Category: MMO

Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Are Elite:Dangerous ship interiors worth doing?

Fleet Carrier Camenecium visiting a precarious three-body barycenter.
Is her interior a ship interior or a station interior?

The long-awaited “space legs” feature has been announced for the next major update to Elite:Dangerous: Odyssey. Commanders will get to walk around stations and planets, shoot and be shot by things, and … practice xeno-botany with a hand-held probe-ulator. The community has been up in arms since that announcement also said that ship interiors would not be included in the first release.

Frontier can learn something from Cryptic here. Star Trek Online stopped doing elaborate interiors because they were expensive/resource-intensive to make and added very little gameplay. They only do bridges now if they use them in missions.

With dozens of ships to backfill and assuming they would all have unique interiors beyond existing cockpits, Frontier could better spend their time and money crafting social areas (fleet carriers?) or actual gameplay. Except for VR players, who I’d guess are a minority, who’s going to walk around their ships just to walk around their ships more than a handful of times? No gameplay would be a terrible waste.

Worse would be punitive gameplay like interiors meaning you have to repel boarding parties or it takes longer to get in and out of your ship without any gameplay added. Interiors should not be a tax I pay to play the parts of the game I like.

The best bet for making interiors worthwhile would be including optional beneficial gameplay like mini games inside to provide long-lasting buffs or find/fix damage without an AFMU or repair limpet. Still doesn’t seem worth the cost as a goal at launch.

The one interior I’d love to see at launch is my fleet carrier’s. I want to be on a super-star-destroyer-style bridge when she jumps. It’s really a station in its own right, can have many of the same features like shipyards and stellar cartographics, and could be a mobile social zone.

Bridge (starship) | Wookieepedia | Fandom

See Also

Star Trek Online: Best Space Wars simulator ever?

The upcoming season of Star Trek Online features an instance with a black hole, and Cryptic dev “trekhead” couldn’t resist turning it into a PVP map. Yes, boys and girls, STO just became a giant Spacewar!/Space Wars simulator with a huge graphical update!

That early vector-graphics arcade game ate more than a handful of my quarters in the distant past, but it’s not the only blast from that past with Season 12. Remember the Breen Rezreth Dreadnaught Cruiser? It wasn’t just the game’s Rock Lobster; it always reminded me of the Cygnus from the Disney flick The Black Hole. See for yourself:

I haven’t touched PVP in years even though I have many fond memories. In STO’s first year, PVP was how Klingons leveled: there was great PVP to be had at every tier all the time. Since then, balance went out the window for a bunch of reasons, and it’s just too much grind to be competitive with the min/maxers and pre-mades. Regardless, I’ve already dusted off my Rock Lobster and renamed her Cygnus. I’ll definitely queue up for this PVP map a few times before hitting the hyperspace warp-out button back to PVE.

Here’s the big unanswered question for me: Is the black hole map going to be a Foundry asset?

UPDATE: R.R.W. Cygnus with Reman Prototype Shield

Music is Murder: The Myth of Moderate Minstrel DPS

Another one of those Minstrel versus Rune-keeper threads showed up in the forums recently. I saw several responses that echoed this notion that rune-keeper DPS was superior and Minstrels only had moderate DPS output. My recent experience with running up new characters on Laurelin doesn’t match that “common wisdom”.

Rune-keeper Epic Conclusion
Boom goes the dynamite! But only after reaching maximum dagor attunement.

It may be different at end-game, but the burst damage a minstrel can do–and now sustain–seems to eclipse a rune-keeper’s DPS in the middle levels. I just ran a minstrel and a rune-keeper through getting their legendary pages: Both started at 39. Both ended at 41. I could clear the Bitter Stair or Skathmur with the minstrel much faster than the rune-keeper.

Part of this comes from a fundamental difference in the classes: Healing and damage are front-loaded bursts for minstrels where rune-keepers are end-loaded over time. Moving through the areas, my rune-keeper required more positioning and preparation like dropping my rune of restoration and building up over-time heals before and in the beginning of combat; the minstrel just ran from mob to mob blasting them and self-healing only when needed. Mobs didn’t last long enough for over-time DPS or critical/devastating hits to result in faster kills for the rune-keeper.

This isn’t really new; the Minstrel’s makeover in Update 6 was amazing, and it’s been a struggle deciding to keep the rune-keeper as my main because the minstrel is so fun. What is new is power management. Before the power revamp, I would have to moderate my skills use and use Anthem of Composure for power regeneration rather than Anthem of the Free Peoples for morale regeneration–the latter being critical when tackling that four-mob cluster of orcs and Angmarim in Skathmur. This time around, I could spam codas and never run out of power.

Instrument of War
Instrument of War

In long fights, the rune-keeper may do more DPS over time, but in short fights the minstrel’s consistent burst damage and lack of power issues will blow through landscape content faster, at least at the middle levels.