NPC reactions to being battered to death should probably be addressed...
NPC Reactions
- Thread starter deleteduser
- Start date
NPC reactions need some tuning all round actually.
Open fire on an NPC that's facing you and they immediately, instantly, return fire.
There should be some reaction time.... 1/10th to 1/4 of a second.
Open fire on an NPC that's facing you and they immediately, instantly, return fire.
There should be some reaction time.... 1/10th to 1/4 of a second.
If you're talking about NPC ships, then there's a good reason that they're ready to fire as soon as you shoot them. Have you not noticed that they deploy their own hardpoints whenever you get near them with your own hardpoints out already? Seems to me that NPCs already know what they could be dealing with.
I thought that was just because their scanners require hardpoints to be deployed to work, I know that I have to do that for the KWS but am assuming it is needed for the Manifest Scanner.
They will (/also?) deploy and retract hardpoints as you do.
This still doesn't explain literally zero reaction time though.
My abiding memory of Odyssey NPCs is innocently wandering into an outpost, only to have 2 or 3 NPCs say "Stand still so I can scan you" one after the other and then, inevitably, end-up getting shot at by at least one of them because I was standing still to let one of the others scan me.
It'd be nice if, perhaps, FDev could find a way to consolidate NPC responses so that once you've been scanned by one guard they're all happy.
Regarding ships, I find it dubious that NPCs always seem to have weapons on their ships and can fire on you from almost any angle.
I've even gone as far as to fly right up to Wanted NPCs and verify that they don't have turreted weapons on their ship and then move around underneath them, open fire and... they can return fire immediately, without turning to face me.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're not "cheating" insofar as they're firing within the arc-of-fire of gimballed weapons fitted to their ships but it seems like they certainly don't have the same constraints we do with regard to having to look through a canopy to put a crosshair on their target.
Imho that would be a bad change. You would let yourself get scanned immediately and only then get your E-Breaches and start cloning IDs while not having to worry about anything anymore.
The only annoying thing about the scans is that after they tell you to stand still, the guard will stroll towards you in a very leisurely way. Because clearly they are on the clock - not in a hurry.
Especially if they are on the sidewalk and you're on dirt ground. They won't take that one step towards you like a pleb, they will look for the nearest stairs.
I have never experienced this, and with a sufficiently agile ship, can usually take out NPCs who don't have appropriate positioned turrets, without ever receiving any return fire at all.
NPCs in ground conflict zones are most entertaining. When you win the CZ, your team mates celebrate. You can join in by beating them all to death with your hands or the stock of your weapons. You can even do it in front of another friendly NPC.
You do get one get out of jail card, if you pull out your weapon the NPC will stop the scan and tell you off. But it only works once (it's also indicated on HUD).
It certainly doesn't happen all the time and, I guess, it's possible that the times it does happen are times when the NPC does have turrets.
Just seems a bit "coincidental" that you'll target something like, say, a Wanted Anaconda in a RES, wait for it to decide you don't have any tasty cargo and turn away and then, when you start shooting, it turns out the Annie can return fire perpendicular to it's direction of travel.
In fact, now I think about it, I wouldn't mind betting that, during assassination missions, I've had NPC FdLs fire rail-guns at me from strange angles, which would (unless I'm mistaken) definitely be "cheating".