* Don't know where I'm going despite having quests to go there
Yea, you have to scout to find starlanes and wormholes and go through them to find out how to get to the various stars. Getting that done fast without taking too much time away from other critical early game activities is one of the challenges. But it would be better if:
- add a diplomacy option to give/sell info on the location and destination of starlanes/wormholes. This is already doable for jump gates in the player-buying-from-race direction (races don't use jump gates, so they wouldn't care) and for planets in the race-buying-from-player direction (though that would be nice to be done in both directions though it might generate a longer list than desirable).
- have races
not give quests for places
they don't know how to get to. I mean, c'mon
Quests for "we've heard of star so-and-so but don't know how to get there, please find out how" would be ok, I think, since it wouldn't surprise the player if they didn't know where it was.
-- that said, since I started my second sector I only rarely hear about quests I care about where I don't know how to get there since I'm really aggressive in early scouting.
* Upgrading and items feel clunky. I can't tell when something is an upgrade or what slot it goes into quickly and easily
You can tell what type of slot takes an item by the borders: blue triangles in three corners is a heavy slot, orange triangles in two corners is a medium slot, a green triangle in a single corner is a light slot. Cargo holds go in cargo slots but you won't pick those up often at all (I've seen about 1 per sector).
Edit: but I would
dearly love some way to sort/filter my inventory and/or a vendor's items by slot type or main-stat (like +max-power-load or is-a-weapon or +attack or +thrust, etc). I would have loved something similar in every ARPG I'm aware of; I think some WoW addons actually had workable features like that, but that's the only place I've seen them. But my breadth of ARPG experience is relatively narrow so I may just be missing a good example.
* Combat is annoying trying to click everything as fast as possible, including incoming missiles
Mouse-only targeting is basically the same finger-buster as it has been in any ARPG for me. Thankfully I've not had to do mouse-only targeting at all in this game:
- if I press 1, it uses the ability in slot one on the nearest target eligible for it. And 2 uses the second slot, etc. Simple flight and combat is actually possible one-handed if you leave movement on WASD and the abilities on Alpha1, Alpha2, etc; I've moved movement to Numpad8,4,5,6 so I more readily access all 10 ability slot keys.
- There is some annoyingness in how once you have locked on to a target mashing the button won't do anything if the locked-on target is out of range; that makes sense from one perspective but not from my standard "make something die, there's like 20 things on my tail" perspective. Given the number of input-mode toggles already present, I think he'll be willing to add one for "make direct-trigger abilities ignore locked-on-target if said target is out of range".
* Quests feel like standard fetch and postal from MMORPG's
A lot of the individual tasks are pretty similar, yea. The difference is in what they mean:
- In an MMO or most any other ARPG, if they tell you something like "go buy some non-lethal weapons and sell/give them to planet X so they can handle some unrest" then the game will jolly well wait
20 years for you to do that and totally not care about the delay (and possibly refuse to advance the game at all until you do as you were told).
- Here:
-- In the meantime, that planet's production and whatnot is actually reduced, making it harder for them to build/replace defensive ships (edit: or combat ships to explore/patrol/attack, or passenger cruise ships for money runs, or diplomacy ships for +relations runs, or colony ships for new colonies; I've seen all those behaviors), and contributing less money to their race, etc. That can be significant.
-- If you wait too long, either the unrest is resolved naturally (rare) or breaks out into a fiercer unrest or even outright rebellion (more penalties; I don't remember actually seing a planet change owners through rebellion, dunno if that's implemented).
-- Depending on which race it is and the diplomatic situation, you may not
want to help them with the unrest. And the game does not make you do it. You might want them to get hurt. You might have started the unrest yourself. You might choose to run guerrilla weapons to the rebels instead.
And of course the ol':
- "if you don't kill this uprising, it might promote one of its members to a boss" (just saw this happen)
- "if you don't kill this boss, it might form a fleet"
- "if you don't kill this boss fleet, it might do a bunch of other nasty things, like start uprisings or even invasions" (just saw a three-wave invasion go across the announcement log)
- And the part that was new in this game compared to Din's for me: that invasion made me happy, because it was in the territory of the main remaining opponent race, so I was cheering for the monsters
Of course if it had been in my allies' territory I'd have felt differently about it.
I'm going to give it more time, but I didn't get near the feeling of what you posted. I decided to try it because it does have a money back guarantee.
The first sector had some oddness for me; the Dryad were colonizing
like crazy in a way I haven't remotely seen in any of the other 4 sectors I've played. I didn't mind so much, but it did lead to some other weirdness (the Dryad just giving me
heaps of credits towards the end of my time in the sector, etc) and it does indicate that there may be bugs more subtle than any one tester is going to necessarily notice, but which lead to an undesirable range of experience. I don't think that's what's going on here, I think partly it takes a while for interesting gear choices and quest situations to both happen and the player to understand what's going on. That's a flaw, but I think it can be worked out in the beta.
And yes, the money-back guarantee is a good point.
