Why multiplayer is the worst game experience ever created - ever

[MARTFONGER]

This doubles as my review of the game. I felt that I wanted to post this someplace where steam doesn't automatically bury it under one-liner reviews like "you can space in this game and you can blow stuff up". If that type of review is enough for you chances are you won't get through this entire post.

I don't think that the fact that this game is "alpha" is the reason that you should not play it. Dealing with alpha issues is one thing but dealing with outright design flaws with no thought behind them betrays the types of developers we can expect to deal with and the issues we can expect from multiplayer and SE in general for a long time to come.

It may not be impossible to change any of these issues. The fact is that this is the state of the game as it stands. Changes come but this will be good for a least a week as the developers literally went on vacation.

REASONS WHY SPACE ENGINEERS IS THE MOST ABYSMAL MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE POSSIBLE;

1) Other players can use readily available tools to find your ships and destroy or steal them by using the included "save game" feature in multiplayer games. Nothing is safe. Period. Unless you have a friend to just sit there in the cockpit and watch it for hours and hours on end and even then your defenses can easily be made worthless. Additionally if you bother to set up and do development on a server others can easily save and steal your work.

2) About half of the players in the game are griefers who just run around either hacking and stealing or slamming their starter ships into your base or ships. Building something requires vastly more time than tearing it down does and ship collisions are one of the nastiest things that can happen and one of the easiest griefs for kiddies to generate as they have an infinite supply of starter ships with which to do this. Even defenses will quickly have their ammo worn down by this as turrets waste huge supplies of ammunition on unproductive targets i.e. the debris left behind by a now-destroyed starter ship suicide attempt.

3) Defensive turrets target any moving object including you. They will instantly kill you and whatever you were standing near and the turrets have no IFF whatsoever. If a stray piece of object comes floating into your base area the turrets will wreck everything. If you happen to spawn at a medbay in range of a turret you are now trapped in an endless and unescapable cycle of instant one-bullet deaths.

4) You can easily not respawn in the proper location due to bugs. The respawn marker/medical station is very easily disabled by any damage making griefing even easier. If you spawn outside of your base with the turrets turned on you are completely screwed.

5) It takes 10-15 minutes to get anywhere at all. To get somewhere safer you'll have to go at least 30 minutes out to build. Even then hackers will still grief you. Imagine Desert Bus in space with 5-year-olds griefing you.

6) The toolbar does not work and randomly selects items or switches from welder to grinder at random.

7) The toolbar bug also causes an object placement frame to continuously appear and constantly blind you.

8) The devs put out two terrible and rushed patches and left on vacation for a week with no hotfix.

9) The intricate conveyor systems required for every ship often don't join/connect properly or move contents in irregular ways or, worse, when dropping items into them the items will sometimes randomly turn into gravel.

10) If you manage to have fun with this game, it will be in offline-mode only. In that mode you either move immediately away from the starting position or get owned by the asteroid storms.

11) No player can ever be banned from a server. Hackers just blatantly get away with it and due to the complete and total lack of any admin tools cannot be stopped by any means whatsoever.

12) The most populous servers are the worst for the above meaning that you can't really find meaningful ship-to-ship gameplay except at the lowest most childish end of the scale on which those experiences are judged.

13) Nothing in the game has any sense of ownership whatsoever. If you leave the cockpit of your ship even for a single instant someone else can get in and fly it away and it is GONE forever. They can also convert your station into a ship and watch it fall away into space or put a new cockpit on your ship and fly it away. There is absolutely nothing AT ALL that can prevent theft of your craft by anyone who wants to do it.

14) Has multiple server crash bugs that are very easy to exploit. About an actual total of 30% or more of the time you spend playing this game will be working around bugs or doing work to fix issues that they caused. I have not even scratched the surface on how many game-breaking bugs are in this "game".

15) The lag is absolutely. insane. oh. my. dear. god. Any time someone joins or leaves the server the whole game lags for every player for about 2-3 seconds before and after. This leads to another type of greifing.

16) The default skybox is painted with things that look exactly like the physical asteroids in the game. Yeah really.

