What is this
Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we’ve been working on over the past few weeks. I’ll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won’t be able to cover everything, but I’ll share what caught my interest.
Why am I doing it
I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I’m passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren’t set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don’t like spoilers, then don’t read this.
Space Engineers 2
One of the last touches to our planets is adding tree variations. Different shapes, sizes, and colors give each biome its own character. Even small visual differences can change how a whole area feels when you explore it.
We’re also making final adjustments to biome transitions, especially between grass and snow. These areas now blend more smoothly.
And we won’t stop improving our planets even after the VS2 release. There’s still plenty we want to add and refine to make them feel even more detailed and dynamic over time.
Remember when we showed you the first prototypes of multi-character emotes? Here’s a look at a much more refined version. These improvements will allow us to create proper story cinematics in SE2!
NPCs won’t be part of the VS2 Update – planets and survival foundations are already massive tasks on their own. However, we’re already working on all the named characters that will appear in the future SE2 storyline.
So how will you get missions if there are no NPC characters in VS2? For now, this will be done through a Contract Block, which will serve as your main interface for receiving and managing your contracts.
Our art team keeps improving their workflow – this time they revealed their Kitbash Library, a collection of small detail elements used to add those final touches and ensure every block is rich in detail.
We’ve also polished all the block build stages, making the construction process more visually consistent from start to finish.
A small but useful visual feedback feature is the new welder particle effects that change based on your distance from the block, clearly showing when you’re too far away to weld effectively.
Share your thoughts in the comments below – I read them all, and they’re one of my favorite parts of making our games.
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“Please prioritize engineering and exploration in development!
I believe adding the story afterward would be more fitting for Space Engineers.
Also, I’m a bit concerned since there hasn’t been any news about pistons or rotors yet.
Could you let us know when we might be able to see them?”
concur with engineering focus — most of us are going to to off and create our own stories 🙂 when we ask for content, its for more grids appearing in the star system / planets to explore, not necesarily named npcs
last touches 🤨
me likey the sound of dat
The story brings a purpose to the game beyond creativity and freedom of action. In SE1 there isn’t a game-given reason to do anything. You attempted to introduce some purpose at some points but I never felt that it was enough for me. The Factorum story is interesting and the goal is to get prototech, but why? To do what? I believe SE2 has the potential to develop a purpose to answer questions such as these. I love the sandbox and freedom of actions, but I like to have a purpose to do those things.
Campaign will give you a complete start-to-end game to play. Other than that, NPC factions can still give you missions in the “free sandbox” mode. In order to make those missions interesting and to avoid remaking them many times, good sandbox foundations might be required to do first.
For a bigger purpose, some endgame content can be obtained not only from random encounters (like Factorum) but also from different NPC factions. Each of them might have a unique endgame block, but you need to gain maximum reputation with them by completing their missions, trading, etc.
In SE1 there is no particular incentive to do missions — trading can give you much more credits. But here, you could unlock some high-end blocks: some unique, others just more powerful versions of regular blocks. You might need a certain level of reputation to unlock faction ships and/or ship parts (modules, prefabs, blueprints). You could be able to just buy those ships or get a blueprint to build them on your own. The higher your reputation, the better ships you can have access to.
By doing particular missions, you could have certain ships given to you as a reward. Depending on your playstyle, you will want to befriend certain factions to obtain their endgame content, while inevitably losing reputation with other factions that are their enemies — so you cannot unlock everything; you have to prioritize.
Some factions might give you high-end weaponry, others could offer better blocks for exploration, and others might focus more on mining and production. A pirate-style faction could also exist, where you gain reputation by attacking and raiding traders. They could provide unique high-end blocks suitable for piracy, such as longer-range radars or stealth technology.
This would make players or player-made factions specialize in different key areas — for example: miners and production, trade and exploration, or warfare.
I hope that you’ll be able to play as the NPC models. Just like how you could change into a dog or an arachnid in SE1.
Seconded. Personally, I like to run around with a girl avatar. Apparently at least one of those will be in the game, please make them available at least in sandbox mode.
In general, I tend to go for the engineering and survival rather than the story line.
