Incline Colony Ship RELEASE THREAD

[Beans00]

So Colony Ship was the last good game that I have played.

If you think this pile of shit was good, you must not have played many good RPGs.

 

[axedice]

An incredible game, so first of all thanks Vault Dweller , Elhoim and the team, for keeping the bar so high under these circumstances. I haven't been able to follow the progress of Iron Tower in the past couple of years, I know you will not be releasing AoD2 due to how the first one was received so that's a bummer, but I sincerely hope CS will provide you with the necessary funds to keep on developing games.

While the game is amazing overall, there are a some places to improve as well. However, the character system is not one of them. Feats on leveling and skill gains on use with a wide variety of builds and items to complement them, is one of the best ones I've seen in an RPG. Truly well done. The overall story and writing are also exceptional, as expected from an Iron Tower game.

I think the weakest point of the game is exploration. I can understand that climbing, squeezing and crawling etc. animations can be expensive to implement, it might have been better to remove those obstacles altogether for a better feeling of exploration, maybe except for the ones with difficult encounters afterwards. Regular obstacles on the map that teleported you to the other side are certainly boring. And the graphics are kind of weird sometimes. While the overall quality is good, textures are somehow blended together when you zoom out, so it is difficult to see an underpass from a wall sometimes, however this is not the case when you zoom in.

I have mixed feelings about the factions and their motivations though. Especially compared to AoD. I'll quote from Marat from the other topic

AoD had two parallel storylines, the one of whichever faction you aligned with and the one with the temple, whilst CS has just the one - and it is centered on a piece of technology that's the be-all, end-all of the setting. You get considerably less variance over the course of the story compared to AoD. You always visit the same locations and see largely the same things in them, when AoD showed you different storyline in each of the major cities and you could observe and influence events unfolding from different perspectives - a feature CS sorely lacks. I can't help but think it is what AoD would be like if you only had the quest for the temple.

I think a strong sense of involvement is lacking from the factions. In AoD , it was easy to play the part of a trader, a soldier, operative of a noble house etc. due to the initial story hooks and they got even better with possible betrayals later. Here, all we have is assholes that you meet halfway through the game, trying to uphold power with bankrupt ideologies while sacrificing their minions. I can see the grim appeal of reality here, as history and present is pretty much the same and the future of humankind will quite probably be the same as well. However, none of the factions offered a compelling reason to really ally with them, unless you're roleplaying as a caricature fascist, librul or religious nut. I agree with Marat here that the story would have progressed better if the factions were implemented earlier, with varying quests that bind your fate to theirs.

Overall I had a great time playing the game, trying to figure out the combat system and learning the history and mission of the ship. Hopefully we will get other games likes this in the future.

 

[Vault Dweller]

However, none of the factions offered a compelling reason to really ally with them...

You aren't allying with a faction as you're nobody but selling the machine to the lesser evil (or whoever strong arms you into selling the machine to them).

I agree with Marat here that the story would have progressed better if the factions were implemented earlier, with varying quests that bind your fate to theirs.

AoD was focused on the factions at the expense of everything else. Most side locations were very small and had a single point of interest/interaction as we didn't have time to do more.

 

[thesecret1]

You aren't allying with a faction as you're nobody but selling the machine to the lesser evil

That's the same thing for all intents and purposes. You pick a faction and help it to victory by running missions for it and fighting for it, while locking yourself out of content with the other factions. That the MC's motivation is just money or choosing the lesser evil (supposedly - player's motivation is unknown by definition) is irrelevant.

 

[Vault Dweller]

That's the same thing for all intents and purposes. You pick a faction and help it to victory...

That's generalization. Details matter. The way you join a faction in Gothic, for example, is different from the way you join (and later play for) in Morrowind or Tyranny.

Anyway, in AoD you join a faction and work your way up. In Colony Ship you remain an outsider and most tasks are related to assembling and delivering the machine, but not really working for the faction.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

In AoD the factions were the people you came across and the different projects they represented, while in CS the factions were the ideologies put forth by each one as political philosophical propositions, embodied to varying degrees and imperfectly by faction members. As a game design concept this is certainly the more difficult approach, as it's difficult to make the player care about philosophical abstractions, in general. The best ever game to do this, imo, was Alpha Centauri, not technically an RPG, but still an RPG in all ways that matter. Each faction in that game embodied its ideology fully(how they built, produced, waged war, how they treated their subjects and the planet and so on), with a perfectly internally consistent worldview emerging from the style of gameplay.

While in AoD the different factions also offered different playstyles, in CS the factions stand towards each other in nearly perfect symmetry, with the varied approaches in gameplay in the various quests and locations not usually linked to the the player's faction. There are advantages to this, but what, then, is supposed to guide the player's identification with a certain faction other than some kind of moral bias(and the desire to see another ending if you're replaying)? Furthermore, each faction is meant to represent the "extreme" version of a reasonable idea: order, liberty, transcendence(and "pessimism", I suppose, if you hand it over to the machines), so they're not even meant to be compelling moral choices, only lesser evils.