Hi folks,
I'm new to ED and SC both, even though I was early backer to both of them. Well, I have played ED a bit a while back, for for many reasons not in a long time. I guess one of them was to wait for a bit more "meat" to be added to the experience. Also, it's a bit intimidating in terms of learning curve... Anyway, yesterday I decided to give the SC "pre-Alpha" 3.2 a trial run, to see what it's all about. I only started the "Persistent Universe" part, since that was the one I was interested in; not an FPS wannabe or a pseudo dogfight arena. So I launched the game on my pretty beefy gaming rig, but as expected, it ran at an astonishing 3 - 40ish fps; heavy stuttering and at times slideshow-like performance, just walking around in the space station. The NPCs were all just standing there and staring at the wall... (except those in the shops). I managed to get to a terminal and have one of my backer-ships delivered to a landing platform. With some difficulties I then even managed to get there, only to find another NPC, standing out in the open vacuum, without a space suit, hovering about 1 meter above the ground, staring into the stars... OK, so I ignored him and walked up to my ship, looking for a way to enter it. Stupidly I though the entrance might be underneat, so I crouched under the ship, which made my character bobble up and down like crazy, and when I got away from the ship again, I was stuck in the ground.
I could not get unstuck, so I had to quit the game and start again. So, in my second attempt I managed to get to the ship and actually enter and launch it, although launching it it what is the jump button in walking mode, looked pretty hilarious, because I had the engines fired up already. One moment my ship was standing on the platform, next it jumped up and started to spin around like crazy, a few meters above the platform. I then managed to stabilize it and fly away a little; but when I attempted to jump to a target on the star map, it simply wouldn't work. Maybe I did something wrong, but as far as I could tell, I followed the on-screen instructions. I aligned my view ony a target, then opened the starmap and selected that same object - at this moment it disappeard from my view. Why, I have no clue.
Also the cannons felt and sounded like... well... bad, and in general the flight mechanics seemed more than simplistic, from what I could tell (I'm not an expert on this). There didn't seem to be any typical newtonian physics at work, but again, maybe that was just me.
At any rate, after about an hour I gave up, both bored and infinitely disappointed. The term "pre-Alpha" is correct IMHO as this is still years away from even an early alpha state. Even the most simple things like walking around don't work reliably. One of the ships I saw lowered a ladder into the ground; people get stuck inside the floor; and in the station, NPCs were standing, not sitting, on chairs... I mean, really? After all this time they can't even make an NPC sit on a chair?
Well, it was kinda what I expected after all the negative reviews and videos, but somewhere deep inside I hoped it would "feel" better; I mean I did spend 150$ on it, and would still like to have a decent game at some point. But this... this is never EVER to be a game, if this is all they could come up with in 6 years.
Bummed out now. Time to get back into ED, then I guess. And maybe also check out the "Next" update of NMS...
