It has been a long (looooong) time since I first fired up SC1 and was awed by the diversity of ships, and pored over the menus to learn more about the ships. SC2 did not make it any easier, and fortunately you could always drop out of the main story to go knock heads with the AI until you figured out what the enemy ships did. I loved this, so much so in fact that I'm the original author of the SC Saga (http://www.star-control.com/hosted/scsaga/) and yes, looking back on my paragraphs, I wondered why I didn't have more important things to gab on about. Ahhh, wasted youth...
So with nostalgia goggles off, I am a bit worried that I have no idea what the ships in SCO are able to do. Some are pretty straight forwards, the Scryve shoot a big scary death laser that you should not stand in, and if you stand in it, boom, you die. But even their Flak Cannons are a bit of a mystery. Do they block shots? Do they kill asteroids? Do they hurt the enemy ship appreciably? What's their range? As the person flying the ship, I have no idea in general what they do, and that's kind of a problem -- you'd think the captain would have at least an inkling of their range so as to not waste battery firing wastefully.
Suggestion: The person flying the ship should see some sort of range finder for their ships. This can be turned off as an option, but certainly for a new player, it would be most helpful to know what a weapon can at least hit.
Damage is a real question mark. In the originals, the kablam was relative to the scope of damage being done. When you were hit with a Mycon Homing Plasmoid up close, you knew you were cooked. 10 damage with an audio cue that says bigbaddaboom meant you were limping away. The animated crew portrait is great, and a lot of love went into making the pilots panic when their ship was about to explode (I especially love the Tywom's animation). However, the incoming damage pips are so small, that while, yes, it does show the strength of a hit as crewmen turn into red pips and then blacken, that's not where the eyes are. Players are watching the screen.
Suggestion: Make hits sound like the damage they do. Have damage numbers fly off the ship somehow like hit point indicators in modern games. Or both!
New players are going to struggle with wanting to learn these alien ships. Some of the weapons are just mystifying, and not in a good way. What does the Demotivator do? Is it like the Syreen Penetrator's call, which does more damage the closer you are? Or is the outer green ring the real sweet spot, and the inside less damage? If so, this should have some sort of distinction in-game so that everybody knows that damage is being done relative to position. Ideally, and perhaps this is in the works, there should be an infographic in Melee that tells you about the ships. SC1 famously did that, and it helped a little, but looking at the screens now, they still don't say enough (to wit: http://www.star-control.com/sc2/ships.php#, mouse over Androsynth Guardian. "Pokey. Blows mean bubbles. Changes to flaming comet" sounds like badly translated stereo instructions!) It's 2018. We could have small video snippets of the ships firing their primary and secondary weapons with damage indicators overlapping.
Suggestion: Jazz up the learning tools about the ships so that new players aren't frustrated. Teach these pilots about their ships!
In general, I'm pretty excited about seeing this style of gaming make a return, and of course I'm chomping at the bit for a Star Control story, as well as the tools to create more. Since the beta allows only a look at the combat, that's the part I want to see being fun and welcoming to new and old players alike.
Flak is from WWII, a kind of anti-aircraft fire; basically, a big ol' shell was fired into the air where it would explode, sending fragments of metal flying all over the place, almost like fireworks. The explosion wasn't meant to make the kill; it was the fragments that did the damage.
Well, the Scryve Flak Guns basically do the same thing; if a ship gets too close, turn on the anti-spaceship guns and let the enemy ship take damage from what is essentially debris fired from the ship.
It does what it says, really: it makes the other ship's crew unhappy, and they abandon their posts.
I agree; when I first started playing, a lot of the weapons were mysteries.
The Gravity Wave, for example, seemed to do next to nothing; it wasn't until I got near certain enemy weapons that I could see it would repel them.
So, yeah; it'd be nice to have some descriptions of a weapon's function, in the Crafting section, if nowhere else. (Actually, it'd be nice if they were a mystery in the story game; it's supposed to have an exploration/discovery element to it, and finding aliens ships that make you go, "What does that do???" would be part of the fun!)
But it doesn't take too long to get the hang of the weapons, really. I've been playing this thing for a couple of months, now, and gotten the hang of most of 'em (though there are some I'm just...not into; they're difficult to use with my style of fighting).
It's not knowing what the flak cannons are that's my problem; I can see the random blow up fireworks around the ship. Same as the Demotivator; I can see the green ring. But that's just about all I know about them. The alien technology is important for story mode; how I use them is important for combat. In combat, I just need to know when to shoot them, and that is missing from the experience.
Compare this to a beat 'em up brawler like Mortal Kombat. All the characters are roughly human, and can punch and kick. I don't need to know what shoe size they wear; I need to know where I insert my boot into the enemy stomach, and how I can avoid similar. I could learn fairly quickly that one button punches, another kicks, and that I can press up and down to modify them somewhat. Any new player will figure that out quickly. Star Control does not have that level of obviousness to it, so already the player needs to figure out where the punch and kick parts of their ships are -- and then when you see something weird go on, you're going "Is that a kick? Where's the boot part?"
So I have two options as a new player. I can either fire up player versus player mode and let the other player sit there like a target while I test the weapons out on them, or I can go in blindly and hope the weapons actually deal some damage. Eventually, by bashing my head into the game, I'll figure out which weapons do what, for how much, and how long. But is that really the way to attract short attention span players?
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