Distant Worlds 2

Quick review - I've got a lot more playing to do before I write a more complete one. I play 4X games weird. I like to use big galaxies (or worlds or whatever) with just 3 or 4 other empires in them. I also like things to be generally peaceful. Monsters/barbarians with some bigger (but temporary) military challenges are fine, but I enjoy trying to win more on the explore/expand/exploit fronts than extermination. This game appears to be supporting that style of play really well! Regarding the DLC: don't buy it yet. The base game has PLENTY! See if you like its style of pick-your-automation first, then get the DLC when you know you'll use it.

Boring get stellaris instead

Gotta say, based on the screenshots alone I wasn't totally sure what to expect with this one, but I'd heard good things online about it, and I'm a sucker for trying new 4X games, so I gave it a crack. The Good; Automation. This is something I kinda hated at first but definitely grew to love by late-game, as late-game micro always sucks yet DW2 pretty much handles it all for you. The AI decisions are actually decent too, and I actually felt surprisingly comfortable delegating important tasks, without fearing I'd come back to a smoldering ruin 10 minutes later. The map system is also fkn awesome, as it ditches hyperlanes entirely in favour of free travel, which is a HUGE breath of fresh air compared to other games in the genre. The ability to seamlessly zoom in to and out of solar systems without any loading screens or scene-switches is awesome too. The early game is definitely the strongest part of the experience, as with most space 4Xs, and I think DW2 does this really well - especially since every single ship, both military and civillian, are fully simulated and rendered; meaning you can sit back and just watch your empire go about its business and everything is actually happening in real time. Ship combat is also very enjoyable in this game too, and since each ship uses fuel when travelling, there's a wide range of tactical considerations involved. And espionage is leagues ahead of almost every other implementation I've seen, and actually HAS major importance in every run. The Bad; The UI in this game is absolutely terrible and lacks many basic features you'd expect in a 4x game, such as fleet merging, simple homeworld selection, comparing techs, ordering attacks on a actual fleets (instead of individual ships), and whole a lot more. Narrative content *exists*, I guess, but it's just the same walls of text each and every game, and the majority is non-interactive and linear, which is strange for a game in this genre. Colonies are also VERY shallow and basically just equate to floating spheres of statistics - I kid you not, even Sins2 has deeper colonies than this game. Similarly, the planet suitability system and independant colony system are both terrible - as they force you into the exact same playstyle every single game (mixed species / wide empire), and the resulting border gore and late-game colony management is just PTSD inducing. There's plenty of jank to be found too, with lots of inconsistency in quality/visuals for both 2D & 3D assets. New DLCs look WAY better than vanilla, and that's not a high bar to begin with. I also experienced many many bugs in basically every run, which isn't great, but I will kind of excuse this due to the immense scale and complexity of the game (fair is fair). The Ugly; Performance.... it's BAD lol. I had to abandon multiple runs, in favour of a smaller sized galaxy, due to the profound simulation lag by mid-game. The game (somehow) runs at a high FPS but micro-stutters constantly and the simulation itself slows to a crawl. Icons on the map stutter and lag, UI becomes unresponsive, the game itself starts to freeze and/or crash, and the experience is just pretty bad overall. This is all with an Intel Ultra 7 265k, which ain't nothin' to scoff at when it comes to processors. Performance aside, the late-game experience kinda sucks regardless, as you're constantly bombarded with notifications 24/7, with 9,732 colonies to manage (since, remember, you can't play tall in this game), and endless AI ship spam/colony spam/station spam to top it all off. The game also has a complete lack of customisation. Almost everything is 100% predefined. Empires all have predefined traits, suitability, stat modifiers, playstyles (if you'd call it that), and even predefined relationships with other empires. Sure, you can *technically* change your government type but... a few modifiers change and basically nothing else. You can't even name your homeworld before starting a game. Similarly, all in-game events/texts are the exact same each game, and so, combined with the one-and-only (wide+mixed) playstyle... it just ends up feeling like the same old experience across every run (only this time, you're blue coloured and not orange! :o) Conclusion; I think DW2 is a very unique yet very niche 4X experience, and is probably best served to more hardcore fans of the genre. I enjoyed my time with the game, and I'll likely keep coming back for more every now and then. There is definitely a good game here - it's just buried underneath many layers of bugs, jank, strange design decisions, and crippling performance issues.

I recommand this as a good game in the 4x sci-fi genre. +simulation type game; + great mechanics with; + customble levels of automation; + lots of awesome mechanics glued well together; - the biggest downside to this great game it that it has a really bad and uninspired storyline and the game has only ancient types of government, the new ones and the imagined ones are almost zero, either its a bad idea to put someone who still measures distances with their feet to write a storyline for a sci-fi game or it was touched directly by the propagandalf ministery. We hope the moddlers will do a better job in that regard. First example of bad inspiration is the name of the game, Distant worlds, while "worlds" refer to planets. The whole universe is the world while this game is only in one galaxy... Some easy fixes for the game: a search box inside galactomedia. a search box in universe a music player.

this is an awesome 4X real time strategy. i do like it better then stellaris (which i put hundreds of hrs into). it does have a learning curve like all games but it is not bad. you can make it as hard or easy as you want.

dislike that renaming planets and stars doesn't work right half the time it shows the original name, half the time it shows your name.

