As someone who loved playing Frontier on my Amiga 4000 (and a Kickstarter backer, to boot) this really should be my sort of game, but I'm just finding some of the menu layouts and the lack of visual feedback of the UI really jarring.
It's like looking at my ship in outfitting: are those all the slots available to me and they're already filled, or am I able to add more equipment? That's something that the game should be making clear to me, not something I've got to guess at; if there are a limited number of slots, all it needs is a simple "Equipment slots: 10 used out of 10". When I click on a scanner system, looking to upgrade it, I'm getting everything possible that could be placed in that slot; give me a filtering option, let me pick out just scanners, or cargo rack, or gimballed pulse lasers.
On the commodities page, all I can see is red, red, red and more red, there's no immediate obvious distinction between which column is which; it's like looking at a spreadsheet on an old greenscreen monitor from about 30 years ago, not a holographic display from a thousand+ years in the future. At the larger stations they've got multicolour holographic adverts on display, so why not in the ship?
How about docking indicators? When I approach a station and can barely make anything of it out (which is really weird, as I could swear they looked pretty visible in the trailers and screenshots, but none of the lighting options in the menus seem to make much difference), having a landing pad, or the entrance, on the other side of the station and no way of knowing which is the way to it, surely there should be some kind of general indicators showing which way you need to go.
And some of the gameplay mechanic decisions: oooh, lets sit looking at this star for a minute whilst the scanner figures out what it is!
Yeah, I realise that you're not going to have access to information on every star system, if they're unexplored, so I understand the mechanic of being rewarded for providing that information, but having nothing on the surrounding systems is just plain stingy when you start. Maybe I was spoiled by playing Frontier, all those years ago, but this level of withholding information is ridiculous.
As to the actual acquisition process, this isn't sodding pokemon, it should be a case of you turn up in a system and the scanner says "X amount of stars observed", then, as you fly around the system it picks up more and more detailed info, like star compositions, planets, stations, etc. Whether they made it a simple case of time spent in the system, or proximity, with better equipment decreasing the former or increasing range of the latter, that would have been something to find out during testing as to which worked better.
I was in a binary star system, earlier, and I spent about half an hour flying back and forth between the two stars hoping to get Unknown Source Signals to appear, as I needed specific items to be found, but it wasn't until the end of that half hour that I almost flew into the second star and it finally popped up "Astronomical object found" message and finally allowed me to scan it. This is a scanner which blatantly spots other ships in the blackness of space, half way across a system, yet bizarrely can't see a massive star filling my screen.
So, yes, there are some really illogical game/interface design decisions I'm seeing here; definitely a case of created by engineers, not human interface designers.
It's like looking at my ship in outfitting: are those all the slots available to me and they're already filled, or am I able to add more equipment? That's something that the game should be making clear to me, not something I've got to guess at; if there are a limited number of slots, all it needs is a simple "Equipment slots: 10 used out of 10". When I click on a scanner system, looking to upgrade it, I'm getting everything possible that could be placed in that slot; give me a filtering option, let me pick out just scanners, or cargo rack, or gimballed pulse lasers.
On the commodities page, all I can see is red, red, red and more red, there's no immediate obvious distinction between which column is which; it's like looking at a spreadsheet on an old greenscreen monitor from about 30 years ago, not a holographic display from a thousand+ years in the future. At the larger stations they've got multicolour holographic adverts on display, so why not in the ship?
How about docking indicators? When I approach a station and can barely make anything of it out (which is really weird, as I could swear they looked pretty visible in the trailers and screenshots, but none of the lighting options in the menus seem to make much difference), having a landing pad, or the entrance, on the other side of the station and no way of knowing which is the way to it, surely there should be some kind of general indicators showing which way you need to go.
And some of the gameplay mechanic decisions: oooh, lets sit looking at this star for a minute whilst the scanner figures out what it is!
Yeah, I realise that you're not going to have access to information on every star system, if they're unexplored, so I understand the mechanic of being rewarded for providing that information, but having nothing on the surrounding systems is just plain stingy when you start. Maybe I was spoiled by playing Frontier, all those years ago, but this level of withholding information is ridiculous.
As to the actual acquisition process, this isn't sodding pokemon, it should be a case of you turn up in a system and the scanner says "X amount of stars observed", then, as you fly around the system it picks up more and more detailed info, like star compositions, planets, stations, etc. Whether they made it a simple case of time spent in the system, or proximity, with better equipment decreasing the former or increasing range of the latter, that would have been something to find out during testing as to which worked better.
I was in a binary star system, earlier, and I spent about half an hour flying back and forth between the two stars hoping to get Unknown Source Signals to appear, as I needed specific items to be found, but it wasn't until the end of that half hour that I almost flew into the second star and it finally popped up "Astronomical object found" message and finally allowed me to scan it. This is a scanner which blatantly spots other ships in the blackness of space, half way across a system, yet bizarrely can't see a massive star filling my screen.
So, yes, there are some really illogical game/interface design decisions I'm seeing here; definitely a case of created by engineers, not human interface designers.
