First Impressions

F 2nd impressions, already deleted this poopoo. Wasnt worth the 4h or 20gb download

Now can I haz your stuff? Sorry, it's a running joke on this forum.

Seriously though, while I agree with you that this game has more annoying bugs and just plain bad UI design issues than seeds in a pomegranate! For some reason they just can't figure this REDACTED REDACTED out.

... The game does have something to offer...🤔

There is nothing quite like being alone 50,000 light years away from the habitable systems (called the bubble) and exploring different planets and seeing amazing sights. It's an existential experience that is hard to put into words. It's taken you 4 months to work your way this far out, way out across the other side of the Galaxy... Home, safety, are way behind you... It's one of the few games that can give you a sense of pioneering, whilst still sitting in your chair. 🙂

Fleet Carriers have eaten into this experience, especially for new players who haven't spent a year in the black with just the ship you are flying in. You learn to be a LOT more careful with your ship, and the situations you get into. Dying actually begins to mean something. FCs have removed that... Now help, safety, repairs, other ships etc are only a jump away. That is why this is end game content - after you have done the existential experience side of the game...

You may have been initially drawn to the game for the pew pew (most men are) but do consider the exploration side of the game. Some of the moments in the game are worth the hassle of the crappy interface... Floating in an ice ring around a distance planet and seeing it's star rise around the rim of the planet; the light through the asteroid field...

Btw, the game was ported to consoles from pc...
 
LOOOOOOOOOOOOL is this thing really 6 years old? And you have to navigate 3 UI's like an old 1990's dos application just to join a friend in a game? So one can get disconnected when undocking just so you can do it all over again.

And ye I came to post a real first impression. Figured many fanbois will have something to say, as seen above, but in all honesty.... In 20 years of game, one of the truly worst games i've tried. Think only no man sky launch and Titanfall topped this. God, sacred 1 with a bugged main quest was more of a game than this. This is a few pretty textures and lights on spheres. Nothing more going for it.

Thank you for your honest feedback! Even if fdev hasn't done this personally for you.

Yes the comms panel is a REDACTED nightmare! Believe it or not, this did actually work at one time... Before they tried to fix it...
 
Just a few first impressions after 3h walking...

Floor looks great, is kind of hard though.

Gravity design is unpleasant, constant pratfalls are annoying. Alternative is swimming along floor, so might as well force me to use fins. Legs an obvious flipper port.

Social and racing with a friend, making Morris dancing troupes, unreachable handholds, lots of falling down when you finally figure out where everything is hidden. Well ye... terrible experience.

Glad it was free on evolution, would have been p'd of if I payed 450ZAR for this.

Destinations already seem pointless and generic after doing 4. As much as I loved crawling, and a lot of other kinds of locomotion, don't see myself walking for too long. Can already tell its heading for a running grind.
Oh man... This post almost put me in trouble.
So I'm on work, slow day, and I'm reading forum. And this post happens.
I was choking, crying, drooling... So people looking at me, one guy wanted to ask me something, but I can't stop laughing.
My boss standing near, watching me in disbelief and shaking his head...
Priceless, thank you
 
Before wasting hours on a game its well worth spending some research time prior to download if it likely includes:
- more than an hour to download/install
-10+ hours to get a good feel
- hoping to be a 100+ hour gaming experience

I would think most people would know this. The OP could have seen what the game was like (good & bad) pretty easily.
 
LOOOOOOOOOOOOL is this thing really 6 years old? And you have to navigate 3 UI's like an old 1990's dos application just to join a friend in a game? So one can get disconnected when undocking just so you can do it all over again.

And ye I came to post a real first impression. Figured many fanbois will have something to say, as seen above, but in all honesty.... In 20 years of game, one of the truly worst games i've tried. Think only no man sky launch and Titanfall topped this. God, sacred 1 with a bugged main quest was more of a game than this. This is a few pretty textures and lights on spheres. Nothing more going for it.
Really?? you think I'm a fanboy??? You should spend some time reading a selection of my posts I'v made over the last six years too....................................but you won't 'cos you'll get bored in 5 mins & give up.......just like you did with ED:ROFLMAO:
 
Just a few first impressions after 3h playing...

Game looks gorgeous, and sounds great.

