Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Initial Post Fanfest Thoughts

Disclaimer: I have not had time to dig into all of the information released about the new Abyssal pockets, Triglavian NPCs, and mutation mechanics for modules coming for the May expansion Into The Abyss. But here are some initial thoughts I have from the event and what I did pick up.

New Space: The Abyssal space sounds like just another type of wormhole space, but leaving nothing to chance this time to ensure players don't unexpectedly decide to move in and live there. On one hand that makes me disappointed about long term exploration possibilities since its basically feels like just instanced mission dungeons, but on the other hand I'm excited for the weird effects and environments these pockets can have and the new PvE content that they can host.

New Ships, New Weapon System: Ambivalent overall. I love the look of these new ships, but the new weapon system that increases damage over time (hello Inferno Dragon!) sounds great at first, like a weapon that smaller groups could employ against larger super fleets, but I suspect much like Strategic Cruisers, will find greatest use in mass numbers that large coalitions can bring together. Big losers might be the smaller elite groups that depend on up-shipping to maintain dominance.

Module Mutations: Random mechanics always sound neat at first, just like invention did when it first released. But here is a hard truth about random mechanics: you do enough of them, the randomness is eliminated via statistics. Ultimately the randomness will only punish the small guys trying out the mechanics, and the big producers will reap the benefits of the new powerful modules. Plus balancing these new mutated modules is going to be a pain, and ultimately will be the new benchmark for PvP ships if they come down in price. Remember, cost is not good a balancing factor.

Overall the feeling is hopeful pessimism. A lot of the devil is in the details of this expansion, so I eagerly await the dev blogs on some of this new material.

No comments:

Post a Comment