DLC ruined the game

[belfagor]

I loved this game... until Glitchwalker... it's a messy annoying grind. boring and stupid.. really the worst thing they could do to this game. Just installed the whole thing... Horrible

[Nightwolf]

its poorly done to be sure. there are some good points to it but those are just drowned out by all the bad. the further you go into it the more clear it shows how little effort was put into its design.

it needed new tech to offset the design decisions.

there should have been a new paver that had a wider width to it over the old one. new truck storage modules for rss and soil. over just slapping on the old cans for rss.

the sheer size of the map now makes trains actually worthwhile investing in building. a new train station with more automation would have been warranted. a train car built to hold a packed up large rover for instance.

rockets should have been removed from the tech tree entirely in the DLC. a new rover to justify the map size would have been nice but rovers are actually very balance intensive in terms of work and the dlc made it clear that kinda work was vastly outside what they had planned for.

if you play astroneer a lot its worth it just because its different. outside of that, this was a hard failure. i will never touch a dlc they ever release for at least a year from now on.

10 bucks for what amounted to a skin is more in line with the crap AAA studios pull, charging 50$ for a mount or something.

[Gopher]

there's been very little effort put into this game in general since it's full release. The content has been a very slow drip and one look at the expansion it looked like a cash grab immo

[GreenMan]

It was a pretty cheap DLC. I had fun with what it was, though it was annoying as hell to traverse most of the biomes with a vehicle. The inner layers were even worse.

[Geauxboy]

I'm perplexed by those who complain that the DLC is a grind. Isn't the base game a grind too?

[Nightwolf]

the DLC dumps you in the deep end and then FORCES the grind by adding meaningless progress walls. The base game does not do this. Its open ended to progress at whatever pace suits you. You can go straight to end tier tech in the base game, you cant do that in the DLC.

the base game just doesnt have the meaningless progress walls and thats where much of the hate comes in the DLC

i suppose to put it in context you might be able to understand, imagine if the DLC required you to pay $59.99 to progress through each tech tier while base game was free.

[Diernayr]

Totally agree OP, and so do 50% of people that left a review.

https://steamdb.info/app/3042220/

This is what happens when the suits take control over the creativity.

[Geauxboy]

Originally posted by Nightwolf:

the DLC dumps you in the deep end and then FORCES the grind by adding meaningless progress walls. The base game does not do this. Its open ended to progress at whatever pace suits you. You can go straight to end tier tech in the base game, you cant do that in the DLC.

the base game just doesnt have the meaningless progress walls and thats where much of the hate comes in the DLC

i suppose to put it in context you might be able to understand, imagine if the DLC required you to pay $59.99 to progress through each tech tier while base game was free.

I do agree that the way that research gets unlocked really throws a monkeywrench into a typical playthrough (at least for me). Ever since the introduction of the tapper, I unlock the tapper and autoarm before almost anything else. There's nothing more annoying than trying to craft something and it's going soooo slow cause you have no real power going. Same goes with my research unlocks after that is done. Really have to change your strategy on how you play this dlc.

The dlc does force you to defeat the storms and that is something I didn't really think or care about since defeating the storms are the missions. Just have to adjust your playthrough strategy.

[RemRoc]

I dont mind the grind, but the need to play most of the original campaign just to access the DLC planet is stupid. I restart every time I come back to the game, I love the beginning and mid game, endgame, not so much !

[Geauxboy]

Originally posted by RemRoc:

I dont mind the grind, but the need to play most of the original campaign just to access the DLC planet is stupid. I restart every time I come back to the game, I love the beginning and mid game, endgame, not so much !

You do not need to play most of the original campaign. Unlocking the DLC only requires completion of 5 missions which can all be done quite early in game and 2 of them are done in the first few seconds of being on the ground.

Go to gateway
Power gateway
Drill to core and unlock

Drilling to core takes some planning of course. Take oxygen, power, drill, canisters, core materials (no spoiler). No need to make any vehicle especially that early in game because the best way to drive to the core is with a drill and paver and you can't unlock the large rover that soon. Just go on foot. Oxygen can be replinished with resin. Power can be replinished with organic (if you don't have a q-rtg that is). Even the material for unlocking the core can be found along the way...........usually.

DONE!!!!

[Drinkcup]

The only thing worse than doing nothing is making something actually worse.

This dev only makes things worse... they dont understand what made the game so captivating at all. Instead they added another layer of frustration and 'see light, press button' type gameplay, instead of making the survivial exploration things better.


they're just failures.

