Could we get some info on the future of survival?

From my review:
Lots of cool blocks. More in the workshop. You can find a mod for anything. Yep, even curves.
You can build walkers, tanks, and even articulated warships. Landers with drogue chutes, and articulated legs. Bases with huge doors, all sealed against the vacuum, and other awesome things.

Therein lies the problem.

No point building the ultimate warship, because there's no point fighting. Even in scenarios that HAVE enemy installations, they don't provide anything that you cannot build yourself, so why bother attacking them? Because you like flashes and bangs? there are movies for that.

We mine to get the resources to build our base. We build a mining ship/truck to harvest lots of stuff, so we can build more.
We expand our refinery to refine build more stuff.
And we use this to build our cool carrier/warship... that does nothing. and has no reason to exist.

So the whole thing is simply a matter of when you click that there's no point to it all.
Some early. Some late.

The whole point of this game then becomes 'can i build something to show off on the workshop?'
Sure. maybe. if you are actually good. and that is a thing that motivates you.

Many of us want to play an actual game.
And SE is not a game. It's a game engine.
And if you like designing scenarios, then it's good for that. Sorta.

Even other sandbox games usually have some overarching goal you can ignore to muck around, but is there for when you want to take on the ultimate big bad.


From the store page: "Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets."

There is no reason to explore, unless someone has made a scenario with things for you to find.
There is no survival once you have a solar panel and a battery, as that will keep you alive indefinitely.
Engineering is the act of constructing things to solve problems, and there are no problems to solve.
And there is no goal to give you a reason to build anything.

It's great if you are a person who doesn't care.
But a lot of people need that goal. Hence the people asking about survival/progression/goals.

TLDR: And SE is not a game. It's a game engine. a better looking one now.


New stuff: So, that's my complaint, and why.
And reading the threads here, and on steam there's one common theme: No body knows for sure.

The roadmap is 2 years out of date.
We've had teases when KSH still had videos, of new survival blocks like fuelled generators and wind turbines.
But to my knowledge, nowhere is it written down 'This is what we are planning' one way or another.

Sure, old hands have their opinions as to what's likely.
But even Xocliw, who's frikking job this is, does not know what's happening with survival.
He's often asked on-stream, and he just doesn't know.

So what i'm wanting is:
An up to date roadmap.
Some statement of intent from a dev, or link to same if it exists already, of exactly what they intend for the game side of the game. Particularly the survival mode.

Yes, i know there are tools for making scenarios.
But not everyone wants to spend weeks making a scenario in order to play for a few hours.

Yes, i know there are a couple of scenarios on the workshop. Though they are a bit iffy, and often break with each update.

I guess what i'm asking is: if a couple of modders can make a halfway decent scenario, why cannot the devs do the same?
and make a well thought out scenario with some progression, and an overarching goal, along with some challenges from vehicles and drones?
Maybe a handful of such with themes like Tutorial 1-2-3, Basic campaign Earth, Mars, exotic, and one or two long campaigns involving multiple planets, with greater and greater challenges, and carefully placed resources, challenges and enemies?

P.S: don't bother with the 'sandbox' comments. Seen 'em and they add nothing to the commentary.

 

Greetings

Your missing the point. It's Space Engineers it's a game for those that like to build stuff (over simplification but I'm tired) What you want already exists several times over in various forms or themes. What made SE unique is that it didn't do all that other stuff. It was never meant to be a survival sandbox. I'm all for more fluff to make our worlds more alive but do not want to become slave to the usual "survival" tropes. In the beginning I had full control of my SE world and this is what made me buy it as it was unique and filled an otherwise empty gap in the gaming world.

You have a point of view and it is valid just as any others are even those that disagree with you. Peace and may the great Lord Clang never visit your creations.

 

I disagree. I think that you might be missing the point.
The point being, a significant number of people need a REASON to do those things, and lacking that, find the whole thing pointless.
Clearly, not everyone.

and what do you think those survival tropes might be? Food? Progression? Things to fight?
i'm not arguing for food. There's a mod for that.
Progression? Keen are doing that already. Check the feedback forum, it's in planning now.
Things to fight? We already have that, i just want a more fleshed out reason to do so.

