Reply With QuoteThanks for the insight man!
Since Mr Rubin is so brief, I think I'll list my experience and hope it helps.Originally Posted by Brian Rubin
I got it on the IPad a month back and had about 3-4 days of fun (the first two days are obsessive 12 hrs of play each I think)
1) the ship controls are easy and quite freelancer-ish as inertial is not fully modeled. Combat is quite action oriented and arcadish. It feels like flying a plane in space. Closer to freelancer as opposed to independence war.
2) the graphics and effects are really good
3) there are a variety of weapons you can buy and you can also buy blue prints from Npcs to create equipment and weapons to upgrade your ship, the list is quite large, much better than freelancer's if my memory don't fail me
4) there are a big number of ships to buy with a big variety to choose from, I remember owing about 6-7 ship types before settling on a uber ship design (I may be wrong but it seems like there are more than 60 ship types)
5) their take on mining is totally awesome. You just have to try it to see how awesome it is. The usual side quests from Npcs involves bounty hunting, delivery, escort.
6) the campaign can be a bit short if you rush through them
7) I think I spent about 20 hours having fun before starting to "game" the game, making highly profitable trade runs to get the uber ship, which kind of made it boring for me once i started doing that. Your mileage may differ.
8) I got it for 6.99 on a sale for iOS and felt that it was worth it (relative to 1.99 or 2.99 iOS games) because the production value is superb.
9) the add-on campaign adds ships, weapons and equipment and extra campaign missions. It also adds the possibility of player owned station (although the station don't allow u to do much, it's kinda gimmicky). The addon ships and weapons are string though.
Overall a fun title. Not sure how it plays on the PC or Mac though. But on the iPad it's responsive and good.
Thanks for the insight man!
Despite all the rave reviews the high price of Distant Worlds was holding me back. I was poking around the matrix website and found this
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm...39&mpage=1&key=
Uh. WOW! After the disappointment that was Mass Effect 3 lame ass ending, I was surprised how excited I got seeing a mod being made in Distant Worlds for the ME universe.
I guess I have higher hopes from true fans, than a company consumed with mirco-transactions. It’s a great universe, a lore that captivates me, and a chance to see what some true fans using a game with as feature rich as this one could do just tipped me over the edge into getting the game and all the expansions!
Huh, neat. Yeah that's one of the benefits of the 2D artwork is the modability. I really wanna try the Star Trek: TNG mod.
Dammit. I cannot spend $90 on this game. You guys are killing me!
Then wait a few months for the Matrix holiday sale, where it'll hopefully be more affordable.
If you buy all three you get a dicount. I bough legends full price and Matrix offered me 20% off on the other 2. Coming in over just $70 for the game and the 2 expansions.
Oh? Had no idea, wow, they need to advertise that better.
Then make sure you don't read Brian's four-part AAR, as I did, it'll kill you even more.
Spoiler: Brian's AAR
Brian, your AAR describes some technical problems. Was this written when it was still in beta? Is it still stable?
And I believe this was answered earlier, but just so I'm clear -- is the base game alone is NOT enough for newcomers? Are the expansions' improvements that vital?
There are some really neat mods for SEIV out there as well (although a lot of them were never updated for the latest patch, sadly) for much the same reason :)
That was a few beta patches ago. It's also been smoother when I wasn't trying to take screenshots of it, so I kinda blame Hypersnap for that. :)
As for your other question, I jumped from playing only a little bit of the vanilla game to playing a TON of Legends, so I can't really comment on the improvements since I don't have enough time with the previous versions.
re: Galaxy on Fire 2 - available on Android, looks like free download with in-app purchase. Checking it out.
"Over just $70" meaning $79.97. Not really a super-deep discount at closer to $80. Sigh. I guess I'll wait for the possible holiday sale. $80 is still just too much for this.
Perhaps I missed it but did I just get through 6 pages without seeing a single mention of the original Sword of the Stars? That's a great game and the complete edition is often on sale for $5
Pretty much, although I did give it a shout out in #171.
Sword of the Stars 1, it is a great game that I still play.
I forked $80 for Distance World after reading this thread. But on a valuation basis it is going to have to be better than sex to be a better deal than SOTS 1.
DW is a great game and I love SotS. DW is the best implementation of a clockwork universe in a game bar none. But you've still got sprite swaps and +/-1 for attributes to differentiate the races.
They both scratch different itches and are both worthy if you like space strategy.
Dude, you can get SotS1 for like, $3 multiple times, kinda unfair. ;)
For those complaining about the price of DW you'll be happy/angry to hear that there's another expansion due out this fall so the game will probably end up costing $115.
I wanted to revisit this sub-thread and defend EVE-online. To start with, your criticisms - though they do contain some germs of truth - are a little unfair. But to me EVE does two unique things that should keep it in contention for the top ten lists of a lot of space gamers.
1. it's Elite, but with other people! It does everything that Elite and all its spiritual successors do except that in EVE you're in a living universe populated by a 100,000 other people. When you play the market in EVE, you're dealing with a genuine market made up by the actions of thousands of individual actors responding to the stimuli of supply and demand. When you make and sell stuff you're selling to other players, and if you can't make what they want or can't set a price they're willing to pay then you won't make money.
