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This really is a flawed gem, I'm personally loving it but I totally get why a lot of people can get soured on its structure during their time in the first system. I've never seen so many people call a game with this much depth "shallow", but it makes sense if you focus too much on the repetitive slow-moving low-payout side stuff at the beginning, which the game actively encourages you to do. I also feel like it's a big missed opportunity making the Red Devil Cartel (i.e, the dullest of pirate forces) the only baddies you can side with, it's really lame that we can't befriend rad space Cthulhu people, sweet not-Kilrathi dudes or hella not-Salarians. I guess it's to balance it so you can't be neutral/friendly with everyone, but man, the rep rewards are already balanced in a way that'd make that kinda difficult, and if I end up being that good at playing the field then let me gdi. This is accentuated by the way the game teases you with them having their own rep bars and displayed rep numbers. At least give me a cat dude defector as a merc buddy so we can make the Wing Commander parallels even more apparent (p.s. there might already be a Murath buddy i don't know about cos I haven't been visiting many bars). Also make it so that sieges on stations and war statuses can actually result in faction takeovers that we can aid in and get big ups from ok i'm sure that's totes easy to design and program and balance and not a nightmare for two people to layer on top of everything they've already done ok thanks
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Oct 25, 2015 18:58
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Klyith posted:I think the comparisons some people might be thinking of are X3 (where you can own fleets of ships & entire stations) or the Escape Velocity series (which had more interesting / dynamic factions and multiple storylines). I can see how some I'm someone who's always loved everything the X games have been going for on like a really spergy simulation level (i.e, an economy based around actual NPC trade that can boom or bust and be hosed with by the player in all manner of ways) but gently caress me if I know how to begin actually playing that game. For some reason (mainly aesthetics and sound design) I decided to dig into Elite: Dangerous instead and boy that's a game that rewards you with a whole lot of nothing for your trouble. I see RG as like, one of the only games I've seen translate some of what uniquely appeals to me about the design of X3 (and what I wanted Elite to be but it refuses to even try being) into something way more approachable and casual, which admittedly ends up losing a lot of the potential for crazy unique overarching systems-driven scenarios but still makes moment-to-moment gameplay feel more meaningful than most action games to me. And hell, it takes AC Black Flag's only good parts, strips the lovely fluff away and puts them in a place where they can breathe. Layer on top of that the rad visual design that evokes several kinds of nostalgia (without outright nostalgia-baiting, arguably) and a soundtrack that fuckin' speaks to me, man, and I totally stand by it being a flawed gem. I don't think of it as revelatory or innovative or whatever, I just think it's a really drat fine game that's incredibly impressive given its development cycle, just with flaws that come with a first attempt at a game of this scale by two people used to making aRPGs for a living. As much as I loathe when people clamor for sequels the moment an original game comes out, I do feel like this is a really promising thing that deserves to be iterated on in a big way. Though I am curious to see what else the devs want to do, since they founded Double Damage to branch out and experiment with stuff they couldn't do elsewhere. Also yeah the progression is hosed. Thankfully it's not like E:D's early days where it's in a way that makes the game unfun, it's just obviously unbalanced in ways that knock of last-minute economy design changes/realizations.
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Oct 26, 2015 01:02
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types would call it shallow: it's not like this game has a huge amount of complexity to any of its systems. It has tactical depth, it's got some interesting event-based trading, and it has a storyline. It's not a super deep everything-simulator. Some people like complexity for complexity's sake, and some people just like to play a fun game and move on.
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NLJP posted:Is there anything you can do about those engine impairing mines? Cos holy poo poo is endless engine impairment even after the goddamn fight is over the most unfun poo poo I've encountered in a game for a long time. Am I missing something obvious? I think there's a (guild-rank-locked) Merchant's Guild Subsystem module that lets you use your deflector to stop mines from seeking you or something IIRC? You could probably use that to either get a good aim on them with your turrets or boost away, as long as you have a decent deflector and good boosters. They are a pain, though, and it's supreme horseshit that there's no way to combat the scripted engine-impairing interdictions during high-risk missions that literally spawn enemies in front of you. Like, I'd even take a short minigame to combat it ala E:D, just make it slightly more interesting than "Oh, I guess I'll just boost through this group of guys so i can boost through another group of guys so i can get to my delivery point  ". At least the actual near-station blockades have potential for fun NPC infighting and poo poo.
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Oct 28, 2015 15:13
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LibbyM posted:Do you spend as much time in every system as you do the first one? I'm enjoying the game quite a bit but I can see this getting a bit old when I look at that galaxy map. zedprime posted:I spent more time in the first system than the rest of the game combined. I spent a lot of time in the first system but that seems absurd. Later systems have way higher payouts and are kinda obligatory if you want to keep the loop of side-content -> upgrading poo poo -> side content to keep a decent pace. Even the story missions don't take too long to tell you to get a jumpdrive and start farting around elsewhere. Also you don't really stick around systems like you do the first one once you have a jumpdrive, I only hang around one system if it happens to have the highest payout missions available at stations, and even then the >1,000,000 credit missions tend to send me through a jumpgate or two. It also seems more efficient to do stuff like trade in lesser systems, because the highest value ones seem to have an absurd amount of NPCs floating around, which is great if you get a Detail Scanner and go pirating/bounty hunting since they also carry the best loot and bounties but not so great for doing quick trade runs.
