Hi Dev Team, I joined the game in Alpha 12 with my wife. As a general rule I have barred myself from buying EA titles because of various reasons. I decided to lift the bar to come check your game out as we are currently struggling to find something to play together. -Graphics- The first problem my wife and I encountered was the graphics. They really are dated and I do appreciate that your focus is elsewhere for now, so we downloaded reshade to spice the graphics up for us. -Tutorial & Quests- The quests and tutorial system is barely functional. There are many bugs and design flaws that need to be fixed The main issues we faced was the quest markers not showing up in space when you leave the planet, also none of the quests had an descriptions, they are all blank. We proceeded with quests up until the moon part where you get teleported into enemy bases and have to find the core etc. While these are functional there is little warning on whats going to occur and you can be locked into doing these quests and die without being prepared, and if you re spawn near your corpse you will be shot down by the outside defenses of the base, we gave up here. If you are going to have single player quests that rely on POI that players can dismantle or destroy you need to stop that from occurring, either from allowing instanced areas that players can quest freely without issues or by making the POI immune to change. -MotorBike- The Motorbike is absolutely frustrating to drive. Its handling is garbage, We really just preferred not even using it. -HoverVessels- The Hover Vessel again. Like the motorbike has really bad controls, and hitting small rocks, flipping you all over the place just makes for a real poor experience. I think some tweaks could be made here to make the Hover Craft suitable for use. -Base Crafting and Ship Building- Really enjoyed the range of options when it comes to the freedom of design, and the workshop content is amazing. Some of the work players have put into their designs is unbelievable. My Wife and I didn't experience many issues around this..Maybe the hangar doors for the CV should be custom, so that you can have any size, not sure if that's possible, the current ones seem a little limiting. Also the terrain doesn't snap to buildings you place, and the tool to smooth terrain is a nightmare to use. I would love to see some requirements around base building before you can craft a ship or vessel, like making a shipyard that can deploy the ships from. You can make room requirements by having certain objects needing to populate the room to trigger it to be a shipyard. Like a crane or stations that look like tools that fabricate the ship. -Random Gen- I'm in a mixed state of mind about this. While I do enjoy the randomness, it comes with a cost, and the cost is that the world will always feel empty and the planets plain. There seems to be an issue in making a random gen offer the features a hand crafted galaxy would be like. IMHO I would prefer a hand crafted galaxy, with populated factions and cities etc over a random gen galaxy that has very little to offer in variety. You could do a happy medium, having the main faction areas hand crafted, but beyond the known frontiers of space, have it random gen that the players can have full range to control. -AI- The AI is pretty bad. I'm sure work in progress. But would note that it would be nice if they did not use a hardcore Aimbot. Because the ones that launch missiles are a real pain. -Death- The death mechanic is pretty hardcore. If you die somewhere remote and you have to re spawn and you cant do that on your ship. You can lose almost everything. On one hand its pretty cool if you kill a player and get their stuff, I don't have a problem with that. But if you did die in a stupid manner and you have no friends to help your ship could be in the dead of space until you get enough resources to craft another to go fetch it. I would love to see a auto recall feature, that you could go to a trade station and pay to have the ship delivered back to you. So long as no other player is currently interacting with it. Such as salvaging it for parts etc. -Mining- On the surface mining is good. Like most voxel games its good fun hunting for minerals and such and mining them. But it does become repetitive and tedious. I would love to see more effort in space games, rather than just click a button and mine away for hours. I would personally like to develop mining stations that mine for you, either on asteroids or on the planet. These stations could require NPC's to hire to man the machines and look after things while you travel space and look for more deposits. You would still need to transfer goods from the facility to your base, which would make great gains for pirates if your doing so unguarded. But the mining meta seems pretty bland and static. Across most voxel games I have seen. I think the auto-miners you have in the game is a good idea, it just needs to be expanded upon, given more depth. -Progression- Progression was nice to see. Even though the tech tree is small. I would love to see it expanded upon with some more depth. Some major issues I had with it was having things like the ship repair console at high level. Any tool that is used to build with or repair with or repair blueprints should be accessible at level 1. Repairing a ship you have got from the workshop one block at a time trying to work out what they used is very tedious and frustrating -Block Information- I would love to see the information on the block used to construct. It would make life so much easier to see what was used to make something in case I forgot which angle was used, also what skin was put on the block face that I am looking at. -UI- The UI needs some work, especially the map area. When you explore planets and see resources if your in another galaxy you cannot view those planets and see what resources they have. The map interface feels clunky. -Player Movement- Would be nice to not skate around like you are on roller blades. Its really frustrating. -Movement Penalty- Remove the movement penalty for heavy armor or give us a light armor option with multiple booster slots. -FPS Combat- Not so smooth, I think namely to AI issues listed above, but movement doesn't feel right. Also sounds are off you cant hear which direction you are being shot from etc. and the sound for missiles only plays the moment you get hit. There are no audio queues before that. -Vessel Combat- Not being able to zoom, or have your ships target what you want to target at the click of a mouse button is pretty frustrating. All in all combat in space is pretty boring. The ship firing "at blocks" rather than the ship as a whole entity is probably a hard limitation of the Voxel system in place. I am unsure what you can do here to improve it. I might have some more additions at a later stage. Maybe we will come back to test after some more progress has been made.
