Oh look. A star. Alone. In the pitch black abyss.
...
I'm sure it's fine.
A single beacon in space - all alone in the night.Anyway, this is all super neat, and although it does give the player more "superpowers", from feedback it's been obvious for a long time that there needs to be more to Do™ in hyperspace to make it interesting past your very first playthrough. While it would be neat to see the
occasional Pather fleet yeeting itself across the Sector, I can imagine the work trying to get the AI to cooperate with these abilities in a non-obnoxious way (and determining which NPC factions would get wormholes - though it might be fun to see that open up as the game/main storyline progresses) to not really be worth the potential payoff, compared to just making thing interesting for the player.
And it's worth pointing out that the Slipsurges, from the sound of it, aren't without risk. Use a really big one, and you could end up yeeting yourself clean out of the main bounds of the Sector, which is where Things™ are!
Though, that's probably not
too big a deal.
It's just dark out there, after all. And they're waiting to say hello.I am wondering if Alfonso might have to revise the "edge of sector" static constellation in HMI a bit, though...Wormholes/WH-Anchor sounds interesting, but considering how strapped for real estate 90% of systems are in regard to stable locations, I can't see it become of much use.
This is a point of consideration, though. It's already nearly mandatory to have a comm array in a system you want to control, and depending on build, nav buoys can feel needful too. So with this, we're already hitting all three possible stable points, and if a Gate takes up another, welp. And of course, a lot of systems don't even have all three points, and you can only generate two via grav manipulation (with stable point #2 costing an arm and leg in story points).
This might be intentional in design, but I do wonder about feel in practice. Certainly on paper Hostile Activity looked neat and made sense, but going by feedback, hasn't translated to good game feel.
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Anyhow, I also have a World Building Question in all this: it's generally been assumed, ever since the Orion-Perseus Abyss label was added all those years ago, that it represents the Persean-side edge of the large, star-thin area between the Orion and Perseus Arms of the galaxy. Is that still accurate? Is it known in-universe if this is something Else? Can you reveal how many Spacer Rumors there are in-universe about this area of space, since we're presumably not the first to try and go in there?
also:
It's estabilished from the begining since you can spend 15 skillpoints on combat skills when other human officers max out at 7, Alpha cores max out at 8 and Omega maxes out at 10. You're the dog, man.
And more to the point, anything in the skills
can be done by other captains. You explicitly get both of the first-tier science active abilities outside of their skills as part of the storyline (and can even surprise people by being
stupidbrave enough to try Transversing on your own without software assistance) and you see others using those actives. Enemy fleet commanders can even have capstone fleet-altering skills (and in fact can go beyond their actual stated level in skills). We're not comparatively
that "super-human". We just get a few extra skills from high-end levels, and at least one of those skills involves us just deciding to Break Da Law™ and figuring out how to do that
(which, as a side note, I wish got more acknowledgment from patrol NPCs in various polities). This is actually the first instance of us getting to do things the non-player can't, and at least one of these will be tied deeply to the progression of the main story. It would, again, be neat to see the occasional yeeting NPC, but clearly being able to do that involves a lot of research and mapping on your part, and anyone else who's done it is likely keeping their cards close to their chest.
I do somewhat understand where Helldiver's coming from (the game up till now has been pretty good about the player not having any truly outlandish abilities that the wider Sector couldn't do, at least not without a well-rationalized explanation for why that is), but I think it's a bit of an over-reaction.
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Edit:
Why do that if the game ends already, when we have enough resources to do all this stuff? So, my question is: do you plan to introduce some end-game activity (hopefully: something bigger than randomly generated REDACTED raids)?
Spoiler
Given what is 99% likely to be required to unlock Gate-building, I would, by 1.0 and possibly even in this coming update, absolutely expect there to be Things to fight beyond standard [REDACTED] raids, and probably even beyond [SUPER ALABASTER] combat.
Which is also to say... huh, are we getting the rest of the main story in several more updates? I always figured it'd be done in one go. But given the scope of what's in this update...