Imo, strong lore / a embedded storyline restrict the user in creating their own stories. Other sandbox games like Minecraft have no official deeper lore, allowing players to come up with their own explanations for the discoveries they make. Chunks of lore could be there for those who dig deeper, but it should also be easily avoidable.
The large trees look great, but the new transitions between grass and snow look a bit too noisy in my opinion.
Even if they have a story mode, they’ll ALSO have a Sandbox mode; the player is free to choose to play without the story if they want. That’s not really relevant to the choice.
What IS relevant is development time; time spent creating a story and the systems that allow a story to work is time that’s not spent improving the core engineering and technology. If you have an argument against the story, you need to approach it from that perspective.
Or, to put it another way, the only way adding a story mode is going to affect you is if it reduces the quality of the sandbox mode somehow… and I don’t see that happening.
I’ve seen people adding lore to workshop ships saying what company built them and ran them and were they operate, and if you tried to combine every piece of player made lore, while still making sense it would have to span thousands of years and lightyears.
there’s nothing wrong with that but if most things were based on the in game story you could easily imaging that you could interact with the events that other players created.
player made storys can be miner and fit in with the in game lore or be therorys that fill in the gaps, some storys often take place on modded far away planets or further in the future and have modded futuristic blocks so they can be independent of the main story.
so no, i don’t think a strong in game story will interrupt any fan made lore, you can even ignore it if you want
I’ve seen people adding lore to workshop ships saying what company built them and ran them and were they operate, and if you tried to combine every piece of player made lore, while still making sense it would have to span thousands of years and lightyears.
there’s nothing wrong with that but if most things were based on the in game story you could easily imaging that you could interact with the events that other players created.
player made storys can be miner and fit in with the in game lore or be therorys that fill in the gaps, some storys often take place on modded far away planets or further in the future and have modded futuristic blocks so they can be independent of the main story.
so no, i don’t think a strong in game story will interupt any fn made lore, you can even ignore it if you want
Вы всё время говорите, что вторая часть не должна повторять первую, а должна быть новой игрой с новым опытом. Сюжет как раз и должен быть этим новым опытом.
You keep saying that the second part shouldn’t repeat the first, but rather that it will be a new game with a new experience. The story could be precisely that new experience.
Yes
I am extremely excited about the story elements of SE2, though I have some specific thoughts that might be worth considering:
SE excels at nudging you in a few general directions but leaving the majority of what happens uo to you. Since SE lacked a significant “story” layer, this meant that the narrative of a player’s adventures in a save was entirely up to them. Since they both discover and actively create the entire narrative as they played, investment came easy. SE2 introducing a story layer has the *potential* to mess up this player-driven creative process, unless great care is taken to preserve it. Like SE, if the narrative layer of SE2 can succeed at nudging the player in certain story directions but also leave enough space for the player to create, then I think it will be a big success.
Another thing: remember Subnautica? I think most would agree that it is one of the most successful narrative-driven survival games in recent memory. But for me, it was also a valuable lesson in the dangers of early access, haha. I followed its development too closely and ended up spoiling too much of the mystery for myself before ever getting to play it, and then when I did finally play it I realized I wasn’t having any experience of discovery, because it was all familiar to me already. All that to say, it might be worth considering keeping *most* of the story under wraps until 1.0.
I do prefer the engineering and the whole do-it-yourself nature of the sandbox experience, but … ! As others have mentioned already, I do as well reach a point where I question the purpose of further improvement, exploration, and expansion.
However, I also strongly believe that the implementation of a main storyline should come after the introduction of the main SE functionalities (like programmable blocks, hinges, etc.). Simply for the reason that this is what makes Space Engineers feel like Space Engineers, and not like other space exploration games. This is your competitive edge.
I can only speak for myself, but I do believe that the majority of players would agree with my view.
So to answer your question: we need both! pure hardcore engineering with (eventually) deep SE lore. But engineering should come first.
P.S.: If there’s a framework for it, we can mod it for ourselves anyway… 🙂
I’d say focus more on a sandbox mechanics. the best part of this game is an emerging gameplay. Missions promoting engineering and using these base game mechanics will not only be interesting but also make unexperienced players reaslise what a great things you can do in this sandbox environment.
