What's your beef with this sublime game?

Engineering. Specifically how insanely random and 'gamey' gathering materials is. Chasing some bizarre combination of circumstances to get a percentage chance of the magic token you need appearing is insanely frustrating. Having to repeat the whole dull, irritating process numerous times to get enough magic tokens to achieve the desired end result is soul crushing. Having a stupidly large number of magic tokens to try and accumulate adds to the misery. Material traders were a decent idea, but they only take one sub species of magic tokens and their exchange rate is beyond ridiculous.

The whole thing is utterly bone. There's no need for any of this, the mechanisms to make material gathering a fun and immersive process are already in the game. One raid on a surface facility, one visit to a crashed ship, one rendezvous with a suitable salvage site in the deepest dark makes perfect sense. Having to log in and out and run the scenario literally hundreds of times is pathetic! It ruins the efforts of the team creating these wonderful side quests, turning them from a beautifully rendered challenge to a dull, repetitive chore to be completed as quickly and often as possible.

What really hacks me off is that engineering is no longer optional. Every activity in game is balanced around using engineered ships. To fight Thargoids you even need a specific type of engineering. It's not possible to 'blaze your own trail' if you spend the bulk of your time grinding out tokens to bring your equipment up to the minimum standard needed for even low level activities in game.

The game went from 'sublime' to 'ridiculous' when FD introduced grind activity in lieu of new game play.
 
When I said it was a 'roll', what I meant was it isn't skill based like a minigame such as tetris. We have NO agency whatsoever and it seems to me that inserting a small loading of a minigame like tetris to make engineering feel more personally involving would amount to loads more than the sum of it's parts. I say Load because I think it could be done without needing to 'insert' it into the main body of software and thus not requiring a major update.

As for FD addressing bugs and what not. I haven't got any gripes about that. I feel their level of polishing is very adequate and updates that improve 'quality of life' have never felt as though they impacted anything particular to me.
 
Ex: longer range weapon, but faster or more extreme heat build up per shot.

I don't understand. Engineering modifications do exactly that. Yes, the grind is tedious but I think if they weren't just 'ingredients', but also tickets for credits to play a mini-game then they would 'feel' more precious and feel more of an accomplishment in gaining.
 
To add to your Engineering point.

There is one horrific and incredibly lazy aspect of engineering that I wish so BAD it would change.

Material gathering. Raw materials is fine since there are specific planets where you get ONLY the one type of G5 that you need and you get it consistently which results in no RNG no time wasted and you finish gathering pretty quick.

On the other hand.....encoded and manufactured materials are so incredibly RNG dependant that trying to gather them makes me want to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.

The problems:
1. "Fdev approved" quality gameplay that is HGE hunting. The gameplay itself is lazy, it's stupid, it makes no sense considering what other types of interesting missions are available that you can do.
2. HGE's may or may not be in the system you are in.
3. HGE's may or may not be in the correct faction state even though the system you are in is in the correct state for the material you are looking for.
4. HGE's may or may not contain the specific material that you are looking for even though the signal itself may be in the correct faction state. Why? Since BRILLIANTLY ENOUGH they made more than one manufactured material line overlap with eachother in the same system state/faction/population
5. Pharmaceutical Isolators are simply broken. The HGE's in outbreak are so rare that you waste an incredible ammount of time finding just one.(There is a bug reported on this but since the "confirmation" mechanic is the way it is, it is largely ignored)

And don't get me started on the encoded data materials. There's one crashed ship where you get consistent G4 and G5 materials from just one line of encoded materials. So with the disgusting conversion rates between different lines of the same grade, you need to farm your brains out to get your full of the specific material you need. Other than this crashed ship there is no sure way to get a specific material, so it's even worse than manufactured and HGE's.

Can't agree with this. I feel the material traders are a perfect solution to the scarcity of high grade materials. Data is constantly picked up simply by targeting anything in sensor range. Wave data scanners can give plenty of data for trading and other sources abound. All of these can be traded across categories. Perhaps the ratios are a bit cruel when trading G5 data for that of another category but I'm content enough for it not to bug me.
 
Don't like limpets - a sane (ingame) engineer would have desgined them to be dockable, refuelable and armored (could perhaps take more cargo space and use ship fuel supply for refueling)
Don't like the combat hud (ships, cargo, limpets) - they appear in a small circle at the center of the screen, to get a good overview of the battlefield I'd like all of them to render all the time (and add wings and other important info to their icons)
Would be great if we could reconfigure ships we have at the same station that we're docked at but are not currently flying.
A distance column in the left hand side panel would be great (for both combat and mining)
Mission screen is needlessly obfuscated and confusing, sorting options would be great (distance, destination, mission type, etc)
Would be great if you could buy a trading license for each system/sector/whatever (like in X4) and maybe a mission license too, to get updated price/availability without having to dock at every station - could have a system hub (i.e.operating on a network of sattelites) where all this is listed. (or maybe a trading extension/mission extension module you have to fit in your ship?)
Collector limpets are very stupid and will cheerfully fly into asteroids instead of avoiding them.
The engineering grind is a bit much at times, but in lieu of actually content I suppose it is 'meh, fair enough'.

All that being said, the game is indeed great.

I'd like to collect a limpet if it's not expired and use it again. This would be especially useful if you've only a small ship and can carry only a handful of limpets.
 
I am not fond of the meta game-play progression. It's like any MMO RPG grind, but somehow even less contextually apt.

Also, parking my spaceship and playing a lock-picking type mini-game and chucking Poké Balls at words to go exploring in a 1 to 1 scale galaxy sim of all things is... very much less than ideal.

