Commander Profanicus is on shore leave until my consumer Rift arrives.
I sold my Python and back into an Asp, albiet now a completely tricked out one :) Deep space exploration with my Oculus. Having a blast :)
Squee
5743
Still in my asp. I occasionally hear about things like the price drop on the expansion which sounds mildly tempting if I wasn’t hours and hours of flight away from civilized space. One day I’ll be able to actually play Elite again. One day.
Actually met up with a friend of mine in a nebula a few thousand lightyears from Sagittarius A* though. We were both heading to the core and were in roughly the same neck of the woods so we met up for a picture or two.
That’s awesome Squee!
My working theory is that the proposed 10h server downtime to upgrade the game to 2.1/1.6 is just to give you time to read the patch notes. Seriously. Great googly-moogly!
HRose
5745
I sometimes peeked at the forums and hopefully they didn’t fuck the AI.
I’ve read that before beta 5 the AI became really, really good. Some people complained. So the usual knee-jerk reaction you expect: the AI was nerfed back to the ground in beta 5 and 6. The latest patch notes don’t mention any changes.
So, it looks like that what goes live is not the great AI that happened at some point, but the nerfed version that came out after the complaints.
I just can’t understand why they can’t use tiers properly. If you have GREAT, challenging AI, that’s something that has to have a place in a game. Just don’t use it EVERYWHERE. Is that so hard to understand? They don’t have to nerf the AI itself, they just need to tune its distribution. If the game gets too hard for the reward it gives, it simply means you employ weaker AI across the board and ramp up the difficulty only in those cases that need it. But nope, lets nerf everything for everyone.
(my interpretation of what happened: it’s May, the AI has a few things that needs fixing/tuning but the patch release can’t be delayed further and the code is in feature freeze. So they decide to strip the relevant features of the new AI -the actual flight behavior that was stripped off in recent betas- while keeping the smaller fixes that don’t give issues, and push the rest to the next major patch. There still seem to be plenty of bugs in the game that weren’t fixed, including the mission system. The patch obviously isn’t exactly perfect so, without being able to afford further delays, I’d expect this release being still quite buggy.
Reliable review without even booting the game: the new version is a marked improvement, but the new features are kind of “meh” and there’s again the pervasive feel of missing opportunity and unfulfilled potential. The Engineering/crafting is just glorified RNG that is designed to enhance frustration instead of fun. 6.5/10)
Oh shit, they dropped a major patch? I forgot that was coming I am out exploring. Given the past experience of a major patch often screws exploration data somehow. I am nervous to say the least…
It’s ok, and its a really neat patch too. Game looks better and there’s another foot of depth added to the pool.
The ai got improved but not so much that I cant make a buck anymore with my Federal Assault boat. The station UI for outfitting and missions got overhauled but what will matter most to you out there in the black Rod, is that your buggy will now leave tire tracks and no longer find canisters of tea thousands of lightyears from home.
Does anyone know if accounts are transferable across clients? For example, I bought the Rift and so I downloaded a copy of the game on the Oculus store, if I launch that version will it be my account or will I essentially be a new player? Also I don’t see a Horizons option on the Oculus store, is the expansion not compatible yet?
Accounts are transferable between steam and frontier clients for sure. Just log in with your other email & password at the client login. I log in with my and my sons accounts on both and mix & match no problems. I have to do this because my Rift doesnt want to run Elite without SteamVR.
Dont know about the Oculus version but I imagine it is the same.
HRose
5751
Despite the actual good AI shouldn’t be part of the patch, there’s quite a huge rant on the forums about “AI being too hard”.
But it turns out it’s not because it’s good AI, but just because the NPCs come fully upgraded with the modules kept behind the RNG crafting, leaving most players “nerfed”. So, the AI wasn’t much improved, but their damage numbers went up.
