Praise for Starcom: Unknown Space

[King[Big]Mac]

I've been posting a lot of feedback and criticism on this forum as well as submitting a lot of reports but now that I've completed the game (with only the rarest stuff remaining to be done) I wanted to counterbalance that with well-deserved praise.

In my opinion there are three core pillars of enjoyment to be found in Starcom: Unknown Space:
1) Exploration
2) Combat
3) Story

Exploration is clearly at the forefront of what this game is offering, and it offers plenty. It evoked feelings of Star Trek, which I love, immediately, although with a militaristic slant like in episodes where the Enterprise finds itself in an alternate timeline where the Federation is losing a war with the Klingon Empire.
In some sense there is nothing revolutionary on display here; you find wormholes and nebulae, explore strange new worlds and seek out new civilizations, with the graphics themselves unsurprisingly not being at the level of triple-A budget games. However even with limited resources the team managed to create beautiful visuals which I often found surprisingly dazzling (great particle effects) and a sense of discovery in the vein of classic science fiction.
By exploration I also mean uncovering mysteries and the very fact that this game is filled with what turn out to be puzzles and riddles took me by surprise in the best way possible. The initial plethora of one-and-done anomalies made me slow to realize there are actually many which hint at further interactions, and the subtlety demonstrated here was impressive and often clever.
Having artifacts be a frequent physical milestone is satisfying and looking through your cargo as the game progresses at your increasing hoard is cool.

Combat is the least robust pillar but what is here is fun and relatively varied. It's a solid foundation with basic tactics that feels good to play around with. Fighting is in of itself well executed and just flying around blasting things is enjoyable. Destroyed pieces falling off damaged enemies really adds to the experience. It looks good too, with great explosion effects. There are enough types of enemies and weapons to keep things fresh till the very end.
I'm considering ship design as part of combat, and I am a sucker for building stuff and optimizing designs and this game delivers on that front. The tech unlock system is engaging and I think it was an unexpectedly good decision to tie research points to exploration. It not only creates a tangible reward for successfully finding new things but creates a natural sense of progression in an otherwise (very) open world.

But where the game truly shines brightest is the writing. The story is well done, if somewhat straightforward when it comes to good guys vs. bad guys, but the way it's delivered is superb. It's the writing quality itself, working within the constraints of paragraph-sized chunks, that's outstanding. I learned a fair few words playing this game, which is always a pleasure, and they never felt crammed in for the sake of obscurity to boot! Plenty of appropriate technical language that most assuredly did not feel like techno-babble (even though personally I'm partial to techno-babble) enhanced the atmosphere greatly. Returning to the plot, it does have some twists and turns, and all of it congeals excellently into fine world-building. Following along with the revelations and forming ideas about what's going on is one of the strongest parts of this game. Starcom could be called a visual novel, and it wouldn't be a gibe. I've read my share of inferior full-length sci-fi novels. This is science-fiction created by someone who knows what they're doing.
And all this presented largely in the voices of some well-written characters. Having them occasionally say something in a pop-up went a long way to making the game world feel lively. This is where the comparisons to Star Trek are best, because the game succeeds in creating the sense that you're commanding a crew of highly trained and competent professionals in their respective fields, all dedicated to a noble mission. Regarding the point about the story having black and white morals, I don't entirely mind this as it works in the classic Trek tradition of resolute characters with sound ethical principles seeking to apply them in novel circumstances.
The strong writing as well as characters are what make this game stand out. This is why I think the series should double down and expand on these aspects. I would love to see more RPG-lite or full blown RPG systems, with more choices and narrative branching. The skill check system is - let's be honest - serviceable. There are strange design decisions which appear incomplete such as characters losing HP during an interaction which has seemingly no consequences as right after the interaction ends the player just waits for them to heal up passively. These interactions ("away missions") could be just as exciting as space combat if they had more coherent and developed mechanics. Lastly, it would be fantastic to have dynamic character relationships (and I'm not saying that because I want to romance Dr. Rama, why would you even think that?), which would really tie together the experience of leading a crew on a mission of peaceful exploration and scientific inquiry. A cast of characters which, while all having the same central goal, have their own ideas and attitudes about how things should be done. Just as Star Trek was an at times laughably low budget TV show which nevertheless managed to capture the imagination of millions with lofty visions of the future, creative science-fiction and most of all intelligent writing, Starcom is a series which, despite it's budget, captured my imagination the same way.