Similarly; the pirate(s) on the other side of that gate are players. They're probably just as smart as you, they're probably better armed than you, and they've had plenty of practice at doing what they do. Pirates aren't just some routine threat that you can take on four at a time and beat without thinking too hard. They make every jump (in certain high-risk parts of space) a risk and a decision that you have to think about (or live to regret if you weren't thinking about it!) Thanks to being inhabited by real players who want to role-play pirates, sometimes simply getting from A to B in EVE can be a complex, time-consuming and difficult task. That can be a source of frustration if you're in the wrong frame of mind. But for me at least, it's been a source of enjoyment and some major adrenaline rushes; the experience of having to outwit and outfly the pirates in order to deliver a valuable cargo has generated major gaming highs for me.
In fact, I've mostly stayed away from this genre (and regretted it when I didn't) since seriously playing EVE. Once you've played with and against other people, dealing with simplistic markets and stupid pirate-targets really doesn't compare.
2. You can be a space admiral! You can command real intelligent subordinates and with or through them hundreds of ships each piloted be a real, intelligent[1] player against hundreds of equally intelligent opponents. And because this is a fight between players, they don't just turn up to be shot whenever it's convenient. Both sides are trying to win which means each side will only engage when they either think they can win or they're caught by surprise. So as space admiral you're going to have to collect information about your opponent while denying it to him, manoever to set up the battle to happen where it suits you, and then direct your ships during combat which (when fought between the largest fleets) can last several hours.
That's a gaming experience that I think is genuinely unique. Also uniquely powerful and rewarding. It's not easily accessible, and part of the cost of accessing it is having to invest time (doing stuff that's sometimes boring). I recognise that's not always possible for anyone whose gaming time is strictly limited. But I do think that anyone who likes space games should at least investigate EVE.
[1] and sometimes incredibly dumb in alternately frustrating and entertaining ways.
And, even if you don't have enough time/money/interest to play, following the drama of the rise and fall of empires is great free entertainment.
I stopped subscribing last year in order to make a point to the developers but still check in on what's happening from time to time. Even (relatively!) small scale stuff such as Juan Rayo's new faction warfare corp makes for a good read.
I think Eve Online is probably the awesomest game I have heard of that I have absolutely no interest in playing.
Mark, I appreciate your passion about EVE Online, I just don't feel I, in good conscience, could recommend it to a new player, or someone who just wants to jump in and play shit right now. EVE Online is great if you understand it's also work, and I just don't feel right recommending that unless I'm sure the person I'd be recommending it to would be into that.
The thing is, the 'end-game' empire-building/space warfare/politics side of EVE does involve a major time investment. But the 'Elite with other people' really doesn't ask more than any other RPG.
Not that I want to come over as a fanboy who thinks that EVE is perfect. But it does some things that other games just don't. And it does them in space!
One rule of thumb I always adhered to when I was still playing Eve Online was to never fly a ship I was not willing to lose or able to replace. This was especially relevant once my corp moved to 0.0 space.
I still think it is one of the better space games but unfortunately I do not have the time or spreadsheet skills to do it justice. I do enjoy reading about Eve politics though. Now that is a whole other metagame. :)
That is true but $80 is too much for game with the pretty minimal production values of DW.
After playing with it for a number of hours over the weekend. I can easily understand why people rave about the game. There is nothing left out from a standard 4x space game; detailed colony management, elaborate ship design, interesting tech true, differentiated races, bunch of types of mining. It has some unusual features for a 4x game, a story line (although I didn't get far enough in the game to really understand it.), heroes, spying, luxury resources.
The interface while overwhelming is very good. It was not too hard to get to the information I needed. The problem was making sense of the information which is very tough to do at least for a beginner.
But the end of the day this isn't my type of Space game. The automation is probably essential to playing the game, but for me it left me feeling that I was watching a movie rather than directing. Advisers tell me what to build, who to attack, what to research. While I can override them I don't really know enough to do so in most cases. I also am more of TBS player than pausable real time, although enjoy both types of games.
The 80s style graphics are offputting and I while I'd be ok if we were talking about $20 or even $30 game, at the price of DW, I just feel ripped off.
Last edited by Strollen; 08-20-2012 at 01:47 AM.
I doubt a game with as much going on under the hood as DW could manage a much prettier engine on today's hardware.
I'm pretty sure that unless they are simulate each person demands and outputs and individual level, that hardware that is able to render the stunning views of game like Skyrim, or all of the intense physics of modern shooter, can do all of the underneath the hood calculation and still have plenty of CPU/GPU cycles left for better graphics.
Maybe, but personally I'd rather they focus on gameplay than graphics, so I'm fine with it.
Generally agree...
Except this and the part where you didnt like the automation. I think in a game as deep as this, automation is essential.
On this point I couldnt agree with you more!!!! Its very overwhelming!! So far my biggest issue...the depth i see i really like, and the automation is nice, but I really struggling with all this reading to struggling to understand this massively heavy layout.
The interface may be good from the information it offers and how it tries to present it. The design however is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
- Grey text on dark grey background
- abysmal small fonts that look even smaller on modern displays
- almost unreadable tech tree with blurry micro size fonts
- Interface does not scale on high resolutions (it uses the windows resolution), so you have a vast space and micro small buttons, icons and information bars.
It's a shame that there is no demo.
Last edited by Christoph; 08-21-2012 at 02:39 PM.
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