izigame.me

Forever Skies is an interesting take on the survival genre. Unfortunately the developers, when they recently implemented multi-player, rebalanced the entire game for this component in mind. This left many aspects of single player now requiring a lot more tedious micromanagement or just having to navigate multiple interface screens where the experience prior was more user friendly, and allowed players to focus on the exploration and building as opposed to tedious base management exercises.
This is not a knock on multi-player, this was a much requested feature, the issue is that, as is usually the case, the developers botched the implementation.
Added micromanagement:
- Originally all the planters had a 5 unit water storage, so the player could fill them up, add the seed they wanted and come check on them maybe one additional time, add a little water if needed and then harvest the plant when ripened.
Now, the dev's have removed the water tank so the plants hold a single unit of water. Why is this a big deal? Well the large planters can take 5 units of water for the plant to grow, so where before there was a single fill up and then off to do other things, the player now have to come back about every three minutes to add another water unit. Who doesn't like having to baby-sit plants instead of just letting them grow when you give them all the resources needed? /s
Now the player can get pipes to connect the planters to water storage tanks but that's fairly well along the main story line, so unless a few hours are spent to speed rush to be able to get them, they are stuck having to babysit planters. Fun fun.
Added user interface tedium:
- The dev's did a great change where they added a printer to the players suit, where previously this was only possible via a ship based printer/fabricator. The issue? They removed every recipe from the ship printer that they added to the suit printer. So what could have been a nice addition to the stand-alone printer is now a tedious exercise in swapping between two different devices, that do not share any recipes, where it all used to be on one device prior.
It's to be applauded tho give the players more portability and accessibility by adding the suit printer, but a complete cock-up in removing functionality that was there previously and now forces the players to not only swap between the two, but remember which recipes are made for each device.
Oh, and did i mention that the suit printer is 2 layers deep in the interface? So instead of an instant open interface (single click) as there was with the ship printer for the suit printer the player now has to open a sub menu (like inventory) and then manually click the "suit printer" tab, since there is also no hot key for the suit printer.
This might not sound like much extra but imagine going into the suit printer hundreds or thousands of times over the course of the game, and having to stop and select the sub menu for the suit printer. That second or two of extra time add's up and would be hours of time spent cumulatively just opening a sub menu.
These are just a few of the changes that show that the dev's have questionable choices on game balance and keeping things focused on player time spent in game on the actual game play and not game micro-management. The idea may be fine in theory but a game that originally was a SP game shouldn't be balanced for MP since that makes the SP experience very grindy when it doesn't need to be. Other developers have changed the game resource spawning, resources needed or other things that help split the difference between SP and MP without skewing the balance, but this takes time and effoprt which was not spent here unfortunately.
Also, implementing items that are meant to bolster player options, like the suit printer, should NEVER decrease functionality in another area, especially if the change adds even more time spent in interface instead of playing the game. Additional items were mentioned to the dev's during their initial MP play testing and they were ignored, until the MP aspect went live and many others added the negative feedback, and they finally adjusted those issues. This shows the dev is more focues on their vision, even if that implementation is faulty or goes against player time and game flow. Ripping functionality out, just because you add something different (substitute vs addition to) shows the dev misses the big picture or doesn't value player time.
With all that taken into account, I don't feel Forever Skies is a positive recommendation, unless the player is ready to micro-manage parts of the game they shouldn't have to, and like having tedium added for their play experience. Even then I'd strongly recommend to get the game on sale, if it's picked up at all. I will likley continue to play since the game is now finally almost finished and may as well get my money worth from being an EA supporter for more than a year, but definitely don't recommend to others as noted.
EDIT Feb 14, 2025: The dev's are adding a suit printer hotkey but doing NOTHING to reinstate the recipes they ripped from the ship printer to make the players time worth while. As noted earlier, poor dev implementation is when they add something helpful but rip something else out in the meantime.
Unfortunately this isn't actually a zero sum equation, it's a complete step backward. Nothing makes up for splitting the entire printing structure in half to go to two different machines when they could have left all of it on the ship printer and simply had the suit printer for extra player convenience. Talk about missing the forest for the trees, and dev's being so stubborn that they actually add in items that take MORE player time to complete the same task than it did before, for no additional benefit.
Beware of dev's who complicate things just to add false padding to the playtime than what you actually need to use. Splitting a single task into two now, with nothing extra added other than splitting processes and using more player time to complete the same tasks than before, is a sure sign of a dev who doesn't care at all about player time and experience.