From the desk of Michael Brookes:



In this latest dev update I’ll cover the remaining two high level goals for the changes to the mission system coming in the 2.1 The Engineers update.



I’ve decided to tackle consequences and rewards in the same update as they are often different sides of the same coin. Missions already have a range of impacts on the galactic simulation, but this isn’t communicated as clearly as it could be. This is relatively easy to address for things like state and reputation as they are based on absolute values and with buckets that need to be filled or emptied. For aspects like influence this is much more complicated as the changes occur after the mission is completed and also relative to every other action during that period. So influence isn’t part of the mission changes (except to indicate that you’ve made a positive, or negative impact), but is planned for the future.



As mentioned in previous updates your success and failure in missions affects your relationship with the minor faction and these changes are clearly identified and communicated. With minor faction states we’re intending making their effects more noticeable on available missions, ship traffic and composition, and markets. At the moment these can be quite subtle, so beefing them up with add more drama to a star system.



Consequences also have a more immediate response, so authority response if they are attacked will be sharper.



For rewards our first goal is to provide a range that is wider than simply credits. Credits will still be a common reward for missions, but we’re adding greater variety. One such addition is that of ‘treasure’ locations – this is a bonus for certain missions that can lead you to a cache or other location with valuable vouchers or items that can be collected.



Materials for crafting can also be awarded for completing missions, along with certain hard to find commodities, or even salvage only items. More commodities and materials are being added to the game, I’ll go into more detail on this in a future dev update. Some of these commodities may only be available through missions and can be used for story events as well as rewards. Missions have varying rewards for effects on minor factions which are getting a balance pass to make changes in state more likely as well as more noticeable.



Credits will still feature as rewards and rewards will be balanced to scale better with difficulty and also be more lucrative if you’re well regarded by the minor faction.



Along with the changes mentioned we’re conducting a pass through the mission templates to make them more reliable and address issues seen in the current build. This is accompanied by adding more scenarios for the various mission types and also to better reflect the active states in the system.



One other small tweak is that the cockpit now has a clock to help keep an eye on the time!



As you’ll no doubt know by now we announced that we’ve delayed the 2.1 The Engineers release - there is a lot in it, and we decided it was better to take some extra time to ensure that we get it to a quality we are fully happy with before releasing it. While we aren’t talking a specific release date at the moment we are aiming for a beta release in May. I’d also like to reiterate David’s post from earlier today that The Engineers isn’t the next build release, we have a few more 2.0x releases planned before then.



As usual when we are preparing for upcoming releases my dev updates will now be paused for a while – but I will return!