I mostly agree, but making me land on boring planets to farm for fuel will not improve the game. It’ll just make it more tedious.
Now, if there was a questline to find and repair or create fuel depots in each system, that could actually be fun.
The problem keeps coming back to planets being really boring outside of a few hotspots. If they solved that problem, a lot of the other problems wouldn’t be nearly as noticeable. But instead, they dug in their heels and declared that real astronauts don’t find them boring. And I’m not even sure I believe that. The first steps were very exciting, but after that, it was mostly just anxiety about dying and making sure they prevent that. They’d actually be fighting down the boredom to make sure they didn’t make a stupid mistake out of complacency.
Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.
That’s a tradition going back to Fallout though. Why should you build a base in Fallout 4? Because you can’t advance the game without doing so. Beyond a crafting station it was completely superfluous. I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
They probably have, but decided to not bother, “too much work” involved. I mean, I can easily think of many ways to make outposts something players would look forward to mechanically:
outpost can create a trade route to a city, lowering prices of certain goods there and/or making new goods appear on the vendors. Making this increase vendors’ credit stock alone would make most players create at least one outpost.
remove outpost engineering skill, let the player buy blueprints to learn new stuff AND also allow the player to buy prefab from vendors, or let the player hire a construction crew to build some stuff instead, such that, when you arrive at the outpost, you’ll see their ship and have X of the bought stuff “in stock” to place “for free”
make the research aspect happen in a crewed outpost with a research lab. Let the npc create an activity/side quest asking for the components. Adding to this, let the player buy stuff and ask it to be delivered to an outpost for a fee, or have a new NPC that is basically a space trucker to make deliveries to your outposts.
I mostly agree, but making me land on boring planets to farm for fuel will not improve the game. It’ll just make it more tedious.
Now, if there was a questline to find and repair or create fuel depots in each system, that could actually be fun.
The problem keeps coming back to planets being really boring outside of a few hotspots. If they solved that problem, a lot of the other problems wouldn’t be nearly as noticeable. But instead, they dug in their heels and declared that real astronauts don’t find them boring. And I’m not even sure I believe that. The first steps were very exciting, but after that, it was mostly just anxiety about dying and making sure they prevent that. They’d actually be fighting down the boredom to make sure they didn’t make a stupid mistake out of complacency.
Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.
That’s a tradition going back to Fallout though. Why should you build a base in Fallout 4? Because you can’t advance the game without doing so. Beyond a crafting station it was completely superfluous. I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
They probably have, but decided to not bother, “too much work” involved. I mean, I can easily think of many ways to make outposts something players would look forward to mechanically: