Questions before buying

[Guest ClockworkHex]

I found this game a little while ago, it looks pretty cool but i have a few questions first:

 

-Are there flexible graphics options available?

-How stable is the game in general?

-How many hours have you guys put into the game?

-What is your favorite and least favorite part of the game?

 

Thanks

[WARGAMES]

graphics are flexible but it seems that if there's faction wars fps will die hard at times for lesser machines, if there's too many projectiles and drones at once.  especially graphical projectiles like launchers from both ships and drones.

 

the game is getting more stable, it's decent enough but kind of depends on whether you machine gets angry at it.  for me it doesn't usually crash but it's better to be sure and play without collisions.  as crashing can lead to collisions at the worst time that can wreck your ship.

 

142 hours, but mostly waiting on  patches to try things out by now.

 

my favorite is skulking around the galaxy killing things looking for interesting seeded shipyards and turret factories, since I munched through the rng capable content.  it's kinda boring after you look too long for a favorite weapon type at turret factories though and all their materials to make upwards to 30-40.  personally I want loads more sector type events of what you warp into or that can occur.  not specifically events but the variety of settings that you find.  such as abandoned ships, asteroid fields, large station wreckages and more but more variety over all.

 

my most aggravating part is dealing with the falling fps every time I go to a new sector.  60 fps eventually going down to 7-6 fps is pathetic even if over 6000 sector files saved will do that..  faction wars are also very annoying when they keep occurring in each system following you and causing fps issues or just being bother-some.  faction wars still happen too often and need to happen once and not follow into each new system you make active.  weapon balance by rng seems too wild on loot quality, and turret factories can be obscene or garbage.

 

after most fixes come around and some important changes, I'm mostly waiting to see how content shapes with the generation of events or sector settings you warp into, as well as the potential mods to create these by players.

[DivineEvil]

-Are there flexible graphics options available?

Yes. Ghaphic setting include Display settings (resolution, window mode, Vsync), Fog (amount, sprite quality), Quality (Shader bias, Super-Sampling Anti-Alias up to 4x, Bloom, Reflections, Ambient Occlusion), Level-of-Detail (Background quality, Planets quality), and extensive Shadow setup. Overall, these settings are enough to down-grade the game to the 20-year old 3D graphics standard.

 

The game in general is not graphic-intensive due to very, very low amount of individual polygons, although it would help to have a decent CPU. Save files for the generated Galaxy worlds can also add up to several Gigabytes of hard-disk space. But you don't really need more than two at a time anyway.

 

-How stable is the game in general?

In the single-player mode, the game is flawless. I've myself tested it to being run for 6+ hours in an active gameplay region without FPS drops, memory leaks or crashes. In multi-player there are some noticeable bugs, most of which are going to be resolved in the next patch. Netcode is also not quite optimized for the active multiplayer servers yet, although its good enough for cooperative play with one or two friends.

 

-How many hours have you guys put into the game?

220 hours and counting, ~150 of which are single-player and the rest is cooperative with a friend.

 

-What is your favorite and least favorite part of the game?

Favorite: designing ships. Avorion has very consumer-friendly ship building principle, that requires minimum pre-development and provides creative freedom to make good looking ships without impacting their gameplay performance. Most ships parts add up into the general stats regardless where they're placed. You can put just as much time into building a ship as you want, and whether you want a Star Destroyer or a flying brick in regards to details and shape, it will still be a fully-functional ship.

 

Least-Favorite: hard to tell. Probably managing your own AI fleet and making it do exactly what you want. AI is a bit fiddly at the moment, but its more than enough to play the game and have fun. There's plenty of similar aspects of the game, that require improvement, but none of them are scaled big enough to count as "part of the game", nor they're so bad as to pick one and describe it as "least favorite" without hesitation.

 

Overall, the game is already worth more than its EA price. It has caused me to abandon playing Space Engineers and Starmade entirely.

 

You're welcome to ask any additional questions you might have.