So I want night vision for my suit...

[Valorin]

So, I thought night vision is great to have when on foot for all those dark sides on planets, so I was looking up what I would have to do to get it.

Some general feedback on this:

• I wasn't able to find any information on that in the game (which is true for so many things) and had to look it up on the internet. On that note: the Engineer list still doesn't show us complete lists of the upgrades they make.
• The stuff I need to gather for simple night vision technology has nothing to do with the technology itself. It's just a list of ingredients which don't make sense at all. So the engineer takes a small mountain of surveillance equipment, loads up five surveillance logs and mashes all that up with some radioactive data and a pinch of NOC (whatever that is) and then applies 5 switches. There! Night vision done! Errr. Nein.
• So far the only source for those materials (correct me if I'm wrong please) is to pillage and plunder settlements and become a thief. Because I want night vision tech anno 3307.
• As far as I have seen I can't even trade those items (at the barkeeper. The barkeeper trades junk, electronic parts and chemicals.)

Okay, it's a game and all and gameplay loops and upgrades and so on and so forth, but suspense of disbelieve has its limit, and for me this crossed the line where I can't simply buy a night vision device at the store. It's basic equipment. My smartphone can do night vision to a degree, and those suits are supposed to be space faring equipment.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

I've been looking at the recipes for much of the new engineering on Inara (because where else...) and have been wondering whether I should really bother jumping into that particular rabbit hole (although I do want NV myself, in fact I'm a bit miffed this is not part of the standard gear - just shows how out of ideas FDev is here).

Some of the numbers involved are crazy, I've been raiding a few bases now but this is already starting to get old - and I'm only doing it on an opportunistic basis right now, i.e. no grinding - I'm sure the idea is to unlock these over months not days, but even upgraded stuff (I bought a G2 Mav suit and G3 laser carbine) isn't really all that imo.

The entire engineering pathway for EDO doesn't look very inspiring to me (looking at the upgrades, it's just 'more' of this and that with a few exceptions like scope/NV) and I assume we can't remove upgrades from upgraded suits so if you want a new combination of them you have to start again. Even the thought of that is giving me the heebie-jeebies.

 

[Factabulous]

Lots of that is available as mission rewards (certainly the first 3). NOC data seems very rare and is my main blocker on that. As ever - engineering is about 'encouraging' you to play the whole game. If you don't then you are gimping yourself - but blaze you own trail!

 

[ebbrell]

Nah flash light will do me
I don't used NV on ship either makes everything too easy for me

 

[Deleted member 182079]

It would probably help if the game would give some sort of indication where to look for these things though (like it does for EDH mats). I can't recall this to be the case for EDO mats though; I mean what the heck even is NOC data? Unless this pops up randomly everywhere? Haven't come across it myself yet.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Its almost as if FD learnt nothing from the previous three years

 

[Valorin]

Lots of that is available as mission rewards (certainly the first 3). NOC data seems very rare and is my main blocker on that. As ever - engineering is about 'encouraging' you to play the whole game. If you don't then you are gimping yourself - but blaze you own trail!

What annoys me with it is the fact that it's about a basic function like night vision. If it was something special, that would be cool. And the ingredients I'd need are nonsense as well.
Having an incentive to do missions and so on is okay. I mean, that's what games do. Any kind of ingame reward is an artificial incentive, because it's a game.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Nah flash light will do me
I don't used NV on ship either makes everything too easy for me

I was desperate (well, relatively needy of to maybe use a better term) of NV on my suit last night - went to an impact site (mission related) and of course because every single POI seems to me on the dark side of planets all the time for some reason, it was tone-in-tone pitch black and my ship didn't want to find a landing spot nearby, so I had to move around quite a bit until I did - disembarked, turned on flashlight but couldn't see the crashed satellite so had to go back to my ship and board the SRV. Turned out it was just behind me, mere metres away...

 

[Deleted member 182079]

What annoys me with it is the fact that it's about a basic function like night vision. If it was something special, that would be cool. And the ingredients I'd need are nonsense as well.
Having an incentive to do missions and so on is okay. I mean, that's what games do. Any kind of ingame reward is an artificial incentive, because it's a game.

I probably would've designed the entire suit stuff differently - have one base suit (or a selection of those with different characteristics like ATK/DEF/SPD etc.), and you can engineer/create attachments (like add/remove the bio scanner, arc cutter, extra weapon holster) independently.

But alas I'm no game designer and it's probably not as good an Arx earner either....

 

[Rubbernuke]

I probably would've designed the entire suit stuff differently - have one base suit, and you can engineer/create attachments (like add/remove the bio scanner, arc cutter, extra weapon holster) independently.

