But there shouldn't be many places you can land in the Solar System have enough atmosphere to even Notice.  Venus, earth and Titan.  Mars is so thin it's hardly worth talking about.  Does anything else in the solar system even have anything of note? (ignoring gas giants)  I haven't tried to land on Venus or earth.  I've lost landers on 5 separate moons.   

Here's a quick system specs reminder:

1. Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 17134)

2. 16GB RAM

3. Intel(R) HD Graphics 530, 8GB RAM

4. Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz

All right, now on with the feedback.

I've started my second run-through, now that you've released the update. And this time through, I'm gonna nitpick.

1. When I descended to Triton, the graphics were choppy and slow (not as slow as they were last time when my landscape settings were on "2", but still slow and choppy). Since I'd had this problem before, I went back to the settings.ini file and changed the landscape settings from a "1" to a "0". But I only knew to do this, because I had the same problem last time. If this resets every time there's an update, that's going to be annoying for me to have to fix. And I know about it. Imagine how frustrating it will be for players that don't know about exiting the program and modifying the settings.ini file. Can this not be preset to "0" with the option to adjust it higher within the game?
2. You got rid of the little Ur-Quan & Spathi ships hanging from Wymdoo's ceiling. Why? I liked that Easter egg. Is it P&F's fault? It's P&F's fault, isn't it?
3. When talking to Wymdoo, after prompting him with the question about "abductions" and "probing", he says "...and they made all that up...", but the text reads "...and they made up all that..."
   I know it's a minor thing, but little discrepancies like that just take me out of the game.
4. "Clamminess" has two m's, not one. It's misspelled in the commander's dialogue.
5. When talking with the commander about whether or not to help the Tywom, she says, "This is too great an opportunity to pass up." Then moments later she says "The choice to establish friendly relations with an alien civilization is too great to pass up." This is too redundant having her say practically the same thing two or three lines later.
6. The lines about the "payroll" have no audio (I suspect you're aware of that, though).
7. I can still buy multiple Kerrys. What the Androsynth is going on here!?

And that's as far as I am right now. About to go get the Tywom ship parts and then revisit him. I'll let you know what other little nitpicks I find this time around when I pick it back up tomorrow.

First Officer Kerry is Stardock's way of sneaking the Androsynth into SCO's alternate universe >.>

Mars and the others are easy to land on. You don’t even have to touch the keyboard.

The problem is that you are shifting 90% of the dificulty of exploring a planet to a 10second window in the start, and 10% on the remaining dificulty spread afterwards in 60ish seconds, wich sounds too much "make or break" in the start and causes frustration on the more newbie player.

On the classic Starcontrol, you could "feel" that you were going to get killed while exploring and it would be a choice to risk it a couple seconds more and more (was a fun gamble), but now since 90% of the dificulty lies in the first 10 seconds, it makes a helpless feeling when you die even before you have more time to risk it second-by-second.

TLDR: The thrill of exploring is gone, just the initial burst of frustration when you die in 10seconds. The dificulty should be spread while exploring, not only on the initial landing.

 

Soooo tried the new version, heres my thoughts:

- The star system navigation is better now. Would probably still like to have a minimap showing at least where every planet is, if possible. If there are some special planets around you want to keep secret and found via exploration, just omit them from the minimap.

- Not sure about the conversation UI-change, I kinda liked the old one better, but both work.

- Having to reselect the landing zone, even if there is just one available, is a pointless click. Why not have it so that it automatically selects one landing spot, the last one you used for example?

- Would be nice if the landing zone came available much zippier after you have chosen it. Even if you are just next to it on the planet screen, it still takes quite a while for it to come landable.

- Feels like the resource collecting is a bit faster now? Or is it me just getting used to it? Seemed nicer now tho.

- Sometimes its annoying to try to find either the last resources or the last drone. Anything you can do about it? A minimap which comes when there are just a few resources left? Or some other indicator where all the rest of them are?

- The lander UI vanished once while I was on Andraste. (and one resource was under the surface so much i couldnt get it)

- When firing rocks on moon, the resources that get spawned are not really that obviously resources and can be easily missed. Also they are graphically a bit on the plain side. Is it not possible for the rock to spawn normal resource icons when destroyed?

- Sometimes there is only one dialogue option left, but after that you still have to separately close the communication channel, which seems a bit redundant.

- There was a loop once In the Lexite ruin in the drone planet. When I drove next to the Lexite ruin, the usual "its too dangerous to enter when these drones are here" -dialogue started, but looped many times over until i pressed the X.