"In the beginning I had full control of my SE world and this is what made me buy it as it was unique and filled an otherwise empty gap in the gaming world."
You have this already. it's called 'Creative' mode.

 

I have to agree with Azirahael. If I just want to design something, and that's it, I have Creative mode. But if I actually feel like BUILDING it, piece by piece, and working for it and making it an achievement, Survival is only okay. Threats to the player are either ridiculously numerous/nonstop or nonexistent, depending on world settings, and once you've built something, there's nothing much to do with it. Self-set goals are decent, but eventually you want something more.

 

There is no "reason" to exist in any survival game. That's an issue with the entire genre not SE. The goal is to exist and once existing is easy enough then there always lies the issue of what to do now. Which is why multiplayer survival games generally descend into dominant groups of players bullying others or other such sociopathic behaviour.

 

Sounds like a problem someone should take the initiative to fix then.

 

If only there were some game designers out there...

 

My issues with survival are quite simple:

1) You can get all the resources you will ever need within 10K of your start point, giving no reason to travel much further afield once you have found all the ore types...be that in space or on a planet

2) There are no real threats in space or on planet surface. Pirate ships seldomn spawn and those that do are so dumb the biggest danger is them flying into you.....

3) There is nothing to find out in space. Even if you do find a spawned wreck, it has nothing you can't make yourself. It's just a free resource pile.

Now...if there were randomly generated planets, random asteroid fields ( rather than a constant evenly spaced field ) then there might be something worth going looking for. If you start on a small group of asteroids with limited resources and HAD to go out to get more into the huge empty spaces looking for mineable asteroids or planets. If there were actually dangerous animals on planets, and pirate ships that actively posed a threat in the areas they controlled ( maybe where good resources were found ) that used the tactics modders have managed to formulate in certain pirate mods. Then perhaps dynamically generate the planets and asteroid fields so the game played differently.

Surely none of this is beyopnd hte realms of possibility and none of it would require massive code re-writes.

I just want to feel that there might be something out there I haven't seen that will make me go 'wow' because some random interaction of asteroids and planets and moons produced something spectacular.

 

Yeah.

1: Which is why the idea percolating in my head is to lay out resources on the planets by biome. Like Gold/silver/uranium at the poles. Silicon in the desert Iron/nickel/cobalt in temperate areas. Wherever you land, you are going to have to travel to get all the stuff. One wheels, because you can't build thrusters yet.

2/3: Worse there's no reason to fight them. Even if the AI gets sorted out, why do you want to fight them? They have nothing you want.


Adding in restrictions to survival to delay the acquisition of all the toys, pushes the problem back a ways. and is a good way to encourage the use of the new toys, like working wheels.
Putting some stuff at the poles requires us to drive there to get them.
Putting some stuff on an asteroid requires us to fly there to get them.
Putting valuable resources in a pirate base gives us a reason to fight them and board them.
And that gives us a reason to build fighters and carriers if we prefer that over mining.

One slightly more complex [but doable] campaign fix would be to have a big battlestation guarding the game's exit point.
And if that base were constantly getting resources for repairs and power from bases and supply runs, we'd have a reason to track them down, blow them up and steal their stuff, to stop the base being repaired, so we could whittle it down.
If the base had a projector and a repair bay/nanofactory/other mod type thing it could constantly repair itself.

 

Schrodinger's developer will work on a bunch of things, and when some are ready choose to release them in a month or so. The month delay is to prepare update videos/graphics, load files to steam, and inform streamer PR guy about the content of the next update.

When they release something (fancy graphics and improved wheels, for example), they were working on it for the last year - but if they decide to not release something, it *appears* as if they were not working on it at all (which might be better for PR?). With this development model, they may not know far-out what will be released and what will end up as cut/forgotten content.

 

Sure. And your description makes sense.
None of which stops them posting a roadmap.

And they WILL have one, they just aren't sharing it.
Because they will have a list of goals they are working towards, and more and more refined ideas as they close on it.

The team WILL have some idea what the plan for survival is, ranging anywhere from 'We are doing nothing' all the way to 'we are going to do amazing things and make a whole game out of it.'

Because how are they going to work, if there's no plan?

And it would be nice to have some idea of their intent, even if the details are not shared, or even change.

 

This is from Valve's guidelines for Early Access devs. Essentially they're saying "don't talk about future plans". Keen is taking this to heart. All they're saying is that there will be a survival update, nothing else. Xocliw isnot allowed to answer those questions.

https://www.pcgamer.com/early-access-rules/2/#article-body

 

Huh. There's a thing i did not know. thanks.

 

Ways to make survival more of a challenging effort:

-Play x1 inventory, realistic refineries/assemblers speed multipliers, and asteroids low density (Dont complain about having too much too easilly with easymode settings still selected)
-Play with Environment hostility on Cataclysm. (and dont complain about losing stuff and broken ships)
-Play with auto save off, and permadeath on (no copout do-overs; you crash and die far from base= its crashed. you're dead. now rebuild)
-Play crashed red ship with oxygen pressurization on, and with NEVER a helmet on (let the engineering puzzles/challenges abound-like how to even begin mining)

Or be a REAL baller, and do all 4 at once!

There is a real game here, and real survival challenges- even in pure vanilla with no mods. Its just that most players see the "challenge settings" as "annoyances" and shy away from them.

 

lets just say i ate up the whole drop pod thing because it gave me something to do apart from building in normal games.
.
something like that i enjoy. you know a reason to do something different.
.
I like that one mod that can cause surface bases to spawn...now thats a challenge i enjoy.
even though im still rubbish at building combat ships its still entertaining to build 2 gattling guns then wield a camera in the middle for a sort of rubbish scout ship.
its about fun up until the point my cockpit gets shot to pieces i am forced out of it and see my doomed ship fall to the ground. :'(

 

Yesterday, I decided to have a look at the Dead Drop Arena scenario, which I hadn't touched before. It turns out it's multiplayer-only, and as far as I can work out, requires a full set of ten players to log on before the scripts will work. I searched for any discussion of it, saw a few people expressing excitement when it was introduced, and then a few laments that no one hosts it online.

My first thought was that this went to show Keen's inexperience with designing for multiplayer, since a hard requirement of a minimum number makes it hard to fulfill. But then I realized, I've played another game that was (when I first played it) in Early Access, Fractured Space, that has a hard requirement of 8 players for the basic gameplay mode, and there were always lots of sessions running. I checked today's listing, and Space Engineer's the 78th most popular game on Steam; there are 5,263 people playing as I write this. Fractured Space has 224 playing; its all time peak was 6,251, not that much more than SE has at 9:45 AM, Pacific time, on a Monday morning. So, it's not the numbers of players that's the problem -- so I'd guess it's the scenario. But, as people familiar with multiplayer FPS games will know, sometimes a particular map will just be unpopular, for no clear reason. That's one reason why there should be, you know, more than one.

This gets at a basic contradiction in criticizing Space Engineers. It's far more popular, has more people playing it, and its players log many more hours, then many games that are more polished and have more robust multiplayer. So on the one hand, you can hardly condemn SE as a failure. On the other, I think a lot of defenses of SE's shortcomings lean implicitly on an assumption that it's an obscure, niche game, so Keen must have limited resources. It's not an obscure, niche game; it's very successful.

Yet, somehow Keen keeps giving the impression of being starved for resources.

 

There's a difference between 'more challenging' and 'pointless busy work.'
An infinite inventory mod would make things more convenient, but also remove the need for welding ships.

What we are looking for, is not even challenges, but REASONS to do things.
Ideally, inbuilt ones.

But the only difference between x1 and x3 inventory is the number of trips you make back and forth welding stuff.
Me, i use the Nanite Factory mod. It makes building super convenient, but you have to PAY for that convenience.
Ditto with refining speed.
If you have like 4 arc furnaces, and 5 refineries blazing away processing a huge haul of ores, is there any point sitting around waiting for an hour for it all to process?

