Awwwww.... Pretty colors!
Newaiz, the main dealbreaker/maker for me is the damage model. Every shot should have a visible effect, chainguns tearing apart armor plating, missiles blowing sections apart, smaller fighters melting from being too close to the capitol ship beam weapons. Fuck, the tech has improved so much that they have no excuses anymore.
I could larp the effects with Freespace, but I shouldn't have to do that this day and age. You don't need to make the game much prettier, just make the damage model and physics better.
This.
We don't want cinefaggic awesome, we want interactive awesome.
Though when it comes to space-sim set in actual space, I still want my Newtonian.
Even leaving my obsession with space realism aside, the combat model in this game looks plain boring.
It would be adequate for an RTS like Homeworld, but in directly controlled shooter it simply can't sustain the interest.
Art design (apart from stupid mecha in space) is good, music is good but this isn't helping much if the game sucks.
Maybe there is some reason for me not liking arcadey spasims other than simply me being a hard sci-fi nerd.
Space is big. Space is empty. Big empty space isn't conductive to the gameplay if you're moving with velocities not exceeding that of a WW1 biplane. Purty backdrops and 'sploshuns don't change a damn.
A shooter has to be dynamic. If you want to make an arcade space shooter, make it revolve around flying at high speeds around planetary atmospheres, surreal landscapes and massive space stations, with a lot of interactivity and destructibility.
Open space and fleet battles won't sustain it. If you want open space, you need something else than pewpew to sustain your game, because it frankly won't be terribly dynamic otherwise.
As for 'sploshuns, what's with the recent trend of explosions not looking like explosions, but some monochrome, shitty, sterile (no debris or damage), cheap looking... things?
I can see it here, saw it in ME vidyas, saw a bit of it in UT3. What the fuck?
Q1 or Build explosions carried more oomph.
With all those fancy shadurz I'm sure you can do better you lazy fucks.
Stop complaining about pirates or haveing to sell over 9000000 copies to break even and get to fucking work.
And if you don't care about realism or anything, but want to go full space opera, then the best looking 'sploshuns, shields and whatnot in a space game were featured in Haegemonia.