By smuggling materials to the outposts of the Engineers, players can earn their respect to unlock powerful module upgrades. Now, at the start of June, Frontier has discussed its ongoing investigation into Elite: Dangerous' super aggressive, super powerful AI, and reckons it's worked out what went wrong.Īccording to a post on the Frontier forum, the developer believes The Engineers shipped with a networking issue that let the NPC AI merge weapon stats and abilities, thus causing unusual weapon attacks. The video, below, shows just how quickly AI spaceships can now kill players.īy stripping the NPCs of their upgrades, Frontier hoped to be able to review the effectiveness of the AI on its own to see if it needed to make balance changes. The situation got to the point where a lot of players - even those experienced with the game's combat mechanics - dared not venture out in anything other than a combat ship or an extremely fast ship. And this, coupled with the powerful new upgraded weapons, meant the AI was devastatingly dangerous. Players have found post-The Engineers, NPC spaceships try to do this to human controlled players much more often. In Elite: Dangerous, players can be "interdicted" - that is, they can be pulled into combat situations by other spaceships.
Players also complained that the Engineers update had made NPC behaviour overly aggressive, and that they were now being attacked without being "wanted" or carrying any cargo of note. Players quickly discovered that this challenge was too tough - and took to Elite: Dangerous' forum and sub-Reddit to complain.įrontier responded by removing almost all Engineers upgrades from the NPCs in the game, a move designed to help players deal with NPC threats and last longer in a combat situation. The intention was that higher ranked NPCs would be harder to beat than ever before, providing players with a tougher challenge. The Engineers (2.1) expansion made key changes to the space game's AI and NPCs. Each has a unique personality and history. The Engineers are hidden on planet surfaces across the populated galaxy. But one of the unintended consequences was it made AI spaceships incredibly powerful - so powerful, in fact, that developer Frontier was forced to strip them of their upgraded weapons.
Elite: Dangerous recently revamped with the release of a big new expansion.