But alas I'm no game designer and it's probably not as good an Arx earner either....

What I find odd and shake my head at is you have two engineering pathways in game, when it was a golden opportunity to streamline and unify engineering across both ships and suits- not to mention use suit like enhancements for ships (such as night lo vis vision as an added extra).

 

[Deleted member 182079]

What I find odd and shake my head at is you have two engineering pathways in game, when it was a golden opportunity to streamline and unify engineering across both ships and suits- not to mention use suit like enhancements for ships (such as night lo vis vision as an added extra).

It seems Frontier want to keep both EDH and EDO as separate as possible - you can see it in the missions; why can't I do a cargo delivery to the new EDO settlements from regular stations for example (at least I haven't come across them so far), given they have their own markets now? Playing EDO really does feel like playing two separate games - the only overlap is getting to/from the EDO specific locations in your EDH ship.

 

[Jup]

The entire engineering pathway for EDO doesn't look very inspiring to me (looking at the upgrades, it's just 'more' of this and that with a few exceptions like scope/NV) and I assume we can't remove upgrades from upgraded suits so if you want a new combination of them you have to start again. Even the thought of that is giving me the heebie-jeebies.

You can't remove or replace upgrades, upgrades can be only installed on a empty slot.
This alone is just stupid.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

You can't remove or replace upgrades, upgrades can be only installed on a empty slot.
This alone is just stupid.

That's what I thought - and yes I'm not a fan of this... if we were to apply the same logic to our ships we'd have to build a ship (say a mining vessel) but could never refit it into something else, instead would need to buy a new hull and start A-rating and engineering again.

I do think a lot of these design decisions were driven by the cosmetics side of things tbh.

 

[ULITE]

Even the thought of that is giving me the heebie-jeebies.

I did some calculations yesterday, with the actual speed I am farming materials it will take me more than 400h of playtime to get all the materials I need for one full upgraded Maverick with two full upgraded guns. And I have to do this a multiple times for all the suits and all the weapons.

 

[Darkman Returns]

NOC data I see offered as a mission reward a lot, but then I have Night Vision on both my main suits. It's like the game knows and teases you with stuff you don't need

 

[Jack Schitt]

I had similar believability issues with the "recipes" used by the original Engineers. I found it easier to headcanon that they aren't using the stuff you bring them (or at least not all of it) to do the actual modification, but rather they are applying pre-made modification kits to your gear in exchange for you restocking their shelves with general materials. It still doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, especially when "recipes" were renamed to "blueprints", but it helps. A bit. I think of them as "shopping lists" that you're filling for them, in a similar way to the often nonsensical unlock requirements. They're using you as a glorified Yodel or FedEx, in exchange for hardware.

(It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to realise that FD could probably introduce a mission-based element into Engineering if they wanted to, so you might have to bring the Engineer a bunch of random salvage and a specific item purloined from a particular organisation's base, or some biological data from a particular world's alien flora. But they seem to lack the imagination for this sort of integration. It's always appeared as though they've looked at a template for a very basic fantasy MMO crafting system and just replaced generic fantasy macguffins with generic SF macguffins.)

As for night vision, it does seem very difficult to logically justify the existence of this feature on ships and SRVs but not space suits. Then again, this is a universe in which the docking computer (which in reality is a few lines of code on your actual 2021 PC's hard drive) takes up an entire Class 1 equipment slot and draws the same power as 450 electric fires, so maybe the Engineers are the only ones who can make small and efficient hardware in this universe. Whatever happened to human civilisation after WWIII, the ability to make energy-efficient technology and to miniaturise it appears to have been lost except to a very few individuals. The rest of us seem happy to be Pakleds.

 

[Evazan]

They are rare, but you can buy upgraded Maverick suits with night vision already on. I got one on Thursday. Might be worth keeping an eye on the upgraded gear thread. There are lots of people helping others to find stuff.

 

[Shintai]

• So far the only source for those materials (correct me if I'm wrong please) is to pillage and plunder settlements and become a thief. Because I want night vision tech anno 3307.

This is wrong. Also you can get all of them as mission rewards.

 

[Valorin]

This is wrong. Also you can get all of them as mission rewards.

That's nice. Which kinds of missions?
So far the only thing I can agree on with my Commander's conscience is those turn-power-back-on and fetch missions and so far I didn't see anything on my list as reward.

 

[Vardaugas]

Its almost as if FD learnt nothing from the previous three years

It's almost like they took the old game design document for engineering and rolled with it, ignoring everything that went into the design after it got released. At least we don't get random rolls.