Sure, you could do something else for an hour, but what if that is all done already?
That's not challenge. That's padding.
--- Automerge ---

They can be starved, IF someone [Marek] siphons of the bulk of the funds to run his AI project.

Don't forget, he explicitly stated in his livestream and blog that he made SE and KSH for that exact purpose.

 

Huh. I hadn't seen a statement that it was his plan from the beginning, just that he'd decided to move on and pursue a (different) dream. Kind of dodgy, in any case. Steam's disclaimers aside, the natural assumption to make is that if you pay for a game in active development, in part you're paying for its ongoing development.

 

That article was from late 2016, and the wheel/parachute/hydrogen generator/wind turbine teasers were in early 2017 (complete with the "not final version" disclaimers). It's not a *complete* answer to KSH's change in promotional behaviour. When you say "Keen is taking this to heart", is that an opinion or is that the inside scoop?

Since you (and a few other people) had secret advanced access to testing wheels before 1.186, it is plausible that you have seen the other things that they are working on. Are you allowed to comment on that?

 

The rules outlined in that document hasn't changed. It's not an opinion, but it's not an inside scoop either - because Keen has said this over and over again since the very beginning.

Publicly.

Educated guess: The teasers were an attempt to acquiesce to the demands of the player base for more information. The fact that we have not heard anything more about this indicates that this was a mistake. Clearly their priorities changed and they couldn't release those items yet - which is exactly the kind of thing Valve's document warns about. Seeing this, they stopped teasing this way.
--- Automerge ---

Bull.

Don't let yourself be dragged in by the rumor mill. Yes, he wanted to make money by making games. That doesn't mean he's pulling more than his fair share from the company. It does not mean he didn't also want to make games. People need to stop trying to read more into statements than is actually there. Marek Rosa has funded GoodAI with his own money. That's his right. There's nothing "dodgy" about that. No more than anyone else working to save up money to live a dream. I disagree with a fair few of his decisions regarding SE (so far), but I envy Rosa that he was able to pull this off. I wish I could.

 

I have an nice survival server running (mhh - it takes after SE updates frequently much more time to update the mods than expected .. but it is fun if all run flawless ..)
It is an "Real Hardcore" survival server ...
This mean :
The Life is VERY precious .. losse ithave a bunch of drawbacks ....
Surviving IS hard -> you musst make eat/drink - power - resources, that are extrem much harder to get as on vanilla ...
Danger IS here -> on the start planet not so much (if you not seek at it ..) - here you should learn to survive and build an base to expand further ...
In space - on the Moon - on other planets - the Danger IS permanent here - NPCs are primary not for resources - it is to kill you ........................ and he can ....
To get into space is an enourmous task (like in relity ..) - you need an extrem amount of ice to get anough Hydrogene to get into space ... in space you get practicaly no oxygene , musst carry all over from the ground .. with drastic reduced oxytank fillage ....
To survive in space is even much harder .... many have give up ......
I have an assembler and reffinierie level system to split available and buildable ores and components - you can only reffinie ot build an component with the right level ... and the higher levels cost an hugh amount of resources ...
So .. my players have an "nice" (for survival enthusiast players ...) time on my server
(and this was only a small part of the "making hard times" things on the server .......)
So - you "can" make in SE an nice survival game .... but you have doing it self ...

Regards

 

Greetings

To quote myself :

The quoted post below from @R-TEAM kind of reflects my original response above. The point being what makes SE different is that it isn't all handed to you on a plate, "survival mode" is what you make it you have full control on how you play in your universe this is exactly what makes SE unique! If the posts above that talk about its popularity and its numbers still playing well that's telling you something isn't it.

However I would really really like to see Keen provide more "fluff" be that a simple chair to sit in at a table to an in game wind system to turn a wind turbine and not have to rely on mods however great and clever mods may be simply because mods do break and people that create them are not going to always want to fix them or even still be playing the game.

