And all of this to be completed by the end of the year?
Why is NQ not coming clean and out by making it clear that release of the game will be pushed out
There is a lot in this blogpost that could be good, also a lot that could not. It's a lot of "working on, planning, looking at, considering, might, may". Where is the actual roadmap update that frankly is clearly needed as from this blogpost one can easily deduct that most of what is still to be done is not even in implementation stages yet and still on the drawing board if not in the conceptualize stage leading in to that stage.
Based on this blogpost, a release ready game is at least 18 months away, probably longer.
Also, IMO too much here seems to imply NQ is looking to make the game "more accessible" for new players. I am not sure how that is even needed. Why should surface gathering yield even more resources? and why do I get the feeling that NQ is actually trying to find a way to roll back schematics and "reimburse" those who bought them instead of designing and creating gameplay solutions that will allow _players_ to find and create schematics which can then be researched, enhanced, copied and brought to market.
for most of the mentioned mechanics there is no change or even a signal of progression in the concept of these from what was shared in December. Why is NQ rather clear in part 2 that they need to fix the back end and the core of their technology and then in part 3 just goes back to their usual spin on all the kewl things that are coming.
Overall, these three blogposts have not told us anything we did not yet know outside of maybe giving more clear signals that NQ is very, very far away from getting close to a game that could be released.
The actual value of these posts is minimal at best. It's fluff and filler. While I get that currently the company has other things to get sorted, why not communicate that more clearly and create time for yourself to make that happen. This just feels like it's mostly ignoring the reality of what NQ is going through which unfortunately is more of the same.
-Surface harvesting has its place, but the rocks seriously clutter things visually, it may be advisable to cut their number down (say to a tenth) while increasing the time to collect them and their payoff.
-Mining units will be a welcome addition for those of us that find mining tedious, but care must be taken as to their implementation lest you either end up with wealthy players immediately turning a hex with "good stats" in to a money factory that craters the value of materials gathered by newer players, or cause the existing player-base to go grab-happy and claim every tile they can afford to drop a TCU on (thus risking locking new players out of mining if too many tiles are either un-minable or stripped clean).
-Shields will be appreciated for people with visually complex designs and people that find repairs tedious, but it will probably need to come with a sizeable nerf to voxel if you don't want people to abandon it entirely when they realize they probably can't carry enough ammo to kill a shielded cube under current voxel stats.
-I look forward to finally having more/variant skins for weapons. It would be nice to get them on other elements too (not even major re-shapes, just alternate colors on the main color section so we aren't only stuck with bright red space engines, yellow containers/hovers, and grey everything else).
-Visual improvements to planets are appreciated, but there must also be care taken to ensure to doesn't slow loading things down, most pilots and explorers tend to appreciate the visual appeal of the terrain a lot less when they need to worry about the ground suddenly deciding to jump up and swat them from the sky, or shifting up slightly after they landed but before ship physics unload and breaking their ship.
