Hai Reveal Thoughts and Issues

[warp-core]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Describe the bug

Some issues I have with Hai Reveal (I expect more will come later.)

• Hai Reveal should not offer to a player who has not yet discovered the Hai. It removes chances for exploration and feels like rather aggressive encouragement for hte player to play it.
• If players who have not discovered the Hai (or Unfettered) are to be directed to them, proper new first contacts should exist. At a minimum, the Hai first contact should perhaps acknowledge the fact that we the player arrived here after hearing about the Hai on the news and then literally being given directions to the wormhole. The current first contact acts as though their secret is still secure even though it clearly isn't. Perhaps also mention the hordes of pirates gathering in Waypoint.
• The first contact with the Quarg on Alta Hai should also be overridden for this (note that this should happen regardless of if HR requires the player to have independently discovered the Hai or not.)
• The Unfettered first contact is perhaps the least terribly presented here, but still not great.
• The introductory conversations on the timed events are presented somewhat problematically. The narrator seems to aggressively hate the position of the "fringe" politician you introduce, and wants to force that hatred on me. There's also no need to have the narrator tell me that the Pug invasion was their attempt to get humanity working together and end the civil war, and you certainly shouldn't tell me that I myself think that.
• Presenting the coverage of the Pug invasion as though it has been going on too long and is getting ridiculous itself seems ridiculous. It's only been a few weeks and that invasion lasted months. It was also a pretty noteworthy event for humanity as a whole.
• Describing the claims of the guy leaking the existence of the Hai as "ridiculous" is itself ridiculous. We just had aliens invade our space and they were living in a system 2 jumps away from Earth and most humans had no idea they existed. We also know, or at minimum are pretty sure, that human space is being actively raided by another alien race (the Korath.) For all we know, that's who this guy is talking about. While, sometimes, in storytelling, it may be good to say something is ridiculous before showing that it is actually true, this doesn't really seem like the style the ES narrator should use. Have characters in the story tell us it's ridiculous instead.
• The current implementation of blocking the Wanderer story is not great. The reasons for wanting to block the Wanderer story are also, in my opinion, not great. Sayari does say she wants to go stay with the Wanderers as some final excitement in her life, but if that happens before HR, she has no way of knowing that there is a huge amount of excitement on its way to her. Even if she is with the Wanderers, it seems perfectly reasonable that we might be asked to go and get her when the secret of the Hai leaks in human space and 50000 pirates (seriously how many pirates do you need?) set up in Waypoint. In fact, having her want to stay with the Wanderers as some last excitement in her liffe shortly after Hai Reveal seems a bit silly: we've just been through a whole lot of excitement with her. It's not like her life has been dull for a few decades at this point.

[MasterOfGrey]

I think everything on this list falls under one of three categories:

• Already edited.
• Edited in an open proposal.
• On a To-Do list.

I'll check back here once we get to the end of the existing work list and see if anything is lingering as a consequence.

[Amazinite]

I have some notes of my own on changes I'd like to see, but there's enough actionable feedback that's been provided so far that I'll just provide a couple short ideas that have mainly been on my mind (outside of those I've already expressed):

• The end of HR currently involves Danforth helping in the assault beyond the wormhole. In doing this, he brings a ship with a jump drive. But during the Wanderer campaign when you meet Danforth with Elias, he mentions having a jump drive that he secreted away from when the Pug invaded. The latter event doesn't really make sense now that the first one occurs. I've expressed that I'd rather not have the whole scenario of systems outside of human space that are involved, so I'd prefer if this situation of involving Danforth and him having a JD be avoided entirely by just not having JDs be necessary, instead of perhaps trying to tweak the conversation in the Wanderer campaign.
• I think the intro suffers from making the player the center of the universe a bit. When the player enters Hai space, the Hai confront you about being a liaison between the Hai and humanity. This somewhat assumes that the player became well known after the events of the main campaign. I'd prefer if instead of the player being confronted by the Hai and then being asked to bring various diplomats from human space that the diplomats already be in Hai space, and it is one of the diplomats (dependent on which of the main campaigns you chose) that contact the player. This way you're being brought into the events by a character who you already know, instead of being brought in seemingly randomly by the Hai.
• If event X occurs because we need outcome Y to occur, but X is a bad event (bad as in bad story) and the only stated reason why we have it is because we need Y to occur and we can't think of any substitute for X, then our approach should be to rethink or even ditch Y, not keep X.

[Zireael07]

@MasterOfGrey Can you (or the OP) somehow list which is which?

