Posted: Dec 30, 2020
Voidspace is a survival MMORPG, which means you could potentially be in contact with many other players, however the game world is enormous and this gives people the option to be generally outside of civilization. You start out in the void with a destroyed ship, no oxygen, and if you do nothing you'll die. As far as online video games go, Voidspace is definitely one to start you off in the deep end. First order of business is following the tutorial to get yourself a habitat that functions and some breathable oxygen. Then you need to get a power source going, there are solar panels in the vehicle you entered with. Your old ship is mostly destroyed, but as part of the early tutorial you'll have it patched up so it can at least hold an atmosphere.
Using the unique invention (crafting) system you "McGyver" yourself a solar array from pipes and wiring from the wrecked ship you arrived with. This is just a matter of filling out a recipe for this one after you scavenge around for the parts. Once that's taken care of you need to figure out a means of travel because your suit can only take you so far. There is a working escape pod in the ship, but it's fuel and inventory storage is terrible. I mean, it's an escape pod. So you add some makeshift tanks and storage pods onto it, once again utilizing invention/crafting. The new ship you've made is bigger and travels further, but it's quite a bit slower due to the added mass. You also don't have a replacement for it (and currently you can't repair things, yet) so you gotta be careful with it. There are also some ominous looking ships nearby on your map, they're red, and you should be worried about that and stay away.
The last part of the tutorial is finally making a weapon after learning how to mine from asteroids and having learned a slew of new "inventions". What makes crafting unique in this game is that while the recipes are created by the devs, every time you prototype a new technique for a recipe the resulting item has randomly different stats. This allows you to created better versions of that equipment simply by working on new techniques by repeating the step of prototyping, which takes time. There are a lot of progress bars in this game, but you're meant to play with multiple characters; while one alt is working on some invention you're exploring and scavenging.
From here on out you're experimenting on new stuff (gas clouds you find, mining asteroids) you get better and better at building ships and can start making bigger ones and they'll eventually get quite large. You do start to hit a serious problem of a shortage of resources though because really the game is meant to be built up by the players as a whole, not just by 1 person. As an individual, you can't really accomplish modern living like we have in real life; it takes a lot of people specializing and contributing to common infrastructure to create that kind of convenience, ease, and a "land of plenty".
Since Voidspace is an indie MMORPG in early access, we're not quite at the point where players are working together much yet. There are mechanics for that in place, but there isn't yet a critical mass of players where this has been accomplished in a meaningful way. We're right at the beginning of the game world right now, what we like to call the pioneer stage.
The game is "twitch gameplay" so not so much point and click, but you're actually driving your ship. We plan on making an option of playing point-and-click and we've been working towards a better AI that would allow for this. This option would especially be nice on mobile where controls can be more difficult than on other survival MMORPGs that are targeting a specific platform.
The invention system does involve a lot of waiting. Most things take under an hour, some only minutes, but dismantling a huge multi-ton wreckage by hand takes actual days. Technology WILL progress so that this takes MUCH less time, maybe even minutes compared to days, but we're not quite there yet and we have to create the tech tree in the appropriate order that it would be discovered in real life. These timers are absolutely necessary to ensure there is a steady progression due to the fact that this is an open-world MMORPG. If we made it easy for people to progress through the tech tree and max out the stats on each skill, those skills could easily be taught to other players and the technological progression would hit a ceiling much too early. The hope is for Voidspace's game world to grow gradually over a period of years as players slowly push technology forward to advance the in-game civilization.
The community is very helpful and friendly for the most part, odds are this is going to be your experience. Which is good because there isn't a lot of protections in place yet for you and your stuff just yet. The AI has recently been overhauled and it's better but still needs polish. This AI is important because you can set it to defend you and your stuff while you're not online. Your character and their stuff doesn't "disappear" from the world just because you're offline, the AI is meant to keep it as safe as possible. It is for this reason that people are encouraged to group up and form common defensive measures where everyone is defending each other and keeping order in their part of the void.
This is a very raw and untamed world that will hopefully one day be tamed by the very players that make it chaotic.
