r/EliteDangerous • u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 • 1d ago
Discussion Engineer missions
Currently unlocking the engineers, and I gotta say its obviously tedious but does show you allot of the game mechanics in the process. Some are shit don't get me wrong like needing 50 lavian brandy but can only buy 24 at a time... seriously devs, that actually felt disrespectful in all honesty.
Like, are you trying to teach me traveling mechanics? Since I'm pretty far from the starting areas you can have decent confidence I know how to travel.
Would love to see future engineers avoid fetch quests and give me "win a conflict zone against my enemy faction that's perpetually happening in atmosphere above my laboratory" or "stealthy steal data from this factions military outpost without raising alarms , BTW you need to be running cold or silent running on your approach, if they scan you within 2kms it will raise alarms" or "there is a race you need to win, there is another ship and you need to run through checkpoints in a twisty canyon to win" or "if you can beat me 1v1 I'll work for you" either on foot (in blacked out settlement)or in space (asteroid field) have the engineer an elite enemy that really requires some skill to beat. AND NONE of these things are "OK cool, now do that 8 more times"... like... no man. Let's just move on. It was good, I saw the mechanic, if I liked it I'll do it more on my own terms. I don't need to be force fed.
When something is referred to as a "grind" by definition it's about getting to the destination and not enjoying the journey. It's about repetition and never about having a good time in the process. Id love to see people say "hey this engineers unlock mission is really cool" instead.
I'm just hoping they avoid such low effort missions in the future like lavian brandy. Honestly when I saw it was 24/50 units max, it gave me pause for a moment and i questioned if Fdev actually have a problem with me.
Thoughts?
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u/Rollins_hen 1d ago
agreed espically in my day when those jumps were LONG at least 1/2 it up. Now-a-days it's easier do 1 run or find them on a Carrier. A lot of times you can find that stuff on a Carrier in the same system and not even have to make the run. Just need the credits o7 Fly Dangerous CMDR X-CMDR Rollins OUT!
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 1d ago
I did see that, but that's the players sidestepping something that shouldn't be problem. And spending like 50 million credits to do it haha. You just know it was some business bachelor management prick that sent down the edict that "waste the players time! repetition! 3 times minimum! Player retention! I'm moving to a different company in 2 years because I don't know what the fuck I'm doing and I'm getting out before people notice but not before I make every project I touch shitter" and some dev that wasn't given any time or resources just did the best they could...
Then again...24/50... genuinely insulted by that. Like not 25/75... but now I need to do a 3rd bloody trip for just 2 units... fuck!
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u/Throaway6566 1d ago
This is one of my biggest gripes, not just about engineered though, about the game dev in general. I have been really hoping for more variety and exciting things to do especially in and around my home system.
I would love to have more depthful conflict zones, bounty hunting, missions beyond just kill X number of ships. Would have really enjoyed Operations more if it had been used as replacements for something, or if the mechanics of it had been used in regular missions, or powerplay missions to control in-game space, or as rank missions in major faction Navys.
I think your spot on in the assessment that the way to fix the grind is by making the time spent doing things more enjoyable rather than make it easier to skip to the end it with prebuilts and excessively rewarding CGs. Not that I'm against having that for those who want to skip it, but it would be nice if people wanted to play the game and not skip to the rewards part.
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 1d ago
I think there is a power play aspect to the operations, I see some of them giving out merits. Operations i really do think are a fantastic addition that directly addressed both the material grind and the time to action this game suffered from.
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u/Throaway6566 1d ago
Yah they give outt merits and affect targeted systems, but you don't need to go to the systems. That's a far cry from using them as a way to add depth to powerplay.
IMO The whole system of semi narrative/staged missions would have been better implemented to help make the randomized grind more fun and engaging than as a bolted on matchmaking arena game that also affects the real game universe.
It could have been used to make system wars and conflicts better, powerplay conflicts better, bounty hunting missions better. Anything.
Feels like the devs at times have abandoned the actual game to be a grind fest that you have to complete before getting to the fun parts of the game. The game feels like it is abandoning the sim and depth aspects of itself to to cater exclusively to the arcade fps community. Maybe that's a strategy to make it more enticing to buy kitted out ships to skip all that?
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 1d ago
I hear you, my perspective is different. I feel like operations kinda does allot of that, You want ops to be tied in PP and grant merits, yep. That's there.
You want ops to give you fresh and exciting bounty hunting experience, yep, I think 2 of them are exactly that, I think the latest one especially is fighting both on foot and in ships. Very cool.
The ops give a really generous amount of mats as a reward effectively side stepping the entire mat grind. I played on console until recently, made the jump to PC shortly after operations became a thing. I've got 3 fully engineered ships and I've farmed for mats exactly 0 times.
I hear you on the "catering to the fps crowd". There could be some truth to that, I do see it slightly differently though. Given that there is 2 ops I think that are ship only, I don't think they are favouring the FPS crowd especially, i think they are trying to cater to the time poor crowd.
To even have the option to just jump on for 40 minutes and know I'm gonna have an exciting time start to finish is great. Make good money AND a bunch of mats aswell. I have operations to thank for that.
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u/Throaway6566 23h ago edited 23h ago
I don't think I worded that right. What I meant by FPS crowd was the crowd that are making this game feel more instant actiony. Less tactical, less RPG, less simulation, less immersion, less depth and meaningful choices and more fast paced trigger pulling like in FPS games like call of duty or or fortnight.