I spent some time yesterday making nice with a bunch of engineers. Took my FAS to visit one for some multicannon upgrades which, okay, incendiary rounds sounds cool. Then went looking to upgrade my Asp’s FSD. Needed some meta-alloys to bring to another engineer, but there are currently some issues farming them in the usual spots, and as an interim fix until Frontier can figure out what’s wrong, you can purchase them at Darnielle’s Progress in Maia. So as you can imagine, I spent a lot of time jumping in and out of the bubble, getting interdicted and taking a few scrapes in both a FAS and an Asp, taking on a range of NPC combat skill from novice to elite. And if the AI was using fully upgraded modules and weapons, I didn’t notice it. So at the very least, it’s not like every NPC you’ll come across has a better ship than you do. ;)
Watched the vid, looked like a bug to me. And while I’m sure it was extremely frustrating for the player, and I say this as someone who has lost ships to buggy AI behaviour in “under a second”, it’s not a good reason to not play the game. Stuff like that is typically rare, and even if the frequency has increased with the latest patch, there are also a lot of players testing it out and posting their experiences on the forums. If everyone started talking about lions, you’d understandably start worrying about lions.
But given the ship he was flying, I’m sure the player had the cash reserves to cover the loss and then some. Plus, recovering from setbacks builds character. ;)
HRose
5755
Yeah, there are a few “bugs”:
Ach, its HRose, might as well try and get the depressed donkey from Winnie the pooh to have fun dancing.
As for the new NPCs, i fucking LOVE em. Get some! Feels like a proper scrap at times. Yea thar be lions and that’s what gives it zing.
Out of curiosity I fired up the game last night. Has anyone noticed a change in the head tracking? FD seems to have moved the side interface panels back somehow, at least with TrackIR and the profile I had for ED which worked fine before. Now you really have to lean your head back to get a look at them. I suppose it’s fixable with an adjustment to the profile. Has anyone seen an adjusted one?
Yeah, I noticed that too, it take a bit more of a turn to see the side panels now.
I also fired this up for the first time in months tonight to try it on my Rift and some of my key bindings seem to have changed on my HOTAS. I used to have HAT stick set to redistribute power when my gear was up and to lateral and vertical thruster when my gear is down. Now I see an option for landing override but I can’t set my HAT stick to both those controls and the power distribution, it only allows me to choose one or the other. Shouldn’t I be able to set the same control to the landing override group and another control option? Isn’t that the point of override? Anyone know how to set this up now?
Two random points:
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Wow is this game difficult to come back to after a long hiatus. It took me almost an hour of screwing around in options just to figure out all the buttons on my HOTAS again and relearn the basics (it didn’t help that i was learning the VR differences as well). I spent so much time trying to remap controls and figure things out I was only able to run a single cargo mission for the night.
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This game is so much better in the Rift! The sense of immersion is truly impressive, just being able to look around the cockpit, look behind my seat at the door that I suppose leads somewhere in my ship, track a planet as it passes my cockpit while in supercruise, all these things are so fluid and natural in the Rift, the god-rays and lower resolution don’t even matter. I was kind of done with Elite before but now I think the Rift is going to drag me back in.
Finally getting back to this on the Xbone- I picked it up in early access, played a bit, and drifted on to other things. Came back a few times, but the last few, the gamepad wouldn’t respond. Well, the start button (and menu) would work, but literally nothing else in the game would. I tried un/reinstalling. Nothing. Finally I figured out I had to clear the key bindings, reimplement them, and save it.
So. In the meantime, it seems they’ve made the game crazy difficult to make any money, at least at the low end where I am. I remember doing trading missions, a few jumps, that would net decent change. Now, those are all around 8K/each. I took one that was 46k, and found out it was something like 48 jumps. WTH? I tried it anyway, and ran out of fuel in a series of uninhabited star systems. I’m now in debt around 70k, having no money when that went down, and getting killed trying to snipe with my warrant scanner just to keep alive. At this rate, it just doesn’t seem worth playing. Meh.
