Originally posted by MadLight:

I have quite a lot of things to say about this mod after playing it through multiple times. First things first - the mod reminds me of a jank 16-bit era game. It's clearly was made with lots of love and passion, but some things just don't stack up.

Let me start with my grievances.
1. Planetary Dungeons mid-bosses and Bosses.
They are all incredibly well animated. Unfortunately, they are not really fun to fight. In essence, all mid bosses have the same moveset with different timings and are all fought in the exact same way - with melee only. And not only that, you actually would do better to bring a completely different set of armor and trinkets to them to have a chance at beating them flawlessly.
When i did, i felt nothing. The three bosses that i beat like that were more like a test of my reflexes than knowledge of the fight itself. Instead of rewarding, it left me feel frustrated.
Maybe it's because i don't really like the melee combat, even though it's miles better than vanilla one.
Maybe it's because i don't enjoy having to drop the fight after making a mistake and dying to a split-second attack when the boss is at less than 10% health and having to now scour the planets to find the entrance and do it all over again.
Yes, you don't have to flawless these bosses, but then the fight is just me beating my head against the wall again and again and again until i "win" and leave with scraps that they have graced upon me for not turning the game off.

2. Harsh disconnect from vanilla game.
GiC is not Starbound. It simply uses the engine and it's assets to make something else. My grievance with this is that it does not go all the way. I feel like it should completely change the vanilla game at this point, instead of sitting at the back corner with the mindset of "the player will just switch game mode when they want to play GiC".

Adding to this point, i really don't get the usage of custom races and all the clothing being made for them only, when most people (i think at least) will just play with their favorite race with a "vanilla" head and body.

3. Ammo and Commodity.
This is a lesser one to be sure since it's relatively well balanced. The ammo problem exists mostly because of the points 1 and 2. Guns are essentially useless against bosses (yes, even with attachments and trinkets) and run out too quickly if you use them on vanilla planet. Commodities are basically there to sell or dismantle, but the problem is that you really don't need the resources that you get from dismantling them.


The positives.
1. Cutscenes, animations, voiceover.
They are all really charming and i love them. The pixel art representing characters is also well-made. Cannot say the same about the custom race sprites, sorry.

2. Main story missions.
Now they are much, much better than planetary dungeons. First mission being a sprawling, interconnected level is really good and the second main bossfight was really cool. What else can i say? If only the planet dungeons were the same.

3. Planets.
They are the the reason why i keep playing this mod, not going to lie. Unlike the dungeons in them, they are also very well made and paced. If only there were more randomness in their chunks. A certain Crusade planet dungeons with a mark is also insanely cool, just as the planet itself.
This is a smaller grievance related to my 2 one - i wish there were more micro and macro (the size of an city) dungeons like that on vanilla planets.

4. Dungeons.
Even though i really dislike the bosses in them, the dungeons themselves are, again, very well made and paced, even if somewhat linear. The Vault dungeon is seriously one of the better ones... aside from the final boss. See grievance 1.

All in all, i really like this mod but some decisions make me scratch my head.

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Thank you for your time.

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Bosses

1a) While I get the point here, it would be like saying Iudex Gundyr and the Lothric Twin Princes are "the same" because they include a mix of thrusts, slashes, and sweeps, "just with different timings". This seems to be more of a personal "idea" of how a boss "should work", which is precisely what actual souls-bosses (at least, Bloodborne and beyond) started to test players on.

1b) You unlock the ability to replay boss fights directly without needing to go through planets after completing GiC's 2nd story chapter at the Gazrian Portal Lab.

Again, I understand the point here, especially as to some there doesn't seem to be any point in really "continuing" to fight if the flawless incentive is gone. GiC is designed to be replayed, and that was the intent of the flawless system (to come back later with better trinkets and skills). Of course, nothing's explicitly telling you to "beat a boss", but the way it was intended was that we expected players to continue practicing a boss even if they "failed", rather than throwing hands and giving up on putting any effort.

1c) Parts of these sound more like personal grievances with gameplay tastes, but I'll admit that running pure gun builds against bosses are still hard to do without applying effects like corrosion and overcharging, along with the exotic underbarrels (but the viable options are limited). Ranged builds are a little more viable if someone else (player or otherwise) can tank for you, but that's obvious.

Sirbucketkicker (actual dev) is working on gun parries to make it smoother to use firearms overall, which is the main reason why ranged builds are so non-viable until much later on where you can just tank and do other shenanigans with bleed trinkets.

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Story Missions

2) These actually had less time allocated to them, funnily enough. These were not as affected by certain "demands" made by now-former "advisors" (so-called devs who did literally nothing but bark orders at others). I personally hate the state Khurtovyna is in thanks to the demands made by others (even if I did all of the work).

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RNG, Disconnect, Vanilla, and Armor

3a) Randomness is just a matter of how much labor I can allocate. Without actual funding, how much work I can put into different areas with vastly different aesthetics can vary heavily. This was especially true in the earlier days where I could ill-afford to really stick around on a specific area for too long.

