Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Apocrypha: Probing Update

Remember all that work I did on probing in the new system? A lot of it may be useless.

Currently on Sisi the probing mechanic (when the map is cooperating) does not give any visual cues to hits. No blue spheres, no red circles, no red or yellow or green dots.

Some pilots are celebrating this as a good thing . It makes exploration harder they say, weeds out the dumb players and makes it more worthwhile and elite to be a true explorer.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

I'm flying around in a god damned space ship, I expect this advanced technology is capable of showing me on the screen the stuff that it can figure out itself without me having to do it manually by moving the probes around in a game of infantile hot & cold. Yeah, I'm pissed. I liked the visual cues and I seriously hope they come back. I stopped doing exploration in the old method because it took so goddamn long with special bookmarks to get the best probing spots to find the sites. I could do it, but the hassle wasn't worth my limited time online.

Bring back the visual cues. It made probing enjoyable and not an annoying game of hide and seek.

(Less ranty opinion was posted to Game Development Forum)

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:07 am

    That sounds more like a bug than a design change, don't you think?

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  2. I agree with casiella, but if this is an actual change, FUCK THAT!

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  3. They did rework the map so it could be a bug but they have not, as far as I can tell, come out and said one way or the other.

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  4. Anonymous11:52 am

    is it significantly Faster...or was there no frigging benefit at all to this? I liked the visual representations....I just wished it was quicker

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  5. The current system without the pretty pictures is not any faster. You still need to do the same steps, just with the added difficulty of trying to figure out exactly where you are scanning.

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