The Game is UN-FINISHED, it has reached a Point where the Development-Team installed the Main Frame for being able to build upon. The further Development continues on this Main Frame. They have still a long list of Items they want to add but most of them are only extensions/changes and refinements of Items that can already be found within the Main Frame of the V1.0 of this Game. Non of the Team go to leave the Barn. Not before the Game isn't finished.
Alpha, Beta & Release are "only" psychological and have nothing to do with the actual state of a game. But you can use them for promotional purposes. "Hey Cool, Empyrion is now in beta" sounds better than "Empyrion is finished" A beta tag says that the game is not yet 100% finished, but it is still being optimized. Do not "hack" it yet, put a beta in front of it and you will see that this benefits the game and you.
Sadly this wont matter. A12 was out how long? 1 Month.. 2 by the time EGS will go 1.0? What was the usual length of an alpha... 6 months? WHY this rush? With all due respect, I cant find better words other than: This is stupid! End of Early-Access-'Tag', does NOT suggest beta. 1.0 does NOT suggest beta. 1.0 suggests a release, even a final edition if you will. Many bugs still there... that have not been fixed since A7.... New ones on top of that. Unbalanced CPU / MV does not help either... This will ALL fall back on Eleon on 'release' date for 1.0 or a few days after. I paint dark and say, Geforce will remove EGS again due to 'too many bugs' in a final game. I mean seriously... have you watched the 'using ladder' animation? I can live with such things, as long there is an 'EA' tag.. But without.... noone can 'defend' them saying: "oh, it's still EA.. give them time..." Because this is what happened all the previous alpha updates... They were borked, people complained and people defended because it was EA.... And they WERE right, back then it was an EA... but 'now'... not anymore... No more excuses, with a 1.0 as version number, I expect NO bugs at all, but maybe a few minor glitches. A beta is early access by definition. It is incomplete, thus early. 1.0 does not sound early, it sounds 'ready' or even 'done'. Which it is not. /trigger off
For me it is obvious. It is all about money and They have earned it. But They are hitting the wall more and more often as game is being developed. Max speed limit, light graphic effect, collision damage, aerodynamics etc. There is no good soultion for those issues. I am hoping that after V1.0 there will be no more additional content, just polishing, bug fixing and performance optimisation. But in the same time few people from Eleon will work on Empyrion 2. New engine with aerodynamics, air and water resistance, acceleration factor instead of max speed, collision damage and clear windows (for God's sake is it hard to make them fully transparent from the inside? And few months after V1.0 of EGS we will receive EGS 2 Alpha 1.0. And belive me or not I will buy it for 20 USD even if it is going to be a .txt file with wishlist now. Best regards Eleon team. You are doing the great job. PS: Sorry my english.
God help me with Space Engineers then. They got an up to date wiki and all. Still intimidated to learn it.
Right. The game needs a bullet-proof, non-skippable, indestructible noob-friendly tutorial, set in an indestructible/ unescapable series of corridors and rooms, where each task and tool is explained in context. Right now it is an "open world" tutorial where players can easily drift away and loose track, fall in a hole, get snacked by critters, etc.
Good day, I know I'm not very active on the forum. But now is the time to comment on the situation as well. I understand the developers' decision to abandon the preliminary approach, but there are a few rock issues that I see as a graphic designer. 1. It is an incomplete HUD, because dialogs have been added in recent updates and the appearance of dialogs does not fit the rest of the graphical environment. 2. An incomplete and unfinished story, which is a huge pity. 3. The playable character is really terrible by today's conditions, both the appearance and the animation of the character. 4. And other various minor bugs I would recommend the developers to make a new character, including animations. And they added PBR materials to the world and that the HUD was completely redesigned. I would just agree for the game to come out. I understand that they are a small team and lack essential team members such as animator, level designer and graphic designer, if the developers and their boss will be happy to help. I don't want this game to end up like other space games like Planet Nomads, Hellion or Osiris: New Dawn.
As a colleague said, these are physically based materials of both blocks and nature. I know from practice that the first thing that players look at is what the game looks like, and this would take the developers to a different level. This is also related to the modification of the character or Hud. As far as I know, the developers use the unity engine in version 2019 which would not be a problem to use PBR materials nor is it a problem to create better animations there than the developers have. Furthermore, working with the camera from a third-person perspective to create a spring arm for the camera is a matter of a few lines of code and they should be up and running.
One thing I really hate in games are non-skippable tutorials, especially when I have done them before. I agree with everything except that part, it should be skippable but with a big warning.
It could simply be a checkbox in the options before the game starts, enabled by default, so players who have gone through it once can simply start the game normally. Because if the player starts in an indestructible structure of rooms and corridors and "skips" the tutorial, how could he get out ? Edit : it's obvious that they intended the actual tutorial to be part of the story, because we fall in the escape pod into the "open world". But this is exactly the problem. Having the player start the game in an indestructible structure for the whole tutorial could then end with the real game's opening sequence, with the escape pod falling from the sky. I don't have high hopes for that right now. The beginning of a game, with or without a tutorial, is crucial step to get the player hooked and to help get started. Some games have an intro movie and shiny (annoying) nVidia and Xcompany logos spinning before leaving controls in the hands of the player. Players are usually unable to perform any action that is not part of the opening sequence, and they get in there one step at a time. And that is for simple games not having 3 pages of keybindings... Here it's a bit... crude. To make something similar in Empyrion would be very difficult, but at least the players should not be thrown with full control in a field with a pseudo-story interfering with their apparent freedom from the get-go. If player controls can't be restricted at that stage, then it's the environment that has to be very "strict" = a dedicated, indestructible structure with sequence of tasks and tips. How many times did the devs have to "adjust" the "landing zone" so players would not be critter breakfast the moment they step out of the pod, or just freeze to death, or wander aimlessly around and die from starvation right next to a corn dog ? It is a bit puzzling to see that for some aspects of the game, the developers clearly want to limit player's freedom to prevent exploits, and use sentences like "because players do player things" to illustrate how easily they can do the unexpected, but for a crucial part like the "tutorial" the developers expect the players to scrupulously follow each and every step while being completely loose in the wilderness...
