So now that I have tried to a fair depth all ships of up to end tier 2, I am comfortable giving some feedback and return to playing it in a few months to see how it goes.
I am constantly looking for the next sci-fi spaceship/planetside rpg/simulator, and coming from all kinds of games, multi and single player from EVE online to X: series (awesome game model btw) I initially frown upon the game with “eeeew… arcade shooter”, but was fairly surprised to how the aspects combined with other genres, still NOT my cup of tea mind you, I just am not a twitch gamer, but this game manages to combine twitch with much more, and that makes it that much more fun.
with more investment and clever game design this can actually become quite the popular game to those less patient of the strategy/rpg aspect games, and would keep even me, interested at least until robert’s Star Citizen comes out.
anyhoo, to the things I found most “out of place” and in need of addressing.
- cover
its excessive you know wow’s arena pillar humping? I should not feel like playing THAT in a space battle game, I realize its a basis for any shooter game, but if you really need to make cover so vital to the gameplay, at least try to incorporate it into ship types and abilities, when you add dreadnoughts, its a awesome chance to rework the size of the ships, making dreadnoughts “passive tanks” and mobile cover for the rest of the fleet, also adding force field type of abilities to whatever ship roles, but seriously rework the damage/mitigation/hull/shield formulas so that cover isn’t such a vital aspect of gameplay, and for the love of zeus, christ, muhamed, krishna and whatever other gods blessing need be, get rid of the “asteroid humping” feel.
- missiles
this partially pertains to cover aswell but, lets try to think outside of that issue, missiles cost money, are of limited supply per battle, and have plenty of implants to upgrade them, but they miss, way too much, are way too easily avoided, are way too often intercepted/negated by abilities with little to no effort or cost by the target… especially the cruise missile… a great idea for a long range high damage weapon… that just doesn’t work… I think I landed a total of 2 since I played the game.
you need to rework the missile mechanics, I havn’t given too much time figuring out what I would do if I was designing the game (not my job tbh 
) but you definitely need to make them more powerful/useful.
the implant to increase range, for example, sounds great (in all rpg’s I played more range = more kills and less deaths), but its quite silly to have 20 000 km range when you cant even lock on at half that distance and well I doubt any cruise missile will hit at that range
3)ship/role design
this is a beta so its pretty normal to be trying out and reworking all kinds of things, but a few things I want to point out, is its important to have a “layout” to how you want to design the classes/roles/ships/abilities and the synergy between them (between allies and against enemies) beforehand, most ships feel… homogenized, the recent patch improved it TONS, but it still needs work.
seeing a interceptor take better use of long range weapons like the hail plasma, while long range frigates being dependent of short range weapons like assault plasma, is strange game design (especially reading the tips on loading screen :P)
I already made a thread that suggested a few new abilities and exposed the current state of torpedo frigates, but I will use that example again as a pretty bad course of class/role design, you now have a special module that is close to useless/unusable or even sometimes prejudicial to the team, while there are very few differences to those frigates firepower and the abilities that complement it, and any other, they use the same weapons, have the same ranges, the same missiles, they just have different stats, shields hull, speed etc, this is not enough, if you design long range frigates, you should plan out their practical use into the game’s mechanics, log into any faction and you will see the amount of hate the so called “snipers” get
right now you have good team synergy between two class of ships and two alone, guard and engineering, all other ships are better off on their own, and they most surely do so, that is bad
you also don’t have much synergy between ships on opposite teams, meaning they don’t have particular traits that you can say “yeah this is what I’m facing, so this is what I need to do”, besides what weapon types you are getting shot from, or what weapon type you are shooting with, this is also less interesting gameplay (tho granted it is a twitch shooter trade)
those are the 3 main points, I have tons of ideas and suggestion for this game, from a mini salvage-crafting mechanic, to new weapon hit/ship damage effect mechanics, but I will save those for the farther future, just want to say again I was pleasantly surprised with this game and find it has huge potential, pvp, and especially pve (I am enjoying the ideas there)
cheers for reading my wall of text, have fun and good hunting.
