Has anybody played Empyrion recently? It’s 50% off, again, and I’m considering the purchase. Is it worth the $10? I believe the last time I saw it mentioned here, it was basically lauded as having great potential, but there just wasn’t a lot of “game” there yet, so I thought I’d check in and see if things have improved.
I’m also interested in it. Would love to hear from folks who’ve played.
I went ahead and picked it up.
Much more polished than I expected it to be. I just completed the tutorial, so I will report back as I put more time into it.
I don’t like the mining- hopefully there are vehicle miners like in Space Engineers… we’ll see. Aside from my problems with the mining though, I thought it was so far enjoyable. Maintain oxygen (never even had to address it at all during the tutorial), keep your food bar up (I did have to eat several times), but there seems to be relatively abundant food, at least during the tutorial.
I got mauled a bit by a triceratops, and managed to take him down fairly easily and turned him into salami, which I stored in the fridge. Don’t get to say that every day!
Next up will be actual base building- the tutorial gives you a relatively complete base to start with, so I have no idea how that works, but I’ll give it a go.
I’ve put a few hours into it. If you like these kinds of games, it’s definitely worth $10.
Last time I played it was late last year. So it may well have more polish since then. It definitely has a few flaws and could use some polish, but I played it enough to travel to different systems and collect all the available materials. Not a whole lot of game left when you get to that point, but it was reasonably fun.
Unfortunately, I managed to strand myself on a moon after being careless with my ship. No real means of escape. Always make sure you have a backup plan.
I’ve been playing it off and on for quite a while now. It’s definitely worth $10, and it’s a fun “builder/survival” game. But it’s the kind of game you play, quit, and revisit rather than one that you invest in heavily.
Caveats: The learning curve is very steep, especially if you want to design your own vehicles instead of taking the “pre-made” blueprint ones. They’ve addressed this with new tutorials in the latest update, but it’s still a tough game to learn. It is, for all it’s polish, still very alpha: every couple of months they do an update that adds a lot of features, but generally renders old savegames untenable. There’s basically no endgame or midgame content – once you can build a capital ship and travel to other planets, there’s effectively no game left (yet). There’s a lot of tedious “resource gathering” and crafting takes significant time rather than being an “instant” process. The game changes dramatically at each new update, and not always for the better: this last one, for example, added a bunch of “emissive dangers” (radiation, temperature, oxygen levels) and various “armors” to manage them, but they’re pretty much just annoyances rather than being fun. Networking, multiplayer, and co-op are a mess – hard to set up and very fragile when you do (they’ve got a lot of work to do here, still). They’ve done basically no balancing of the difficulty yet – enemies are either trivial or impossible, and you’ve pretty much got to take out some of the impossible ones to get basic resources early in the game. There’s multiple planets and planet biomes, but beyond that basically no diversity at all – if you’ve seen ten square meters of any given planet, you’ve pretty much seen it all. (The exception is some of the “POIs” – enemy fortifications, bases, player hubs, crashed ships, and waht can probably best be described as “dungeons,” but even these are selected from a very small set of layouts – every “drone base” will be exactly the same as every other – which is necessary because you need to find a single “core” block hidden somewhere in every fortress in order to capture it, and you’d never find them if they could actually be randomly placed – they could be (and sometimes are) inside of a wall somewhere, for example.)
For all that, it’s kept a friend and I entertained for a week or two every update for months, despite having to start over repeatedly. It’s clearly GOING to be a great game – the devs clearly know what they’re doing and have a vision, and they’re not generally afraid to go back and undo things that “didn’t work.” But it’s a slow slog, and a lot of what you expect to be there just isn’t present yet. But as a sandbox instead of a game, it’s great fun.
Thanks for that breakdown! Real Life™ interrupted any chance I had to monkey around with it more yesterday, so it is good to know what to expect.