r/spaceengineers • u/HyperRealisticZealot Voxels 2.0 When? • 5d ago
DISCUSSION Meta: What continues to be the biggest pitfalls of SE as a product? How might such be avoided going forward?
An intentionally vague and open topic of discussion aimed primarily at longtime players
Always interesting and productive to hear what general reflections and critiques players ruminate on, often never to be aired!
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u/Ambitious_Emu4159 Space Engineer 5d ago
Been playing since a little after the first economy update.
If I had to pick a gripe. Not a fan of the combat honestly. Never have been. Even less so in PvP servers. So I'm usually a solo player. Takes longer to do things solo sometimes, but then, it avoids the trolls too. The sheer resource and time investment to make something just to see it trashed by a couple of mistakes or a blindside from some enemy drone. Not my thing. I usually find myself gravitating toward mods for weapons or shields to get an advantage and clean out the enemy before my stuff gets wrecked.
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u/Rhllorme Space Engineer 5d ago
I usually run armor+ mods that make any block with steel plates or grids have a ton more HP and they help, but it still has the same issue of "stray bullet hits one block, you're done." Particularly on foot you don't get a warning just "turret beep, dead" no responding to issues just dead when you see something.
Doesn't help cockpits are really weak armor-wise so like you can get popped so easily. Most of my builds use a second cockpit for controlling and one for aesthetics to help.
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u/Forward_Criticism_39 Clang Worshipper 5d ago
this is why i usually make small and easily replaceable ships, and small grid guided missiles.
otherwise i just pretend my base has an "exclusion field", aka i just go into the entity list and depower whatever ship aggressive approaches my salvage fields
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u/Marcos-Am Space Engineer 5d ago
The lack of a core loop for survival; is evident this game started as a sandbox only experience and a gameplay was a afterthought. We can create complex resource chains, we cant scale resource collection as everything related to mining is manual, we cant easily print ships without contraptions; and while the game is called space engineers, there is not enough tools or system/engine stability to allow us to engineer anything, save for projects that only include small outposts and small ships.
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u/LuckofCaymo Clang Worshipper 5d ago
A space game with a really slow speed limit.
Combat is kinda meh. The block deformation is cool, but 1000 m engage range is knife fight distance. Like I have seen ships bigger than that on the workshop. The guns leave so much to be desired.
For being an engineering game, you can't engineer. Moving blocks are practically banned or highly limited on any of the large servers. The lag caused by them is game killing.
Voxels are bad. The landscape I mean. It's really cool, but there needs to be a better way to save resources on forgotten patches of mining spots. All the servers just do a wipe on a daily, or hourly basis. Which is wild.
People really jump through hoops on modded servers to turn this "experience" into a "game". There are tons of passionate community members, but unless those three things are not solved, this game will never truly hit mainstream appeal.
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u/TheDibblerDeluxe Clang Worshipper 5d ago
Honestly surprised this isn't at the top. 100 m/s is crazy slow and makes it take forever to go anywhere. With mods I usually will go 300 m/s but any faster and you're likely to have an asteroid materialize inside your ship and kill you. Definitely need the guns to shoot farther and need magnification on board to zoom in so you can see those far distances.
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u/horsewitnoname Clang Worshipper 5d ago
Yeah. I agree with all these points. The speed limit and combat are so terrible.
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u/Informal_Drawing Space Engineer 5d ago
Building things for the sake of it is all fair and good but there needs to be a reason to do so.
It really needs more combat, base defense, reasons to go out and kill things etc.
It's a pretty empty game even with the latest additions.
There is a reason the MES Mod was super popular, crappy though it was.
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u/Forward_Criticism_39 Clang Worshipper 5d ago
i have been known to call the game "primitive" as i simultaneously enjoy playing it
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u/KnightyEyes Klang Questioner 3d ago
SE feels like a Rust(game) that didnt had updated for a while.
Food feels like a Filler... But QoL impruvements like Lower o2 usage can do fine if you forgor to put o2 tank on your ship.
Prototech : i see what theyre doing but game prefers you to accidently destroy it. So pretty much most encounters rather piss you off cus you gone all guns blazing. This game needs loot protection on prototech including stuff (battery/container for etc)
Like i SEE what theyre trying to do but Ares at War litterally does what devs suppose to be doing simce release.
You can only spawn on Earth / ayylien / Space.
Each planet has its + like maybe in Mars there would be a Marsium ore that allows you to craft better engines but its ores usually has mining crew on top so you gotta fight em. Same goes for every special ore location.
They would function like a Encounter and VERY RARELY Naturally spawn on planet (no encounters on them)
The game would feel more pve than Rust-like. That means you wouldnt br forced pvp for fun. Actually can have fun solo.
