Will there be any other way to stop people from "jumping" away during combat other than using an EMP? Will we just have to hope to shoot their engines off and not destroy their ship or can we look forward to some sort of tractor-beam technology?asked by Cyres
TL;DRRoberts says they don't want players jumping away mid-combat and are working on interdiction, such as gravity well generators, power drain and engine cooldown after exiting, so there will be other ways to stop jumps.
As I sort of discussed a little bit of this when we were talking about Quantum Drive and we're thinking about several things like, the whole ability to interdict is something that we're working on, all the ins and outs and edge cases of it. We do not want people to be able to jump away during combat.First of all, they're going to have to be able to get far enough away from whoever they're fighting to have enough separation to spin up the Quantum Drive, they can't have anything that's blocking them inside. We've talked about certain things like the power drain needed to actually do the jump may drop your shields or whatever else it would make you vulnerable, if there's other people around trying to take you out.We're also talking about when you come out of Quantum Drive, let's say you get interdicted, you can't just instantly go to cruise. Your engines will have to cool down, there will be a moment of vulnerability where if you're getting interdicted you'll have to survive for awhile before you can spin up to cruise to try and get away. Then get far enough then maybe you can Quantum Drive again, that's kind of the idea.So, one of the idea of the interdiction is that you deploy a kind of, whatever you want to call it, a gravity well generator which can be something that your ship deploys or you could deploy it... kind of think of it as putting a mine out there or something or a hook to catch fish going by. Definitely there is going to be plenty of ways to stop people from jumping away, the gameplay you see right now in the mini PU, will not be the actual final gameplay.We're working on the systems, like everything we've got a massive list of things to do and it's really just comes down to priorities because we could have double the amount of game programmers and they'd probably still be saying, 'We don't have enough people'. Yes, there will be other ways to stop people from jumping.