First i'd like to thank for the work that was done, it's a great addition to the game. But my thoughts are that these quests need some further polishing. The biggest issue i see with these quests and the starter moons overall is that i was at level 18 after collecting all tablets and completing 1-2 quests for local factions. This looks like a content for a separate scenario where you are already in the UCH fleet doing some routine mission to investigate energy bursts but your ship gets destroyed, your rescue pod gets damaged as well and you are left stranded there. Maybe the artifacts should also damage all your ships except hover vessels until you collect all the tablets and stop the bursts, so you can finally build a ship or repair your ship in orbit and get back to the fleet and do some more routine procedural missions to bring a number of some resource, to visit some planet and collect data from a terminal there etc. Besides there should be an option to start directly on Omicron like before and do the main quest line. Some smaller issues with those are just quest design issues. Like you are asked for eggs but there are no eggs anywhere near. You are asked for alien organisms but you already sold them to the quest givers on the previous step and you can't buy them back. There's like 20% chance to fail hacking a terminal but if you do there's no way to unlock it and you can't proceed with the quest line. I've already seen some rage reviews from new players who have no option to start old quest line directly and have to deal with these moons first and i can understand them. These quests will add more raging reactions from new players unfamiliar with console.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created." Elderscrolls 3: Morrowind When you kill the annoying NPC that you didn't know would be an essential part of the main quest 20 hours in the future. But, yeah, this is some bad game design right here. This part is particularly egregious. They send you to the coldest parts of the planet and tell you to do it at night, when it's even colder, to the maximize spawn rate. If your really lucky you got some medium or heavy armor form loot and if your super-dupper-extra lucky with a charry on top, you found a eva boost somewhere. But more likely you'll just have your staring light armor and maybe an insolation boost. The ice golems are rare even under the most ideal conditions, and to make it even worse, the alien organisms are a rare drop. I spent more the 2 hours just trying to get the 5 alien organisms I need... === Edit === Oh, and then they send you through a fairly large wrecked building that isn't air tight so you either have to chug 'hot beverages' or keep running back to the single working shower to stay warm. And THEN they send you down to the bottom of a deep pit, only to spawn drones up at the top to destroy your parked ship or HV! I'm more then a little salty right now.
it's not that bad actually, as soon as you get those alien organism you can sell them and buy insulation boosts. if you have medium armor you can stay warm everywhere. and you get at least several of those from science vessel and convoy. but if you sell them before the second quest you're screwed. also these quests break if you first hunt for PDAs and then go to the faction. Talon quests cannot even be skipped by force completion, so you have to restart the game. i remember my first time playing the game, it gave a free HV on a second mission and you had to complete building it, so you learned some basics on the way. it was very satisfactory and gentle to a new player. now you have to build a ship from scratch or from factory with no other options just to progress with no help from the game. it seems very cruel to those who see the game for the first time. so my point is that these moons shouldn't be a default start. we should start on Omicron by default and if we are familiar with the game and want more adventures we can try the moons as well. they were intended as an easy start for the new players but they actually make it much harder and frustrating. well, i can't play the game for the first time again to compare, so it's just an opinion. but i feel like i wouldn't give the game a second try if i first was stranded on akua moon with no ship and no instructions.
I try to approach these test as someone who hasn't been playing this game for over 4000hr. By the time I made it to the science station I had 4 alien organism sitting in a container at my base. I COULD have bought the insolation boosts early or just went out to grabbed one more and completed the quest. By the time I went to the Mineral Synth Lab I had like 20...But when I was actively hunting for them while following the games directions it took me more 2+ hours. The point is that the game doesn't give you important information (the useless commodity loot is important) when you need it and sometimes give you information that is just flat wrong. One of the places they tell you to hunt for ice golems is in the 'low mountains' but that is where I found the least of them. I mostly found them on the 'ice shelf' and then mostly because my HV turret started shooting them before I could even spot them. The second point is that being able to have a half way enjoyable experience in this start relies heavily on RNG. I was lucky and found two(!) medium armors and a T2 Sniper in a submerged tank POI and then two(!) EVA boosts in the Mineral Synth Lab. Not everyone will be this lucky even if they know to go exploring for loot. Assuming they can survive long enough to go exploring in their starting light armor... Then there is having the main quest be gated behand an RNG drop. But honestly what really killed it for me was the scripted surprise drone attacks. Unless you get lucky a loot a bunch of Neo, you can't build a HV/SV shield and even if you could, there is no real reason why you would. There are no hostile POIs, no enemy drone base or ground troops. The random, wandering drones are no threat to even a junker HV being piloted by a half way skilled player. The first indication you have that you might need a shield is when the game drops drones on top of your ship after deliberately sending you away from it. Then it does it again at the end of this planets story! The narrative up till that point is that your dealing with scientists, not a Saturday morning cartoon villain with on demand access to heavy weapons and combat robots. That's ...really bad...If you haven't already, then you should file a bug report on this. If I have some time to kill I might try to break the quest this way. For science. The Skillon start at least gives you a damaged SV to start. But this start is just as obnoxious as the Ningues start...Instead of freezing to death in the fire minuet you accumulate rads that you cant get rid of and have to mange O2. I might have some more feedback on this start latter. I scrapped my first start when I realized I had 30 O2 left and was still waiting for the portable O2 gen to build...Same basic problem as with Ningues just different resource. I 100% agree. Honestly, the Reforged Eden starts feel much better balanced then these.
