And yet what we have affects PvE very negatively. Just look around. +700% of defense is a -common- thing by now. Mind you, that's not the limit, just an often reached value. Now take a look around: what challenging PvE content do we have?
I would list only those:
- Wing assassination missions
- Conflict zones
- Thargoids
Now in more detail. The first one, while it can be terribly dangerous for a new player, can be cheesed in a well engineered outfit. Bring a pair of reverb torpedo launchers to destroy the targets shield generator. Follow up with a set of MCs to shred it quickly. Once you have your setup there, the risk is gone. These missions are insanely tough for beginners and are a challenge for people in RES setups, but are actually no challenge at all once you know how to handle them.
The second one was upped a while ago. For quite a while combat zones were just the same as the rest of the game: engineer your ship, you can go AFK in a combat zone. Your ships turrets just do the job. And actually: if you set up your ship correctly, the risk still is not that bad. NPCs by now are more engineered there, but still not on par to player ship. A good ship with good engineering still can wreck havoc there, but for the sake of giving veterans at least some challenge, these places turned into absolute deathtraps for newer players. At least you can tell them, they entered a battlefield and picked a side at their own decission. They opted in for it. Twice.
Last not least, Thargoids. A very different topic. Mostly due to the fact that human weapons do little against scouts and nothing at all vs. Interceptors. You need AX or guardian weapons, which can not be engineered. And while you can engineer the rest of your ship, all the classical resist stacking does nothing against Thargoids. Purely stacking up health numbers works, but this a good deal weaker than when combining it with resist stacking.
So yes, of course some excellent pilots also easily take down Thargoids. But at least the difference here is that it's the pilot making the difference. I can have the exactly same ship as some of the more renowned AX pilots. I still by far can't meet their performance. While i can easily copy many of the "oh so awesome and unique" combat successes of other content, merely by engineering my ship for it.
So this is what the problem of engineering in PvE really boils down. People who have spent the effort for their highly engineered ship also want those ships to shine. They look for challenging content. But any content which might just most remotely try to look like a slight challenge for a well engineered top end ship is utter doom and destruction for any new player.
Sp people want a challenge. The game world should be consistent, so challenges should not be hidden away behind opt-in mechanics. (In some cases even several of them. ) But the game should not bleed out its own playerbase by radically eliminating all new players. As long as engineering effects are as powerful as they are, this can not be solved. The current "but the world seems strange" and "everything dangerous is hidden away" is the best the game currently can be.
Cutting down engineering would give FD much more freedom in creating new content. I really think that it would be a very good move for the game, but i also don't believe that FD will ever muster the guts for that any more (they backed off from attempts of even slight nerfing more than once) and thus what we have is here to stay.
In my eyes, the whole thing was a mess of:
- Somebody at FD deciding that Horizon power creep would sell Horizon.
- Somebody at FD not understanding or caring how engineering effects could not just add up but multiply by themselves.
- Somebody at FD not caring about feedback when the thing was introduced.
- Some players later "defending" what they got, opposing any nerfing attempt, no matter how small and how reasonable it was. (Till they left as they found out that the game was boring. How could that have happened? )
Last edited:
