Here we go again…

For no particular reason I’m trying to work on maxing my Vy’keen milestones and as we all know, one of them requires destroying a lot of sentinel walkers.

Before anyone gets it twisted, this is not a whine about the supposed “difficulty” of fighting the Sentinels. Destroying them is actually trivial. I am a planetary catastrophe on legs; my riced out neutron cannon can destroy most types other than the laser dogs and the walkers with a single shot. Rather, here’s what happens:

I can fight through the usual levels one, two, three, and four waves as usual with the typical escalation of units thrown at you. Wave 4 spawns one of the mini-walkers, which I blow up.

What usually happens (or used to happen) is that wave five would spawn a couple of laser dogs/quads, a bunch of various little flyers, and after a short delay one of the big bipedal walkers. You fight this guy, he blows up, and your wanted meter turns blue and the Sentinels are out of your face for 20 minutes or whatever. We all know how it is, right?

Well, now the big walker never spawns. I get one laser dog and one mini-walker instead, and no big walker. But my wanted level enters some kind of bugged state where I am always “Detected!” no matter how far I go and no more Sentinels spawn after I destroy the initial few.

I’m just stuck listening to the stupid wannabe breakcore combat music forever. No Sentinels are visible, there are no red dots indicating their locations on the HUD, but I am being “seen” by someone erroneously no matter how far I go on the planet’s surface. The big walker is absolutely not stuck in the ground anywhere or hiding behind a mountain – Believe me, I’ve checked. All I can do is cheese with my cloaking module until the wanted level eventually decays down to zero, and then start the whole process over.

This has happened to me literally every time I’ve tried to escalate a Sentinel fight to maximum since the latest update, on multiple planets of all types and biomes, in at least two different galaxies. High or low Sentinel security level, it doesn’t matter.

It’s worth noting that if I go to a Sentinel Pillar there is still usually a big walker there, as normal.

What gives? Is anyone else encountering this, or is it just fuck me in particular?