Sol Trader

Very cool concept and design. The interplay between NPCs is groundbreaking in my experience. Don't let 'mixed reviews' deter you, this is worth playingif it seems at all interesting to you! Looking forward to further development, I'm hooked!

"Social networking in space" That should be the name of the game. Title 'Sol Trader' is a bit misleading, as trading is not needed at all, nor is money as you can borrow ships for travel from friends instead of buying them. Its more 'information trading'. There's a variety of way to play, can use a ship to shoot down travellers and traders, but soon you'll end up being hunted by various planets with citizens working 'cadet' jobs in eg. starfleet hq on earth. So you need some friends too. You have a certain goal you pick at start like to become president. To get that, you need to apply for job in the senate building where that job is available, but you wont get it right away, you would likely need to start at the bottom 1st as guard or political assistant, then manager, senator and so on. Each job has certain criteria for acceptance, for instance you need loyalty or wealth or reliability, a certain friendship rating with the interviewer, to gain acceptance. Sometimes the job you want is occupied by another.. There are ways to 'open' said job but I'll leave that to your own discovery. Certain jobs increase your 'wealth' status (naturally some pay more) which allow you to apply for jobs with that criteria. Working in a job gets you money, which you can use to buy/rent a spaceship for travel, which also increases your 'wealth' status (the better vehicle you drive/own, the more wealthy you are perceived to be). Loyalty is more tricky, but easiest is working in a military job or trading goods like ore to specific businesses/mines of your faction - so you thus support them. Then tell others about those deeds to make them learn about your loyalty. That is the core of it, might not be for everyone. Its done well and I like it.

I had the good fortune to hear Chris Parsons (developer) deliver a talk on how not to launch a game at EGX2016. As well as the valuable information in his talk, it prompted me to come and visit the Sol Trader stand, try the game out and subsequently buy it when I got home. Sure, there's room for improvement and Chris was the first to acknowledge that, but once you appreciate the depth that the core game delivers, it's hard to be over critical. The game generates a database of more than a thousand people, generated from hundreds of (in-game) years of interactions between families of generated characters by creating a potted history for each person. But deeper than this: while the individual histories are universal in the game, each individual character is not universally aware of every fact, and it is only through interractions between characters that information is revealed and can be used for better or worse. In essence, since it generates histories for characters, it's basically procedurally generating stories based on a huge randomly seeded cast of characters in a universe where you play your part and your choices ultimately affect how characters perceive you and other characters in the game. The game isn't a 3D, voiced, open world if that's the kind of game you're looking for, but rather well presented panels of information about characters, planets, ships, tasks etc, interpersed with 2D space navigation, mining and combat when in a ship. If you don't like text-heavy games, this might not be the one for you, but if you appreciate seemingly autonomous universes with rabbit-hole-like depth, you should definitely give this a try. Looking forward to seeing what future updates (and future games) bring.

Not terrible, definitely an interesting idea. But seems to be just fetch (info) quests, with no goals or progression. Although it is amusing to hire a ship off my father (cheap bastard wouldn't lend me his) and him "Thank you for your business!". Uh, sure dad. Not weird thing to say to your son at all. For something that touts relationships as the important thing, having one of the most important relationships being little more then skin deep, highlights the problem. Still, enjoyable and interesting, for a while.

An incredibly cool proof of concept which I'd like to see adapted into some other game(s). The conversation systems, reputation and alliance systems, and the way characters, social networks, and backstories are procedurally generated, is thoughtful and fascinating; but the presentation is so bland and sterile, and the other play mechanics so rudimentary, that I couldn't stick with the game. Worth playing around with if you're interested in seeing complex systems in action, but otherwise probably not worth your time.

This game is for sure different. I went into it with the right mindset - read some reviews to get it, but this game is more like a detective simulation than a space-pilot simulation. Yes, you can guy goods and make money flying around trading them. You can be a space-taxi, too. But really the main gameplay loop here is flying around and talking to people - there are 1000 people in the universe and they're all somewhat simulated, they live and move around the universe and make their own friends and enemies - and as a space detective you will probably want to talk to most of them. Maybe you have a passenger on your ship who wants to meet someone, and you need to fly around asking people (like - workers at space ports, people at bars etc) if they know your target. Do they know someone who knows your target? OK where is that person? Where do they work? Now go to that place, and ask more people if they know your target - eventually someone is friends with them, and maybe will tell you where your target is, or maybe you just randomly run into them. Either way, it's a lot of talking to random people buttering them up (gaining favor through a kinda conversation minigame) and then hoping you can untangle the social web and find whoever it is you are looking for. The topics you talk about are either generic ("How is work?") or can be about people - everything that happens in the game-world is a 'fact' and you can spread it by telling people. You learn facts by talking to people, then use those facts to gain favor with people in order to get them to tell you more facts about other people. That's the game. It's fun, kind of a mindless puzzler with some space trading/taxi'ing bits where you talk to everyone about everything you can. I think it'd be better if there was more outside of the detective-stuff (which to me feels like 75% of the game, would be better at like 25%), or alternatively if the detective-stuff was actually the focus of the game and was deeper, so that your conversation topics mattered instead of just clicking topics to share facts.

Been playing it for three hours AND I HAVEN'T EVEN REALLY STARTED THE GAME YET. I'm just running around town, trying to get people to like me and working my job as a mining engineer. The interactions and generated world, history, and relationships alone have entertained me. I don't own a spaceship, never been on a spaceship, and never traded anything but I've had fun so far. Even if the space trading sucks (I don't know if it will or not yet), the game is still worth what I paid for it.

It's rather simple in scope but surprisingly addictive for what boils down to a kind of light talking sim, in space. While not as in-depth as I would like to see, the weird social bent to everything in the game makes it kind of endearing and I just wish there was more background to the characters and more control over your own beginnings. I don't know if I can say that it is worth a twenty but it is definitely worth trying if only to experience a space game that focuses more on character interaction than shooting or, uh, spacing.

Nope. 9 hours seems a fair trial. Spent almost all of it trying to find a decent cargo to haul. It feels like this is some kind of training system for aspies, teaching how to perform 'conversation' The routine gets old fast.