beta review SPOILERS

[radix_s]

I completed a playthrough in beta and have some thoughts. This is my third playthrough, two others were like a month and half a year ago. Overall feels great, albeit very rushed The world is magical and for the first playthrough I am sure it would be a blast. And that's it. After the questline is done there is nothing else in the game while it has so many building blocks in place for more.

**Spoilers below alert.**
It feels the game wants the player now to follow the questline strictly - the barriers are for this here - but I have strayed from the questline and explored all available locations (yeah I am this type that goes for side quests and poi's before taking on the main quest) and I ended up twice having to go back to a location because I explored it before the questline pointed me to it. First is overgrown garden - I read the laptop in free roam and had to come back later to progress the questline just to enter the room (the game did not record that I already did it). Then the workshop - I got the USB and no clue what it is for (okay for me, but if you do not want whines then probably access to the room should be blocked until you reach the quest line). Only later I had to come back to get the card, fortunately somebody had thought about the shortcut but I still had to power the generator.
Also I got it frequently - like I got some material or plant well in advance of the questline. I had it stashed in the box on the ship but the quest instructions still wanted me to go somewhere and collect the thing. So either I had to go there again or grow the plant for it to be registered. I think these things are critical to get cleaned up before release since we still can freely roam within biomes and it feels like the game is not finished and buggy.

Barriers - some people like them, I do not. They took away one of the coolest things about the game - free roaming and exploring POI's. It was the meat of the game while the story was an addition. Now it is the reverse and this is a totally different game, it has been... 'dumbed down'. Much less fun imo. Also the fact that I have to shoot them down constantly as I fly becomes very tiresome and tedious quickly and makes me not want to come back. Could we have it that when you shoot a barrier it collapses completely everywhere?

I understand the game was changed to be much more strict so that people do not cry about soft locks and not having found some gear but this ruined the awesome free roaming feeling. It is what I liked by the previous playthroughs, without the barriers.

Locations seem very empty - as in not architecturally but as in being repetitive empty husks - just wrecked walls and some empty containers everywhere. I thought these are just because its EA but now as we close to release that became a stingy problem. I would recommend making an asset decorating pass.

Pipes - recommend removing them and re-adding when overhaul comes. For 1.0 their current mechanics and issues are unacceptable.

In many, many places there seem to be invisible obstacles added everywhere - especially in the garden POI - where there is an opening that I should clearly be able to pass but cannot and have to find another way. There is just too many of them. And they were not there before current beta got released. I assume you moved some assets around but did not do testing well enough. Or almost no testing at all. It is just too many of those and too obvious to throw at beta imo.

Honestly, with two weeks to go, this feels very rushed and rough around the edges. As in still deep in EA. It might bite back if you release like this. My recommendation would be you guys add another month and start doing some serious playthroughs.

[ngx]

I agree. Beta state is far from ready to be out of EA. Many things done hastily, i.e. cranes movement lacks basic physics, barriers are useless and annoying, many locations design seem more like first draft, objects like whole building or crane popping up into your face etc.
Game itself is good and relaxing, but IMHO, it could stay in EA a year or even more to be much more polished (no pun intended). With beta available for all impatient freaks like myself.

[[UA]Ramiel]

I agree on every point.

Also want to add that grind was cranked up once again, now it's even worse than what happened after co-op was introduced. In my 15 hours playthrough I never had storage full of basic materials. I was always short of metals. So much so that I've been going to certain towers to strip them of metal panels and synthetic containers. Circuit boards and motherboards were in high demand for mission-critical items in many cases. Deck extractor had its range nerfed so much it wasn't able to extract a cluster of synthetics withing visual range. And they also lowered FOV when operating extractor (and docking plank) for no apparent reason, making use of these devices slow and tedious.

