Well, I finally got a chance to play with 3.0 myself, and I’m being totally honest here… I actually had fun playing it.
To be totally honest, I started playing it yesterday, and had lots of issues. The game is still totally buggy, and the servers are unstable, but when it works? It’s pretty awesome.
Yesterday I had it crash a number of times… I think a few were the game crashing, and a few were the server crashing. Also, things like activating quantum drive (the little jump drive thing that lets you fly really long distances between planets) were really inconsistent… also, a number of things aren’t really clear. Like, you need to use your starmap to chart locations before using your jump drive.
Today though, I got the hang of all that, and I’ve remembered how to actually fly the ships. I haven’t played in months, since I mainly wanted to play in this 3.0 incarnation. I think I jumped in once or twice in the past few months just to download it and see how it ran, but I didn’t really bother doing anything in it since a while back. I haven’t really “played” it since the arena commander days. So I was, shall we say, rusty.
Anyway, today things were much more stable. Quantum drive was operating without issue, which allowed me to pretty easily fly around the system. I was able to use the little arm computer thing to accept missions, and then go and do them. I managed to complete some and get paid. You can also go around and buy/sell commodities, and apparently folks are earning money doing that. I didn’t bother with any of that though.
I did however fly down to planets and visit various places on them, which I must say, was pretty badass. Compared to no-man’s sky, it was dramatically better… mainly because there was no massive shift in terrain as you moved in through the different LOD’s. Stuff you saw from orbit was there when you landed. Some things of note… Landing on the dark side of a planet is pretty weird/bad/nuts. Mainly just because it’s pitch freaking black, and you can’t see anything until you’re a few km out from an actual station. Maybe this is how it would be? I dunno. On some level it was cool… because you were flying purely by instruments until you got real close… just seeing the location on your HUD, knowing it was out there… and then suddenly, a little spec of light… and as you got closer, sure enough, it’s a little mining colony. And you can land and buy/sell cargo, etc. Aside from the missions, there’s not a whole lot to DO at these colonies, other than ferry cargo around to make money… but flying down to them was pretty slick.
However, the coolest thing I encountered was, essentially, emergent gameplay due to bugged AI.
I was flying around, and a distress call came in. These happen periodically, and you can accept them, then fly to the distress beacon.
I did this, and there was some ship (Maybe a constellation? I honestly don’t know the ships that well.) defending itself from some pirates or whatever. So I got into a fight with them, and this was cool… I’m generally averaging a framerate around 25-30 or so. Not really silky smooth, but it’s pretty stable at that point, and definitely playable. So I’m able to engage in combat with these guys, which was fun. The flight controls are still very good, once you move beyond the basics and can decouple your ship’s velocity from it’s facing direction, etc. I managed to kill these guys, although the second one I clipped with my own ship, damaging it pretty bad in the process.
After I killed all badguys I had on radar, the guy I was supposed to protect was just sitting there… I decided to check out what was going on in his ship.
So I EVA’ed out of my ship, and floated down to his… sure enough, I could see the NPC sitting in his cockpit, chilling out. I floated around to the back of the ship, and managed to get INTO his ship. This amused me to no end. At this point, it actually failed the protect mission… I dunno if it was because I had boarded his ship, or if it was a total coincidence, or some other thing… I honestly didn’t care much. I walked through his ship to his cockpit.
I had kept thinking that a door was gonna be locked or something… but nope. Here I stood. He didn’t seem to mind. I actually sat down in the co-pilots chair, and was able to power it on and stuff, but you can’t actually fly the ship from that chair. You can control shields and other junk. But I wanted to fly. I tried the captain’s chair too, but same deal. So clearly, this guy had to go.
Huh. Well, his body didn’t disappear or anything… It just hung around there, flopping onto the console. But I was able to get into the chair at that point.
Well, this is awkward.
At this point could control the ship, but as you can see, I couldn’t see what the hell was going on. I managed to get up, and then kind of jump on the seat and move the guy around by colliding with him. At one point, I was afraid I had gotten stuck, since the way they have it set up, you are linked to your avatar’s body… so you can’t really turn around, unless your avatar can turn around, so I was jammed in there. But I did manage to get free, and got back into the chair.
This guy was clearly coming along for the ride, but at least now I had pushed him to the side so I could see out the cockpit (I’m actually looking off to the right in that picture) So at this point, I can fly my newly stolen ship! And I absolutely could… Honestly, I don’t think it even gave me the crime rating that normally happened when you shot other folks, likely due to whatever bug had occurred. Anyway, I was able to bring up the starmap, chart a course to the space station, and then engage quantum travel.
At which point the game hard crashed, about halfway to the space station.
The moral of the story is that it’s still hugely buggy… but for those points where the bugs aren’t breaking stuff, and such points DO exist, there’s something here. It was legitimately fun.
Some other things… this is the first time I got to play around with the new system where you can go into interactive mode and just click on stuff… to turn on the ship, engines, etc. Actually doing that basic stuff? Didn’t care. I just hit the “Flight ready” button and the ship started up.
However, one thing that WAS cool, was how all the consoles in the actual cockpit are interactive now, using this system. This was actually cool and useful, beyond just a gimmick, as it allowed you to do stuff quickly without needing to memorize as many buttons (and really, there are infinity controlls). For instance, you can hold the interactive mode button, look over at the console with the power settings, and change the distribution to put more towards shields… or look at the other console that controls shields, and change the distribution between different shield sections… all very seamlessly, and without really needing to memorize much. Or to hail other ships or landing crews, you can look up at the console with comms, and click a button to hail a guy on the touchscreen. You can even interact with these consoles themselves to customize what’s displayed on each. Overall, the system worked very well, and actually made flying the ship easier and more seamless, rather than just adding “immmersion” as I had feared.
Anyway, I would not recommend anyone actually buy into this game if you haven’t already… but if you do already have a ship, you may wanna check it out if your PC has the horsepower. I was running on a laptop, but it was a pretty beefy one, with a 1070 in it.
