Originally posted by High Max
Good, it's nice to learn about what you are fighting and it's interesting to study another species. It would make the FS universe more exciting if we would learn more about what we are fighting. It's stupid and pointless to keep them a secret. How can you put a thumbs-down on something that is very interesting? It would actually increase the fun factor of Inferno if we learned some more stuff about the Shivans, like their motives and origins and their numbers and largest ship in existence. Also, it would be nice if Inferno made cutscenes of something similar to Hall Fight in which we board a Shivan ship and it would be nice to penetrate deep within Shivan infested systems and discover more of their technology.
OK - you've seen the film Predator, yes? Right, now watch it again, but add in a little bit at the start where it tells you all about the Predator, what it looks like, where it comes from, how it hunts etc. Not nearly so tense and scary now, is it?
The whole
point of the Shivans is that they're an enigma. They're like a horror-movie monster. If you tell the player all about them, they instantly become un-scary and tame, and that wrecks the whole concept.
You remember the first time you saw the Sathanas? When it appears out of nowhere and blows a corvette away in about 3 seconds? You remember that feeling?
That's why we don't know anything about the Shivans. If you'd gone into that mission after a briefing that said "Oh, by the way, the Shivans have this f**kin' huge supership that they're probably going to use this mission. It looks like this:...." then it would have been about as fun as watching daytime television.