To my understanding it is Kevin who besides being lead Dev wrote the game. Congratulations Kevin.

[King[Big]Mac]

Aaand because I can't help myself I wrote down a bunch of my thoughts on how I imagine the game could be better:

I see room for improvement in the basic means of navigation and how sense of scale is created. I find it repetitive to scan every single planet I encounter by physically flying to it and pressing a button. I think a better system would be to have sensors (which may be separate from other sensors and which increase in range/capabilities as the game progresses or tech is unlocked which is already the case) which passively scan surroundings for "anomalies" which of course in game terms mean points of interest and reveal them to the player automatically. This would have two big effects: eliminating the unnecessary manual button press and more importantly making spaceflight far more freeform. Currently it feels rote to fly to every planet like some optimized autonomous exploration drone acting out an algorithm and frankly really takes me out of the immersion of just soaring through space and appreciating it's grandeur.
Alongside this I also offer a second suggestion which is increasing the scale of the game by greatly increasing the number of star systems and planets and other celestial bodies, ideally with orbital rotation. The second suggestion I realize, especially orbiting bodies, is probably a stretch goal so to speak in terms of budget and I imagine the devs would have already done so if they could. Nevertheless I make it to draw attention to the big effect such an improvement would have on the reinforcing the sense to the player that they are exploring the unknown. I want to clarify I'm not just idly saying "more anomalies more content" but specifically that the amount of "content" the game offers is good and what should be increased is the ratio of non-interactive "background" objects to interactive anomalies. It feels totally unimmersive and weird to have literally flown to every star by the end of the game since as we all know space is proverbially enormous with an ungraspable number of stars. I see that there are points of light in the actual background as one travels around but actually had to check to make sure that's what they're supposed to be because otherwise they look like an animated wallpaper. What I envision is flying through space passing many stars that one never visits while passive scanners reveal points of interest at a range which typically covers multiple star systems. Most stars should never be visited by the player by the end, which I recognize would certainly require procedural generation and be a great task. The passive scanning would also alleviate what was one of the main things detracting from my enjoyment of the game which is the worry of missing out. Missing something that is left to press "x" on and see a dialogue blurb some "content" that has yet to be completed. This game is a small nightmare for anyone with completionist tendencies such as myself. (I loled at the anomaly in the void effect slowing nebula referencing a captain who insisted to his crew the difficulty of the trek assures there's something to be found. so I know the devs know where I'm coming from)
I imagine there is a sound rationale for why the system was designed as is. Having to press "x" on a planet by being so close ensures a player will see that planet, many of which are quite pretty, and perhaps some get a sense of gratification from having sort of checked something off the list definitively. For me this sense of gratification was quickly superseded by the monotony I described above. Besides that, having an entirely passive system would be boring and make the player feel as if they have no agency. I know this, but the press "x" to scan system only creates the illusion of player agency and should ideally be replaced by something truly interactive, such as: more involved flight controls with many more and different hazardous regions that must be actively navigated and prepped for with equipment and upgrades. Drones that the player dispatches from the main ship and do scouting of their own. Random encounters. More ways for the ship to degrade on a journey than the only one currently in the game, losing support crew, with the possible inclusion of "supplies" that deplete and must be replenished at bases of operation. Just some ideas.
The truth is I know we can all endlessly imagine a game that is "grander" and "bigger" "better" as a "space opera" *cough* Star Citizen development hell *cough* which is why I'm trying to make fairly concrete and hopefully actionable suggestions for any potential sequel. Procedural generation enabling an order of magnitude increase in background objects for instance would be a difficult, but hopefully not inaccessible undertaking which I think would definitely be worthwhile.
As a minor point it would be cool if artifacts were more interactive in whatever way: whether it's combining them once you have enough (actually I thought that's what will happen with the Talonian fragments, I thought at the end you would find a Remnant foundry or factory and would put a Talonian together), or being able to actually use them like not just finding a missile warhead and being able to research that weapon but finding a unique weapon you can mount on your ship or some other component with utility.