17) What timing for this review. As of this very moment the game won't even launch. So you can't even play it. I'd say that counts as a bad multiplayer experience.

Space Engineers is really, really really REALLY _REALLY REALLY_ BAD BAD BAD right now. That probably looks really awful in type but I want to overtly stress how utterly soul-wrenchingly bad this experience is. I mean that is is TERRIFYINGLY BAD. The above is not really my opinion or a review as much as it is a list of the worst aspects of this experience and a warning. The rest of this is more of a 'review'.

Not ever having played this game is better than having played it. I cannot stress enough right up front that the experience will drain your soul and make you want to die. The only reason to play multiplayer is if you literally hate youself. I mean this will all my heart. It's like smoking meth - having never done it is probably best.

The worst part of playing this game isn't having spent twenty dollars on it. As bad as the core game is, those flaws pale and wither in comparison to how bad it's made to be by the people who play it as the underlying, core mechanics of the game itself lend themselves easily to exploitation and greifing. Left4Dead over it's entire lifetime has had less idiotic, childish and psychopathic victims of child abuse play it than this game already has. If you see someone on your friends list constantly playing this game then chances are that they are a totally hopeless focking shiethead.

Don't even THINK about spending money on this trash until it is ready. It COULD be a really great game someday. Right now it is not and it is not worth any money. Unless extreme and direct measures are taken to fix greifing then this game will never be worth a damn at all.

"Alpha" used to mean that internal playtesters were paid to play the game. Now it means that you get to play to play it. I wouldn't even call this an alpha as they don't even know what game they are making yet and readily admit this.

I would rather attempt to copulate forcibly with a mountain lion than play this game in the state that it is in.

I tried to warn you.

-10^1000/10. Imagine a game that is absolutely and totally focking abysmal. Space Engineers is FAR worse than that. Buying this game is exactly analogous to paying someone twenty dollars to kick you as hard as they can in the nuts. That this game was released AT ALL is nothing less than a troll by the development team. Calling this a "game" is like saying that a live nuclear warhead with a flower painted on it is "art". An absolute tragedy. An insult to gamers and developers alike. That this costs money at all should (and may actually) be a criminal act. I want to go outside and scream at the neighbors that they should never play this game - nearly regardless of any potential consequences.

A true scourge on mankind. This is certainly a sign of the apocalypse.

If you have read this and agree with my statements please locate my review on my profile and find it helpful so that others will see this before they choose to buy this game.

[Ice Forge]

Well i like how you constructed and thougt this one through but it all pretty much sums up how 95% of the "alpha early access" released games are looking on steam.

As for this game the devs listen, acknowlages the fans use input to further improve and continuesly patches and fix said broken things and i can probably say that 90% of your complaints of the game is being worked on at the moment.

I for one have had nothing but fun in this game, both pvp wise and just overall building stuff BUT that said; of course there is ( under public play ) the same huge amount of infantile fking craptastic exploiters & trolls/morons that will go out of their way to make YOUR life miserable for their own amusement.

And i would like to point out like with any other early access games, if you dont like unfinished stuff ( yes ALPHA not mid stage beta games ) stop buying them. Wait until they hit beta or even a proper released state.

[Arcamean]

When it comes to greifers this is why I do not host public survival servers anymore. If you want a survival build I recommend joining others servers and seeing how they play. Build a small friends list and you'll have MUCH more fun.

edit: Sorry but the rest of it looks like a simple rant trying to scare new players away.

[warhawk_rider]

OMG, that was hilarious. Brightened up my day! While I may not agree with EVERYTHING you said, there is one thing I definitely agree with. SE certainly does not feel like a "game" to me. It's more like a box of legos, or tinker toys, or tools, with no goal or objective in sight.

[White Rhino PSO]

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

...6) The toolbar does not work and randomly selects items or switches from welder to grinder at random...

...9) The intricate conveyor... move contents in irregular ways or, worse, when dropping items into them the items will sometimes randomly turn into gravel.