Now that I have played through the Ningues start up to reactivation the teleporter in the asteroid field I going to try the Skillon start. Here are some initial thoughts and as I experience more I will edit this post. Right off the bat the game starts you standing beside your cockpit on the outside of your ship. I know this is so the motion sensor on the ship can detect you, but really? I like what your going for here but the end result is janky and weird. Is it really that hard to send a signal when a player is seated in a cockpit? Could this not be handled more gracefully some other way??? By far the most dangerous part of my game so fare was the first 10-20 minuets. It was a scramble to get the xp to unlock the portable constructor so I could power the portable O2 Gen, gather the resources to make both plus some fuel, then wait for everything to build. On top of all that building a shower was a top priority to get rid of all my rads. Its all doable without dyeing, but its a scramble, and you have to know EXACTLY what your doing and have prior knowledge of the map AND do things that don't really make since for desert survival stand point. If your stuck in the middle of a desert, you probably shouldn't be sprinting across the landscape. There needs to be far more wiggle room for on this start. Starting the portable O2 gen unlocked would help. Also this feels way better with Oxygen Consumption set to low. Constantly managing O2 is not the most engaging game play. I have mapped out almost the entire planet on my hover bike and found NO promethium except the two measly bits I got from killing golems! Cool form a survival game stand point but bad from a building stand point. You need promethium pellets to make multi-charges. What exactly are you supposed to do if you miss-place a block while building? Really all you need to do is change the multi-charge recipe to use fuelpacks instead of raw pellets. That way you get what you need just by extracting to fuel for POIs. As with the Ningues start, finding copper is problematic. Edit #1 The first stage of this quest line is completely nonsensical. The game explicitly tells you to talk to a guy in the rear of the ship, and nothing more, but all the doors are locked except one that is high up and out of the way. Your expected to wander around and find one specific guy to talk to, completely by chance. How do you get him to open the door? by pointing your survival tool at him of course! Yeah, you threaten the dude with the rocket launcher, in plain sight of at least one other armed guard and three sentry guns. What could possible go wrong with that??? When you talk to the person your PDA tells you to talk to, they tell you to go back and talk to the captain. The same captain you walked right past to talk to the guy you were ORIGANLY told to talk to, only to have the captain send me back to 'Oldtimer'. There is no need to waste the players time like that. All you had to do was tell me to talk to the pirates at the ship and let me figure it out. Don't tell me to do something just for the sake of wasting my time. Edit #2 Now that I'm situated and have the time to go out salvaging, I realize that the 'Crashed Capital Vessel' right by where I landed my pod had a working shower! The rads were never actually a problem. I don't really know how I feel about this. I also found the two promethium deposits. This moon should probably have at least some promethium surface rocks to pickup. Maybe in the mountains where there is pentaxid crystals. Edit #3 Skillon has the same problem as Ningues with the drones. The game send you into a POI, has you destroy the core, then summons drones. There is the potential for this setup to wreck an starter HV/SV you may have built. Also because HV/SV shields are over 16000(!!!) CPU you will need to be at least CPU tier 3 to install one and that is not really realist for a starter planet. Your only option is to turn your vehicle off and hope the drones ignore it. Not good... Edit #4 I give up. Lambda Labs is a complete dumpster fire of a POI that breaks at the drop of a hat and spawns enemies right behind you and the entire story so far is dumb. They didn't even clean up the goop form the when this was a legacy POI...For whoever wrote these missions: Saturday morning cartoons are not examples of good writing.
Hi, I've not tested the current 1.10 Experimental version myself, but can anyone tell if whether the Sniper aim down scope issue is fixed or not? It's making life very hard in the current live version, as I'd usually make good use of a quick aim, scope and shoot, and that's not currently possible.
Scoping now moves the aim down by maybe a degree and slightly to the right. The aim snaps back perfectly when you leave the scope. So, good luck quick scoping.
Thanks. So, much improved over the current live version of the game, but still a little wonky. Will check it out when this version goes live.
Skillon start is a piece of cake compared to other 3: 1. you start with a ship! 2. harmless drones are everywhere and each can be looted for about 1k, you're flooded with money! 3. every mission sends you to core a base, you end up with several fully functional bases. 4. pirates give you unlimited free oxygen. the ship can't be sealed though, there place for a windshield is already occupied by the cockpit seat and in fron of it there's tiny metal block that prevents window placement. so you can't repair it, you need to disassemble the front part of the cockpit and rebuild it, need to know what you're doing. even after rebuilding all glass, unlocking garage doors in the tech tree to have an access through the glass to the seat and adding missing blocks the ship wasn't sealed even though it totally looked like one. i lost my patience and sent the whole ship to the factory block by block and i found out in the process that unsealed broken carbon block looks exactly like a sealed one from most of the directions. multitool shows a different name on it but it doesn't say "broken" or anything like it. even the debug menu show everything green. so... i think that ship on a starter moon must be easily repairable, people come there with no experience in building ships. for the rest it's the easiest start of all. the game tells you to go to the pirates, you go there and find everything you need. they have a shower, need to check every corner of their ship to find it though. they have a free oxygen. they buy loot from the scrap drones. they sell ammo, boosts, health potions. you get all materials from the cored bases and scrap drones, never dug any deposit. for the enemy spawns and weird story it's not a bug, it's a special style of this game. just need to get used to it.