Walls... gimme a break. Straight lines like they were drawn with a ruler. And a convenient rocky mountain placed exactly at their intersection... When organic wall I can accept as viable option, electric wall is just bonkers. You shoot the core with charged bolt and giant metal ring gets yeeted right into your face and despawns immediately. And all of this without a sound. Overall walls just make you feel boxed in all the time, like you are locked inside and have no freedom to explore. I guess, this is how devs tried to prevent players from going places they were not supposed to be at the moment and there is nothing wrong in doing that, games do it all the time, but how they executed it just ruins the exploration. You can't just take it seriously, when you see walls abruptly ending because engine can't draw them at that distance anymore.

Colossal lifeforms that were teased in first promo materials 2 years ago are very underwhelming. They have no actual purpose or impact on the world or the way you play the game, they are just a source of decoration items and - in one case - 20 energy crystals. Which you can craft now anyway. They pose no threat, they are just there. A decoration you can remove and nothing would change.

Workshop location was presented as a place where players can have a lot of space to rearrange and expand their ships. Except it only spawns once for a story purpose. Credit where credit is due - navigating this place and solving little puzzle of how to access different places to progress forward was a nice 20-minutes sequence. But the place itself... empty, barren, unfinished. Containers you can move with cranes have no physics and serve no actual purpose. I opened every last of them and found nothing. Cutting tool - why was it even added? Where are sound and visual effects of cutting locks with it? There are no other places in the game where you can use it and at this stage game finale is ~1 hour away. Completely pointless addition, portable extractor would do the same job just as fine. Feels like entire puzzle to acquire cutting tool was made to stretch the time player would spend finishing the game.

And all of mentioned above is beta. meaning it's not gonna change dramatically in little time before in goes live on stable branch. Which leads to another conclusion

What we gonna see on April 14th is not gonna be real 1.0.

In this case 1.0 is just a number and doesn't really mean anything. Beta clearly demonstrated that devs have no intention of delivering a finished and well polished product. 1.0 is just for news headlines and - as a result - influx of new players and cash.

1.0 used to be a significant milestone for any game when development phase is done and support phase starts. Support, not further development. It's mildly infuriating that this concept is being bent and twisted, so that developers can claim a W for themselves. They said it themselves - development will continue, we saw a roadmap. And it was confirmed that players' suggestions will make their way into the game, meaning we can expect hefty additions, not just minor adjustments and bug fixes.

Shipping the game in this state is unacceptable by any reasonable production and consumer standard.

[radix_s]

Originally posted by UARamiel:

Shipping the game in this state is unacceptable by any reasonable production and consumer standard.

Yeah, Agreed.

But then I remember I am a developer too and know damn well when I have had a vision too big for my team to complete in the time frame I promised to the investors - I had to cut corners. So you do what you can in the time you have and the limit is when the investors start dropping hints at pulling out the funding.

The 1.0 is going to be a fairly complete scaffold with a complete story. Still gonna give it thumbs up without hesitation, just hope that other people will do too and not flare red because of some hard decisions dev team had to make. They have been great at listening to people so far so I am looking forward to 1.1, hopefully we will get the game we want then.

[dark.sin]

I have to agree wholeheartedly with everything too. I haven't played the whole game, but only the latest new part, but it doesn't seem to be better than before at all, on the contrary. The electric walls seem like a terrible idea too. i also felt like i was flying in a room and not in the world. The worst part of it all is the ending arcade - AI roots, it's so empty, redundant and boring that I don't even want to believe it's not just a stupid joke.

If the developers release the game like this, I think they'll piss off a lot of players.

[Alcator]

My addition to the above:

The electrical walls are something that presents the player with a question, but it's only in the last ~10% of the story that answers start appearing. Nothing in the game hints at an "AI" being behind all this until the very end. The devs really should add a secondary story line, essentially "Decipher the mysteries of the world". It could be triggered by scanning the energy wall. The quest line of this could be:

[ Long term quest ] Uncover the mystery
> Find the hidden office in the Dust (on first visit to the surface) --> a room where we first get hints of Cockroaches, perhaps 'the first cockroach', who disagrees with the plan to deploy an AI to fix Earth, and starts planning his alternative solution.
> Find [location] in [Dust 2] (the surface area with the Lillies) --> more hints about Cockroaches, first mention of 'hacking virus'

This way, the Cockroaches would not appear in the last hour of the game (after blowing up the Cosmodrome), and wouldn't be such 'Deus ex machina'.

