today we are going to talk about the Vox race and how can it be improved. now why I am doing this thread? it’s because simple, vox feels kinda pointless when we look actually it’s potential could have included a special mechanic of breathing tanks only for… nothing? what were the developers thinking before they released it?
THE STORY:
I have been looking into early videos and source files for the game and it appeared that the Vox would have been introduced along with slimes based on the Paradise Station 13 races with Vox breathing nitrogen and not rotting, and slimes being able to regrow limbs. Unfortunately, the idea was quickly scrapped in the development and the “vox ideas” from Paradise were merged with the slime instead so slimes ended up having breathing nitrogen and for a while anti-rotting Vox remained dormant for a long time, leftover file in the game (it was not round start, the modifiers were present for a long time as seen on the modifiers_set.yml file):
id: Vox
coefficients: # To be decided
Poison: 1
and now for some reason, somewhere in the spring of 2024 the developers decided to poof, introduce the race for some reason,(I thought at the time the race was new and will eventually be reworked but nope, this is why I am writing this).
So where are we now with the vox?
the vox status are:
same diet as humans
they breathe exclusively pure nitrogen and oxygen is toxic to them and for that…
they constantly need to breathe from a tank and keep it filled
for that they have slash damage?
undoubtedly vox appears to be more of a cosmetic race with minor conveniences(reptilian and moth) rather than a practical viable playstyle (arachnoid and Diona) but they fail to attract any user attention cause reptilians Lizards as they call them or Weh! and moths appear to be more attractive and even more customizable too!
so what does that leave us? undoubtedly slash damage instead of blunt is not as epic as the developers sound it, as you need to land every hit on the enemy which is very difficult and much easier with hitscan weapons like right-clicking crowbar or knife and also, bleeding bloodloss damage take some time to apply, approximately 30 seconds to 1 minute meaning the combat encounter would have ended with someone dead or critical first rather than gaining a viable advantage and also slash is useless for some kind of furniture (ex non-reinforced windows), they also can’t gib by the way too(this might have been implemented later). So we conclude that with slash damage being barely useful(unless on very specific occasions), and the nightmare of having a breathing kit stuck on your moth 24/7 which even prevents you from eating(at least without taking a little bit of poison damage) (hell even worse than the starving reptilians!) we officially conclude that the vox is the WORST RACE in the game as of writing this, slimes have slow asphyxiation and blunt damage to attempt to do something but apparently vox have none.
what can we do?
here are a few of my ideas, if you think we can fix them comment below!
we can introduce rotting proofing on vox (similar to older slimes) so they can have a viable survival mechanism
we can change the damage modifiers and either have them to be a combat race(damage resistances) or be harder to get poisoned (sounds perfect for those intoxicating food breaks)
challenging race? Do you mean developers have intentionally “Bad, worse races”? I mean races solely exist to allow different playstyles, just look at most TGS13 and Paradise Station 13 races on the wiki, almost none of these races felt like a downgrade when compared to SS14 standards. If you just want a more “Challenging” gameplay, the disabilities(ex traits) was just made for that purpose, just pick up which disabilities/challenges your character want to have on a gameplay basis, I think what you say is that we need a more diverse disability menu, not races that are intentionally bad
Reptile a cosmetic race??? Its literally strongest combat species in game in most scenarios. They can sustain themselves on their own or anyones elses blood too, so diet isn’t really important.
This will require a lot of work as there aren’t really poison weapons in the game and reagents simply follow instructions to modify health when metabolized, someone basically would have to put vox conditional metabolism exception on EVERY SINGLE poison damage reagent in game and make sure only poison part would get reduced.
I have seen many scenarios where lizards fail to deliver in combat in NPC encounters I had a hard time hitting the enemy and just like I predicted in 90% of cases the bleed-out damage from the slash occurred only after I got critted and died. drinking blood is a very poor way to heal/satiate hunger it is also a viable power-gaming issue. even if I drink a puddle of blood I still fall(become in critical) from blood loss due to how inefficient it is. what matters is the short encounter with NPCs to survive, not the thing that you can sustain yourself in combat as for diet. AS I SAID in an earlier post, DIET IS an MRP and HRP ISSUE, I played Reptilian not only on LRP but also on MRP and heck even the famous cosmic drift HRP and I concluded that while free tail pulling was very good in fast-acting scenarios LRP ,when you go to slower scenarios of higher roleplay servers you will realize that it was more of a convenience rather than an epic tool that many claimed also here is a famous quote from the frontier (another ss14 server)discord server
and from above drinking blood to feed yourself rather than visiting a restaurant(kitchen) is bad for most MRP servers
and yes in cosmic drift people play reptilian solely for the looks and not any job practicality or advantage
regardless vox is a terrible race to play on all occasions including LRP , MRP and HRP
This is a roleplaying game, some choices are given that aren’t optimal or are objectively ‘bad’/make things more difficult, not everything needs to give a mechanical advantage. Also most species only have relativly minor differences from one another, they aren’t complete playstyle changers.
There are no ‘the developers’. Sure, their are maintainers, but everyone is a volunteer, and anyone can contribute code and such to the game
off course i have been realizing that races differences were much smaller in SS14 compared to SS13 but the main issue I am talking is that vox breathing on nitrogen tanks shouldn’t just justify slash damage, there should be something more into it , even slimes are better than vox due to blocking blunt damage and having slower asphyxiation rate. the point of this is to make vox not a direct downgrade but an alternative choice, remember plasmamen? they traded plasma breathing only and caughting fire when stripped with radiation immunity
