SE2 Gameplay

Hi Keen,

I've played through the Survival story a good few hours, still working through the first contracts, crashed a ship & built a new one. Here's an opinion or two:

- Visuals are great, the game runs mostly smoothly, nothing that a save & reload doesn't fix.

- inventory search doesn't seem to search the names of containers, just their contents. But it's basically working in a useful fashion

- the whole storyline of 'we came to a new star system but there are all these buildings and stations already' -> it doesn't feel much like exploration. I'm a contract worker following the orders of some invisible corporation. Perhaps we'll find out the back story eventually, but so far, it just seems contrived, artificial. There are surely ways to drop hints right from the start if you want it to be convincing - like 'we heard rumours that another organisation sent a colony ship here before us - what became of them?' or make the crashed colony ship into the base station with a contract terminal. And if we discover bases along the way, make them very alien or unexpected.

- I'm fine with having no stone & searching for ores - it makes sense. To pacify the stone-age players who want it back, stone could be an ore used to make concrete & other basics.

- we need toolbars to control our ships soooon please! & a camera would be useful, or is that hidden one more rung up the tech tree?

- grinding and welding basically seem to be working OK apart from minor glitches where I have to double-click to have any effect, even when I'm close up to the block I'm working on.

- I like that the survival kit doesn't produce anything now

- I like that the tech progression only gives small H2 thrusters to start with - I built an ugly little ship with an array of 4x 9 thrusters for main propulsion.