistent.

This is likely because none of the game’s autors is capable of creating either a “good enough story” or a vision of the future with a coherent timeline. They simply aren’t “writers”.

What can be done about it?

In the current stage — nothing.

In the alpha version of the game, the story and lore aren’t necessary. For future versions, it would probably be worth considering hiring a “pretty good sci-fi writer,” a professional (there are still quite a few of them in the Czech Republic), who could create a consistent back story and timeline for SE2 according to the designers’ requirements.

But rather than “lore,” I'd prefer to see detailed technical descriptions of the structural components, including their functions and specifications.

URL

1

Al Kerb ●

"In the alpha version of the game, the story and lore aren’t necessary. For future versions, it would probably be worth considering hiring a “pretty good sci-fi writer,” a professional (there are still quite a few of them in the Czech Republic), who could create a consistent back story and timeline for SE2 according to the designers’ requirements."

>>> i like this idea, hire a good czech sifi writer! (for official release)

"But rather than “lore,” I'd prefer to see detailed technical descriptions of the structural components, including their functions and specifications."

>>>absolute agree, thats what i was trying to say aswell.

URL

1

Deon Beauchamp ●

Where to start ?

SE1 lacked lore and story.

SE1 players asked for lore and narratives.

SE2s opening gambit offered lore, a story and the potential of a game with a background setting.

SE2 alpha has evolved based on player engagement.

SE2 alpha has introduced the colonisation process to enable fast travel to adjoining sectors and NPC sector activity.

The story is SE2, without the SE2 story you have SE1 remastered, and as yet a journey unfulfilled.

Advancing the lore, the setting, and the story, with the advent of VS4, will give the game context that it needs. The conflict between factions will be carried by the story, the opportunity for nuance between a faction and it's affiliated members can become apparent when there is the narrative to carry it. The gameplay can exist either within the story's framework or it can be ignored as a background, the play is flexible.

The questions that I have asked are slightly tongue in cheek, but some do need to be address to solidify the game.

@AI Kerb - I 100% recommend that you experience SE1 for all of it's good and bad, there is a lot to see and do there, and it would give you a better idea of what SE2 alpha has to achieve to surpass SE1 and what SE2 has the potential to become.

URL

2

Deon Beauchamp ●

Well done ZerꝊ, SE lore education incoming.

URL

2

Nigel Haslock ●

A few not so random thoughts. Note that all of this is dreaming of world where infinite resources are available.

We began with a framing story for the survival experience. If lore is going to work and be credible it needs to fit with the framing story. The random texts at game start contain some lore teasers that speak to the concept that people arrived long before the Calypso crashed into something near Verdure (although we have no clue how far the pod had to travel to get to its landing.

So we would like lore that is snippets of the history behind the earlier arrivals, named ships, named settlements, named factions, specific interactions between them.

We would like some evidence of these events, abandoned ruins, pits empty of all but the tiniest traces of ore (just enough to show what was there), rumours of bunkers containing experimental tech, libraries, battlefields and random monuments to the victors/successful leaders/captain of industry,

It would be cute to find bits of non-lore. Love letters, letters like the the one found at the 'Free Scrap' site, letters that show that people lived in the area but died or moved on. A fair share of the datapads found in SE1's 'Lost Colony' scenario are like this.

However, there does need to be a Loremaster at Keen to ensure that the story remains a story rather than a jumble a fragments of conflicting elements. And this is what I was trying to get at when I mentioned TES. Certainly different factions can have different backstories and different takes on the interactions between them. In fact this would open the Almagest to hosting limited campaigns to replay how he 'Red' team took out the 'Blue' bunker at Heartbreak Hill or in the Ferric Drift or ...

Basically if the Lore mentions an incident, someone could turn it into a playable scenario. Or, if someone comes up with an interesting scenario, it could spawn a batch of lore references while the creator tries to get it implemented.

There are lots of ways to have fun with this and we need more ways for the game to support having fun.