Creative doesn't float my boat I have always played "survival" because I like to actually build everything in my worlds piece by piece for the sense of achievement. Also many things built in creative just fail to work successfully ( creative items also often tend to be not so practical ) when used in "survival mode"

 

Oh .. and btw. - the server (and naturaly the clients too ..) running still 1.185.LATEST ......
As 1.186.x is ...... mhhh ...... mhhh .... a mess ...... mhhh ... a GFX horror show ...... mmhhmm ....... simply strange ........ ............ sort off ...

 

I'm afraid I don't see how Valve's guidelines for Early-Access devs has anything to do with the OP. I don't think he's asking, for example, to know the date that those teased wind turbines are going to be available, and exactly what they do. I believe Valve was cautioning against something like that, or against setting a specific time frame, or a specific promise as to the form that a given feature would take. Unfortunately I think Valve worded that part of their "rules" very sloppily. If Valve really did intend on all early access devs shying away from sharing, generally, their plans and hopes for this game; then they're doing a huge disservice to any developers that use their platform. Especially bad is that part about encouraging players to buy the game based on what it is now, because I'm pretty sure every early access game I've bought had to remove features, increase system requirements or otherwise fundamentally change the game in ways that pissed off parts of their player base.

I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Keen to make a statement to the effect of: "We would like to reiterate that we do have goals for survival mode and that they will include: additional early game content, additional survival challenges for players, and additional combat threats. At this time, however, we are focusing on improving SE's graphics and physics engine."

Edit: Just want to point out that my above suggestion is just an example of how Keen could respond to questions such as this without being too specific or setting any promises.

 

But they have been doing that repeatedly for a long time already... But they will not say anything about what that update will include, for the already specified reasons. But it is very much confirmed that there will be an update.

I very much disagree with you that there's any disservice being done here. The disservice would be much much stronger if a promised feature could not be made. See No Man's Sky for an extreme example. See also the issues occurring when Keen has broken this rule and teased something - and it's been cancelled or postponed. This is why and it's a very good reason.

As to the "what it is now" bit, that's explicitly there because games will change. Don't forget, there are older versions of the game available. That's quite common. So if you buy the game today, and a feature you want is removed next thursday, you can keep on playing what you bought. If this is not acceptable a person, that person has not understood what early access is and what it means to invest in one. Yes. Invest, in the fullest meaning of the word: It's a gamble. You don't know for sure if your investment is going to pay off. Just like on kickstarter, except with early access you get to play with the product while it's being developed.


For the record, I find the early access model foul. People do not and cannot be expected to understand the complexities of software development. This is why people are dissatisfied, they don't understand that there will be plenty of bugs, that things will change and it will take a lot of time. Thus we developers get a bad reputation, unfairly, for situations that's quite simply par for the course.

 

I think you misunderstood me. I find Valve is doing a disservice to developers and customers. I find that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too: They're sort of taking advantage of software development and reaping the rewards in the process, getting paid for a product that might not ever come out (and their refund policy is wholly inadequate to deal with early access). Valve, of all companies, should have seen this coming really, but I doubt they care. For this reason I agree that Steam's Early Access is foul. I personally love buying into alpha and beta products, and I like having ideas about the route their development could take, but Valve has sort of enshrined the process in a really unnatural way. I think, as a result, it's going to do harm to the idea of open development and crowd funding, which I think do have a place in the market.

As far as Valve's early access rules go, again it smacks of "having your cake and eating it too." Additionally a customer can't rely on it. Buying into a game just because of what it happens to have right now doesn't really work since I've gotten a couple games that fundamentally redesigned or re-balanced systems and removed or changed a big aspect of the game, sometimes within a month of release after things had been a certain way for 2 years or longer. In the example I'm thinking of, it wasn't done for technical reasons or because of a lack of money, but due to the developers possibly not "liking" the way players played their games. Also with Steam games, it's not a particularly easy or long term solution to block a game update because you don't like a feature.

