Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:24 am
Alpha 2.0 is the first time that I've really seen the promise of the game be delivered on in a meaningful way. It was really cool to walk through a multiplayer station, call up a ship out of my hangar, and watch it descend onto the pad. I won't lie, I couldn't suppress a grin when I walked out of the airlock and saw a bigass Retaliator sitting on the landing pad, with space station hab rings spinning behind it and a gas giant hanging in the far distance. It looks really good, and far more than with the dogfighting module or or the hangar module I finally feel like I have some confidence in what Roberts and company being able to execute on what they've been promising.
That said, there are performance issues, and stability issues, and weird bugs galore. One session I couldn't get aboard one of my ships because every time I tried to get into the cargo bay, I fell through the floor and got stuck. Another time I mis-clicked and got stuck in the onboard bunk with no readily apparent way to get back out. Another one of my ships starts spontaneously sparking and smoking like it's about to fall apart as soon as I get into the pilot's seat. Every game session in the Universe portion of the game has ended in a CTD after some period of time, usually between twenty minutes and a half hour. This is by no means, a polished, finished product, and anybody who tries to judge it on that standard is going to come away horribly disappointed. But when it works, it really, really works. I get what they're trying to do, and I like it. It's great fun to blast pirates out of space, then park your ship and EVA out of it to fix a damaged space station, then get back out to your ship and warp halfway across the system while planets whiz past.
It's taken CIG a damn long time to get to this point, but it finally feels like things are coming to together like they were supposed to months ago., and they're building up momentum. If they can keep going without getting bogged down in crazy snipe hunts and goose chases, and more importantly if they can keep a lid on the scope creep going forward (which I think is probably easier when there is concrete progress being made and clear next steps to be taken) they could very well pull this off.