Feedback Required V.1.10 Locale Mission: Skillon - DESERTED POWERS

*SPOILERS*

I tried this start and so far I like it. Balance is nice, no Fe,Cu,Si ore deposits just boulders so you have enough to start and then need to scavenge the good supply of wrecks, which is fun and works well with the blueprint fabricator. Took a while to figure out how to play the start though...

The mission and the trade opportunities work well so far, suit mods are a nice combo for skillon and logical the pirates would sell them given the story flavour text.

I have just done upto raiding the collection point and was only confused when I kept getting spare parts and was not sure I would ever get another computer.

There was another snag where I found the data pad in Opportunity which initiates the mission beacon to the pirate ship, but I left it a while to make my burger garden and it disappeared. Could not find a way to bring it back via F1, but had looked at it when it was visible and knew where to go (middle of pirate territory ofc) so just went there and found the ship and talking to the guard started the mission OK.

There were several (three) internal inconsistency warnings in this time though which might have been related to putting lots of marker flags on the map and making them visible in HUD. Some were wrecks and some were freehand for particular resource locations.

Not sure why but the internal hiccups look like something is not quite going right with something.

 

OK next stage, the attack on the pirate ship, was not a simple thing to defend.

First try it happened at night and I dont have night vision yet. Had no clue what was going on. Avatar died, reloaded. Used a bed tried again.

Second try it didnt complete so I reran the mission using assault rifle and sniper instead of SV gatling but the mission still did not complete. When I go back to the Old Timer after waiting a while, he is saying get my gun and go outside, but I finished one wave, all attackers are dead (except the troop transport) and nothing else is happening. Only when I manually set first wave complete did the second wave arrive after first talking to old timer. So the trigger for first wave completion looks broken. Second wave completed correctly.

Thirdly I fired on droid targets just next to a drop ship with SV cannon and they did not go down, not sure if that is properties or hitboxes as the dropship was still right next to them.

 

Lab mission, at the bottom of the elevator shaft the door out into the core level is a block up and very small, which is a total PITA to get out of the shaft. IMHO it dserves a broken block to land on so you can walk out.

I got the instruction to remove the simulation lock after I pulled the lever, as a result the core exploded but the trigger failed. Had to replay, suggest moving the trigger to the door entry point to the room, not the window.

Got an internal error approaching La Grande Maira, possibly because I added a map waymarker for the location already bookmarked by the mission ?

 

completed the story line, and found it enjoyable. Only thing that annoyed was toward the end when completing the abandoned vessel part, another wave of drone can in - so I started shooting them down only to find they were pirate faction now and my rep was ruined. Had to spend time shooting critters in the pirate zone to regain the rep to complete the quest line. It would be soo much better if only faction that were hostile appeared as red dots on the mini map!

 

During the Deserted Power Pt5 Pt3 you are tasked to "Follow the marker to LAOCAI."

But the marker is for Abandoned Vessel Yard, which is confusing as it does not say LAOCAI and would be clearer if it did. Or at least say "Abandoned Vessel Yard" in the mission order if that is your destination.

I have half a dozen markers on various things and the only way I could tell this was the mission marker was because it is not on my list of map markers.

 

final mission the LAOCAI OPV failed to spawn

I used weapons no explosive but had a hunch it was because my SV was parked on the Abandoned Vessel Yard platform, when the core blew it was able to dock, which is previously could not, my guess is it autodocked and fouled up the OPV spawn, so I reloaded and dug a hole near the base outside its borders and put my SV in there to protect it from any OPV fire but also because reloading caused the defence drone which I already cleared to respawn and it began shooting my SV.

When I blew the core with explosives and SV off the Abandoned Vessel Yard site, the OPV spawned.

The OPV was gone too quickly after taking out its downward thrusters. I was trying to get away from it as I could hear weapns fire, I thought it was coming my way but was presumably the PIR drones finishing the OPV. As I was circling round there was a kind of thud explosion sound and nothing... I was hoping for a fanfare, there was also no wreck to salvage, less even than for a drone. I didnt realise it was blown up until I saw my updated objective.

I would suggest some wreckage and an optronic matrix drop or something would be nice.

 

I started the game on Akua, but decided to complete missions on other moons as well. This mission is pleasant, even considering that I came to it slightly overpowered. However, at the end of the part on Abandoned Vessel Yard, the ship whose engines I had to destroy did not spawn, or I did not find it. I'm not sure if a marker should point to it or if it should appear near the base. So I just had to mark this part done

 

Hello everyone!

Just finished Skillon story: sorry for being late but I had a lot of business trips in this 2023.

So I must say that the Skillon story is really fresh water on the game:

- liked the idea of not spawning on the escape pod;
- liked the plot;
- liked the POI involved in the plot (definitely) some among my best;
- liked the idea of reaching the space only after something done locally on the planet and related to some event happened on the planet;
- liked a lot the choice of setting as a default volumes and mass: this is definitely the way to play Empyrion and use really every gizmos the game offers to the players (...well to me not a great impact considering I'm playing like that since years and that the best mods already has it enabled but nice to know now it is a default setting also in the main game).
- liked the new battle dedicated music: I'd add more than one if it was to me
- liked that maps on NPCs consoles now resembles the planet surface: in the previous versions you basically see everywhere the Earth map. It was fine having Earth map on one but everywhere it's not

Skillon now is definitely a quest line very close to the ones in Project Eden so it is a definitely good job to me.

That said let's go to what I didn't like but I guess those are things not exactly Skillon related, maybe are some strange things of the engine itself:

- not liked the enemy AI: it seems that as soon as you open fire if you don't miss the enemy will not answer to your fire. It happens both on ground battles and on sky battles. Can't remember all the times I died in Project Eden simply because I was not quick enough to dodge: v1.10 seems that it is not required;
- not liked drones: it seems they collide on a lot of invisible walls and they got stuck in the mid of the air. Well not exactly an engaging fight
- not liked the bug on the last quest: needed to reload three times to make the game spawn the LAOCAI ship.
- not exactly liked the total absence of enemies in the starting planet: by seeing that enemies are also missing on the other starting planets I guessed it is a choice so let's see. Anyway building a base in a medium difficulty planet and having not a single attack well it seems... wrong? I do not know (maybe I'm used a little bit too much to Project Eden which at level 0 will send you nasty Zirax bombers )

That being said in my opinion the new Skillon is a huge step on the path towards a better game.

Thank you devs.

 

Part 2 was kinda boring. I had to shoot out around hundred scavengers to finally get 5 computers.

Same here. The first wave completed but its still says "Destroy attackers (3/5)". Worth a bug report?

Although it says fixed, the mission is still broken. OPV on part 5 does not spawn.