Why can you not blow up sentinel freighters? Is it intentional?

[Snaxxor]

So I've fought a lot of sentinels so far in my playthrough more so on planets than in space. In total i've killed 1,632 on planets and I have plenty of maps of pillars to turn them off on a planet that has aggressive sents or good resources instantly from previous battles on dangerous planets. But in space if I ever accidentally trigger a sentinel attack whether poking a base or getting in my ship to leave a planet sometimes I say why not to murder some more sents. I get to 5 stars and their carrier/freighter comes, i blow up all the guns and cargo and then...nothing. It just sits there awkwardly summoning more ships. I actually wanted to see how long it would summon squadrons untill after 10 mins of blowing up squads i realized that it wouldn't stop lol.

So why is there no way to turn them off in space like on a planet? Shouldn't you be able to blow the freighter like when a walker comes and get like signal to their starbase and turn them off? Maybe get special sentinel class ships? Or get control of a starbase yourself like controlling a settlement on a planet? It just doesn't feel like a finished idea.

[Snaxxor]

I am on survival mode too, so it just makes it weirder that you put that effort into it then getting nothing at the end, at least on planets you can get a gun that is better or looks cool and you get to freely do whatever you want on that planet so long as you don't leave the system

[+VLFBERHT+]

I am no programmer or game dev but, there must be a good reason why ALL freighters cannot be completely destroyed, let alone move about local space like spaceships or landing on planets... Must not be as simple as it seems.

This aligns with other things in the game that "seem simple", like water physics that include rolling waves that crash onto beaches, rivers, waterfalls.

Sean Murray commented one time in an pre-release interview that (paraphrase) ... (")after the Universe is set live... making a seemingly simple change to NMS's universe, set off Global changes to the entire game [that must be fixed] that set off even more changes(") ... so maybe certain modifications are much more complicated than we mere-mortals:) are aware of ?

Perhaps freighters function as intended. Maybe a game balance issue they decided not to pursue modifying at present time because it requires alot of work for little return ?... kind of like, planets orbiting the sun, moons orbiting planets, planets rotating, etc. (maybe someday?).

I think delivering "content" is their main focus with quality of life blended in... and WOW they have delivered :)

However, i would like to think they will get around to fully fleshing out freighters too, as another immersive aspect of the game and eventually, add-in all the things you would expect/could imagine from an open-ended, proc-gen_sandbox game world.

They have been adding in MANY "quality of life" {the little details} features over the years. Many on planets and many in space... to freighters, they just added the very cool looking "warp-in effect" all freighters have now, nice touch :) ... and they keep adding in and improving special-effects to all the environmental and device effects also.

There must be so many possibilities of what they can do with NMS

[Looniper]

Originally posted by +VLFBERHT+:

I am no programmer or game dev but, there must be a good reason why ALL freighters cannot be completely destroyed, let alone move about local space like spaceships or landing on planets... Must not be as simple as it seems.

There is, but it isn't complex.

At the base, it is the same to destroy one as the other.
Art would create mesh assets (models) to represent the debris created by each given freighter mesh, and a number of groupings decided on as the ways it could break apart... and when one is destroyed... it is replaced by those meshes and a scripted sequence of particle effects.
Just as it is now for star ships.

The problem is... where a star ship is the same whether someone is in it or not...
A freighter can actually contain other objects.
Players, ships, anything someone has built....

They could make it so that only NPC-owned ships could be destroyed, but that only removes Built objects from the list.

What happens to your friend's perm-death save if he managed to land in the freighter before it went into alert mode and the lights went red?

Does it blow him and his ship up with the freighter and cost his save?

If it doesn't, where does it place them?

They could find answers to the problems, but any answer would make the fact that it doesn't happen to Player owned frigates seem like a bug.

[MoistGamer]

the game is all ball and no shaft. Width but no depth. Mega dumpling

That's why.

[Snaxxor]

I mean stuff like that is annoying as hell, it makes the game feel like it's early access game. I've taken a break from playing not because I ran out of stuff to do but because I got tired of running into the same issues over and over and over. It's not just this either, it's little things like waiting through a loading screen to be able to change your settings, things never rendering in, no way to manually save, no way to place items anywhere on Z axis always at max distance of your crosshair. No crouching, which technically is fine since you can dig or build cover in a fight or getting somewhere, but then enemies no-clip through your cover anyway (robo-dog, mega-walker, etc.) so you have to cloak instead.

Then lastly, after learning the lore of the game my immersion was completely broken, any rp with friends or myself completely shattered, so yea these issues just keep piling up because they don't seem to go away

[SaD-82]

Originally posted by Snaxxor:

no way to manually save

That's a bit of a stretch. There is a way: The portable savepoint. Granted, you can't use it in the Space Station and you can't save in space, but on planets and in your freighter? Manual save by slapping this guy on the ground.

On a side note: Rp-ing with others without knowing the lore of any game is...brave. And nothing which you should blame on the game when you realize that you were rp-ing using just your own imagination without keeping to the lore. This doesn't work for NMS nor any other game.

