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[puke]

Seemingly a little bit of Space Engineers meets No Man's Sky.  Single or Co-op play, explore, mine, build, survive.  I have not seen any hint of weapons or combat, which makes me hopeful that there is actual interesting constructive activity at the core of the game play.

This was a turn off for me on NMS and Space Engineers, they both seems to have their exploration, resource extraction, and construction as a backdrop to the actual game of blowing stuff up.  Astroneer, as far as I can tell, has nothing at all to do with blowing anything up.

Astroneer is game about wonder, discovery, power, greed, mystery, and grand endeavor in a new age of expansion on the fringes of humanity. You will land alone, or with a small crew of friends, on a planet to call your own. Harsh but bountiful, infinite worlds will beckon you to explore, exploit, and ultimately to reshape to your desire.

Video Montage from GDC:    https://twitter.com/astroneergame/status/711288783128436737

Verge article:    http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/8/9483347/astroneer-video-game-space-exploration

Steam Page:    http://store.steampowered.com/app/361420/

Official:    http://astroneer.space/

[Damiac]

At a rough first glance, this looks quite similar to starmade, minus the combat stuff. 

What... exactly is the goal, if this game can be said to have one?  Are you actually producing anything with your various buildings, or are the buildings themselves what you produce?

It's a nice looking game though.

[Jopax]

What's the point of building stuff if you can't blow it up when it bores you?

[puke]

Edit: (oops, confused starmade with starbound)

At a rough first glance, this looks quite similar to starmade, minus the combat stuff. 

Yeah, thats fair.  If starmade had resource use and survival aspects.  That is a fair comparison.

This (from what they say) starts out as a resource management / survival game where you are struggling for enough basic things like Air, Fuel, and Power just to survive.

Then it goes on to resource exploitation, and getting rich by processing and exporting vast wealth, presumably (and I don't want to read too much into it, to avoid NMS style head-canon based enthusiasm) X3 style (or factorio-light, if you will) resource and manufacturing chains.

It also hints at alien artifacts and some sort of meta plot laced throughout the game.

But from what I've read, the game is:  Survive -- learn to exploit resources -- re-invest your wealth so you can exploit resources on a larger scale -- repeat.

So I'm imagining a little bit of NMS meets Factorio without the pew-pew aspects of the former or the tower-defense aspects of the later, and a little bit of KSP's TAC Life Support layered on top.

What's the point of building stuff if you can't blow it up when it bores you?

I for one am tired of games defaulting to violence.  The default interaction in most games being to shoot a gun.  I like guns, I've shot more of them than most people ever will.  I don't need them to be in every piece of entertainment.

Also, if you should have been able to figure out ways of murdering your Sims without actual weapons, or of causing wanton destruction in simple physics puzzle games like Fantastic Contraption...  I expect you can cause similar destruction here with a little bit of creativity.  But the focus of the game does not look to be "build a bigger gun and shoot a space dinosaur" or whatever these other games are about.

[puke]

Here is a cool article on Popular SCience with some more detail:  http://www.popsci.com/is-astroneer-next-minecraft

Initially, an Astroneer must survive with very limited resources, managing small sets of resources such as oxygen and water. But later on, advanced players will be ferrying large cargos in spaceships

Ultimately, though, Astroneer is built around that idea of endlessly grander adventures and excursions. As developers we are simply constructing the foundation for these mechanics…we’ll be very interested to see the different ways people end up playing the game.

here’s where it gets interesting: indirect cooperation. “Eventually, players will want to split up and work together while on different sides of a planet or even on different planets. Because the game allows players to seamlessly travel to or send resources to other planets, this creates a wide variety of emergent gameplay scenarios, such as when one player is running low on resources and must rely on [his or her] distant teammate to organize a resupply.”

[Retropunch]

Hmm, I've felt that this was coming for a while. The latest 'procgen, craft and explore' all seem to lack any real direction, and instead 'allow the player to make their own story' - whilst that's all well and good to give the player maximum freedom, not giving them ANY goal or driving force just seems a bit like half a game.

I mean it's like going to a restaurant and them giving you the ingredients and utensils.

[GrayFox]

I'm already looking forward to NMS more than any game ever (not debating this, it always turns into an argument), but this looks like it could be pretty good! (Also looking forward to Planet Nomads) I just hope all will turn out well. I don't really have any specific pieces of criticism. I know things can go wrong in development. People have good reasons to doubt, but I prefer to be a bit optimistic about games most of the time. Except when I'm just not that interested in the first place.

Not wanting to debate. I just want to provide some info. NMS does have at least one main, optional goal of traveling toward the core systems. So there is direction, but it's optional and non-linear.

[PrimusRibbus]

This doesn't look bad or anything, but the feature list and screenshots feel so samey compared to all the other "creative stuff in space and on planets" games that I probably couldn't pick the screenshots out of a lineup.

Not that there's anything wrong with this style of game, it just feels like we've got a couple dozen very similar games in early access; to the point that I can't even keep the games on my Steam wishlist straight anymore.

[puke]

Not wanting to debate. I just want to provide some info. NMS does have at least one main, optional goal of traveling toward the core systems. So there is direction, but it's optional and non-linear.