UI design is , no offence but navigating a UI with qe ws ad spacebar etc.... Might as well force me to use a controller. Pretty obvious console port.

Social and playing with a friend, making groups, unreachable wing requests, open mic when you finally figure out where everything is hidden. Well ye... terrible experience.

Glad it was free on epic games, would have been p'd of if I payed 450ZAR for this.

Missions already seem pointless and generic after doing 4. As much as I loved freelancer, and alot of other space games, dont see myself playing this for too long. Can already tell its heading for a mining grind.
I'm glad this thread was free, would have been p'd of if I payed for this. Terrible experience (especially the later post where OP blatantly trolls the community).

Also, I worked hard to earn all my negative (and positive) impressions about ED. All these "I got the game free yesterday and here's my expert opinion" posts have close to zero credibility IMO. Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to create a new account on every game forum for the many many games I own and have barely played so I can let the world know what I think of them, because of reasons. It might take me awhile... Maybe I'll just tweet my impressions instead!
 
It's not as if they're actually wrong about the UI, though - sure, a lot of it has to be designed to be used with a HOTAS hat switch in VR ... but so much of it isn't optimised even for that. For example:
- if you're in a mission depot, the most likely action you'll want to do is "load maximum" or "unload maximum". There are times when you might not, but in general that's the obvious action. However the UI defaults to zero, so mouse, keyboard, joystick, whatever ... you always have to load it up.
- on the commodity pages, you can't set separate filters for buying and selling: the obvious sell filter is "things I have in hold", which makes a terrible buy filter. So you either have to spend a lot of time messing about with filters, or use a whole list
- transfer of cargo to and from your carrier is a multi-click process buried deep in the right panel
- squadron tools are split, not entirely intuitively, between the right panel and the comms panel
- the positions of the "confirm" and "cancel" UI controls are not consistent between panels - sometimes cancel is below, sometimes it's to the left, sometimes it's to the right, sometimes it's default-selected and sometimes not
(And while the station UIs do have mouse support too, which helps a bit, the ship ones don't)

Output UI is also pretty bad in places:
- to discover that you were half a degree off on your FSS zoom positioning is a top-level red alert message ... to discover that your power plant is a few percent off critical failure involves going to the right panel, then scrolling to the modules tab, then scrolling down to the power plant and picking out its damage level from a bunch of identical looking orange rows
- no-one knows what the red and green supply/demand symbols on the market mean (if you think you do, I'd be interested to hear your theory, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong because all the obvious ones are)
- the galaxy map state filter gives incredibly misleading information (and on the input side, has at least one state missing entirely)

The multiplayer-focused UIs are particularly bad, too - wing beacons and navlock confuse a lot of new players (and even some experienced ones) in exactly how they work and when you should turn them on and off.

All of this we basically ignore because we're used to it and we enjoy the basic spaceship flying bit enough to put up with it, and many of us learnt it a bit at a time as it was added incrementally over the years. But a lot of it is very definitely not good, especially not for beginners who have a huge amount to learn already without having to fight weird UI choices as well.
 
It's not as if they're actually wrong about the UI, though - sure, a lot of it has to be designed to be used with a HOTAS hat switch in VR ... but so much of it isn't optimised even for that. For example:
  • if you're in a mission depot, the most likely action you'll want to do is "load maximum" or "unload maximum". There are times when you might not, but in general that's the obvious action. However the UI defaults to zero, so mouse, keyboard, joystick, whatever ... you always have to load it up.
  • on the commodity pages, you can't set separate filters for buying and selling: the obvious sell filter is "things I have in hold", which makes a terrible buy filter. So you either have to spend a lot of time messing about with filters, or use a whole list
  • transfer of cargo to and from your carrier is a multi-click process buried deep in the right panel
  • squadron tools are split, not entirely intuitively, between the right panel and the comms panel
  • the positions of the "confirm" and "cancel" UI controls are not consistent between panels - sometimes cancel is below, sometimes it's to the left, sometimes it's to the right, sometimes it's default-selected and sometimes not
(And while the station UIs do have mouse support too, which helps a bit, the ship ones don't)

Output UI is also pretty bad in places:
  • to discover that you were half a degree off on your FSS zoom positioning is a top-level red alert message ... to discover that your power plant is a few percent off critical failure involves going to the right panel, then scrolling to the modules tab, then scrolling down to the power plant and picking out its damage level from a bunch of identical looking orange rows
  • no-one knows what the red and green supply/demand symbols on the market mean (if you think you do, I'd be interested to hear your theory, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong because all the obvious ones are)
  • the galaxy map state filter gives incredibly misleading information (and on the input side, has at least one state missing entirely)

The multiplayer-focused UIs are particularly bad, too - wing beacons and navlock confuse a lot of new players (and even some experienced ones) in exactly how they work and when you should turn them on and off.

