Codex Discoveries are a lot of fun - for the first player to get them. Whoever finds the first Fonticula or Green Fungoida is quite happy, and gets their name enshrined in the Codex for all time.
Which is all well and good, but then nobody else gets to enjoy that gameplay aspect, ever.
And that's a massive waste of opportunity. Why should that enjoyable experience be limited to only the players who happened to own the game at that time? And why should that aspect of the game cease to exist past that point? If there were an infinite number of biologicals, that wouldn't be an issue, but there aren't.
It would be very nice if there were other aspects of discovery at play, such that there can be an endless search for things in the Codex.
For example, rather than having "Yellow" fonticula, and "red" fonticula, what if you had a sliding spectrum of Fonticula? You might have 'red' fonticula that's actually orange, with a color distribution of 85% red, 15% yellow. Another might be 49/51.
Then, you could have codex entries for all the players that get closest to 'pure' Red fonticula. One player gets 98.65% red, and another finds 98.72%. If you made them rare enough, so that maybe there's only exactly one site of pure red in the entire galaxy, then the search could go on nearly forever.
Then, you could have a 'leaderboard', where all the closest discoverers are displayed, and you can look up your relative place. Maybe you're 10000th, but then you find another and suddenly, poof! You're all the way up to 50th!
This gives endless exploration gameplay for those who care about it, without diminishing the experience for those who don't particularly care.
Which is all well and good, but then nobody else gets to enjoy that gameplay aspect, ever.
And that's a massive waste of opportunity. Why should that enjoyable experience be limited to only the players who happened to own the game at that time? And why should that aspect of the game cease to exist past that point? If there were an infinite number of biologicals, that wouldn't be an issue, but there aren't.
It would be very nice if there were other aspects of discovery at play, such that there can be an endless search for things in the Codex.
For example, rather than having "Yellow" fonticula, and "red" fonticula, what if you had a sliding spectrum of Fonticula? You might have 'red' fonticula that's actually orange, with a color distribution of 85% red, 15% yellow. Another might be 49/51.
Then, you could have codex entries for all the players that get closest to 'pure' Red fonticula. One player gets 98.65% red, and another finds 98.72%. If you made them rare enough, so that maybe there's only exactly one site of pure red in the entire galaxy, then the search could go on nearly forever.
Then, you could have a 'leaderboard', where all the closest discoverers are displayed, and you can look up your relative place. Maybe you're 10000th, but then you find another and suddenly, poof! You're all the way up to 50th!
This gives endless exploration gameplay for those who care about it, without diminishing the experience for those who don't particularly care.