FTL: Faster Than Light

kind of addicting cause it seems pretty hard even on normal. did the tutorial and fiddled around for 3 runs, my entire crew was dead within about 5 jumps every time, then I ragequit. did not even make it out of the first system yet, I'll give it a serious go later. first thing I noticed was the 8-bit/demo style bg music, it's mesmerizing and really well done here.
 
Ya the difficulty curve needs some work. On easy I had no problem getting to the last system, and then found the boss completely impossible. Tried cheating (giving myself tons of money), still couldn't handle the boss. It goes from easy to impossible in one sector.

Hopefully they'll fix that as the game is interesting and over all well done.
 
They should put out a demo or something. Seems like the kind of game you either love or hate, but it's hard to tell from reports and videos. :D
 
This game sucks. I'm the target audience and I hate it. Waited months for this release and I'm disappointed to the point of being sick. It's just a bad game on so many levels. Rubbish presentation. Tedious, tedious gameplay. Difficulty curve is absurd and frustrating because the "strategies" the game wants you to use are counterintuitive and poorly explained. I had my ship destroyed twice in a row within the first several combat sequences because a fire raged out of control and I couldn't vent the fire to space because the door controls were damaged both times when the fire started. The "adventure" part of the game that connects up the various combat sequences is bland and pointless. The combat itself is frustrating, unintuitive, and just plain boring. The universe is lifeless and utterly dull. I concur that the music is kinda cool in a retro 8-bit spacey way, but I can't think of much else good to say about it. It's like Ninja (DOS, shareware, 1986) -- a decent game for shareware and considering the fact we didn't have much else to play in 1986 when it came out it was a dandy little action game. But in 2012 Ninja would be an utter piece of shit. That's how I feel about this game. It would have been a solid freeware/shareware game 20-25 years ago, but today we've got good games everywhere you look, on all manner of platforms. I could go on Google and in 5 minutes play 3 different flash games that are better than FTL. I was hoping for Starcon 2 meets MOO2 or at least "Space Rogue" like they advertised but this is not even Space Rogue. It's "garbage".

edit: I've spent 2 hours so far on this thing, and because I'm the target audience and I LOVE space TBS/roguehack/etc I'm going to give it another 2-3 hours before I uninstall it. I'll post again tomorrow.

edit2: picture of ninja circa 1986. if it doesn't look familiar, you aren't oldschool enough. I did not play ninja in CGA color as shown however, I had a green monochrome AT&T 8086.

jWrIo.jpg
 
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Pretty harsh, requiem. I like it. Sure, it's hard and unforgiving, but that's the nature of the genre, no? I'm enjoying it.
 
Hard and unforgiving is fine. Arbitrary random chance causing unforgiving difficulty is not fine at all. On top of that the combat mechanic is dubious at best, the interface is simple yet unintuitive, and the gameplay entirely lacks nuance. There are cool things like balancing your crew jobs effectively, and the randomness of encounters is always welcome, but its this very randomness being heavily slanted against the player (mistakes and failures are not only not explained, they often aren't even apparent) that makes it a tough game to get into or appreciate. Plus the game is 90% combat and the combat sucks. It's so boring, and that from someone who spent his entire Friday night playing MOO2, SMAC, and Starcon2. :(
 
Yeah I just beat the first area and I'm uninstalling it. It's a tedious statgrind timesink. You can easily lose hours and hours playing it but they aren't hours you will look back on fondly. It's just a time waster, and a really generic time waster at that.

edit: and lol permanent death with no save function except when exiting the game. GG for thinking gamers want to statgrind over and over in a generic random universe with permanent death and no saving. What on earth is wrong with you? I'll fire up IdleRPG before I waste one more minute on this dreck.
 
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gave it a bit more time today and it's not that bad imo, once you figure out the ui and some basic strategy, stayed on "normal" and managed to get through the first 3 systems or so. the combat can be sort of turn-based as well if you make use of the pause function at the right times, I would just set weapons to auto-fire and pause to change targets/reallocate power in between volleys. it's key to get that 4th crew member asap, and preferably an engi type (a "cyborg" immune to infection with double repair/half damage), or at least some other non human with other abilities, once you have a decent crew it's pretty much smooth sailing. and make sure to upgrade engines first, this evasion stat makes a huge difference once you get to 25% or so, then you have more options to leave it unmanned and still dodge a good amount of hits.

agree the game is ruined by the save system, not because you can't save at any point easily, but because ship mechanics are deep enough to be a tactical rpg that makes this play style pointless. complaining about permanent death would be pointless as well though tbh, since the game was advertised as rogue-like from the start, and if you know what that means then you should not be expecting the ability to spam save-reload at all.

