This week’s update is going to focus on some changes coming to the early game experience, new mission features as well as some UI modifications.
Over the past few weeks I’ve talked about putting an emphasis on the early to mid game experience. This started with my post on Arctia, continued with last week’s post on Vulcan and continues again this week with a look at the starting experience in the Nexus.
Over the last week I’ve done a lot of work on the Nexus. I think everyone can agree the current iteration is clunky, confusing and a bit unforgiving for the newer players. Many players get lost or otherwise stuck in the Nexus and that definitely doesn’t leave a good impression. So I’ve been working on making it a much more accessible and streamlined experience.
Some of the biggest changes so far are changes to the mission flow. A few months back we added in the ability to start and finishing missions on the fly, without the need to dock at a base. Paired with the mission tracker, this offers a very accessible way to get new players oriented with the game. A lot of the Nexus missions are going to use this. This is because docking after EVERY mission really is kind of boring and a little bit frustrating. Why should you have to go back to the previous galaxy to get a mission to kill guys in the next galaxy? You shouldn’t. With the changes, players are really only ever going to dock when they get a new skill or want to buy an upgrade. This will definitely help us establish a flow through the Nexus that we didn’t have before, and make the entire experience more enjoyable for the player.
Along with streamlining the starting experience, I’ve been looking at making the inventory more accessible for new players. To do this, I’ve added some new mission options. First, I’ve added the ability for a mission to equip your item rewards. This is especially useful for the starting side of the Earthforce chain where players were given a surgical laser that was essential to progression, but no help on how to equip it and switch between weapons. Now, we can automatically equip the weapon for them and just let them know via the mission which key they need to use to switch between equipped weapons. Much easier, right? Secondly, I’ve added a new mission goal that requires the player to equip a specific item. By adding new missions with this goal, we can ensure that players open their inventory and explore it a little bit. We can gradually introduce the concept of the inventory in Star Sonata with some helpful hints via mission. We can also use this tool to help explain upgrading your items which absolutely vital at the lower levels of the game.
Speaking of upgrading, one of the most confusing things for a new player is no doubt upgrading their ship. It’s a messy process that involves buying a new ship, finding the right tab on the station, moving all their gear over and reequipping everything. It also means losing any augmenters they may have gotten. To alleviate some of this confusion, at least for the very early game (techs 1 through 3) we are adding a lot more ship upgrade items. Along with this, we are removing the equipment requirement from ship upgrades, and having them only require piloting skill. Finally, we are moving where ship upgrades are listed in the trade bay from the ‘items’ tab to the ‘ships’ tab. These three changes should make getting out of that Zebucart into something useful — like a Wingship — a lot easier for new players, and getting into that new ship will in turn make the Nexus easier for them.
So that’s it for this week’s update. As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the forum post! I’ll be back again next week with another look at what I’ve been working on!
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