Posted September 07, 2021
I've just finished up the campaign and thought i'd share my experiences with the game, good bad and the bugs. I'm an older gentleman, a serious space nerd, back in the day I played eve online for about 7 years and other various nerdy space games.
Firstly I just need to say what an amazing game you guys are creating, I played and beat everspace 1 on PS4 and thought it was OK but really cool. Everspace 2 looks like a solid improvement in all areas but most notably combat. Combat in everspace 1 sucked, unless you crunched energy boosters every 20 seconds.
This has been improved greatly with the revamped energy economy.
The exploration, art direction and level design are next level. The high level of detail draws you to explore further and the many secrets reward the inquisitive, superb. Those lght swith puzzles show up everywhere, the more i look the more I find......it never ends and I love it.
With that out of the way lets get into my 60 hours. I've finished all story and side missions, I nearly have all factions at maximum standing, my ship has superior grade items in every slot, with my ships firepower stat being over 1500 with > 700% bonus damage.
So far I've found 17 and 1/3rd augments. I've almost ulocked all crafting blueprints, with only half the superior sencodary weapons left. I used a controller almost exclusively.
Bugs
1) Job markers would sometimes persist after the job had been cleared, usually until I reset the game.
2) Sometimes bits of NPC ships would remain after it jumps away, like a random barrel or other bits.
3) When docked at homebase, and at screen where you can select which paintjob to apply (default, custom 1-4) if you switch between your ships using R3 the paintjobs slected sometimes wont match what is displayed.
4) After usingthe crafting menu the ships stats (firepower, structire, expertise etc) will display erronious values, too high. My ship was displaying with 1900 firepower one time, another it showed 12k hp.
5) Occaisonal lag spike/feezes after certainevents. Most notably collecting the last packge when on a 'Recover lost cargo' faction job but also sometimes when finishing a quest it'll freeze briefly before the dialogue plays.
6) Not a bug as such but why does the controller have so many deadzone sliders. I use an old wired xbox controller which has wonky deadzones. If mydeadzones are off for thruster and movement they are also off for phototmode and map navigation. Too many sliders for the same thing.
7) Job not awarding exp or standing. This mostly happens G&B trading jobs, recover lost cargo but also sometimes G&B defence search and destroy jobs. Basically if the pop up didn't show you getting the exp and standing, you didn't get it.
Gameplay
1) Faction standing is utterly pointless. All they give is some stuff, useless stuff. By the time you'd reach max standing (which after 60hours I still haven't) you already have a fully pimped ship. A couple of superior items makes no difference while the trading and mining rewards (some ore and tec materials) are just useless crap filling up inventory.
No amount of stuff is ever going to be worth the effort of reaching max standing. The rewards need to be meaningful, and unique. A pile of iron, some clygon and a cargo unit are not unique rewards. They aren't even rewards.
2) Other than providing perks homebase is largely useless. Heres an exapmle to illustrate. I was at a node in Zarkov system and I decided that I'd rather be flying my striker than my intercepter. I thought about getting it until I remembered that it was all th way back in Ceto.
And even if I had some means of deliving the ship It still woulkdn't matter, becuase it had no equiped modules. Earlier I had a fleet of fully equipped ships until one day I saw a much better version of a ship I had at homebase. Despite being able to remotely sell the ship I couldn't, because my inventory wasn't large enoughto hold the ships modules.
Homebse is rendered almost useless by it's remoteness. Even sending loot back to homebase with the HIVE perk is uesless because of it's location, I may as well drop it into a black hole.
3) Inventory managment. There are far too many tiems that take up inventory space and nothing else. In the previous game the inventory existed mainly to serve crafting and didn't require any managment from the player. Now crafting uses it's own seperate, largely invisible inventory that requires no managment and takes up 0 space, while what used to be crafting resources are now ore/tec resources and comodities.
A few of these items are used for jobs/ ulocking perks but most are just inventory clutter and could be sold or destroyed without hesitation. Just to highlight how insane this is 10 packs of ramen take up as much space as a gun, but the materials to craft 500 guns take up no space what so ever.
4) Tareen and his perks are too late to be useful. Homebase is too remote to be ueful and the extra ships are nice but the round trip is too much to make use of.
5) Elek NEEDS an off switch. Put it in the perk menu.
6) Crafing isn't rewarding enough for the resource and time sink. Once I reached max level I started pimping my ship. The most reliable method of getting the best gear i found was find or buy a max level rare item with the stats you want (+firepower for me) and then upgrade it to superior. Unlocking and rolling for a superior level part direfctly seems like a fools errand. Also, why the restritions with crafting? Why cant I upgrade a common all the way to superior, or upgrade a level 10 weapon all the way to 18? It seems neednlessly restrictive and a waste of time until you reach max level.
Suggections
1) Jobs/High risk areas on planets. A change of scenery would be welcome.
