Amazing game with a worlds you could lose yourself for hours and hours in - with a caveat:
The game currently suffers from an idenitity crisis - Missions vs. Open World
Missions: On one hand you have a rogue-like game mode where you drop in naked; rush for tools, build a base to protect yourself from the storm, and tech up just enough so you can complete the objective. Once you complete those objectives you get paid in Ren (in-game currency) and/or Exotics (another in-game currency). Then you extract off the planet with your rocket shuttle and everything you built gets wiped. So it's in your best interest to complete the mission as quick as you can without overgrinding to tech up, no more no less. It's got a good fast pace and IMO its fun with friends as everyone starts on equal footing and you decide how to delegate the tasks effuciently to be ready for the objective.
Open World: Then on the other hand you have Open World mode where the community which wasn't a fan of the single mission wipes asked for. You can still launch missions (now labeled Operations) from Open World, but now everything you built is persistent. Pace is alot slower as you can take your time building a fancy base, launch missions (Operations) and once those objectives are complete your base is there waiting for you. You even get to keep stuff the mission gave you like guns or solar panels. It sounds neat on the surface as why would you want hours of progress wiped each time you play anyway, right?
The caveat:
- Tech Progression: My biggest gripe is the cost of advancement. I've got alot of hours of Factorio and Satisfactory racked up and understand/expect how a good tiering up experience to feel like. More complicated tech ages comes with additional cost and complexity of recipes. But the identity crisis shines forth when you try to transition from Tier3 to Tier4.
Tier 1-3 is fairly straightforward and not incedibly grindy. It feels thought out where if you mined about 3 decently sized caves you'd have enough to hit Tier 3 and make rifles/shotguns if you needed to kill a particularly tough enemy on a drop. But Tier 4 is something else. Tier 4 is magnitudes more expensive you are literally pushed to utilise the deep mining drills to make use of the infinite ores, or scour 10+ caves for rare ores you need as resources DO NOT RESPAWN. Which means you have to spend hours laying down mining infrastructure. In Open World, sure thats nice. Do it once and your set. On a mission? Spend hours to set up something you'd use once and wipe. This balancing heavily favours one game mode over another. Which brings me to my next gripe-
Resource Respawn: Because the game was originally designed to wipe each mission, having resouces not respawn wasn't a big deal. But in Open World, after awhile your base will look like a desolate wasteland as you chopped down all the trees and stripped every cave. To fix this they introduced what feels like a bandaid solution where you build machines to respawn these resources (terraforming) which triggers a tower defense.
Performance: Game performance takes a massive plummet once you start laying out Tier 4+ infrastructure. Every electric cable and every water pipe and every base entity gets polled and calculated every few server ticks. In Missions where your bases don't ever grow that large? Not an issue. In Open World where you want your dream mega base with all your automated comforts? Be prepared for frame drops and lag spikes. Have a mining drill a mile away that you want to power? Every one of those cable nodes you lay down will add more strain to the server.
Flow of missions - some missions were designed to experienced in a localised area/biome. This is even more apparent from the earlier missions. When you launch these missions in Open World instead, it sometimes forces you to travel across the entire map depending on where you decided to make your base; even for the simplest of missions.
With all that being said though the game is still very beautiful and charming and my friends and I have just decied to cope with workarounds whilst we enjoy everything else it has to offer.