Never had either of these happen to me before in the many hours I've played the game. Granted, I play the game almost exclusively in single-player with occasional direct invites to friends to show them the things I've created.

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

...7) The toolbar bug also causes an object placement frame to continuously appear and constantly blind you.

The only time I ever saw this happen was when getting out of a cockpit, it would sometimes have a placement frame for one of my toolbar items. Fixing it was as easy as switching to one of the placable blocks on my bar and then switching back to the welder I had been holding. And I haven't seen this bug happen in a while, not since they fixed it as addressed in a previous patch.

Originally posted by UNDERHIL:

...10) If you manage to have fun with this game, it will be in offline-mode only. In that mode you either move immediately away from the starting position or get owned by the asteroid storms.

Yes, that's part of the elements of survival they added. You can just as easily turn them off by editing your saved game through the main menu or by finding servers that don't involve themselves with meteor showers. I personally like them, even though all of my things are huddled behind an asteroid currently.

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

...15) The lag is absolutely. insane. oh. my. dear. god. Any time someone joins or leaves the server the whole game lags for every player for about 2-3 seconds before and after.

How many people do you have entering and leaving your servers that two to three seconds of lag is really this big of an issue? I've had worse lag than that and still enjoyed the game enough to keep playing as long as it wasn't some kind of revolving door of players.

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

...16) The default skybox is painted with things that look exactly like the physical asteroids in the game.

This is something I had a problem with as well - and fixed it easily by replacing the skybox with a different texture that is just an open galaxy of stars.

I've played this game more than any other that I've bought on Steam. I think it's up there with Minecraft, Starbound, Terraria and all the other games that have sucked me in and given me an open world to build in, each of which more than gave me what I paid for. I personally suggest this game for anyone who likes building things out of parts, building your own space ship and being able to go inside and fly it around.

Of course, this is only my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

[dahZee]

my goal in this game is to create something of a base that is less griefable, it's kind of fun thinking of the inevitable griefers as the "enemy" and tying to play around that, as they will be constantly assaulting you.

[MARTFONGER]

Thanks for the replies. I've played quite a bit of the multiplayer and thought the review over heavily. I honestly expected more hate but the things that I have listed are factual and not really open to interpretation.

[Ice Forge]

Well i do agree with a lot of points on here but they are also a lot of it getting fixed along the way.

So if you have issues with it at this point let it rest for a month or 2 then check back and see what its like then.

[MARTFONGER]

Originally posted by Arcamean:

edit: Sorry but the rest of it looks like a simple rant trying to scare new players away.

Yes. That's right. I absolutely do not want anyone to accidentally buy this yet. That is my review of the game as it is at this time.

[Ice Forge]

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

Originally posted by Arcamean:

edit: Sorry but the rest of it looks like a simple rant trying to scare new players away.

Yes. That's right. I absolutely do not want anyone to accidentally buy this yet. That is my review of the game as it is at this time.

I would personally just chalk it up to what alpha early access are for here on steam.

If you want to be a part of the continued developement of a game and help it out by testing, reporting problems; adding suggestions etc i strongly recommend this game if you are a fan of building stuff, designing cool features and being generally just creative.

You should NOT buy this if you want finished completed features and want smooth unhindered gameplay as this is NOT what alpha access is for.

[MARTFONGER]

Originally posted by Erik Vargnäve:

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

Yes. That's right. I absolutely do not want anyone to accidentally buy this yet. That is my review of the game as it is at this time.

I would personally just chalk it up to what alpha early access are for here on steam.

If you want to be a part of the continued developement of a game and help it out by testing, reporting problems; adding suggestions etc i strongly recommend this game if you are a fan of building stuff, designing cool features and being generally just creative.

You should NOT buy this if you want finished completed features and want smooth unhindered gameplay as this is NOT what alpha access is for.

My point is not only that the game is lacking - it is that the feature design is poor and the underlying mechanics had no thought behind them for multiplayer whatsoever. It's like they definitely planned on not making a multiplayer game and then did.

