A letter to the developers: Pivot.

I have reams of admiration for what you're doing with SE2, but I want to intentionally throw a wet-blanket your way; I've seen the inside of success AND failure, and right now I would posit you're at a failure-junction. The engine/game look great - amazing for this phase of alpha - with a huge asterisk.

I grabbed the latest SE2 build and jumped in, and ... it felt a bit like home.

Too much.

For players you risk making it feel like a clunky Unity update.

I'm more concerned about the development ark this inevitably produces. Doing this much work *twice* on a project is the mind killer. It's like working on a port only to find the publisher decided to give you no creative leeway. I'd wager certain people have seen LinkedIn more times lately in recent weeks than in prior months. Maybe not actively going there yet, but not not-noticing the notifications/emails so much.

It feels like you're building this game on tech and haven't yet figured out the creative. It makes the story feel like cheese (someone played EgoSoft games, eh?), mouldy cheese.

I'm hoping you've already figured this all out, and you're just holding your pivots close to your chest and out of the alpha.

I think you have reached a fantastic stage with the engine where it can sandbox/validate/prototype a bunch of ideas meaningfully. I earnestly encourage the team to take a timeout to play with creative concepts. What are you bringing to the *game*? Trade? NPCs? KSP-like rocket building? Factory-building with a factorio/satisfactory spin? Underwater? Biomes? Terraforming (small, mid, or planetary scale)?

I'm really enjoying the current build, but only because I'm doing the same-same things I would do in SE1 which I haven't played in a while. I can already estimate how long my interest will remain, and SE2 will come to market with a challenge SE1 didn't have - the influence SE1 had on other games.

- Oliver