After playing the game longer here are some things I have a problem with, and some things I would add or change. Whether their good or not is up to you. You may have a different experience.
- New Player Experience
Many of the low tier planets straight up suck. Becken or whatever and a few others are annoying to traverse. Either theres lots and lots of water to traverse or theres tons of small pieces of land surrounded by caverns of water. The land there is often has many elevation changes with no easy way tp simply walk around. Even with one of the low tier grapples you can eventually get their super slow to reel in and sometimes will not even reach far enough.
These issues need to be fixed by either changing the terrain of the starter planets or giving grapples to new characters.
- The Skill Tree…
The skill tree IMO sucks as is. You are entirely gated from stuff with this tree uness you make alts. This is a poor design that will simply cause people to quit early or later on when they realise skill pages have limits on skills per page. Nothing like being a miner or hunter and finding out you cant craft anything to get to a new planet, or realising once you can get to a dangerous planet you dont have the points to simply survive there. Once you are able to get there you will likely die cause your weapons suck and are weak and have no forged effects on them and enemies aggro on you. No matter what you choose you will have issues.
The skill trees should be divided to combat specific and everything else. There should only be skill point limits on combat stuff like energy, hp, resists, damage with fists or bows and so on and made into epic choices so you can only specialize in 1 thing at a time. New skill pages should be only for the combat stuff.
- Experience Gains
Experience gains are pretty slow. Getting to 50 is going to take ages especially when you cant make your own gear thats good.
The whole stone xp thing needs to be cut in half and then gaining xp from combat and other methods needs to scale up. Xp for levels past 40 need to be reduced.
- Trees
Leaves do not decay when a trunk is removed from a tree and thus leaves float until the area regens. Ive always hated games that lack decay when their copying minecraft. I would prefer tree felling be in game so removing the bottom trunk of a tree automatically destroys the entire tree. Can make it a forge effect on axes.
- Durability
A game with durability but no way to repair it on tools and weapons is mind blowing. Why I should have to make brand new weapons and tools with new sets of forged effects consistently daily is beyond me. Thats not fun, its tedious and annoying. Make a machine that repairs stuff and add stuff in skill tree to reduce cost and increase how much durability is repaired.
- Towns and Settlements
I went to all the hubs and capitals in each of first couple tiers of planets mainly to see their shops and malls. Astonishingly I found that 95 percent of the shops were empty, or had only a few left over items over priced no one wants. Out of the hours i spent doing this I only saw 2 players. These cities were filled with useless structures that simply wasted space and added tons of lag in some situations like in many guardian hub locations. These wastes of space make their settlements seem great cause they have ao much stuff built but really their just filled and empty. Their not filled with active citizens at all. In fact I even see frequently newer players like myself asking in help chat if this game is dead cause this game looks and feels dead. Why inactive settlements and shops are allowed to stick around is crazy cause they steal tons pf land and resources from active players by owning the plots of land. This is made easier with Gleam membership as people can quit for months and not worry that their plots are gone.
If settlements are not active they should disolve. I dont care how much they built.
- Armor
All the endurance skill tree stuff should be on gear not in a skill tree. How you can put a point in some form of hazard protection and magically be ok on a dangerous world is just immersion breaking. Obviously its done this way cause its a lazy way of not needing to make armor for different character models. But this also clutters the skill tree and wastes points. Alternatively give these free upon level up milestones up to level 50. So we can use those points elsewhere.
- Progression
With the way the skill tree is set up it really kills progression. It doesn’t help that the progression is not taught to you or explained. If it wasnt for people building portal hubs and some shops actually selling stuff a new player could literally be unable to progress if they dont get into crafting, if they ever go to a settlement that is. If they dont know about settlements and shops and they try to do everything solo, as long as they cant make spark related machines they will never get off their planet. Once they pass 20 resets are limited. Im not really sure if forcing people to make alts is a good idea. Personally ive never seen anyone willingly want to make alts cause they have no choice other than to grind infinite xp. People like to make alts in pvp rpg games like runescape or rpg heavy games with real skill trees like diablo or path of exile. But this is a minecraft like game, and no one ever makes alts in these games. If you were forcing more mmorpg mechanics into the game it would make sense. But when its simple crafting stuff that everyone should have access to for free with no skill points that you are forcing us to make alts for, thats just crazy.
- Wires and levers and such dont exist
A redstone alternative would really be great. Likewise ways of making stuff more autonomous or smart. Like if i got a shelf next to a workbench and im looking at recipes it should be able to pull required items from adjacent shelves. This idea can apply to all machines even machines next to machines so they can pull outputs of other machines into their inputs. The more efficient we can be the less huge we need to build and thats better for the servers.
- More to come its late
