Equipment at the time: T2 Pulse Rifle T2 Shotgun Laser Pistol Medium Armor - Multi Boost, Armor Boost, EVA Boost Thinking back on it, this mission would have been well suited for the minigun or flamethrower, however, this gear was perfectly adequate for dealing with basically everything up to this point. The Zirax radio station and the Xenu Mainframe were perfectly fine with this setup or slightly weaker. But by golly was it not enough for the Derelict Ship-- I really didn't want to have to godmode through it, but I simply decided that moving an inch at a time, listening to monsters screeching in my ears as I slowly cleared out long corridor after room after corridor of dozens of melee enemies was just not fun. It would have literally just boiled down to me running backwards and shooting for goodness knows how long. This combined with the back-and-forth design of the POI itself made it quite painful for me to complete, and I was already flying through walls and ignoring all of the enemies at that point. The following points are just what I think contributed to this: The core combat simply does not support horde-style encounters in spaces this tight where the enemies move so fast that controlling the space is nearly impossible. It's easy to get stuck on furniture or walls trying to back up to go through a doorway or up some stairs, and the fact that the enemies run at what appears to be sprint speed with light armor doesn't help. Player vs. melee enemies is doable with minimal injury with the gear I had, but only against maybe 2 or 3 enemies, after which the shotgun would need to reload and I'd be forced to switch to a different weapon and risk taking more damage. There is little defense against melee other than running away or killing the enemy. Ranged opponents you can just hide behind cover from. There is a lack of checkpointing in the ship itself. Basically every area in the ship spawns monsters or is next to a room that spawns monsters. Since enemies follow you through doors here, you just don't get any room to breathe unless you kill every single thing that shows up (assuming they don't just infinitely respawn, which may be the case, but the spawns are far too numerous regardless). There's no halfway medbay like in the zirax radio station, and pretty much the only safe spot after you pull the lever in the bridge is the bridge itself. This mission is really really hard compared to the ones that come before it. The zirax radio station has much more sparse enemy placement, much safer encounter zones with cover and obstacles. I honestly would have been fine with the idea of having an area that is meant to tell you to gear up better, but the way the ship is designed makes that idea only apparent after you already turn on the danger at a point of no return. (remember, you can't get back to the cargo bay you entered from after you pull that bridge lever until i think you pull switches for ventilation) Having the "start" point for the dangerous part of the mission be at the cargo bay or having an exit from the bridge would alleviate this. I'm just hoping that the difficulty I encountered here was a gross misapplication of combat mechanics (suggest loadouts for this mission) or just a relic of older quests.
EVA boost drastically reduces your armor. I can't speak to the mission because I've never done it but that probably increased the difficulty beyond what it would otherwise be.
My full setup had 135 armor-- medium armor is 150 base. I'm not sure how much armor you're expected to have by that point but the sheer number of enemies would still be a problem, especially with heavier armor that makes it much harder to run away. I'll consider retooling my medium armor for combat and keep a spare light armor for space exploration (the EVA boost was mainly to avoid the -127c space conditions)
EVA also slows you down a lot as well. It gives like -80 armor and -20% speed so that's the difference between 135 armor and 215 armor. Massive difference in the amount of damage you'd take. Also don't forget you can use your jetpack in space but the enemies can only walk.
Another thing to watch out for is make sure your armor isn't broken. If it breaks you lose any damage reduction from your armor value.
Apart from the checkpointing.. did you feel there were certain spots that had too many enemies .. or did you feel there are too many enemies in general in all locations?
I've recently watched @Chief_Rockie do the Derelict Ship. His problems were he had to spend lots of time trying to find out how to open some of the doors/hatches, or where to go next. Check out his thought in this vid where he couldn't find out how to open the hatch at the end of the mission. Time: 24:14 I really can't blame him for going into GM to go through. He has a lot more patient than me. I would have gone into GM waaaay earlier. I don't want to spend over 30 mins looking for a switch. The mission just looks like a pain to me.
Taking EVA booster on POIs is a mistake if they are powered, it takes away most of your armor value and you move slower, instead of this add 1 or 2 armor boosters. At 200 armor you are ok. For good weapons you need to compare them and look at shots/seconds and damage delivered, some weapons are slow but very effective, I generally carry a T2 sniper, a good 150m range weapon, plus always a T2 rocket launcher or better a plasma blaster for these nasty sentry guns. You probably know already that you don't need to finish an entire POI in 1-go, you can leave and return.
I agree with others finds. It took me 2 separate runs to complete the Derelict Ship. All in all the POI and the enemy placement are fine. I think anyone can find a way to negotiate around them or find ways of leading them out. However, and I first have to thank @Spoon for linking my video and speaking up for what I believe is the large majority of the player base feels. The follow on the POI is off. I know I rush around and might miss things. So, I normal either watch my video over again or watch Spanj's videos to guide me through. However, I seems I did not miss anything in this instance, I was just lacking a detailed direction. What I mean by that is a little more discerption of the next location I should go to. For instance, I believe in the bottom of the ship, there is a ramp that leads to a area filled with spiders that tells you to go back to level 4. That is was a good, compared to what I got before. It had just a enough details that I was able to at least figure out the general location and eliminate about 85% if the ship to search again. The last issue I seen was just some doors, especially that last shutter door, are just locked for no reason at all. Or, there is not information to help you figure out what needs to come next. This is a HUGE turn off to people and could drive players away from the game. Just my 2 cents.
