It is an RPG.
No, it isn’t, not by any normal definition. Yeah it has some roguelike elements, but it doesn’t bill itself as an rpg.
One could argue that some of the Perks are characteristics of the pilot, not the ship.
https://everspace.gamepedia.com/Perks
E.g. “Pilot Perks” and “Ship Perks”.
Plus, the retention of stats from one playthrough to the next does not make a lot of sense from a pure and realistic hardware standpoint. This is close enough to an RPG for me, IMO.
Tons of games, especially roguelites, have progression systems. That doesn’t make them rpgs. A game like Neon Chrome is no more an rpg than Everspace. You are perfectly free to like the game or not. I don’t care. But calling it an rpg is silly.
This opinion is not universal.
https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=003516479746865699832:leawcwkqifq&q=neon+chrome+rpg
Many reviewers at the very least say Neon Chrome has “RPG elements”. And I’m generous when it comes to stuff like this.
Anyway, my main point is that Everspace should have more RPG elements.
I said the same thing about Doom.
How is Neon Chrome not an ARPG? It probably even says as much on the box.
I like a good semantic argument as much as the next guy, but rogue-likes and ARPG have had claims to the RPG genre for some time now. Everspace isn’t an RPG like Baldur’s Gate, World of Warcraft, or Deus Ex, but it’s certainly got enough of the same elements to appeal to the same people and therefore have a spot in the pigeonhole alongside them.
-Tom
Ok, I guess, but if I’d said this about Neon Chrome, would it have been a fair criticism?
This game is okay, but is too primitive and meager for me to really enjoy it. I prefer a stronger narrative, being able to explore, more quests, NPCs, etc. More like your typical RPG, basically.
Before I bought it I read reviews, read various threads, and watched a few minutes of a let’s play. I came away thinking it’s a space shooter. I played it, thought it was a space shooter. Seems silly to complain a game isn’t something you wanted it to be when it was never labeled as such. Sure it might have links to an RPG (sort of), that doesn’t make it an RPG. It’s not even close to the game Yakattack wanted though.
Well, I can’t speak for him, but I don’t think it’s too much asking it to hew more closely to the RPG side of the spectrum than the arcade shooter side of the spectrum. When he says “typical RPG”, I didn’t get the sense he meant Baldur’s Gate so much as, say, Elite or Eve.
This kind of makes sense to me because the advancement is slower than the typical fly/fight/trade or upgrade-your-spaceship/pilot game. In fact, when I played it, I seem the recall the advancement was pretty slow, period. Anyone looking for a robust rogue-like or a solid fly/fight/trade space game would probably find that pretty disappointing.
-Tom
I agree with this but also I think as a player your in-game skills improve exponentially the more you play. In a more typical RPG you do learn to game the system but your basic player skills do not increase at such a great rate. I think therefore that the two counterbalance themselves.
BG is not the best example, but I prefer the written and scripted narrative of Baldur’s Gate to the sterile and sandboxy trading of Elite. (I haven’t played Eve.)
I like Everspace’s combat well enough (except for how you have to cycle between modules first before activating one), but the combat alone is not enough to carry the game for me.
It would just be nice to have a full-fledged Space RPG, since there are none.
Honestly, that’s pretty much any fly/fight/trade space arcade game ever has to offer, isn’t it? Is there one I’m missing that would be worth playing if you didn’t like the combat?
I’m with you, by the way. The rogue-like elements are a nice hook, particularly for how they introduce a sense of risk to the combat. I like that a lot. But Everspace’s shooty bits aren’t nearly as satisfying as, say, Rebel Galaxy. The VR support is also a nice hook, and it works a lot better than Elite if you’re into that sort of thing.
-Tom
I don’t understand. Do you mean games with similar combat to Everspace? I can only think of Freelancer and Starpoint Gemini. The latter was disappointing. Neither are very good RPGs. (Freelancer is not an RPG.)
I wonder how budgets compared between this and Elite. Anyone know?
Wish I could get the Arcady combat of Everspace into world of Elite.
Or into an X-wing v Tie Fighter remake.
I hate the combat mouse+keyboard combat in Freelancer, the Chris Roberts game from Digital Anvil. It was still worth playing through the campaign.
I’m about 14 hours along according to Steam - my usual survival time is about an hour now. I did only just realise how to craft and upgrade stuff… (a lot of that UI stuff is unclear in VR). I think I’ve seen everything the main game has to offer now but I’ve just made it to what I guess is ‘the next phase of plot’ or an interlude or something, then splat, back to the start :)
I think it’s great overall. For me the VR version just perfectly captures what all other attempts at and descriptions of space dogfighting were trying to achieve…
I haven’t experimented with HUD options and I do find the big orange aiming aids obscure the ship graphics until they’re right outside your window. I’ll see if I can turn those off. But they are pretty key so not sure how that will work…