Expose more information about weapons and armor

[manekineko]

I think a really important improvement the game needs is to expose more information about weapons and armor directly to the player, without requiring him to go online and look for spoilers to find out how things work.

It was a total surprise for me to discover that as armor and shields increase in level, they gain innate resistances, and I've already beaten the game before. The game displays resistances already, but it should display the resistances net of the level.

Also a big surprise to discover from version history that
# Armor >= level VI is immune to blinding
# Armor >= level VII is immune to radiation
# Armor >= level IX is immune to EMP
# Armor >= level XI is immune to device damage

It might add a few more lines to the display of items, but personally I have always thought that Diablo-style items that display with a lot of modifiers are actually very fun from a player perspective, it makes my items seem awesome, and since gives a lot for a player to balance and customize when he knows what he's working with.

Along the same lines, the little symbols for what resistances are is really confusing without consulting outside sources. There are so many kinds, and they're so small it's very cryptic. Mouseovers at the least would be super handy.

Besides resistances, a lot of really quite key information like weapons range or shield down time is hidden from the player. The whole reason the a howitzer is good is because of its range, and the whole reason the Lazarus shield is amazing is that it doesn't have downtime.

Maybe the most important issue is that the game doesn't have a visual indicator of what items are incompatible with your ship. I saved up and spent all my money on new armor, only to find out it didn't work with my ship. Extremely frustrating to say the least. A nice improvement would be doing what I've seen some other games do, and changing the background or font color for non-compatible items to red.

[Jeoshua]

Seconded. I never knew that my armor would be radiation resistant until I docked with a radioactive vessel accidentally and started to panic... then realized I was immune. Actually I didn't realize it was the armor until you pointed this out.

[darksider]

I think a really important improvement the game needs is to expose more information about weapons and armor directly to the player, without requiring him to go online and look for spoilers to find out how things work.

It was a total surprise for me to discover that as armor and shields increase in level, they gain innate resistances, and I've already beaten the game before. The game displays resistances already, but it should display the resistances net of the level.

Also a big surprise to discover from version history that
# Armor >= level VI is immune to blinding
# Armor >= level VII is immune to radiation
# Armor >= level IX is immune to EMP
# Armor >= level XI is immune to device damage

It might add a few more lines to the display of items, but personally I have always thought that Diablo-style items that display with a lot of modifiers are actually very fun from a player perspective, it makes my items seem awesome, and since gives a lot for a player to balance and customize when he knows what he's working with.

Along the same lines, the little symbols for what resistances are is really confusing without consulting outside sources. There are so many kinds, and they're so small it's very cryptic. Mouseovers at the least would be super handy.

Besides resistances, a lot of really quite key information like weapons range or shield down time is hidden from the player. The whole reason the a howitzer is good is because of its range, and the whole reason the Lazarus shield is amazing is that it doesn't have downtime.

Maybe the most important issue is that the game doesn't have a visual indicator of what items are incompatible with your ship. I saved up and spent all my money on new armor, only to find out it didn't work with my ship. Extremely frustrating to say the least. A nice improvement would be doing what I've seen some other games do, and changing the background or font color for non-compatible items to red.

Well, I think that hiding information is one part of the game design, considering how it is in NetHack; in NetHack not only you can't find any in-game information about damage output of weapons or anything, you can't even find how much an item weighs! But you can still learn eventually without reading spoilers (well, maybe not you but at least I did).
"Die and learn from the experience" so says every NetHacker, and Transcendence is infinitely easier than NetHack already, if I say.

As for in-game symbols for damage type, you can just press F1 key to read in-game help. And about the maximum weight of an armor plate your ship can have, look the New Game screen (select your ship) very carefully. I see that you want to learn about in-game mechanics as quick as possible and be an almighty being, yet you are frequently missing things that are already out there.


Well, by the way, I'm a bit dissatisfied about the "innate immunity depending on the armor level" thing, since this makes a number of your clever tactics completely useless in later stages of the game, and boring straight-forward, brute force fighting more frequent. Also it makes various special resistance coating utterly useless.

On a side note, I see the ion disruptor of a Ventari Destroyer can damage the repairing ability that CSCs have, which is a bit weird.

[Aury]

Isn't the repair ability done via a virtual item...? Shouldn't those be damage proof?

