I think it's more about expectation mismatch. It was marketed as a space exploration RPG, but i'd say it is a space survival roguelike with strong text adventure elements.

Combine that with the fact that the game kinda tries to give you a culture shock with the aliens as well as the fact that you need to piece a loooot together yourself (trading prices, enemy fight patterns etc.) like rather oldschool games, and you end up with a game that is very easily misunderstood.

A game which also is not that cheap/was not that cheap with it's original pricing. Once you misunderstand the game as a brute force exploration lander minigame, the planet variety starts to wear thin eventually. And you just... die over and over again, without feeling it was your fault, and the content you see doesn't reflect the price at all, not even potentially. You just simply miss a lot of the work going into the game: There is a novels worth of text in the alien interactions, which is localized in a variety of languages. The soundtrack is also pretty great and a real orchestra recording.

So, in short, i'd say it's a expectations mismatch combined with a game that wants to be good at giving the players a hard time orienting.

Originally posted by Wrzlprnft:

I think it's more about expectation mismatch. It was marketed as a space exploration RPG, but i'd say it is a space survival roguelike with strong text adventure elements.

Combine that with the fact that the game kinda tries to give you a culture shock with the aliens as well as the fact that you need to piece a loooot together yourself (trading prices, enemy fight patterns etc.) like rather oldschool games, and you end up with a game that is very easily misunderstood.

A game which also is not that cheap/was not that cheap with it's original pricing. Once you misunderstand the game as a brute force exploration lander minigame, the planet variety starts to wear thin eventually. And you just... die over and over again, without feeling it was your fault, and the content you see doesn't reflect the price at all, not even potentially. You just simply miss a lot of the work going into the game: There is a novels worth of text in the alien interactions, which is localized in a variety of languages. The soundtrack is also pretty great and a real orchestra recording.

So, in short, i'd say it's a expectations mismatch combined with a game that wants to be good at giving the players a hard time orienting.

That's a very good point. Ty for the insight. I've seen gameplay of this game before so I knew what to expect and it sounded like my type of game. With this new knowledge, I think that they should change the tags to better fit the premise of the game.

I think "game too hard" means different things, it can mean a challenge, or it can mean punishing, or even obtuse and un-explained. For me, so far, it is the latter. Hard to figure anything out,m and I'm in the tutorial.

This game has absurdly awkward controls, at least that's what i remember, haven't played in a long time.

The game is massively grindy, play the same minigame over and over again until you get bored and quit. I don't have 200 hours to put into a game unless it's some kind of masterpiece which this isn't.

Also they completely bungled the achievements, look at how many players got any of the achievements, it would take 6 months to 100% this ''game''

Originally posted by Renesco:

The game is massively grindy, play the same minigame over and over again until you get bored and quit. I don't have 200 hours to put into a game unless it's some kind of masterpiece which this isn't.

Also they completely bungled the achievements, look at how many players got any of the achievements, it would take 6 months to 100% this ''game''

Yeah, i'd say the actual gameplay is the decision on whether you should land or not, and mostly the answer is "no". Pretty often "hell no". The tutorial does teach you to land, but not to decide whether to land... Definitely an issue.

From what I've seen it takes 35 to 60 hours till you've seen it all, depending if you go random seed and are unlucky or start to target certain alien races and crew members. And by seen it all i mean the storylines/worldbuilding. That's where the meat is at.

The achievements are part "have you seen it all" and part "this is really a stupid and hard challenge", so it's unlikely you complete it all when focusing on the landing Minigame over the alien interaction Text adventure parts. but you really have to know the quests, the diplomatic relationships and the preferred trading prices. the game has no interface for the player to look that up, and it doesn't communicate that way to play directly, only the increased variety of content and increased rate of success... Which both are not always a given/hard to notice if the player is unlucky.

While I don't want to say that there is a wrong way to play the game, figuring out how to play it "the right way" has been made part of the gameplay itself, and the game is not very upfront about that. Not at all.

I'm about to give this another try, but it`s one of the rare games I never finished. I like challenging games and games where decisions are permanent, but dying and restating has to be fun. This game was very enjoyable at first but once the novelty wore off it became a chore to restart.

Originally posted by belangf:

I'm about to give this another try, but it`s one of the rare games I never finished. I like challenging games and games where decisions are permanent, but dying and restating has to be fun. This game was very enjoyable at first but once the novelty wore off it became a chore to restart.

I hope it works for you, I thought it had so much potential, and I really didn't think that much effort would have been required to get it over the hump, but clearly no one on their end cared.
As it was however, so boringly repetitive.

Originally posted by helix2:

Originally posted by belangf:

I'm about to give this another try, but it`s one of the rare games I never finished. I like challenging games and games where decisions are permanent, but dying and restating has to be fun. This game was very enjoyable at first but once the novelty wore off it became a chore to restart.

I hope it works for you, I thought it had so much potential, and I really didn't think that much effort would have been required to get it over the hump, but clearly no one on their end cared.
As it was however, so boringly repetitive.

Random development fact: the lead game designer feels like the closed beta phase, while being super helpful over all, also was something of an echo chamber, leading to some of the weaknesses of the game, like the quite hard first run, to be left somewhat unmitigated.