Distant Worlds 2

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it. I played hundred of hours the previous game in it's "Universe" edition. (I’m sorry if a dev reads this.) The interface is worse. I am not kidding. And the more I dig, the more I could extend this review. Who was in charge of this ? Did they play the previous game ? Did they had any class or experience in UI design ? I don't mean to be rude, but this is not ok. They took the worst interface in the genre, and managed to make it worse. How ? By displaying less information, but with more clutter, with even less intuitiveness, and less shortcuts. Example : you have a table that say that your intake of 10 resources is critical. Ok. This is a table that regroups info for your entire empire. Surely, if you hover your mouse of the info, you will have more information that will explain what the resources are ? A way to click ? No. You have to go in another menu, and then play with the filters to try to find the concerned resources. To be fair, the issue was in the previous game... If only this was made with the benefit of hindsight. Another example : at time of writing, you cannot change the home base of a fleet from the fleet screen. Or from the fleet tab at the lower left hand side of the screen when you have selected a fleet. No, you have to select your fleet, zoom out to wherever the hell you were, and then zoom to the wanted base, right click, and make it the home base. It only takes a minute. And I do mean a literal minute, as many things do in this game. But rest assured, it’s normal, because, you cannot do much to edit or control what your fleets are outside the templates, unless you want to handle most of it by hand... But, you know, this is Distant World. Automation is supposed to be the strong suit. It's not anymore. I mean, it’s still is, there is even more options. Look at all of them. If only you had a way to understand how the ♥♥♥♥ they all interact with each other. In the first one, I was able to understand what I automated and what I didn't. Not anymore. Just an example : you can turn off shipbuilding. But, if you have fleets, remember to turn off the automatic top-off of your fleets. If you do not, fleets will keep on adding units to replace the lost ones. Can be nice and useful once you know about it. But you first have to know about it. By the way, where the ♥♥♥♥ are the population policy controls ? Seriously, I looked everywhere for something that was front and center in the previous game. In the first game, you had your exploration ships and construction ships on a shortcut. Where is it now ? Well, in a menu. Kind of a good addition, that one, the menu, I mean. In the previous game it was a sidebar, apparently, which was helpful because, well... you had a shortcut ! Not anymore. Three clicks are more practical and intuitive than one, I guess. You cannot minimize the choices for your inbox of messages. I will phrase it better : if you want to read your messages, you have to keep the option menu for the messages open. That... after a dozen more hours, I still cannot figure out what is going on there. I went to the previous game, and oh my god... there was a logbox, visible, but not in the way, that told you the usual minutiae, and you had popups for important messages... Holy hell, it's the same mechanics and info, but they managed to make it worse ! Again ! The automation of the taxes is the same as in the previous game, as far as I can understand it... but the menus give you less info about what the triggers are. So the mechanic is the same... but you have less info than in the previous game to explain to you what happens. Nice ! And so on. What, the, living, hell... Oh, and the performances are not good either, even at the start of the game. 3D can create cool moments, I know, it's neat. But look at the vids made by the community : it's mostly spreadsheets. I do not understand how people can like this hollow copy of the previous game, that is an unstable software, with terrible sound design, worse controls, worse interface. We spend most of our time, not in the system view, but in the galaxy view. So why did the devs put effort into making 3D we won’t look at most of the time, because we claw at the menus trying to figure out where is that damned button ? I dunno. 2D can be magnificent and clear, and crisp. Look at StarSector. Or the previous game with modding. And of course, the faults of the previous game are still in there. If you want to know what a given ship part actually does... well... off to the wiki, sorry, Galaxipedia you go ! No tooltip there. No search bar in the Galaxipedia either. Why would you need one, am I right ? And the shipbuilding seems to be worse too. In the previous game, you had ship categories, yes. But you did what you wanted with them, they were more guidelines. Here ? It's more like with Stellaris : an escort has a given number of slots, which is fine... but not coming from the previous standpoint, because it suddenly feel VERY limiting. I think they should have gone in the direction of Endless Space, with more modular ship design, so this issue of "the 3D models need to make sense with what the player put in them"... or just not cared that much about this issue. No space to detail what I mean here, but better options existed. We have lost something, yes, but mostly, we have even more clutter in the menus because of all the added classes. Fleet this, and heavy that, and so on, as if this game wasn't already complicated enough to get into. No options either to hide the "old" categories. And, again, off to hit the books you go if you want to know how the AI handle differently different ship classes. For example, is it possible to try to have only medium freighter ? Can you skip one class of military ship completely ? From what I gather, read the wiki, do not find your answer, then go out looking for people who read the code of the game. They did remove SOME of the hassle that came with the living space / life support duo… But again, they could have remade the system in a much, much better way. Space sim are less rare now. Terra Invicta, Nebulous Fleet Command… It’s not just that it could have been better, it’s just that I could have been good. Special mention to the writing of the story, which is mostly on the good side… but with typos and easily skippable because of… you know… the interface. I will play the previous one if I want that specific itch scratched. At least the interface responds to inputs where it should. Or StarSector. Or Stellaris even. These two have the benefit of having a clearer way to understand the game, instead of having to fight to take part in it. And the sound effects seem to be part of this decade. Because yeah, I forgot to mention it, but sound, in a game, is important. Most good games have great sound effects and ambiance. This game ? I played on mute, while I automated mechanics that were not fun because of the menus… or just because I could not find the menus… I tried. I hope the devs will try to do a new installment that learns what the indie dev community has known since the end of the 2000s. Put the money where it matters. Interface, sound design, reliability, and, again, for this game, INTERFACE, (and QA, the long forgotten element...). It’s supposed to be fun to be able to parameter your AI… Wow. I went to replay the previous one just to refresh my memory. The previous one is better in many aspects... and that's in it's vanilla state. With mods, the interface can be flat-out better, and the game will have, of course, more content. Still. I am burned out now. Hope the third will be better software. I wanted to like this game. I am very frustrated that I could not. A comment add some info.