This is just for reference for any players who are on this forum.
So I noticed after going through the forum for a bit, that there aren't any threads that summerizes the games strengths and weaknesses in one place. Well, I do see bits and pieces scattered all over the place, hidden under shit thrown around about the games development.
Just to clarify, this post is about gameplay strengths and weaknesses, plz don't comment about the games development process along with slandering the dev team. There are many other posts that already do that.....
That aside, this is just my impression of the gameplay sofar. Take note about how it does not include anything about the game development process, if it did, it would definitely be included in the weaknesses.
Strengths:
ability to make anything.
open-ended gameplay
-Doesn't make you pay to play an unfinished product - unique, as far as I know.
- Best build mode of any game I played. Still waiting for an McEdit style "move selection box" and "move selected blocks" commands, but it is quite good as is.
-Greatest creative freedom in any openly available games as of today. Latest power fiasco, shield and integrity are impediments, though. MAYBE you can build nicer stuff in From The Depths? But certainly not as large as in Starmade.
-Myriad custom servers provide ample choice of preferred environments. Want a role playing Star Trek server? You can have it. Want a pvp cube arena? That too.
Weaknesses:
- Nonexistant sound engine for half a decade
- Predisposition towards awkward design choices throughout the game's entire history.
- I don't think the dev team is too much into sci-fi or art, nor playing their own game for fun. And it shows in their decisions.
- Other space minecraft games were /will be/ released that do either combat, resource gathering, logic, and lately, even fine detail construction considerably better.
I've really only played Starmade and From the Depths much, so here's my thoughts on the differences.
Multiplayer / PvP: Starmade wins hands down. It has a working, well-developed system with persistent servers and usable, though not amazing, faction mechanics. FtD only baarrreely manages to function in MP and has very minimal attempts at factions, and the idea of persistent multiplayer PvP servers is laughable.
Combat: FtD has amazing weapons design that's complex, yet highly intuitive because it's somewhat realistic and makes sense because things work basically how you would expect them to. Starmade is really simplistic, but also more or less intuitive and easy to use. FtD wins for sure, but Starmade isn't entirely bad, just simplistic and crude in comparison. Of course, FtD also has a few simple one-piece weapons that you can use if you don't want to go through the trouble of design.
Building: This one is really close, but I think Starmade has the advantage. Both of them have different strengths and weaknesses, though. FtD has multi-meter blocks and extended slopes, which are really handy, and you can repaint without needing separate blocks to do it with. But it has no slabs, which is a bit annoying, there's a few additional seemingly logical block shapes and types which aren't there, and you have break-off mechanics in build mode which is VERY annoying. StarMade has a significantly more usable interface, honestly, so it takes the prize here, but it would do well to add extended slopes and multi-meter blocks like FtD does, because there's advantages to building with a smaller number of larger blocks.
Modding: FtD completely destroys Starmade, it's not even close. There's a lot of really great mod content for FtD that expands a great deal on the game, and much of it should really be adapted into the base game itself to some extent. Starmade has.... server configs and LvD, and not very much else.
With all that said, I am pretty fond of both games, but Starmade is going to get more play from me because I can actually play it in MP and get somewhere, instead of trying to spawn in ships in FtD and have them not appear for anyone else and then get frustrated and give up after 10 minutes when all we were going for was a friendly 1v1 creative-mode destroyer duel that ends up being completely impossible.
I'd like it if the two games were much more like each other than they are, but I can understand why that's not the case.
Strengths:
- Sandbox (total freedom) in choosing your purpose in this game. Money, power, women, slaves/NPCs ... wait, no women yet, but, who knows what future may bring?
- Sandbox (total freedom) in choosing HOW to pursue your goals in this game. Just for military power there are: Engineering, brute force, stealth, etc. Huge weapons, hundreds of small weapons, turrets or spinal weapons, missiles or cannons or beams, big ships or swarms of drones/torpedoes, there are hundreds of ways to make your ship(s) better in combat and strength in combat is just one of the game's possible personal purposes. Some updates detract from this, probably the developer(s?) do not really understand the importance of freedom to choose from many (well balanced) different paths to fulfill your goals. But the freedom still survives even against developers, because the original idea of a Minecraft in space had a lot of freedom in it and it dies hard.
- Sandbox (total freedom) in ship design (though some designs may prove less worthy for certain purposes, they are still possible). Stabilizers and integrity made a devastating attack against this freedom, but now they are slowly strangled by the development team, to let the freedom be mutilated but survive. If you want a death cube, you can make and use it. If you want a SF ship replica, a town replica, if you like a steam engine or an actual seaworthy warship, a plane or a bunch of Sauron rings rotating inside one another, all these shapes are possible for a warship, a miner or a cargo ship or whatever. Strange shapes need better engineering than simple shapes, but they can still be valid for anything.
- Flexible price. (0 $ or just how much you want to contribute, if you want to. The actual game price is not mandatory, it's a sort of a guide. You can pay way less or way more, no pb.)
MP only strengths:
- High stakes. For some, this is a weakness of this game, but reality is this makes people less indifferent toward each-other. Behavior in this game has consequences. A bit of help goes a long way, griefing/ninjaing can't go unnoticed and is very hard to forgive, comrades/team mates are important etc.
- Bragging rights You can cooperate with others in every aspect of the game and you can also proudly show off almost anything you gain or make.
I am sure there are many other SM strengths that after so many years I came to take for granted and do not even realize they are strengths of this game.
Weaknesses: Only one. Sometimes developer(s?) try to educate/push players in directions not all players want to go. Usual excuses are "exploits of game mechanics" and "best min-max solution tends to lag the server, so we must change the mechanics to make something else the best min-max". You can't take away freedom from people after you already gave them that freedom without risking a wrath stronger than expected.
