Article about SEV on Gamespot!

[Fyron]

SEIV has proven to be an order of magnitude or two greater in popularity than SEIII was... It went from shareware to having an actual publisher. Would you say SEIV is worse than SEIII?

[Kana]

My concern is the floating/ghost status reports on each ship in combat...get a bunch of ships on the screen, its going to be cluttered with ships, and status reports...

Kana

[Ed Kolis]

Presumably they'll be toggleable...

[Raapys]

SEIV has proven to be an order of magnitude or two greater in popularity than SEIII was... It went from shareware to having an actual publisher. Would you say SEIV is worse than SEIII?

Not at all. However, what scares me is when developers of a game series you like start to aim for a bigger audience, because their previous game became more popular than expected.
Now, a bigger audience *is* a bad thing for a gamer who's followed a series and has certain expectations.
The more people you make the game for, the more diverse their opinions about a game feature will be. So where as that company might have pretty much designed the previous game(s) for yourself and others like you, that could change if they decide to aim for a wider audience.

There's been a few titles that have dissapointed me that way lately, but then I barely see any good(subjective opinion of course) games released at all, anymore.

Anyways, I'm not saying that's where SEV is going. I don't believe it is, actually, because the developers have so good contact with the great community here, and the game series is still not very well-known.
I just don't like it when games become too popular.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Kana said:
My concern is the floating/ghost status reports on each ship in combat...get a bunch of ships on the screen, its going to be cluttered with ships, and status reports...

Kana

From what I can tell, those "status reports" are more like damage reports, i.e. they show you how much damage has been done to the ship in question. For all we know, those two ships might just have been hit (almost) simultaneously, and the damage reports are growing and fading, as is the custom with certain RPG's or something if I'm not mistaken (i.e. when you hit an Orc, it shows "22" above the orc's head, which then grows and fades away).

[Randallw]

I note that both those ships have no shields and that they are in a storm. Cleraly it's one of those storms that removes shields. What I find interesting is that it appears that the storm disspitates at the edges. So would the storm fill up the entire map or just part of it? As for the race portraits, it's going to be hard to make shipsets with race portraits as good.

[Will]

Well, I don't think it's exactly clear that it's a shield-removing storm. I mean, the two ships *are* only frigates. How many frigates do you make with shields? You can tell both are frigates because it shows the design report for the red-flag one in the third screen shot, and the fourth screen shot shows the brown-and-green flag ship details on the bottom. Both clearly say "frigate"

Something to note, neither of those flags are from the "standard" races shown in the Quick Start screenie. The red-flag one looks like a Starfury Xiati destroyer, and the other one kinda looks like a variant of a Terran destroyer... maybe a neutral?

[Randallw]

You're right, though the frigate doesn't have a lot of anything by the look of it.

[Captain Kwok]

Frigates are small, but not useless small.