I saw there was a thread from a few days ago to kind of dump on the game, so I should just preemptively clarify what kind of discussion I’m NOT looking for:
• Discussion about what you think is a reasonable cost to develop the two titles
• Discussion in the way of “I played 8 years ago but quit because…”
• scam talk, belligerence, sarcasm etc.
I realize the game is an emotional lightning rod for some, but I’d ask you refrain from that in this particular instance. Please, thank you.
‐--------------------
I’m more interested in discussion from people who play and appreciate the game currently, and some of the good experiences you’ve had, things you’re excited for etc.
‐--------------------
For myself, I’ve played SC for years through the good and bad, and I’ve been most excited about the persistence and salvage stuff finally coming online (despite the painful rollout of 3.18). 3.19.1 seems much more stable despite the early hiccups and I’ve finally had a chance to test some of the things I was curious about.
One of the things I’ve been trying to do is get back on the same shard consistently and really test how well the world persistence holds up. A really cool experience I had was stumbling across a bunch of long abandoned player ships scattered around one of the outposts. One was tipped over with its door open so I climbed inside and poked around for loot.
The really cool part is I connected to that same shard literally days later (after even a 30k server crash), went back to that spot and the ship was still there where I’d flipped it back over, in the same condition. I needed a new gun for my own ship so I used the tractor beam to detach it from one of the turrets and upgrade my own.
I’ve been creating random little stashes and dropping items in remote places and then visiting again later and it’s all just still exactly where it was. The interesting part is per-shard the world persistence layer seems much more reliable than the actual player inventories right now, lol. I’ve found random flares that I dropped in the middle of the desert.
I think once we get the ability to queue for our previous session shard people are going to really start to understand why PES is so huge.
Real World Money: Not much. It will dictate what ship & game package you start with. You can buy ships, some gear, and paints for your ship. Other ships and gear you can get in game with in-game currency or looting. You can ebay in-game credits, but that doesn’t affect the game too much because they wipe periodically.
Game Structure: There is no real progression beyond acquiring additional ships and gear. It has missions, but they are mostly pretty rudimentary game loops. Box delivery missions, bounty missions, assassination missions, salvage missions, missions to clear underground bunkers, illegal drug delivery missions, etc. With some mission types, you build up rep which gives you access to higher paying missions. The missions are built around earning credits to afford ships in-game. You can also do game loops that don’t have missions like cargo hauling or mining. It is sandbox, and EVE-like, but no where near the depth of play EVE has.
The Fun: Flying the ships. The ability to switch up gears and go in another direction, like any other sandbox. Grouping up with friends to tackle things at scale.
Computer specs: Anything remotely current is going to run the game decent as can be. It is highly unoptimized. They haven’t done the performance polishes other games do because of so much stuff on their backlog. But I’m running a 5800xed cpu and a 6750xt gpu, and can run the game ~80fps on average. Your performance experience is going to be dictated by the game’s back end servers. Sometimes they forget to feed the hamsters.
This game is always online. You can play the Persistent Universe (PU), which is the Sandbox MMO portion of the game. The single player game is still in development, and they keep that one close to the vest.