Continuing the coverage of critical aspects of EVE Online, I am happy to report that Garde sentry drones now do, in fact, go *pew* *pew* in a satisfactory manner.
For a while there sentry drones were… well… boring.
Due to some screw up during some update in the dark past of EVE Online, the firing animations for sentry drones were lost.
And so they just sat there.
Garde drones... maybe firing, maybe asleep...
Then, as part of the Incarna expansion plans, it was announced that sentry drones would be fixed. As part of the new turret effects system, sentry drones would again go *pew* *pew*.
And then Incarna launched, and on top of all of the other indignities, some sentry drones, the Garde drones in particular, ended up barely getting any *pew* *pew* at all!
It was a metaphor for the whole release. As the Garde drone animation was mostly build up and little bang, so was Incarna. This was the build up quote:
Sentry drones such as Garde, Curator and Warden were missing their firing animations. Thanks to the new turret system we can now witness their destructive power.
And this is what we got.
This? This is not *pew*!
Apparently other sentry drones did get full animations, but the Garde just got a warm-up glow. It didn’t not appear so much to be shooting as oozing.
Since then, the Crucible expansion has launched with a focus on making the current game better rather than adding on new extensions to it. Among the items on the list was to fix the Garde sentry drone firing animation. And this past weekend, I finally got a chance to try it out.
And it works!
Garde animation redeemed
The Garde drone actually shoots… and you can see it shoot. In fact, the animation is cool enough that I made a couple of very short videos.
Here is the Garde drone rotating a bit then firing. My Dominix is in the background taking fire.
But better still is how it looks when firing down range.
The way the beam moves… it looks like a burst of tracer rounds arcing towards a target… and the green coloring… which is a very Star Wars flavor of laser… looks really cool.
Sorry that the videos have no audio. The sound in EVE Online is messed up on my system and the game makes no sound whatsoever now, which is annoying. Sometimes I like sound.
Ah well, at least my sentry drones look cool now.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
EVE has sound?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist the meme)
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@Letrange – Not that I can confirm at the moment. Heh.
Yeah, when I searched the forums for sound related issues, I ran into “EVE has sound?” in every thread.
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I actually had the sound issue on my last foray back into EVE, and never found a fix before I unsubbed again… If you do find anything concrete, do post it up.
If I recall right, I gave up looking after too many “no solution” threads
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CCP still encourages even usually non-douchy people to be Paul Christoforo’s far too much for me to consider returning to Eve. But leaving that aside, I will say I always felt CCP dropped the ball when it came to sound in Eve. Such a lot of potential for cool sci-fi sound effects, all wasted. When Sega Master System games sound better than a modern MMO, I have to wonder…
Still, I did like Eve’s music and drone ships like the Fleet Issue Typhoon were always my favourites. Even there, though, I felt drones were sorely lacking in AI. It’s way, WAY in the future and sentry drone AI can’t at least retarget when the target goes beyond falloff range? I’d rather have weaker drones with better AI than beefier drones with worse AI. By all means make me work to kill stuff and don’t make drone AI perfect. But at least have it pick semi-sensible targets automatically. Ugg.
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I can confirm, after last night’s POS shoot, that Warden drones have a similar firing animation, just in blue. It just doesn’t seem quite as cool as the Garde animation though.
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