Some early feedback:
The game looks and feels amazing. The movement around the world, the flying of ships, the mind-breaking ability to change your “down” orientation at a whim. I love the music and sound effects of ships flying by. Instantly inspires awe and makes you think “I want it. How do I get one for myself?”.
I love how the trailers mislead me about the asteroid belt. I thought it would be a fairly defined line between “not in the belt” and “lots of asteroids”, but the gentle increase in density as you get deeper in feels amazing and really puts the vast scale of things into perspective.
The game needs about 500x more guidance before early access launch. There are SO MANY SYSTEMS, and nearly none of them are explained even a little bit. The complexity of the game is one of its strengths, but the new player experience is going to be extremely badly received unless more guidance is provided at nearly every step of the way.
Even for a player that knows exactly what they are doing, the beginning stages of the game are painfully slow. Mining job on the station for over an hour to get enough credits for a thruster-with-a-chair is not the right balance. I think a great solution for this is to have a system to somehow rent ships (for 10% of their cost?) for a few hours instead of having to buy them outright. This gets people off the station, learning ship controls, learning real mining, and generating real resources and making real money WAY faster. The current loop is a slog, but destabilizing the balance of the game by increasing the credit gained by starter jobs seems way too risky as a long-term solution.
Ships fly off into the sunset without you. Maybe implement some sort of “am I within x meters of my owner, if no, kill thrusters” yolol command, and have it be default installed and on for every single purchasable ship. The amount of ships that have flown off into the distance is already pretty big. Once more people get into the game, this will only increase.
The social UI is a big mess. It took me and a guy 30m to figure out how to get into a group together. You’d think the ability to accept a group invite would be in the group UI, not having to press enter and tab, click on the textbox words “Group invite received” and accept there.
What are all the things and what do they do? Worlds Adrift had a “Scanner tool” by default. It sent out a little short-range tether wire to scan whatever you selected, giving you info on whatever you scanned. Perhaps an equivalent exists somewhere, but I currently, I see no way to inspect a ship to see what everything is called, what it’s made out of and a quick description of what the part is for, letting me learn naturally how it all works. If this already exists in some form, let me know.
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My impression overall is very positive, especially for day 1 of a closed alpha. I was expecting things to be way more broken, way less table, especially performance. Obviously, there are a lot of things to work on, but my extreme levels of hype were not disappointed.
The game looks and feels amazing. The movement around the world, the flying of ships, the mind-breaking ability to change your “down” orientation at a whim. I love the music and sound effects of ships flying by. Instantly inspires awe and makes you think “I want it. How do I get one for myself?”.
I love how the trailers mislead me about the asteroid belt. I thought it would be a fairly defined line between “not in the belt” and “lots of asteroids”, but the gentle increase in density as you get deeper in feels amazing and really puts the vast scale of things into perspective.
The game needs about 500x more guidance before early access launch. There are SO MANY SYSTEMS, and nearly none of them are explained even a little bit. The complexity of the game is one of its strengths, but the new player experience is going to be extremely badly received unless more guidance is provided at nearly every step of the way.
- There should be a map of the station, or way more signs
- The marketplace shouldn’t be a maze to find things, or should have some way to guide you to the thing you want to buy. Have some directory stations that let you select the thing you want, and it creates neon arrows for you to lead to you it, or something. Maybe apply this idea to the whole station, putting directories everywhere
- The game should guide you to buy and explore all of the basic tools. They’re vital to gameplay, but complex and fairly hard to find in the marketplace.
Even for a player that knows exactly what they are doing, the beginning stages of the game are painfully slow. Mining job on the station for over an hour to get enough credits for a thruster-with-a-chair is not the right balance. I think a great solution for this is to have a system to somehow rent ships (for 10% of their cost?) for a few hours instead of having to buy them outright. This gets people off the station, learning ship controls, learning real mining, and generating real resources and making real money WAY faster. The current loop is a slog, but destabilizing the balance of the game by increasing the credit gained by starter jobs seems way too risky as a long-term solution.
Ships fly off into the sunset without you. Maybe implement some sort of “am I within x meters of my owner, if no, kill thrusters” yolol command, and have it be default installed and on for every single purchasable ship. The amount of ships that have flown off into the distance is already pretty big. Once more people get into the game, this will only increase.
The social UI is a big mess. It took me and a guy 30m to figure out how to get into a group together. You’d think the ability to accept a group invite would be in the group UI, not having to press enter and tab, click on the textbox words “Group invite received” and accept there.
What are all the things and what do they do? Worlds Adrift had a “Scanner tool” by default. It sent out a little short-range tether wire to scan whatever you selected, giving you info on whatever you scanned. Perhaps an equivalent exists somewhere, but I currently, I see no way to inspect a ship to see what everything is called, what it’s made out of and a quick description of what the part is for, letting me learn naturally how it all works. If this already exists in some form, let me know.
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My impression overall is very positive, especially for day 1 of a closed alpha. I was expecting things to be way more broken, way less table, especially performance. Obviously, there are a lot of things to work on, but my extreme levels of hype were not disappointed.