On most POIs there are Armor Lockers, make use of them, they are always empty so do not look for loot, but place an EVA booster + armor booster and even an SOS suit when you are out of wireless range of your ship. Another mistake is to only have your boosters and other suits in your ship's armor locker - you will not be able to tranfer them from your ship to your avatar to use them if needed.
Hello Hummel-o-War, first congrats for this POI, it's very well done and a highlight in early play, no doubt. As for what could be better guided, I can only speak for myself. I had great difficulty towards the end where you must return in the Hangar Bay below the shutter ramp where the security door is now open. This is very hard to guess, I only found this out by watching a play-through video. Then, at the very end there should be some tips about the core blowing up if you get close, some players may miss that and leave without being able to salvage the ship later. Greetings,
I just played this new POI and i must say i really don't like it. A lot of the Time i was running around without a clue where to go next and i died multiple times because of the Enemies that swarm you. My Heavy Armor (4x Multi Boost) didn't helped much. The old version of the Ship was a bit hard and annoying, but doable. This is just no Fun and makes me angry. I appreciate the Work that was put in this POI but i will never play this again and going to skip this entirely in Future playthroughs.
I'd like to add my thoughts. Firstly, I like nonlinear level design, but I agree that there aren't enough breadcrumbs to guide you through the ship. There are basically zero waypoints, the few objectives that are given are vague ("investigate", "end this", etc), and IDA is inexplicably silent after you arrive onboard. Providing some direction via dialogue would help, just so long as nothing spawns while IDA is talking. Second, there are several areas in the crew quarters of the ship where you can easily get jumped by 6-8 abominations at once. They're probably spawning in packs of 3, but being funneled together into a giant pack. I find 3 at a time pretty manageable, but 6? I'd need a minigun or flamethrower, because I'm not that skilled at headshots. With anything else, if you go for center mass you'll get eaten while reloading. Even just slowing down the spawn timers would help. Third, one of the later consoles still refers to the ship as the Kullervo Last gripe (I promise!), I agree about the core exploding with no warning. It is instant death, which could be the final straw for some (I thought it was funny, but I'm an old Vault Hunter, I have a warped sense of humor). Highlights: Figuring out how to reset the Mech in the cargo bay so it's friendly was awesome. I also liked the section after the "freight elevator"; it's a long enough drop that I jetpacked down, which also provides the key strategy to deal with the horde down there. Overall, I think it's a great POI, but it is definitely a jump in difficulty from earlier missions, and the lack of dialogue stands out against missions both before and after it.
It was built to have multiple instance points for IDA to guide the player and point out the changes the Legacy had done to the ship. It was never given any of those in the final story mission. Some of the PDA instances don't work at all and come up with non-designated entries (e.g. pop-up that says pda_qq44eg instead of actual text) The ship IS (or at least was) the Kullervo; it's the Ilmarinen-Class Superfreighter Kullervo. Kullervo was the ship, Ilmarinen is the class of ship like the dozen other Ilmarinen-Class Superfreighters you encounter in the game they have their own names too. Just like the NCC-1701D Enterprise is a Galaxy-Class Starship and not the "Enterprise-Class Starship: The Enterprise". The exploding blocks killing players are a side-effect of the 1.4 explosion changes. They originally only exploded themselves with no damage. What you have wrong with this POI is that it was made to function a certain way, and wasn't implemented in that way.
Well the same could be said of anything, really, but players don't need to know that when simply reporting what they think of their experience. That's a matter of fixing the problems that players have no clue about, but the devs do.
The mission is in space in a CV that is part-derelict / part-functional - you NEED EVA boost to survive the transition zones. However, there is an armour locker and armour/weapon repair station in the hangar where you first board, so it may be possible to switch EVA Boost for Armour Boost at that time. Personally I just went in with heavy armour and my 4 standard armour boosts. I also had an epic laser rifle (and 3000+ rounds) and an alien plasma blaster, plus back up laser rifle and epic sniper rifle. I still died over 30 times clearing the Ilmarinen ... and collected 187 alien teeth with probably a similar number uncollected from the despawns when I was respawning. It is a very enemy-heavy POI. I finished the mission with only 2 dozen rounds of ammo left. Edit - forgot to add: I also used up over 60 bandages, 25+ health packs, a dozen or more anti-biotic pills and injections, and a ton of health-boost foods, getting through this mission. If I didn't have those, I'd have died in every room of the ship and not been able to finish the mission.
Yes, in 1.5 The problem(s) are that the internal spaces of the ship are very constricted with a lot of blind corners and U-junctions. That coupled with superfast infected mobs plus roving Zirax kill-squads that turn up in areas already swept and cleared, and it is an extremely high risk zone. I don't know what weapon the Zirax were using, but they consistently one-shotted me in heavy armour with armour mod installed (yes I had EVA and temperature protection mods too, but the sum armour penalty was only -25 on the heavy armour). Added into the above, was the problem of several critical route junctions being one-block-wide corridors next to exposed XL thrusters (that were operating) and you were trying to stealth through 256-degrees temperatures with 25+ radiation ... you can imagine how that goes, especially if you meet a mob and have to backpedal while shooting.
