General Feedback

Hello,

I was about to send a feedback form when the test ended, so I figured I would provide feedback here. I have 3276 hours in SE as of this writing, starting in 2014. I "exclusively" play in survival, although I spend lots of time in creative getting my designs for survival tuned to perfection.

I love the progression system, it adds so serious challenges to both space and planetary starts, and makes the game more rewarding. When I finally finished the yield modules on my large refinery I felt a lot of satisfaction. The game makes a lot more sense in terms of Uranium being the end-game power source, and players having to make do until they find it AND have the technology to reap it.

I greatly dislike being unable to choose my spawn location anymore. I am not sure if this is even correct, I didn't get time to play around with actual medical rooms versus survival kits, but at first appearance it looks like "spawn teleporting" is gone. This is a major setback for me, on some servers where I have created an empire, a massive mobility advantage is gained by being able to "respawn back at base". This change would alter the gameplay pace significantly, not for starting players, but for established players. It would make the game more linear, which is not what I enjoy. I think the game should be easier to play one you are at end-game status. I have a few possible compromises for this dilemma:

1) Make the respawn screen/spawn teleporting a world option (not sure if it is yet, again, I know only what I witnessed in survival.) Having it enabled would place the difficulty somewhere between "permanent death" and normal "spawn-wherever-you-want".

2) Or, make the actual medical room able to give you respawn points. Survival kits would respawn you automatically as a last-ditch measure. In this case, I would place the medical room AFTER gravity generators on the progression tree, along with jump drives and other fancy blocks. Give it a little gold requirement, or platinum. This way, end game players could have access to different respawn locations for their sprawling empire while noobs have to actually work their way to that ability.

Either way, I am not a fan of a blanket ban on respawn teleportation. I love pirating, I love sneaking aboard enemy ships, and I love the ability to visit any of my outposts or ships at a moment's notice. I would also enjoy playing with spawn teleportation off, IF IT WAS OPTIONAL. One of my favorite things to do is place a clandestine medical room onboard an enemy vessel, and "mess" with them (not grief). Spawn in with broadcasting and lights off, change a few block settings, or paint everything vivid pink - this is where the game picks up secondary content.

Moving on, I thing the hydrogen engine and power in general is a healthy challenge. I spent most of my time in the test world finding solutions to my ever-dwindling energy resources. I didn't find uranium until after finding everything else, and I greatly enjoyed the challenge that presented. I hope uranium is more sparsely distributed, only end-game players should have access to it anyway. At one point my mining/everything ship was floating off with inertial dampeners activated, but almost no power for the ion thrusters. I had just finished building my first hydrogen engine, and the trickle of power from the solar panels was the only thing allowing the dampening to occur, albeit at a greatly reduced rate. As my ship gradually floated into space, I raced to a nearby ice deposit. One powering up the hydrogen engine, I found I had only moments to maneuver the ship back to the deposit and start mining. I found this enjoyable, and challenging.

I could not figure out the temperature system. I noticed a small indicator on the HUD but I didn't look into it any further, and noticed no in-game ramifications. Does it degrade your o2 or energy reserves at different rate? Something to do with health? I couldn't tell, playing both on a planet and the in space.

Also, I never noticed a ragdoll effect, is this only when you die? My engineer would go rigid every time.

Here is a screenshot of my greatest obstacle during the test, a catastrophic explosion caused by improper placement of hydrogen engines, almost knocking out my refinery/large cargo container and splitting my ship. I recovered with a very slim margin of error.

In summation: I love the progression, I think uranium should be quite rare, I think respawning should be left as it was or made optional, I noticed no differences with temperature or ragdoll, and I love the new blocks. Thanks for reading!