requiem99 said:
and lol permanent death with no save function except when exiting the game. GG for thinking gamers want to statgrind over and over in a generic random universe with permanent death and no saving. What on earth is wrong with you? I'll fire up IdleRPG before I waste one more minute on this dreck.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Like
 
mas said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Like
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The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by level randomization, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment.​

From the Steam game page:
This "spaceship simulation roguelike-like" allows you to take your ship and crew on an adventure through a randomly generated galaxy filled with glory and bitter defeat.
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Emphasized in case anyone criticizes about the perma-death. These are the kind of games and different other genres I and many other 30-plus year olds on this forum played when we were kids on our good old PC XT or DOS machines, or old 8-bit and 16-bit consoles.

You know... when games actually offered a CHALLENGE. Games that made you think. Games that made you throw your controller halfway across the room because you couldn't get past a certain level. Then, you'd eventually come back to it when you get this "epiphany" and beat the level afterwards. Back then games took days, weeks, or even a couple months to beat. Many games didn't even have save features or had to enter codes to resume a level.

I consider the 80s and 90s the best days of PC and console gaming, the peak of gaming. No Call of Duty or 8 to 20 hour games that are only extended by DLCs that cost $5, $10 or $20 a piece. Games nowadays I don't see that same level of challenge. It's always catered to the short attention spans of people nowadays. There are much less games I've played in the last 10 years that have lasted as long as many of the games I've played in the 80s and 90s, and kept me playing them. That's a fact. Less games nowadays have offered me the same longevity and challenge as the games of the past. I hate it, absolutely hate how gaming has become. Only real-time strategy and long adventure games keep my interest now to keep playing them.

This is why I love indie games like FTL and I've voted up a lot of Steam Greenlight indie games that remind me of the old days and look fun and challenging at the same time. I think the big name game publishers and developers like EA, Ubisoft, and a few others don't care about them anymore. It's why the cater-to-short-attention-span console gaming is going up than down compared to a lot of PC games nowadays. Those criticisms are everywhere, and it's not even from me but other players.

The only downside to FTL I can see so far is the lack of a save feature. Other than that, I feel nostalgic playing it.
 
octoberasian said:
The only downside to FTL I can see so far is the lack of a save feature. Other than that, I feel nostalgic playing it.
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there is a save feature, but it's designed so that you would use it only when quitting the game. though if you really wanted to, I'm sure it's possible to save/reload at any point you want, by backing up the FTL profile in your userdocs every time, you could even set up an autohotkey script or something to quicksave/quickload with copy/paste/run commands.
 
mas said:
there is a save feature, but it's designed so that you would use it only when quitting the game. though if you really wanted to, I'm sure it's possible to save/reload at any point you want, by backing up the FTL profile in your userdocs every time, you could even set up an autohotkey script or something to quicksave/quickload with copy/paste/run commands.
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Then, it's a lot like Minecraft's save feature for single player and multiplayer mode. It doesn't save until you quit or disconnect from the game.
 
The game isn't totally worthless, don't get me wrong. It's that the core gameplay, the ship to ship combat that you spend 98% of the game doing, is simplistic and tedious. Sorry, but I think Zaxxon, Space War, and Fort Apocalypse required more strategy than FTL, and they aren't even strategy games. Throw in no-save-anywhere (which would be just fine since this is Rogue-Like and not Rogue-Clone) and you have a game that is both boring and tedious. We don't even need to mention the lack of content or the utilitarian graphics (which I actually like) because they don't factor into the final verdict as they're irrelevant when the core 98% is so bad. I stand by what I said. This game sucks.

edit: And I could care less about permanent death. I love the permanent death option, but notice that key word in there -- OPTION. Nobody wants to play Hardcore the first time, every time, until the end of time. If you claim you do, you're trying too hard.
 
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requiem99 said:
The game isn't totally worthless, don't get me wrong. It's that the core gameplay, the ship to ship combat that you spend 98% of the game doing, is simplistic and tedious. Sorry, but I think Zaxxon, Space War, and Fort Apocalypse required more strategy than FTL, and they aren't even strategy games. Throw in no-save-anywhere (which would be just fine since this is Rogue-Like and not Rogue-Clone) and you have a game that is both boring and tedious. We don't even need to mention the lack of content or the utilitarian graphics (which I actually like) because they don't factor into the final verdict as they're irrelevant when the core 98% is so bad. I stand by what I said. This game sucks.
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Rogue-like means it is like Rogue, as in shares many of the same features of said-game. Rogue-like is a genre unto itself. Most games of the genre do not have a feature to allow you to save anywhere and they are brutally difficult. They are also very simplistic in their mechanics. Perma-death is also a staple of the genre. FTL is supposed to be a hardcore Rogue-like.
 