- There is a one pixel line on both the bottom and right side of my screen, which do not show the correct game graphics but rather something else, mostly black tho. This was on the previous build aswell.

Seems to be getting better!

Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600

 

First off, this is great! you've done a great job!

There were some minor bugs that have already been mentioned here so I won't list them.

Something major for me was feeling a bit too lost and disoriented both in space and on planets:
In space, at first you're zoomed-in way too much and I was unable to see what was in front of me and where I was flying well enough.
I'd like some sort of zoom control but still have it be relative to the speed of the ship which seems to be how it's working today.

Where are the planets? As far as I can tell there is no indicator as to the location of a planet except for the orbit becoming less visible when you get close to it. There should be a way to know the general direction of where the planet is and not just guess that it will be positioned in one location or the other.
A minimap of the solar system would be useful and make exploring less frustrating.

Flying on moons and planets is fun right now but I imagine that doing it again and again is going to get very repetitive, a minimap would help you get in and out after collecting minerals much more quickly, hopefully it'll take a bit longer before it feels like a task.

 

Other then that, I'm happy! Fantastic work!

Similar thought on landing zone. Plus it takes a while to focus on it, and it gets old...  A good solution would be: on first click/Enter it starts moving towards the landing zone. While it's moving towards landing zone, second click/Enter will instantaneously jump you there.

I get the same exact thing, QHD resolution.

Thanks Brad, It was on 1. There is just the slightest jitter on planetary approach, but it is real minor.

I agree at on the zoom control in solar system, we need it...lol.

I notice that some of the planet resource icons that float above the surface for pickup, some are half buried still.

(Just my preference) I think landers should be bought in the same place as equipment, instead of resources.

Lander Launch button is redundant. Why do I have to move my mouse over to press it when I can just press on the landing spot again? In the age of touchscreens it's very unintuitive. I find myself constantly clicking on the landing spot trying to launch my lander. Controllers don't use it. K+M shouldn't either.

I really like the new solar system view.

Question: Why are the planetary orbit circles between planets and not on a planet?

When you fight the drones on Elpis:
1. They charged me and killed me instantly, seems a bit strange to me...
2. when you kill them they turn in to crates?! This temporary, right?
3. It takes several shots to clear to clear the green life bar and few more to clear the red one. Why to life bars?
4. When they reach the red life bar I fired a few shots. They hit. I waited. only a few seconds later the drones exploded. Seems off...
5. Still really hard to find them and actually see them...

Resources:
1. For each resource you have a sell all button. But I need one Uranium for the moon.
    Since I can't buy resources I think that I will need to save a few from each mineral type...
    This means that I need a sell X button as well...
2. The legate ship still does not appear in the inventory.
3. For fuel, we have the fill me up and bu fuel buttons. Both have the same functionality.
    Why do we need both? Shouldn't one of them be "buy X fuel"?

Planet exploration:
1. I zoom out to see more but them it is very hard to see the resources when the HUD's triangle vanishes
2. Can't find a zoom level or something that works for me.

Nice bug...
If you load an Auto-Save that was created upon entering a planet you will leave your engine trail behind.

Dialog screen:
1. If the text is two lines, the top lines is sometimes hard to read because of the background.
    You should add a frame / boundary (not sure what is the correct word...)
2. The last text the character said remains on the screen, why?

Oh and just stopped to think this: You kill the Legate near Neptune and the ship ends up crashing in Titan near Saturn. That's like astronomically improbable (pun intended), considering the two are 3,076,400,000 kilometers apart. I get that perhaps you don't want the ship to be that easy to find but still...

4 more landers down, controls feel pointless. I don't see what making landing a mini game adds to the overall game, It will be the most bitched about thing post release if it stays in the game. The general populace will HATE it.  Landing for resources is a big part of star control, and I see no evidence this is going to change.   We don't do manual landings with space craft in 2018...I doubt we'll go back to it in 2088.

 

Where are you landing that you keep losing landers? Most planets don't require any manual corrections, and can be landed on w/o touching the keyboard.

Any planet with severe weather and heavy gravity. I lost three landers on Titan alone.  Depending on how far you are off will decide how many crew you lose. Not a fan of it myself. 

And what would people prefer? The game blocking you from landing until you get upgrades which means you'll have a safe landing? There was a debate on this several months back. It didn't change then, won't change now.

