I have to side with aRJay here. Being hyperdicted every other jump, and interdicted 10+ times in 1k lys isn't fun. And enough players were complaining that even Fdev, a company famous for never listening or correcting even the simplest things, first scaled back on them and then all but removed them.
New Thargoid Activity
- Thread starter Pooka Lime
- Start date
That's fair! As someone who has only experienced them through videos and second-hand accounts, I concede that I can't speak on how fun it was directly. I will say that there are definitely people who did enjoy them though, and talk about them with a lot of enthusiasm.
The silliest thing was that you got an encoded material every time they interdicted you. Everybody was full on that mat after a few trips and there's nothing that uses it.
If at least we could've given it to that engineer for FSD interdictors in Sol to do something with (like make them difficult to fight but not impossible to control the ship as if in a jet cone). But we just got a GalNet barely covering the subject of Thargoids suddenly interdicting toward the start of the Titan war, and... that was it.
I was never highly discouraged by interdictions but it did get a bit stale that the only way to fend one off was to submit, drop out and low wake (mostly, if you weren't there to fight). Or hope you didn't get a Glaive when they still had a presence in both interdiction and hyperdiction, aka from their introduction to until Titan attacks began. Still not sure completely removing them was the right call but it's the one Frontier made and a fair number were happy with it, so...
Yes, risk is fun. Threat is fun. Overcoming adversity is fun.
What do you want, a free lunch? The game to play itself?
No I don’t want the game to play itself.
Every rescue round trip being incident free is even less fun.
What would have made it fun would be the not knowing what was going to happen, would I get through without incident this time perhaps I will only get interdicted once etc.
Did you do any rescue trips after update 16? At the very least you'd get hyperdicted on your way out basically every time (only times it did not happen is what looks like a hyperdiction cooldown of sorts, where if you got pulled going in, your return journey would be smooth).
Not a perfect mechanism though as even though you're pulled by Scythes (or were) for holding humans/pods with humans inside, they'd sit still firing off their scanner pulse first. And at some point Frontier broke the AI in hostile hyperdictions where they sometimes fail to get a proper lock on you even if you're running at 50+ heat and just follow you looking angry but not doing anything until they get into assured detection range. It remained broken like that until the end of the conflict. *Them reducing ranges at which Thargoids can detect you to make Titan environments more playable also results them losing a fast target after it boosts away once, because Interceptors sit still while deploying a swarm.
I did war rescues back when the Maelstroms arrived, they were great mainly because the passengers said nothing and sometimes you were attacked by pirates, so there was variety.
I did rescues from Sol during the Cocijo incident and it was almost like following a script,
- load evacuees
- Jump for rescue ship
- Get hyperdicted
- Evade 4 scouts or 2 something else while cooling down
- Jump for rescue ship
- Get talked at by cargo
- Dump evacuees on rescue ship
- Jump for Sol
- Minor variation either hyperdicted or more usually arrive
- Head to station
- None to several interdictions
- Start at 1
The two "somethings" would be Scythes. If scouts spawn alongside it's a singular one. They can steal your passengers (and escape pods) and fire FSD reboot missiles but Frontier made them about as fast as a Basilisk without the ability to perma-boost so the usual speed of 'safety' at 450+ gets you far enough from one to be relatively out of harm until you can jump away. Especially since they won't begin moving until a few seconds after the hyperdiction occurs.
This might catch newer or unused players off-guard but they do become a little underwhelming after you know how it works. Previously Scythes were rather persistent in chasing you even past the imminent Titan perimeter, with interdictions (they'd apparently even go after completely unrelated passenger ships or ones carrying occupied escape pods within a certain distance)... then people began complaining and Frontier in their usual fashion completely stopped the interdictions entirely, instead of just toning them down/limiting them to war evac transport [missions].
Damaged ports were more exciting with the Scythes waiting outside, as I mentioned, but with Frontier leaving the system poorly balanced for multi-week states such that invasions would, outside of ones specifically set to have a higher strength (like Shinrarta - Thargoid kills approached a million and rescues were in the hundreds of thousands too), routinely be cleared out within 1-3 days... it barely ever happened that a station would even go into the damaged state to begin with, because no invasions crossed into week 2.
