Just some ideas for the new game

[GLaDOS]

here is a list of things that you guys should add to the new game.

1. Add old concepts, like the TerraFormer, or the Transfuser

2.a money or trading system for special items, Not like v-bucks but more like rupees in botw

3. a jet-like vehicle that could carry resources for early-game stages

4. more base customization

5. player customization, like cosmetics, or a make your-own-character zone

6. Teleporters so that traveling from my base to my friends base would be easier

7. The return of the cyclops

8. adding back the"single celled organism"

9. The atlas

10. Natural Disasters

LOL the devs prob will not respond

[Catalytic]

The terraformer concept is just a practical thing to stretch the terrain polys a bit if needed to get a base component to fit. It's a very logical thing to consider adding.

Money isn't terribly practical if you don't have an actual economy. You're simulating a situation in which up to 4 people are marooned on an alien planet. If you trade, simple trading works. There really is no need for a currency as an intermediary for that kind of trade. To the extent that there is, players can just choose something to use as a currency. (Ex. in Diablo 2, people used Stones of Jordan as a currency for trade).

Base customization is certainly going to be in. Be specific about what you want if you want the artists to have time to create it.

Player customization is a bit trickier. We've had a lot of discussion about that, and my guess is the devs will dig their heels in here and tell people complaining that they will play the character they designed whether they like it or not.

They did add a teleport module in BZ, so it's within the realm of possibility. If the map is really big, it'll certainly be a welcome figure. Though, do remember that each time you use something like this, you have to basically delete the character from their old location, recreate the character in a new location, then have the client redraw the environment around the player, so there's a load screen issue.

Re: the Cyclops and Atlas, see the thread on that. I'm not a supporter. They're too big, too bulky, and too convenient. They make the game too easy and I think a survival game benefits from challenging the player to do dangerous things and risk not surviving. I'd rather see a surface-limited mobile base and a wide selection of undersea vehicles.

Natural disasters depend on how you do them. I'd imagine that screen overlaid weather is an easy enough thing to do. In BZ, you had annoying Blizzards all the time. They were a nuisance more than anything else. But if you wanted to do a proper hurricane or something that actually changed the map, you're now asking for the devs to create multiple iterations of the custom, hand-made map. It can be done, but you'd have limitations in how many such events there are. It'd have to be a major story event like before/after the Aurora explodes or before/after the Sunbeam arrives. That sort of thing.

[Arondil]

Good morning, GLaDOS! How's the testing going?

Originally posted by GLaDOS:

1. Add old concepts, like the TerraFormer, or the Transfuser

That would be nice but there should be limits. Making minor terrain alterations to better accommodate a base is one thing but tunneling from the starter area to the end zone should not be possible.

Originally posted by GLaDOS:

2.a money or trading system for special items

Here we disagree. For me this would break the isolation aspect of the game which I rather cherish. But at this time I don't know much about the premise of the game; if an off-planet trade connection fits into the lore and setting then I would hesitantly accept it.

Originally posted by GLaDOS:

4. more base customization

Where do I sell my soul for this?

Originally posted by GLaDOS:

5. player customization, like cosmetics, or a make your-own-character zone

Where do I sell my first-born child's soul for this?

Originally posted by GLaDOS:

6. Teleporters so that traveling from my base to my friends base would be easier

Given that the map will be larger than the map in either predecessor I think it's a safe bet that there will some way of 'porting. Whether that takes the form of fixed-location teleports like the arches or a mobile device remains to be seen. My personal preference is fixed locations.

Originally posted by GLaDOS:

7. The return of the cyclops

I'm sitting on the fence here. The Cyclops had many rough edges that I found jarring: The small built-in lockers, the way how things I build don't connect properly with the walls, the serif font they used for the compass in an otherwise futuristic cockpit, the lack of strafing capability. It was convenient but it never had that special place in my heart.

Originally posted by GLaDOS:

10. Natural Disasters

If they are required for plot reasons (like the avalanche in an early version of Below Zero) they will be in the game.
As random events they are problematic because I would be slightly miffed if my carefully built and customised main base fell victim to a seaquake without indication that such things might occur in the area.
If, however, the PDA warns in advance that an area might be liable to (say) meteor showers and I have the means to meteor-proof my base then I would love to build an observatory and watch the show!

[aeroripper]

I imagine the devs have many ideas of their own, that's the easy part of game development.

[admiral1018]

I'd like to see some novel tech rather than just a rehash of the stuff we saw from SN1 and BZ, especially around inventory management.

For example, and I'm not sure how fun this would be, but what about some type of storage drone that could be stashed on the Tadpole that would automatically return resources back to your base while you were out? This wouldn't be so much storage that that it was game breaking, but it would extend your time away from home in a meaningful way for when you're farming and have a full inventory.

In other areas, I wouldn't mind seeing better inventory management integrated into the tech tree. The final state of inventory management and storage should be the starting state in the new game, and it should only improve from there.

[Catalytic]

It's important with any of that sort of thing to ground the experience in practicality. Inventory management is an essential part of any RPG experience, particularly in a survival game. You just can't carry everything. Having to make difficult choices strategically so you don't die is a key part of the experience.

Anything you do to make that process easier has to be earned.

• Additional storage space in the player's inventory
  
• Additional storage space on a vehicle
  
• Additional storage space in a base
  
• Anything that allows you to economize your space or stack more items of the same type together
  
• Improved accessibility to all your storage reservoirs when crafting (ie teleporting materials)

All of these are conveniences that make managing a massive bank of resources easier to manage and making a complicated crafting system less onerous. Again, because of the inherent nature of a survival game, giving you things that dramatically reduce or remove fundamental challenges in that experience (we call it QoL stuff) has to be something given only after a player demonstrates mastery of the challenge. The player should have to prove that managing this challenge is trivial, then get the QoL boost as a reward for it.

On this, SN and BZ never really pushed this nearly as hard as other games. There's a very simple resource system and a very simple crafting system in both games. There's less of a need for QoL benefits when the system itself is that simple. I'm hoping SN2 embraces a more complex crafting system where key tools and vehicles have a level of difficulty that's more like where the Seamoth and Prawn Suit were as a baseline, and the real rewards as difficult as the Cyclops or even more so. If this is the case, those QoL measures start to look like real in-game milestones and rewards.

I also like the idea of:

• Dedicated farming tools, something that's task-specific. So your indoor farming of terrestrial plants uses one toolset, while your outdoor/seabound alien farming requires different tools that have to be researched/discovered/invented.
  
• Dedicated farming vehicles for open water farming/fishing vs cave-diving for minerals at various depths
  
• Avoid the one-size-fits-all solution like the prawn suit was in BZ. Once you got it (and it was really early), you basically could play the whole game in it both underwater and on land. It made the game trivial
  
• Alien tech when "magical" properties are needed. For example, BZ's recyclotron that disintegrated anything into its components was a good alien tech, as was the teleporter. Specific to crafting, the ability to access all your storage as a common bank is a great late-game function. The Quantum locker was a cool concept, but it probably needed to be a base feature you put in a room dedicated to storage and crafting. Having it be relegated to outdoors only and only 16 slots was a bit of a pain. It solved the problem of making it mobile, but didn't solve the logistical issue of having storage across multiple bases in multiple zones.
  
  Again, great ideas there, just need a few tweaks to really make them feel like the reward they were supposed to be.