[Edit: Though this review remains largely unchanged after another 10 hours, I'm willing to say this is palpable enough of an experience to flip it to a tentative thumbs up. Also, the developers seem like a good sport who are open to feedback, and that's always a good sign.] Making a game is really hard, so it with the utmost respect that I look at this magnificent artifact and report that, fourteeen hours in, first impressions are that it's an extremely bad time. The technology tree advances very slowly. In Distant Worlds 2, every time a new ship tech unlocks, it feels like the patience to wait for them is rewarded with a need to redesign the same ship for the 20th time for a barely tangible benefit. Maybe my fault was playing at 1X speed. Ship design is what got me to buy this game. What I saw reminded me of a Malfador Mechanations Space Empire game. However, like all things in Distant World 2, I can let automation do it, and I have been. And that's a shame, because ship design is an opportunity to give the player something they could enjoy. But all of the component choice seem really straightforward to me. So I might as well let the computer do it. That sense of, "yes, I could turn off automation, but why bother" pervades most of the systems. The overall scope of the galactic map is set so huge that I could not possibly make all the decisions for my 4X space empire, so you can automate most of it. In fact, it's one of the biggest things that set the Distant Worlds series apart: you can automate as little or as much as you want, and what you choose to automate will change the way the game plays. It's several games in one! Sort of. However, in this case, even if I found the best balance of automation for me, I'm not sure it would feel meaningfully involved as a player. By the Sid Meier attributed mantra that games are a series of interesting choices, Distant Worlds 2 overflows with the variety of choices, but makes no effort to communicate to the players in what way any choice offered is particularly interesting. Distant Worlds 2 leaves the players to find meaningful choice for themselves and, with a scope this vast, it's a needle in a haystack. So far, my hands are coming up with nothing but straw, but at least I can marvel at the sheer size of the haystack, how it's a microcosm full of magnificent teeming fauna. I do love a simulated microcosm, and this one can't be beat. But could this shift of perspective alone enough to spin this straw of a lack of meaningful player agency into the gold of a satisfying gaming experience? I didn't proceed aimlessly, but was rewarded with aimlessness. I followed Scott's guide, but it neglects to mention that if you try to rapidly build a fleet and muster it to defend you can only watch in horror and helplessly as all the ships spread themselves to the four corners of the vast expanses of space instead of mustering where you want them. It's because Distant Worlds 2 isn't an RTS, it's an immersive universe simulation that bears some minor resemblances to an RTS. It's that RTS resemblance that left a bad taste in my mouth as my newly-built frigates foundered helplessly with no in-game explanation. I can't say I enjoyed watching my captains [i]apparently pointedly ignoring my orders[/i] while they ran off and did their own thing and my mining stations burned down. Because that's not what games typically do. But I'm no stranger to adapting to ship AI jank (in fact, I'm quite good at X4: Foundations fleet management now).So it really comes down to whether or not I'm willing to put in the hours to adapt to the method behind Distant World 2's madness, to foster a better understanding why the AI does what it does and how I'm [i]expected[/i] to play. It later dawned on me that of course they must have been out of gas. Because they're freshly built ships so their fuel tanks are empty and they're going to limp to the nearest refueling station. However, the cause behind this initial confusion was again, my expectation this was more like an RTS. An RTS wouldn't launch a freshly-built ship without fuel. It would likely have pretended it had stockpiled enough fuel at the construction yard, that detail abstracted out. In Distant Worlds 2, it's not as abstracted. That same detailed microcosm that attracted me to Distant Worlds 2 carried this additional overhead. So the question is, "Should I be willing to put in the time to adapt?" 14 hours in, I sit at that crossroad. The immersive sim lover in me thinks that it's glorious to have a whole simulation running at all times. But the gamer in me thinks I ought to have been able to find some interesting choices in 14 hours of dabbling. Will I ever have a [i]good time[/i] playing Distant Worlds 2? If the answer leans to a mediocre-feeling "maybe," I can't help but look at my backlog of alternatives and wonder why I'm trying. You know what? I'm unlocking the comments. Tell me what I'm missing. What makes the adaptation curve worth it? I dumped $60 on this, it's too late for a refund, tell me what it'll take to turn that thumb around. In the meantime, here's some constructive feedback for the developers: improve that first impression. Prioritize gamism in the balance a little more over simulationism. Or don't. After all, making a game is hard, and Distant Worlds 2 is much more complicated than most. If this is the game you want to make, who am I to argue?