Things That Empyrean Really Needs

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Empyrean now. It’s an amazing experience that’s full of bugs and things blowing up, as well as lots of hectic running around. While the bugs will eventually be fixed or at least minimized and made less common, like the weird stuck-on-crewship bug, there are a lot of little QOL feature things that Empyrean needs in the meantime. We’ll get more missions soon, we’ll get Corpus, Infested and Sentient missions soon, but these suggestions are all little changes that would make Empyrean smoother.

Ability to designate the role you want

There’s really only four roles you can take on a Railjack, but sometimes there can be disagreements as to who does what job. Thankfully, from what I’ve seen so far, most people will accept a job because most of the ship roles are pretty fun. But when you’re playing with randoms, things aren’t always smooth, and it’s probably worth having a way to at the very least mark what your current role is in any one mission.

The ability to more easily see where everyone is

I find it really strange that you can’t actually see who is on the ship and who is outside with ease. There’s one workaround where you can set your map to the big version and have that on your screen, but if you want to switch to another player’s view, you need to unlock that ability via a Tactical Intrinsics upgrade. Quite a few useful features, like being able to switch to different views and ship recalls, are locked behind Intrinsics upgrades, and even then there’s no reliable way of seeing ally health or whether they are on board or not all the time, which is vital if you’re piloting a ship.

Some sort of large sucking ability for easier loot pickups

At the end of every mission, there’s a vast amount of loot you can pick up, scattered all over the place. But your railjack is slow and your Archwings are small, so picking up that loot is a pain, especially if it’s near lots of asteroids. While I feel like all dropped loot being automatically picked up regardless of location and range might be a bit too much (aside from loot inside ships/locations, because that NEEDS to be shared, since not everyone can go on the ship and grab it!), it would be nice if there was a Cosmic Crush or Vacuum ability but for Railjacks, that sucks in loot (and enemies maybe) in a large radius.

The ability to add waypoints while inside your Railjack, and issue commands

So many times I’ve wanted to mark a specific enemy to be targeted, or I might be piloting a Railjack and aiming at something in particular that needs doing. Inside the Railjack though, there’s no way to actually target things that are outside the ship, someone in Archwing has to target things that are outside the ship. A way for a pilot or gunner to target specific enemies or add waypoints will be invaluable, especially when you are aiming at a crewship and need an away team member to blast onto it with your slingshot.

Slightly higher base ship regeneration

The default values for regenerating shields and health are very slow. Sure, you have a minute to repair your ship and you also get a boost of invulnerability, but the actual regeneration is so slow that it’d be quicker to go out there and repair the ship yourself. It’s even worse for shields, which are so quickly destroyed yet so slow to recover, while also being essentially worthless. At the very least, an out-of-combat regeneration boost would be wonderful.

Aiming Guides for Archwing

When leveling up gunning, you can unlock an aiming icon that will help you lead your shots, essentially a requirement considering how fast ships fly. But Archwing users really need something similar, because their weapons are all projectiles as well and they are much smaller. The Imperator Vandal is now almost a requirement due to its faster projectiles, outpacing things like the Fluctus, which are high damage but slow and thus incapable of hitting anything.

Make it far, far easier to find components used in the Forge

There’s nothing worse than knowing that you’re out of magic Omni juice… aside from being out of magic Omni juice and being unable to craft more! Considering that things like Cubic Diodes and Pustrels are vital to keeping your ship going, they can be incredibly sparse, essentially dooming a ship if you run out of them at a critical moment. Yet they can also be incredibly hard to find too! It’d be great if these were slightly more common, especially since we need so many of them.

And while we’re at it, we REALLY need more obvious cooldown timers for the forges.

Anyway, those are the main quality of life features I think we need right now. There’s other stuff too, like adding new areas and new missions, but that can all come later…