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[PC] Space Engineers

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[PC] Space Engineers

Unread postby icycalm » 10 Jul 2020 23:44

I reviewed this back in 2018 in a good bit of detail and gave it 3/5: https://www.patreon.com/posts/20567875

It has a truly fantastic building system, but in true Minecraft fashion, it gives you nothing to do with it because there's next to zero PVE and only 16-player PVP, so that people never even manage to meet in the huge systems, let alone fight. Now recently I said that everyone who's into survival-builders should buy it so we can give the PVP another chance, but I since found extensive Steam forum posts from a couple of guys that explain in great detail everything that's wrong with the PVP, and precisely why the game's PVP is so screwed. So I am copy-pasting these posts below, and I am updating my review with a link at the bottom to this thread, so that new readers can easily find it.

Suffice it to say, we won't be prioritizing this in our War Journal schedule. However, I still think it might be worthwhile to set up our own server at some point and just build some cool stuff, while on a lull between better designed games. It's way more interesting than Minecraft, at least, as all the stuff in it actually functions, and the design/engineering dimension of this game is far stronger than in any other game in the genre I have seen. Maybe Starbase will surpass it, but we'll see. I will definitely like to see a detailed comparison between the engineering aspects of both games when the latter finally arrives.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 098368385/

Troubleshooter wrote:Multiplayer doesn't actually exist - Change my mind

16 players at a time, in a solar system sized map, with draw distances measured in tiny chunks. Everything is a hiding place, and everyone hides perpetually. There's so little interaction that other than people playing cooperatively in the same faction, you will almost never see another player.

People avoid contact to the extent they wont even salvage a static wreck with weeks worth of resources to just sitting there for the taking. Even when notified to come-and-get-it.

Offers for PCU trading are frequent. Everyone wants more PCU to build with, and then avoid contact at all costs even harder. The PCU limits don't seem to make players happy, and given the constant lag on the servers, they really can't be increased without risking the server stability.

Last, I submit that SPLITSIE himself highlighted the limitations of the Keen servers. He played cautious for days, hiding and avoiding contact. Then, I believe he realized it wasn't terribly compelling game play, ran into the PCU limit on his craft, and drafted his co-star into the server just to provide some minor relief from the standard "multi-player experience"

Then he even drafted other players into his series just to have SOME content, because otherwise NO ONE is doing anything outside of their faction.

Multi-player doesn't exist. On line play is a sort of shared-single-player experience, where everyone is perpetually hiding and trying to get more PCU rather than engaging in some emergent storytelling or anything like that.

The multi-player forum is full of people looking for players, the server list is full of empty servers, and the KEEN servers rarely reach capacity... Seems like there's a serious disconnect in the community.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 8180109913

Troubleshooter wrote:You misunderstand. I don't care if people fight or not. Combat isn't a goal to be achieved any more than emergent game play of another sort, even cooperative PVE style gaming.

People join factions, and they do things in those factions, but they rarely if ever do anything external to those factions... combat or otherwise... because everyone expects combat, and thus avoids contact outside of their faction safe-space.

The game is designed to reward insular behavior, and so that's how it's played. Thus, actual multi-player (lots of people interacting in a game, with different goals and playstyles, not JUST combat) isn't actually happening on KEEN servers at least... and judging by the multi-player forum, its not happening much anywhere.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 7178684613

piddlefoot wrote:PCU is to SE what CPU is to Empyrion and both of those features suck.

But SE has only ever been good in MP for under 10 players, and its always been a limited amount of time thing because of the constant system SE uses, your save file just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, that file, is loaded when your playing, making your PC read more and more and more the longer you play, its been like that for years, it was never really designed for more than 4 players to start with, but the P2P code from Steam piggyback was just so baaaad they had to write there own, a no brainer really.
And dedicated servers and proper MP were born, but the game is so physics intense it can only ever do it at a small scale.
Thats just being realistic.

SE itself is not really set up for proper MP gameplay.
Its more set up for co-op game play.

Its not a game where factions will take you to war, that would be Empyrion.
But SE does SP in extreme detail pretty well, and none of the MP problems arise in SP with SE so long as you dont play on a potato.
It would have been really awesome to see some proper PvE content, factions, AI humanoids and give players real reasons to do things, drones just dont cut it, they are the lazy way out for such a profitable company, that touts an super duper AI project on the side, the AI in the game should be outstanding and thats where SE really fails, for SP and MP.

The AI in SE should be and probably is, a direct reflection of just how good there AI inside of there AI project really is.
Touted as a module system that could be used in a range of industries, HELLO ? SE was the perfect testing ground and we never saw bugger all proper AI in the game, tells me the AI they have, is crap still.
It cant do the first thing they said it would be capable of doing.

