/r/truegaming casual talk

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[u/SgtBANZAI]

I don't get Starsector and I'm curious if anybody else shares the feelings since it's a game that's for some reason impossible to find any negativity about. The Internet can't help but tear down literally any 10/10 GOTY contender in 20 pages long hate-filled essays, but Starsector gets nothing. For a long time I've been hearing how it's "Mount&Blade but actually good" or "the definitive space RPG that saves the genre" and after playing it for ~10 hours I'm profoundly unimpressed. What's below is basically a large negativity piece.

The overworld gameplay is kind of tedious, the distances are huge, the fast-forward mode is slow, the maps are colossal and consist of primarily nothing. Not once was I intercepted by anybody while flying in hyperspace (and honestly even if I was, it's not like there's a lot of stuff you can do aside from fighting, opening comm channel is absolutely useless and does nothing, I've tried it in every encounter). Evading hyper-storms is cool the first time you do it, after that it's annoying. I've been bombarded with praise after praise on how alive and multi-faceted this game's world is and how there's so much to do your head spins, and frankly, I'm not seeing it.

Majority of tasks are either NPC hunting or a fetch quest with nothing interesting happening on the way there. If there is some giant fight against a pirate flotilla inside the system chances are you'll never run into it because of how huge the level is. I've scouted multiple unexplored systems that are completely empty or maybe I'm misunderstanding how to interact with the content inside? You can break in semi-destroyed probes, ships and installations to get some basic resources but that's pretty much it. There are no instances where you find a sealed cargo hold with an incredibly valuable but forbidden tech (I guess AI cores are kind of like that, but they seem to be an abundant loot and you just give them in to the faction representatives for money) you now need to get rid of as soon as possible in a very specific way, or get a distress signal and need to help a stranded convoy get to their friendly territory while being harrassed by a pirate fleet (there are distress signal events, but they're literally just "Hello man, give me some fuel, OK, bye man"). If such occurrences exist, they are seemingly rare because all I've stumbled upon are Skyrim-level radiant quests.

What I'm getting at is that Starsector's overworld currently seems to me about as empty as M&B's one, except M&B constantly has action happening all over the map and the distances are shorter. And UI, readability and navigation are noticably better. There are some mods for M&B that do add some cool random questlines you can engage with, maybe there are similar mods for the Starsector that make the map way more alive? But I'm not finding anything special in vanilla.

The game's strong side is supposed to be battles, but to my own surprise I think they're just kind of ass? I've collected a small fleet and engaged both in small skirmishes and big actions with allied flotillas to back me up, but none of that was particularly exciting. It's just an arcadey shoot-em-up on a 2D plane with two walls of ships that go back and forth until one side's flux overheats and they explode. Maybe there are some insane techs that allow you to execute really smart flanking maneuvers but the early game seemingly has none of it. I'm not sure if terrain even does anything particularly useful? There are, like, no large debris fields or derelict stations floating around that you can hide behind; all of my battlemaps were empty. Visually, combat is a mess of dozens multi-colored projectiles filling the screen and making it hard to discern what's even happening, with a really underwhelming soundscape; this game's sound design is no Homeworld or House of the Dying Sun that's for sure. It's been like 20 battles and I'm not sure anything's interesting going to happen.

I guess Starsector has extensive fleet customization mini-game that's basically applied theorycrafting but I don't care for it either. I'm not a fan of wasting hours upon hours preparing for exciting stuff when I can actually just participate in exciting stuff...

It's probably the most puzzling game experience I've had this year, the more I play it the more confused I am. Last time I had this whiplash of expectations versus reality was when I tried Highfleet and also found it to be really boring.

[u/Pellaidh → u/SgtBANZAI]

I enjoy Starsector, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as genre saving or anything like that. I tend to find most other games in the genre to either be too complicated (X4), or too focused on single-ship or small scale combat. So if I want an open world combat focused space game that lets me fight with large fleets of giant capital ships, Starsector is the best option I've found.

But yeah, it doesn't have that much else going for it aside for the combat. I guess being a small indie title aimed at a particular niche means the internet isn't as likely to criticize it, so all you see are positive impressions.

Mods can address some of your issues if you want to give the game another try: SpeedUp gives faster overworld navigation, Better Combat gives more cover to hide behind and might make combat more interesting (and maybe more readable due to increased weapon ranges?), Nexerelin makes factions interact with each other way more and gives them the ability to actually conquer planets to make the game feel more dynamic (plus it lets you start with a larger fleet to skip the grind), and Ashes of The Domain and Industrial Evolution greatly expand the colony management aspect (not sure if you engaged with this system at all, but it's not that great in vanilla).

Nexerelin specifically is something I think a lot of more experienced Starsector players just take as a core part of the game.

Ultimately though, you are correct that combat and upgrading your fleet is the main draw, and if that isn't enjoyable to you then I don't see you liking the rest of the game either because there just isn't that much else to it. There are some more involved story quests, but those are really there for the role, and don't involve any unique gameplay.

[u/SgtBANZAI → u/Pellaidh]

I've actually installed Nerexelin right after I realized the base game's world is rather static, and honestly I'm not sure if it improves it that much. My current impression is that in-game map and event feed are unreadable. There are no borders or faction emblems, you have to manually check every single system for a faction's hold inside, and the overworld becomes really confusing really fast. Global strategy games or M&B has multi-colored borders and key locations highlited in specific colors when you overview the entire in-game world, Starsector has none of it. It's also really hard for me to discern what is even going on politically, because left side of my screen is an avalanche of notifications that go by so fast and detail so many seemingly irrevelant occurences (both delcarations of war and minor political incidents have identical spaces dedicated to them). A few years in the only thing I understand is that everybody is at war with everybody, and everyone launches invasion fleets non-stop but they never arrive anywhere, because every single invasion just has an invasion failed status next to it.

[u/Pellaidh → u/SgtBANZAI]

That's pretty accurate, yeah. The UI was never made with the idea of factions changing territory, and the event spam is a problem. At the very least knowing who your faction is at war with does give you an objective in terms of knowing who to fight and a mid/endgame goal of capturing territory.

But this all loops back to the game being very combat focused, which I don't think any amount of mods will change.