Goddamn this game to hell. I just can't catch a break. FUcccckkkk.
It's just really hard to kill a cobra solo in a sidewinder, shitty NPC or not shitty NPC.
Why the fuck do they make the NPC so hard anyway?
I've died so many times I've had to reset, and the first mission you get when you reset? Eranin/Dahan defense force shit.
And what do you see when you get to the locations you're supposed to go? Fucking 1 federal fighter - the only thing that's reasonably easy to ping in a sidewinder... and cobras and eagles and anacondas.
Seriously, these guys did not think about the actual play experience starting out. I mean, ok, it's not the full game yet, but still, this is exactly the kind of shit that the playerbase needs to ping them for before release so that the game is actually fun to play.
At this point, it feels like Gran Turismo 5. There's a beautiful game mired under the hubris of the menus and poor user experience; in this case, instead of slow menus, they've got jumping into and out of supercruise to serve the same do nothing for long stretches at a time transition.
It's not just dropping into and out of supercruise - it's navigating to locations in super cruise. It's not just a case of accelerate and be there - every jump involves a slow minute long wind up and deceleration.
And then when you are actually doing something exciting like combat... the encounters aren't exactly well balanced.
It seems to suffer from a classical design issue; where the further you progress into the game, the easier everything is. Which means that it has a brutal brutal upfront curve.
A lot of that can be better solved through better game design.
The Premium beta conflict zones were actually a great starter location - slow, easy rewards to get players feet wet on the combat. Great place to go swat flies.
No kill limits, and no loss of credits if you die before you cash it in (currently: if you die before you return to base you lose all the credits - you have to cash in bounties which you lose upon death).
Mission structure is also just atrocious like I mentioned before. If you're given a system to jump to, you're not given a broad indication of how to locate the targets - the lead designer has literally told players that the intent is for you to fly around and investigate unidentified signals.
Well, that's like searching for a needle in the haystack - not a whole lot of fun, time consuming, and a lot of luck required.
And even if you do get into battle with the right opponents; the AI is tough. And sidewinders against larger ships requires a lot of skill and a lot of luck. And the rewards they pay is shit - so it's not as if the intention is for you to go and grind you way up to a decent ship so you can take on these risky, time consuming, but highly rewarding combat missions.
The whole thing just reeks of people pulling numbers out of thin air and releasing it without actually playing through the user experience.
A reasonable play experience would provide sufficient stepping stones to get players started with little friction. Then ramp up the difficulty as they teach you the skills you need to take on more daunting tasks, with punctuations of higher risk and reward scenarios along the way.
Pretty much the only mission worth taking right now are delivery missions. Thousands of credits for moving one piece of cargo around. Only problem is, those missions are few and far between - the game shouldn't devolve into you loading and reloading so that you can get one of those missions to spawn. But that's what you gotta do to optimize the earning rate.
And you want to do that, because the sidewinder while a decent ship, is just less capable than all the other ships you'll come up against.
