Hi everybody!
Heard about diaspora from the Kotaku post. Been a follower of Black Mesa for a long time so I understand the modding community but I'd never heard of Diaspora before. However, I'm a HUGE BSG fan and so when I heard about it I decided to give it a spin. I normally play RPG-FPSes or sealth games, so I was a little daunted at first playing a space sim.
WOW. Thank you to the Devs, first of all. I am having an insane amount of fun and it FEELS like bsg. Amazing work.
Couple things. I have lurked the forum a little bit and seen a lot of discussions on difficulty and the tutorial (namely, the issues the ign review had keeping Diaspora from a higher score). It sort of seems like a lot of you have been in the FSO community for so long, you don't really have an idea of what it feels like to be new to all of this. So I thought I'd let you know what it felt like to come to Diaspora as a BSG fan, never having played a space sim shooter (I've played rogue squadron and star wars starfighter but nothing else)
1. Difficulty
- The Game is hard at first. I played on easy and it certainly took me a few hours of gameplay to learn the ropes. This is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind. There certainly is a learning curve to learning any new genre, but I was definitely reality checked when i entered the game after the tutorial and got my ass handed to me. That being said, after leaning the game, I'm now doing really well in easy and considering moving up difficulties
2. Tutorial
- The movement from the tutorial to the campaign was NOT super helpful. In fact when I started the campaign itself i was still having trouble understanding how exactly my ship moved. Conservation of momentum and the near- newtonian physics of a game based in FSO is not something that's easy to understand from a nugget's point of view. ALL THAT BEING SAID: The way to fix it is to incorporate Aether's guide for nuggets into the game itself somehow, even if it is just in a briefing before or after the tutorial. Before I read the guide, I had NO idea what I was doing and was quite frustrated. If I didn't find any tips for beginnings on the forum, I might have quit playing. After I found and read the guide, I understood the mechanics of the game in a way that allowed me to start racking up kills and having fun.
This mod IS as good as any standalone game out there. Thank you devs so much for the work, looking forward to an R2 release in the future! In the meantime, I'm gonna keep working my way up the difficulties and maybe check out some other FSO mods. So say we all!
