Perhaps for a SHUMP expert there is a pattern, but I just see every right angle covered by 3 or 4 overlapping fields of fire.
No, you're right, they're uncrossable when they do that. MAYBE in a proper bullet-hell type shmup that might make sense, but the player ship's hitbox in this game is a bloated whale compared to the tiny hitboxes used in those. Typically the way past... or I guess I should say, the way past without taking *any* hits (if I dont do it bloody perfectly, it bothers me too much) does require a good bit of waiting, when it does that. Or a good bit of the RNG not being a jerk. In some cases you can try to go around the other side of the area.... but this takes bloody forever.
Hm, one suggestion: Make it so that the probes have to stay a certain distance away from one another? I'm not ENTIRELY sure this would work.... what you're essentially trying to do is make a maze of bullets with randomly placed firing locations that move in random directions (and fire very fast bullets, even if they have little range). Right now though it's pretty much like the old version of that mission. They essentially project a bubble around themselves that the player cannot enter without a high chance of taking hits, which is very similar to the effect of the previous probes, that had the radar bubbles, accomplishing the same thing. It can be possible to get through based on the directions that their firing points are facing, but with the sheer randomness, and the tendancy for there to be heaps of these things, it can very frequently produce impassible walls. So then you have to go around looking for some that arent producing that, and that takes time....
It's not that these missions become totally unbeatable or anything.... it's that they take forever and can frustrate. And with the glowing red circles gone, players might have a MUCH harder time now spotting a point where they can approach the overall probe field. And yeah, I know, you're not really meant to do many of these.... I usually do 2 and leave it at that... but it seems too much for being just the first or second one of these, when on the lower difficulties. New players almost definitely will find this annoying, which can be a problem when it's one of the very first battle missions they undertake after getting the game.