To simplify building at the beginning you can provide a bigger ready to use ship parts. Say you open some kind of block and you can drag prefabs into your hotbar. This way you can teach new players on how to build ships relatively quickly instead of a long and tedious process of assembling it block by block, and this mechanics can be used then in multiolayer to exchange blueprints between players or have them availabke on NPC stations. Each NPC faction can have a unique set of base building prefabs their ships are made of so you can quickly assemble a grid that is in their style or upgrade an existent one with additional modules.
i’m just speaking for myself here but my favorite aspect of games is the story, characters, and writing. the gameplay should also be good with goof replayability, but honestly if the story or characters are forgettable i find myself not really returning to play the game much. that’s why i love Vermintide 2 and not Dragon’s Dogma 2 (still love the first game though).
one of the things i’m most excited for with SE2 was NPCs, cutscenes, an actual story, and developed characters. everything else is still hella cool, don’t get me wrong, but that aspect of breathing life into a world is my all time favorite and has me very very excited for the future!
i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, i think a very good addition would be random NPC ships flying near your bass with actual NPC Space Engineers flying it inside the cockpit. they can fly by your ship and either call out over the radio or send a message in chat; “nice base, Engineer!” or some silly stuff like that. they can land at a designated landing pad and actually get out and come look around and the bigger your base the more NPCs there are. this actually fulfills that “colonization” aspect heavily and really makes it feel like you have people in your bases across the galaxy rather than just empty, soulless bases that function.
thank you KSW for all that y’all do. i love you guys <3
Yes, stations filled with actual NPC characters roaming around is something SE1 was desperately missing. And of course, you should be able to interact with them — no more boring and soulless contract block.
Each station would generate a unique set of characters that remain the same every time you visit that station — and they should remember you too. NPCs would come in different types, and some could give you specific missions. This means you wouldn’t have a generic list of missions in a contract block; instead, you’d go and find specific NPCs for different kinds of missions.
Some NPCs could also be hired to work for you:
Combat Pilots can patrol, follow you in formation at a set distance (allowing for real fighter squadrons), and attack or defend against enemies using different strategies. They might even have unique preferences or tendencies in combat behavior.
Military Engineers can control turrets, making them more precise, extending their range, or unlocking additional options such as targeting specific subsystems.
Production Specialists can improve production rates, lower power consumption, or reduce hydrogen usage.
Miners can operate mining ships or drones to extract ore from asteroids.
Construction Engineers can pilot ships to weld or grind other grids, docking to a designated connector to collect components or unload cargo when full.
Each NPC would have a skill level that determines their effectiveness. Their skills increase over time up to a maximum level. If they die, you can respawn them — but their stats reset to the base level.
I couldn’t agree more – while I think there is lots of value and enjoyment in a loose narrative/story to explore, I think im more excited to uave a “living” world in SE2, and that strongly revolves around different types and factions of NPC. this largely falls into two categories:
NPC Crew, when designing a capitol ship, I want to be incentivized to crew it for better performance of guns, engines, and maybe evensome automated repairs – ideally with a few clear roles/types and persistent names. I think it’d be incredibly immersive to be able to have a designated captain of a subordinate ship or base that would incentivize designs and economy to hire/maintain the NPCs in your faction. like some survival games , you could have npcs have core requirements , like their own bed, that require interesting engineering constraints for crew quarters that are currently unneeded/self-imposed.
unique npc factions/quests Sounds like there are already exciting plans for npc faction/representatives. I’d love, long term, for a bit of lore to be attached to each faction, and for there to be a few faction-specific contracts/quests that become available when you gain a high relationship with that faction. Not only would it add immersion, but adds variety to each long tern survival playthrough. One example of this could be an ocean world faction that , after completing severl geneic contracts , eventually requires you to build a nautical vessel to recover a salvage wreck. success there then leads to them revealing the location of a deep ocean valuable artifact/resource cache that requires you to build/have a submarine. You can return the loot to the faction for a permanent strong relationship, or steal the loot for yourself , but anger the faction. situations like this, though simple (and clearly a fair bit of work to code) can provide deep immersion , incentivize engineering, and allow players to craft their own story motivations.