The only reason I brought it up, was that one of the major stated features of NMS was blowing things up.  Be it space dinosaurs, or space robots programmed to protect space dinosaurs.  This, by contrast, has no blowing stuff up to fall back on.  The gameplay must be upheld purely by NOT BLOWING STUFF UP, which makes its focus necessarily laser like on the other aspects.

I am actually cautiously enthusiastic about NMS, but yes, lets not go there.

On the other hand, Noctis also has no blowing stuff up, and I am less of a fan of that.  I dont expect this to be similar.

screenshots feel so samey compared to all the other "creative stuff in space and on planets" games that I probably couldn't pick the screenshots out of a lineup.

what, really?  I thought the art style of low-poly completely untextured art really stood out.  They got one of the Halo concept artists to design for it.  Here is a Kotaku article focusing on the art choices:  http://kotaku.com/the-gorgeous-art-of-astroneer-1735971876

and a cool blog post about how it came to be:  http://blog.astroneer.space/post/137760074384/the-art-of-astroneer-low-poly

[puke]

Here is a full GDC demo video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-ZoIIGrWFc

3:58, they start talking about the interface and how interaction works

7:00 they talk about running tethers from the base to hook up power, so you explore further from base.  they also go into other aspects of crafting and power management.

12:18 using a portable printer

18:44 problems with sameyness with procedural generated worlds, and what they have done too make it interesting

20:28 environmental hazards talk

22:35 talking about multiplayer

[Damiac]

I like the "start with just enough to eke out survival, build your way up until you're shipping tons of materials for great profit" part, but I wonder, what am I using this profit for? To enlarge my mining operation, to build bigger ships, to make more profit?

I get your point about almost every game being about shooting stuff, and I agree not every game needs that, but at the same time, I need to be building toward something. 

In minecraft, I played for a while, had the best equipment, a bunch of mines, tons of diamonds and what not... and then I stopped playing, because all I could use those resources for was getting more resources.

In starmade, I could use those resources to build a mighty warship, to blow up pirate bases... but then what? 

If exponential resource growth were enough, I'd still be wasting my time playing adventure capitalist (Even when I played it a lot, I knew it was the dumbest game ever...)

In DF, I love getting established, getting a military trained, fighting off a siege or two, etc.  If the danger of invaders kept ramping up, it would be a great survival game, and would keep me interested a lot longer.  Maybe someday...

What I'd love would be a game like this, where there's something beyond the very easy survival portion where you have to keep fighting to survive.  Like if the game kept ramping the challenge up somehow...

The groundwork has been laid and laid again over and over.  We have the first step of this great freeform game, we've nailed the freeform crafting survival sandbox, now we need someone to get the game part.

A sandbox is a place where you build a sandcastle however you want.  A game would be where you try to build a bigger sandcastle than everyone else in 10 minutes, or something.

[Retropunch]

The groundwork has been laid and laid again over and over.  We have the first step of this great freeform game, we've nailed the freeform crafting survival sandbox, now we need someone to get the game part.

Nail on the head. That's exactly how I feel. DF has !!fun!! down below which you can go after late game, and you can also have survival as a main goal in less than adequate climates. Minecraft equally has a kinda story thing going which you can follow to find the end boss.

But for all the rest, I kinda don't see the point after I've done the main loop. I think there's two way to approach it - you either need a ridiculously difficult end game story arc which you need to massively prepare for, or just kinda ramp up the difficulty exponentially so survival keeps being a struggle.

Rimworld does the latter quite well for instance - I've never really felt 'safe' even when I've had a good setup, and that's kept me playing. 

[puke]

Competition would be a good way to handle it, though there is no mention of anything like that here.

I'm thinking of something like Trade Empires (by Frog City, the Imperialism guys) or Transport Tycoon (or OTTD, if you prefer).

Build your trade or manufacturing or logistics empire, and compete against others who are trying to do the same thing.  You're not necessarily rushing for resources, so much as you are rushing to satisfy the needs of some market.

[Parsely]

Hmm, I've felt that this was coming for a while. The latest 'procgen, craft and explore' all seem to lack any real direction, and instead 'allow the player to make their own story' - whilst that's all well and good to give the player maximum freedom, not giving them ANY goal or driving force just seems a bit like half a game.

I mean it's like going to a restaurant and them giving you the ingredients and utensils.

Maybe I wanna make my own space burrito once in a while.

[Kazagarth]

The game was released today (or yesterday, not entirely sure). I saw it pop up on my steam front page.

Looks fun. Right now there is a major memory leak (if you build your base, FPS tanks). So probably better to wait a week or so for patches.

Someone said it was one of the most "complete" early access he has played...that is a good sign. Not sure what other games he played to compare, but a lot of early access games are obviously pretty unfinished.

Don't have anything else to add. Never even heard of it until I saw it pop up on Steam. And its very hard to find let's plays on this, as a lot of them seem to be in different languages. And I only read/speak English So it seems a lot more popular in other countries than the English speaking ones. Not that makes the game good/bad, its just something I noticed.