[UnorderedSigh]

I'm revamping the dialog of all of Hai Reveal right now, but not changing the story yet, because the story can't be given a fair chance or a good analysis when it's behind massive text walls that almost nobody will read. @warp-core noticed some problems I didn't. Thank you!

My responses:

Initial media coverage - I hadn't realized just how bad this was until I read @warp-core's point of view. The amount of dialog change needed is actually quite small, so I hope to have a PR for it this week.

Poorly-timed Quarg intro - as @warp-core noted, this is a matter of bad coding in the txt files, and can be fixed.

Unfettered intro - the introduction to the Unfettered has always been appallingly bad because it harks back to a time when the game represented them as mindless suicidal murder hobos. It needs to be rewritten, regardless of the connection to Hai Reveal. However, this should be done in coordination with the Unfettered campaign. (Saying hi to @Hurleveur here.)

[Hurleveur]

Unfettered intro - the introduction to the Unfettered has always been appallingly bad because it harks back to a time when the game represented them as mindless suicidal murder hobos. It needs to be rewritten, regardless of the connection to Hai Reveal. However, this should be done in coordination with the Unfettered campaign. (Saying hi to @Hurleveur here.)

I think its important to realize the Unfettered are not all the same. They in fact have a lot of internal differences.
That said all the UHai missions probably could use a rewrite - but I'd wait for the ideas in the UHai campaign about the Unfettered to be clear and approved first, so we don't have to rewrite it twice.

[UnorderedSigh]

Hai Reveal should not offer to a player who has not yet discovered the Hai

That is contrary to the principle that "the player is not the center of the universe." By that principle, the Hai will be revealed, whether Captain Last is involved or not. That's what the intro missions are for: they show that the Hai are on their way to being common knowledge. At this point, Captain Last can choose to explore the problem or not.

The reason this doesn't work now is that the Hai Reveal is mandatory to reach the Wanderers; that takes it away from "exploration" to "you must do this to proceed."

If the two campaigns could be run at the same time, then the story of the Hai would go back to exploration.

[UnorderedSigh]

My first of several PRs to fix the intro issues is here:

#7760

It deals with the Pug Media Coverage. There'll be more PRs for the intro troubles eventually.

[MasterOfGrey]

Alright, now that the main list of things that were clearly identified are all effectively done, I think it's time to do a review of where we stand with respect to this.

From Warp:

• Hai Reveal should not offer to a player who has not yet discovered the Hai. It removes chances for exploration and feels like rather aggressive encouragement for hte player to play it.

This response is listed in the FAQ for the Hai chat: Not everyone is an explorer. We seek to reward exploration, but not to penalize simple narrative enjoyment. The most common questions people have are on whether there's more stuff to do and how to find it, because not everyone wants to spend the time to kit up ships to seek out new lands and discover things the hard way. We reward those who do explore, and gently teach those who don't how to look for things by eventually having some things appear to them directly - and point out that they could've discovered them all along with a little bit of exploration.

• If players who have not discovered the Hai (or Unfettered) are to be directed to them, proper new first contacts should exist. At a minimum, the Hai first contact should perhaps acknowledge the fact that we the player arrived here after hearing about the Hai on the news and then literally being given directions to the wormhole. The current first contact acts as though their secret is still secure even though it clearly isn't. Perhaps also mention the hordes of pirates gathering in Waypoint.

Complete first contact reworks are on the list for Phase 2, which also includes addressing the draft Unfettered Campaign and where/if/how it fits into things, and the additional ways to engage with the Wanderer's outside of direct narrative follow-on.

• The first contact with the Quarg on Alta Hai should also be overridden for this (note that this should happen regardless of if HR requires the player to have independently discovered the Hai or not.)

From what I can see there is no first contact mission for the Quarg specifically on Alta Hai. Frankly if people in the normal play of the game have somehow managed to get here without visiting the Quarg in Human space I'm going to be quite baffled. Do we need a specific fix alternative for if somehow people have done the entire main campaign without meeting the Quarg anywhere?

• The Unfettered first contact is perhaps the least terribly presented here, but still not great.

See above.

• The introductory conversations on the timed events are presented somewhat problematically. The narrator seems to aggressively hate the position of the "fringe" politician you introduce, and wants to force that hatred on me. There's also no need to have the narrator tell me that the Pug invasion was their attempt to get humanity working together and end the civil war, and you certainly shouldn't tell me that I myself think that.
• Presenting the coverage of the Pug invasion as though it has been going on too long and is getting ridiculous itself seems ridiculous. It's only been a few weeks and that invasion lasted months. It was also a pretty noteworthy event for humanity as a whole.