Maybe its just that everyone isn't aware that upgrades will be available in game to make landing and planetside easier. SC2 let you go on to crazy difficult planets that you could die on, SCO is not different. It is a player's choice to attempt a landing. You can always come back later.

You mean landings on to planets that scientists have spent decades studying, analysing, and creating landing vectors? Good luck doing that for a planet you only saw 10 minutes ago.

Hopefully this is the right place to post this.

I like the idea of having a the minigames on the planets, i think adding a first person view would help improve lander play when you have to clear out an area of hostiles. also adding different armaments for lander. there is so much potential for this part of the game. Having to explore sub terrain areas to find cool stuff would be awesome. Also I had has issues where the dialog randomly skips.
On another note I flew through the sun and all but one of my crew were killed. normally i would agree with logic, but i just wanted to make sure if that supposed to happen.

There are NO directions on how to land.  The controls are...Mush and meaningless, landing goes from oh look your fine to Oh crap I'm gonna die instantly.  I've tried landing with out control..and with "control"  I've died both ways on planets I'm being told are safe(enceladus). This mini game will add early game frustration to new players who will turn the game off and never play again.    The controls have no real clues as to how they are working  The Little jets just spray in every direction.  

Making a game "hard" is not the same as making it "good".  In SC2 there were planets that were VERY hard to get RUs off of early...but if you were quick and lucky you could pick up something valuable and get off before you died.  This just adds a Risk with zero payback. It's just boom dead.

 

all this tells me is you know nothing about landing on a planet works.   We don't even try to control landings on mars, we build the system and because of light speed delay we don't know if it works until after it's happened.  And tell me....how can you tell the wind speed when all you have is a blurry picture?  Landing on a Moon with NO ATMOSPHERE is never a challenge if you have a computer, we could do in the 60's, I could set it up on my phone and I'm just an artist.   If I have a ship that can vertically take off and return to orbit, there is no atmosphere that bothers me until it's nearly soup (Venus).....and the russians successfully landed on Venus anyway.   What kills in a thick atmosphere is not wind, it's heat.  A heavy atmosphere means you land slower...and the air itself slows you down. If you can launch straight up...Landing is nearly meaninglessly easy. 

Sc2 did the landing and take off right.  Don't make players get annoyed because of a zero value minigame.

dialog tree with the scryve needs work. I was able to select the option to ask " did you say that you did report to your superiors yet" without following that tree.

Computer System: Self-built - will be nine years this October!

Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. EP45-UD3P

Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (10.0, Build 17134) (17134.rs4_release.180410-1804)

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad  CPU   Q9550  @ 2.83GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.8GHz

RAM: 8GB

Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660

Game Resolution: 1920 x 1200 (32 bit) (59Hz) on Primary, note I have two other monitors @1920 x 1200 Portrait and a projector connected @1920 x 1080 (so running quad monitors while playing the game).

This is my ancient computer, but it still pretty much does everything I need (obviously, I've upgraded mechanical drives to SSD's, sound cards, and videos cards during the initial build time and I also have a new Acer Predator Helios 300 that I posted my previous comments with and a few of the comments here might be in regards to my third playthrough on it with the latest build).

When I first ran the game on this machine, I found the graphics a little choppy here and there, but reduced the quality from Great to Good. I also turned VSync on. I then rebooted the machine since I usually let this machine run weeks without rebooting since I just hibernate it when I'm not using it.

After rebooting, the Good setting works really well and so I may try to set it to Great again to see if it is choppy again (might just needed the reboot).

This is my fourth playthrough to getting Wymdoo back to the Starbase (first on this computer).

Let me start off with bugs that I noticed:

• Miranda's gravity is wrong: I think you had it listed at 8.54m/s², but it should be 0.079m/s² according the Wikipedia.
• The lander crew count (reported this bug previously) still gets it wrong when suffering damage upon landing. I had another situation where the crew on my lander was 0, but it did not get destroyed. When I went back to the ship, it had indicated that I had lost only 4 crew members.
• This may or may not be a bug, but I can't seem to get the option for me to return to the Starbase before I accept Wymdoo's mission when talking to him. I'll fiddle with the responses a little bit more. With the previous build, I could tell Wymdoo that I needed to go back to the Starbase before I accepted his mission. It's possible I'm not choosing the correct responses now as it seems like I always need to say "I'll do it" before ending communication with him. The strange thing here is that when I go back to the Starbase, the Commander (still don't know her name by the way) tells me to go help him (even though I've already agreed to help him). So there might be a little conversation logic here that is not right.
• Any bugs that I think were fixed that I noticed before, I'll list below.