Basically, there are still improvements which they could make for that eventual Thargoid return.
Just give us another round of Thargoid invasion, and bring back the evac work. Add a new interceptor that spawns on threat 8 evacs that flies about 600m/s and fires a few fsd reboot missiles and packs a hilarious amount of DPS, enough to kill an engineered conda.
I am totally here for the possibility of permit-locking systems until you rank up on your Thargoid Superpower allegiance and all that jazz. The problem with this is there is a contingent of Starship Trooper/Helldivers/40k nerds who want to stomp out the xenos at every turn who would show up and prevent this from even being a possibility.
I think if something like this were on table a lot more people would be interested.
However, it’s never been on the table. The Thargoid story was literally called the Azimuth Saga and wrapped up the decades long tale of the long loved John Jameson, torpedo bombing and all. The whole war was a throwback to the olden days.
The lore even clarifies the Guardians learned the Thargoid language, but the Thargoids wouldn’t come to the table to talk.
If peace becomes an option, I imagine many people, myself included, would rather explore it. But since I’ve been playing before Engineers came out, the story has seemingly been on rails the whole way.
If activity does resume I'd like to see a titan that moves if a heart is destroyed. Say a few thousand ly and heart is rebuilt while it is chased down. As to why it would be present, maybe they are trying different measures against humanity such as limited resistance to nanite torpedoes or changed vent / heart properties
Plus more orthrus continuing whatever they were looking for in Sol (humanity origins, the alien device, interaction with Voyager / New Horizons etc.)
Plus more orthrus continuing whatever they were looking for in Sol (humanity origins, the alien device, interaction with Voyager / New Horizons etc.)
Now we’re talkin
I did wonder if the reason the Titans didn’t try to cut and run was that they had found what they were looking for or had found it wasn’t here so their purpose was over.
The idea that what they were doing was related in any way to us being just because we happened to be where this lot was looking has a certain appeal.
We’ll get Hudson back!
More cheap cannon fodder that is slower than an engineered T9? Meh. Never saw much appeal in the Orthrus massacre farms that were spires, messing around with the Revenants and Banshees on the ground was more fun. Especially if you suddenly ended up chased by three of the Banshees at the same time (and they will not stop until actually losing track of you, unlike the Revenants which remain close to the barnacles).
... and I looked at what they were doing in Sol during the alert state, didn't seem to be much more than the usual placing of probes and/or sensors. (Has it really been 5 months already?)
Once again, I find myself in the position to repeat that the Guardian logs are NOT a conclusive source of information due to the complete lack of details of what actually happened when they made contact with the Thargoids. Did they refuse to move even temporarily off the barnacles which they'd occupied and likely caused the aggression with when the Thargoids asked so? Did the Guardians immediately take up an aggressive tone telling the Thargoids to buzz off because "They were there first and nobody was looking after those weird looking things on planet surfaces" (would sound very familiar)?
I could go on.
It is almost certain we're just a small and relatively unimportant piece in whatever it is the Thargoids are after or doing, even if humanity loves to overinflate its own importance in the grand scheme of things. Or panic and scream about being attacked as there are clear signs whatever is happening is not a purely destructive assault. If that was the intent behind targeting Sol, they A, needn't have bothered scouting it (which they didn't with Shinrarta but why they went after it is an even bigger mystery), nor B, needed to send a Titan straight into humanity's home/origin system.
Arf even strongly hinted at that we were looking at it with too much of a 'human perspective', which can't be much more direct of a hint that there was another purpose at play than just causing pure devastation. If giving humans a scare and a beating on the head was even ever part of it at all, but the fact Cocijo went right into Earth orbit does suggest some symbolic meaning to the action as well. (But it's easier for people to keep pretending the Thargoids are 'mindless bugs' and 'They made their biggest mistake sending a Titan to Sol', not realizing that it keeps blinding them to the fact that there is more going on and the Thargoids are just as if not more intelligent, but in a different way, than/to humans)
I'd rather take the Thargoids or Nemesis not at all a Salvation hint.
We don't need to learn the thargoid language any more, they speak english through the comms panel. Even have the same old regular NPC portraits.