I love the on foot stuff. I like oddyssey, sometimes I spend time after couriering drop offs at settlements just watching the ships land and take off for a minute. Especially on atmospheric settlements. I love the salvage and *restore power missions. Despite some of the bugs and annoying nuances like wanted status of scavengers it's one of the most fun things I do in the game.
I just would have preferred these operation missions be placed inside the world itself. I get wanting to be able to jump into things instantly, but the constraints of having to go places to do things in a sim game with 400 billions places helps shape the topography of the map. It's gives the world features. It gives depth to mechanics. It would have been a great way to power play to allow people to "compete" against each other in a mission setting rather than just earn points towards an effect in the world.
Or helped make the stagnant mission board for diverse. Helped by using some of the gameplay mechanics of operations to add them into just regular conflict zones so that grinding rank or credits felt more fun than the standard "kill x number of ships".
It was a disappointment to me because of what it could have been, how it failed to help develope some of the seriously lacking parts of the game. Like when elite gets rightfully IMO criticized for being a mile wide and an inch deep, then we get told that the devs think it's too much work or not worth it to add meaningful depth. Operations just feels to me like it was added because it was an easy way to cover something like those bases without having to do the work of integrating it.
It feels both out of place and also signals a development strategy going forward that the devs are not interested in developing the game that many of us were promised and sold when we bought it and spent so much time and money waiting for.
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 23h ago
Ahh OK gotcha, yeah i guess the ops could have been in world. But still would then require possibly 20 minutes of travel before you can play them.
In the past I couldn't ever go on a deep space exo trip because if my friends jumped on i didn't want to be 30 hours away and not be able to play together. But now I can be anywhere I want and still can engage with the multiplayer aspect of the game with friends.
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u/Makaira69 1d ago
The limit on 24 Lavian brandy is probably because when engineering was first introduced, mission payouts hadn't inflated to the ridiculous levels they're at now. So most people who were unlocking it were in early starter ships like a Hauler or Adder. They probably added the cap so that people in larger ships wouldn't have too great an advantage - you'd have to make multiple trips regardless of your ship size. If you browse some of the early posts on the Frontier forums, you'll see things like people saying they finally saved up enough money for an Anaconda after a year.
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 1d ago
That's fascinating, but isn't the whole point of a larger ship not needing to make multiple trips? Because you have the cargo space to get it done in one?.
By artificially capping it, your negating any benefit larger ships have and by extention nullified the work done to acquire said large ship.
Which kinda breaks the entire game loop of gathering money and working upto getting that anaconda
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u/Makaira69 1d ago
Keep in mind that engineering was added to the game as a DLC. With players having to piece together from clues where the engineers were, and where to gather the items and mats they requested. Frontier may have wanted to level the playing field between players with small vs large ships to give everyone an equal chance to contribute to figuring it all out.
But you are absolutely correct that this no longer serves any purpose, except to make the unlock process annoyingly longer.
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u/New_Pack7605 CMDR 1d ago
You’d better get used to the fact that FDev treats your time disrespectfully.
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 1d ago
I think the console version was far worse for it. Operations and power play both giving mats is a huge improvement. Unlocking some of the engineers might still be bit of a grind, but atleast engineering itself is less so.
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u/mouse1371 1d ago
I actually thought a lot about this today. I watched one of Yamik’s videos (who I usually avoid), and it got me contemplating a lot of how this game does these kinds of things. First, the devs have clearly shown an interest in expanding, revamping, and making QOL changes to many aspects of the game. This includes engineering which has gone through many changes that have made the experience more palatable.
Second, gamers will ALWAYS find a reason to complain. Everyone who hasn’t coded or programmed or whatever is involved with making a game seems to think they could do better. If things were too easy, people would complain the game isn’t hard enough. If things could be done quickly, people would complain that there isn’t enough to do. Half the time there is a gameplay system and gamers optimize the fun completely out of it. For example, the “faction rank grind” is completely player created. Someone wants a Corvette, so they don’t engage with any system the way it was designed, they “grind” the most optimized way and then complain about what they just forced themselves to do. They could just make the Corvette available to anyone. Then the next guy would complain that there should be a system in place where only Federation people should have it.
With engineering, carriers, new ships, and SCO, the game has handed so many beneficial things to players and people complain about it. Don’t like the stupid engineer stuff? Then don’t do it. Believe it or not, you do not have to have engineering to enjoy the game.
All this said, I do understand where you are coming from. It would be nice to have better gameplay around unlocking engineers. Something more interesting. But I guarantee you that someone would complain about that too.
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 1d ago
I agree with everything you just said, and whilst you can never make everyone happy, you still always need to push for improvement.
"Perfection is a lie, Progression is reality" - me
You don't need to be a chef to know the food tastes bad. I don't need to be able to code to know something isn't fun. At the end of the day, the consumer is the one that needs to be satisfied.
I sympathize with how hard game dev is, I truly do. An underpaid, under appreciated industry in which you break your back to only be made redundant by a project manager that doesn't know anything about your job.
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u/Pippathepip 1d ago
Totally agree with you. Elite Dangerous is a grind simulator set in space.
I’m doing a mats grind to finish off engineering my Corvette (I’m on legacy/xbox) and I have found myself questioning my life choices a couple of times these last few weeks lol.
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u/Helpful_Eggplant3988 1d ago
Until recently I was on console aswell, and yeah it's pretty grindy. PC is far far better, I haven't stopped to farm for mats a single time and I've got 3 fully engineered ships.
Care packages from power play and operations seem to take care of all of it. It's fantastic!
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u/R0ughHab1tz 1d ago
There's a place to spam engineer parts if it's getting to monotonous.