I think that quite a few of your points are ones which will resonate with many players, though not all. Some of the things you mention are things which players have been mentioning for literally years. Out of that set of longstanding gripes, probably around half are ones that are reasonable complaints, given the scope of the project and the scale of Eleon's capacities. The other half are things which: in an ideal world, would be nice, but in reality are not likely to ever happen. Overall though, a very thoughtful, detailed, well-presented set of observations and critiques! Welcome to the community. Having read through your thoughts, it sounds as if you folks are very unimpressed with the game, would tend to give it a "do not" recommendation and intend to move on to other prospects? If that is not the case, then how about telling us all what it is that you actually LIKE about the game and why you would keep playing it or recommend it?
I am also new to the game. Alpha 12. I agree with @dichebach in that some of your points are valid. The thing is, this game appeals to lots of people as there are soooooo many ways you can play it. I personally don't mind mining (if I'm nor getting shot at by Drones) so the times it takes, I think, is right. This type of game can never make everyone happy, for the reason I have mentioned above. I don't mind the graphics, but then again I play Minecraft a lot..
The games strong points is its free building and ship building. Seeing what people have created in bases and ships truly is amazing. But outside of that the game needs much needed polish for me to personal invest time into building things and taking time to create stuff, and I would never do that in a unfinished product.
Hello and welcome. Don't mind me if I pick apart your posting a little - I promise, it will be constructive. Really a minor thing at this point. I'd much rather time and effort be put into making the game more engaging, more complex, and more bug-free before worrying about making it pretty. Graphics are really the easy part. What we have is completely passable at this point. POI's can be made impervious to damage, and many have been. The quest system has been revamped tremendously in v. 1.0, and that too has been greatly overhauled since previous Alpha versions. It's far from complete, but it has come a very long way. There are still some bugs in it - perhaps the most notable is that if you die and respawn, quest markers often despawn, or quest steps will occasionally just stop. Fortunately there is a tick box to advance a stuck quest. I'm use to it, but yes, the handling is not great at all. At the very least, it no longer launches you into orbit, or hundreds of miles across the planet - so Eleon is aware of the shortcomings here. Again, not a critical issue at this point, but I am confident this will be addressed in the future. How an HV handles is almost 100% dependent on how you build it. Some are fast, can spin you to the point of nausea, stop on a dime and pick it up. This is one the best features of Empyrion. While it can take some time to really develop as a Builder and painter, you can create nearly anything you can imagine - and if you find a block shape that is missing, Eleon has been really good about adding them. I do know there is some discussion/planning regarding the Factory and possibly changing how this works, something I have been a strong proponent of for several years. There is a mix of both randomly generated and hand-crafted already present in the game. I'm rather keen on the randomness - as it gives a great deal of replay value. You can see a lot of hand-crafted in the various POI's discovered across randomly generated terrain. The AI is pretty bad, no doubt, but it has gotten A LOT better than it use to be. I expect to see even more improvements here as we progress. The death mechanic is pretty hardcore - if you set your difficulty that way. We have options, and those options determine what happens when you die, ranging from keeping your stuff to having to hunt it down. As for respawning on your ship, add a Clone Chamber. On the surface mining is good. Below the surface, mining gets better, and out it space, mining is great - my favorite thing to do. As for some sort of automation, work your tech tree and build some Autominers. They do exactly what the name suggests - they mine automatically, until they're out of fuel or full. Progression is good, though the low level cap and small tech tree means