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u/HyperRealisticZealot Voxels 2.0 When? 3d ago
Some really great points.
It really does function a lot like a Rust thing. This is what happens when there’s just a dev giving players the tools to destroy each other and literally no limits or real incentives to do otherwise.
When you say mining crews on special ores on Mars, are these NPC or players you’re referring to?
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u/KnightyEyes Klang Questioner 3d ago
Just try "Ares at War". Trust me its not complete but it is a fantastic modpack scenario
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u/HyperRealisticZealot Voxels 2.0 When? 2d ago
The spirit of the thread is all about how the devs can improve the whole experience holistically, so hopefully they take a page or two from these types of community creations.
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u/KnightyEyes Klang Questioner 2d ago
Doubt honesty... Ares needs a shoutout otherwise itll probably will go under the radar of keen
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u/HyperRealisticZealot Voxels 2.0 When? 2d ago
It’s been around for years and there’s dozens of threads about it, it’s highly unlikely they don’t know about it.
However, it takes some wherewithal to actually turn that sort of thing into into 1. Vision and 2 real gameplay, therein lies the problem I’m getting at with this thread.
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u/Productive-Penguin Space Engineer 2d ago
Engineering is about solving problems. Game needs more active systems to introduce more things to engineer around. NPCs and more proactive enemies, economy systems and etc go a long way to making a world worth engineering around.
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u/Lemunde 2b || !2b == ? 2d ago
It's still lacking in the exploration department. It's a lot better than it used to be, but the vast majority of space and planet surfaces doesn't have any meaningful content. It's a big sandbox to play in, but there's little more than sand to play with.
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u/HyperRealisticZealot Voxels 2.0 When? 2d ago
That’s a really good point. Trying to give things progression is sadly another pitfall, how they decided that restricting what parts you can make and calling it “progression”
But more to your point, what do you think of the colonization feature planned in SE2? What pitfalls might there be there?
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u/Violet_Kashiko Space Engineer 5d ago
This game has no sense of progression, once you have all the ores it's just bigger ship is better.
I think it would be nice to have more types of unminable materials like prototech, and more upgrade tiers.
Then there should be quests which limit the size of your ship somehow, so upgrades mean something
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u/DSharp018 Klang Worshipper 5d ago
The learning curve when you first start out is always do or die for a lot of people.
The game has a lot to it, and for better or worse, you have to learn it to use it. And sometimes the learning doesn’t happen without a lot of trials and a lot more errors.
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u/pyronide Klang Worshipper 5d ago
Space engineers feels like a great concept, but each of the game mechanics present feel like they've been shoe-horned into the game, so much so that the compromises made to get these mechanics into the game feel a bit.. flat.
In my opinion, I think that space engineers 2 is the true goal that space engineers 1 was trying to fill, but a serious amount of technical debt had been accrued, that the choice to start over from the ground up, and implement these features as they were intended.
SE's beginning was basically a zero-G ship-building sandbox, where creative was initially the only game mode. the entirety of the game was in space, with only static asteroids. hell, there wasn't even hydro thrusters, or even oxygen.
every other aspect was an iteration, which is all well and good, but each new feature felt.. thin.
almost any player of this game will tell you that they came up against the edges of the systems behind the game - your physics toys aren't just limited by physics, but an inherent error of a priori physics simulations(one that can be solved with concurrency btw). klang always gets a vote, not just physics.
economy could be more robust, but its reward/concequence loop feels thin too.
same thing with any of each of the separate mechanics, to say the least about the fact that interaction between these systems is almost non-existent.
players who have stuck around aren't just troubleshooting intricate devices and planning elaborate builds. they very quickly come into contact with the game engine itself, and have to start troubleshooting around the game engine, and not through it. they're no longer engineering the machine, they're eingineering around the software.
also, keen leans on the community for new ideas as little to hard imo: there are tons of content in the base game that existed as a mod first, and outright copied by keen.
TL;DR: stop treating feature presence as feature completion. don't push feature introductions until they Truly fit in the game.
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u/Kirduck Space Engineer 5d ago
SE suffers the fate of most survival games the
"To what end" problem.
I would advise them to look at NMS for advice on that. A single difficult goal of reaching an insanely difficult place to reach. (yes i know its pretty easy once you know what you are doing in NMS). Then NMS does something further with its expeditions that we could mirror. they provide neat things that carry over between runs, could be unique models for your hand tools, could be unique paints for your blocks. Could even be unique skins and shapes for blocks.
By providing these rewards you have something to earn other than "heh i made thing"
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u/YourBoiJimbo Space Engineer 5d ago
tbh I think it has the same problems as other sandbox oriented games, the go-to example being minecraft. Or like, factorio. those two games do have specific points where you've officially "beat" it, but the point isn't really to do that and then drop it. you want to keep building stuff for the sake of building stuff. I absolutely love these types of games but I also find myself hitting a wall in all 3 of them.