3b) We can't put any of the content on vanilla worlds because people already went into a major uproar about being "instant killed from offscreen". This also ties in to the "major disconnect". Absolutely there is a disconnect, but only because the absolute vocal majority despise us anyways and that we NEED to keep the ability to "switch modes" available. There are many who only want to use the guns and play the worlds with their other mods,

This very much leads into a "cannot please everyone" mentality, of which it doesn't matter whether this project leans into pleasing vanilla, sitting on a fence, or going all out, there's still going to be a large majority who despise that decision no matter which way.

3c) We did not maliciously "make the clothes smaller so nobody else could use them." This was done out of an artistic styling choice for smaller heads. Body armor can still be worn by humanoids, and the head armors can ironically still fit on the Avali, but since most races follow the "normal" bobblehead sizes this means GiC headwear typically don't fit on them. Again, not out of "malicious intent", but out of artistic style.

Which, yes, many have already shown their discontent at the racial sprites, just as many have already shown their love of it.

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Vaults and Detail

4) The vault dungeon is relatively "freeform" because it actually just takes from the vanilla ancient gateways and adds a few more elements like the ladders and offices. Though there are about 30 or so "intermediate" pieces.

It's either detailing each piece impeccably at the cost of far less pieces (hence the linearity in many non-overworld dungeons), or vomiting out bland empty rooms that "technically let you go in all directions". Without actual funding, I can't spend all my time making content every month.

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All in all, I appreciate you going for this review and saying what you thought (I could've really easily just deleted this), even if I will disagree a little to point out that a few of your points are very much leaning on the heavily-subjective side.

I'm still a solo dev (the other guy is mostly for small complex operations, I do all the heavy lifting), so it's probably obvious where that passion came from.

But hey, obscure mods for an obscure game.

Thanks for the reply. Well, obviously they are going to be subjective as i am not a professional reviewer.

I guess i should have pointed out that my main grievance with DS-like bosses is not so much the fighs themselves, but the fact that they require a completely different playstyle when compared to vanilla and even the rest of the mod somewhat.

Also never said that there was malice in the making of clothing, it's not like you are FORCED to wear them without any vanity. So really, it's a small thing.

And finally i think that if people don't want to have the main mod influencing vanilla too much because they are getting "instant killed from offscreen", and need to have the mode switch... why not take the advantage of modularity and create an addon that does change vanilla and removes the disconnect?
Those who don't want it simply wouldn't download it and both sides will be somewhat pleased.
Yes, i get that this too takes time and effort and there's not much resources, but it is one way to do it.

Originally posted by MadLight:

Thanks for the reply. Well, obviously they are going to be subjective as i am not a professional reviewer. :reimu2:

I guess i should have pointed out that my main grievance with DS-like bosses is not so much the fighs themselves, but the fact that they require a completely different playstyle when compared to vanilla and even the rest of the mod somewhat.

Also never said that there was malice in the making of clothing, it's not like you are FORCED to wear them without any vanity. So really, it's a small thing.

And finally i think that if people don't want to have the main mod influencing vanilla too much because they are getting "instant killed from offscreen", and need to have the mode switch... why not take the advantage of modularity and create an addon that does change vanilla and removes the disconnect?
Those who don't want it simply wouldn't download it and both sides will be somewhat pleased.
Yes, i get that this too takes time and effort and there's not much resources, but it is one way to do it.

Well, I guess I'd rather trust you more than a bigshot name, so there's that concession on my end.

> Adding to this point, i really don't get the usage of custom races and all the clothing being made for them only, when most people (i think at least) will just play with their favorite race with a "vanilla" head and body.

Regardless of misinterpretation or not and whether "malice" was too harsh of a term, that's what I got out of it when asked about the "confusion" of the alternate proportions. No problem otherwise, answer's the same.

The "mode" at the moment is actually that all GiC content is located in its own planets, a tiny handful of space encounters, and the properly-labelled story. This means that mode-switching is a matter of choosing to interact with GiC content or not, though there've been plans to dissociate from the vanilla storyline in regards to the GiC storyline (make it more accessible + not force players to play through the vanilla line).

This whole "modularity" thing is mostly a matter of complex "hows" rather than "why not?".

That's all the plans I have for now chief. I'm still in the process of sweeping through the whole mod which has been an ordeal now taking a few months worth of time. I guess I got nothing much else to say then other than I appreciate you taking the time to talk here.

>This whole "modularity" thing is mostly a matter of complex "hows" rather than "why not?"
Oh, definitely. Thinking about it, the range of engagement in GiC is vastly different from vanilla encounters so slapping random GiC dungeons with enemies on the planets wouldn't really work. Partially because of how they generate and partially because of the vanilla systems.

That would require a complete rework of vanilla armor and hazard systems, together with generation algorithms, which is probably beyond the scope of even full mod teams. Hell, even FU builds upon existing systems, but then again, FU is giant blob of "appropriated" content.

You can probably add smaller ruins or houses that lead into separated instances on vanilla planets, but that again - requires time and work to build and plan out and is more about content filling than anything else.

But yeah, thanks for the reply and i too appreciate your dedication and passion for what you are doing. All in all, the mod is fun and different from any other on here. There are people making good addons for it already, and i really want to see it grow. Cheers!