Idea: How to get players to use O2 pipes without playing with O2 tank capacity
0x6A7232
US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
It appears to me that They are doing this so as to drive the player-base toward using the O2 Pipes more.
I realize that They put a lot of work into that particular part of the game, but it should remain a choice for the player, not be a requirement based on development time.
< shrug >
If they want to have players use pipes, then stick a battery in the floating air pump, and have the entire pipe chain lit like an LED light stick the whole way down, but with much less intensity (to avoid making the flashlight, floodlight, and LED stick obsolete). That'd make it more worthwhile to use.
EDIT: How about also making them stackable, up to 5 pipes (or however many are fabbed at a time) per slot? I mean, it can't weigh more than an titanium ingot, and pipes usually bundle well.
Comments
The caves and wrecks are things you generally explore once and you're done with them with no reason to come back. On top of that, the materials required to build a pipe network are significant enough in early game (when the pipes would be most useful) that it's a pain to bring all the materials in one trip, plus the player has more important things to spend the resources on like their seabase. The Seamoth lets the player bring the materials more easily, but at that point why not just park the Seamoth right outside the entrance to the cave/wreck and use it to refill oxygen?
To extend the idea of the OP to make the pipes more useful, I can see the pump as a reusable deployable item with hoses that unreel like the dive reel instead of rigid pipes. The player could carry additional hoses in their inventory to allow them to venture further from the pump. A further upgrade to the idea could be a modification station upgrade of the pump to allow it to be an oxygen generator instead of just a pump. It would also be cool if the player could connect the O2 hoses to a vehicle and use its oxygen generator.
Aside from the pipe improvements already mentioned, the best way I can think of to get players to use the pipes is to provide a challenge in the game where the O2 pipes are legitimately the best solution.
For example, maybe we could have long tight, twisty caves (kind of like the cave systems in the safe shallows but much more extensive) that are too small for a seamoth or prawn (and by extension too small to build in) that have a respawning necessary resource that only occurs in those caves and can't be farmed.
They should be big and twisty enough (and the resources deep enough in the caves) that the easiest solution to the problem is to use the pipes rather than just loading up on O2 tanks and using a seaglide. It doesn't have to be limited to one cave system either, we could have several of these tight cave networks scattered around in different biomes with multiple resource types depending on where the cave is located.
When the player first discovers one of these cave networks, the PDA could inform them of the O2 pipe system with a short description of how it works.
Brilliant, I like your ideas it does seem like they aren't useful enough, I have used them before but that was because I didn't know you could stack O2 tanks so easily and I couldn't get deep enough in a wreck