Some critique, kindly meant.
In general... the overall story is interesting, although there are parts that feel like they could use an editing pass. The early bits, especially, don't paint a coherent picture of "this is where you are now"- the very first bits about having to pay the Recovery Installment Plan, etc., set a nice tone of Dystopia.
If you could clone yourselves or your "brain tape" in the case of death, e.g., the classic Lord British / Chuckles game
Autoduel...
that would be a cute nod, indeed.
Past that early bit, I feel like the story could use more editing. There just isn't quite enough meat on the bones. We change contexts and conversations a little too quickly, and there are too many different voices being used.
For example: how did we become Space Captains? Were we pilots before all this started? Are their automated ships full of cryosleeping people still arriving in the Sector? Are there large numbers of ancient cryopods floating around in various places? Or is the Player an ex-member of XIV?
None of this got touched, even though the story implies it could be interpreted in a lot of ways.
I like how the collapse of the Domain Gate Network is once again, left as a total mystery (Was it Ludd? Was it merely coincidence?).
A fun factoid you might want to put in there is something like, "a long-range fleet was constructed and is en-route to the nearest other Sector, but it will be 200 years before it arrives" to tie in with the Warlord Loke story (which echoes the XIV story, nice touch) with a believable explanation as to why, after all this time, there's been no word; the Gate Haulers
might be on their way via slower FTL, rather than Gate jumps, but we'll never know.
However, I don't really like the idea that the Gates are inert objects throughout. Perhaps Gates need to be "tuned" to one another, and what happened wiped out the tuning data; that seems pretty unbelievable (it's the Future; we'd have backups for our backups' backups) but an "AI virus weapon" might be a good-enough bit of hand-waving (well, presuming the Ludd Story is true, rather than all the fun alternatives).
I feel like there wasn't quite enough centrality to the story, though. The thing about the Mechwarrior and Car Wars stories was that, while they could, at best, be described as, "thin excuses for the gameplay mechanics", they were at least that. The problem with the Starsector backstory is that, past, "the Gates crashed, everything's gone to hell" there just isn't quite enough Stuff there to indicate how a player might find a route to be an agent of change.
In Mechwarrior, you could be anything from a mercenary-company executive to one of the leaders of the Houses. The central story- the death of the Hegemony, the known galaxy disintegrates into warring feudal states after a horrific Civil War reduces the technological knowledge base by a huge amount, etc., provided props for the player to construct goals around, even though these weren't explicitly built into the game.
In Starsector, with the introduction of Outposts and all that implies, we have a sandbox where, potentially, we can write various stories, like "helped the Hegemony to finally control the Sector", "Killed all humanity that wasn't the Player Faction through cataclysmic use of PKs", "Served the Tri-Tachyon Corporation as it rebuilt its resource base to wage AI War III", etc., etc.
But, ultimately, we need a hook here and there. The story can't just just be self-built. There has to be some structural elements in place. The strongest part of the entire game right now is the Tutorial, where, hand-holding and all, we suddenly have a context to our actions that isn't merely, "kill stuff, get monies, use monies to buy more things to kill stuff".
SS needs more of
that to achieve classic status.
The core gameplay mechanics are fine. I'm sure that once the Economy's straightened out and Outposts are a thing, it'll be in a good place, in terms of fundamental mechanics; sure, there are areas here and there that need cleanup (like, for example, tying the Intel UI intelligently to the Mission Board in Stations so that the game feels less like it's full of redundant UIs) but these are polish details, for the most part.
The important thing, once the fundamentals are built, is that there should be structural elements to introduce both causality and to provide reasons and moral imperatives (for example, taking a mission to peacefully re-integrate a colony that's rebelling might involve bringing said colony some resources and negotiating a compromise, or a choice to take advantage of the situation and take over leadership of the colony yourself). We need missions with more structure and moral context so that our actions feel more meaningful and our emotional attachment is greater. If there's any one issue I had with the Tutorial Mission, it was that there was no peaceful resolution of the Pirate Station's problems, by filching the data, avoiding fights, and then presenting them with the fait accompli of the Gate's re-activation and your temporary credentials as a Hegemony representative; that would have given the missions a greater coda, if you took a non-violent route (as it is, you're
always going to want to fight, for the XP gains; it's the best situation of easy XP you get in the early game).
Little notes:
Colonel
not Colonal, heh. It would also be nice if Kanta had a female first name; her sex is unclear in the text until suddenly: "spaces the Loke loyalists left on her station".
"PK" as a short-hand for "Planet-Killer" needs to be introduced a little earlier; it's suddenly stuck in there and we're supposed to puzzle it out. It'd be interesting to explore what a PK means, as well; probably, for low-tech colonies, it's merely a big chunk of something driven to near-c, but for major worlds, one presumes it's a massive AM warhead or something else that's seriously dangerous; one would presume that basic technology for protecting planets with serious Shields was pretty normal for this universe, frankly.