Mob Bring back special attacks

Discussion in 'NPCs and Creatures' started by Yzzey, Aug 3, 2016.

  1. Yzzey

    Yzzey Heliosphere

    A lone human walks through the wilderness of Alpha Horsebutt II. At the base of a hill, he sees a small creature. Standing upright and foraging for food. He watches it grab a small mammal and chew on it. Adorable. Wanting to get a closer look, he slowly slides down the hill. As he approaches, his quarry looks up from it's meal and stares him straight in the eye. Hissing, the little beaked biped stalks towards the human with an unusual air of menace. Gulping, the man tries to turn and walk up the hill. He wasn't going to deal with some angry little critter. It was cute. He'd just let it go about its life. He could just walk away and leave it be. Or so he thought. Abruptly, his movement stops. Some otherworldly force is holding his arms in place. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the monster lift its hand as green sparks flicker amidst the warm forest air. As the creature lifts its clawed limbs higher, the man too rises. Until he's sent down hard by the telekinetic force, reducing him into a bloody paste.
    ~~~
    A small army of glitch knights bend down to examine a huge footprint imprinted on the wet soil. The captain, a glitch with a red scarf around his neck, points towards a cluster of trees. He begins walking towards them.

    "Solemn. It's close."

    Without warning, a wall of fire erupts from between the branches, setting a large swathe of the jungle ablaze. Amidst the confusion, a massive monster steps out of the charred foliage. It has the body of a demon. Large spines line its back, along with an unblinking eye on a prehensile tail. It's big. Bigger than anything the glitch knights have ever seen. Bizzarrely, it's white with bands of neon pink. A snouted face akin to that of a tapir watches the destruction, the fires reflecting in it's coal black, beady eyes. It would almost be cute if it weren't for the struggling glitch captain slowly being crunched into scrap under its massive claws. The 'boss' monster makes a bleating noise, before starting towards the rest of the hunting party. They draw their weapons and charge.
    ~~~
    The Floran hunter scowled as he got to his feet. He had fallen into a canyon. Miraculously, he was unharmed. But his gear was scattered everywhere. He reached for his spear, dropped a few steps away. Always prfioritize getting the weapon first. It was a dangerous world, with fire-breathing tapirs and telekinetic chickens. He wouldn't want to be caught off guard by-

    His beloved spear split in two as a sonic wave of sorts sliced clean through the shaft of the spear. He leaped back, gulping. All around him, lining the rim of the canyon, were birds. Hovering in the air with their disgusting insectile wings and their bulbous bodies. The bat-like monsters screeched, and a wave of sound shot towards him. He had nowhere to run as he was cut into pieces by the relentless attacks.
    ~~~

    So, now that the dramatic writing is out of the way, do any of the stories sound familiar to you guys? Maybe memories of playing in beta. Memories of seeing an adorable puppy. Holy shit it's a puppy. A puppy on this strange alien world. You gotta go pet it. You gott- Oh, it's just breathed out liquid nitrogen in your face.

    Mob special attacks were a big part of the game, seriously. Part of starbounds charm came from the randomisation. The generated monsters. Wasn't the system thought out well and boasted to be so great? And it was for a time. The attacks served to do that. Who wouldn't want a pet that was both cute, and could literally create black holes to smite your enemies (And the entire star system if we're going on realism here) with?

    And then everything changed with one of the updates. Monsters were no longer the unique, adorable guys we once knew and loved, and kept around for their ridiculous powers. Gone too, were the minibosses. The large demons who had high health and never despawned, and who dropped cool shit upon death. (Okay I understand the miniboss removal. They were obviously placeholders.) Instead, what we got were boring monsters who could only charge and swoop. Seriously, who's going to want to nerd-pole up to the atmosphere just to get a largeflying monster for its breath attacks? The monsters now are shitty remnants of what they used to be. Sure, the set ones are pretty cool, but wasn't the game's main focus on the old, procedurally generated mobs? Why the change in direction, chucklefish?

    [​IMG]

    When you think of a fire breathing monster this is what it'd look like.
    [​IMG]
    But no, it just runs at you.

    When you look back on it, this type of monster looks familiar. Oh hey, didn't that thing crush you with sheer psionic strength one time a few years back?
    [​IMG]
    It just charges now.

    Woah, I should bring an umbrella to this planet. What if the birds try to vomit blood onto me?
    [​IMG]
    Scratch that. They just swoop down.

    Really though, it's not fun to deal with monsters when there's literally no variety to their moveset. The ones aren't considered cute are just dumped and left behind. There's no incentive to put up with and come to love an ugly monster because you REALLY love what kind of attacks it can pull off.

    [​IMG]
    Seriously look at this shit. It's a conga-line of mobs who all just run flailing until I end their misery.

    Chucklefish, please. I hope you guys can read this suggestion and implement these monsters back with their attacks. On that topic, what happened to evolution anyway? It never happened. With a proper pet system now, it would be great to see that come back. The 'unique' monsters now are unique. One of a kind, I'll give them that. But the old UNIQUE monsters were the real special snowflakes. They were one in a million. Billion. Quadrillion. I don't know how many -illions. Someone did the maths in the Derrick search. There was a reason to go out and catch these once. But now everyone goes for a Fennix. Can't blame them. Fennix are great. But they'll never be my fire-breathing chicken.

    Also, if you've read this far, thanks for taking the time to. And I hope I can get the communiy's support on this. Especially long-time members.

    TLDR: Please add special moves for monsters back. Charging is not fun.

     
    Jappards, Arra, LilyV3 and 1 other person like this.
  2. Jareix Cryvix

    Jareix Cryvix The Waste of Time

    Don't think they wanted to remove special attacks, but they had to for the same reason they had to remove racial weapons....
    Engine rewrites...
    In case you remembered, there were a fuck-ton of special attacks, all of them using what I think was a .monsterattack file or something. Of course, just like weapons to activeitems, monsters had changes of their own too. And unfortunately, CF probably just really didn't have the time to squeeze in everything they wanted without axing other things out and setting them aside for later. Among those things were certain biomes and trees, racial weapons, techs, and monster attacks... However, don't think they are gone forever. Remember, this game is 1.0, but it's still an infant learning to walk. I think it'll remember what it wants to be given time.
     
  3. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    The attacks were most likely only temporarily disabled. Apart from them, I'd also worry about the sprites of randomly-generated monsters, as they currently look out of place due to how the unique ones look like.
     
    Jareix Cryvix likes this.
  4. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    yes they shoudl be back spitting and breathign all weird things at you.event the rainbows.

    But irrc they removed the birds spitting stuff becasue too many complaiend they were "too hard"
     
  5. Omegagreen

    Omegagreen Starship Captain

    The high sky birds spit projectiles, so yeah, why can't ground mobs? Maybe not all of them, only some, should be able to use projectiles, maybe shockwave jumps as well? This would make the procedurally generated monsters a lot more fun to catch.
     

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