you're going to max out pretty fast. I'd likewise like to see more here in both departments, and a good number of new things have been added, including mining lasers for SV's (yay!). Again, this is one of those areas that is a bit less critical at this time. I had to this about this for a while. I could see a benefit to adding a bit more information, instead of just "steel block", something like "cut-faced steel block" or even "steel block #14b" would be helpful. Actually you can. Double-click a star and you'll jump into that system's map. There was a horrible bug with this in the last build that was thankfully fixed this time around. I don't get that feeling unless I'm in a heavily-weighted down HV. I have heard other people mention this as well. Could be something in the animations that are just a little... off. Not really sure here. No. Ever wear heavy armor? I've spent more than a few summer days in gothic platemail. You're half turtle, half tank, and hotter than co-ed whip-cream fight. There are three (actually 4) armor types out there. Light, with 2 booster sockets. Medium with 3 booster sockets, and Heavy with 4 booster sockets (there's also Epic Heavy, with no booster sockets, far too many buffs, and it cannot be repaired, but that's another story). The movement penalty is just fine. Add a movement booster instead. Not the best, to be sure, but not the worst either. The AI can be obnoxious at times, and there's nothing like getting a case of Every Type of Parasite from an unwashed Abomination in a walkway right under you, as it attacks through the floor. These things regularly get fixed, though it can take some time. Not being able to zoom - many turrets can zoom. The Mining Turret is a great scouting device. But there is a huge area for improvement in vehicular combat. Having your turrets be able to concentrate their fire for one - instead of switching targets like they have ADD in the middle of fight, being able to mount manually-fired weapons on the rear of your ship (or on the sides), combat controls - the list is tremendous, and that road will be traveled, one step at a time. Without a doubt, you've picked a great game to get involved in, and at a great time as well. Empyrion did just leave it's "Early Access" phase, but it's still far from it's "Final Release" version. It's taken a number of years to get to where we are, and it will likely be a couple more until it's really ready to be called a "Final Release". As you've noticed, there are still a number of shortcomings, and I'm sure you'll discover to, more than a few bugs, typographical errors, grammar errors, or just plain wrong, outdated, or mislabled information to be found. Do yourself, and everyone else a favor - when you run into a bug, report it. The team behind this game is every bit as fantastic as the game itself, but they're still human too (except for Taelyn - I'm pretty sure Taelyn is a Legacy Agent in disguise ;-) and Hummel, who I'm pretty sure is actually a cyborg ;-) ), so help them help us help them make Empyrion as great as it possibly can be! ~Indigo
I am not playing anymore so cant report bugs. I'm sorry the game devs lost me when they launched on steam out of Early Access. I cant take a game seriously if the owners cant. I just have to take the loss of money on the chin and move on.
Wow, do you not read dev blogs or something, how can you say the devs dont take the game serious after the work they have put in, its absurd that people think a difference in opinion, means that whoever doesnt agree with their own opinion, must not care, what sort of logic is that anyway ? Here dev blog, explains it in detail. https://empyriononline.com/threads/leaving-alpha-early-access-some-clarifications.94900/ I guess they really do care and take it all seriously afterall..... I cant take people serious that make the most baseless claims. The forums are literally littered with Dev and closed tester responses to posts, questions, explaining function etc the list goes on and on, literally a 5 minute check, shows incredible involvement in the game with the playerbase, right down to multiple surveys done by Eleon that most game devs never bother to do, most AAA games companies , they just do everything their way and you get what they serve up, like it or lump it, kinda like AAA games often do. But your opening post was good, it was detailed and I agree with some of it, but to say the devs dont care or take the game serious, thats you, not being serious.