But other than that, the game is quite decent in spite of itself.

Cheers.
 
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I don't understand. Engineering modifications do exactly that. Yes, the grind is tedious but I think if they weren't just 'ingredients', but also tickets for credits to play a mini-game then they would 'feel' more precious and feel more of an accomplishment in gaining.
Sorry, I was imprecise. Yes, you are correct, but everyone Always arrives at the same result. I want sliders, or dials, or whatever, that allow me to adjust the equation in a controlled fashion.

The engineers are still RNG within a certain G level. It is still Alchemy, not Engineering.
 
Engineering. Specifically how insanely random and 'gamey' gathering materials is. Chasing some bizarre combination of circumstances to get a percentage chance of the magic token you need appearing is insanely frustrating. Having to repeat the whole dull, irritating process numerous times to get enough magic tokens to achieve the desired end result is soul crushing. Having a stupidly large number of magic tokens to try and accumulate adds to the misery. Material traders were a decent idea, but they only take one sub species of magic tokens and their exchange rate is beyond ridiculous.

The whole thing is utterly bone. There's no need for any of this, the mechanisms to make material gathering a fun and immersive process are already in the game. One raid on a surface facility, one visit to a crashed ship, one rendezvous with a suitable salvage site in the deepest dark makes perfect sense. Having to log in and out and run the scenario literally hundreds of times is pathetic! It ruins the efforts of the team creating these wonderful side quests, turning them from a beautifully rendered challenge to a dull, repetitive chore to be completed as quickly and often as possible.

What really hacks me off is that engineering is no longer optional. Every activity in game is balanced around using engineered ships. To fight Thargoids you even need a specific type of engineering. It's not possible to 'blaze your own trail' if you spend the bulk of your time grinding out tokens to bring your equipment up to the minimum standard needed for even low level activities in game.

The game went from 'sublime' to 'ridiculous' when FD introduced grind activity in lieu of new game play.

nah. You're being unreasonable. It sounds like you need to take a break. Yes the grind is tedious but you only do that if you get obssessive about getting that upgrade, or getting that magic token to get that upgrade. I just got the game again on Epic and have started a new career from scratch. I've been unlocking engineers and using an completely unengineered Vulture in a ring to unlock Blaster McQuinn. It's actually been really good and I've got into exploration first this time. Honest Cmdr. Take a break. Go play something else for a while and come back. It'll do you good and you'll appreciate it.
 
I personally dislike engineers and engineering in ED. The grind for materials is an utterly joyless, tedious, sadistic nightmare of RNG and pointless repetition.

There are a handful of materials that in 4 years I've yet to find during normal gameplay, some other materials are mathematically so rare you may as well be looking for rocking horse s***. That leaves us with material traders and their horrendous trading ratios.

I do however like the results of engineering so I put up with it to a certain extent. What this means for me is that I'm unwilling to buy any more ships even though there are a couple I'd like to add to my collection and that is simply down to engineering and not wanting to face that awful grind again.

And get this...the current iteration of engineers is so much better than it was...can you even imagine how bad it was when it first appeared? Grown men were crying, people found religion and one player even managed to crawl into his own left shoe just to escape the grind.

Mini-game, shmini game...they need to sort out the material gathering mechanic first. Or better yet redesign engineers from scratch...for the third time!
 
reddit is the place to flex. Don't infect this forum with juvenile baiting.

You're on a public forum, not in an echo chamber.
Are you really new or someone that abandoned the game many years ago (before the first iteration of engineers) and now came back for a fresh start?
The mining reference seems to be pointing for the later. And if so it means that you came back with a baggage of old beefs already

Now, back to the game, it's a MMO sort of like and it has the grinds that are common to the genre.
IF you dont like Engineers, just skip them - the only part of the gameplay where they are mandatory is the PVP, but even there, there are events and places where you can pop and ask for fight in non-engineered ships.

If you like the benefits that come with them Engineers, you need to work them out.
They are not that hard to unlock and they will get you through various types of gameplay.

Also you dont really need to go all the way to G5
G3 Is good enough and offer the most of the benefits while being very cheap with materials.
If you want to go to G5, again you dont need to go all the way - usually 3-4 rolls are more than enough to get most of the benefits of G5 engineering.

I spent more than two hours in one system yesterday scanning every world because the current CG is asking for 2 million scanned worlds with bonuses for Ammonia Worlds.

Mistakes were made. You need to pay more attention to what are the CG requirements if you really want that DSS+
The current CG is asking for data for Ammonia Worlds and that's it. So FSS / Fly-by AW for 1 point or DSS them for 3 ponts.
Nothing else matters so you just wasted 2h for nothing or at best for a single report, but there is still time to recover from this.

The CG's generally are grinds with a purpose and exploration CG are very rare and not the most loved ones
And this one is quite a grind because its the first one that asks for specific body types. Previous ones were the honk and jump types.
 
Note that there is a big difference between the stupid MMO RPG grind and the complex and much more interesting progression gameplay in certain single player RPGs. I really wish they could draw at least one or two inspirations from it, although I understand that this is not something that is really compatible with MMOs. It already starts with the silly respawning of items that is necessary for MMOs, which takes away any illusion of a valuable speciality. And it does not end with the need to make all these items reasonably accessible and 'balanced' to everyone else. In my eyes, the thing that ED suffers most from is the simple fact that it is (or perhaps better: wants to be) a MMO .

I do think that if they designed ED for single player exclusively, it would had been a way greater game and infinitely more immersive (*)
but MMO requires a lot of gameplay compromises :/


*(Also i don't think you'd be still playing it for 7 years)
 
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