I’ve been pretty busy the past week on some extremely important and interesting stuff related to the new player experience. I am sure we can all agree this is an area the game needs to improve on, and hopefully this round of changes will help!
Nexus
First, creating a new character is going to be a bit different. When you start your first character, not only will you have a faction choice (Volcom or Cadet), but also a starting ship selection choice. We are introducing three new Zebucart variants each tied to the idea of a focus for new players. In addition to the default Zebucart, we’ll be adding the Heavy Zebucart, the Zebu Freighter and the Zebu Gunship. If it’s not apparent, these are meant to allow players to experience a focus without actually being tied to one.
A very WIP screen of the new build selector.
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The Zebucart won’t receive any changes.
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The Heavy Zebucart will be a slightly slower, more armored Heavy Fighter with a big energy pulse gun superitem.
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The Zebu Freighter will be an even slower, but significantly more spacious Freighter with a special Zebu Drone superitem.
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The Zebu Gunship will be a mini-capship with a missile launcher, a missile superitem (and of course, a Capital Engine).
Expanding on this idea, we will also be adding a bunch of new ships from Techs 1-3 to the Nexus (mainly in the freighter and capital varieties) so players can continue along their ‘focus’ as they progress through the Nexus. When the players are sent to Janitor’s Outpost at level 10, they will be asked to choose their focus. The missions have been rewritten to be more new-player friendly. I hope that adding some new character creation elements and pushing focus choice forward will help new players connect to their character a bit more — as well as make it a bit easier to understand Star Sonata’s rather unique class system.
These aren’t the only changes happening to the Nexus though. Almost as important, we will be offering Drone Deployment and Remote Control in the Nexus. More importantly though, we are changing the way the very first missions work when a new player logs into the game.
I created a new option for galaxies allowing them to specify a mission to be given to players when they enter a galaxy. Using this, when a player enters the starting galaxies, Earthforce Outpost or Volcom Testing Grounds, they will be given a short, interactive mission chain that should help familiarize the controls and the basics of combat. Hopefully this is much more exciting than docking to pick up a mission which is the first thing a new player is required to do now.
Mission Enhancements
Other than some Nexus tweaking, I’ve been working on some other interesting features. If you haven’t done any missions in Subspace, you might not be aware of the auto-complete and auto-start features we have for missions now. They allow players to start and complete missions on the fly. For these, as well as the ‘auto-accept on galaxy entrance’ tag I recently worked on, I’ve added an attribute called “display pop up”. Enabling this for an auto-mission tag means when the mission completes (or starts) it will display a mission dialog in the client, IE, you are getting a “transmission” from the mission giver while you are flying about.
Second, I’ve been working on a feature that might seem more interesting to more players than the above changes — that is an auto-complete feature. If you dock at a space base and accept a mission that you have the ability to complete right away, the mission will be automatically completed. In addition, if the mission is repeatable, it will reopen the mission automatically for you. I am sure the appeal of this feature is instantly understood when it comes to turn-in missions. Instead of sitting and sifting through the mission list in Lyceum and tediously clicking until all 40 of your Avalon Whatever Blueprints are gone, you can quickly turn the entire stack into Mentions.
Hopefully everyone has enjoyed another look into what’s been going on behind the scenes at Star Sonata! Be back next week with another update!