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Oct 28, 2015 16:26
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I kinda feel like running the highest value Merchant's Guild missions for a few hours kinda completely broke the campaign for me. poo poo could still be a little overwhelming when i was truckin' around in a Deep Horizon with subpar turrets, but even then I was able to get the best armour and shields in the game really early (like four Merch Guild missions in, long before i could even buy the space trucks), and even after farting around a bit I managed to get to the Blackgate surprisingly quickly, and slap any Mk6 broadsides I wanted on it even quicker, which the campaign doesn't ever scale to. I seriously beat the final mission by just spinning in circles wildly spamming broadsides in all directions without ever properly aiming. It made the campaign ending feel pretty abrupt actually, and that on top of the "unreachable" system being a real dud of a bog-standard UNAMBIGUOUS SPACE BAD GUY place and the jumpgate-anywhere thing being a lame plot device and nothing else makes the campaign probably the most disappointing part of the whole package, even after going in with fairly low expectations. I don't think it should have scaled the enemies like some Oblivion poo poo, I just wish there was more to the campaign, like proper branching paths and a better sense of multiple approaches, the latter of which already felt lacking after I had gotten in good with the Red Devils and they still attacked me when I tried for the first Reliquary piece because they were the DESIGNATED CAMPAIGN MISSION BADDIE. The campaign stuff only really opened up when it was vague boilerplate "go get this thing I don't care how you do it" stuff, and that's just because it designates the objective the same way any standard off-the-board mission like that does. I feel like a lot of this design comes from Double Damage coming off of Torchlight and Diablo campaign design, which is also pretty straightforward and rarely very systemically strong or accommodating towards radically different approaches (beyond "use other equipment to fight goodly"). It's a bummer, since everything else is designed to be so free-form and it really does not jive with that at all. Between the lackluster campaign, the lack of more fleshed out side stories, and the limited ability to side with the "baddies" (perhaps due to being a space racist), I feel like this game really could use an expansion. Maybe not a full-on sequel, though I certainly wouldn't mind one, it just seems like something that needs a big enough follow-up to really deliver on some of the unfulfilled potential on display.
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Nov 3, 2015 02:23
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I believe Double Damage said that they're working on mod tools, but i'm not really surprised it's not a thing yet because it's probably just them two and nobody else working on it. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if this is another Hotline Miami 2 situation of the tools coming out in limited beta that nobody knows about like a year from now...
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Feb 24, 2016 23:20
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If you hate the soundtrack because you're a monster, you can replace it on PC pretty easily. It'll even switch the music dynamically as it does with the default soundtrack, provided you give it enough to pull from for each folder it asks for. As much as I like the OST, I will admit that using the custom soundtrack to change this into ELO: The Game owns pretty hard. Train of Gold's a real good space hauling theme, y'all.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:45
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Winners Don't Do Escort Missions No seriously don't do the escort missions, just go to the highest level systems and look for delivery missions (I think you can cheese mission board refreshes by just taking missions, ditching them immediately, then reentering the station? Been a while since my first playthrough where i just cheesed delivery missions 4 dayz) if you want huge spacebux. Unless you really enjoy the cataclysm of awful game design in this otherwise decently-made game that is "escort mission with jank-rear end AI and arbitrary mission boundaries", in which case, more power to you. Moartoast fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 13:27
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Sgt. Cosgrove posted:Don't forget to play the space-market whenever you hit a station. If you get lucky you can basically double up on profits, mission payout and trading combined. I've been doing this a lot more on my second real playthrough and seriously, the economy in this game is alright. I'm really looking forward to loving up supply shipments to mess with markets once I get a more formidable ship, because the stuff they implemented to let you gently caress with station states is something I never really engaged with before yet always wanted to. I will say I'm still super bummed you can't actually blow up stations, even though you can wear down their shields and armor. I totally get that it'd be a nightmare for a 2-person dev team to accomodate for that level of player shenanigans long-term, but goddammit these stations tell me where they get stuff from and where they send stuff too, i want to use that info to commit monstrous corporate sabotage and crash some goddamn space markets.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:08
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THE MACHO MAN posted:I am still green but I put in a few hours last night. I didn't realize you can actually snipe shipments. I assume there's a rep penalty for this? AFAIK You're fine unless you're in outright hostile standing with the faction the station belongs too. If they're still mad at you after you warp out and warp back into their space, maybe jumpgating to another system and back will make them chill. And yeah there's a bunch of opportunities to intercept convoys that appear on the map to affect the economy, it's honestly one of the least-appreciated cool ideas this game has. For instance, Treaty vessels will eventually appear on the map during a War state, and from what i can tell, intercepting and destroying them before they reach their destination will keep the war from ending, so you can literally become a war profiteer if you really want to. The rep hit is probably the same as attacking/blowing up any other ship you find out in the wild. I do wish it wasn't just these events that could affect it, like I wish there were proper constant supply lines to disrupt, but what's there is still real neat.
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Apr 18, 2016 19:19
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