Greetings capsul.... ugh.... wrong game... Hello Pilots!
tl;dr: I have been asked by a friend who is a veteran StarSector pilot to write down my impressions as a first-time player. I will do so below, in the sincere hope that they will provide useful feedback. So far, I have 1
horribly failed StarSector play, and one game in-progress with a lvl 38 pilot. I figured that about now is the time to write this, while I have played a bit of it, but I'm still having that "new player" experience.
Be prepared for a wall of text.
Long version:Let me give you a little bit of background about myself.
I'm an average 37 years old dude that has been wasting time around computers ever since games came on audio tapes.
I'm quite sure that wasn't such a long time ago...
While being just a "filthy casual", I am used to weird games with a rather steep learning curve. Among my obsessions, I am counting Space Engineers, Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm DDA, Unreal World (URW), Stalker, Homeworld 1,2 & Cataclysm.
Aside from the above, If it's a Sandbox, I've probably at least tried it.
I'd like to make a point that not only I did manage to successfully play Battlecruiser 3000AD (Universal Combat), but I managed to be quite good at it, and get quite far.
Now, compared with
that game, StarSector should be a breeze, right?
Wrong. Let me conclude by saying that yes, I do like the game, yes, I have some favorite things about it, but we're not here to sing praises, are we now?
So I'll dive straight in, and start with...
(woo-hoo, look at grandpa' using old normie memes!) 1. I'll be damned, I did not manage to pass the tutorial at first. For some reason I was inclined to think that one is supposed to "mine" debris fields.
Fresh in the game, I ignored the size of my first salvage load, the second one got me a few metal plates, so did the third, and the fourth, and I believed that to be the normal outcome. I did notice that they are worth almost nothing, but I also did see the loading screen hint that says "trading is not profitable because of taxes, you have to take advantage of events"
And it made sense. Because in Freelancer Discovery you do the same thing. Fresh off the boat, you gather a load of crud, which is worth nothing in your starting system, but across the map, is in quite high demand.
And nobody told me "look,
doofus, salvage once, okay?"
Thus I happily ruined my financial status hoping for a miracle at the end of the rainbow! (SS was already emulating RL too much at this point)
To make matters worse, I also noticed some derelict ships along the way, scrapped those as well, because not like I was planning to start an army right now.
And promptly got myself stuck, unable to beat the pirate fleets at the gate.
Quirky combat mechanics, concepts not really explained, plus the ruinous tutorial, if I did not have a friend already playing, I would have said "quite a nice game, has potential, I'll try it again at some point" and I would have uninstalled it, forgetting about it for a decade.
But I did have a friendly pilot in comm range, so I blasted his ears, rattled his brains and got a few non-spoilery basic gameplay concepts.
Moving on!
2. Thank God for the new salvaging system. Because otherwise I would not be able to play this game, period.
I'm not talking about enjoying it, splurging on random useless ships, and so on.
Nope. Not able to physically play it.
There's quite a lot to manage for new players, mechanics are harsh, mistakes cost you dearly, and, well, the supply/fuel cost drives you into the ground. Still, quite grateful for the ability to take a breather, lick my wounds, rebuild my fleet, and fight again. To be quite honest, it's best to keep the fight hard as it is, to please veterans.
I just wish I had more non-combat ways to make some credits.
3. Being neutral is surprisingly hard. While in other games, the hard part begins only after you have chosen a side, in SS, I find little to no combat while not taking any Commissions.
Not too many pirates to bash into the ground. The Path of Ludd are ridiculously hard to fight at first, due to their choice in ships, and because of said ships, the drops are low, and fighting them is not that rewarding for a new player.
A temporary non-combat salvaging fleet is also not an option, because it simply does not seem to turn a profit, at least not in the core systems.
I know, there's always the OTHER systems as well.
But if you want to take it slow, build a bit of a fleet before poking into dangerous systems (Like how the excellent Space Rangers 2 lets you do)... well... you're gonna have a bad time.
4. As an aging, bitter old man, I am taken aback by the lack of... The ability to feel like an angsty, edgy teen again, and be a pirate.
This one is simple, I would like to have Pirates as a fully-fledged, playable faction.
I mean, the vibe is THERE, there are now incentives and mechanics put into place to actually be possible to haul around a fleet of barely-flying DHulled Rustbuckets.
(Yeah, I mostly played as a Junker in Freelancer Discovery. The quasi-neutral pirate, that could dip his toes into smuggling, occasional piracy, but mostly spent his days hammering debris fields and drinking artisanal space moonshine)
While I
do realize this is not that game, or any similar games, eh, 'twould be nice at some point.
But until then, I am utterly confused by...