I hope that your question is one of priority rather than a fork in the road. In the immediate players, that want to play SE2, will want what ever gives them the most enguaging play time. For now this will be engineering, to get back to familiar territory in complex building and interacting with the environment. As the game is still in alpha, players will turn to the need for lore after they feel settled with construction and roaming around. Lore and story will give context to the game that allows the imagination to fill in the gaps within the world. Interaction between characters can introduce narratives that scale, whereas contract missions on their own will not have human qualities. It would be good to see the lore fleshed out a little more at this stage with room for it’s expansion and evolution later on. My only concern with storylines in games is the ‘groundhog day’ effect, repeating events identically, but wishing to see varations in the event time line. Engineering first, then character, then lore and then the campaign plot.
Actually I like the “before” version of the first snow blending screenshot more than the “after” version 😅
Will the small details library be available to modders? I would hope so, because it would increase the visual fit of mod blocks to vanilla blocks.
But yeah, I can’t wait for NPCs and story lore. Two things that probably won’t come, but I would really like are:
1. Beeing able to have NPCs on your ship / station that just wander around. Maybe you assign them an area where they can wander. Just so you can make your base feel more alive rather than an lonly thing drifting in the nothing of space when you don’t play multiplayer.
2. NPCs using your actions in non-story dialog lines. Something along the line of: “Did you hear of the guy who blew up his ship? Heard it was a catastrophy.” when you crashed your ship recently.
I like lore that contributes explaining and shaping to the environment much more than a story line in SE. Why are you out here? Who are you doing contracts for or against? Are the sabroids just another animal or the there more to them? How did these old wrecks get here? Why are these random drones showing up?
What brings me back over and over is I get to set my own goals and challenges and decide what I want to accomplish and explore. Story lines feel limiting by comparison – it’s like walking down one if those glass tunnels in an aquarium compared to scuba diving in the open ocean.
Even if they are optional it seems like you are forced inti a choice of “do this story line every play through” or “do this storyline once or twice then never again – like a tutorial”.
Just my thoughts – you’ve built something unique in SE so far, so I trust your vision to keep that special something alive.
An idea regarding programmable blocks…
I don’t know if programmable blocks are a planned feature or not (strongly hope it is!), but if yes, then here is my take on it:
What if, instead of having one programmable block per script, there would be a computer block and server blocks.
So if you want to access, add or modify some running scripts, you simply sit down in front of the “interface” or terminal computer, and select (from a list) which script you want to edit. And, to reasonably simulate things, the number of allowed scripts (or their character length!) should be tied to the sum of actice server blocks.
This would make maintaining a dozen or so activly running scripts easier. Plus, having a dedicated real-life-looking server room somewhere deep down a base would be really cool! 🙂
Да, цель нужна. В любом случае.
По Ю Кай Чоу и его Октализу что важно? Чтобы была главная цель и куча преград на пути к её достижению. И именно в этих преградах и содержится основная игрофикация и основные мотивы продолжать играть.
Японские игры, которые кажется без геймплея (Death Stranding тот же самый) про что вообще? Про мужика который идет. И у него на пути куча преград. Но в самом начале нас погружают в такую удивительную фантазию, что хочется узнать чем оно кончится. В середине подогревают историей.
Вообще я считаю, что сильнее чем история – человека ничего вовлечь не может. Постоянное преодоление – это всё стресс и всё временно.
Любое творчество строится чаще на сильных негативных эмоциях. Люди пишут песни, картины когда им плохо. В 99% случаев. Так устроен наш мозг.
Помню как в SE1 наиграли более 500 часов именно в те моменты, когда нужно было защищаться от кого-то, прятаться от кланов и людей. Просыпались ночью, чтобы посмотреть все ли в порядке с базой.
Я за историю. Кстати тот же Planet Crafter имеет совершенно дурацкий геймплей, но интерес поддерживатся именно историей и целью игры – восстановить планету. Это так прекрасно)
Могу сравнить космосимы (не инженерные игры, а именно симуляторы). Есть Elite Dangerous и есть Star Citizen. Кто популярнее? И почему? В гражданине есть история. История разработки игры, история выхода из “крутого пике” и падения разработчика, история в игре, история в параллельной игре. Там лор проработан на 12 томов деталей. 12 книг с лором игры. Представляете себе? Это очень интересно, когда история прорабатывается настолько глубоко.
