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[Nick9]

In short, this topic is about (but not only) proper and large-scale text quests for Starsector. Would you want them? Maybe as a mod?
Now, to more explanation:

This game is not from this world. Okay, maybe it is - but... If we start talking about gameplay, there's nothing even close. And it's easy to see the result of several productive years of development with the idea and passion. In my list of favourite games it'd be ranked as 2-3 place. Comparing games of totally different genres is not a good thing to do, but, aside from the overwhelming positive experience Starsector(tm) has to provide, there's one small itch that it somehow... didn't cover? Should it even? Starsector is what it is, it is perfect that way it is, the missile knows where it is at all times, but I still want to share.

There are open-world space games I've played before that are astonishingly good. I am from Russia, this may be relevant, because, most likely, you wouldn't hear about these games: Space Rangers (1, 2, and 'A War Apart', though last one is definitely broken, and please don't try any mobile versions, like 'quest'), Parkan: The Imperial Chronicles (1997). They are (at the very least, first one) part of Post-CIS culture, a "Nostalgia for a future that never came". They both are open-world, but different in gameplay terms and scale, even genres, they both have some wacky gameplay moments, but also... they both have that one thing in common - in-game atmosphere is on another level.

Now I'll provide some examples based on Space Rangers only.

You'll find a lot of different dialogues based on who you are. If you do pirate activities more, you'd most often referred accordingly, you'd have more quests (text adventures) related to your 'job', and vice versa. You will be judged by your “appearance”, judged by your rating, military rank. Different parties (civillian fleets, military fleets, independent rangers) will have their opinion based on a lot of metrics. You may try to rob someone, and the success of the persuasion will depend on your ship's strength and speed. Military bases will provide dialogues with the context of current galaxy situation in mind. They will be brave if a war is in stale and the galaxy is split equally, and desperate, if the war is almost lost. What I mean, there're a lot of contextual dialogues. I've seen occasional context-dependent dialogues in Starsector, of course, but... different games, different genres, yeah.

Yet there's also something that could be in Starsector right now. Large text adventures. Not everyone likes these, so it's good to keep them optional, although in the right hands these could provide much more immersion to the game.

There's a Persean Chronicles mod that somewhat close to what I want to see, but those quests are still relatively small. E.g. in Space Rangers game text quests have HUGE branches, a lot of possible choices, some of them are complete mini-games that make them replayable, though they are not necessary, most of what they do is... Atmosphere. While music adds to it.

It's hard to find good videos on English about these quests because of the reason mentioned in 2 paragraph of prologue. My favourite one was a "Cybermind", where you've sent by some government to fix a problem on some distant AI-driven complex, and it already delivers from the start. You find it pretty much abandoned, except from the one scientist that tells you about rogue AI problem. And then that rogue AI activating its comms and says that... the scientist is the problem. It has a lot of branching and minigames, and a lot of ways to die, of course. They may be hours long, like Proprologue, that sends player in the past and emulates the game in the text format, although this is overkill.

These quests add a lot to world design and creating in-game atmosphere in general. Also music works, in Starsector it's usually serious, but sometimes also feels boring and repetitive, though it's whole other point and some will already throw hats at me. Right now, there are some quests in Starsector that involve some text navigation, and I love them. I simply wish for more.

Now, should we, as a mod community, find some writers that are willing to make some full text adventures? I also feel like there'd be a need for a framework in this case.

Random images from text quests

[close]

...and some music:

[Killer of Fate]

Space Rangers text quests were definitely one of the strongest part of that game. But Space Rangers was always more of an intellectual query than a combat simulator. Combat in fact in Space Rangers is kinda ass. And its strategy scenarios are less about strategy and more about finding a way to abuse the manual control and then infiltrate the enemy.

Implementing text quests into Starsector would definitely work on some level at fleshing out the story, and I would want to write a bunch, but I'm not really into programming of that level at the moment, though if anyone out there would like to cooperate with me, I'm open for invitation.

I would probably write a branching story on the level of some choose your own adventure book if I had the time, but then I would expect someone else to assemble it, cause it is probably a pain-staking process that involves many sleepless days of hard work that I would already be spending on to write a good story that would fit into the Starsector vanilla atmosphere.

Plus, I feel like the current UI would be really frustrating to do text adventures in, as the text box is too small, thus it's hard to write dialogue in there, and overall it should be redesigned to occupy the whole screen. And if it comes to artwork, I feel like it should be using only art that sticks close to the original artstyle of the game, excluding AI generated images (unless, they're good somehow???) I'm kinda surprised that there are so many custom ships in the game, but if it comes to creating custom artworks for planets it's really really barren... It's mostly captain portraits, and I do feel like too much of that variety is occupied by randomly generated images that lack the emotional investment human art has.