[Prophet]

More information being displayed is a matter of personal choice. It used to be that weapons and equipment would not display any stats until they were installed or identified via Rowena's roms (which i miss)

In order to display all the possible information contained within the xml you would need a whole new dockscreen to display one item at a time. The itemPicker screens can barely hold the descriptions and the stats we do have now.

This would be a good subject for a mod, so players can decide for themselves whether or not they want all that information, but not for the main game.

[manekineko]

Well, if that's the game design, I suppose I just have to write it off as agree to strongly disagree with the design. In my opinion, game depth through obscurity is not really a particularly interesting type of game depth, as it's actually shallow (you figure it out by grinding and observing) and simultaneously makes a game much less interesting to the non-hardcore devotees, who want to just play the game and not play figure out how to play the game.

Starcraft is not a great game for the beginners and the hardcore alike because it won't tell you the stats for your units and you have to think it out, it's a great game (even though you know all that stuff) because you have to think about the gameplay.

In the end I suppose it all falls on George on what type of a game he wants to make. As I recall, George cited somewhere his inspirations for Transcendence as Star Control and Nethack. In the end I think that in terms of the GUI, the more like Star Control it is (which was basically awesome), the more accessible and hence popular by numbers it will be. In this regard, a mod to make it more accessible wouldn't really help, since mods are probably used by only less than 1% of people that try the game.

The more its GUI draws inspiration from Nethack (whose GUI I consider to be basically user-hostile, hiding all sorts of info for the purpose of game depth through obscurity), the less popular by numbers it will be. Now there's nothing wrong with targeting to create a game that is less popular by numbers, niche games that appeal highly to a small demographic are cool, too.

Interestingly, for me at least, things that are normal in Nethack (like you can't see the weight of items) strike me as downright weird in a game with modern GUI design. Maybe I mentally give Nethack a free pass on these because of the limitations of its graphics engine (or lack thereof). Those certainly aren't the parts of Nethack I admire, however. A mod to make the game more like Nethack would seem to work, since people looking for the Nethack experience are, on the whole, pretty hardcore.

[manekineko]

Well, I think that hiding information is one part of the game design, considering how it is in NetHack; in NetHack not only you can't find any in-game information about damage output of weapons or anything, you can't even find how much an item weighs! But you can still learn eventually without reading spoilers (well, maybe not you but at least I did).
"Die and learn from the experience" so says every NetHacker, and Transcendence is infinitely easier than NetHack already, if I say.

As for in-game symbols for damage type, you can just press F1 key to read in-game help. And about the maximum weight of an armor plate your ship can have, look the New Game screen (select your ship) very carefully. I see that you want to learn about in-game mechanics as quick as possible and be an almighty being, yet you are frequently missing things that are already out there.

Even if it is part of the game design to hide information, right now the display of resistances is straight up deceptive, not hidden. As a player, looking at the item displays, it would be reasonable to think that p1000 hexphase armor is stronger against particle than light Iocrym armor. When the game has a symbol next to the hexphase showing it has bonuses against particle, it didn't even occur to me to think could there be additional hidden bonuses based on the level of the item.

Good tip on the F1 to see resistances, I'm not really sure how I missed that. Somehow my eye was drawn straight to the hotkeys on that page and the rest was entirely processed out by my brain or something. As feedback for that, I don't really think it's a good idea to put that schematic of the Sapphire on the help screen. It contributes to making the page visually busy and intimidating for a beginner to look at, while providing no actual information. A picture of the player's ship without the words and arrows would be much better I think.

Regarding the maximum weight for armor, yes, I realize that it's on the New Game screen. In my opinion, that is not really an acceptable only place to be able to access the information. The first few times I played, there was so much information exposed on those screens, it did not occur to me to memorize the heaviest armor my ship could use, and it does not strike me as reasonable to expect a player to do so. By the first time I made it a reasonable distance into the game, and the armor limits actually came into play, I didn't even remember any more that there were such limits, since they hadn't ever impacted my game before that. This is such an easy fix, to make unusable items written in red, I just don't see why you would say that because it's on the New Game screen, it shouldn't be shown again in game to make the game more user friendly.

I'm not really trying to learn the in-game mechanics as quickly as possible to become an almighty being. These things I've noted in the Brainstorm Forum are simply things that I ran across as a player, that I personally found dissatisfying or annoying as I played.

"What do you mean you can't tell me how far this gun shoots before I buy it?"