Я думаю, что любая игра с интересной историей и глобальными целями всегда будет выигрывать у чистой песочницы. По большому счету даже история не так важна, как вплетенные глобальные цели)) Они и есть история, только в действии. Меньше описания, больше действий. Именно это залог качественной истории и нарратива.
И книги больше пользуются популярностью, где много действий, и меньше описаний, но при этом созданная реальность должна быть детальной) Как гарри поттер. Там очень много действий, но очень качественно прописанна реальность, куда мы погружаемся. Звездные Войны или Властелин Колец? Много действий, качественно описанна реальность)
I would prefer a non-linear story without specific characters.
I had this idea that the player finds remants of an alien civilsation from time to time. Abandoned bases or cities, crashed ships, mining sites etc.
On these you can find files (notes, images/videos, art, etc.) telling the story of some big challenge they faced and if/how/why they left this solar system.
The order in which you find them doesn’t matter but piece by piece you get a bigger picture of them.
Reading any of it could either be completly optional or it could be integrated into the progression system (ie. having to unlock more processing power for translation later down the road, obtaining some late-game materials/blocks through disassembly or unlocking new refining/mining capabilities.
Satisfactory and Outer Wilds are good examples for non-intrusive, non-linear storys.
Story is important, and the direction I saw so far is I think a good one. Namely that the story is therein the world, and people can find it in terms of objectives. It needs to have a ballance between sandbox survival and story driven game, because of the story is too much tied into the story, the 5th time someone playes through the game, it will be boring. One of the key elements of SE1 is that it’s infinitely replayable, so you need to come up with a system that lets players have story without restricting the open sandbox.
I think another key aspect of this is to have NPCs doing their own things, NPC bases, NPC ships, to make the system a lively one. Just from the top of my head I’d say 20% story, 40% NPCs and events, the rest is sandbox focus. I’d make the story interesting, but make it in a way that it’s only 20% of the entire experience, so even when people are skipping it, they still have a lot to do.
Our group of around 20 people are simply waiting for multiplayer. So I say multiplayer when.
with all those suits and faces/hairs we are seeing. it would be good to we to get to unlock them for player customization. one idea would be to make suits cosmetics to be acquired after completing some story misions or specific sidequests/challenges nstead of going by the gatcha style of SE1
I think making the games profression and engineering abilities is more important than the capain. However, adding small stories and good encounters to keep survival interesting is very important to me. Also good multiplayer performance. I really want to blow up my friends. 😁
1700 hrs in SE and I can say I rarely touch any lore/story. Not that I don’t appreciate it, it is just the replay-ability comes from the sandbox element. Place more resource on providing a more robust canvas for this community to develop their own sagas. Content creators already do a great job of this imo. I can play a story or scenario once and be done with it, I can play a million times with a deep engineering experience and places to visit.
Lore is always nice, but impactful exploration is priceless. Think about how people do exploration in Elite:Dangerous or plan missions in Kerbal. Going to faraway places should be rewarding and require extensive preparation. You could for example make jump drives that use their own fuel and build exploration and economy around that.
I do love a good story; RDR2 is one of my favourite games and a big part of that is the story and characters, but it’s not a game that I often return to.
I haven’t logged over 8000 hours into Space Engineers 1 because of it’s story 😅
The engineering and exploration is more important in my opinion. I’ve been runnning a first-person only community server for about five years and I can say that many players love designing vehicles and engineering creative ways to overcome unique challenges. Giving us a larger tool box will only fuel our need to create.
There are also those who enjoy roleplaying their own stories, and it could be limiting to them if the story is too rigid and doesn’t allow for them to bring their own stories into the game. In contrast, dynamic and open-ended exploration mechanics would fuel thier creativity and let them tell thier own stories too.
