I really love the addition of corvettes to NMS. I was literally thinking about re-installing Starfield, partially to play with ship creation, when this update came out. Needless to say, I did not re-install Starfield (maybe some day).
I have to wonder what the long-term impact will be to the game, and whether and how Hello Games will address it. In many ways having even a barebones corvette is better than Exocraft and even regular ships.
For example, you can get out of the pilot seat, use your visor to find and mark what you're after, fly there, and beam down without landing. It's an overall more optimized experience than what you can do with a ship or Exocraft. Will they bother to address this or just allow ships and Exocrafts to become more vestigial?
The main hurdle is having enough units to buy parts or a Terrain Modifier to grind for scrap. Expeditions tend to begin with providing you a ship that you typically have to repair. The level of effort depends on the expedition nature and storyline. Will future expeditions avoid going to systems with Salvageable Scrap to prevent players from just making a corvette?
Not being able to use regular landing pads is an annoyance. I tend to make bases in caves and more than once I've teleported to a base only to find my corvette spawned in, partially underground and embedded in the dirt as opposed to spawned on a landing pad like a regular ship would. Will they eventually deal with it like they did with Space Stations, Freighters, and the Anomaly? Admittedly, I think how they handled landing on Freighters feels a little cheap and awkward, but it's an easy solution to the problem.
Given the procedural nature of the game, a big part of the NMS community has been centered around finding that "perfect" ship, multi-tool, and companion, which is why we have communities like !nmsglyphexchange@lemmy.world on Lemmy and Reddit. While I don't think that focus will completely go away, will the community shift from finding the perfect ship to building the perfect ship, which is similar to the Starfield community?
It's also possible that Hello Games never really addresses these. After all, NMS is nearly a decade old at this point and many of the new features it's getting are actually a test bed for Light No Fire features. They may not be too concerned with "cleaning up" the overall NMS gameplay.
What are your thoughts?
NMS has kind of a kitchen sink philosophy which is exacerbated by nine years' worth of content additions whereas older content tends not to get addressed and tweaked too much beyond the first initial couple of patches after its release. There have been some exceptions, yes, but generally that's how Hello Games seems to do it.
In order to "address" this, if you want to think of it that way, the game needs a major overhaul to its difficulty curve. Otherwise, we just have to accept the kitchen-sink factor and resign ourselves to the notion that most of the mechanics are in fact completely optional, and they have to be in order to prevent players from getting trounced by combat or the environments if either of those were made tough enough that you outright had to hide in a base or exocraft regularly or hover your freighter over the surface or have your fleet help out in combat or train and maintain your squadron or have your Minotaur on the surface or, or, or... etc. In some ways, I think that's really the game's core groove: You can play it how you want to, and if that includes or excludes using any of the stuff available that's perfectly valid.
For instance, since their very inception I found all of the exocraft except the Nautilus to be utterly useless. Like many things in the game there's a high initial barrier to entry in terms of materials cost and obtaining all the blueprints and upgrades, but then there's no major benefit to their use which offsets how cumbersome they are to deploy, use, and keep fueled. The main problem is that most of the exocraft are excruciatingly slow. It's literally faster to just jetpack-punch all over a planet surface if you need to get anywhere, plus your scanner doesn't work through the canopy glass for some reason so you have to stop to hop in and out all the time to scan things and pick up materials anyway. If there were a major transportation speed boost to offset this hassle it'd be worth it, but there isn't. A player on foot who knows what they're doing can easily outrun even a Nomad. Only the Pilgrim offers anything resembling a reasonable vehicular speed but not out of the box, and by the time you're done upgrading it you may as well just jump in your damn ship and fly to wherever you're going. I mean, donate like three things to the Merchants Guild and space stations just hand you launch fuel for free, even if you don't have a launch auto-charger.
At that rate the only reason to use the exocraft at all is for the sake of completion in fully kitting out all of them just to say you did (and then probably never touch them again) or for self-imposed roleplay purposes.
Time will tell if starships themselves eventually get relegated to this secondary capacity. Other than being marginally slower and less maneuverable than a top of the line fighter or exotic single-seater ship, which is unlikely to be much of a factor for anyone other than maybe doing the pirate ship trench runs, the only other major drawback of a corvette seems to be that it takes approximately seventeen years to complete a docking operation โ especially on the Space Anomaly.
In fact, you can build your corvette to be so versatile it threatens to make your capital ship obsolete, too.
Maybe what the corvettes are now are what starships should have been from the beginning. In any case, I'll bet you
5,000 that nobody is ever touching that stupid build-a-starship panel in the back of the space stations ever again.