twisty on 8/3/2016 at 06:56
Being a fan of Digital Eel and knowing that they are only a small Indie studio who probably rely on a lot of word-of-mouth recommendations for their sales, I feel a little guilty posting what I am about to say about SAIS 3, as I've found it to be a very disappointing sequel to the highly addictive and charming Weird Worlds (which was a notable improvement on its predecessor). As a backer of this during their Kickstarter campaign I only played one of their early builds briefly as I presumed that most of the issues that I encountered would be fixed by the time of its official release. Since its official release I have tried to play it on a number of occasions but have lost interest as I just don't feel that their chosen direction for the design of this game has improved the series in any way.
While the general premise of the game is still the same, unlike the first two the player now travels between worlds on a 3D map, which adds in a layer of navigational complexity without adding in anything to reward the player for his or her effort. Unfortunately, in the one part of the game where the 3D perspective might have been fun to play, when you enter combat the game switches back to a 2D plane. This is an odd decision considering that this is the one area where the additional dimension could have made for some very interesting tactical combat. I also find that inventory and ship management in general to be fairly non-intuitive.
Shadowcat on 13/3/2016 at 09:23
I completely understand where you're coming from. WW was an outright replacement for SAIS, and simply better than its predecessor in every way. I don't know whether SOS was ever intended to be a replacement for WW, but it undeniably <em>isn't</em> that. What I've ended up viewing it as, however, is a replacement for specifically the large maps of WW.
I almost never played WW's large maps, because they just required too much time for what the game was, and there wasn't enough going on to justify it. I think that SOS takes that larger scale and adds in enough new features and activity to make it more worthwhile spending that amount of time. I don't feel that it succeeds in occupying its niche in the way that its predecessor did, but I am at least much more interested in playing a game of SOS than I ever was in playing WW's large maps.
I've thought about the notion of combat in 3D space -- and I'm sure that Digital Eel at least considered it -- and I suspect that heading down such a path was simply too much of a complication (for both the game and the user) to be worthwhile for them. It would have differentiated the gameplay for sure, but I'm sure it would have been tremendously tricky to do well.
It will be fascinating to learn whether the modding support opens up this possibility, though.
