Is the game playable solo?

[Xinner]

title

[kegomatix]

+1 this is the only thing left to know keeping me from buying yet.

[Zaidah]

The very first pinned thread : https://steamcommunity.com/app/1063420/discussions/0/4626980894528324700/

(short answer : yes)

[TobiN]

It's very playable solo!
There's a solo oriented loadout for each ship called "Lone Sentry", which starts with multiple AI controlled modules to help solo ectypes. The game is also dynamically balanced to account for solo play.

[Reignhardt]

Thank you!

[Gann]

No it is not. There is solo ship loadout that attempts to fix that and fails at this massively:

1) You must go out of ship to complete some objectives. Every time enemy spawn you must go back to ship and chase them away or let them molest your ship.
2) B.R.A.I.N aka automatic turret firepower is not enough to eliminate key enemies even on normal difficulty. You can upgrade them but still you have to endure pain of doing so every time you start mission chain and even then they are not that powerful.
3) On 1.0 they added automated mechanic to help compensate for lack of crew and honesty it is just waste of space
-You must manually choose it mode meaning that you must exit helm every time you want to it to switch tasks and 2 of 3 modes are for task that take place in same room.
-Time it takes to complete task is just.....I am testing it right now the repair that would take me -1min to complete takes this machine 10min and still counting.
4) if you bring single friend to help you maintain ship you will lose "solo player ship bonus" increasing energy cost of automatic turrets from 1 to 3. Just to compare on small ship you will start with 6 power and you need 1 to make ship moving.

In short, there is ship loadout for solo players but this isn't enough to enable comfortable solo play.

[Swordy]

i would say no its not. i loved to play this game solo in early access and it was fine. no skills, just one turret, no clue what to do, and cleared some stages, challanging but it was ok.

but know its to hard, you get two towers instead of one, but they dont hit anything, they just missing the enemys multiple times even if you stay right next to them. you get a auto repair module so you can pilot the ship while the ship wont fall apart. but the ship will fall apart anyways coz the repair bot wont do anything or it takes hours while every hit hurts like hell and trust me, you get swarmed. The Enemys spawn endlessly, so no way to retrive loot or repair the ship after combat, coz there is no after combat. you are always in fight.

dont know what happed to the difficulty but at the moment i would say this is a coop game only, no way to survive even the easiest difficulty on any of the ships.

[outlaw_hat]

It's very hard solo.

Gann summed it up pretty well.

The game is made for 4 players. It's even hard for 2 people on normal.

Sadly it's not like DRG although it tries to be.

[FatherGrim]

Originally posted by TobiN:

It's very playable solo!
There's a solo oriented loadout for each ship called "Lone Sentry", which starts with multiple AI controlled modules to help solo ectypes. The game is also dynamically balanced to account for solo play.

i think you might want to adjust some of this dynamically balanced system you have for solo play, i was able to do 1 or 2 missions solo before 1.0 and now i cant do a single mission without dying at the end. i think you turned the brain accuracy from a pretty good shot, to cant hit the broad side of a barn,

[Zaidah]

Originally posted by FatherGrim:

Originally posted by TobiN:

It's very playable solo!
There's a solo oriented loadout for each ship called "Lone Sentry", which starts with multiple AI controlled modules to help solo ectypes. The game is also dynamically balanced to account for solo play.

i think you might want to adjust some of this dynamically balanced system you have for solo play, i was able to do 1 or 2 missions solo before 1.0 and now i cant do a single mission without dying at the end. i think you turned the brain accuracy from a pretty good shot, to cant hit the broad side of a barn,

Something I noticed with the update is that the shuriken canon (I think it has a new name now) now get worse accuracy after each shot, just like the benediction canon (it used to stay 100% accurate no matter the firerate). That's probably one reason why the accuracy feels worse.

[Dark Priscilla]

This game is not playable solo. I can barely do damage to enemy ships and dodge bullets until I can do anything. i probably will quit the game before I play with 3 other strangers.

[Koriar]

I also used to play solo a lot, but I tried to do a run in the current patch and I found getting past even a single mission much more difficult. It felt like the brain turrets couldn't hit anything without upgrades, and I never got through a second mission before being VERY quickly overwhelmed.

[The Real Phoenix]

Yup, agree with Koriar. Brain turrets are now as precise as a blind man looking at a screen. 4 turrets unable to kill in time a collector or a mine @500m. Before I was able to at least make a run to the boss, but now I cannot hit anything. Like cannot kill a bomber before it shoots its torpeedos...
Also, MK1 mods are now 10 alloys each, so there's that for your upgrades...