2) Make the superluminal flight boost thingy default, and have a different perk when you master each region. Some jumps in union are almost 1000Ls, this is too long to wait without the boost.
3) Multiple map marker waypoints. Quite often I want to do a bunch of high risk areas and jobs but going in and out of the map each time to set a marker gets old. If i could set a bunch of numbered waypoints the game could direct me to them in sequence making for smoother gameplay.
4) Crafting needs an improvment, the time + resource sink is huge and the benfits small.
5) Consumeables need a lot of work. I barely used them. Where are the drones? Sticky turrets are like crap drones that only work in asteroid fields. I never used energy injectors, tbh unless your planning on a ship with only 1 gun these can be safely deleted.
6) Larger engagments with big ships. Most ships look like little red squares with red circles in the middle. Big ships tickle my sci-fi brain in ways the small ones just can't, because I can actually see them.
7) Probably way outsied the scope of this game but for DLC/everspace 3 this could be food for thought. Instead of a static homebase make homebase a repurposed capital ship. As i explore the game moving from system to system the cap ship could follow, setting up in a safe spot somewhere in the system.
This would make ship swapping and collecting the stuuff you've shipped home much much quicker. There are also more opputunities for base defence scenarios with it moving aroufn and when the story needs to advance along I'm not jumping for several minutesback to Ceto just to get some text and then fuck off back to where I was in the game.
8) Augmenst are far too weak. If I had 90 augments i'd be able to boost all 6 ship stats by 100, a total of 600 points bonus. A single level 18 module can gives bonus's of aroud 200 for 3 stats. A total of 600 points. I have 17 augments. A single superior level 18 ship part provides as much benefit as 90 augments should illustrate just how weak these are. A shame because this is the main reward for exploration. EDIT - I've just watched a a community stram vod where the guy (sorry I can't find his name) mentioned that augments used to be MUCH stronger, so strong they were game breaking. As a work around/compromise maybe the bonus augments provide could scale with player level?
9) Custom shipyard. I'm not the only person who would very much like a very specific set of ship part and passive abilities, and rolling ship dealers in the shops RNG in the hopes you get what you want seems a bit crap. Maybe if you were going to sell those ships in microtransactions I'd understand (i also wouldn't be playing) but your not. Move Tareens inventory perk to someone else and give tareen a customship yard. Make it a heavy sink for all those useless tec resourcres. Roling shop dice is sad :(
I think thats everything.
Thankyou for reading all this and thankyou for making this wonderful game.
I can't wait for the next updates.
Firstly I just need to say what an amazing game you guys are creating, I played and beat everspace 1 on PS4 and thought it was OK but really cool. Everspace 2 looks like a solid improvement in all areas but most notably combat. Combat in everspace 1 sucked, unless you crunched energy boosters every 20 seconds.
This has been improved greatly with the revamped energy economy.
The exploration, art direction and level design are next level. The high level of detail draws you to explore further and the many secrets reward the inquisitive, superb. Those lght swith puzzles show up everywhere, the more i look the more I find......it never ends and I love it.
With that out of the way lets get into my 60 hours. I've finished all story and side missions, I nearly have all factions at maximum standing, my ship has superior grade items in every slot, with my ships firepower stat being over 1500 with > 700% bonus damage.
So far I've found 17 and 1/3rd augments. I've almost ulocked all crafting blueprints, with only half the superior sencodary weapons left. I used a controller almost exclusively.
Bugs
1) Job markers would sometimes persist after the job had been cleared, usually until I reset the game.
2) Sometimes bits of NPC ships would remain after it jumps away, like a random barrel or other bits.
3) When docked at homebase, and at screen where you can select which paintjob to apply (default, custom 1-4) if you switch between your ships using R3 the paintjobs slected sometimes wont match what is displayed.
4) After usingthe crafting menu the ships stats (firepower, structire, expertise etc) will display erronious values, too high. My ship was displaying with 1900 firepower one time, another it showed 12k hp.
5) Occaisonal lag spike/feezes after certainevents. Most notably collecting the last packge when on a 'Recover lost cargo' faction job but also sometimes when finishing a quest it'll freeze briefly before the dialogue plays.
6) Not a bug as such but why does the controller have so many deadzone sliders. I use an old wired xbox controller which has wonky deadzones. If mydeadzones are off for thruster and movement they are also off for phototmode and map navigation. Too many sliders for the same thing.
7) Job not awarding exp or standing. This mostly happens G&B trading jobs, recover lost cargo but also sometimes G&B defence search and destroy jobs. Basically if the pop up didn't show you getting the exp and standing, you didn't get it.
Gameplay
1) Faction standing is utterly pointless. All they give is some stuff, useless stuff. By the time you'd reach max standing (which after 60hours I still haven't) you already have a fully pimped ship. A couple of superior items makes no difference while the trading and mining rewards (some ore and tec materials) are just useless crap filling up inventory.
