SE2 makes me sad

Good morning,

I’m going to try to explain my experience with SE2.

To me, the progression and the “soul” that SE1 had are gone. In SE2, you can access space content almost as soon as you start playing; it takes maybe 15 minutes to reach space and gain access to an almost endless amount of resources with barely any effort. That genuinely makes me sad because I believe (and I’m not speaking only for myself) that many—if not most—of us liked SE more for the engineering than for the exploration. And don’t get me wrong: I do enjoy exploration, but I want to earn it through my own work.

What I loved was starting a survival game with literally nothing—just dropped alone on a planet—and then, with my own hands, finding a nice forest and turning it into a true massive mining base: a world-eating, industrial monster built step by step.

Space exploration isn’t a bad direction, but I have to say it: there are already many space exploration games out there, and some of them are incredibly good. What made Space Engineers feel unique was that if you wanted space exploration, you first had to do engineering—slowly, progressively—and exploration became a secondary reward. In SE2, exploration feels like the primary focus, while engineering has been pushed not into second place, but into third. It can feel almost unnecessary, which doesn’t make sense when the game still carries the same name.

I don’t want this to come across as pure criticism—if the developers wanted to make a game more focused on exploration, that’s totally valid. But along that path, it feels like the players who loved building huge drill rigs, carving out massive areas of terrain, and creating insane advanced engineering factories have been left behind.

Best regards, and have a great day. ()