Or in between "JOIN A GAME" and "OPTIONS" in the lobby landing page- isolated, resetable, always available, never forced on you.
I have about 300 hours in the game, most of which has been spent on a local online server with my two friends. We love this game. The adventure, buildings, ships, etc. all mixed in with testing out an EA title has been a great experience for us. With how much I've paid for the game, I've more than gotten my money's worth. However, the two friends I play regularly are able to role play, use their imagination, and relish in understanding complicated mechanics. I have a ton of other friends who love to play indie, EA games. I introduced one of them to Empyrion, and he really surprised me with what he said, considering his Steam and Switch library are EXCLUSIVELY indie games: "Oh, I thought the game was a bit more polished than this..." I would describe this game as having a ton of steak but no sizzle. To this date my friends and I have not even tried out half of what came out in A12. But that's the point. There's just so much to do and more importantly, so much to LEARN that is really overwhelming for new players. Complicated games are not inherently flawed and nothing new, and I wouldn't call any of my friends who've avoided this game dumb or lazy, but it is practically impossible to learn the ins and outs of the game on your own without exhaustive trial and error. Its great that you don't hold players' hands when they play, but the complete and utter lack of a proper tutorial, story, and in-game hints is deal breaking. You have so many great features. You have so much you can do. But unless you go over every patch note listing and consult a couple dozen YouTube videos, you can't access the vast majority of it. Simply put, this game is not ready for release. You need more optimized graphics, better sounds (I still have nightmares of that tweeting bird sound loop every 10 seconds... yeesh...) a more user-friendly HUD, an intricate and in-depth tutorial for EVERY MAJOR FEATURE, a fleshed out story that is better presented (if I wanted to play a MUD I'd hop on a Windows 3.1 machine...), in-game hints (it's ok to prod the user along, just make sure not to shove them), optimized faction/online interactions (I cannot count how many times my friends and I have gotten lost/confused because we THOUGHT we shared a waypoint... Why is it so hard?), etc. And those are just the major issues that come to my head. I have not played this game online with strangers in any major capacity, so I can't speak to that. The point is that you have an amazing core game. It is why I believe the majority of people in this thread have been so passionate in their responses. But you simply have far too much to polish before you can release this game to critics and regular gamers. And I don't think we would be asking for this polish before release if we weren't sure you can do it. We KNOW you can do it. We believe in you. Please, I beg you, please reconsider this move. This game upon its proper release deserves to be an absolute masterpiece that any AAA developer would envy. But if you release the game as planned in this post, you will be mocked, derided, and forgotten. You deserve better than that. The players in this community who have stuck with you this long deserve better than that. Please be reasonable and postpone the 1.0 launch.
Well, Eleon stated that A12 was kind of a landmark for them. Many companies are having a hard time this godforsaken year especially the smaller teams. I don't think it's stupid but I agree that it's a little too fast to call it a release version. Internal error popping up every now and then, the space map showing a POI that doesn't exist, player getting stuck, etc, etc. But given the complexity of a project like this for 5-8 people and judging by the hundred thousand hours people invest on the game, it's playable. Highly. One thing that could be a major game changer would be allowing user original content and missions. Neverwinter Nights still have a huge fanbase (me included) because of the Aurora Toolset, an excellent editor for whole campaigns, expansion quality mods. Hell yeah! Some mods are even better than the original campaign + expansions. I see a huge potential for user created stuff in a universe this big. Make an editor, sit back and watch the game live forever.
There are already custom scenarios on the Steam workshop for the game, however an editor of some kind might make it easier for players to make these.
There is already an editor for scenarios : https://empyriononline.com/threads/tool-ewpda-empyrion-web-pda.82979/ All "editors" are in the "Hangar Bay" thread, and we also have the API if we want to dive a bit deeper in modding. The main problem is that for many things, the Q&A and Information threads for many features that came in through the years are all over the place, some are pushed many pages back in the archive, and most of the time we have to search several main forum branches just to find one bit of information; is the info in the "release notes" or in one of the "experimental" section? Just to answer this, one has to search for a while. Playfields can be edited with the Playfield Editor, or players can look in the "example_xxx.yaml" to see some instructions, but some things have impacts or are impacted by the sectors.yaml, now by the galaxy config, etc. There are many small details that can be overseen and lead to problems, and linking all this requires extensive searches on the forums. Some cleanup and consolidation of all these pieces of the huge "knowledge base" would help a lot. Some things that were changed with updates may often not be reflected in the relevant Q&A, for example. So even if we can find the right thread where X new mechanic or tool is explained, some elements may have changed in a posterior patch, and there is no other way to track this other than by asking the devs or making lengthy searches. As a simple example : try to find all the actual console commands we can use in game, and their usage, without having to start the game.
Indeed. I see a lot of outdated wiki information around. And I didn't know about an editor. I will have to try it but does it enable original content? Does the procedurally-generated-galaxy-thing make use of user content POI with new missions, traders, custom dialogues, art and music without having to load a predefined scenario? It'd be awesome if it did.
