Today I arrived at Maia, docked at Obsidian Orbital, and the voice that welcomed pilots to the station and announced random things was that of ObsidianAnt, which was amusing. I liked that. It was fun and unexpected.
A bit later I got a message inviting me to find four Thargoid Technology Samples. The mission paid well so I accepted it and fitted a ship with an SRV to go hunting for them. I had to google to figure out where I was going to find these samples, and that I needed some corrosion-resistant cargo racks. This is an online multiplayer game where mysteries are collaboratively revealed, but still I would prefer to figure out these things with tools provided within the game.
I went to a crash site in HIP 17862 6 C A. There was no point of interest showing up from orbit, although there was a tourist beacon that would run away from me very fast after dropping out of supercruise, and although I could scan it, there was no amount of boosting I could do to catch up with it. I think at that point I knew that things were going to be a bit on the rough side.
The tourist beacon gave me no useful data. Still no indicator appeared on the moon so that I could go to it. I had to navigate to a set of coordinates I found in the Elite Dangerous Wiki. Navigating to coordnates is very painful. I am given a system map where I can see the surface of every planet, but it doesn't have a set of coordinates displayed so that at least I can try to identify a landmark and orient myself, nor a way to locate a particular set of coordinates and then mark that point as a destination it so that I would be able to navigate to that location with ease.
After doing the horrible coordinate navigation I landed on the site. When I got out of my ship on my SRV I found myself below the surface and I could see the stars and space under my wheels. Eventually the SRV pulled itself above the surface, but rocks were floating all over. I managed to get the Thargoid Technology Sample and drive back to the ship where I could drop it in the corrosion-resistant cargo hold.
I logged out and logged back in to get the site to reset and the tech fragments to reload. I saw some tech samples, but one of them seems to have appeared below the surface and then sunk into the planet and then out of my sensor range. I could get the other one.
At one point I found myself driving above the Thargoid ship wreckage and got stuck in an unnatural way for no reason in a way that took me significant effort and time to undo. It wasn't fun.
I wasn't satisfied at all by this particular game loop. It is buggy, quirky, there is no enough information in game. Logging out and back into the game should not be necessary to achieve anything. It is a similar story with some Guardian sites and the insistence on the part of the game that we get multiple blueprint fragments in order to unlock things. Fine, I can run the site again, but don't make it so that in order to reset it I need to log out.
A bit later I got a message inviting me to find four Thargoid Technology Samples. The mission paid well so I accepted it and fitted a ship with an SRV to go hunting for them. I had to google to figure out where I was going to find these samples, and that I needed some corrosion-resistant cargo racks. This is an online multiplayer game where mysteries are collaboratively revealed, but still I would prefer to figure out these things with tools provided within the game.
I went to a crash site in HIP 17862 6 C A. There was no point of interest showing up from orbit, although there was a tourist beacon that would run away from me very fast after dropping out of supercruise, and although I could scan it, there was no amount of boosting I could do to catch up with it. I think at that point I knew that things were going to be a bit on the rough side.
The tourist beacon gave me no useful data. Still no indicator appeared on the moon so that I could go to it. I had to navigate to a set of coordinates I found in the Elite Dangerous Wiki. Navigating to coordnates is very painful. I am given a system map where I can see the surface of every planet, but it doesn't have a set of coordinates displayed so that at least I can try to identify a landmark and orient myself, nor a way to locate a particular set of coordinates and then mark that point as a destination it so that I would be able to navigate to that location with ease.
After doing the horrible coordinate navigation I landed on the site. When I got out of my ship on my SRV I found myself below the surface and I could see the stars and space under my wheels. Eventually the SRV pulled itself above the surface, but rocks were floating all over. I managed to get the Thargoid Technology Sample and drive back to the ship where I could drop it in the corrosion-resistant cargo hold.
I logged out and logged back in to get the site to reset and the tech fragments to reload. I saw some tech samples, but one of them seems to have appeared below the surface and then sunk into the planet and then out of my sensor range. I could get the other one.
At one point I found myself driving above the Thargoid ship wreckage and got stuck in an unnatural way for no reason in a way that took me significant effort and time to undo. It wasn't fun.
I wasn't satisfied at all by this particular game loop. It is buggy, quirky, there is no enough information in game. Logging out and back into the game should not be necessary to achieve anything. It is a similar story with some Guardian sites and the insistence on the part of the game that we get multiple blueprint fragments in order to unlock things. Fine, I can run the site again, but don't make it so that in order to reset it I need to log out.