this game is fail whit out saves.i got to sector 6 and was doing go then i got in to a fight over a sun and the other ship had emp which took out my shields and the sun went and set my ship on fire my weapon room and shields room was on fire, and and my door room got hit by the other ship so i couldn't even vent the dam fire. by the time i had my door room fixed i was under 50% hp and guns and shields where gone and no air left on 1/2 my ship. by the time i had shields back online the sun hit me again and set more of my ship on fire and then the other ship killed me.

there should be a save every time you go to a new sector or give you x amounts of saves at the start of the game. this is not 1980s anymore and this game is way to complex to not have some kind of in game save. other then that its a really fun game and theirs so much ship customization that it should be a rpg not what we have right now
if
the guy doesn't patch in some kind of saves he and idiot as no one likes not having it and just have a hc mode with no saves
 
Derangel said:
Rogue-like means it is like Rogue, as in shares many of the same features of said-game. Rogue-like is a genre unto itself. Most games of the genre do not have a feature to allow you to save anywhere and they are brutally difficult. They are also very simplistic in their mechanics. Perma-death is also a staple of the genre. FTL is supposed to be a hardcore Rogue-like.
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Except it advertises the difficulties as "easy" and "normal". If it is super hardcore then maybe they should be "very hard" and "near impossible".

My biggest problem with regards to difficulty is the whacked boss fight. Like I said, I played the game on easy and generally it was. Got to the final sector. Then it was suddenly impossible. That isn't a difficulty curve, that's a difficulty wall. Had it been a case where I'd barely survived the previous sector and then gotten beaten, well that would make sense. Things slowly got more difficult until I couldn't handle it. Learn more, try again. However it went from quite easy, to completely impossible.

Like I said I even cheated the second time through, which made it trivially easy up to the boss, then still impossible.

That is bad design. Games can be hard or easy that is all fine, nobody is saying all games should be a walk in the park. However consistency in difficulty curve is important. It is important that it smoothly ramps up in difficulty as the player plays. If it doesn't change at all, it gets boring. If it suddenly jumps, it gets frustrating and there's no change to learn.

Overall if they don't fix the difficulty curve I think the game is a pass (and I was a KS backer of it).
 
solution for those who want a save you can go back and reload to in case you die or mess up or something:

1. save and quit where you want, like when you enter a new system
2. go to userdocs .\mygames\fasterthanlight\ and make a copy of continue.sav
3. reload and play where you left off

when you die the game keeps high score and completed stats in prof.sav, leave that file alone. it also deletes any continue.sav files when this happens, but since you now have a copy, you can just rename it back to continue.sav and reload it.
 
The game is AMAZING, one of the best this year.

Also, all of you complaining about difficulty kind of miss the point. One thing is that you gain better and better ships as you play. Eventually you get ships that can reasonably make it through the end game.

Until then, enjoy dying.

I'm being serious, dying is actually one of the best things about this game. After about six hours my mindset changed from "how am I going to kill the end boss?" to "how badass can I make this shit before an unfortunate confluence of circumstances completely fucks me over?".

I've grown to love seeing the unexpected ways in which my ship and crew dies. Its an aspect of random generation I haven't seen in a long time. These days (because games have become easy) people associate random generation with loot, but not with how completely unfair some sessions can turn out to be. There's generally a balance, but in this game you can get all the good things in a run (crew, resources, etc), sometimes you get a mix of good and bad, and sometimes you just get flat out screwed the whole time with no hope of making it very far.

You don't know what'll happen, each game is totally different, but that's the fun! :)
 
I agree with Serpico. The possibility of annihilation at any moment and the end of your adventure is a big part of the atmosphere and fun in a game like this. On my first run I had a lot of luck (it was almost too easy) and got to the boss with quite good weapons, almost maxed shields and 8 crew members. While I got obliterated by the boss, I did learn a lot about managing my crew, the appropriate tactics for the default ship and what I did wrong.

I'm currently on my second run, this time with the Engi Cruiser, and the tactics differ quite a bit from the Kestrel. If all ships (and possibly layouts) have similar impact on tactics, then I'll be playing this game for quite a while.

Also props to Subset Games for making a Linux version.
 
I have been having fun with this game. I do agree that difficult curve is nuts. I can get always get to the final boss. I can even get to the second phase of the final boss but then it all goes south.

I think you need to strategize when to engage the last boss. You want to do it near a repair station so that you can repair then jump into second phase of the fight. I do fear it will have a third phase based on the how the enemy boss graphically damaged..