This only weakness could be avoided entirely by making a good game modding interface instead of only a handful of server settings.
And who the freaking hell said servers must be cheaper than MC servers in a MC in space? They don't. Game must be good, game must make regular people happy. The players that psychologically deeply feel the need to rule over the others should establish servers and pay for the server they rule on and it does not need to be a small bill at all. Just like in real life
So, if player freedom comes first, before player predictability and before server's cheapness in the mind of Schine, this game will be more popular than MC and will probably make Schema richer than Notch. If not, then we always have the fall-back solution in the old versions, with less features but more freedom, should the development kill the game's huge amount of freedom completely.
Most viable Multiplayer mode available for a space Voxel game.
Lots of different ways the game can be played.
Diversity of areas for a player to develop their skills strongly encourages faction/social play.
Most of a player's advancement comes from experience and knowledge rather than grinding.
Free-to-Play
Weaknesses:
The one major weakness is that the "forward" direction of the game seems to be a constant march away from its niche strengths... but this is a really big weakness with pervasive consequences.
New weapons have WAY fewer options which makes it feel more like things you select from a list and less like something you must plan out and engineer. Too many of the new weapons are highly specialized, and the system as a whole ignores the more basic niches and customization that weapons 2.0 had.
New power is both harder to pick up for new players and has less depth to master than it did for old players.
Chambers significantly limit a person's ability to make a ship that feels basically functional.
Integrity and stabilizers force systems into shapes that make RP-PVP building much harder and more unbalanced than it was before.
A number of the fixes to prevent exploits result in mechanics that just plain defy logic such chamber that are bound to reactor size.
The number of practical logic systems gets nerfed with pretty much every update. This turned one of the most interesting aspects of ship design into something that is mostly only useful for cosmetic effects.
I've really only played Starmade and From the Depths much, so here's my thoughts on the differences.
Multiplayer / PvP: Starmade wins hands down. It has a working, well-developed system with persistent servers and usable, though not amazing, faction mechanics. FtD only baarrreely manages to function in MP and has very minimal attempts at factions, and the idea of persistent multiplayer PvP servers is laughable.
Combat: FtD has amazing weapons design that's complex, yet highly intuitive because it's somewhat realistic and makes sense because things work basically how you would expect them to. Starmade is really simplistic, but also more or less intuitive and easy to use. FtD wins for sure, but Starmade isn't entirely bad, just simplistic and crude in comparison. Of course, FtD also has a few simple one-piece weapons that you can use if you don't want to go through the trouble of design.
Building: This one is really close, but I think Starmade has the advantage. Both of them have different strengths and weaknesses, though. FtD has multi-meter blocks and extended slopes, which are really handy, and you can repaint without needing separate blocks to do it with. But it has no slabs, which is a bit annoying, there's a few additional seemingly logical block shapes and types which aren't there, and you have break-off mechanics in build mode which is VERY annoying. StarMade has a significantly more usable interface, honestly, so it takes the prize here, but it would do well to add extended slopes and multi-meter blocks like FtD does, because there's advantages to building with a smaller number of larger blocks.
Modding: FtD completely destroys Starmade, it's not even close. There's a lot of really great mod content for FtD that expands a great deal on the game, and much of it should really be adapted into the base game itself to some extent. Starmade has.... server configs and LvD, and not very much else.
With all that said, I am pretty fond of both games, but Starmade is going to get more play from me because I can actually play it in MP and get somewhere, instead of trying to spawn in ships in FtD and have them not appear for anyone else and then get frustrated and give up after 10 minutes when all we were going for was a friendly 1v1 creative-mode destroyer duel that ends up being completely impossible.
I'd like it if the two games were much more like each other than they are, but I can understand why that's not the case.
Most viable Multiplayer mode available for a space Voxel game.
Lots of different ways the game can be played.
Diversity of areas for a player to develop their skills strongly encourages faction/social play.
Most of a player's advancement comes from experience and knowledge rather than grinding.
Free-to-Play
Weaknesses:
The one major weakness is that the "forward" direction of the game seems to be a constant march away from its niche strengths... but this is a really big weakness with pervasive consequences.
New weapons have WAY fewer options which makes it feel more like things you select from a list and less like something you must plan out and engineer. Too many of the new weapons are highly specialized, and the system as a whole ignores the more basic niches and customization that weapons 2.0 had.
New power is both harder to pick up for new players and has less depth to master than it did for old players.
Chambers significantly limit a person's ability to make a ship that feels basically functional.
Integrity and stabilizers force systems into shapes that make RP-PVP building much harder and more unbalanced than it was before.
A number of the fixes to prevent exploits result in mechanics that just plain defy logic such chamber that are bound to reactor size.
The number of practical logic systems gets nerfed with pretty much every update. This turned one of the most interesting aspects of ship design into something that is mostly only useful for cosmetic effects.
Weapons 2.0 sucks, badly; it's just missilepalooza.
Weapons 3.0 getting rid of what nobody used to begin with to focus on a few weapon types with still some distinction to create diversity is fine by me.
I do think Power 2.0 promoting tube ships with giant streams of weakness in their interiors is a big problem. It makes it too hard to mess with a reactor setup to be fun building a ship's systems. Chambers would be neat if not for having the same problem of needing to be made bigger when you upgrade the reactor.
Overall, StarMade's greatest weaknesses right now are lack of content and ship design, the one thing it really has, being counterintuitive.
It's strength is having some damn good building otherwise and having the generalized tools to make a lot of Sci fi stuff. Most spaceship games are more specific about what a ship looks like and such.
It can be interesting to play the game for the ship building part of it: rails, logic and other components like that allows to do tons of sci fi space ships you would have an hard time building in other games.
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