{"id":5867,"date":"2011-11-15T18:11:48","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T02:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spacesector.com\/blog\/?p=5867"},"modified":"2012-02-27T09:22:02","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T14:22:02","slug":"sword-of-the-stars-2-lords-of-winter-first-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spacesector.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/sword-of-the-stars-2-lords-of-winter-first-impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"Sword of the Stars 2: Lords of Winter – First Impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok folks it’s worse than I thought, Sword of the Stars 2: Lords of Winter is currently unplayable.<\/p>\n

I’ve witnessed some bad releases in my time. This one has been no doubt one of the most\u00a0disappointing. It’s sad how this is becoming a pattern these days and how the players are being turned into beta testers more and more. Add on top of that the fact that people had extremely high expectations\u00a0for SotS2 (since the original SotS is a game loved by so many)\u00a0and you get one of the most dramatic releases of the last years.<\/p>\n

It’s fairly known by now that Paradox Interactive and Kerberos Productions have announced that there were (major) problems with the game’s release, so, I am sure many of you are not being caught by surprise. On the release’s very next day the publisher’s CEO Fredrik Wester made a statement on Paradox’s forum apologizing for the current\u00a0state of the game<\/a>. One day after that, it was Martin Cirulis time to\u00a0apologize\u00a0on the developers forum<\/a>. In that post Kerberos’ CEO asked for\u00a0patience\u00a0and promised that things will be fixed as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

Having heard so many horrible things about the release I decided to get my hands into SotS2 as fast as I could. So, in the meantime of my work on the review here are my first impressions.<\/p>\n

So, how bad is it?<\/h3>\n

It’s bad, really bad. Consider that I based these impressions on the latest available patch at the time of this writing (which would be the one from last Friday’s 11th November patch (several patches have already been issued since release day).<\/p>\n

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3D Map is a bit cumbersome to navigate<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Let me start by saying that the worst part of this all is stability. It’s really hard to play the current release because it’s almost impossible to play 20 or more straight turns (actually trying to do something) without getting into a random crash to desktop (sometimes on the fleet manager, others on the “diplomacy” menu and on other places). Other times the game will just freeze, when you try to access the game menu for example.\u00a0I know this is not happening just here because I’ve been checking forums where people are discussing the game, and they are saying the same there too.<\/p>\n

But it’s not just stability. The game feels incomplete, it’s unpolished in many aspects and you can tell that there are features that are dummy or still work in progress. I think a couple of pictures will show you better what I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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But it’s not only the incompleteness. Some things are just plain missing. Trade for example is not yet functional <\/strong>from what I could tell. You adjust your sliders to divert production to trade but nothing happens, you don’t get more income as you’re supposed to.\u00a0(Edit 16\/11<\/strong>: So it seems that trade should be already functional by now – from what I could learn in the Kerberos’ forum – however apparently the player is required to build the right kind of station, research the right tech, build freighters, and then trade routes will eventually be established, but I can’t confirm this yet. And\u00a0surely\u00a0this is not documented anywhere, and nothing in the game leads you to think you need all this) Another example is diplomacy. At first I could not see any diplomacy options, that’s ok, I had not encountered any opponent yet. Eventually I found an opponent and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Most\u00a0Diplomacy options are just a placeholder<\/strong>, a dummy version barely 20% functional perhaps. See below.<\/p>\n

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Diplomacy options are currently a placeholder<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It looks better than it actually is. The buttons “System Data”, “Slaves”, “World”, etc, are all placeholders, when you click nothing happens. At first you think you’re doing something wrong but after a while it becomes evident that you’re not. This is what you get if you request or demand something (I don’t know what the difference between the two options is since both lead to the same screen above). If you click treaty you can’t do anything (maybe you can’t yet? At this point you can’t help to start thinking otherwise).<\/p>\n

Then there’s the random crashing and freezing (that I already talked about) and the annoying lag-time between menus that can go from a normal 1 to 2 sec time to more than 5, 10 or more seconds in some cases (again I know that this is not happening just here).<\/p>\n

Then there’s more unpolished stuff and more annoyances proper of an Alpha\/Beta release. Things like:<\/p>\n