Clarification: Space Rangers text story adventures were entirely in their own world. They had no affect on the game other than landing you a large money reward. Whether you were on bad reputation with centralized governments of alien races or humans, it didn't matter. Whether you had a violent past and served the pirate regime or were a dominator hunter didn't matter. You were always starting fresh in the story quest. Even the amount of money you brought in didn't matter, cause it was not affected by inflation. Whereas in the game spending 15 credits meant nothing, in a text quest it could land you a crucial tip. This ironically also affected the additional objectives within the side quests. These would land you really small amounts of money.

[Nick9]

Really small clarification on clarification:

>Whether you had a violent past and served the pirate regime or were a dominator hunter didn't matter.
At least, this did matter, because certain quest are locked for certain characteres (war hero/trader/pirate) that is based on your rating that is based on what you've did in the past. Alhough it's easy to change.

Alhough with instruments that Starsector provides, it's much easier to make something that depends on your previous choices on some previous quests, I've seen save file structure.

>but then I would expect someone else to assemble it

It's really difficult to implement something large here, at least SR had utilities (like, TGE), there you need to code everything and, yeah. There would be a lot of code. We need framework.

upd: I still want to try to collab, at least, to implement one quest and to see how it goes. My English is not good, my writing skills may be worse, but I know how to code. We probably need to contact each other.

[Killer of Fate]

Really small clarification on clarification:

>Whether you had a violent past and served the pirate regime or were a dominator hunter didn't matter.
At least, this did matter, because certain quest are locked for certain characteres (war hero/trader/pirate) that is based on your rating that is based on what you've did in the past. Alhough it's easy to change.

Alhough with instruments that Starsector provides, it's much easier to make something that depends on your previous choices on some previous quests, I've seen save file structure.

>but then I would expect someone else to assemble it

It's really difficult to implement something large here, at least SR had utilities (like, TGE), there you need to code everything and, yeah. There would be a lot of code. We need framework.

upd: I still want to try to collab, at least, to implement one quest and to see how it goes. My English is not good, my writing skills may be worse, but I know how to code. We probably need to contact each other.

are you referring to specific pirate missions introduced in A War Apart that you could only access if you were doing a promotion procedure after earning a specific amount of career points? Cause most of the text missions in Space Rangers were like... Make space pizza, or beat a nerd at chess... And these didn't really care who you were. In fact the cool aspect of those missions was that they had usually nothing to do with space gameplay. They were wacky and crazy...

There was a pod racing story, a submarine exploration text minigame. Jungle exploration. Solving mathematical problems. If Starsector did text quests. It would be the equivalent of being called not to kill or blow up something. But to *** cook a Hegemony official dinner... Or play Call of Duty against a Tri-Tachyon a-hole that bet you a hundred bucks they could beat you.

Do you remember the mission where you had to go for a palace weeding or some other diplomatic mission, and had to gift the giant orc/goblin warrior and his wife proper gifts to appease him for some sort of an economic deal? Imagine if we did that in Starsector, instead of just blowing up the same materializing ship captains whose fleets of deserters are 10 times bigger than the actual fleets that patrol the systems they deserted from.

[Nick9]

>are you referring to specific pirate missions introduced in A War Apart

Not specific, there are prerequisites for some, so there's a small chance you haven't seen some. But mostly it's like you described. It's not like they are themself... specific enough though

Spoiler

[close]

> and had to gift the giant orc/goblin warrior and his wife proper gifts to appease him for some sort of an economic deal

They are maloqs, baka!... Yes, it was a funny one. I remember gifting a rifle to his wife.

There was also one quest from SR1 where you need to hold a ground defense against rebellion, but in the end, (after some battles) it was better to give order to retreat despite what you've been commanded (to hold the line and die), because corrupt superiors were trying to evacuate valuables instead of soldiers. I wonder if something like that is possible with Nex in mind, but I wouldn't really think about it because 100% it will be broken mechanic not working as intended most of the time.

I think there's a lot of potential. Some quests could really make an impact, not like in SR. And yeah, "spawnfleet" after some not good quest endings are, indeed, a possibility

Although making a pizza would be nice too. We have modded bakeries and stuff now, come on.

[Killer of Fate]

>are you referring to specific pirate missions introduced in A War Apart

Not specific, there are prerequisites for some, so there's a small chance you haven't seen some. But mostly it's like you described. It's not like they are themself... specific enough though

Spoiler

[close]

> and had to gift the giant orc/goblin warrior and his wife proper gifts to appease him for some sort of an economic deal

They are maloqs, baka!... Yes, it was a funny one. I remember gifting a rifle to his wife.

There was also one quest from SR1 where you need to hold a ground defense against rebellion, but in the end, (after some battles) it was better to give order to retreat despite what you've been commanded (to hold the line and die), because corrupt superiors were trying to evacuate valuables instead of soldiers. I wonder if something like that is possible with Nex in mind, but I wouldn't really think about it because 100% it will be broken mechanic not working as intended most of the time.