I feel like the lore and characters should be deeply connected to engineering in the sense that all of it should serve to make you engineer and think of engineering ways of doing things. I’d love it if the story used npcs and enemy factions to inspire curiosity in the many ways you can solve problems. From building ships and stations for specialized situations to programming autonomous systems. I feel like lore should serve to show off what you can do in the game in subtle ways while leaving holes for the player to fill. I feel like story characters shouldn’t be memorable for in lore things they have done, but more for the places they run and inhabit and for the new concepts and capabilities they introduced the player to. Make them matter for learning to engineer.
Before anything, I would like to say that the block should say “Contract terminal”, for the same grammatical reason why it’s “ticket machine” (not “tickets machine”) and “shoe store” (not “shoes store”).
About the enviroments you show, I don’t know which version is better. They look much better than what I’m used to, so I can’t tell. About your question, exploration and engineering are fundamental, but it’s people that give life to places. But I think there’s a bigger problem, or aspect, to consider. Many people (me too) would enjoy a story, but remember that Space Engineers is a game that can consume thousands of hours. How do you make a meaningful story, meaningful characters, to fill all this time? There’s no way to write a story that will span that many hours that will also appeal to players that play under 100 hours. If possible, I would like you not to appeal to players that won’t play the game much and instead make a storyline that could take 100-1000 hours to complete, but honestly maintaining writing quality would be a challenge to anyone. I have two ideas for this. The first, to fit a wider audience, would be to have a large amount of side quests. This would make the overall story experience more flexible. Focused players could go through it in 50-100 hours, while players who like to take their time enjoying the world could take as long as they wished. The result could be something like a sandbox-ish first story part and then a sandbox part. The second idea would be to release the story in parts, but then, how to weave it into the world? If, for example, all the zones are known, that creates some limitations. Imagine if you wanted to add a Frostbite-style story section, but you hadn’t blocked the whole planet off years in advance. A player somewhere will have probably built a giant powerplant and you can’t just spawn the scenario in. Maybe there could be generic NPC areas like cities whose parts could be replaced when convenient. This is just one of the challenges that this idea could bring. But, to start ending this comment, I feel that characters are more important than terrain-changing plots. Characters that feel real, characters with whom you can interact as if they were people, that’s what would be really cool. Imagine if the level of the game was such that some NPC threw a space apple at you and you could, for example, catch it and throw it back (reputation increase in the zone), fail to catch it (dissapointing the NPC), or catch it and try to hit the NPC with it (reputation decrease), and these were just some options. Maybe you would like to put it in your pocket and keep walking, or maybe you slice it up and share it with the NPC. There could be no limit to the things to do. Imagine this: “Update 10.10: You can now order street food and while it’s being made pick up a newspaper with the news of the day. In it, you may learn that these NPCs are going to start a war with these other NPCs and from it you could deduce that it’s a good idea to ship some precision components.” As always, thank you for Space Engineers.
what I care about is the writing of the whole ecosystem as a cohesive gameworld instead of the writing on small scale of some “main characters”.
the industry, economics, environments, dangers and rewards of the system is what matters. The player can figure out himself how he sees his character and other small elements of this massive world.
Factions : where do they come from, what are their role in the system, strenghts and weaknesses, resource control and needs, their intentions, what kind of alliance, contracts and reward do they offer ?
Planets and asteroids : what are their geology, climate, POIs, resource type and abundance, human and fauna occupation, territory segmentation, strategic position in the system ?
Npcs : Are they fancy contract dispenser terminals or actual intelligent entities you can interact with ? can you employ npcs ? crew a ship ? Are there laws you can break and law enfoncement entities ?
Economy : is there a point to do trades if I can simply drill everything around me ? how do you make this mechanic a good alternative to the more primitive approach ? certainly not the same way you did in SE1…
And that’s just a small sample of elements I think necessitate tons of writing and thinking process, instead of focusing on storyline and narration.
Sorry to sound harsh if I do. I really appreciate the open conversation your blog posts allow and the cool opportunity to voice my opinion about a game I am deeply passionate about during its development. SE1 has something no other game has, but it also lacks so much depth in many essential features that could have made it an absolute masterpiece, and I really want the second game to succeed where the first one didn’t.
A few things come to mind here.