[Smiley]

Been trying to get a refund, but I went over the 2 hour mark because I did event content before starting the DLC. 26 refusals via steam and System Era gave me a 'oh, so sorry, if steam says no we can't help you' as if they couldn't do a manual refund upon me showing a removal of the content. Hell I'd happily remove the main game as well if I had to.

Took me about ten minutes before I realized that I did *not* want to play this. It's one thing that your things are gated behind the hacks and that you're stripped of everything with no way of getting to any of your stuff, it's entirely another one when they force you to research everything again, to go through that horrendous byte grind, which was already one of the key negative parts of the game.

The fix to this is simply to remove the byte grind or to not have creative mode stop missions. The hack in itself is already plenty enough of a handicap.

I've already spread the word around not to get this, preventing a handful of friends from even looking at it.

Screw me over and I'll happily return the favor.

[belfagor]

Given the hundreds of hours I enjoyed the original game, I decided to give it another go. Started a new save, trying not to rush things and taking it slowly and safely. Cleared the Alfa storm, got the second vault, unlocked again a bunch of stuff and now I am trying to solve Delta storm... but it's again a terrible experience, completely broken.
I tried to "solve the storm" getting a couple of medium rover with Ruby and portable decipher with proper power, leaving in the storm "hot spot" and getting out to avoid suffocating. It worked a couple of time, but then I fell in a crevasse due to zero visibility.
Now all my tools are down there (drill above all), the rover is unreachable (i got out of it and fell down,,, again visibility).
This save is completely broken.. i can just respawn at the shelter I planted outside the storm. All my tools and equipment scattered in 2 different crevasses. And sincerely I don't know how to get back in the game. I had to switch to creative mode for the first time since i started in beta.. unbelievably bad design.
Overall, if the developers wanted to provide a different experience, they should have given us different tool to do that. For instance, in the base game, going around planets without a large rover with drill and paver, is a complete suicide, but here we are "forced" to do so as the large rover design is "hacked". For instance getting back from the bottom of the second vault underground canyon was a terrible experience. Having to climb for 20 minutes, hugging to the wall as I was running out of soil for the paver (given that the medium SOli canister also is "hacked"). Really whoever "designed" this "esperiance" should sincerely consider to switch to another job... janitor would be perfect of them,
Update: new bugged situation (or maybe just another insane design decision) while finally heading back to my home base, I drove next to one of the "core spikes", the big purple and shiny things protruding from the core. On Aeoluz, instead of being in the core only, they go all the way to the surface. Short story: driving next to it, the monolith like thing attracted my medium rover train (4 of them) and now it cannot move.. they (and myself) are "stuck on the shiny purple surface" and the rover doesn't move forward or backward... like a mousetrap. What may ever be the sense or meaning of such weirdness? just to piss people off? or the real developers were on vacation and they left a bunch of high school drop-offs develop the DLC? really i cannot undestand.
Astroneer was a cozy and fun game, this DLC is complete garbage and it's just annoying and stupid. Too bad, so far System Era has been very good with the different addition to the base game after release and also the event are a fun opportunity to get back to Astroneer, but Glitchwalkers is utterly bad really the worst thing ever done in this game.

[juanxlink]

Originally posted by Smiley:

Took me about ten minutes before I realized that I did *not* want to play this. It's one thing that your things are gated behind the hacks and that you're stripped of everything with no way of getting to any of your stuff, it's entirely another one when they force you to research everything again, to go through that horrendous byte grind, which was already one of the key negative parts of the game.

Imagine if you had done your due diligence as a purchaser and informed yourself with a 10 minute YT video about the content of the DLC.
I gave it a thumbs down too, but you seem awfuly angry for what amounts to throwing 10€ to the fireplace.

[Nightwolf]

Originally posted by juanxlink:

Imagine if you had done your due diligence as a purchaser and informed yourself with a 10 minute YT video about the content of the DLC.
I gave it a thumbs down too, but you seem awfuly angry for what amounts to throwing 10€ to the fireplace.

thats because good developers dont screw you. its one thing to say i dont like this mechanic or that but overall its a reasonable experience.

you had a previously good developer that put out a DLC and there was no reason not to take it on faith it would meet the minimum standards for a DLC on steam. What they made was so wildly bad, something that had so little effort put into it, it doesnt even qualify as a DLC.

they made a story line and sold it as a dlc. that was it, that is all there is to it. it has no content. they could not even add multiple worlds because that would have wildly stretched the budget and development time they had set.

If paradox, EA or Sony put out a DLC, you investigate. You look into it because those companies routinely scam their player base. Astroneer does not do that....or they used to not do that.

They earned the trust.

This broke it.

Not a little........it just shattered it.

[Diernayr]

I guess we're not wrong. Steam review score is at 48% and still dropping. Ouch.