This has been wholly replaced by a selection of missions in #7760

• Describing the claims of the guy leaking the existence of the Hai as "ridiculous" is itself ridiculous. We just had aliens invade our space and they were living in a system 2 jumps away from Earth and most humans had no idea they existed. We also know, or at minimum are pretty sure, that human space is being actively raided by another alien race (the Korath.) For all we know, that's who this guy is talking about. While, sometimes, in storytelling, it may be good to say something is ridiculous before showing that it is actually true, this doesn't really seem like the style the ES narrator should use. Have characters in the story tell us it's ridiculous instead.

Text has been updated and no longer narrates it explicitly as such.

• The current implementation of blocking the Wanderer story is not great. The reasons for wanting to block the Wanderer story are also, in my opinion, not great. Sayari does say she wants to go stay with the Wanderers as some final excitement in her life, but if that happens before HR, she has no way of knowing that there is a huge amount of excitement on its way to her. Even if she is with the Wanderers, it seems perfectly reasonable that we might be asked to go and get her when the secret of the Hai leaks in human space and 50000 pirates (seriously how many pirates do you need?) set up in Waypoint. In fact, having her want to stay with the Wanderers as some last excitement in her liffe shortly after Hai Reveal seems a bit silly: we've just been through a whole lot of excitement with her. It's not like her life has been dull for a few decades at this point.

A final pass on post-reveal dialogue is going to occur along with everything else, when I do a playthrough basically as soon as the existing open PR's are attended to (especially the Geocoris one).

From Amazinite:

• The end of HR currently involves Danforth helping in the assault beyond the wormhole. In doing this, he brings a ship with a jump drive. But during the Wanderer campaign when you meet Danforth with Elias, he mentions having a jump drive that he secreted away from when the Pug invaded. The latter event doesn't really make sense now that the first one occurs. I've expressed that I'd rather not have the whole scenario of systems outside of human space that are involved, so I'd prefer if this situation of involving Danforth and him having a JD be avoided entirely by just not having JDs be necessary, instead of perhaps trying to tweak the conversation in the Wanderer campaign.

Danforth no longer uses his own JD. The Unfettered now loan JD's for the handful of human ships required for the pertinent arc. This negates the need for later edits on that front by making the matter narratively self-contained.

• I think the intro suffers from making the player the center of the universe a bit. When the player enters Hai space, the Hai confront you about being a liaison between the Hai and humanity. This somewhat assumes that the player became well known after the events of the main campaign. I'd prefer if instead of the player being confronted by the Hai and then being asked to bring various diplomats from human space that the diplomats already be in Hai space, and it is one of the diplomats (dependent on which of the main campaigns you chose) that contact the player. This way you're being brought into the events by a character who you already know, instead of being brought in seemingly randomly by the Hai.

Part of the reasoning for this is meant to be an implication that the Hai aren't ignorant in their isolation. That they do have information sources for what goes on in Human space. While we definitely could change it up like this, at this particular point in time you are a notable figure, at least to the powers that be - and I would like to award the Hai a certain amount of agency in their decisions. You've momentarily put yourself in the spotlight during the war, they've chosen to take note of that before you fade into the background again.
Making it so that the diplomats put you forward reduces the player's significance in the event, but it increases humanity's significance in the actions and decisions of the Hai government to the degree of reducing their agency as a faction.
The other thing is that, by having the Hai ask you to help independently, rather than having you served up to them, there's a firmer established justification for why those who choose to trust you and interrogate you would put stock in your involvement specifically. They've chosen you, for their own reasons, not just accepted you as a valid actor.
Notably, beyond this start point, you're not particularly important: you could be swapped out generically for a mildly less competent captain and the event (the handling of the reveal crisis) would likely be unchanged, or possibly even go smoother.
You are not integral to the event. By the time you start the plot the scene is set so that event will happen more or less the same without you; your main impact is on the people whose opinions you can influence for the future.

• If event X occurs because we need outcome Y to occur, but X is a bad event (bad as in bad story) and the only stated reason why we have it is because we need Y to occur and we can't think of any substitute for X, then our approach should be to rethink or even ditch Y, not keep X.

I think this originally came from a conversation that was only tangentially related to the other points listed here, so I don't know if it's still pertinent to situations present.

The current pathway forward now looks like this:
(*starred items are from the issue list above.)

People to attend to the current open PR's.

• One of which is waiting on Amazinite specifically.

