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Playing the campaign for the first time and I am really struggling and want to have a bit of a rant. In Sandbox I made it to all of the Planets and Moons (one way), but I can't seem to build anything that can get to the Moon (let alone back) in this, which stops me from getting much in the way of science. I felt the demo was perfect for an introduction - you had a few different but distinct fuel tanks and engines, several decouplers, a single capsule, a parachute, landing legs, and SAS and RCS stuff - everything you needed to get into orbit and even to the moon and back. In that I flew higher and higher, got into space on a ballistic trajectory, then into orbit, then into an orbit and return in a few hours, and was basically sold on the game before I ever got to the moon, but if that demo was this campaign I'd never have picked it up. You start with no radial decouplers, which prevents you from building anything with staging or boosters at first. You have absolutely nothing in the control category until the third set of unlocks (which is crazy, surely those aids are the exact things that new players should use? My big rockets are tipping over on the way up and I can't do anything but watch - I feel I'm being punished for things that are completely out of my control). You have no power generation or ability to increase power storage until the third tier again, which is crazy when you have only fifty power, which is used for the only way of keeping your ship on course and transmitting science (which transmits so much that it kills your ship). Like, maybe it's trying to disincentive you from transmitting, but that's an arse-backwards way of handling it, simply swapping the battery and the antenna unlocks and making it unavailable at the start would be so much better. It just feels so grindy and artificially padded - too much stuff locked away behind high requirements, designed to give the Abyssal Lurkers and Scott Manleys something else to do for another XX hours of Early Access rather than actually building towards something structured and accessible.
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Apr 20, 2014 19:20
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 11:25 |
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sckye posted:Actually, that's not really a concern. If you tip your rocket right, you don't need to touch the controls or use SAS at all, assuming it's balanced (and isn't a flying brick). It will continue to tip over gradually, the rate of which you can control with thrust. Also, the alternator on the engine will make electricity concerns a non-issue. Do you not get that these are really unintuitive considering the rest of the game though? I know how to make balanced rockets, as I said, I've gotten to all of the planets, but it's crazy that the new experience requires new players to understand how to balance their ship perfectly and control their manoeuvring with gimballed thrust (the only way I can think of a player even learning about engines having gimbals is randomly right-clicking on liquid and solid rockets on the launchpad, it's certainly not covered in any tutorial). Doesn't it make far more sense to give new players all of the assistance they'd need early on and then allow them to do without later on, than to demand they do it without aid and then give them ways of making it easier later? As to using your rocket to charge your electricity, that's teaching players something that's completely counter-intuitive to how most people are going to be generating power through the rest of the game. Isn't it design 101 to make the first encounter with a mechanic consistent with how it's used in future? I really hope this stuff is a first draft, because for someone who likes the game and stuck 150 hours into Sandbox mode, it's a series of arbitrary hoops to jump through, I can't imagine how confusing it'd be for someone genuinely new to the game who didn't know these mechanics. RubberJohnny fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 22:10
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OK, I was a bit premature with my bashing of the campaign in this, once you get to the Mun and Duna and start bringing in big science it works well and is fun. That whole Kerbin stage still seems spectacularly misjudged, whoever thought taking a soil sample next to the launchpad was an intuitive first step for new players should have their dev tools taken away. There are some key parts I'd move around, and it needs a balance pass, but there's a decent foundation there.
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Apr 23, 2014 18:48
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Icons for atmospheric entry would be good for those who don't have the heights of all the atmospheres memorised, it'd be nice to show how aerobreaking would affect your flight path as well (although I imagine that's quite difficult to implement). It would also be good to mark the duration of burns, particularly long ion burns, on the orbits visually. Again, probably a bit difficult because of the constant acceleration, but even just marking a segment length based on current speed * duration would give the player a better understanding than the current single point for something that takes 6+ minutes. Ultimately, I've love the ability to select a world, moon or space station and have the game plot the course (to some default per planet orbital altitude and inclination), leaving the execution to the player, and the manual fiddling for course corrections or changes of plan. That's probably a bit of a bigger task.
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May 27, 2014 10:27
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A small one would be auto-zooming the camera based on the size of the spaceship loaded in the VAB or launchpad - they fill the whole screen at the moment and I tend to destroy bits by clicking. Not as much of a problem now you can Ctrl-Z and save subassemblies, but still. I think the stage notifiers down the side (what are these called) could do with some simplification - it's odd that multiple parts of the same type on the same stage get combined, but only when not-active. If the fuel counter for those six engines is the same, maybe they can share the same gauge, auto-splitting if one gets heated differently or fuel is manually pumped out? I'd like to be able to minimise non-active stages to decrease clutter, both in the VAB and in flight. Save whether they're shown or minimised between sessions/ships. If a stage has entirely binary propulsion (i.e. SRBs), maybe hide the throttle indicator?
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May 27, 2014 11:46
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