The research system

[Caddrel]

Played a fair bit of the early access release yesterday. Was very impressed by how the game held up, and the mining & tutorial systems were very well polished and intuitive.

However ran into an immediate wall. To quote a Steam review that I reflects my own views:

the "research" system. This, of all things, immediately turned me off to playing the game. The fact that you need to grind for XP to unlock ship components for me feels like it defeats the purpose of a creative building system.

Initial impressions are that the research system is poorly implemented and unnecessary. Poorly implemented; big UI issues, such as it's not even clear at the most basic level (tooltips) what parts are unlocked by what research. Unnecessary; building ship parts is already gated behind material collection. All the research system does at present is add MORE material collection.

Currently one of the best parts of your game (the building system) is completely inaccessible to new players. As a query, how many hours does someone need to play to be able to research the parts to put together the most basic ship?

For examples of how research systems can work effectively in a resource driven game, look at Satisfactory, Factorio.

Solution: Given developer time constraints at the moment, I'd advise simply removing the entire system. Either unlock all research for all players, or if a developer is particularly wedded to the current system, be far more generous with the initial research that is unlocked (so people can mess around with building a ship and modifying the base ship).

I'm concerned that if the research system is not fixed ASAP people will just bounce off the game.

 

[Third Mattress]

I was looking for a post like this, I essentially spent all day today trying to complete the tutorial with some major hiccups. Got to the ship research bit and realized that there was no way to even wire a ship up without investing a significant amount of time into going down a separate research tree. so not only do you have to unlock the modules to build but the tools to build them as well. This seems like a major design flaw.

I've spent what is essentially five hours in a tutorial and looked down the barrel of a another 10 hour grind to just be able to get the parts to make my own ship? Walling off the core gameplay with a grind seems pretty short sighted. I was hoping to at least be able to kill some time doing some mindless player versus player battling but I can't even get a gun to shoot with.

Worse then that I think I need to restart the game to even be able to mine because of weird building hijinks. (half of my ship disappeared.)I think they want players to fill the market with their products and establish an economy but systems like this always end up being exploited like crazy where there's no baseline for commerce. I'd hate to get scalped for thrusters in my silly little space game.

 

[Lukas04]

You dont need to research things to get access to them, you can get design Blueprints and buy them in the ship designer (works for single parts too), buy premade ships from ship shops or buy things from the auction house without researching anything. Researching things is usefull for Easy Build modules and building things away from Origin.

As someone that played Closed alpha a lot, i kinda like the system, it gives you something to work towards. There was almost zero progression within the Closed Alpha. I think the costs are way to high, but its generaly a nice system to have.
What i can also agree on changing is to unlock tool and fuel rod research by default, since that can be a bit annoying, though you can still just get fuel rods from the space ship designer too.

 

[Caddrel]

A sense of progression and achievement are good things and should be present in the game. However there are better ways of providing those that don't involve resource grinds that are hostile to new players.

A good progression system can guide a new player into the game without overwhelming or limiting them.

 

[Lukas04]

Again, the system can be avoided in many ways. I agree its to grindy, and the game doesnt really help a lot on knowing of those, but they exist.

 

[blazemonger]

Right now the whole tech tree serves no purpose at all, you are basically forced to mine ore, then just craft stuff for the sake of crafting stuff and sell it to vendor for much less value than the ore you collected to craft it to begin with in most cases.

A reasearch tree for the model Starbase uses can still work but it shoud be much more straight forward, much like how Space Engineers does this, you unlock new items by using/crafting certain items which unlock that section. As you start building, you will need these elements and so you will unlock more advanced tech by using these "gatekeeper" elements.