I bought this because the fonts in DW:U were too difficult for me to read. But I stopped playing this soon after release for many of the issues cited above.
Swing and a miss but there are still innings to go.
The UI being scalable is a huge plus in the new version, but other than that there’s not much reason to recommend it over DW: U. What a waste of $60. But, lesson learned on buying into hype from people who have barely played the game I guess.
I think it makes a lot of sense to feel wronged if bugs or performance were ruining the experience at launch. The performance at release, in particular on AMD systems, was inexcusable. I was part of the beta and it wasn’t caught there, but was a huge issue at launch.
But for everything else, I think it’s buyer beware. The game was obviously old mechanics in a new engine, with no advertising at all (?) of anything new beyond that. There were plenty of let’s plays and other previews that made it clear this was the same DW formula.
For me that is fine - I’ve posted here and on their forums that a new engine and better UI were enough to get my money at 1.0. I’m hoping the official updates and mods take us well beyond DWU, but don’t feel wronged at all by the feature set included at 1.0.
Sure, buyer beware on everything, and luckily I’m in a position that wasting $60 isn’t much more than an annoyance.
For me, DW:U with scalable UI would have been enough to make it worth it, but they’re not even close to that. Even bugs, ‘design decisions’, and performance issues aside, there’s just a complete lack of content. There are what, 7 playable races? And that seems to mostly stem from the decision to add custom story content to each race, which isn’t what anyone is coming to DW for.
This is a fair criticism. I think a much better use of time/money during development would have been into:
- making all prior races playable; with the main sink here being developing all those unique 3d models
- a in game ship model designer, a la GalCiv 3, democratizing ship model creation without the need for separate software (which could still be an option). I personally don’t care for this, but I guess it would be a big hit and be more successful at outsourcing content creation to your fan
- a custom race/empire creator that has some reasonable feeling constraints
- spending essentially zero time on race unique linear stories that repeat each play (more or less), and instead focusing on dynamic events that trigger for certain combinations of government type, approval, development level, etc. Leave race specific events for patches, mods, DLC
- far more robust modding (stats, event, DLL) support at launch. By this I mean fully implemented ability to search/discover, install, update and load multiple mods simultaneously. Thorough examples and documentation of each type of mod. See RimWorld or Oxygen Not Included for best in class on how giving the community the right tools pays back a million fold. What we have now is a dead sub forum and a few mutually incompatible mods (can only load one at a time) that one has to really seek out to take advantage of.
I think they made it clear on the matrix forums at least that it would initially have less content and features than DW1 which had gone through numerous expensions by the time DW:U was released.
Is there any reason to play DW1 if you pretty much hate DW2?
I’m pretty much willing to give any 4x game a second shot. In fact, I started a thread “Games that are worth a second look after patching”, which directly led me to discover Sword of Stars, which I loved.
In the case of DW2, there is so little I liked and some much I hated, it will take a sea change in opinions to give it a second look.
A game like this with a single developer could have really benefitted from going the EA route instead of what they did. I don’t think Matrix does EA though. I’m not sure why.
DW1 was also a mess at release which is why I never even considered buying this one. Maybe I will after an expansion or two if it’s on sale.
This is such a shame. I think that I’ve completely given up on this.
They certainly have a very particular way of doing things - I wish they did EA also, as well as were willing to scale up the team.
I really like the game, but I think the one man approach looks more stubborn and tarnishing a valuable franchise (for now), as opposed to renaissance man level development. I also wish they had better outreach - a dev update on patching priorities every three months is so incredibly threadbare. I don’t need weekly, but at least do monthly!
Which Stardrive, are you playing 1 or 2?
And what mods are you running? If you say it’s great I would give it another try.
Not sure what Janster uses but I have found the Black Box and Combined Arms mods for StarDrive 1 to be very good.
Pretty sure he is talking about that.
Awesome, thanks guys.
Yes, both mods needed, for an amazing experience, just compare the combat of Stardrive to DW 1 or 2, its not even same ballpark. I don’t mind combat of DW 2 though, but rest of the game is very stiff…
Stardrive feels just modern.
I just reinstalled my vanilla Steam Version of StarDrive and get this error message.
EDIT: A post in the Steam discussions reveals that the Steam version does not work with Windows 11.
I am pretty sure i have run it on my w11 system. I will double check this afternoon.
Edit: I should caveat that with it was almost certainly with the mods installed when id did it
I did a fresh install and then installed the mod but no dice. Hopefully it works for you @Fenris99
And now back to our regularly scheduled channel
Never had a problem with my windows 10, but I have no experience with 11 sadly, and will not touch that with an iron poker until it offers something more useful than less compatability.
I would try installing the blackbox mod anyway as it fixes the game a -LOT-
