I love this game, but my computer is too old to run it well. I have something like 200 hours in the game, and I endured framerate issues the whole time, lol. If I looked in one direction, it would be buttery smooth, but if I rotated the camera at all, then it would drop to 1 frame every 10 to 20 seconds and then go buttery smooth again. Lately I've been looking for something to scratch the Empyrion itch; any other survival game with shipbuilding. So I bought Space Engineers for my PS5. But I would rather just re-buy Empyrion on my PS5 instead. There doesn't seem to be any other survival and shipbuilding games like Empyrion out there, only survival OR shipbuilding. I wouldn't care if the console version falls far behind the PC version due to the console approval process. My friends are mostly on console anyway.
From what I know the only console you can play Empyrion right now is Steam deck. On the other hand I am not sure how easy it is to build vessels on a console due to the stick controls they use. Steam deck on the other hand has the ability to plug keyboard and mouse, once docked, which give the sense of using a PC actually.
Other challenges- consoles are walled garden models which implies serious barriers to entry for a port- fiddly IDE and emulators to license approval processes that could mean you are deeply into sunk costs and unable to release. Since the console environment has a fixed hardware platform you need to optimize performance within the constraints of the platform which will be a more apples-to-aardvarks than apples-to-oranges sort of experience. If the devs have no experience with release into that sort of world it implies a steep learning curve on lots of fronts. There may be a good market out there but as M points out above the current UI is really keyboard and mouse heavy- lots of risks and unknowns. Working with a partner that does that class of work would reduce those but dilute or fully consume the profit ... all that adds up to a pretty heavy lift.
Designing for consoles is how we get the terrible UI like what No Man's Sky and Skyrim has. No thank you!
Absolutely nailed it with that! I hate weapon wheels, and can tolerate it with Empyrion bc of work arounds and the fact that they're not the kind that stack weapon wheels on weapon wheels like Rockstar and Ubisoft like to do