[DarthDan]

I think the 1.0 update makes things a little easier overall for solo play, but only a little. For the upsides, now you can make system upgraders, weapon mods, and level 2/3 modules without needing capstone skills in the engy or gunner trees! This means a solo player can devote their skillpoints to the piloting and scavenger trees where they really need them, which is a huge help. They also added the new brain engineer, which is... something, I guess. It's very underwhelming compared to what I hoped it would be.

However, there are some new downsides to solo play. As others have mentioned brain turrets got a huge accuracy nerf which feels pretty bad, especially when the turrets are low level. And the new brain engineer is close to worthless. It does a decent job at recharging boosts, but that's the only mode that seems to work. The engine trim mode is the job that should be the most helpful to a solo player, but I haven't seen it fix a single engine trim when it's in engine trim mode. In the repair mode it only seems to fix internal damage marked as "superficial defects", which are the least important things to fix, so that mode is also pretty worthless.

On the whole I think solo play is more do-able than it used to be, but not by a huge amount. It's still very daunting for a new player. IMO the brain turret accuracy nerf needs to be undone, but maybe only for solo play. I think the devs did the nerf because they were worried that brain turrets are too strong in general play, but they ended up making them too weak for solo play, and that's not a good spot since their main purpose is for solo play.

Also the new brain engineer modules seriously need a buff. Engine trim mode needs to actually do something, and the modules either need a general buff or the ability to be upgraded to higher tiers where they do more things more quickly. As they are right now the only thing they're good for is charging boosts.

[Dark Priscilla]

I'm not sure if anyone from Hutlihut are listening to us, but we cannot play this game solo or two players anymore.

[Sigvuld]

Originally posted by DarthDan:

I think the 1.0 update makes things a little easier overall for solo play, but only a little. For the upsides, now you can make system upgraders, weapon mods, and level 2/3 modules without needing capstone skills in the engy or gunner trees! This means a solo player can devote their skillpoints to the piloting and scavenger trees where they really need them, which is a huge help. They also added the new brain engineer, which is... something, I guess. It's very underwhelming compared to what I hoped it would be.

However, there are some new downsides to solo play. As others have mentioned brain turrets got a huge accuracy nerf which feels pretty bad, especially when the turrets are low level. And the new brain engineer is close to worthless. It does a decent job at recharging boosts, but that's the only mode that seems to work. The engine trim mode is the job that should be the most helpful to a solo player, but I haven't seen it fix a single engine trim when it's in engine trim mode. In the repair mode it only seems to fix internal damage marked as "superficial defects", which are the least important things to fix, so that mode is also pretty worthless.

On the whole I think solo play is more do-able than it used to be, but not by a huge amount. It's still very daunting for a new player. IMO the brain turret accuracy nerf needs to be undone, but maybe only for solo play. I think the devs did the nerf because they were worried that brain turrets are too strong in general play, but they ended up making them too weak for solo play, and that's not a good spot since their main purpose is for solo play.

Also the new brain engineer modules seriously need a buff. Engine trim mode needs to actually do something, and the modules either need a general buff or the ability to be upgraded to higher tiers where they do more things more quickly. As they are right now the only thing they're good for is charging boosts.

This - and the game's barely playable even with two people, because one of you is gonna be the pilot, and the other is gonna be doing everything else under the sun, everything will be a scramble, because the game just straight-up does not care how many players are on your ship no matter how much the devs might possibly insist that "oh but it's based on the amount of players!" or something. It absolutely is not, not remotely in my experience.

One of you is gonna be scrambling to do every single job but piloting all the time, and the other is gonna be stuck in the pilot's seat because there isn't anyone available to replace you if two of you are needed to do something important that needs doing fast - you'll just have to suck it up and accept that your ship is gonna take a bunch of free shots because neither of you are free to go fill in for the pilot role because, well, there's only two of you.

Void Crew is horrifically balanced on two or less players. I say this as someone with a MASSIVE LOVE for co-op games, especially games I can play with my partner. Every single time we've retried has been an exercise in frustration if we don't have at least one friend along with us.

Of all the things Void Crew could have taken notes on from DRG, they chose the live service-y mission structure instead of the game being impressively well balanced for any number of players. They say solo players are welcome, but the game won't remotely feel that way unless your tolerance for frustration is sky high.