If you think it is hard now....wait till you unlock the stealth fighter. No shield...just 9 seconds of stealth every 15 seconds ;P Gotta time stealth to go off when the enemy ship is about to fire. whaahahahaha.....pain in the ass!

The difficulty of each run I believe is based on luck to a degree. What tech shows up at the store. What tech do you find by questing/doing good deeds. I got the bio gun once...and let me tell you that just wrecked people. Once you dropped an enemies shields you can just kill their crew.

The most reliable weapon seems to be the s-bombs. They only use one power and cannot be shot down by drones. They use missile ammo. They also ignore shields and in my experience cause a lot of fires.
 
The second phase is where it suddenly went very badly. No matter how much I fired at the boss ship, I could never manage to do more than get through the shield. The shield then regenerated by the time I was able to fire the next barrage. I'll have to try and get some teleporting bombs.
 
I don't consider slogging through tediously slow randomly generated statgrinds multiple times at the mercy of a luck generator to be "gaming goodness". If the game itself was fun I wouldn't hate on it so much, but the core gameplay is simply dreadful.
 
requiem99 said:
I don't consider slogging through tediously slow randomly generated statgrinds multiple times at the mercy of a luck generator to be "gaming goodness". If the game itself was fun I wouldn't hate on it so much, but the core gameplay is simply dreadful.
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Then, quite simply, the genre isn't for you. I spent the better part of the last three hours playing it and dying multiple times I find it fun, I love the genre. You don't and that's that, nothing wrong with it it just is what it is.
 
requiem99 said:
I don't consider slogging through tediously slow randomly generated statgrinds multiple times at the mercy of a luck generator to be "gaming goodness". If the game itself was fun I wouldn't hate on it so much, but the core gameplay is simply dreadful.
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We get it. You don't like the game. You really don't need to repost the same opinion with no new information after every post someone makes that says they like the game.

Personally, I like the game. The permadeath makes it all feel much more meaningful, and the gameplay itself is addicting. I suck at it though. Always die when my craft gets boarded...
 
MasterOfPupets said:
Personally, I like the game. The permadeath makes it all feel much more meaningful, and the gameplay itself is addicting. I suck at it though. Always die when my craft gets boarded...
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get defense drone schematics, this guy is badass he can take 2 dudes by himself. other than that just put 1 bar into blast doors and open the airlock soon as you get boarded, defense drone doesn't need air and you get the rest :cool:
 
Great game, played it all the way from the onlive demo through the beta phase but haven't had a chance to play for a good month or two (I've missed a few patches at least). If you don't like roguelikes, don't bother - if the idea intrigues you, go for it.
 
requiem99 said:
I don't consider slogging through tediously slow randomly generated statgrinds multiple times at the mercy of a luck generator to be "gaming goodness". If the game itself was fun I wouldn't hate on it so much, but the core gameplay is simply dreadful.
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The game is not like the old NES Star Voyager game where if you didnt get a weapon on the first five planets you needed to restart the game. It is not that bad.

This game just forces you to change out your tactics depending on what you find. My fun comes from trying to adapt to what tech is given to me.
 
Game is a major time sink, but challenge accepted. A welcome change of pace from the hand holding industry standard we've been bombarded with in recent times.
 
MasterOfPupets said:
I suck at it though. Always die when my craft gets boarded...
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Upgraded blast doors should be one of your first upgrades.

Open up the airlocks and make a path to where the enemies are. Let the lack of oxygen soften them up before you have to go in and take them out. Try and fight them in medical if you can since you'll be healed as you're taking damage.

Pretty soon you'll be able to handle a boarding while fighting off an enemy spaceship with no problem!
 
requiem99 said:
If the game itself was fun I wouldn't hate on it so much, but the core gameplay is simply dreadful.
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Nope. Move forward.

Serpico said:
I'm being serious, dying is actually one of the best things about this game. After about six hours my mindset changed from "how am I going to kill the end boss?" to "how badass can I make this shit before an unfortunate confluence of circumstances completely fucks me over?".

I've grown to love seeing the unexpected ways in which my ship and crew dies. Its an aspect of random generation I haven't seen in a long time. These days (because games have become easy) people associate random generation with loot, but not with how completely unfair some sessions can turn out to be. There's generally a balance, but in this game you can get all the good things in a run (crew, resources, etc), sometimes you get a mix of good and bad, and sometimes you just get flat out screwed the whole time with no hope of making it very far.
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You nailed it.

