Some impressions after a few hours
The 'technical demo' aspect of the game is impressive. There are other random/procedural games, but some are 2d games (Starbound / Terraria) and others like Minecraft or Cube World are 3d but they use a naked to the eye grid-like structure, giving them the cube aspect. This game uses the more impressive 3d world, while still maintaining a 'smooth' appearance. There also games that do the random universe/galaxy space creation, it has been done since Elite, but their genius idea was to combine both the Minecraft like generation for planets and the galaxy creations in a single game, and do it more or less in a seamless way (unlike Starbound), giving the player the feeling of a staggering huge universe at their hands. Add to that the Spore-like random generation of creatures just to round off the feeling of 'everything is procedural and infinite!!". And not only that, there are at least some planets where the game can be a looker, as the title of the thread remind us, it has that feeling of a 60s-scifi cover, very visually striking. I wanted to highlight that because usually with procedural games it can be hard to give it an interesting art style, but here they got it, it seems they also introduced a bit of color theory in their generation, so the color of the atmosphere, color of the ground, etc matches.
Now, it's a pity they couldn't put a proper game on top of this technical demo. Not only it's a bland game, I think it's actively a bad game in lots of areas.
I think mainly it's an exploration game. It could be classified too as a survival/crafting game but... the survival part is very reduced in comparison with Dayz, Neo Scavenger, the Long Dark, etc, and the crafting part is also reduced in comparison with games like Minecraft (where you can build structures, reshape the landscape, complex stuff with redstone, etc). So what we have in our game is mostly an exploration game. Basically a game where you walk in the procedurally generated planets. And here it's where the game starts to fail. As an exploration game in real life-sized planets needs stuff like
1. to be fun to move around. Running and jumping has to be finely tuned to be fun, as it's the thing you are going to do in an exploration game. It needs to be fast and agile, and have a generous sprint. Same with the jetpack. They have done a slow, utilitarian thing, instead of something fun. Imagine flying around in chasms like Rocketeer. But no, that would be very close to put some fun in their game. It was clearly something to avoid.
2. to have a fun flight model for the starship. Like, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? You make a game about huge worlds and give the player a ship to fly around with freedom, and YOU DO THIS?? This shit isn't fun to fly! I love flying in games, even better if it is fast and close to the ground, it was one of my favorite activities in GTA5, Arma games, hell I even bought Take on Helicopters because of it; if they would nail that aspect the game would redeem itself. Alas, Hello Games are the anti-fun police and gave a ship that flies like a boring, unresponsive brick. The feeling is totally off, and that's in the middle of the atmosphere, as everyone will know by now, the game just flat out disallows flying anywhere close to the ground. It's more like a taxi, a way to move from A to B. Thanks Obama.
3. recall ship function. The game isn't promoting real, big distances exploration if afterwards you have the problem of having to return to your starship. Just give me a way to call my ship, even if it costs resources.
4. automap. Hello, do you remember Doom? The autogenerated map as you moved around? The game need some kind of basic map, even if it doesn't offer complex information about height, to see in a overhead clear 2d where is your ship, where is the two outposts bases you explored, where is the 2 resource towers at your left, etc would be great to have a clear reference of the area you are exploring.
5. and finally, to have 3-4 more times of variety of things to explore. This is pretty 'duh', if you are doing an exploration game. There are outposts, some ruins, some towers, chests with resources, monoliths, supply points, some micro villages, and from what I read not a lot more of variety. Thematically, there should be also weird as hell scifi stuff. Like, in real life there were news of a diamond planet! why not put that in a space exploration game. Or ringworlds, or shell worlds, quasars, wormholes, megastructures, giant derelict ships, etc etc.
Jumping to the survival/crafting aspect, oh god, where to start. From the basic stuff, I suppose. There are two main aspects here, the more rare/advanced crafting needed to improve your devices and advance in the game, and the trivial part about regular maintenance/survival that is basically busywork. Busywork put there because as it's clear, 'exploration game' is a codeword for 'boring walk simulator' and they know it, so they needed to put something in there to make the players busy at a surface level. But oh god it's so terrible. The inventories are sooo small! Yeah I know that eventually you will gain access to bigger inventories, but the game misses the mark. It just feels restrictive, and annoying and boring, not challenging. Usually limits like this are put in videogames as a way to to make an experience challenging, and through that challenge (difficulty), having a fun or at least engaging experience. Here it's just a pain in the ass. The limited inventory size just makes you take x resource when you find it, then drop it because you need the space, then 20 minutes later have to again find it and collect it as the needs for it has arisen.
Then you add little things like upgrade also taking valuable space in your inventory, or the fact you can't drop temporally objects in the ground (sometimes you are missing just one slot to craft a complex object like hyperspace fuel cell, so if you could drop a tradable object for 10 seconds it would be ok), and it's like Hello Games hated secretly their players.
You want to know another aspect of why this is an exploration game? Notice how annoying are the guard drones. You mine for 45 seconds in a place and they are appearing already, out of thin air! How that would make sense in a mining game, even them aren't that stupid, it's just too annoying. The guard drones are crutch in the game design of the game, despite the typical talk of player freedom and blahblahblah, they wanted the player to be walking more or less constantly, only stopping here and there briefly to collect resources. There are some parts of the game where the player (imagining he would have a inventory big enough hahah) could mine quietly for 10 minutes, but they didn't want the player to hold the laser button aiming at rocks and plants for 10 minutes, it would show too clearly how naked is the emperor, so they put the guard drone system as a way to force the player in changing constantly the mining area.
And form these two main pillars of the game, already so flawed, we can add how the creatures don't have any kind of interesting AI, how the combat is awful, how limited is the 'space experience' (the game is clearly throwing a dice to see if spawn a few pirates or a pair of big traders in front of the space station, that's it), how limited is things like trading, how ugly is the dithering lod, how the pc version stutters badly, etc
One small thing I liked, the idea of collecting words to learn bit a bit the language of the aliens, it's a nifty progression system without having to use xp progression bars. Yeah, something positive!
and found an icy world where its always "dangerous" night time freezing temps....was able to hide in caves and such to prevent death...but I died for the first time ever owing to the equivalent of an AT AT on this frozen planet from frozen hell! ....will post that one later but got to get back to playing...video editing these long videos is murder!!
