Source
r/avorion•
Perqq

Came back after a while - why does this game feels LESS polished than before?

Hello,

I've been playing Avorion on and off for about 500 hours now, way in early access. The game had its problems, but more or less had solid idea to work with.
Now, I come back to it after not touchin it for a whole and it feels like it went back...
Few things that struck me as very dumb at the very beginning:

  • New player experience has been made worse (somehow), by extending the period in which new player will hold LMB while slowly gathering iron and titanium,
  • No new quests or things to do in the early game - mine (manually), until you eyes fall off,
  • Independent turrets are EVEN HARDER to come by - you need a module for them now. So not only the early game is longer, you can't even build while mining, you have to look at the asteroid and mine them one by one until you get something,
  • Salvage was made... way worse. Bored of staring at asteroids and holding LMB for 20+ minutes I though that maybe something interesting was done with salvage, but no - for some reason salvaging yields NOTHING - no items, credits or materials. You get +1 iron by using salvage laser on stations you can find in deep space. Why?

I see that there are now 2 DLCs out, and yet I feel like the game isn't even finished yet. The base experience is unpolished and quite frankly it should have never left early access. I understand that devs have to get by somehow, but having such obvious long standing issues while releasing paid DLCs seems like a very strange move.

Not hoping this changes much, as I've posted similar stuff before, but at the very least I can vent my frustration with the game (I quite frankly like a lot).

Posted Sep 4, 2022, 12:11 AM UTC

1612
jthill•

There's ways to avoid the tedium, I get that your old strategies got painful but the tutorial and some in-game clues put all the right tools in your hands.

Sure, you can still do it all the obvious, now-even-slower way, and, from what I've seen in the patch/release notes you're right, that way's now even boringer if watching numbers go up slowly isn't just your bestest gig ever.

I'm just here to say, there are other ways to deal with it. I've been stepping through the difficulties, up to hardcore this last few restarts so maybe not for "insane", but for anything less than that fully-automated mining and a second ship to build my first armed scout around in about fifteen minutes? is easy if you pay attention and think about what you're seeing. Full confession (and the reason I'm posting at all tttt): it took me a little longer than that to learn enough respect to pay that much attention though.

Figuring this stuff out is pretty much the game afaict, it's really not about the click-here-next experience, so no spoilers. You might try what I mentioned, though. The game gives you all the pieces, you just have to put them together.

8
PerqqOP•

Please read the original post. I'm not looking for advice, nor I have trouble progressing through the game. I know that there are easy ways of bypassing all of this.
My point is that there are ways early on that are simply broken (mentioned in OP) - they do not work the way they should. This leaves new players with an impression that the game is far from being finished.

1
jthill•

See, I think making the lazy, inattentive approach not actually fail, just almost comically slow, like so awfully slow people capable of respect and thinking might have time to wonder whether there's a point to it, is a good thing.

2
PerqqOP•

I'm not really sure what you're talking about. If the game gives you an option early on, only to them make it bad for no reason, it is simply bad design.

1
TheLeadSponge•

I don't mine at all. I mined until I had a enough for a basic ship, and located captains who could lead mining missions. I kitted out minding ships and went from there. My entire experience is leading a combat fleet across the galaxy. It didn't take me much time to get the materials I needed.

That said though, the design could be better, but I'm not having the experience you're having.

6
PerqqOP•

I'm not complaining about "my experience", I've played 500h, I know way around in the early game.
What I'm saying is that despite all the alleged effort put into the game and DLCs that are out, the early game feels like beta at best.
New players who don't know what they're doing will have similar experience - seeing a thing, trying to use it and then realise it doesn't work.

4
TheLeadSponge•

Ah, I get what you mean. I started quite late in the game, as in started playing this year. I find the narrative and mission design to be atrocious. I sort of love the ship building and just meandering through the galaxy. At the same time, it feels very flat.

This thing could totally be better designed if they had a narrative designer on the project. Heck, I just wish they'd expose the name lists so I could put in names that are less bonkers nonsense.

This thing is what I expect from a lot of games like this... just sort of half finished, so my expectations are quite low. If I'd played it a while back like you, then I'd probably be irritated too. I don't have that hindsight you have.

1
jagannooni•

It’s much more polished, but the first tier is tedious. They made it much faster to mine manually until you get a fleet of ships with captains on missions. You have to play differently.

1
chevron101•

claim your starting sector asteroid for quick money, get a captain either from the adventurer or buy one and let him do the mining in a sector. later send your miner fleet on missions

1
PerqqOP•

Please read the original post - I'm not looking for advice.

0
-Maethendias-•

2.0 is to blame for that

the best thing to do is to disable the tier system in the first place

1
Quxudia•

2.0 came out and instead of fleshing out systems and deepening the gameplay it just put a brute force gating system in place in an effort to slow down progression to center. Unfortunately the knock-on effect of that is you realize pretty quickly just how little there is to dig into at each stage of the game. Tons of potential but virtually none of it is developed. Early game in particular is painfully bare bones. Diplomacy is mediocre at best, building stations prior to at the very least Xanion is a waste of time and because of how expensive and unreliable it is to find specific turret types you can't really even design an actual fleet. Its bordering on late game before you can do something as basic as say "I want my combat ships to focus on X role in a fleet", instead you're just stuck using whatever random hodgepodge you find via rng as spending all the time and resources needed to build turrets before, again at least, Xanion is a massive wasted effort.

I've said many times I wish the vanilla games systems worked in such a way that you could play Avorion like a 4x-lite. Building up your own fleet and faction even on the outer rim could be worth while and see you gradually expand inwards as you "tech up". But it just doesn't work like that. For all thats been added the mechanics of the game still strongly encourage you to play the same way it always has; Rush center as quickly as possible so you can actually access the interesting parts of the game. Its just now there are a few more barriers in the way of getting there even though nothing new has been added to fill out the additional time spent in the earlier parts of the game.

1
RalleYTN•

Heres my early game experience:

  1. locate big asteroid
  2. sell big asteroid
  3. hire captain
  4. auto-mine while watching a podcast or something
1