Worth it?

[OneShotPaddy]

I've owned this game forever but gave up on it a long time ago. Is it active enough to return? I see a lot of positive reviews, but I don't trust Steam reviews anymore. Too many fanboys who can't hold developers accountable.

[Barbed wire]

It almost sound like you want to hear a negative opinion. ^^

I can try giving you mine.

I play this game since it was available on steam, more or less actively and I sort of developed a Hate-Love for it.

A lot has been done to the game and in the same time it's also lacking in many features. The Devs didn't abandon it and still actively work on it. A couple months ago they partnered with a Publisher with the promise to fill up the knowhow-gaps in their own Dev team, which sounds promising.

I did some research about it and from what I figured out everything is legit.

Split Polygon is currently working on a relatively complex update, since the want to convert the engine to w64 and a replacement for the Havoc engine.

I personally recently took a break from the game an right now the servers are not much more populated than during pre-launch times, but that migth be due the Summer-Hole and the entire Covid Situation.

I still trust them. They will make it work.
Since you already own the game, it wouldn't hurt to give it a further shot. You have nothing to loose.

I hope this was sort of helpful. Feel free to ask when you got further questions.

[Loki McNeil]

Over all, its a good game with most of its features working flawlessly. The area the game needs most work in is its online experience. Specifically, fixing the lag issues that bog down the servers. Additionally, they could figure out what helps to create online content, content that keeps players playing and keeps challenging them to survive.

[Johnno]

Depends why you abandoned it in the first place. When you ask if it's active enough... well, the developers/game progression somewhat is, but the playerbase notsomuch.

If you prefer PvE you will eventually hit a "wall" where you're just building a bigger ship to gather more materials to build a bigger ship, to gather more minerals to.... build a bigger ship. You can grind faction reputation that does nearly nothing (cheaper store prices), grind derelicts (for data cartridges to get armour parts), or just play to stockpile resources.

The multiplayer aspect of PvE is severely lacking as you can do anything solo really. At best you could use a buddy to sit in your cockpit so you don't get jumped by NPCs, but since you can use automated turrets that's not really even a danger.

In PvP the main problem is lacking playerbase. Beyond that, on the official servers PvP is only available in tier 2+, meaning players can easily escape combat and rift back to a "safe" system. There's also not really anything to fight for, unless you enjoy piracy (stealing from other players), and while that's fun for some of us it's far too much hit and miss, you could spend two hours waiting and hunting, only for the prey to rift away, rinse repeat every day for two weeks, and then you give up because there's no actual PvP.

Let me be blatantly honest. I've spent thousands of hours on this game. However, I would not have done so if the game was presented to me in its current form. I would not have stuck around for PvP as long as I did, because it's nonexistent, and that really was the only reason I stuck around as long as I did. From what I can tell most PvE players quit long before even reaching the highest tier, and even if they reach it they just end up auto mining or drone mining... for no actual reason other than filling their vaults.

Sadly there are few long term goals, unless you run a private server and put heaps of effort into RP or PvP events, or similar. New content from the devs doesn't come often enough to be a viable staying point, and there isn't enough in the base game as is to keep players interested for long.

[OneShotPaddy]

Got it, thanks everyone. Saved me a lot of time!

[Tenryuta]

ship editing and fighting are the positives.

micromanaging(actrs, ammo and nuclear reactors), automation(actors, auto carts), tiered ammo(but not guns?!?!), more skrill, moar skrill, and MOAR skrill by system tier, and a meh mining system(all auto/managed) are negatives.

[Chip Patton]

Originally posted by OneShotPaddy:

I've owned this game forever but gave up on it a long time ago. Is it active enough to return? I see a lot of positive reviews, but I don't trust Steam reviews anymore. Too many fanboys who can't hold developers accountable.

If you won't trust reviews, why would you trust the forums?

You already own the game, how hard is it to fire it up and try it? I did and I liked what I saw (so far).

Yeah I'm still noticing some bugs but it's not critical and the performance is way better. They also made everything easy-mode now so all of the wenging about how hard it was to fly a ship should have been dissolved. Funny the population left after that happened. Almost like my own prophecy that it would kill multiplayer came true - but I digress.

There are a lot of things that were added you should be able to get a lot of enjoyment out of. My only gripe is there is still no goals for a player to achieve after building a dream ship. That tells me the game is building focused and I think they should likely focus on boss fights and custom gear drops that are better than what a player can make.

Adding min-maxing to the game keeps the ocd players around and playing. But again. I digress.

Simply put, give it a try. Why ask something you're going to doubt the answer to when it would have taken you less time to download/install the game than it took to get an answer?