No amount of stuff is ever going to be worth the effort of reaching max standing. The rewards need to be meaningful, and unique. A pile of iron, some clygon and a cargo unit are not unique rewards. They aren't even rewards.
2) Other than providing perks homebase is largely useless. Heres an exapmle to illustrate. I was at a node in Zarkov system and I decided that I'd rather be flying my striker than my intercepter. I thought about getting it until I remembered that it was all th way back in Ceto.
And even if I had some means of deliving the ship It still woulkdn't matter, becuase it had no equiped modules. Earlier I had a fleet of fully equipped ships until one day I saw a much better version of a ship I had at homebase. Despite being able to remotely sell the ship I couldn't, because my inventory wasn't large enoughto hold the ships modules.
Homebse is rendered almost useless by it's remoteness. Even sending loot back to homebase with the HIVE perk is uesless because of it's location, I may as well drop it into a black hole.
3) Inventory managment. There are far too many tiems that take up inventory space and nothing else. In the previous game the inventory existed mainly to serve crafting and didn't require any managment from the player. Now crafting uses it's own seperate, largely invisible inventory that requires no managment and takes up 0 space, while what used to be crafting resources are now ore/tec resources and comodities.
A few of these items are used for jobs/ ulocking perks but most are just inventory clutter and could be sold or destroyed without hesitation. Just to highlight how insane this is 10 packs of ramen take up as much space as a gun, but the materials to craft 500 guns take up no space what so ever.
4) Tareen and his perks are too late to be useful. Homebase is too remote to be ueful and the extra ships are nice but the round trip is too much to make use of.
5) Elek NEEDS an off switch. Put it in the perk menu.
6) Crafing isn't rewarding enough for the resource and time sink. Once I reached max level I started pimping my ship. The most reliable method of getting the best gear i found was find or buy a max level rare item with the stats you want (+firepower for me) and then upgrade it to superior. Unlocking and rolling for a superior level part direfctly seems like a fools errand. Also, why the restritions with crafting? Why cant I upgrade a common all the way to superior, or upgrade a level 10 weapon all the way to 18? It seems neednlessly restrictive and a waste of time until you reach max level.
Suggections
1) Jobs/High risk areas on planets. A change of scenery would be welcome.
2) Make the superluminal flight boost thingy default, and have a different perk when you master each region. Some jumps in union are almost 1000Ls, this is too long to wait without the boost.
3) Multiple map marker waypoints. Quite often I want to do a bunch of high risk areas and jobs but going in and out of the map each time to set a marker gets old. If i could set a bunch of numbered waypoints the game could direct me to them in sequence making for smoother gameplay.
4) Crafting needs an improvment, the time + resource sink is huge and the benfits small.
5) Consumeables need a lot of work. I barely used them. Where are the drones? Sticky turrets are like crap drones that only work in asteroid fields. I never used energy injectors, tbh unless your planning on a ship with only 1 gun these can be safely deleted.
6) Larger engagments with big ships. Most ships look like little red squares with red circles in the middle. Big ships tickle my sci-fi brain in ways the small ones just can't, because I can actually see them.
7) Probably way outsied the scope of this game but for DLC/everspace 3 this could be food for thought. Instead of a static homebase make homebase a repurposed capital ship. As i explore the game moving from system to system the cap ship could follow, setting up in a safe spot somewhere in the system.
This would make ship swapping and collecting the stuuff you've shipped home much much quicker. There are also more opputunities for base defence scenarios with it moving aroufn and when the story needs to advance along I'm not jumping for several minutesback to Ceto just to get some text and then fuck off back to where I was in the game.
8) Augmenst are far too weak. If I had 90 augments i'd be able to boost all 6 ship stats by 100, a total of 600 points bonus. A single level 18 module can gives bonus's of aroud 200 for 3 stats. A total of 600 points. I have 17 augments. A single superior level 18 ship part provides as much benefit as 90 augments should illustrate just how weak these are. A shame because this is the main reward for exploration. EDIT - I've just watched a a community stram vod where the guy (sorry I can't find his name) mentioned that augments used to be MUCH stronger, so strong they were game breaking. As a work around/compromise maybe the bonus augments provide could scale with player level?
9) Custom shipyard. I'm not the only person who would very much like a very specific set of ship part and passive abilities, and rolling ship dealers in the shops RNG in the hopes you get what you want seems a bit crap. Maybe if you were going to sell those ships in microtransactions I'd understand (i also wouldn't be playing) but your not. Move Tareens inventory perk to someone else and give tareen a customship yard. Make it a heavy sink for all those useless tec resourcres. Roling shop dice is sad :(
I think thats everything.
Thankyou for reading all this and thankyou for making this wonderful game.
I can't wait for the next updates.
Post edited September 07, 2021 by bivage
