So, i've tried 2.3 for a bit, and... it's a bit strange.
First of all there are bugs. A lot of bugs, i'd say overwhelming amount of them. Almost every aspect of the game is bugged to the point where it becomes annoying. They managed to break things that were working fine for years... But... this are obviously just bugs, they surely will get fixed (probably couple of years later, but whatever) so i just tried to ignore them.
Then there is performance "change". It is actually mostly positive one. On home PC which has decent CPU and a lot of RAM performance improved a lot. It is not FPS change, FPS stayed mostly the same, but transitions are now few times faster, there is less stutter and things generally seem to be more smooth, but there is also much more CPU load. Which leads to a negative part of it, another system i used to play on, with fairly old CPU, now has almost unplayable performance. A lot of stutter, huge FPS drops etc... i guess i'll just have to upgrade, but it may be, at least partly, a reason for all the issues some people have.
Then, headline customization-related features - character creator and ship naming. Not that i am actually interested in them that much but anyway i spent some time just to see how it works. It is not that bad. Character creator graphics are nice. Ship ID is really nice idea too. But then... monetization. I am fine with "as long as it is cosmetics only it is ok" idea, but then... anything brought up to absurd level can be bad. And when you are trying to use one of headline features of the update and constantly bumping into "buy game extras" button without any free options it is absurd. I mean, name plates. Why not make just plain text ones free, and then add fancy ones into the store? As it is now, it looks more like "everyone gets to fly untextured ship models for free, but if you want textures on your ship you can buy them only for $4.99 in our store". This one made me really angry and unwilling to buy anything from FD store at all.
And at last, multicrew. I tried it with friends in PG (because this is how i play most multiplayer games currenly), and as i expected generally when everybody brings his own ship it is more fun. Gunner role is totally pointless IMO, piloting figter is fun, but then you can build your own small and fast ship if you want to. Technically it worked fine for us, given we had all the networking setup already, with manually forwarded ports configured in routers and game configs, and we have like 1-2ms ping and 100mbit between our pc-s. Overall it is not as exciting as it is depicted in AD-s, but still it is nice option to have.
There are also other changes that i did not have time to properly explore yet, like mission payout ones etc, but they are not that interesting for me because i already have crazy amounts of money.
Overall it looks like the update is mostly positive, with performance improvements and multicrew, but... for some reason it felt really, really bad. With all the bugs and exceedingly greedy monetization... i just closed the game after few hours and do not feel like playing it for some time... there is just not enough good things added to offset all the negative ones. It's really a shame that shield balance changes were scrapped again... they were the main part of 2.3 i was interested in...
First of all there are bugs. A lot of bugs, i'd say overwhelming amount of them. Almost every aspect of the game is bugged to the point where it becomes annoying. They managed to break things that were working fine for years... But... this are obviously just bugs, they surely will get fixed (probably couple of years later, but whatever) so i just tried to ignore them.
Then there is performance "change". It is actually mostly positive one. On home PC which has decent CPU and a lot of RAM performance improved a lot. It is not FPS change, FPS stayed mostly the same, but transitions are now few times faster, there is less stutter and things generally seem to be more smooth, but there is also much more CPU load. Which leads to a negative part of it, another system i used to play on, with fairly old CPU, now has almost unplayable performance. A lot of stutter, huge FPS drops etc... i guess i'll just have to upgrade, but it may be, at least partly, a reason for all the issues some people have.
Then, headline customization-related features - character creator and ship naming. Not that i am actually interested in them that much but anyway i spent some time just to see how it works. It is not that bad. Character creator graphics are nice. Ship ID is really nice idea too. But then... monetization. I am fine with "as long as it is cosmetics only it is ok" idea, but then... anything brought up to absurd level can be bad. And when you are trying to use one of headline features of the update and constantly bumping into "buy game extras" button without any free options it is absurd. I mean, name plates. Why not make just plain text ones free, and then add fancy ones into the store? As it is now, it looks more like "everyone gets to fly untextured ship models for free, but if you want textures on your ship you can buy them only for $4.99 in our store". This one made me really angry and unwilling to buy anything from FD store at all.
And at last, multicrew. I tried it with friends in PG (because this is how i play most multiplayer games currenly), and as i expected generally when everybody brings his own ship it is more fun. Gunner role is totally pointless IMO, piloting figter is fun, but then you can build your own small and fast ship if you want to. Technically it worked fine for us, given we had all the networking setup already, with manually forwarded ports configured in routers and game configs, and we have like 1-2ms ping and 100mbit between our pc-s. Overall it is not as exciting as it is depicted in AD-s, but still it is nice option to have.
There are also other changes that i did not have time to properly explore yet, like mission payout ones etc, but they are not that interesting for me because i already have crazy amounts of money.
Overall it looks like the update is mostly positive, with performance improvements and multicrew, but... for some reason it felt really, really bad. With all the bugs and exceedingly greedy monetization... i just closed the game after few hours and do not feel like playing it for some time... there is just not enough good things added to offset all the negative ones. It's really a shame that shield balance changes were scrapped again... they were the main part of 2.3 i was interested in...
Last edited:
