I was also a founder for this game and have great love for the franchise. UQM was a high water mark to measure against, a very simple game with easy mechanics that would be a cinch to emulate today, made by a small crew on a tight budget. It was clever, witty, fun, and filled with fast, tight gameplay. It had heart, soul and heaps of imagination despite its meager roots.
SCO has itsI was also a founder for this game and have great love for the franchise. UQM was a high water mark to measure against, a very simple game with easy mechanics that would be a cinch to emulate today, made by a small crew on a tight budget. It was clever, witty, fun, and filled with fast, tight gameplay. It had heart, soul and heaps of imagination despite its meager roots.
SCO has its moments. Story is alright, character animations are good, voice acting is fine. But it ultimately feels like an unfinished product halfway through development, and the most interesting aspects of UQM are the ones that were most neglected.
Discovering different types of critters in UQM was one of the most fun aspects of exploring planets. There were a few dozen critter types and there were an interesting variety of them. In SCO, you can count the number of critter types on one hand, and the galaxy has been copy pasted with this small selection. Same set of creatures everywhere you go, and nothing breaks immersion and the suspension of disbelief like seeing the same creatures on EVERY SINGLE PLANET. It's like you're exploring the same planet over and over again for hours. Structures are so boring that a six year old could build something better in Minecraft.
Consistency problems with voice acting. Casual encounters in space are sometimes just written text, while others have voices. There is no consistency in how these are handled, it's just a crap shoot as to whether or not aliens actually speak to you or if you have to read their text messages.
UQM's melee was snappy, intense, and short lived because of the close quarters combat. SCO combat feels like a game of fly fishing because the arenas are enormous and do not behave the same way. You spend a lot of time positioning for attack and not much time attacking, or having your movement slowed or stopped by the environment. It is not bad combat, it's just not great. UQM combat gives the same rush today as thirty years ago, while this feels like it is still in testing even as a finished product.
Lander gameplay is repetitive, a concern during development that remained unresolved upon release. They failed to address the tediousness. There were big plans to differentiate planets distinct geological features, bodies of water to jet across, etc. None of that was even attempted. I know because I watched the game evolve and can testify that what you see in the final release barely evolved from what they had early on in development. Lander mechanics are not suited to racing across terrain; it frequently gets lopsided as a result of poor game mechanics, not lack of player skill. Feels like the environment and vehicle were designed by different teams who never were asked to meet and make it fun to play. There are so many other games that they could have taken inspiration from. Could have added a jet pack to leap over obstacles and reduce the amount of time to travel a long distance. I guess that sounded like work so they went and had lunch instead.
UQM had tight lander gameplay; you were always in pursuit or retreating. You could land and take off within a minute or two. You could choose to land near a specific area to reduce travel time. SCO feels like all the same ideas but in slow motion, with little going on during landings to make them interesting or beyond different planet surface textures. You cannot choose where to land, increasing travel times. So it's largely a resource grinder without much combat grinding, all while staring at boring scenery that never changes because they've rubber stamped the game with the same art, models and textures a thousand times.
The crime here is that there was a ton of conceptual art produced by some talented artists at Stardock for many different types of creatures and environments during development. I was looking forward to just going to different planets and seeing all the visual splendor of each unique location. Absolutely none of it was developed, and I know because I read all the developer diaries and played the betas.
The excuse is that they just “had to scrap” so many great ideas. Yeah, no, not buying it. There was documentation of development setbacks, creative direction changes, and multiple iterations on the same ideas. A lot of effort that amounted to nothing. This game was not given appropriate time and resources. And to insult the intelligence of players with excuses about scrapping development ideas is the height of hubris when there are many examples of action exploration games from small studios that have pulled this off.
I decided to give it some credit for at least being playable. The kicker is that the director of Stardock spends a lot of time in online communities and message boards defending himself, which he can do until he's blue in the face. At the end of the day, this is still an unpolished and unmemorable product that plays like a giant beta test, and it's really a damn shame.… Expand
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