Changes I noticed between this and previous build:

• The zoom is indeed better; however, I'm not certain why there appears to be hesitation from Stardock to give us both zoom control and a mini map. Once I get to another solar system (or after about my 20th new solar system), I'm not going to be all that interested in taking the time to explore the system to figure out where everything is. I'm going to want to find where the planets / moons are and start getting to the business of orbiting them and scanning them to see if there is anything of interest. Once we travel inwards and the zoom level shows fewer objects, I'm probably not going to remember where all the solar system objects are. We're going to need some way of seeing the whole solar system quickly so that we can move to our next object quickly. I think this is going to be of the essence to making this part of the game fun versus drudgery.
• The overall game performance and feel is different than before. Some of the feel seems a bit smoother in areas (I noticed a difference between my second (older build) and third (new build) playthroughs on my Acer Predator Helios 300). I have not, yet, flown through the fog on Enceladus / Europa so will comment further after I've done so to see if the slow down there has been fixed or not.
• We don't bounce off gas giants any more (I didn't try the sun to see if we still bounce off of it). Hopefully we'll have more than just the Sylandro to converse with on a gas giant here or there. There might be something to do here as well (maybe we can collection some hydrogen or something).
• I noticed that you added Callisto - super awesome! I think it would be nice to add some more moons around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. There are two moons to explore at Saturn, two @Uranus, and just the one at Neptune. You have Uranus's smallest moon, Miranda, rather than some of its much bigger ones. Probably not a deal breaker at this point, but still would add more flavor to the starting objects you can explore in our solar system. Maybe pick one more at each of those three planets (Mimas and Tethys are really neat moons since both actually look like the Death Star and both orbit Saturn).
• I'm not 100% certain, but it seems like the lander is picking up more sunken resources, but I may just be getting lucky.
• Is the Scryve Legate harder now? It seems like it might be, or my skills have worsened as I actually died once.
• You now get the Terran ship added to your fleet properly - hooray! Although, I still don't know how many fleet points I have / get (if that has any meaning anymore).
• I think the unlimited resource bug has been fixed with respect to when you are talking to Wymdoo. I'll double check just to make sure.
• I think the squares / triangles change in size now in relation to how far away the resources / objects are (I'm pretty sure they didn't in the previous build, so I like this touch here as it was one of my suggestions).
• The starting position of the planets are now different and the game date is about two years before. I think I remember seeing 2090 before, but now it is 2088. Uncertain as to any significance here.
• I don't think the Scryve Legate can reappear on top of you anymore when reloading and also it pushes you instead of flying on top of you.
• I didn't notice any sound stuttering during loading screens anymore so I think this issue has been resolved.
• I still don't know what the combat arena goodies do here - can someone help me out or point me to where I can find out this information? They actually don't seem to do anything noticeable that I can tell right now - at least it's not obvious to me.

Comments about implemented features:

• I saw posts about the landing feature of the game. I kind of agree that I think this part of the game is going to get tedious really quickly depending on how much effort people want to put into landing on objects that are difficult. Right now the most difficult body to land on is Titan (or at least worth landing on, as landing on Mercury or Venus right now is futile). I managed to do it one time without losing anyone (my second playthrough when I was playing without losing any crew members, just for fun). I actually found that for Titan it was easier if you didn't try to keep it in the box because more often than not, the wind blew both directions (pulling you away and bringing you back). If you happened to be close to the box when you were close to landing (this was purely by luck), I then exerted effort in trying to keep it within the box. Otherwise, I just reloaded and tried again. I tried for about 10 minutes landing on Titan over, and over again, but I only landed that one time without losing anyone (although another time, I thought I had lost 1 crew member, but when I returned to the ship I was at full strength due to the bug I've mentioned previously).
• Planetary exploration is about the same as before, although I think most of my time is spent doing this (more on this below).
• Alien conversations are fun and engaging for the most part, notwithstanding my previous comments. I think there is a bit of a plot hole in some of Wymdoo's comments, though. He says they've been watching our broadcasts for 50 years; however, their homeworld is not very far away (I didn't measure, but seems within at least 10 light years) and by the game time we've been broadcasting our signals for at least 150 years! So our radio signals would have a 150 light year radius and so the Tywom should have been receiving our broadcasts for a lot longer than 50 years, especially since they've been part of the Scryve empire for 500 years. Now it may be possible that they didn't bother to start to listen until recently; however, I get the feeling that they are doing their best to hide lots of races from the Scryve. Another thing I find weird is when the Scrvye say that they didn't think the Tywom were capable of such dishonesty or something like that. Seems like the Scryve don't know their vassal races very well.
• Solar system travel is indeed better than the previous build also I think your ship coasts more before stopping (like you've decreased its friction). As mentioned above, I don't see how we can play the game without being able to manually change zoom level / have a mini map.
• Space combat is okay so far. I'm not a fan of the asteroid belt that prevents screen wrapping, but I think that ship has sailed. I would like to know, though, what's the deal with asteroids damaging your ship? It seems like smaller ones usually don't hurt you, but larger ones do? Seems a little cheap that we're losing crew to asteroid strikes (especially when you fly to the edge, but can't see it because the zoom level is obscuring it).
• Going back to the Starbase to communicate with the Commander I think needs to be changed to allow you to communicate with the Commander as long as you are within Sol. Maybe a technology (a la Subspace Communications in Star Trek) will allow you to contact the Starbase outside of Sol. This also opens up the possibility for 3-way communications (say you and the Starbase Commander are both talking to Wymdoo on Triton to get that approval to help him). This would cut down travel time dramatically.

