These are the little things that really
kill the experience for me. They are not massive deal breakers on their own, but when you look at the game as a whole and put all of them together, they just break the world integrity and make the whole thing not very immersive.
I realise not everyone cares about this stuff and for many of you this is just a game, but for me personally it's more than that.
Please pay more attention to little details, Frontier. They make the world believable. They make us forget it's just a game.
Anyway, let's make a list! Feel free to add your own little imerrshun breakers in the comments
- Black Market being listed as official starport contact, right next to the Authority contact. Also, black market being listed as an official facility of a starport on system map.
This has been in the game since the very beginning and it never made sense to me. I don't think there is a simple solution to that, because the whole smuggler career path is practically non-existent.
- Lack of variety in generic NPC lines, that get old very quickly.
This should be really simple to fix - keep adding new lines, more variety and perhaps keep rotating them or not re-use the one that's just been used for n hours or something like that. I'm sure there are enough creative writers at FDEV to tackle this one
- Idiotic scenarios, where a big ship like Anaconda is interdicted by a lone Sidewinder that claims "I'm gonna boil you up!" or an NPC that yells "This can all stop if you give me X tonnes of cargo" while being practically annihilated.
Yeah, there are more scenarios of this kind in game. Some more attention to details and more background checks before a scenario occurs in game would be good. I.e. if player's ship is in (insert list of relevant ships, i.e. Anaconda, Cutter, Corvette), the worst ship that can spawn is a Vulture. If NPC ship is losing hull do not pass "This can all stop..." message to the chat.
Just more attention to details here please!
- Inconsistent telepresence. I can TP myself 65000 LY to my friend's ship at Beagle Point, but a SLF can't hold the TP link over 30 km distance...?
Another thing that does't make sense. I realise this is a compromise for gameplay purposes, but maybe think of some way to camouflage it better? I don't really know how to tackle this one, but it's really nonsensical.
- Inconsistent NPC crew vs Multi Crew and Ship Launched Fighters mechanics
My NPC crew lives in SLF hangar. Where are they exactly, in the corner between the spare SLF ammo and repair tools? Even though they are physically on my ship, they have to live in the hangar all the time, but when another Cmdr enters my ship via telepresence (so not physically) they get to take a seat in the cockpit with me. Really?
Also, I can launch 2 fighters if I have another Cmdr in Multi Crew (either 1 NPC and 1 player or 2 players), but I can only launch 1 SLF with NPC crew (because I cannot take more than 1 NPC crew on board).
This is easy to fix. Allow us to take more than 1 NPC crew on board and let them both use 2 SLF's at the same time. Make it consistent with Multi Crew.
Also place the NPC crew avatar in the cockpit, using the extra seat.
- No escape pods for NPC crew
This is a big one. The amount of time it takes to train an NPC crew to Elite rank is ridiculous. I'm fine with that, it makes sense. What doesn't however is the fact that all the effort can be wasted if our mothership is blown up. Not only it does't make sense from gameplay point of view (every other loss can be prevented, including the loss of our ship via the insurance), while this is a permanent loss with no way to stop it when it happens.
It also doesn't make sense from realism point of view - why can't I put additional escape capsule for my crew? Who in their right mind would sign a contract like that? It's like in case of a fire, the emergency exit in my office was for management only and all regular employees were forced to stay in and burn to death.
This is easy to fix - just add extra cost to the ship insurance for the additional escape capsule for the crew member.
- Non-persistent USS and NPC ships
I'm in Super Cruise and there are 10 NPC ships all over the place. I drop to an USS. 2 minutes later I go back to Super Cruise. None of the previous NPC ships are there, it's empty and it's getting filled with new ships from scratch. Also, that other USS that I saw right next to the first one I dropped into is no longer to be found.
This is another big one. It reminds me constantly that all the traffic in the system is just 100% RNG and there is no consistency behind it. Just a dice roll, "generate 2D6 NPC ships".
- RNG planetary settlements generation process
This is for Scan missions. The "search zone" is moving around and the actual settlement ends up being behind my ship every single time. Yes, I know, it's so that I can't actually see that it magically appears on the surface. What I see however is that it wasn't there 10 seconds ago, when my ship was turned that way.
Can't it be already generated on the surface when we scan the Nav Beacon or use ADS?
- Tourist passengers jettisoning themselves into space thousands of LY away from populated systems.
Take a long range passenger mission. They "don't react well to danger". Crash on a high-G planet. They now tell you they are fed up and please take them to the nearest startport. But you're at SagA* and the nearest starport is 20k LY away. You start making your way back. All of sudden on the middle of nowhere they go "That's it. It's taking too log. See ya and thanks for all the fish" and they jettison themselves into the big black.
Riiiight...
(Oh BTW, so they can have the escape pod, but my SLF pilot still can't have one?)
- Business as usual, while the system is being attacked by an alien race, a nightmare of the past
The local Coriolis is burning, 50000 people lost their lives, but there is a cheerful wedding going on at top 1% liner and (of course) the groom forgot to write his vows, while the controlling faction that just had their only station burnt and destroyed by Thargoids is enjoying an economic boom...
- You can have a career in both Federal and Imperial Navy and you can achieve the highest possible military rank in opposing forces.
