I used to play a lot of starmade about a year ago, but ended up quitting because of obnoxiously poor performance and a staggering amount of game-breaking glitches. That's all normal, I know that, so I decided to return a week ago to see how that game has progressed. So far almost every single change I have scene is explicitly negative. Here is a quick rundown of the things I noticed (I play single player btw):
-All weapons were massively nerfed. I have no idea why this happened but antimatter cannons are something like 5 times more expensive, and 10 times less useful than they were a year ago. They are completely unsatisfying and also completely useless unless you have an incredible number of them, which is much harder to get now because they are way more expensive and money is far harder to come by.
-Salvage Rays are now burst weapons. The change from continuous ray to burst doesn't even balance anything it is just more time consuming and less fun now. I have no idea why this or the cannons were changed.
-Despite looking cooler now, prefab stations serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever as far as I know. Before they were very useful for either just setting up camp and making yourself a temporary home, or strip mining and getting a large initial boost of credits. Now they are eye candy, yay.
-All of the previously commonplace ways of generating inital income are gone. Ice Crystals and Cacti are now worth as much as grass, stations aren't mineable, and salvage rays themselves got nerfed hard. The only reliable way to make early credits right now as far as I know is to mine minerals, but it is far slower and far more tedious than the old methods.
-There is a huge emphasis on crafting to generate credits. I'm assuming this change was made because Schema felt that factories were underused, but factories suck ass to begin with because of how time consuming, as well as straight up not very profitable they are, so IMO this is a huge mistake.
-The official wiki wasn't updated to reflect almost any of the recent major changes, so me, and all other new players, are left to figure out a game that has a lot of confusing and totally arbitrary mechanics like 3 axis reactor building completely on our own.
-The old weapon balancing mechanics have been completely removed it seems, if I want to increase the speed of my AM cannons instead of damage, I am apparently screwed, which is a double whammy because AM cannons are extremely slow now at the start.
-Planets still aren't very efficient. It is very obvious when you land on the surface of a planet and get plagued with warnings about heavy memory usage that way more is being rendered / stored in memory than there has any place being.
-As a result of the other major changes, such as the difficulty in obtaining credits early on in the game, as well as weapons being extremely expensive as well as weak, fighting pirates is no longer a viable strategy unless you spend a ridiculous amount of time grinding credits out with very slow factory methods until you have enough money or resources to build an enormous ship.
-Jump Drives, despite being a much needed addition to the game, are poorly implemented in my opinion because instead of having a long cooldown, or a shorter distance, you have to just sit there charging it up until it is ready to go, creating an illusion of really doing anything which you aren't you are just wasting time when you charge it up.
There are probably quite a few other annoying things that I noticed but forgot as well, but I think that pretty well covers it, because my point is not about individual elements but rather a very concerning direction the game is going in (at least to me.) A lot of the nerfs, hindrances, and changes to the game seem to make no sense whatsoever and were probably only implemented because the designer wanted the game to be played differently, but not because anything really needed to be changed.
What do you guys think?
-All weapons were massively nerfed. I have no idea why this happened but antimatter cannons are something like 5 times more expensive, and 10 times less useful than they were a year ago. They are completely unsatisfying and also completely useless unless you have an incredible number of them, which is much harder to get now because they are way more expensive and money is far harder to come by.
-Salvage Rays are now burst weapons. The change from continuous ray to burst doesn't even balance anything it is just more time consuming and less fun now. I have no idea why this or the cannons were changed.
-Despite looking cooler now, prefab stations serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever as far as I know. Before they were very useful for either just setting up camp and making yourself a temporary home, or strip mining and getting a large initial boost of credits. Now they are eye candy, yay.
-All of the previously commonplace ways of generating inital income are gone. Ice Crystals and Cacti are now worth as much as grass, stations aren't mineable, and salvage rays themselves got nerfed hard. The only reliable way to make early credits right now as far as I know is to mine minerals, but it is far slower and far more tedious than the old methods.
-There is a huge emphasis on crafting to generate credits. I'm assuming this change was made because Schema felt that factories were underused, but factories suck ass to begin with because of how time consuming, as well as straight up not very profitable they are, so IMO this is a huge mistake.
-The official wiki wasn't updated to reflect almost any of the recent major changes, so me, and all other new players, are left to figure out a game that has a lot of confusing and totally arbitrary mechanics like 3 axis reactor building completely on our own.
-The old weapon balancing mechanics have been completely removed it seems, if I want to increase the speed of my AM cannons instead of damage, I am apparently screwed, which is a double whammy because AM cannons are extremely slow now at the start.
-Planets still aren't very efficient. It is very obvious when you land on the surface of a planet and get plagued with warnings about heavy memory usage that way more is being rendered / stored in memory than there has any place being.
-As a result of the other major changes, such as the difficulty in obtaining credits early on in the game, as well as weapons being extremely expensive as well as weak, fighting pirates is no longer a viable strategy unless you spend a ridiculous amount of time grinding credits out with very slow factory methods until you have enough money or resources to build an enormous ship.
-Jump Drives, despite being a much needed addition to the game, are poorly implemented in my opinion because instead of having a long cooldown, or a shorter distance, you have to just sit there charging it up until it is ready to go, creating an illusion of really doing anything which you aren't you are just wasting time when you charge it up.
There are probably quite a few other annoying things that I noticed but forgot as well, but I think that pretty well covers it, because my point is not about individual elements but rather a very concerning direction the game is going in (at least to me.) A lot of the nerfs, hindrances, and changes to the game seem to make no sense whatsoever and were probably only implemented because the designer wanted the game to be played differently, but not because anything really needed to be changed.
What do you guys think?
