Is this the beginning of the end?
I played Elite: Dangerous last year. Yesterday I ponied up for Horizons. I was going to upgrade earlier but after reading this, I decided to hold off.
It’s fixed now. Or is it?
NPC AI and other updates, tweaks and changes in The Engineers
Last weekend some key issues came to light with Elite Dangerous 1.6 and Elite Dangerous Horizons 2.1 The Engineers, so we wanted to explain some of the changes we have already implemented and will implement in future to improve our Commanders’ in-game experience.
One of the most hotly debated topics in the community since The Engineers (2.1) launched last week were, the AI and NPC changes. The aim of these changes were to ensure that there is a balance for new and veteran players, having behaviour that enhances the challenge for all in an enjoyable way. We didn’t hit that balance, because of some bugs and a number of other reasons.
We were able to quickly remove almost all Engineers upgrades from the NPCs in game, which removed the worst symptoms and gave us time to investigate the problem — it turns out that a networking issue inadvertently gave NPC AIs a loophole, which they ruthless exploited, to merge weapon stats and abilities creating never before seen, devastatingly effective, Engineers-enhanced weaponry. How very sci-fi..
Fortunately for all of us, our dev team won this particular battle for humanity’s future. The AI in-game is still the enhanced version, and we released the fix for the networking issue in today’s 2.1.2 point update. We expect the intended, improved behaviours to become more evident — please rest assured that we will be keeping a VERY close eye on this to make sure it works as intended.
We also received a lot of additional feedback about the RNG element of the Engineers — which is addressed in a future point update — and about the non-existence of bi-weave shields (which was a consequence of a bug fix in a related area and were re-instated in the same server update earlier this week that removed the Engineers weaponry from NPC AIs).
All of the above, and more, was covered in forum posts by our Head of Community, Zac Antonaci, throughout the week — please check both of the forum threads below for details and any updates subsequent to this newsletter — we will keep you informed.
NPC AI, Engineers and Bi-Weave shields.
NPC AI update.
As always, expect the unexpected.