All of this we basically ignore because we're used to it and we enjoy the basic spaceship flying bit enough to put up with it, and many of us learnt it a bit at a time as it was added incrementally over the years. But a lot of it is very definitely not good, especially not for beginners who have a huge amount to learn already without having to fight weird UI choices as well.

While I dont disagree with most of that, none of that has to do with 'being a console port'. 'Its a console port' is to UI complaints what 'it is poorly optimized' is to frames-per-second complaints: a meaningless argument that is supposed to make you sound like an expert. if you prod these people with a stick they'll tell you what the 'fundamental limitations of the engine' are, or provide some fascinating input into the 'netcode'.
 
While I dont disagree with most of that, none of that has to do with 'being a console port'. 'Its a console port' is to UI complaints what 'it is poorly optimized' is to frames-per-second complaints: a meaningless argument that is supposed to make you sound like an expert. if you prod these people with a stick they'll tell you what the 'fundamental limitations of the engine' are, or provide some fascinating input into the 'netcode'.

The problem with this graphics engine is that it was done in the old pop up book style. You can tell when you approach planets from a long distance. And, yes you are right, the net code inputs are fascinating, but they also seem to use a bit too much bandwidth.
 
I thought this might be a joke but when I saw the response with that gave away the preconceived notion that anyone who doesn't agree is a "fanboi" I found that it wasn't.
I have to wonder, how are you forced to navigate the menus with q e w s a d and spacebar? I use the mouse.
 
It's not as if they're actually wrong about the UI, though - sure, a lot of it has to be designed to be used with a HOTAS hat switch in VR ... but so much of it isn't optimised even for that. For example:
  • if you're in a mission depot, the most likely action you'll want to do is "load maximum" or "unload maximum". There are times when you might not, but in general that's the obvious action. However the UI defaults to zero, so mouse, keyboard, joystick, whatever ... you always have to load it up.
  • on the commodity pages, you can't set separate filters for buying and selling: the obvious sell filter is "things I have in hold", which makes a terrible buy filter. So you either have to spend a lot of time messing about with filters, or use a whole list
  • transfer of cargo to and from your carrier is a multi-click process buried deep in the right panel
  • squadron tools are split, not entirely intuitively, between the right panel and the comms panel
  • the positions of the "confirm" and "cancel" UI controls are not consistent between panels - sometimes cancel is below, sometimes it's to the left, sometimes it's to the right, sometimes it's default-selected and sometimes not
(And while the station UIs do have mouse support too, which helps a bit, the ship ones don't)

Output UI is also pretty bad in places:
  • to discover that you were half a degree off on your FSS zoom positioning is a top-level red alert message ... to discover that your power plant is a few percent off critical failure involves going to the right panel, then scrolling to the modules tab, then scrolling down to the power plant and picking out its damage level from a bunch of identical looking orange rows
  • no-one knows what the red and green supply/demand symbols on the market mean (if you think you do, I'd be interested to hear your theory, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong because all the obvious ones are)
  • the galaxy map state filter gives incredibly misleading information (and on the input side, has at least one state missing entirely)

The multiplayer-focused UIs are particularly bad, too - wing beacons and navlock confuse a lot of new players (and even some experienced ones) in exactly how they work and when you should turn them on and off.

All of this we basically ignore because we're used to it and we enjoy the basic spaceship flying bit enough to put up with it, and many of us learnt it a bit at a time as it was added incrementally over the years. But a lot of it is very definitely not good, especially not for beginners who have a huge amount to learn already without having to fight weird UI choices as well.
Not to mention having no way to sort or filter our stored modules; or how time-consuming and clunky outfitting and switching ship loadouts is. The irony is, the UI has actually improved over the years!
 
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