I think there's a lot of potential. Some quests could really make an impact, not like in SR. And yeah, "spawnfleet" after some not good quest endings are, indeed, a possibility

Although making a pizza would be nice too. We have modded bakeries and stuff now, come on.

we should make a mission in which we have to cook the perfect pizza for a Sindrian Diktat superior. And then we get attacked by a giant enemy spider

[Nick9]

we should make a mission in which we have to cook the perfect pizza for a Sindrian Diktat superior. And then we get attacked by a giant enemy spider

Maybe integration with Symbiotic Void Creatures would be cool in that case le epic one.

And starfarer cooking pizza is straight up fanfic stuff. Could be fire because I've never made pizza in my life... byeah, I am totally not being serious rn.

...unless...

[Killer of Fate]

we should make a mission in which we have to cook the perfect pizza for a Sindrian Diktat superior. And then we get attacked by a giant enemy spider

Maybe integration with Symbiotic Void Creatures would be cool in that case le epic one.

And starfarer cooking pizza is straight up fanfic stuff. Could be fire because I've never made pizza in my life... byeah, I am totally not being serious rn.

...unless...

Nah, space aliens are different... When I meant giant enemy spider, I imagine a low gravity moon with strange wildlife

Honestly, I'm not really a big fan of mantis-bug spaceships in space. When I imagined there being wildlife creatures in Starsector, I imagined less zerg from Starcraft 1, and more like giant fart monsters. You know, grubs... Or snails encapsulated in rock? I also thought instead of it being melee focused, they would be more of a guided projectile focused. They would send out chunks of metal and stone mixed with thick biological goo burning fuel of some alcoholic type or whatever (probably not alcoholic, we need something stronger). And then blowing up into a shrapnel. Fragmentation damage. Whilst they fire from far away with these large spears.

And I also wouldn't really mind see them using shields. They could have even their own version of the fart burn Nova and Retribution have. You know. A giant snail capital ship that does a giga fart and then shoots you down at almost melee range with chaingun-like spikes after launching a barrage of quasi-harpoons to finish you off. That does sound very much like Retribution.

Hmmm... I guess I would have to actually experiment with the concept to establish what kind of fighting style these grubs would have.

But meh... I guess we can do Starcraft 1 zerg too, if you guys want it that much.

Spoiler

I could imagine that instead of them having artificial intelligence cores like Remnants, Derelicts or Tessies, they'd have giant gooey brains that you would keep in jars. And there would be different types of funny brains to be sold on markets. With Luddic Pathers paying the most, because they would believe the giant snails were true believers of Ludd given ascension onto a higher physical plain or something.

I could also imagine the skill involving being able to command those snails would have a description hinting that the process to understanding them is built almost on inhaling large amounts of hallucinogenic mushrooms. And then having strange visions in which the main character projects human traits onto an entirely alien species, which inspires them to understand their biology well enough to actually adapt them into their army.

These giant snails would mostly hang around gas giants or lagrange fields. Building giant shelters that you would be able to plunder for... I dunno... Something they would have... Rare ore? Organics? Expensive weaponry? Hostages? Maybe they'd keep ancient ships like XIV Onslaughts or Legions in gigantic webs as trophies or food for later. Would it be implied that they literally digest ships? Yeah... Possibly.

[close]

[Nettle]

In short, this topic is about (but not only) proper and large-scale text quests for Starsector. Would you want them?

No, not really, they don't hold the necessary replayability value, I think. Well given the choice between "nothing" and "large-scale text quests" I would obviously choose the latter, but I wouldn't be super thrilled about getting interactive text quests over more sandbox content and/or refining of existing systems.

[Nick9]

No, not really, they don't hold the necessary replayability value, I think. Well given the choice between "nothing" and "large-scale text quests" I would obviously choose the latter, but I wouldn't be super thrilled about getting interactive text quests over more sandbox content and/or refining of existing systems.

Yes, I agree, as a general rule, they won't have that value. The purpose is to create atmosphere, make a focus on world design, and make them optional, so you won't need to replay them every run and they won't have a strict order as well. That's, probably, what I want to do.

But meh... I guess we can do Starcraft 1 zerg too, if you guys want it that much.

Space snails, that's some unique vision here!.. But I lol'd at this sentence. I really love zerg <3

[Killer of Fate]

In short, this topic is about (but not only) proper and large-scale text quests for Starsector. Would you want them?

No, not really, they don't hold the necessary replayability value, I think. Well given the choice between "nothing" and "large-scale text quests" I would obviously choose the latter, but I wouldn't be super thrilled about getting interactive text quests over more sandbox content and/or refining of existing systems.

yeah, they have no replay value. This is why the fact that Galatia quests spawns in a headcrab to attack you every time you start a new game is kinda annoying. Cause if you started doing that quest once already, you know what will happen. It should be fully optional, invisible even. Like Tessies, Hegemony quest. I also think that the Luddic Path bar interaction is too agressive. And the way how visiting the shrine inserts itself into the planetary menu causing you to click to go there on accident, like some sort of a mobile game trying to sell you premium currency. I think it should be moved to the right above the exit, as I think most people probably exit by pressing escape anyway.

[Nick9]

Btw I love when Nex acknowledges your current faction in text in some quests =)