So… I had the chance to play several hours of the new update yesterday, here are my thoughts.
Some context: My main save is on survival with several hundred hours in, I had maxed out my exosuit, main ship, a second ship, multitool and the freighter with hard-to-get X-class rolls on maneuverability, jump range, shields, S-class freighter 250ly upgrades and all corresponding other S-class freighter upgrades.
I initially was taken aback by only being able to utilize half of many of my hard-earned upgrades. And then I played. I started my save back when I didn’t know anything about NMS and wanted it to be harder.
After making good progress and playing several hundred hours on this save, my progress felt stale, I didn’t feel the urge to log in and do stuff… I had seen a great part of all the variety in planets, building felt horrible with the stack size of 1000 and inventory management was a pain with juggling all the upgrades, the amount of silver to spend on freighter rooms was a pain.
Now that 4.0 is here, I logged in and the first thing I did was change the stack size to 9999. And then mourned my slower ship, less exosuit shield, poured some 400M in upgrading some multitool slots and saw my money drop to below 1B since… well forever.
And then it hit me. Exitement started running through my brain, seeing that ship costs had increased, money was spent faster and I can work towards a great deal more inventory space.
And ohhhh boy is it more, I can stack upgrades now, my whole upgrade “cargo” ship reduced to like 4 stacks.
And then I saw that the fleet freighter upgrades finally work completely. And every system I went to I worked on increasing my exosuit inventory slots, bought a lot of items to sell later, jumped in some dog fights and saw my exosuit get wrecked and my ship get wrecked as I couldn’t solo everything as easily as before, I needed to repair a lot of modules and the quicksilver and multitool slot rewards felt hard earned and worth it and trading feels worth it now again and running around getting more exosuit slots…
And I was really surprised. I thought YES YES YES this is great give me more of it!!
And then I thought about the “lost” ugrades – and it hit me. They are not lost. They are in my inventory ready to be installed again – when I have enough technology space, or, and here comes the kicker: in another ship.
Now I need less upgrades per ship to max it out – and – fights are more clutch, more important, there is a strong incentive in having multiple weapon systems to cycle through, dodging is more important and face-tanking a bad idea.
After just one day and several hours I came to the conclusion that the update is actually great. My biggest fear was that my fighter would feel like a turtle, but because of the law of diminishing returns it sure felt slower – but not as much as I had feared.
And that is a drawback I am totally willing to make for the benefits I already discussed.
Now you might be thinking that there are a lot of updates that are now useless, namely freighter and exosuit upgrades which you can’t put in another ship or multitool.
You are totally right. But then I thought about the community aspect of the game – and the second I am sure we will never be able to put them in again I will head to the anomaly with a smile on my face and drop them off to somebody who needs them more, or give them away here (if that is possible, still haven’t tested it).
The update put back the survival in my survival save, got rid of my main annoyance (the stack size), gave me trading back, something to do, the fun to build more without stupid inventory restrictions and with more ressources to gather while I’m out and about because I can just store them.
So my ship is a little slower and my jetpack a little emptier – well now there is space for some of them ?-upgrades with jetpack capacity and all the more reason to bump around in a few of my other ships.
I really do think I gained a lot and lost next to nothing, even though I am probably one of the people who lost most with this update. And there will surely be updates which will introduce different ways to improve our ships again to former glory.
Thanks for reading, I hope this viewpoint may take some of the frustration away that some people seem to be having and I was afraid of having when logging back in.
Have a great day, fellow interloper!