5. The structure of the menus and other UI-related things. Don't get me wrong, it's not horrible, or unplayable. I did get used to it. But it could be so much better with so little effort.
For instance.
Shield/Armor/Hull. That's the logical order. Thus, when typing descriptions for weapons, can we keep it the same please?
If one weapon does:
-200% shields and 50% armor, another weapon description should be
-50% shields and 200% armor, in this order.
Easier to compare. Easier to remember. A lot more friendly to the brain.
Yes, I know there's not too many damage types, yes, I know they are easy to learn, yes I know damage types have pretty icons.
But this wall of text, is about First User Experience.
(I am a senior Beta-Tester at my job, and my focus is User Experience, thus my atrocious whining ) While we're on the same subject, while in combat, the top bar for a ship is
Flux, and the bottom bar is
Hull. However, after pressing tab, the Flux bar is invisible unless the ship is selected. Which is less-than optimal, I would like to see at a glance that on the right side of the field most of my ships are full flux, thus needing more attention, or support.
And the bars for the unselected ships are now
Hull and
CR.
At this point, I do Tab a lot, to check the progress of the battle, and the fact that those bars keep switching around is a bit annoying, despite eventually learning which is which.
If I may suggest, to have all 3 bars, permanently visible, for ships selected or not, and have them ordered as Flux, Hull, CR. (The CR bar can be a thin one)
And while still on the same subject...
6. The buttons are less consistent than my mental health.I really do not know how buttons were chosen.
It would make sense tho have them either set as an usual gaming scheme with which we are all used...
Or if not that, then have them follow the same logical scheme as the buttons at bottom left, which are quite nice (
Character/
Fleet/
Refit). Like:
Outposts, Resume
Navigation,
Abort Navigation. (
S&
A really hurts my brain even now that I know them).
While in inventory: Abort (Escape is just enough, it already does that, no need for
T), Confirm (Space is already used as yes/ok/confirm in dialogues, no need for
G).
It would make a heaps load more sense to use the T key for
Take All in the salvaging menu, instead.
But I don't know, maybe there are programming reasons behind this, and the same key cannot be used for 2 buttons with different functions?
Besides, I find it a little bit weird to have to
Gonfirm moving items. I mean, I've played a ton of games, once you ctrl-click something into inventory, space closes all, and we're done. Diablo does that amazingly well.
With all of this confusing buttoneering, I most often find myself in need of ...
7. More halp...There's that wonderful "Press F1 for more" function. But in quite a few occasions it does really not help that much. (Or in the case of the Scavenging skill it does not do anything. Like telling you to scavenge once. Or maybe twice. But I know Scavenging is new and quite rough around the edges for now)
Still, it is nice that when I'm an old player, and I hover above fuel, to see some stats, then I can press F1 to see some less-used stats.
But generically, an interface should already show useful stats by default, then show the less useful stats on hover, and finally display the noobie info on F1.
True enough, SS does not get enough noobs to warrant wasting the nicely implemented F1 function with some information that 5 people will read
once and then move on, because so few people rtfm nowadays.
But then again, if the Codex section could be expanded to contain basic information for new players, we could keep the normal/hover/F1 just as it is now.
And if externalized to xml (or similar), I bet old players would be more than glad to contribute to that, instead of the devs spending time on the Codex, instead on the game. Hell,
I would do that!
Which takes me to ...
8. Codex not Codexing enough...It would be extremely amazing if we would be able to compare two ships, side-to-side, in the codex. It really does not need to hold your hand like the modern games, and color worse stats in red, better stats in green, and calculate damage for you. All it could do, is to have the ability to split the window, and have the same tree-like menu also on the right side, so that we could open two ships/weapons at the same time.
Yes, not that many stats, not that many ships, and old players know them already. Still, new players do not, and with the addition of mods, comparing weapons or ships might be quite useful.
And of course, having a manual in-game is amazingly useful, and if properly externalized (or at least made a little bit noob-friendly, so people without serious programming skills could contribute to it) I think the Codex could evolve in quite the useful guide, negating the need for a txt/pdf manual, or an internet wiki.
First thing I would do, like,
right now, I would split the Ship Systems, make new branches, like for instance:
-Hull Mods,
-Ship Abilities.
And add more buttons like, say, General Concepts.
Fuel explained, Supplies explained. Dmods explained. Salvaging explained. Character abilities. Character skills.
It really, really, does not need to be new info.
But it would be nice when I click on fuel, to see, all in one place, that is consumed only in hyperspace, carried by tankers, needed for emergency burn, consumption can be lowered by skills, having an excess increases supply consumption, and so on, and so on.