1. Trees usually have denser brush or vegetation surrounding them. This may be an easy adjustment where trees affect the grass layer, which spawns brush in X radius around them depenging on growth stage/size.
2. NPC’s yes, they’re important, it’s also important that they have a hairstyle that fits INSIDE their helmet. The female model looks nice, but the hair is retard level when it comes to being put inside a helmet. Do a basic google search of female astronauts and look at their hairstyles. Also, why does Dante look like the juggernaut? Space suits and helmets don’t have a lot of variation between them, they’re all standardised. Don’t be afraid to use standard suits/uniforms with just head model changes.
My ideal NPC would be one that can wander around whatever ship/station I build and handle small tasks for me. Farming, welding, sitting at a station and looking busy, while providing a power/H2/O2/weapons accuracy bonus, going to a mess hall and eating, going to bed and sleeping for a while, using a bathroom/shower, sitting on a couch watching TV (Facing LCD screen within x blocks), etc.
There definitely needs to be a way to “rescue” or find new NPC’s to add to your crew via random encounters.
Implementing a story is a great addition! As it was said previosly in the comments it gives a purpose and motivation to player actions. I think though purpose and motivation could be achieved through inhabitation not only NPC bases, but also player’s bases and ships. As player moves forward to colonization goal it would be nice to come back to the places left behind and see that they are not abandoned but filled with people living their day to day lives, talk to them, get some local rumors and news like someone’s gone missing or found a new ore deposit, get some little routine quests from them like fixing a drill rig or build more storage. That would be really nice.
Before story, basic functionality like hinges, rotors, and pistons are needed.
My 2 cents on campaign / story:
Elite Dangerous style factions with personality and goals.
Lots of activity such as cargo shipments, contested areas etc.
Bulletin boards detailing news events etc.
Optional “Main” story line.
Ability to affect outcomes of events, but do not have to be directly involved for things to happen.
This could create a living, breathing world feeling.
I love just being a cog in a big machine and having small effects on events.
just want to say thanks for how good the game runs right now i have a old laptop that gets 70 fps on cs at low 1080 but for fun i decided to play space enggineers 2 and at low 1080 it runs at 40 and drops to 30 when in a crash its a old laptop with a igpu
Gameplay and engineering trump all. strong lore woven in though elevate a good game to great.
Until you fulfill the needs of the core audience; a story and flashy new features are wasted development time.
SE1 was never about JUST what the developers put into it. Space Engineers always was, and still is, about the collaboration between devs and community.
Developers made systems that served as a catalyst for player creativity. Enabling systems is where the magic is. Its about the partnership, not one side doing all the work.
It can be challenging to retread old ground, even boring, but SE1 still holds the audience. Even with a killer cinematic story, that would be true at this point.
Players tell the story of SE, they always have. If you want to give them a story, supply them with the tools to tell one.
I think SE1 was missing something once you had an established base. That was where I would move on to the next game. In some playthroughs I wouldn’t even bother going to space because it was just a whole lot of nothing to do except build your base, over again. The bases were empty and lifeless. Why drop down into another planet to build another lifeless base with no new resources you actually need to progress? My hopes for SE2 would include:
– Struggle to survive, every win means something and makes it feel like an accomplishment (getting a reliable source of oxygen, food, earning flight, earning space, etc)
– Be aggressively attacked and actually NEED to build defense turrets and ammo. In SE I never felt like I had to defend my base and the enemies that were around had to be chased after and killing them had no real impact
– If I did go kill an enemy ship or base, the loot was pointless (oh! more metal plates…not like I can’t just make those myself). It would be awesome if in SE2 you could not progress in tech without fighting and discovering/looting the tech.
– SE2 should have planet specific resources that cannot be found anywhere else, making a reason to go to other planets to get those resources.
– There should be milestones that are strategically locked behind discovery/combat/loot such as only being able to build rovers until you discover the tech for Thrusters, then be locked out from going to space until you discover the tech for Hydrogen engines, etc. SE1 just makes it too easy to skip rovers and get to space with hardly any effort that it didn’t feel like a win you had to fight for. Make us drive around for awhile before we earn the rights to flying!
