bit more research turns out there are different "levels" of guns, basic, calibrated, refined, and advanced. Each level provides a significant boost to the last and allows things like those equinox rifles and other guns to be viable in late game.
Yeah this I understand, but again they're missing in-game fluff to explain the differences. How is a "calibrated" gun different than a "refined" gun? You have to hit the Google machine to find a blog post about it. It would be nice if there was some text that would say "a calibrated gun is 5% more accurate than a normal model" or something along those lines.
Also, i got to thinking on what Ingo said on starfield... I think bethseda wasted a big thing in the space travel.. As stands, you select your destination and zoom, you just appear there after a small cutscene. What the game could have used is some random encounters in these, funny little things happen like an issue with your ship, like one of the gribblies from one of the worlds you set down on snuck on and has decided to make itself known, a stowaway is found, your attacked by pirates, or find a ship in distress, something to break the empty jump pattern as you go.
This is a great idea. I would totally support if this is a standard mechanic and you could have the option to fast travel if you've been to a place before (main story aside). They could have easily added quests to get a "map" or "star coordinates" to various stars and that's how you expand your galaxy map.
Further, and admittedly, ive shipped out with no crew at all cause im a badass lone wolf space ace, but this would have been an excellent moment for interactions with crew and companions. When your designing your ship you get tons of optional rooms of different styles to fill things out. While your drifting through the void it seems a perfect time to go talk to your peeps in a relaxed setting, have different interactions in different rooms, dont have to be major story shaking events, but chat with them about what type of guns are their favorite in the armory, talk science stuff in the lab, hang out in the living quarters, talk shop over a meal in the galley. Something that makes you feel a bit more attachment to both your ship and your companions rather then they are just set dressing in the game.
I think they would have to have spend much more time writing character interactions and recording voice overs and what not, but not too far fetched. I could see why they wouldn't do something like this mainly due to the costs involved but how awesome it would be!
You can build your own landing pad at your outpost that lets you modify your ship... its cool, but its only the most generic of parts.
What i want..? IS the option to save parts from ships. Like, if i catch a ship and it has some rare powerful engines or something, i cant like, remove them and put them on another ship like my main ship which has these really cool and rare other parts on it, but shit engines.
Because of the way they "balanced" selling ships, i actually make more money selling 10 grendels then a pirate heavy ship. The engines they will charge me 80,000 credits for, they will only pay me 200 credits for. I might as well keep them and upgrade my own ship.
I feel like the ship building thing is designed as a mini-game and a credit sink rather than part of the game world. There's no effort to modifying ships at a ship yard or city dock, just bring credits. As it stands right now outside of leveling up your skills to access the more specialist parts, you need to go to specific ship builder star yards to access some of those specialized parts. I think this is fine, it forces you to hunt down where these places are to get the parts, but is super annoying.
Building at your outpost makes no sense to me. You can modify your ships and it seems it's just limited to your skills. Seems like you can access most things if you max your skills? I'm not 100% here since I haven't maxed my ship building related skills. But at the same time it makes no sense here. How would you get the random parts for your ship to this random outpost on this random planetoid in this random star system? Doing it at a ship yard makes sense, there's infrastructure and warehouses there, but at a random outpost it makes no sense. They could have totally gamified it, giving you access to all those parts at your outpost but you'd actually have to build the parts by supplying the various resources. Higher tier parts require higher tier resources, etc.
In addition to the above, I feel like they missed out on an opportunity for ship manufacturer faction standings. Like, cities don't have maybe rank B or rank C parts, you have to go to the builder to get them. And even then you can't build with them unless you have a level of faction standing with them. You build standing by running missions from their job board, and further they could have had a side quest line with each vendor that once completed grants you access to rank B parts. Then you run jobs for them to access rank C parts. Then beyond this they could sell you a "license" to access these advanced parts at your outpost landing pad (if you supply the appropriate resources to the pad). X4 does exactly this, and I think it's a totally immersive and can be story driven. You can build your own space station and build your own ship manufacturing hub, but you can't build anything without first getting licenses from the various factions. You can run quests or just have your automated traders supply them for small faction gains, then eventually you'll have enough for them to sell them to you (assuming you have the credits)
Doing those kind of things would make the whole Outpost thing worthwhile. I feel like there's so many opportunities missed that I'm sure someone there brought up these ideas. I have a suspicion that having the game on a console restricted a lot of what they could do, either based on available hardware resources or knowing the target demographic. Console games don't tend to have this kind of depth to them, and fast travel is totally console driven as the average console player doesn't sit and game as long as a PC gamer would (at least I remember reading statistics relating as such in the past)