Free and Open-Source Gaming

It's definitely a spiritual successor to EV, but it deviates in ~~just~~ enough ways that it's not quite living up to it's predecessor. It's very fun and it definitely scratches the nostalgia, but it doesn't fill in as a full-blown successor.

• It's heavily fleet-focused, rather than being more of a solo-pilot experience. I found several missions that were functionally impossible without fleet support, but were relatively trivial with a reasonable backing fleet, and the end-game is assembling not just one ship with the best gear in the galaxy - but a fleet of them. EV series' relationship with escorts was not as significant - they were very rarely the deciding factor in missions or battles, and you weren't able to change their outfits from default, so the total power available was far lower.

• Because there's more of a focus on fleets, ships ability to be upgraded has much wider balance implications than just pilot experience - so despite there being far more and far more interesting breadth of outfits available for customizing a ship, it feels like ships are far less customizable in total - ships sell with far less 'free' space and lower total outfit space, while sectioned space like weapons or engine capacity adds further constraints. Ships in EV had enough 'spare' space that the gap in power between your ship and a default version was much more meaningful, so that you could be asked to take on several at-level ships for a mission and that wasn't a prohibitive task.

• It's definitely open-source. In absolutely the best and worst ways - there's a lot of really diverse ideas and a lot more creativity among the various factions you meet than EV offered. There's way more story and depth to most factions than EV really offered, and it seems clear the intent is to build that level or deeper for all of the major factions over time. At the same time, they're all sectioned off and have varying narrative tone or content development, and there's not really a ton of interaction - so it does wind up feeling a little patchwork as you explore. The various pieces don't connect to each other well, so you really do get a vibe where the faction over here is Steve's pet project, while over there is Laura's faction, and these two factions were done by the OG dev, while the new guy made this faction over here but it's really new so there's not really anything there, and...

• Holy fucking beam weapons, batman. EV always was very hesitant about using beam weapons, and a lot of plugin content followed suit - as beam weapons tend to be incredibly hard to balance while also being very difficult to do well on an audio/visual front. Endless Sky uses a ton of beams in almost every faction. Whatever noise they make is guaranteed to get annoying after it's your primary weapon for a while, and often drowns out other cues, while the clutter of drawing N permanent glowing lines at all points you're holding the trigger gets really busy really fast. If the damage is even slightly too high, the ability to deliver it continuously and with near-perfect accuracy makes them busted, while if the damage is a little too low they're wasted dev effort. With turreted beams or on AI pilots, beams become a guaranteed source of damage. You can't out-pilot weapons that just draw a hitscan line to your ship, where out-piloting the 'projectile' weapons was one of the major feelings of player skill expression in the original EV series.

It's good. It's definitely good. It's amazing at the low low cost of "free". It's still in-progress so a lot of the content is still incoming and a whole bunch of tone and meshing issues are quite likely to get fixed. Just, some of the gaps between the games that inspired it and the game it wants to be happen to exist in the same spaces that fans of the originals vibed with hardest.