– I do not like the idea of being forced to follow a story however I do like the idea of needing to accomplish certain things to advance your tech tree but that should be at a pace I want to take it.
For the NPC/world feedback. I must say I don’t care that much about the main story.
What I’d rather want is a tool to create NPC for us to play with, to live the dream of having a crew as one of the biggest flaw of SE is the emptiness if you don’t play with humans. Custom dialogue and easy model-animation set in games. Having a believable worlds with station with npcs etc…
If the tech progression is nice it can serve as the backbone without having the campaign forced upon us.
Can you please share the development timeline for adding wheel blocks to Space Engineers 2? Furthermore, could you outline the key improvements being made to the wheel physics and functionality compared to the first game?
In this blog, I cannot tell whether the people responding “factions will do this and that”, “there will be this mode and that mode” etc. are just randos speculating or whether they actually have further knowledge. Alright, when Marek responds, it’s official. 🙂 Are all others just speculating confidently, or are some of them devs?
I prefer sandbox, and if the NPCs I meet also have an opinion, or a story to tell me, or a quest to give, or if the station mechanic calls out “yo ship’s ugly and missing a gyroscope!” 😉 that would be fun.
Does story mode mean we are stuck being a predefined character with a given past and role? I’d rather be an advisor or bodyguard or first officer to such a predefined character. They tell me the story development and delegate steps to me “solve this problem”, “bring me the golden foobar of nothingium” and I, the player, find a way.
In Elite:Dangerous, I can do what I want, but it influences my reputation and factions have different missions/trade offers/powerplay, if it’s like that, that’s cool. We could do various playthroughs, siding with a different faction each time.
> How important is it for you that Space Engineers 2 has strong lore, memorable characters, and a storyline woven directly into the sandbox experience? Do you prefer a deeper narrative layer, or would you rather keep the focus purely on engineering and exploration?
I would rather have a good story than no story, but I would much rather have no story than a mediocre story.
For me, being able to build and engineer cool things is paramount. Once SE2 is brought up to the level of building possible in SE1, then add the storylines. We need pistons, rotors, hinges, etc. before the lore. I also don’t think the main game storyline is as important as making it easier for modders and content creators to build their own storylines and senarios into the game. One main storyline only holds a limited amount of interest. If people can write and create their own, and easily share it with others, the content will be limitless, as will the interest in it. Think of Splitsie’s scrapyard series or Escape From Mars, with a rich storyline.
Personally, I’d much prefer a heavy focus on the engineering and creativity side of things for a game like Space Engineers. While I do love games with good stories and characters, it feels a bit out of place in Space Engineers for me, and I’d much rather have dynamic/randomized encounters around which I can form my own stories instead of a linear pre-defined story that would only feel worth playing through once.
Sandbox > Story
I don’t know about a story per se, but there needs to be some kind of goal. The downside of games like Space Engineers and Minecraft is they have so much to do but no reason to do them and so they kinda get stale fast. The colonization of the Almagest system sounds like a good idea in that regard, and a story would be great too. Just so long as there’s consistent, and ideally infinite, new and varied goals that the game can give me (if I opt in to them at least).
Flood us with lore!
We (JB&B Industries) have been playing on RP servers in SE1 and done internal RP on non-RP servers as well since it gives us a deeper meaning in what we do, and why – creating player made end game.
When SE2 Alpha launched we started to write a fan-fic that we finished this spring. This is on what we as a faction where and how we got involved in the Bering Project offering multiple lose threads that can be followed up and using what lore we got and not interfering with the SE2 lore. So the main purpose of it is to close the chapter of our factions story in SE1 and transfer it to SE2.
If the team is interested in skimming it through just reach out and I’ll send it over.
Best regards,
Fors, founder of JB&B.
I look for lore in every thing I play.
E depois que a base e a nave forem autossuficientes, tendo muitos ou mesmo para aqueles que preferem o modo criativo, haverá encontros mais massivos? Poderia ocorrer invasões mais intensas.so exploracao sobrevivencia nao e o bastante quando voce finaliza fica obsoleto tira ideias do jogo avorion que tem mods que fazem qualquer setor ser sempre atacado