Actually i cant await to turn the game on but i am concerned about its state. Got some points that makes it nearly around unplayable. 1. Building ingame is not possible. Maybe some of you have different opinion on this but for me its just not existing. Its a pain in the a... In our coop games it end mostly we meet in a creative session and build together instead of playing ingame. The game itself just ends as ressource gathering, spawn vessels in, fly it a bit and then go back to creativemode build the next vehicel. Empyrion is a building game, this needs to be implemented into the maingame anyhow. 2. The content is missing. 404 not found. There are some weapons and the same suit with just better stats. Every item with better stats and finally the golden matrixes to unlock cpu as the only viable ressource worth to find. It feels like nothing. I looted so many ships, dungeons, POI and 95% of the game is finding useless nothing like metal plates and any placeholder trash. Even fighting big ships ends up in nothing. The game really needs some variety in loot. Different suits with really different features, maybe split them into helm, gloves, torso, backpack, jetpack, turbines,.... then mods for every single part. Weaponmods and attachments, decorative stuff, unnessesary but nice to have stuff, quality of life features. tl;dr I want to have fun openin lootboxes and not just 99% trash and then 1 of the 3 possible good items in it. 3. The shooting feels weird. Its not so bad like some patches before when scorpions move like gocarts on a ice track but the enemys dont feel like proper animated 3D models with move and turn animations. Feeling is like old DOOM games when you shoot at 2D flat targets. This is a very big point in every game. The mechanic itself need to be enjoyable. 4. There is something i find in many games: gametype a: All motivation of progression is just to improve your ressource gathering, to improve your ressource gathering and storage even more to find out at the end now at the point you always wanted to reach, with all that tons of ressources... there is nothing to do with your ressources or to progress anymore. gametype b: Improving your ressource collecting is for sure a essential part of every game progression but its not in your main field of view. It happens secondary while you follow many other objectives. Often you can choose wich path you focus first and even in lategame there are still some pathes to go. Ressources are not the mainprogress to go! 5. Survival is very simple. It exists early game, partially to simple and annoying and gets replaced anytime suddenly to a 3x3 anything. Many games fail in this part when the lategame food is always the same, the just best effective food. There is a chance to create some gameplay with buffs and debuffs and reward for using different and good food. This are my biggest problems with the game. Imo Empyrion is still a early acces alpha, not even beta. Its a very good technical construct with seemingly endless possibillitys but in real there is just nothing. Its like a techdemo to show what the engine can provide without making a game out of it. I guess i spend 90% of my playtime in creative because its so enjoyable to create vessels in this epic creativemode. So nice functions, so smooth to use. Best part of the game but sadly separated from the game itself. Cant wait to see wich direction the devs choose to improve it. Still worrying about the "Release" of the game in this state. Doesnt make me confident...
I dont disagree with much of what you have to say, and in many ways your gripes are valid. In my opinion, however, much of the reason many things are "lacking" is that Empyrion attempts (and succeeds to a point) at trying to do so much. It is a sandbox/survival/shooter/space combat/dungeon crawl/with attempts at quests all rolled into one. Its a "jack of all trades, master of none" environment.
I call them "Voxel Games" always top tier games champions league! All that games that want to include the good old minecraft in it. 7daystodie plays in the same league but even while its in alpha19 it has way more content and playabillity than Empyrion. Not sure what the curse of such games is but either just indie devs try this genre or its just to hard to code. 7days lacks also in progression, patches take 6-10 month minimum and it goes always 2 step forward and 1 step back. I would like to see a big dev like Blizz or EA or Ubi on a VoxelGame but they seem to be afraid to touch this genre at all. Very sympathic is the call from Eleon to the community to make content straight into the game. Maybe thats the solution. Eleon just needs to implement the mechanics as hardcode and the community fills it up in weeks/month with content. While writing i can add point number 6. The techtree ingame is a placeholder. Its a simple techtreemechanic implemented but it needs to get filled up with life. Different trees. Engeneering, faster crafting, better cooking, skilltrees for weapontypes, more tankyness, agillity, trading, whatever... I want: Buffs: movespeed, flyspeed, jumpheight, armorstats, accuracy, pilotskills in the pilotseat, max hp buffs, armor penetration, bulletdmg, range, crafting effciency to craft faster or cheaper, healbuffs, turnrate, critical dmg, repairing, vision, nightvision, team auras, explo dmg and defense ... you can nearly endless extend this list. Skills: all weapon types, piloting skills for all vessel to specialice on anything, cartography, cooking, repairing, teleporting, mastermind teching, steath/invisibillity, toxic wepons master, professionell healing, whatever.... Slots: for clothing/suits, belt, backpack, jetpack, weapons with slots for magazine, barrel, scope, grip, decals/textures,... When i click on my jetpack in my charactercreen i want to see a tankslot, a thrusterslot, a batterie slot and a special slot for skills like instant refill, a height booster, a slow but steady skill or a fast but short skillitem. A emergency item that always has 15% charge to always negate your falldmg automatically. When i click on my helmet, the helmet screen opens and i see the flashlightslot, my wlanextendermodul, my UV protection cover slot, my frontglass slot, and special skills slots for nightvision, personal radarping feature, a telescope slot for my zoom possibillitys. When i click on the skilltree ingame i wanna think what teh fck! Gimme a minute or an hour, i need to read and check this out! Can you imagine how many items you can find in this endless universe when just all of your bodyslots have 5 different types of use? How many strange plants and spices you can collect to make proper endless universe cooking and healing and drinks. I want to place slots in my vessels phyisically as blocks to put in some general vehicle buffs. +15% max speed, -20% fuel drain, 8% reload on cannons, +10% cpu,shield chargetime, a actionskill for a short super shield, a short active repair. On the pilotseat i want to buff the complete vessel because its me in this seat! I skilled 5% more ressources, 12% more durabillity, and i found this item called "emergency maneuver" when i click it i get 25% thrust and maneuverbillity for 5 seconds with a 2 minute cooldown. I dont know what Eleon is planning to add to the game. Maybe they focus on trading and story to make it more a adventure, maybe getting better flight and fightmechanics to make it more flightsimulator or they think about a charactersystem like i mentioned to make it RPGstyle. I would love a announcement from Eleon what we can roughly expect in what direction the final gameplay will end. Sounds hard but i dont see a real game in this wonderfull piece of engine the devs created until there.
Sincerely, before adding content and even more complexity layers, first of all they should fix all game breaking bugs that the game has. For example: Ships being misplaced every time you go out and return. I catalogue this as game breaking, because it is a basic game feature, that it is needed and faulty. I cannot imagine how many issues the game would to have if they implement all this that you like. If only being a skeleton, just as it is now, as you say, and I agree in many of your points, it is plagued of game breaking bugs... imagine with all this complexity. How to add all this if even now, the game does not work properly? And I am beginning to suspect that the problems are systemic, not very easy to fix. Sorry being so critic, but I have invested more than 300 hours, and from these, many have being expended in the console, destroying objects and in the blueprint menu spawning the same objects, that were rendered unusable due to these kind of bugs. A key feature of the game, apart of the survival component, is based in having small ships, that may be stored / docked in bigger ships. This is a key component of the game, and an ultimate goal midterm, and even this is not working properly, and there are no traces of when this will be fixed or even if they will be able to fix this. The problem has been so big for me, that even it has taken away my desire to play again.