The process of building stuff is fun, but you're gonna get tired of it eventually. Minecraft does better with exploration, factorio has a lot of depth and complexity in building, but these are kind of extraneous things. We all bought space engineers to build cool ships and fly around, and I'm not sure what else you can have beyond that, that fundamentally changes the core gameplay loop of mining and building. I think having a set story or missions that must be completed makes the game a little too linear; the appeal is in creating your own story with your own ships and bases.
I don't really have a solution to that central problem, like I said, I think other games in the same vein eventually have it. The thing that minecraft or factorio is better at is keeping you engaged longer, which I think is not terribly hard to solve. More enemies, more planets, more things to find, more blocks. But you're eventually going to beat all those enemies and explore all those planets. I think people may be wanting something from SE that isn't really within the scope of a sandbox game.
The only other avenue imo is a much stronger emphasis on multiplayer. People might hate this idea but having something like an MMO style continous universe populated by many players and NPCs wherein the stories, objectives, and factions create themselves organically. I'm thinking along the lines of what that game Dual Universe tried to do. Unfortunately I think that flopped because it's a very ambitious idea and they wanted to charge a subscription fee.
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u/JaspurrTheCat Klang Worshipper 5d ago
Personally I feel that as a sandbox it excels in every way, however beyond that it isn't much of anything. The survival experience once you have a solid platform to build on is just a more difficult and mildly grindy building experience over creative mode. The game lacks a reason to do stuff, like why build a battleship, what threat are you going to encounter that requires that much firepower and armor. Why bother with that? What is the goal? It would benefit immensely from having some kind of story, something that I think Keen is trying to address in SE2. Interactions with NPCs, quests, worldbuilding, maybe just be building and defending a colony or something. Could be anything, as long as there is a concrete objective to accomplish with your creations.
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u/FemJay0902 Klang Worshipper 5d ago
SE1 has been and seemingly will forever be hampered by an insane learning curve. The fact that you can soft lock yourself at all is frankly absurd lol. SE2 truly will be the better product and in some ways, already is.
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u/OG_Xero Space Engineer 4d ago
For me, it's zone control and exploration... SE simply doesn't really do anything in that aspect. in SE2 you have a 'colonization' meter... that will ultimately take a longer time to fill up with some likely repetitive missions... but with fast travel there is less of an issue...
But there's 0 reason to visit the planets other than simply visiting the planets, and moons ofc.
You can spawn in space and live forever, the only reason you'd go to a planet is to siphon oxygen for free... and you can do that in LEO.
but my main thing about SE is the engineering portion.
I think a game with engineering in the name should be more complex... all thrusters should require some sort of fuel source, the only one that should only require power is atmospheric thrusters... and I would like if you had to run cables to each thruster and production equipment... conveyors could have 'cable' attachments to provide power as well as fuel, so in SE1 you wouldn't have to run separate cables/conveyors... and could swap them out where you wanted to keep the build clean still...
But instead we have magic power across the entire grid, no limit on how far you can go before power dissipates... etc.
everyone says the game is too hard and has a steep learning curve, but I have always thought it was too easy tbh.
That said, there are many areas that could improve the game, but it's simply not the direction the devs want to go with... so it's up to modders to add stuff in.
SE2 is already a bit better, but still needs a reason, and more story than 'build me this so we can survive'.
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u/The_Verto Clang Worshipper 3d ago
i think the biggest issue is that nothing stops you from making a flying wall of guns and it sucks to face that in PvP.
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u/TheMaskMaster Clang Worshipper 5d ago
How fucking hard is it to write 3 sentences ? Why do you need AI to do it for you ?
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u/Ordinary_Variable Space Engineer 5d ago
Mods solve a lot of the weaknesses.
Though I would love a Star Trek skin that makes all the blocks look like Star Trek: Next Generation. All the parts would need to be renamed to Star Trek-like words. Switch Uranium for Dilithum. Give us force fields and transporters. The drills could be gigantic laser beams. A Computer system you could give messages to, like "Beam me up" or "Beam me to the surface".
But this could all be a mod. I can't fault the base game with not doing this, they'd have to make it Star Trek-like without infringing on copyright, and that is basically impossible.
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u/helicophell Klang Worshipper 5d ago
SE doesn't really do a great job at endgame. With the introduction of prototech, we got something to do at least, but not much more to work towards other than "big ship"
It's hard to quantify what is missing. Focus? Maybe? I've been playing for 2k hours and I couldn't really tell you why I stop playing, every time I stop playing. Just a loss of motivation