As far as KSH is concerned, I've been reading the update notes and stuff for the last while, and aside from the aforementioned update that had those awesome windmills and gas engines (months ago, now), I don't think I've seen survival even mentioned in the update notes or anything. I admit, I could have easily missed it if Marek just put in his blog or something. If I were them, I'd add a little note after the bigger updates they do every couple of months saying something like: "Our continued updates to the physics engine bring us closer to the vision we'd like SE to be, and once we're satisfied we can start shifting our focus on to the more "fun" elements of SE's gameplay."

 

I didn't misunderstand you. I don't agree there's any kind of disservice here. If devs make radical changes to a game they are doing the disservice as you say, or at least breaking the promise made - not Valve. They are why such guidelines are in place. I don't particularity like monolith companies like Valve very much, but they're in the clear here. The advice they are giving is sound and based on a lot of experience. I don't understand how you see Valve benefiting from any of this. Actually they would probably earn more money without such rules because they'd just let anyone into the early access club. The disservice to us would be not having these guidelines.

No they haven't mentioned it on the patch notes, of course not. Well, pretty sure they have now and again, right after planets or something like that. But it has been spoken about on streams. It's been talked about on the discord server. Xocliw mentions it all the time and so on. Pretty sure it's on Rosa's blog too, yes. Generally they spoke more of the survival update earlier when they thought they were close to working on it. Clearly it's been postponed: As I've already said, the teasing of those blocks was when they tried to be more forthcoming. As you say, months: It backfired. Exactly as warned about. Just more evidence that is better not to speak.

I'm a developer myself although business, not game. I've been programming for a long time. I can see Keen's side of the story. In addition I've been in this community since very early on, and I've seen what happens when they cave in and talk, and things don't immediately happen - or like with planets, their talk leading to them getting pressured into releasing way too soon. The backlash is bad. I understand the reasoning behind the silence all too well. This, I feel, is what is happening with Survival right now and it worries me. People know it's coming, and they're nagging. If they cave in and release the survival update too soon, I fear it will be the last straw. It is the one update they cannot screw up.

 

Sorry to say this .. but he have always "screwed" up major updates in the past 3 years ...........
The "big multiplayer update no#1" with server side control - a mess ............... no benefits - only drawbacks
The "big multiplayer update no#2" with the 3 multiplayer code trys, where at end merged all together (so the "pick one as favorite" was senseless as expected ..) get only very small better performance with "again" not less drawbacks ....
The "major update" with multicore grid ingame loading is a mess "again" - it was faster and smother before with bigger grids .....
And now the last 2 "major updates" with physics (a mess again - nothing changed realy ... one thing is maybe more "robust" , but for this 2 other things make more "clang" ..) and at last the graphics and wheels .... graphic is (sure) questionable , the one like it, the other not .. but overall, it is in many things more bad and unrealistic - and the wheels drive better ... but now explode much more suddenly, so "no thanks" - i prefer then not so good driving wheels but without an random explosion timer on it ................................

The buttom line ...
I have startet playing right after the planet update ....
We have driven with cars over the surface .... we have fly in air and in space ...
and it was ALL better then now !
Better simspeed
Better wheels
Better grid loading
Better responsivity
More player with way less impact on simspeed
Simply - ALL was better (except the graphic - this was not better to this time - but i dont play the game for the graphics ...........)
Now after 3 years, we have STILL shaking grids/cars/desyncs and horrible rotors/pistons
Additionaly bad wheels/more desyncs/more laggy server with less grids/blocks by way less players and more laggy grid in-game loading ....

So again .... where is the progression ?
It is understandable that in 2 or 3 or 5 or 12 month you dont get an big nasty bug fixed ...
But in 3 years ...........................

Regards

 

Not quite a necro since it's still on the front page but it is over a month old (which is itself telling) so it's a little necro-ish.

I come poking around every once in a while to see what's been done to survival. I hate to say the last time I posted in SE (vs ME) survival forum was a bit over 3 years ago and the gist of the topics then were 'what survival needs' and/or 'when is survival getting attention'. I left then because it had been almost a year of waiting already when it was clear the focus was elsewhere so it's now been nearly 4 years.

So I hope Malware is right and something's coming, someday but I long since gave up actively waiting. Damn shame too.