Destination-Specific Unlockables.

[stephensmat]

What I want to experience with this game, more than anything, is the feeling of discovery. When Voyager did its 'Grand Tour' of the Solar System, we finally saw what planets looked like. In all of human history, there hadn't been a picture of the earth until the late 60's. There hadn't been a picture of anything else in the Sol System until a generation later.

KSP1 makes you work, and think, and experiment, earn your achievements, but it's still a videogame. You can exploit the rules of the game to get extra science points. You do it well enough, you can unlock the whole tech tree before you reach Duna. You want to see those planets, you can click on the map screen and scroll in.

It'd be awesome if there were some unlockables that depended on specific missions or destinations. Nothing pivotal, because the point of the game is to make your individual way, but this game would be superior to KSP1 if you had a sense of 'And now we'll see what's there' and made it rewarding to the rest of the program.

[Vl3d]

Yes to progressively unlocking (visual) information about celestial bodies.

Yes to having something interesting to discover around every corner.

No to procedurally generated boring empty celestial bodies.

The thing that motivated me the most to play KSP1 was the curiosity related to discovering anomalies. I was very disappointed after some time.

 

[intelliCom]

15 hours ago, stephensmat said:

What I want to experience with this game, more than anything, is the feeling of discovery. When Voyager did its 'Grand Tour' of the Solar System, we finally saw what planets looked like. In all of human history, there hadn't been a picture of the earth until the late 60's. There hadn't been a picture of anything else in the Sol System until a generation later.

KSP1 makes you work, and think, and experiment, earn your achievements, but it's still a videogame. You can exploit the rules of the game to get extra science points. You do it well enough, you can unlock the whole tech tree before you reach Duna. You want to see those planets, you can click on the map screen and scroll in.

It'd be awesome if there were some unlockables that depended on specific missions or destinations. Nothing pivotal, because the point of the game is to make your individual way, but this game would be superior to KSP1 if you had a sense of 'And now we'll see what's there' and made it rewarding to the rest of the program.

In map view, the planets should appear quite blurry, how they would if they were only modelled from Kerbin Telescopes. Duna would have approximate detail, Jool would just be a green sphere, and Eeloo's orbit isn't visible at all until the tracking station is upgraded. Once these places are visited at an appropriate distance, (not just skimming the SOI) they appear in the map view as normal.