I had hoped for some Event Horizon like stories for the generation ships and it seems
they're delivering. I love that they're starting to introduce audio logs.
Bring in the space legs, so we can be chased by space Zombies!
Here's how it'll play out: You'll be able to dock to a generation ship and board it. You have to kill Zombies to get data scans from the late crew. Some engineer will want specific scans to manufacture a cool uprade to your ship. But the types of Zombies are different and not every type drops the data scans you need. There'll be spawn tables to make it all feel like the space leg encounters are more dynamic and about one of six such tables has the type of Zombies you need. Which spawn table you get is rolled when entering the ship, so you can re-instantiate them by leaving and entering again. You can also form a squad of up to four players space legging around for some cooperative fun. But
obviously, in a four people squad, your risk is lower, because scaling enemies and loot drops according to player number is an arcane art Frontier never encountered, because none of them ever played something like Diablo 2. So, to balance this out, the loot gets divided by the number of players participating in the raid. The scans will of course all count towards your maximum of mats inventory, so you'll have to permanently drop other mats you might still need to make room and most mats you can't collect, because they're a waste of space, as there'll still be no per-mat inventory space.
Oh, I almost forgot! It will take some 4 hours of farming space Zombies to get the necessary data scans for the engineer to create the cool equipment item (8 hours with friends, because loot sharing and no enemy scaling of course!). But it'll be an RNG roll and in about one of 6 cases you get the cool thing, while the other 5 cases will be worthless, non-tradeable junk. So prepare to collect mats for at the very least 6-10 rolls. Because that's what a fun risk vs. reward mechanic is like, isn't it? Risk wasting time or just invest
so much time, that you minimize your risk. Erm, wait. The only variable is time and the risk converges to zero the more time you spend? Oh, nevermind, let's still call it risk vs. reward mechanic, that has a nice ring to it!