MP in SE has suffered because of such features being simply missing.
In MP, PvE content is vitally important.
Safe areas are important, the ability for players, server owners to set up a server specifically how they like, one planet PvE and one PvP is vitally important, SE's dev, just never really had a proper focus on MP to understand what it really needed to make it really shine, it feels like more of just an add on to try and please the MP crowd, which Im one of, but the devs never realised what was needed most in MP.
Very unfortunate for the game, I literally have watched thousands of players move from this game to that game over nothing more than MP.

When they built this game engine, V.rage.2, they were using steam P2P netcode for MP, they literally designed the first version of MP around a max of 4 players system.

This game engine was built, as they built the game MinerWars.
All of us that owned MinerWars got a free SE copy.

From day one SE was never really planned to be huge MP, they did pretty well to get it to what it is, they just missed a few seriously key features that obviously thousands of people wanted.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 2340731972

Burstar wrote:All it takes to reclaim that 'trap' is the patience to hand drill ~800m. You guys have really done nothing with this debate other than to reveal your inexperience. The likely reality is that anyone who sees that wreck thinks it's not worth the hassle because it's far easier to just mine and refine or capture NPCs that they all know what to expect with.

As to the meat of the OP topic: MP is really bad in SE. It's buggy, laggy, pointless, grindy, and handicapped by it's own severe limitations. In order to have a good experience in MP you need:

A high Ghz frequency server with loads of RAM, (beaucoup $$$ that noone in their right mind should spend on this game)
curated by knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate admins using third party plugins to curb the bloat and fix the common bugs,
using a carefully designed scenario (mods, objectives, story, etc...).

The Official Servers only purpose imo is to give new players an opportunity to see how bad the game is before their refund option expires in 2 hours. Most community servers are run by people who don't really know what they are doing, or have lost interest waiting for KSH to get their act together and no longer do as good a job as was commonly seen years ago. The game online is truly in a sad state of affairs.

You can count on one hand the number of servers worth looking into playing on nowadays.
Even then it's just more of the same with less hassle than normal. Better to find a sub community to play with, or create your own with friends. Complaining how other people play isn't going to do you any good.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 9644794546

Demented wrote:The problem exists because there are many reasons to avoid other players, and few to seek them out. It's a complex web of apathetic design.

Perhaps the worst part of it is the faction system. Dead factions litter servers, there is no reward for loyalty, it's easy to sabotage/betray a faction, and many parts of being in a faction are outright broken, like grid ownership.

Not to mention that small server sizes constrict the active size of factions, and poor performance routinely drives away otherwise stable populations.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 9647927496

piddlefoot wrote:Yea but so what, the max is a lousy 16 players so putting it into % was a nice sneaky way of trying to hide that fact, 30% is just a few players........

Games in this genre should be aiming for 100, or more.
With just 16 max the odds of you even running into another person in PvP are limited, you need to go hunting, hours of la la la, in a playfield with no boundaries, so players can go out so far the odds of you finding them becomes 1 in a BILLION.

Its a bit of a joke really, MP just has to many limitations in SE to ever be anything special.

So whats 77% about 10 people, oooOOO so not awesome.

Other games in this genre can host over 100 already in this genre, voxel building space exploration bla bla.

How can you call a 16 player max limit, a success for MP for a game in this genre thats supposed to bring lots of people together in a universe, it utterly fails at that.

This is before we even touch on the massive performance issues the game has after a couple of months with 16 on a server, the sim speed, the games had a heap of features trimmed or toned down just to make MP work, for example, when MP first came out there was no way to delete anything that just floated off, like blocks blown off your ship in a collision, so they would float forever, slowly dragging sim speed down over time, things like that got changed to make MP work, in its first iteration MP was hardly even playab;e, so its come a long way no question, but it will never really be anything special in MP, it just lacks far to many features to ever be anything special in that arena.

77% of an Empyrion server is 77 players.
77% of an SE server is about 10 players.
77% of an EVE server is, lol, thousands of players.
77% of Starbase is hundreds of players.
77 % of almost any other game in this genre, is more than SE 77% ratio of players.

Its one of the worst forms of MP in the entire genre, because KEEN didnt really put much design into it, the game is primarily a single player game.
So thats what you should expect, an outstanding SP, which SE definitely has, but a pretty average MP.

Making posts in the % instead of raw numbers can be exposed just as easily.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 9648094590

Troubleshooter wrote:If the game were designed around the number of players and lack of PVE content I wouldn't care if it was 4 player per server... but independent of the player and technical limits is the lack of care that went into the systems that players have to influence their game-play.

Think of it this way. Battle Royale games only work because every few minutes the playable area shrinks. This forces players to move together or exit the game. The novelty of a large-open map is still there, but only for a few minutes at the start of any game... and as time progresses there will be more player interaction around the remaining play area.