Fine. Fine. Are you done bashing our favorite game? I see that you dislike quite a lot of stuff.
Do you even like something bro?Matter of fact, I do.
The Art. Major kudos to whomever made the art for this game. Especially the captain portraits. They look good enough to hang on the wall, and I'd pay to see more, like A LOT MORE, and I'd pay to have a custom captain portrait.
And I say this, while living in a third-world country, and being constantly almost broke.
I'm simply in love with the art style.
The Quirky mechanics.The combat in this game is hard for me. I don't think I'll ever manage to be adequate, no matter how much I watch the AI play my ship, I mostly feel like I'm wasting a slot my my fleet. Nevertheless,
thank the Lord for salvaging, which allows me to lick my wounds, and somehow... I like this difficulty. It is challenging, yet not necessarily causing me to click uninstall and move on.
The Modding.This is simply a must, for me.
For instance, I find it extremely annoying that even me, a new player has already learned to estimate at a glance if I could take a fleet or not. I would like to have 500+ ships in game, even horribly imbalanced ones, so that I could still be surprised and confused.
Of course, I can't ask for this to be imposed on everyone, nor could I request this kind of a feat from the devs, and here comes the modding community into play.
So, thank you guys for implementing modding support, and thank you community for modding.
The fact that the AI is not a burdenEnough said. I think we've all had our fair share of companions running at a wall endlessly.
SS is the opposite of that. Not only the AI does well, is useful, can teach me tricks, but it does so without blatantly cheating. (a.k.a infinite resource injections kind of cheat)
Great atmosphere. The art, the text descriptions, the mechanics, the way ships handle. I love it, it's spot-on.
The open-ended sandbox potentialMy kind of game, not much else to say.
And now for a very generic wishlist. Not sure what it could be implemented and what could not, but here it is. I'll keep it short, and add only items that would make a great impact for me, no tidbits. -The ability to make a trickle of resources from trading on black market, outside food shortages.
-More shortages, not as listed missions but like "Jangala factories are short of metal plates".
-The ability to make a flagship, well,
a flagship. Maybe modules that can be mounted once per fleet. Or even once per game.
-More... fights? Somehow? I may be at the beginning of the game, but I spent time in all Core systems. Fleets do little but chase themselves around in circles forever, if somehow two somewhat-matched fleets meet. Otherwise it's just a Burn 9 fleet zooming the hell out of the way of a Burn 7 fleet, which moves around erratically until it is briefly distracted by another fast fleet. And that ruins my dream of being an atrocious vulture feasting on the sorry remains of great battles.
Salvaging the mess I have created myself has significantly less charm.
You know, kicking trash around after the Rio Carnival, hoping to find a wallet with a million dollars is fun for some people.
Cleaning your room, because your mom told you so, and finding your own empty wallet, damn, that's not fun for anyone.
The path evasion AI in this game works too damn well.
-More common missions, properly balanced. Of course, not every planet should offer to make a fortune out of metal plates daily. But enough to make an almost continued trading run plausible. Despite this game
not being focused on trading at all. But to give a helping hand to players that can't excel at combat, some diversity to those that can, and some variety in fleet types. You know, like, having to actually field on purpose, as a challenge, 5 Atlases or 10 Prometheus, haul them around
and defend them. Just because someone wants a million lobsters ... because of reasons.
So far, missions make sense only if you happen to have that amount of Bantunian Shrimps on your ship,
right now, or at the very least, stashed conveniently nearby. Procurement missions are also quite rare compared to the explore/scan, and the materials that are required 5 systems away, are almost never available in the system where the mission is found, and the mission expires way before getting the materials.
It should be quite possible for me to see a mission for 500 Lobsters, pick it up, and have enough time to go around 2 bases to get 445, then sneak to a pirate base to get the rest, and then haul off to the destination.
And speaking of which. Do I have 500 Lobsters on Jangala? Or was it 347 transplutonic ore? And was it even in Jangala? I wish I could check, but it's 10 systems away.
I'm quite sure that my advanced ship computers could hold a list of what kind of crap I have, and where.
Could they?
-Something like a mobile base. Maybe like a ship too big to be attacked by casual pirates, or a base that can phase to another system of your choice, all this at obscene costs, maybe with some facilities/upgrades, giving you a reason and a need to now haul home thousands of metal plates, and buy food, and arm the marines with hand weapons, and keep worker teams productive with luxury goods, and volatiles to keep a long duration Neutrino Detector, and equip it with dozens of LPCs for defensive purposes, and dozens of Ox Tugs to raise its sustained burn speed to a whopping ...
2.
So there you have it.
A lengthy first impression.
I really do hope it can be at least a bit helpful.
Best Regards,
Vladimir.