Game Phase Balance:

• I have not timed my actual in game time with various sub games of the main game so I will list it by feel.
• I think I easily spend more than 50% of my time on planetary surfaces (and landing).
• Game combat so far has been an estimated 5%
• Traveling the solar system is probably easily 15%
• Alien conversations is probably 15% at most
• Going to the Starbase outfitting screen is probably 5%
• The galaxy map is currently 0%, although I'm guessing it's going to be at least 5%
• I'm guessing that Hyperspace would take the remaining 5%

I think you can see that I am spending way too much time on planetary surfaces. Part of this may be due to the fact that I don't have anything else to do in the beta right now, except explore the solar system and land on planetary objects.

Here would be my estimated ideal game phase balance:

• Exploring planetary surfaces (including the planetfall landing): 15 to 20% tops
• Traveling solar systems: 15 to 20% tops
• Alien conversations; 15 to 20% seems reasonable
• Conversing with the Commander / visiting the Starbase: 5% tops
• Messing with the Galaxy Map: 5% tops
• Traveling through Hyperspace: 10 to 15%
• Game combat: 10 to 20%

So I think we need to streamline the planetary exploration quite a bit; otherwise, we'll easily get bogged down in it. Adding a mini map would be the fastest way to cut down the planetary exploration time and the same would be true for traveling within solar systems.

I think that is about all the comments that I have so far. I think the latest build has a more polished feel to it overall.

I'm going to continue with the rest of the solar system activities and if I notice anything else, I'll be sure to post back here.

Thanks again to the Stardock development team for allowing us to play this beta and also kudos with respect to the rapidity at which you provided a second build.

Matt

There are a lot more people playing the game now and so stating comments like this would seem to have the deleterious effect of dissuading people from providing honest comments.

The game has not been released yet, so all features should be open to discussion regardless of whether or not someone thinks it has a possibility of changing or not and regardless of whether it has been debated widely or not.

I envision Stardock's opening of this first chapter beta as an opportunity to get comments from a larger player base than what was previously available to aid in the game's improvement.

If the majority of comments are in favor of changing an aspect of the game, then it is my hope that it indeed will be changed.

Matt

I can't speak for everyone, but i would much rather prefer that the planetary surface weather would be more dificult in this kind of planets instead of the landing dificulty, kinda like starcontrol II realy.

In SCII, you scan the planet, see it has harsh weather, you still decide to risk it, land on the planet walk around to see if it's realy out of reach yet or not, get a few minerals while risking your crew and lander, but you get a few casualties and evacuate the planet.

This is engaging gameplay. Risk/reward is fun decision.

Right now in origins, you see a planet has harsh weather, and you decide you don't go at all, because there is very very very little control on the planetary landing.

 

Except, even on a planet with harsh weather, it's still not very difficult to land? You won't survive very long on the surface, sure, but the actual landing part is pretty trivial. Staying within the green guide boxes isn't that difficult even on planets with harsh environments, at least for keyboard and mouse.

I don't get it guys. I literally have 0 trouble landing on all the planets/moons baring 3. I am guessing instead of tapping the left and right controls you guys are pressing it for a period of time and totally messing your landing up. I don't really feel the landing needs a lot of explanation myself. Keep the lander inside the square as best you can, it's pretty intuitive to me.