[Snaxxor]

No the impression was there was no lore, but my suprise was learning that there was, like there is no lore for minecraft it's all fan stuff. I thought NMS was the same way, and also until there is an actual roadmap or any sort of real updates about what is planned. I don't wanna play a game that pretends to be a live service game with random updates and FOMO cosmetics from expeditions

[Looniper]

Originally posted by Snaxxor:

No the impression was there was no lore, but my suprise was learning that there was, like there is no lore for minecraft it's all fan stuff. I thought NMS was the same way, and also until there is an actual roadmap or any sort of real updates about what is planned. I don't wanna play a game that pretends to be a live service game with random updates and FOMO cosmetics from expeditions

The fun thing about the lore in NMS...
Not knowing it... IS part of the lore.

You wake up knowing nothing about the universe, or the galaxy, or even the world you're on or who you are.

So it is perfectly fitting to know nothing about the lore.

...
They do the cosmetic rewards from Expeditions, but that's to keep us interested while they work on the updates themselves.

Sometimes ... like now.... the Update and Expedition are linked. Botha re Endurance, to showcase the changes in This update.

As to how much they change...
This game didn't start out As a game. it was a question... how far can procedural generation actually be extended?
They eventually decided it would be a good experiment to try and began running some fundamental concept on NMS..
By the time Sean Murry was over-over-over-hyping the game with promises that wouldn't be delivered for years after release.... it was almost usable, if not "Play'able.

When it became available, people were *$%ed they had spent money on it up front. (Personally, I was in the "how far" camp and was quite satisfied with what I Thought was an effectively 18 quintrillion-world univrerse of worlds... didn't learn about the small galaxies until later)

You had a single multi-tool, no body let alone customisations.
You mined everything with the same laser.
You didn't See aliens, you found their buildings on the planet surfaces.. and at the right kiosks you would get a dialogue as if you were speaking to them.
When you were able to learn words, you got them by simply asking for one, as many times as you wanted.. you could learn a species' language the first time you found a desk that gave you one's dialogue.
(most of us were under the impression they were hostile factions.
Like 3 minerals in the game... all forming big blocks above ground...

They have been determined to make up for the bad release by giving us everything Murry promised, and more. The game we have now, far exceeds everything they promised originally, and continues to improve about 2-3 times a year.

I suspect they'll have to stop investing this much into the improvements at some point, since I doubt they're making the sales to justify it... otherwise they would be devoting more toward the New-player experience and less to the cosmetic, veteran content.
I'm dreading that day... but with luck, they'll give us a NMS 2.0 to look forward to.

Until then... we have this one, which gets more frequent updates than most 1 year old games out there.

[ubik]

I agree that the sentinel fights end in a very anticlimactic, unsatisfying way.

If I were in charge, I'd make it so the player can land on a disabled sentinel freighter, get on foot, breach the doors, fight some automated defenses, loot some stuff, get at least 1 nice rare-ish piece of loot, and set an autodestruct timer and watch the thing blow up.
The timer would be tight enough that you have to hustle back to your starship and get far enough away to not take damage.

[SaD-82]

Originally posted by Snaxxor:

Is it intentional?

Yes.

[Snaxxor]

Originally posted by SaD-82:

Originally posted by Snaxxor:

Is it intentional?

Yes.

But then why do sentinels turn off on the ground but not in space, isn't that not arbitrary if they are both the same thing? You kill sentinels on the ground till they are dead and get a weapon, but in space you can't do that.

[Mandrake]

Originally posted by Snaxxor:

Originally posted by SaD-82:

Yes.

But then why do sentinels turn off on the ground but not in space, isn't that not arbitrary if they are both the same thing? You kill sentinels on the ground till they are dead and get a weapon, but in space you can't do that.

This is the way it always was, it was the same on planets as well. The Sentinel update changed EVERYTHING about sentinels on planets. Which, I'm betting means there will be an update to the space-faring sentinels in the future.

I mean really, we have smugglers / space pirates now, it's only a matter of time before they update the"police" as well.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Same reason buildings, the station, and several other items in game can't be destroyed. It is simpler to not have them be destructible and less chance of errors.

To a certain extent the general flow of the game seems to signal that you should avoid combat and there is no real reward for it. The lore kind of points that way as well with the sentinels being omnipresent peacekeepers (in the simulation).

It is pretty clear HG intentionally wanted to create a different kind of space game then the general type. Almost all usually either focus on kill the aliens before they kill you, expand your empire, or a little of both. They also usually have some kind of WIN scenario which typically involves ultimately saving the (galaxy/planet/good guys)

The final point is they were an extremely small development team. Procedural generation was their only ticket to making something that felt like a triple A game on some level. I am pretty sure their team is bigger but unless they can figure out a way to monetize having a freighter destruct and respawn (in a multi-player space) with more sales and stay in keeping with their basic philosophy for the game, probably way down on their priority list.

[Krash Megiddo]

Yes we should be able to destroy freighters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAT3os74Nrc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ls_vHk9Hpo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_N_ebv-UMg

Ahhh, feel better now?

[Zoran]

Oh, land on sentinel freighters and fight your way to the bridge, raid the place.