Returning player - should I start now or wait

[CascadeHush]

TL;DR I'm confused by the recent news post and am wondering if I should wait to start a new game?

I saw the news announcement and skimmed a few pages of discussion and I'm totally confused. Should I wait before staring a new game or is it okay to play now? I don't know the current history of the game but I'm thinking about giving it another go after 4 years.

I played about 100 hours of this pre-release, mostly version 0.5 and some 0.6. The game was unplayable on release on my computer due to single digit frame rates and physics glitches. Also the 'story' that the ended up tacking onto the game seemed pretty uninspired to me. But it looks like they have added a bunch of stuff. Not sure how meaningful any of it is.

[Marck]

I don't understand what you are waiting for. And how are we supposed to know what you regard as an "inspired" and "meaningful" story? If you used to like Astroneer enough to play it for about 100 hours in pre-release, and now decided to ask your question by opening this discussion, then you seem intrigued enough to play again. If the only thing holding you back is the technical issues you had with the released version, then nobody can tell if your computer will be able to run Astroneer now, you just have to try in order to find out.

[CascadeHush]

There is a very confusing news post which it maybe you haven't seen. It seems to imply that your gamesave is about to be invalidated and that there is a major update coming to the game but I'm really not sure. There is a very long discussion thread and some people there are saying that the devs keep bringing out out updates that make you play through the game from the start. But it's really vague as to whether that just happened, or is about to happen.

I don't want to start a new save only to have to do it all again in a day or two. So I'm asking for clarification.

[Marck]

There's currently a bug related to the update preceeding the current one. Only under specific circumstances, this bug affects some of the players who participated in the limited time event that was part of that update. The developers found a work-around for this, which they want to keep active until they fix the actual issue. If you haven't played during that past update at all, then you are not going to be affected anyways.

The newest update adds missions which you can access only after doing a great number of the already existing missions, so you probably want to start with a savegame that has been progressed as far as possible anyways. That's what I did, and it worked fine although I did participate in the previous limited time event.

Since the 1.0 release, every update allowed you to continue with your previously saved games. At the very least, it has been like that for me.

[CascadeHush]

I'll start a new game, thanks :)

[Marck]

Have fun and enjoy the experience.

If you still do have technical issues, you should consider getting in contact with the developer. Their support page[astroneer.space] lists some options for reporting issues. If you send them an e-mail, you are most likely to get some feedback on your specific issue.