The "wow" factor that boarding enemy ships could have

[winged thunder]

I just had an idea, and wanted to get an official opinion on it.
In the dev stream, yall said that you wanted to making boarding ships much cooler and more helpful. So I propose the ability to take over an enemy ship and be able to use it as a temporary second ship for combat! Depending on the ship captured it would obviously have different stats and be harder to capture (A light fighter would take like 15 seconds but a heavy fighter might take a minute or two), but I think it would be that "wow" that can really help the ship boarding process. Let me know what you think!

[proven beacon]

What would 'wow' me is just more interactive ship details on Corvettes.

Right now it is pick one of two lanes, the good starboard side or the bad port side, then zap a spot, zip line to the 'core', and steal the part.

Where is the ship reactor? The firing control? How do you get to the pilot seat?

The devs have a minimum viable product here of a boarding encounter, and while it works, it needs more stuff!

Give it like all the components that our light Corvette ship has! Give us options to rob one part before the enemy ship reasonably starts to self destruct to prevent us from stealing more parts!

[winged thunder]

I want to take ship boarding past Corvettes, because currently, in the time it takes to board a non-Corvette ship, the pilot can just shoot it down. I want a reward for leaving a ship alive so a teammate or I can board it and use it, or at least maybe get some materia or other loot.

There needs to be more incentive

[sinful urchin]

It’d be really neat if there was like, a maintenance hatch you had to go through to get into the ship’s internals. A maintenance hatch it has to be, of course, because these ships do seem to be robot ships and not ships designed for human control

[winged thunder]

Exactly, something more than just another way to kill the ship

[proven beacon]

True. Pulling off something like a Titanfall core steal would be nice.

I think it should be more of a resource reward, since getting another ship to use would be both OP and take a lot of work to add in.

On the flip side, we'd also need some kind of game mechanic to make boarding more challenging. Right now, depending on the map, I can totally cheese out boarding actions with little to no risk to my ship, even in solo... which is both boring and over powered.

[winged thunder]

The taking over a ship part I feel like would add a whole new layer to ship combat, but I also agree that it would be hard to both implement and balance

But the resource reward should 100% be added

[proven beacon]

To add to the wow factor, ships should react to being boarded. Some already do, but I mean in a more meaningful way.

Either spinning or jerking side to side, pulling in fire support; which distracts other ships, making it more worth doing!

And after that you can get something neat. Salvage (credits or Materia), more Materia than what you'd get from blowing it up, maybe even a some sort of unlock!

[winged thunder]

Oh yeah, that's a great idea

Maybe it could start a self destruct sequence if it notices you on board

[proven beacon]

That's an idea. It does maneuvers to throw you off, you do (whatever actions) to stay on, and then a timer starts going once you've dug too deep.

[toxic cape]

I think it would be very interesting to have a ship that's got heavy shielding that you HAVE to board to deactivate the shields from the inside so that your pilot can effectively attack it. Maybe it would be a ship that is more advanced and only appears closer to the core of the galaxy.

[toxic raptor]

That would be cool. I would love to have a little more reason to board ships sometimes.

And I agree, Corvettes currently are rather lame.

I REALLY want to be able to take over a fighter or two, maybe a mine layer, and start fighting them with their own ships. Just completely leave the Dart, or Catamaran behind.

[toxic cape]

I don't know about leaving the ship behind, it would kind of defeat the purpose of the whole game loop, you'd lose all your artifacts and it would make the component upgrade system pointless. I think you're straying a little too far away from the core game mechanics that make the game fun

[sinful urchin]

temporarily having a fighter on your side would be kinda fun though, maybe it blows up after a certain time? Or maybe it lives for as long as it has health but doesn’t jump with the ship?

[toxic raptor]

Not leave it completely behind. Just out of the battle. And you could make it so the fighters and gunships and etc. also have breakdowns and fires and so on.

[toxic cape]

they have said that they're working on interiors for enemy ships so that boarding becomes more engaging and rewarding

I'm just worried that people want to pull the game in too many different directions, and so far I think the vision that the devs have is pretty solid so far. I'm much more interested in gameplay scope than minutia like whether or not you can take over an enemy ship. I personally want to see more mission variations and types to keep things interesting

[proven beacon]

Yeah, I heard that the devs wanted to make Corvettes more in involved in the latest Dev Stream, and I (finally) saw that after posting my first comment here, and I was like 'Yes! They will add that in!' (in some form or another)

[stable lintel]

Shoot make the corvettes power core a material ingot!

[toxic raptor]

Same. But more ways to complete the missions also makes it more interesting. Like it would be really neat if it were somewhat realistic, in that you have your scenario, now you choose how to go about coming out on top, and there might be a best way, but there's all kinds of ways that MIGHT work.

Like being sneaky, or just blowing everything up.