Launch day: A game I mildly enjoyed. After the Resubmerged update: Wow! What a turn around. The devs had been working hard to retweak the game's formerly notoriously bad controls, but with the latest 1.2 update, Diluvion feels like a brand new boat. New graphics. Changes to quests. Changes to the map. Changes to the save feature. Changes to almost everything. Even many of the old bugs are gone. It's not quite a 5 star game. There are still some minor nuisances. But Diluvion is now worth a dive.
Even though I own the Steam version of this game instead of here, I must say I've found the negativity and even sometimes hatred to be somewhat overbearing and overblown, even from the very beginning during the game's disastrous launch and into its "vanilla" build. This had always been a niche game to appeal to people with a different mindset than most big budget games tend to attract. I had always enjoyed the leisurely pace the game offered from the beginning, but now one year later, with three big updates and numerous patches, the game is far more fleshed out. Foundations added base building. Pathfinder added planetary buggies to get around in. Atlas Rises rebooted the universe and added different recipes to get rich quick and a much needed set of stories to different aspects of the game. Not RPG level, but let's just say different tasks now seem to have purpose. Whether this game is fleshed out enough to be fulfilling depends on the gamer. Planets of one biome type will always load the same types of creatures and assets. That one alien deer thing will always look similar to its cousin in the next star system over. The alien NPCs will always be talking speakerboxes who don't possess the same "spark of life" as the NPCs of Skyrim, who move around and have lives outside your hero. But there's something to be said about hearing the woosh of spacecraft overhead as you touch down on a space station or a trading post. There's something to be said about pulse jetting off to a distant planet and going "what will I find today", breaking the atmosphere, hopping out of your craft and seeing postcard perfect vistas and the planet's brother looming in the sky. People hold up the E3 trailer as some kind of mythical "what if" and hold it against this game. But judging by comments you still see being kicked around to this day, it seems like people were bound to misunderstand how this game wanted to play. For someone like me, it's an explore, trade, mine, scanning good time. Enough to put in way more than 500 hours at least.
