Ship Maintenance: Reworking the Scout
TL;DR: We’re overhauling the Scout’s Ultimate to make it more accessible and more fitting to the ship’s intended playstyle!
Greetings, Pilots!
Here with another sneak peek at what’s coming in our second free update, Incursions, that’s slated for later this spring.
Light fighters are an excellent, but significantly underused class in EVERSPACE 2—combined, the Scout, Vanguard, and Stinger make up less than five percent of all the time players spend in ships.
EVERSPACE 2’s RPG mechanics make light fighters an often overlooked choice. Why jump in the cockpit of a glass cannon with a hyper-specific ultimate ability when you can choose a tank fitted with terrifying main weapons that obliterate everything within its vicinity? In the hands of a skilled pilot, a light fighter ship can decimate swarms of enemies using speed and maneuverability that far outstrip the boosted shields and bulky armor of medium and heavy fighters, and—if used wisely—their ultimates can be extremely powerful, too.
Where light fighters really shine is in debris and asteroid fields, places where stray shots hammer into cover instead of your wispy shield and aluminum (or aluminium for our UK pilots) hull. Being capable of dodging shots with a quick boost-strafe is incredibly satisfying—they can’t kill what they can’t hit!
Right now, Shadowstrike renders the ship invisible to enemies and gradually increases primary weapon damage up to 300% which resets 1s after a shot was fired. Great for sniping, but it really puts a pause on the gameplay while the player waits for that bonus to build up which contradicts with the vessel’s high maneuverability, and is much less effective for mid and short ranged weapons, too.
In Incursions, the new Scout ultimate still renders the ship invisible to enemies and also grants +20% critical hit chance for any weapon type. Firing weapons or using devices breaks the invisibility, but killing an enemy restores it and extends the duration by 2 seconds to a maximum of 20 seconds. Quick kills mean your enemies won’t even know what hit them—perfect for pilots who enjoy high-speed attacks combined with highly effective cloaking.
Pilots who fully lean into this new ultimate should be able to chain together massive kill streaks against hordes of enemies. Sure, that Outlaw Destroyer may still be tough to take down, but with your invisible Scout you will have taken out its escorts and hammered in a devastating blow to its weak point before it even fires a shot. Not bad for a little ship!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little look into the minds of our design team ahead of the next update. We’ve got more to share before Incursions drops. Stay tuned for the next blog!
Lee and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games team