Space engineers doesn't have "watering holes" that encourage interaction between different types of players. Even co-op play is more or less pointless as there just isn't a challenge to collectively overcome (except maybe for preventing raids by trolls I suppose) There's no reason to work together, so every signal is deemed dangerous and to be avoided as a result.

But the endless asteroids in the vastness of space means you can safely pick out a spot and play solo until PCU limit is reached. After that... what then?

I get that sand-boxing is its own thing... you make your own goals and go about achieving them. But you can do all this in single player, without lag, or PCU limits.

It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to set a stage for player interaction either. The only reason they don't exist is that Keen doesn't want to support them. Giving your players things to do, in addition to free play, should be standard fare from a game developer.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 9648105386

piddlefoot wrote:Yea, thanks for pointing out another reason SE fails in MP, one instance, on our home PCs or a server in a data center, what were they ever thinking........

The point of that post was about how low SE MP numbers really are, that using a % instead of a raw number attempts to hide that because the numbers are so low.

Empyrion runs on home PCs and data center servers, it can pull OVER 100 in a server, Ive seen 140 in a server in that game, the server was a dual CPU xeon with 128g RAM, SSD drives, and stupid fast internet connection.

Tell me, can SE even dream of such numbers ?

Kinda says it all, so many people on this forum bag that game, yet it blows this games MP completely away and it has more features and is far more complex in its AI and has alot more happening at any one time in every playfield, of which it can literally run dozens of instances, across your multicore CPU, utilising its cores, and even better, taking advantage of hyperthreading and doubling the thread count, so 8 cores 16 threads, giving it the ability to host over 100 in a PC, you made at home.

Thats how you do MP in this genre.

When its done right, you dont need to hide the numbers inside of a % number, you can use raw numbers, which is really much more informative.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 9651609506

piddlefoot wrote:Yea because there was never any thought put into the structure of the game in MP, it was designed around SP, mine build, go crash your stuff, mine build, is about it.

There is just nothing to din MP.

Spend hours looking for people to attack.

SE desperately needed a heap of PvE and AI and a structure for a story to follow to actually have some goals and objectives other than just PvP.

Thats where the game completely fails in MP, it simply breaks down into a grind fest.

Its not that the game isnt fun or well made asset wise, its just the devs never even tried to put any real PvE into the game, a few dogs slapped in at the last minute doesnt count as decent content, its not very replayable.

What they could have done with this game, could have been absolutely amazing.
Put Empyrions PvE features into this game, absolutely unbeatable combination.

Did you know Empyrion is the result of players unhappy with how SE's direction was headed.....2013....2015 Emp was born.

Did you know dozens of us pushed KEEN to add a heap of PvE content once MP was planned ?
They ignored everyone and put the time into ME and the AI project, so its not like they didnt have the ideal opportunity to absolutely DOMINATE this genre, tonnes of people tried to educate them about that.
Maybe there next game will have actual content for MP ?

But its the serious lack of content for MP that lets the game down, no matter what excuse you come up with, how to set servers up etc, makes no difference if the core of the game is just not there.



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 9651734197

Ronnie wrote:My ten pence here.

My server that run has a active player base of 10 players, I have up to 35 slots and there is one earth 20km in size making pvp inevitable. I have a 40km Mars which is pve only allowing players to pull back and work together to overcome several fortresses that occupy the planet.

The servers are what you make of them, my server is community based so we try to accommodate the players needs and wants to make it enjoyable

Plus on earth it’s plane based so everyone is in fighters or fast jets



https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/d ... 9651791621

piddlefoot wrote:If the game had the performance, you could recreate the TV show Expanse, and it kinda sounds like your server is set up similar to that Ronnie, which is clever I will add, because in this game you need clever server operators to create a scene or story to play out, like what you seem to have done.

Its the best stop gap fix you can really achieve without mods.

But Expanse on an SE server would be just awesome.
Problem is the Belters.
SE cant handle stations that big for a start.

I built Babylon 5 to 1.1klm long in this game, its on utube if you must check, same name piddlefoot, and I did an explode test, where we spin the station up and de-balance it and let it rip itself to pieces, I filmed that also, on utube, its utterly horrific on the system, pushes the game engine beyond what its capable of, so MP around a large base like that for such a server set up would be problematic.
BUT !
You could do what you seem to have done, and just create a Mars vs Earth scenario.
Best solution possible I think for what the game has.


Empyrion, that they reference a few times, seems worth checking out in some depth. I played a few hours with recoil and Robo, but we entered a bad server at a bad time, with too few people. It's worth another try with a bigger team at a fresh wipe. Plus, back then the most you could find was maybe a 60-player server, but the guy above said it goes up to 140 now. Might be worth trying the game before Starbase comes out and probably blows it out the water.
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