Playthrough with final pass on dialogue.
This should also clean up the following things:

• Ensuring has some context for what a Korath is and should look like in the Stormhold debriefings.
• *Sayari's comments post campaign.
• Review of the set-up linkage to Wanderers now generally after the changes made.

Phase 2 Improvement Items.

• *Complete first contact reworks for Hai and Uhai.
• Addressing the draft Unfettered Campaign and where/if/how it fits into things.
• *Additional ways to engage with the Wanderer's outside of direct narrative follow-on.
• Assessing how we want to handle the tribute of Elenchus and any changes/events/choices pertaining to that.
• Resolve the wormhole/alternative & smugglers chase discussion (refer Hai Reveal: label smugglers as mission targets #7734) - a discussion post will be made because every proposed solution so far introduces different plot holes.

[Hurleveur]

About HR not insta offering I think delaying the event a bit would be enough, say by about 90 days to give the player time to do whatever they feel like before being thrown into the next storyline.

[MasterOfGrey]

Half the playerbase is constantly complaining things (like finding the main campaign) take too long, and the other half are always complaining they happen too fast.
I would like to see what the balance of that is for this before deliberately extending or shortening the timeline.

[deimosian]

I recently started Endless Sky again for a new play through to see what had been added and changed, and I found the changes to the Wanderer introduction very clunky and unintuitive.

The text now says that you don't recognize that the second language the Wanderers are trying to speak to you with is Hai even if you've already met them, and in my case spent quite awhile running jobs in their territory. I actually thought my save may have been affected by a bug or something until I found this change.

It makes no narrative sense for that to be dependent on whether the Hai are public/common knowledge in Human space or not, only whether the player knows can recognize what the language Wanderers are trying speak is through having personally interacted with the Hai.

[UnorderedSigh]

How does this sound as an alternative?

1. You can visit the Wanderers at any time, like you could before Hai Reveal was merged.
2. Wanderers speak in the Hai language, and you're told to find an interpreter if you know the Hai (as before Hai Reveal was merged).
3. Hai at a random planet tells you to go to Hai-home (as before Hai Reveal was merged).
4. Hai-home refuses to give you an interpreter until you've finished Hai Reveal
5. Hai Reveal is finished. You're told you can have an interpreter now.

The excuse for no interpreter varies depending on events:

1. Early game: the Elders believe first contact is risky due to "possible diplomatic consequences" (ie. Elders don't want to be forced to involve themselves in the Unfettered's war).
2. Hai Reveal after election until part 6: with the chaos at home, it is too risky to make a new first contact.
3. Hai Reveal part 6 until dream sequence: Sayari is busy, and we don't want to risk sending a lesser diplomat

EDIT: I updated that timeline to change at the election rather than the beginning of part 4. This is because the Elders have changed, and the new ones are not prone to stagnation, but they are still wary of overreaching themselves until the chaos dies down.

After the dream sequence, Sayari is available, so you can get your interpreter and start the Wanderer campaign.

(I've been planning this change for a while, I was just waiting for someone other than me to give your specific complaint.)

[Zitchas]

I'm still in the process of trying to organically play HR, but why is it a forceful "This must absolutely be played before the Wanderers?" and more specifically, why is the events of HR something that the player specifically must be the one to do?

There seems like there could be a fair bit of room to allow the Wanderer campaign to start and have subtle encouragement/routes into HR; or simply have it be a decision point where if the player doesn't get involved in HR, then they see the news and the publicly visible elements occur in the background and/or as intermediary events that they aren't really involved in during the very early Wanderer campaign.

If the player goes sufficiently far in the Wanderer campaign, yes, it doesn't make sense for HR to be doable anymore. That's not particularly a problem, though, just an alternate path the player can go that eventually locks out the HR.

[deimosian]

That would avoid the glaring issue causing the confusion and aggravation, however it still does not make much sense to me.

You're not bringing them news of the Unfettered raids on Wanderers, at least not initially when you need a translator. You don't even need an official Hai government diplomat, you merely need someone who speaks Hai who can act as an interpreter.

I would personally prefer the HR situation get entirely disentangled from the Wanderers, so the player is not railroaded into needing to do the FW, then HR, just to start Wanderers. I encountered this because during the first lull in the FW story I went and did the first half of Remnant stuff, looted a jump drive and went exploring. There's no reason I shouldn't have been able to do the first bit of the Wanderers then.

Aside from the reusing of the Sayari character in HR requiring continuity, I'm not aware of anything actually tying them together. They cannot be the one and only representative the Hai government has.

