The desire to set out into the unknown and build one’s own destiny has been part of the human adventure, since ancient times, including Marco Polo, the great voyages and reaching space, the last frontier. In this sense, it is an ambitious title that seeks to offer an entire universe for the player to explore and create their own narratives.
However, independent developer ResilientLogic Games stumbles over budgetary issues (inside and outside the game), runs into bugs and ends up failing catastrophically by delivering an experience that is even more drawn out than allowed for the space subgenre.
Beauty doesn’t set the table?
We need to talk about financial resources. Immediately, I would like to get out of the way the glaring economic difference between a millionaire studio capable of developing an Elite Dangerous or a No Man’ Sky and a studio in the global South. It would be unfair to make comparisons between graphics, level of polish, dubbing and other technical factors that money can buy. DRIFT is a low-budget game and will be analyzed within this context.
Historically, the genre it belongs to started with monochrome graphics (like the very first Elite, an immortal classic) and generated titles that transcended limitations like Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. More recently, I analyzed , which wouldn’t win any cosmic beauty contest, but it did a great job in this regard.
The fact is that DRIFT is ugly. Its graphical interface is reminiscent of websites from the early days of the internet, its cut-out 3D objects do not have any anti-aliasing treatment against the background used. His use of colors is simplistic. Your space trip is a basically black landscape, with some stars in the background. It’s a game that seems developed using archaic Flash technology, but it was made in Unity.
Still, there’s something seductive about these design choices. It is noticeable that ResilientLogic Games tried as best as possible to skip this UI stage to get to the mechanics. Would an “eye candy” be a satisfactory addition? Certainly. However, deep down, deep down, all space games are complex menus and tables for management lovers. It’s a matter of managing numbers and seeing numbers rising, a truth that David Braben saw way back in the early days of the genre and he just added layers of visual effects on top of the spreadsheets.
Unfortunately, it is in this large empty space of style that the player will spend most of his time. Once the transport mission has been decided, in a matter of seconds, the following minutes will be an infinite succession of the same commands: take off, activate self-navigation, contemplate your life choices for many, many minutes, land, choose the next mission.
DRIFT exposes the aridity of the genre. The “eye candy” had a reason for being, after all. Between one trip and another, there is nothing else to do. The game still makes the extra mistake of making manual navigation almost impossible, in the absence of a tutorial. Auto-navigation itself can cause uncorrectable errors if you turn it off and on again or if you change the destination midway. The only solution for these route changes is to save, exit the game and return, and the auto-navigation resets and returns to compliance.
ResilientLogic Games seems to be self-critical or at least aware that these long journeys are boring. There is an AI on the ship that makes random comments from time to time. It’s not exactly an interaction and the AURA AI seems to provoke the player.
Is this AI messing with me?
DRIFT at least has a great soundtrack. It’s satisfying enough to listen to the tracks, but it’s also possible that my brain was grasping at something between the starting point and the finishing point of each mission.
A Space Gig Economy de D.R.I.F.T.
According to the developer, the title will allow the player to choose how to approach this universe: will he transport cargo? Will he buy resources on space stations and sell them for higher prices on colonies and vice versa? Will he mine asteroids? Will he investigate anomalies? Will he rescue shipwrecks? Will he make alliances with factions? There are many ambitions and, to be honest, I have no way of finding out if the studio managed to expand this range. The reason is very simple: I am poor.
The DRIFT economy is brutal at its inception, it is the ferocious face of capitalism. Your character does not own a ship and works with randomly borrowed ships for each mission. This means that it is possible to accept a mission that will take an unbearable amount of minutes to complete and find that that time will be doubled or tripled because your ship is slow. And the cargo will arrive late and your reputation will suffer, because of an element that you don’t control.
The most obvious solution is to raise funds to buy your own ship. This would not only open up the certainty of the speed it will be capable of, but it would also open up the mechanics of buying parts to improve it or buying goods to resell. Except that the dream of your own spaceship is a torment. I started a session, played for an hour and collected 12 thousand credits. The cheapest ship cost 96 thousand credits. Do the math.
Believing I had fallen into the worst possible universe, I opened another session, generated another random universe, and stayed true to it for another three hours (not in a row, of course). I took care to only accept missions with the best pay. In total, I completed 28 strictly identical missions (fly from point A to point B, earn money). I made 40 thousand credits. I found an even cheaper ship to sell in a lost colony! And the dream remained impossible, because the cheapest ship was costing 56 thousand credits.
Could I have played for another 90 minutes and saved that money? Perhaps. How dedicated was I to watching black space go by for 90 minutes? Disheartening, but I could have done it. Except my last mission left me on a space station with zero missions. None. Nothing. Remembering that I was an informal worker, without my own ship and the only way to borrow a ship was to accept a mission. In practice, I was condemned to live on that station, becoming a space beggar. Could I load a saved game? Neither. The only way to exit the game (without Alt+F4, of course) is the Save and Exit button.
DRIFT promises freedom, but throws in your face the horror of a system that sucks your soul and traps you in repetitive work. Is it the most representative game of our times or just a title with serious balance problems?