Yeah, I get the titles are ceremonial, but I can't imagine a Commander that is an Admiral for the Imps and still gets signed up to serve in Federal Navy. "So, you want to join our Navy. Do you have any ties to the Empire, our worst enemy? Ah, you're an Admiral of their Navy. That's fine though, hop on board, here's a Corvette!".
No easy fix for this one either (imagine the meltdown if one career path was blocked if you're at certain rank with the opposing force... and what about the people that already have both ranks?).
Can't win here. It never made sense and you can't just change it now, because people will get mad either way.
- Engineers were supposed to be these mysterious strangers, eccentrics that are hard to find and even harder to please via some "favours" in order to get the upgrades for our modules.
Instead they became one of the main activities for many players, not to mention that all of them suddenly decided to give a special galaxy-wide discount for their services...
- Fines issued in burning station for pad loitering when players are collecting dead bodies and black boxes all over the place...
Again, it makes no sense whatsoever. Everything is burning, the station is in meltdown, but the local authorities are still enforcing silly fines like that? When the station was practically destroyed by Thargoids?
They can't be found anywhere else. There are come extremely rare exceptions, like when they appear next to a destroyed mega ship, at a barnacle or at their own base. But those are so rare, that practically non-existent.
- 0/1 station attacks (aka Thargoid Thursday).
While I appreciate a real time attack is not possible, why only have 0/1 mechanics? The station is either intact or already attacked and badly damaged. Alien ships are nowhere to be found in either case.
This could be enhanced by introducing a 3rd stage - station under attack.
If we don't stop the attack by killing Scouts, station is under attack and we can fight alien ships right next to it (which would probably result in fines for firing our weapons in no fire zone
). If we manage to repell the aliens, the station is still damaged, but not as badly, as currently when the attack happens.
- Lack of missions to support new content + new content not being profitable enough to try it out
There is no incentive to go and try new content like Mega Ship looting or follow the Search and Rescue career path. The reward for those activities is ridiculously small and there are many other much more profitable things to do, which have missions attached to them.
Occupied escape pod is worth 30k Cr. Personal Effects are worth something like 400 Cr (yes, four hundred Credits). Why on earth should I risk my life to try and rescue people from Thargoids when I can comfortably earn gazillion more Credits by running passenger transport, planetary scan or other missions?
The same goes for mega ship loot. It's absolute peanuts which makes it a one-time activity just to see what's it all about and then one can forget about it forever. Why not use some of the existing commodities like Rare Artwork or Ancient Artefacts being included in the loot and introduce new mission type to get those specific items from a mega ship? Those missions could pay handsomely (considering the risk involved) and the other loot would then be a nice bonus.
Instead we get the ability to loot the space installations instead of mega ships now, which I bet will contain the same worthless loot that mega ships.
- Lack of any NPC comms initiated by the player
So NPC's can talk to me, but I can't talk to them?
Let us ask them for directions or location of where to buy a specific ship or find the nearest black market or IFC or material trader or whatever. There are tonnes of useful communication options that could be introduced to replace the current 3rd party tools that we're often forced to use if we don't want to randomly fly around hoping the RNG will be generous enoguh to bless us with the ship we want being available in the next shipyard we dock at.
- Engineer missions being issued on the local station rather than Engineer base
Yeah, what's that all about? This one is really a minor one, but it somehow still grinds my gears.
The list goes on, these are from the comments below:
- In the 34th century, the ships onboard computer can't sync with orbital stations rotation unless it's inside the station. Even 200-500m in front of the station would be nice. If you you leave the station slow enough, you can get your ship stuck because the rotation sync ends at the letter box and not the end of the grills.
- Every single time you arrive at a sightseeing tour POI, there are always exactly 3 Belugas there that promply fly away. This is one of the case where some RNG would actually be good. Instead of always 3 Belugas, there could be some different number of other ships, like Orcas, Dolphins or even regular ships (or even no ships), and they wouldn't need to blitz immediately just because you arrived. This even happens 20k + light years from the bubble. Then they all fly off as if your presence offends them. Bonkers!
- Every single time you drop into random spot in some random asteroid ring in the middle of nowhere, a couple pirate ships always appear out of nowhere. Not only it is completely illogical, but it does not serve any purpose
- The routines that spawn NPCs are gamey. Always an ambush. Always a lemming attack on me. Pursuers waits at the destination, though I got there first. Always Anaconda with escort. Sometimes it's two.
- USS/Mission Critical USS - why can't I just have a scanner which I interact with, that forcibly spawns the relevant Signal Source(s)? At least I'll feel more like I've been involved in the process, instead of knowing that some arbitrary counter/dice roll is taking place in the background. Plus that waiting for the system to do it for me is boring and frequently unreliable.
- Space is empty of human bodies and that only ships can be damaged. Let's see some people on stations walking around parks and control towers - not just driving trucks. This could do wonders for the sense of scale.
- If you crash into a light stand, how do you just bounce off of it? How can they be that tough? Maybe have them fall over and get fined 50000cr for station damage? Or maybe take ship damage instead?
- In SC, scanners have a range of light minutes. In normal space, it's less than 10km.