[[UA]Ramiel]

Originally posted by radix_s:

Still gonna give it thumbs up without hesitation

I'm not ready to give it a pass like that. They got into making this game with nothing but vague idea and proc gen tools. Overestimated their abilities, set unrealistic time frame (they planned to leave EA in just one year which is bonkers when you have 40 minutes demo), relied on community too much, ignored feedback they didn't like. This game is a "beautiful disaster" of their own making.

[Phoenix Cat]

Please keep the discussion civil or I will lock the thread. There is no need to be calling names or getting angry at the devs as you all are doing. You can complain about the game all you want. Give feedback on the game all you want. But don't make it more than that. Thanks.

[Archie]

Having finished a play-through of the beta, I agree on most things. I don't mind the walls since the automated deck extractor clears one on its own and shooting the other is a couple of seconds at best, but the walls really do not need to be there once they are down anymore. Their purpose if anything should be to block players from entering a zone before the story allows it, and be gone afterwards.

To me personally it feels like up to the underdust suburbs things have a good pace, exciting to see what comes next. But then it falls extremely flat. The workshop was sort of cool but meh at the same time. The cosmodome served no purpose other than to trigger one event. After the pace you get from the underdust labs and the infected garden and the underdust suburbs, this last bit is just boring, plain and uninspired. Typically you build up the story for a big finale, but in this case it seems both gameplay and the story build up to a snooze fest. The ending was unexpected and again, so damn boring and disappointing. It feels rushed honestly.

Still, I enjoy the gameplay and all it has to offer. But man, it could use 1 or 2 years more in EA. Granted the game is in a state where one can guesstimate that it is not getting much attention at all in terms of sales so a big 1.0 release can bring in sales but yeah, was expecting more for a full release. Hopefully the post-release updates help it.

Edit: Forgot to mention, I wish they'd done something for end-game. Some sort of randomized underdust tileset system. Instead of having those token machines, have that sort of thing be discoverable in randomized underdust POIs for example.

[saber1]

I still did not finished the beta, but I noticed, that the max flight height was lowered somewhat.
Now, when I want to visit High Place, I must have something like that on my airship:

https://images.steamusercontent.com/ugc/27691156458902646/217DC1A59BDAF404EE803334151F683210A73B44/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

[Phoenix Cat]

Originally posted by saber1:

I still did not finished the beta, but I noticed, that the max flight height was lowered somewhat.
Now, when I want to visit High Place, I must have something like that on my airship:

https://images.steamusercontent.com/ugc/27691156458902646/217DC1A59BDAF404EE803334151F683210A73B44/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

You need the upgrade machine to make better turbines and engines. Then no need for all that. Although that is a great workaround. First time I have seen that. :)

[saber1]

Originally posted by Phoenix Cat:

...

You need the upgrade machine to make better turbines and engines. Then no need for all that. Although that is a great workaround. First time I have seen that. :)

Thanks, I was confused by the in-game notice after I put 2nd Advanced Turbine - "Maximum Flight Altitude reached" - I was conviced that 290m was hard flight altitude limit, and more turbines would not help - so I did not try (until I read Your post).

[jeanluc]

I'm pretty sure it is hinted that it is some sort of ai earlier in the game, I knew that well before the end of legacy and haven't done anything new yet in beta

[FFH_Greg]

Thank you for the feedback, OP, and everyone else.

We will continue to improve the game up to the 1.0 release. Missing audio, texts, missing animations, story elements/beats, more bug fixes, performance improvements and a little more content.

We will look into those collision issues on the Greenhouse Tower that you mentioned in your pos,t too. I can't guarantee a fix for the 14th as you might expect, but it's on our radar now, so thank you again.

[FFH_Greg]

Originally posted by UARamiel:

I agree on every point.

