Farming Asterite/Titanium is The Bad Place and Should Not Exist

[Wret]

(hi, if you're a dev, I'm sorry I only show up here to say something's bad. After my younger days of posting on forums for a game that's in constant development, I'm just tired all the time)

 

So when Railjack came out I was easily able to quick join missions to get all the way to the Veil and upgrade several intrinsics to 7. I saw no value in upgrading my own railjack until I had collected a good selection of parts/avionics. Like many people, I didn't see any reason to build the MK3 stuff so I looked at the repair cost for them and WOW Asterite and Titanium. Even after the changes boosting their drops. ASTERITE. AND. TITANIUM. 

I did not understand how I could have 1000s of the other resources but so few of those two...oh, they only come from shooting rocks. Tiny red rocks that are less red and less visible if you've turned down the FX slider all the way because the FX in combat can get incredibly blinding. So everytime I want to farm this nonsense, I need to remember to turn the FX slider up in the options, then back down when I'm done. Except I NEVER want to farm asteroids again.

Before writing this I felt I should make one last good effort to farm the asteroids from the first Earth node. I did, I got 2300~ which is better than normal, the experience still sucked. I am not going to buy a booster. Cutting half a terrible experience in half is still a terrible experience. This experience does not need to exist. At this point I'm pretty sure Titanium and Asterite do not need to exist either. What value is in this kind of gameplay? Asteroid mining is something that exist in large open space sim games that have other systems at play that make the experience of mining more relevant. In Railjack, nothing happens after you kill the requisite number of ships, there's no reason not to just automatically vacuum up the entire map of it's resources into the Railjack at that point.

The only reason I could make for keeping Asteroid Specific Resources is if you A)Add things that contest the player's mining and make things interesting or B)add a special mission that rewards alot of it, and only if these things happen VERY SOON. Do not make people deal with this terrible experience until you make it not bad. No amount of tweaking or boosting values for these resources can make the experience good, their farming is uniquely horrible. I am someone who is 99% done with solo Hema farm(also terrible and shouldn't exist) and I say again Titanium and Asterite are uniquely horrible, and make me not want to play Railjack.

I have a collection of MK3 parts and I've repaired a good avionics reactor and 2 guns. I'm done. It's not that I refuse to farm the rest, it's just I look at how much I need to farm, feel it in my bones, and my body violently reacts to the idea. I just can't. If I had managed to drag myself to repair the MK3 engine and Shields, I would still be in a position where I have all these parts I'm technically getting as 'rewards', so I can swap them out for different situations, but the despair associated with repairing a full set of parts would mean I'd probably just so as permanently solder all the components in place because I would just have such a sense of "I'm not doing that again". Really not great for a modular system where you're meant to collect lots of parts.

Like I need whoever's responsible for these decisions to understand, "hours of gameplay" is not always good, extended periods of shooting the rocks after each mission isn't creating anything of value for anyone. Rather than making me more invested in the game it's making me actively resent the time I spend playing in it. Like if it took me a week or two of regular gameplay to max out my railjack and then I played less regularly but was satisfied and would come back when Scarlet Spear is released. I think that would be better than extracting the maximum number of hours out of me to the point where I just stop out of spite? There's alot of things about Railjack I think aren't great but the rock shooting farm is the one thing I can say Does Not Need To Exist and long as upgrading your RJ is dependent on it, it's going to be bad!

 

 

[Graavarg]

If you have done that many missions you probably have the Particle Ram. You also have intrinsics enough to use vector moves/speed bursts.

Using those two you can quickly mine the asteroids, the ram (that doesn't cost anything "over time") will break all containers within a larger area and your Railjack will vacuum the drops.

It is still "farming", of course. And if you have been part of a team that fights inside the asteroids fields (especially with the ram continuously enabled), you would have picked up a lot of stuff just doing the missions. But even if you have to farm the stuff, it is not that impossible using the ram, vector speed maneuverings and selecting the right missions.

I like the mining idea, though. It has worked pretty well in other games, and we ARE mining stuff on the Plains and in Orb Vallis...

Edited March 18, 2020 by Graavarg