Similarly I will draw attention to an aspect of combat that is less obvious in terms of room for improvement, hopefully delivering useful criticism in the process.
What I refer to is the fact that the player's ship does not obey the same rules as enemies. Normally in a game that means enemies have an unfair advantage but in an unexpected twist here it's the player who is cheating. Why does the player ship not fall apart when sustaining damage? When damaged, all other ships eventually have modules become destroyed and fall off the ship or disappear generally permanently, whereas the player's ship has components reach 0 HP, become nonfunctional, and stop blocking damage but not actually become visually or permanently destroyed. This is really dissapointing and makes victory feel cheap and unearned. My suggestion: make it so that the player and enemies play by the same rules generally and the rule should be: modules DO become destroyed both for visual and gameplay purposes but semi-permanently. Now here there are many options for implementation but I imagine something where destroyed modules can still be fully repaired but a) are repaired much more slowly (1/2 the rate or less) and b) do nothing but block damage and slow the ship down while being repaired from total destruction until back to 100% HP. Maybe there are modules (such as armor) that are exceptions to being slower to repair from total destruction, and there should probably be a hierarchy of priorities for module repair which the player can alter where individual modules get repaired in order instead of all modules being repaired until they get to 100% simultaneously.
Would it be annoying to have hostiles regenerate fully from taking great damage? Would it make battles tedious and take forever? It's all a matter of implementation and balancing the numbers: the key is to make victory feel deserved by having the player obey the same rules for combat. I like the module destruction system and it's a waste of interesting gameplay mechanics not to mention beautiful visuals as well as tension to have the player ship ignore it. Yet another benefit is it would eliminate the possibility of anticlimactically "cheesing" combat by deliver permanent damage to enemies only to flee and regenerate fully while the enemy cannot enabling the slow destruction of virtually arbitrarily more powerful foes through death by a thousand cuts.
Regarding the tech unlock system and ship design I think the game should lean into not handing out enough research points for everything by making it more possible to specialize, especially with more incremental and passive upgrades. What I mean is, I don't think a total ship redesign should be so necessary to significantly improve your ship, but it currently is. This is because new components have different shapes and sizes and in the case of weapons and engines higher heat generation. I don't mind the different shapes that keeps things interesting but I think it would be better to give players more opportunity to make a design they find aesthetically pleasing and then just keep improving that through passive tech unlocks. It should be telegraphed to the player, without the player having to infer, that there won't be enough research points by the end even with exhaustive exploration to unlock everything, and then show the player a tree with far longer "branches" as in instead of 5 unlocks leading into each other in a row in plasma turrets 10 for instance. While there is satisfaction in unlocking the entire tech tree, if the game isn't going for that anyway it's better to give player more freedom, as currently it's basically always max out hull size, survivability and maneuverability, and then choose 3 or so of the bottom 6 categories (fixed guns through shields) to fill out. I'd like to be able to say screw it I don't want any survivability just weapons or vice versa and actually have things to spend those research points I won't be using on.
Another minor point is the trade system which I think is nice and better than just some single currency such as "credits" but which is currently severely lacking in quality of life features. The tech unlock for seeing relative prices is crucial for making that playable and I like that it's a tech unlock but that's the last of QOL when there should be more such as data displaying the prices of goods in all known markets (the very fact that I felt forced to write down how many markets I had found because actually there is no list in game is bad). I get that this isn't a trading game and I'm not saying it should aspire to be one but having to fly around to known markets just to see and compare prices is busy work and wastes the players time.

None of this is to suggest that the developers did a poor job. On the contrary, their achievement is great and made all the more so given the resources at their disposal.

[justkevin]

Thanks I really appreciate this!