Also want to add that grind was cranked up once again, now it's even worse than what happened after co-op was introduced. In my 15 hours playthrough I never had storage full of basic materials. I was always short of metals. So much so that I've been going to certain towers to strip them of metal panels and synthetic containers. Circuit boards and motherboards were in high demand for mission-critical items in many cases. Deck extractor had its range nerfed so much it wasn't able to extract a cluster of synthetics withing visual range. And they also lowered FOV when operating extractor (and docking plank) for no apparent reason, making use of these devices slow and tedious.

Walls... gimme a break. Straight lines like they were drawn with a ruler. And a convenient rocky mountain placed exactly at their intersection... When organic wall I can accept as viable option, electric wall is just bonkers. You shoot the core with charged bolt and giant metal ring gets yeeted right into your face and despawns immediately. And all of this without a sound. Overall walls just make you feel boxed in all the time, like you are locked inside and have no freedom to explore. I guess, this is how devs tried to prevent players from going places they were not supposed to be at the moment and there is nothing wrong in doing that, games do it all the time, but how they executed it just ruins the exploration. You can't just take it seriously, when you see walls abruptly ending because engine can't draw them at that distance anymore.

Colossal lifeforms that were teased in first promo materials 2 years ago are very underwhelming. They have no actual purpose or impact on the world or the way you play the game, they are just a source of decoration items and - in one case - 20 energy crystals. Which you can craft now anyway. They pose no threat, they are just there. A decoration you can remove and nothing would change.

Workshop location was presented as a place where players can have a lot of space to rearrange and expand their ships. Except it only spawns once for a story purpose. Credit where credit is due - navigating this place and solving little puzzle of how to access different places to progress forward was a nice 20-minutes sequence. But the place itself... empty, barren, unfinished. Containers you can move with cranes have no physics and serve no actual purpose. I opened every last of them and found nothing. Cutting tool - why was it even added? Where are sound and visual effects of cutting locks with it? There are no other places in the game where you can use it and at this stage game finale is ~1 hour away. Completely pointless addition, portable extractor would do the same job just as fine. Feels like entire puzzle to acquire cutting tool was made to stretch the time player would spend finishing the game.

And all of mentioned above is beta. meaning it's not gonna change dramatically in little time before in goes live on stable branch. Which leads to another conclusion

What we gonna see on April 14th is not gonna be real 1.0.

In this case 1.0 is just a number and doesn't really mean anything. Beta clearly demonstrated that devs have no intention of delivering a finished and well polished product. 1.0 is just for news headlines and - as a result - influx of new players and cash.

1.0 used to be a significant milestone for any game when development phase is done and support phase starts. Support, not further development. It's mildly infuriating that this concept is being bent and twisted, so that developers can claim a W for themselves. They said it themselves - development will continue, we saw a roadmap. And it was confirmed that players' suggestions will make their way into the game, meaning we can expect hefty additions, not just minor adjustments and bug fixes.

Shipping the game in this state is unacceptable by any reasonable production and consumer standard.

Hey Ramiel, thank you for your feedback. It's appreciated.

I'm disappointed to hear that you felt the game was more grindy as we've done a lot of work to remove elements of it. The Deck Extractor and Docking Plank haven't been touched AFAIK, AFAIK. Do you have any screenshot or video examples of this? It could be a bug.

As for your resource management, did you have Ingredients Auto-Crafting switched on? Using this means special trips for Circuit Boards etc shouldn't be needed as all you need are the raw materials (synth, metal, silicon etc). Could you not create more auto extractors or metal collectors if you needed more raw materials?

Like I mentioned to OP, there are some audio files still missing in the beta branch. Such as for the gates and the colossal lifeform.

Finally, you should know that The Workshop always spawns in the Silent City biome, it's not a one-time thing. Just look for the tall building with the tree sticking out of it; there is always a Workshop there. Granted it's quite tall for the early game, so it isn't suitable before you have a fair few turbines.

[ffh_dzawor]

Hi guys, Thanks a lot for all the feedback. Can you please fill out this survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1t2-1xWvj5HLNbjBpk4SLiWwicmh4HUksmSiN36ToZzs It would help us a lot!