Hey all,

First off, have to issue a compliment: the idea behind this game is *amazing*. The flight mechanics are easy to learn, the combat is engaging and surprisingly tactical, and the learning curve isn't overly significant. I had a great few hours with this one today - it's very varied, the dice/RP mechanics are superbly implemented, and I feel like there's potential for a lot of re-play value.

That observed...

First off, the mechanisms by which you save the game are a little temperamental, if not non-existant. If there's an auto-save feature, I haven't found it yet, and the circumstances under which the game saves seems to be mostly on exit - and even *that* option doesn't always appear consistently. Several times, I've exited the game, only to come back and find that I've reverted to where I was a few hours before. Little upset by that!

On the same note...when you log out and return to the game, your ship re-appears *in space*, as if it has just freshly warped into the sector you were in earlier. This is bearing in mind that save-and-exit often happens at stations...and yet, you're not at the station you logged out at when you log back in. The very HEIGHT of frustration, right there.

Beyond that...my other beef is with the Shipyards. You'll find these on planetary locations, but the irksome part is that their inventory isn't consistent. Found a lovely little ship for 15k, which I couldn't quite afford, so I flew away, did a few more bits and pieces, went back to the same planet...and the ship was no longer available, replaced by a 20k vessel I could not afford. Yeah...that's irritating!

Speaking of planets...that was VERY confusing the first time I arrived at one. You have to use your mouse to rotate the planet until the clickable dots appear, indicating Hangar, Bar etc - that's not very intuitive the first time you try it, and there's no instructions for it. Would honestly be MORE helpful if we had a non-rotating planet with all the suitable clickables right in front of you on arrival. It's a cute concept, but I feel the implementation just makes for more of a hassle than a positive feature.

That said, though, I'd still recommend this game - it's still in development, at time of writing, and I daresay not many people have picked it up yet, but from all that I've seen, it's going to be brilliant once finished. The voice acting is great, the sense of TRULY being in space with your own crew and your own ship is definitely on-point, and the RPG aspects are really neatly-integrated. It may prove to be a gem of a game, but that Save Game problem is REALLY troubling. Might have to stay away from the game until that one's fixed, honestly!

Still, do take a look - I think it's worth playing, and definitely fills a niche in the market that hasn't been much exploited in recent years!

one thing is for certain: the game autosave when you lose/die...
and then you can start again from your last checkpoint but without anything you lost

i once died at a main mission event involving inship crew combat, and after escaping (with half my crew dead) i had a ship-to-ship combat that i lost (mainly because i was focusing on an invincible scenarium-hullplated ship instead of the escort)
when the game reloaded i was before the encounter of said mission, but the dead crew members were still dead and ALL my ship/crew combat inventory (sniper,s grenades, bulletproof jackets and so on) were gone (not only the ones i used up in combat, but ALL of them)

the "save" system is annoying indeed as you cant save and exit at a station

the game has potential for sure... but it has way too many issues for now:
clunky controls (exemple "to heal a crew member... so tedious and needless number of clicks across the screen)
ui from a decade ago
heavy memory leak (after 3 hours the whole think had used up 13gb or my ram allocated for itself)
some bugs that completely black out the screen (trying to go to hangar, or other planetary location WHILE an NPC is having some dialog banter)

it definitly need some more design thinking, some tech polishing for bugs and optimization and some more thoughts put in itn. Story so far seemed interesting though.

Autosaving on death...that's not even remotely close to encouraging, is it?

If they'd at least implement a 'autosave on mission progress', or 'autosave on station arrival/departure', that alone would be a HUGE bit of progress. As it is right now...it's pretty unplayable in that respect.

As it is right now... it's an early acces of a Work In Progress video game.

As for ANY alpha or even beta game : expect missing features, bugs, unbalance and unstable engine.

Of course you can report what's missing, what's wrong, what seems off... But saying that it's "not playable at this state" is, meh, pretty obvious. (Yes I know, some EA games are in an almost "ready to be released" state, but that's not a rule)

And of course, to maximize the development of the game and the purpose of any early access (helping improving the game, not please people so they can play before the rest of the world) : post your reports the most closely to dev's network/forum you can do. (especially when they didn't even posted anything in GoG forums yet)

PS : don't forget that they are merely only 2 devs. (I don't count the producer, the composer and the community manager at this point)

Oh, I agree, V3nom - but that's part of why I wrote this. a) So people know what to expect at this point and b) so the devs have some sense of our thoughts, since we're among the first GOG players to test it out.

Thanks Aslyn. I'm just about to decide if I want to buy it or not and this certainly helps alot. Alpha or not - being transparent about the current state never hurts. I value this being *here* because I am *here* and I couldn't profit from some report made as close to the devs as possible. They'll probably get the feedback either way - something as big as the save mechanic won't go unnoticed by the others over there.

I'll try to find a statement from the devs now, because without a solid and always available saving feature, the game ain't very appealing to me. So far I don't know if it's an intended feature, or just not finished yet. Some do this kind of stuff to make the game more challenging - but I hope in that case we'll see a third difficulty where "always able to save" is an option.

If they say it's planned, I'm gonna buy this right away. But if they say they don't want unlimited/free save slots, then this game just isn't for me, because it happens alot that I have to leave the PC in a hurry and I wouldn't want to lose several minutes or even hours of gameplay to this.

So yeah, thanks again - very valuable piece of intel to me :)

Does someone know if they have a trello site or road map or planned feature list, where I could check if saving is gonna be a fully implemented feature?

/edit/update
Well, they wrote about working on the save mechanism over at watervapor, so I went ahead and just got it with hoping the best. And as suspected, I was only about to reach the first station in the prologue when I got interrupted and needed to shut the game down. I was happy to see two options: "Exit to menu and save" and "Exit to desktop and save" - so there seems to be a "save on exit" feature now? That's the most important one. Didn't check yet if it worked - but so far my concerns have been wiped =)

Cheers!


/edit2/update
Meh. You're right. Cheered too early. It didn't save where I quit and I have to replay the last part :(

Fingers crossed, they work on that part some more, because a game as good as this one is shaped up to be is worth, well, saving! I figure I'll try it again in a few weeks, once they've had time. Glad you took the plunge on it, though!

I see small updates ticking in pretty much daily, so it definitely seems like work is being done on the game. I really hope they're able to complete this game, it has a lot of potential. I see many parallels to Starpoint Gemini 2, but it definitely seems like they're going for more depth.

I like that you have to make decisions that have actual rewards or consequences. At one encounter I chose to be rather ruthless and was punished by going down one level. I also like that going to the bar in stations can lead down the metaphorical rabbit hole.

The saving system really should get worked on asap - at least until the game is stable.

I played 2 game sessions and every time I lost progress because of the game crashing. No fun at all - especially if the game crashes upon using the ingame bug report tool (wanting to help -> bam, progress lost).

In general, there is no need to bring in some console style savegame system [and if you do, make it rock solid].

Hmmm, the only thing i find weird fake and really annoiying ships can make like 20% hull dmg on me when my shields are above 75%..... thats not coool every little fight or flight i get pulled out of the g button flight i get a lot of dmg to hull...