SPACESHIPS! Retvik’s First Impressions on Empyrean

I missed the initial release. I’ll admit that. It happened at like 5am when I was fast asleep, tucked up in bed and dreaming of, well, not space ninjas. But as soon as I could get to my computer (after a Windows update or two, typically), I went and installed the 2.5GB update and went to see what was going on. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?) this happened at about 3:30pm my time, meaning I’d missed a lot of the initial rush and the rest of my clan jumping in.

Sooo, Empyrean. The thing that comes after Rising Tides. The ability to fly the ships that you may or may not have built yet. It’s good. Buggy, but good. But also incredibly difficult.

Before you can fly your Railjack though, you need to go and do a mission. A quick fetch quest. You need to go to Lua and grab a Void Key. Cephalon Cy knows sort of where it is but needs you to go and get it because it’s basically a paradox to him. You get the Reliquary Key (it’s just a void key really) and head back to your Railjack.

On your ship, you insert the key, some weird music plays, some familiar white tendrils grow and… oh, hey kiddo! With a wave and a creepy smile, hey kiddo disappears and a.. horrible, wrinkly finger… can… be… seen inside the… glass tube…

Oh okay.

Yeah that makes sense. Our ships are powered by massive Void fingers.

Aaaaaaanyway, it’s time to fly your ship! Off you go, in your spaceship, with Cephalon Cy leading the way!

And thankfully, you can practice maneuvers and stuff in the Free Flight area on Earth. There are no enemies, but this is a great time to work on learning your ship, working out where everything is and getting orientated because you are NOT going to be able to do these missions solo. At all. There’s simply too much going on.

To put it another way, I did some Railjack missions with two high level clan mates and a random, just the early Earth Empyrean missions, and we STRUGGLED. Well, we didn’t struggle that much, but it was insanely hectic for the two people on the Railjack while the other two people boarded ships and blew them up. You need one person to pilot the ship and shoot down smaller enemy ships, and you definitely need a second person to run around killing boarding parties and putting out fires.

There is a lot of things to do off your ship as well. You need to start collecting mods and resources, and thanks to my much more eager (and awake) clan mates, we’ve already started researching new parts for our ships.

Missions seem to be somewhat varied but there’s a lot of things that need to be shot at, and doing so while piloting your ship is tricky. Thankfully, leaving the ship and flying around in Archwing is pretty seamless, although we did run into a glitch where only the host could enter a ship and blow it up. Still, it’s all very hectic, especially since Cephalon Cy is busy telling you everything, and you need to be listening to what he’s saying since he’ll announce enemies boarding your ship before you can actually see them.

It is worth organizing a squad specifically for Railjack. I haven’t tried a 100% pure public match yet, but with how much is going on and how easy it is for a ship to blow up, it might be too hectic for some people.

Still, it’s all very cool and I’m very excited. And I’m also totally happy to play medic, putting out ship fires and making sure we don’t all die, something I haven’t done in a long, long time…