However if they must be intertwined, my suggestion would be to have the Wanderer initial encounter send the player to Allhome instead of Hai-home if the player has met the Hai. On Allhome the player recruits an adventurous Hai interpreter, could even be a human who's lived there awhile and picked up the language. Have them handle the initial encounter between the Wanderers and the player before the interpreter realizes the Unfettered are involved and bowing out to be replaced by a real diplomat later.

EDIT: I thought of another option that might make things cleaner. The Wanderer systems could be moved north and/or rotated clockwise slightly so that initially there is no way to jump there except through the Unfettered system Ehma Ti. This would make spontaneous early discovery by the player very unlikely. Then, to restore their current accessibility when their reveal is intended, have the dream sequence unhide an empty/nova system to jump through to reach them through Unagi.

[UnorderedSigh]

I'll let @MasterOfGrey or @Amazinite give a more detailed response, but allowing the Wanderers campaign to progress during the Hai reveal would open quite numerous plot holes. The biggest ones are:

1. The Hai Reveal assumes you don't understand the Hai language, but the Wanderers campaign assumes you understand the Wanderers' language using a Hai-made device designed to let humans understand the Hai language. Having this device during Hai Reveal would either require a rewrite of Hai Reveal, or finding another translation device that understands the Wanderers' language, but not the Hai. (Maybe from a bird trainer?)
2. If the Hai Reveal and Wanderers campaigns happened at the same time, you would come to a moment when everyone is relying on the trustworthiness of the Unfettered, during a time in which the Wanderers are asking the Fettered to attack the Unfettered. It would take both campaigns in a very dark direction that would require significant rewrite of many missions.

There's also the question of the Unfettered campaign, which must fit into all of this somehow. If the Wanderers and Hai Reveal campaigns were to be rewritten to allow the dark direction, it would involve the work related to the Unfettered campaign, which also requires quite a dark direction. Hence, the work of merging the Unfettered campaign to the master is where we would do the work on the Wanderers and Hai Reveal campaigns.

EDIT: The Unfettered campaign is planned to start after the Hai Reveal, as an alternative to the Wanderers campaign, so there is no Unfettered Campaign vs Hai Reveal campaign plot conflict.

Sayari is an easy problem to solve: use a different diplomat.

Last but not least, there is generally major political opposition to making significant changes to the Wanderers campaign, and it would have to be changed a lot to allow it to proceed at the same time as Hai Reveal.

The long and short of it is that it may be possible to allow them to proceed at the same time, if you can convince the right people that it is a good idea, but it certainly won't happen in the next few months.

[Hurleveur]

The Unfettered campaign is instead of the wanderer campaign, it locks it out (since they're enemies) and the same goes the other way around.
You get warned of it in both ways though in the campaigns.
Also the Unfettered campaign requires no HR or even FW rn, conceptually at least.

[UnorderedSigh]

Also the Unfettered campaign requires no HR or even FW rn, conceptually at least.

Don't you still end up with the same problem? By that, I mean the Unfettered are seen by many people as bullies while they also are expected by Hai Reveal to be seen as heroes.

[Hurleveur]

Both campaigns just cant happen at the same time. It's totally normal the bullys of someone's story are the heroes of another I think. We'll get to patching wanderers eventually but it's fine as is rn, from the Unfet side that is.

[MasterOfGrey]

For the benefit of @deimosian I would like to re-state the current to-do list:

[...]
Playthrough with final pass on dialogue.
This should also clean up the following things:

• Ensuring has some context for what a Korath is and should look like in the Stormhold debriefings.
• *Sayari's comments post campaign.
• Review of the set-up linkage to Wanderers now generally after the changes made.

Phase 2 Improvement Items.

• *Complete first contact reworks for Hai and Uhai.
• Addressing the draft Unfettered Campaign and where/if/how it fits into things.
• *Additional ways to engage with the Wanderer's outside of direct narrative follow-on.
• Assessing how we want to handle the tribute of Elenchus and any changes/events/choices pertaining to that.
• Resolve the wormhole/alternative & smugglers chase discussion (refer Hai Reveal: label smugglers as mission targets #7734) - a discussion post will be made because every proposed solution so far introduces different plot holes.

Insofar as a complaint pertains to any item on that list, it will be addressed after the list item has been done, if it is still relevant.

[UnorderedSigh]

Ensuring has some context for what a Korath is and should look like in the Stormhold debriefings.

Resolve the wormhole/alternative & smugglers chase discussion (refer Hai Reveal: label smugglers as mission targets #7734) - a discussion post will be made because every proposed solution so far introduces different plot holes.

This PR aims to solve the first problem and reduce the second: #8075