I've been enjoying the game the better part of the weekend despite other gaming plans and I'm impressed. I sort of think of it as part roguelike, part text adventure (maybe choose your own adventure), part spaceship sim. I really like the spaceship sim/management aspects that I'm seeing. It's easy to pick up on and learn the basics, but there's some definite subtle tactics that will take some time to master. And strategy that must be considered before you even engage in tougher battles. Popping off a few weapons is good, but, when you start to mix in boarding actions (and repelling boarders!), timing the cloaking device, targeting enemy ship systems, repairing your own systems, healing your crew, and probably more than a few other things I'm forgetting - you've got something that's engaging and satisfying on a tactical level I haven't seen for a while in a space game. Just mashing a trigger button or right clicking? Forget about it.

More importantly than all that, though? It's fun playing it and seeing what's around the next corner (or at the next jump point, perhaps). It's pretty hard for me to put the game down once I get rolling with it.
 
I can make it through to the last system (at least on easy) once I get a decent strategy going. My latest game was quite successful until I got to the end. I used stealth and the weapon precharge augment to gain first strike on my enemies to take out their weapon system - many didn't even get to fire a shot before I destroyed them. However, the 2nd boss attack still does a quick job of killing me; I never managed to destroy it yet.

It spams the drones so missiles don't get through and has max shields so that beam weapons are ineffective. Bombs would probably work great, but finding them in the game depends on luck so I've only used them in one game (I died before making it to the boss because I forgot that bombs used ammo). Maybe next time I'll try boarding the ship to take out either the shields or drone control.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this game.
 
I'm glad that I gave this game a chance. I'm not normally a huge fan of space games but I do enjoy rouge-likes. I'm having fun with this one so far.

I was going along pretty well on my last run until I hit an asteroid belt. It was all over from there.

I really hope that this game gets the sort of attention from the developer that Dungeons of Dredmor received.
 
Excellent game, it really is. I played an rpg board game which was very similar when I was a kid, fighting off aliens with a crew on a spaceship travelling through space... had alot of fun with that, and I'm having fun with this.

To those complaining, it's a Rogue-Like... meaning, you die, that's the end of the road. The hardcore factor really takes it up a notch since you no longer have the safety net of a recent save. Be sure to clear as many beacons in the earlier sectors as you can or you just won't have the crew or equipment or drones to do well in the later sectors.

Your survivability will go up once you figure out all the mechanics but even then there are moments that even the best prepared won't survive... so luck is another factor. I managed to get all the way to the Flagship in the last sector and I died screaming when my missile missed three times in a row. Still when you unlock the Engi ship (by making it to Sector 5) the game gets a hell of alot easier since you start with a drone bay.
 
Best 8 bucks i have spent in years. i am just glad they didn't port it to android since i would probably get fired, its so adicting. i keep telling my self "just one more try, just one more try"
 
I'm in agreement with everyone here. Picked it up off GOG and played the hell out of it while doing mining ops in EVE.

I started out on Easy just to get a feel for it and was alright up until, like others, the end boss kicked my ass first round. I went from paying attention to mining cycles in EVE to "omg wtf how'd my ship just get obliterated like that... that was awesome... alright I'll start over and own him this time".

I anticipate dying often again.

Quite frankly, I've seen it said before that this game is like the Dwarf Fortress of space game roguelikes. I suggest requiem99 play that game, its free so you can't complain about the price, then tell us about the learning curve and the impossibility of that game where dying is "fun".
 
Hey im not really sure on how to get new ships. i got one but i didn't really do any thing to get it, so im still not sure.
 
Managed to complete the game after 15 hours or so of play (I haven't tried easy). Addictive game.

Have to laugh at the people saying the game is too difficult. If they did the tiniest amount of research they'd have known it was a roguelike game... and roguelike games are hard. The instant gratification generation simply won't like this game.

You get a new ship when you reach sector 5 for the first time, and there are events that happen to unlock the others. Each ship has 3 achievements and completing 2 of them unlocks a new layout of that ship. Layout B of the starter ship is good, especially if you can manage to get some drones to go with it.
 
IcarusSC said:
Pretty harsh, requiem. I like it. Sure, it's hard and unforgiving, but that's the nature of the genre, no? I'm enjoying it.
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lol, requiem for the ragequit anyone?

I have enjoyed this game so far. After about 10 deaths on normal I switched to easy mode. A couple of resets, but finished off the final boss with great difficulty.

My path of upgrades: shields, engines, weapons, doors. Keep designated crewmen at only one station for the duration, they're experience will really stack up. Always use at least one missle, since they go thru shields. Take out weapons and shields asap. 2 burst-2 lasers took me thru most of the game. Most ships send thier teleport crew over immediatly, exception is the boss.

There's such a huge roll of the dice involved throughout. One game they're throwing free weapons at you, the next it's crewmen.
 
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