So I've been playing Empyrion on and off every once in a while for a long time. I usually start a single player world, play it for a couple of days/weeks and then repeat to get the latest updates. Even thought there has been a lot of cool features added, there are a handful of just glaring problems with the game. For me personally, the biggest beef has actually been the handling of the motorbike, with it's planet sizes turn radius. And yes, if the planet/moon is small enough, it is actually not possible to do a 180-turn on a bike at speed, and remain in the same hemisphere. The Queen Mary II is as agile as a house fly compared to the bike. Anyway, I digress. Today I felt the urge to play again, so I update, start a new world, and lo and behold, the tutorial-PDA-whatever-the-heck thing that was added is now EVEN MORE INTRUSIVE than it was initially. Like, from a story telling perspective, it is so God damn awful. You spawn in a crashing spaceship, just fire, speed, noise, confusing - and then suddenly, pause game! Read this text for 10 minutes. While your spaceship is burning in front of you. Dinosaurs roaming in the distance. Yeah, just... just read this text. I get the idea, but Jesus Christ, that is not the way to implement lore. It breaks any form of immersion and it is so intrusive that I get angry at the game from the first second of play. And I am fairly experienced with the game, so I am cutting it a LOT of slack. I cannot imagine what this must be like for a new player. That thing has to go, just let us play the game. I don't want to skip objectives, I don't want to miss out on loot, but I also do not want to have the game paused for 5 hours every time I take a step. On to todays update: I picked the temperate planet as my starter, as I always do. Crash spaceship. Read text for 5 hours. Done. I now spawned with a Dermal Burn. As an experienced player, I already know that I need bandages, and fast. because I am already at low HP - as is tradition. So, game pauses again, forces me to read another God damned text dialog, which I quickly skim through. It says something to effect of, you have a Dermal Burn, find plants, craft bandages. Okay. So I look around for plants to use. There are a ton of plant proteins, and only one plant fiber. That is exactly one plant fiber short of being able to craft bandages. I run around the area until I die. Now, granted - I always start with the "hard" starter gear, because I don't want to start with anything really, I want to craft or find everything myself, which has always been completely fine. Now though, you are on a timer of what, 90 seconds from spawn until you die, unless the spawn area has the correct plants? It was at this moment I pressed Alt-F4, composed myself enough to write this rant in the hopes that you will some day maybe, I don't know, actually play the game and realize that this is probably one of the absolute worst ways of starting a survival/sandbox-type game ever created and maybe try to work on that a little bit. This has been the final straw for me at least. Game uninstalled, I won't be back.
I agree its annoying but this is one of the things that has been tackled with feedback in the experimental release forum because people like me were saying this stuff gets in the way to Eleon, who listened and changed it. So now in exp 1.8#3 if you play the 3 advanced starter worlds you dont get any tutes (or dermal burns) and if you play the easy start you get tutes but can discontinue them by declaring you are a vet at the first popup. Then you use F1 to start up the missions you want to. Currently testing is happening to balance the starts on all the worlds with all conditions. If you want the starts to be to your liking you can give feedback. You can opt into the experimental and help shape the future of the game if you want, but only if you can stand the development process. Otherwise FYI other people have remarked on what you are saying and steps are being taken to improve it.