My point also is that it is not only not "fun" but it is a terrifyingly bad experience to attempt multiplayer in this game. I'm trying to save people from that.

Edit: I sincerely hope the developers take this stuff to heart. I want this game to be good. It's not.

[White Rhino PSO]

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

I sincerely hope the developers take this stuff to heart. I want this game to be good. It's not.

I'd rather them take constructive criticism to heart than someone whose review of a game is really just a laundry list of things they've done wrong. With the number of sales they've made, and the number of people in the community that enjoy the game, I'd wager that they've done quite a few things right.

I'm not one to just turn around and say "it'e an early access game" or say that it's in Alpha or Beta or whatnot as some kind of an excuse for particular problems. Whatever problems arise I'm confident they plan to fix.

[MARTFONGER]

Originally posted by WhiteRhinoPSO:

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

I sincerely hope the developers take this stuff to heart. I want this game to be good. It's not.

I'd rather them take constructive criticism to heart than someone whose review of a game is really just a laundry list of things they've done wrong. With the number of sales they've made, and the number of people in the community that enjoy the game, I'd wager that they've done quite a few things right.

I'm not one to just turn around and say "it'e an early access game" or say that it's in Alpha or Beta or whatnot as some kind of an excuse for particular problems. Whatever problems arise I'm confident they plan to fix.

I would argue that if you want more people to play this game then you definitely do not want them to buy it right now. It is definitely better if they wait. If the Rust or Day-Z or survival crowds were to pounce on this right now it would definitely spell doom for SE.

[White Rhino PSO]

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

I would argue that if you want more people to play this game then you definitely do not want them to buy it right now. It is definitely better if they wait. If the Rust or Day-Z or survival crowds were to pounce on this right now it would definitely spell doom for SE.

That's assuming that they plan to focus primarily on the multi-player aspects of the game. I, and I'm sure several others, quite enjoy the game primarily in single-player. I'm not saying that they should focus entirely on that, but it's still a large aspect of the game.

In Minecraft, players have to use server-given commands to claim 'ownership' over a part of the map and stop others from griefing. In Starbound players could put instant-kill objects where a player would spawn on his ship and ruin the character for him. Every game that includes multi-player is going to have griefing in some form or another. Saying the developers have made a bad game and that people shouldn't buy it isn't the solution.

[MARTFONGER]

Originally posted by WhiteRhinoPSO:

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

I would argue that if you want more people to play this game then you definitely do not want them to buy it right now. It is definitely better if they wait. If the Rust or Day-Z or survival crowds were to pounce on this right now it would definitely spell doom for SE.

That's assuming that they plan to focus primarily on the multi-player aspects of the game. I, and I'm sure several others, quite enjoy the game primarily in single-player. I'm not saying that they should focus entirely on that, but it's still a large aspect of the game.

In Minecraft, players have to use server-given commands to claim 'ownership' over a part of the map and stop others from griefing. In Starbound players could put instant-kill objects where a player would spawn on his ship and ruin the character for him. Every game that includes multi-player is going to have griefing in some form or another. Saying the developers have made a bad game and that people shouldn't buy it isn't the solution.

Correct. The prevention would have been for them to not release a stinking pile of garbage multiplayer patch, and then another terrifyingly bad totally untested patch immediately after that one that made the game even worse and less playable.

The solution is about a dozen core mechanics that don't seem to have ever been planned for by which I mean that it's going to be quite some time before multiplayer is at all viable.

[LameWarrior]

Originally posted by UNDERHILL:

My point is not only that the game is lacking - it is that the feature design is poor and the underlying mechanics had no thought behind them for multiplayer whatsoever. It's like they definitely planned on not making a multiplayer game and then did.

Many design flaws you mentioned are only "placeholders" now. They can be fixed by introducing factions (that is planned). Right now there are no restrictions, so you can play in cooperative way, help with testing the netcode and have fun with friends. Reviewing multiplayer design when it's at a very basic stage makes no sense. This is not a final design. Nobody ever said it is. Wait a bit and see. Write another review when SE reaches beta stage. Doing it today is just an angry rant for no reason.