Is it harder than it used to be?

[Claxon]

I've been playing this game ever since it was released 25-ish years ago, so I have a LOT of experience. However, these days I'm noticing some troubles with missions that I found no problem in the past. I'm mainly wondering if the improvement in hardware over the years has given the AI an advantage.

What I find is that there are many fights (always the "Protect XXX" missions) where the ships I'm meant to protect are destroyed within moments. Mishka Shaw is one example. She's generally exploded before my poor Mako can get anywhere close (no afterburners at that point). Similarly on the story-line branching mission where you help defend the shuttles evacuating Independence base, all 3 shuttles seems to be dead within 60 seconds of the first one being targeted.

I thought maybe I was just rusty, so set the difficult to easy, but had exactly the same happen several times over. It's as if there simply isn't enough time to take out the Poseidons with my glint light lasers and spire rockets. It's tempting to cheat to get some weapons with more punch, but that basically ruins the entire rest of the game.

Anyone else feeling thee same way?

[JGZinv]

I have been working with the game for a decade and a half and played in the early days also. Personally my best guess is that like many old games, the AI/game checks are sped up due to newer hardware being so much faster and perhaps some element of emulation not being perfect. Perfect Dark on XBLA had a similar problem where bots were impossible to defeat in custom games (this was later patched). They were chained to the og consoles tick rate, when sped up they were like 300X faster at calculating and reacting. So you'd crack a door and be instakilled through the gap. Is Tachyon doing that? Honestly I don't have a way to prove it. I know for certain the opening cutscene with Logan is triggering too fast once you start a SP account. I know there are some mission flags that are having problems like the Bora Daggers interception of the freighter in one early mission. We don't have the tools to fix these issues. These sort of problems have grown over the last 15 years for sure, since Win 7. XP was entirely stable. So that's why FringeSpace has decided to just make a new game rather than try to infinitely try to fix something that's broken.