Add in the original version of Supercruise, which rewarded bold piloting with quicker travel times, but punished bad piloting with much slower ones, and I’d be in heaven.What I'd love: an ED H with all NPCs having engineering, money as per 1.x days, old collision, pre-engineered ships only (like EDO suits but random- no way to engineer ships otherwise) and really ramp up the difficulty.
I'd pay good money for that, an actual galaxy that hates me and that I have to claw my way out of the mud
WHY was that removed? or at least not introduced at some point.
I assume it worked like something similar to being interdicted? Adding some interactivity to Supercruise would make a world of difference.
A vocal minority wanted ED to be an arcade game rather than a more realistic(ish) simulator. And over time, that's what they got. At least so I am told, and having seen some of the posts to this forum over the years, I believe it.
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I think the point is in the differing records since 2016.
I guess we all hoped for a bit more variety, back when the places were revealed, even with the identical layouts: Banners and things mirroring the ruling faction; More visible law enforcement presence where there is unrest; Information boards with actual live data news and trade tickers; Etc, etc...
We did get procedurally spawned magnetic litter, albeit for some reason governed by economy type, rather than economy health, and there are guards loitering at Odyssey engineer storefronts for some reason, so maybe there could be more window dressing options to come eventually... :7
More of the sort of background chatter that imparts actual useful information to eavesdrop on could be welcome -- maybe not straight Skyrim's automatically plopping a quest marker onto your compass just because a passing town guard were gossipping about a nearby cave, but anything that widens your understanding of gameworld lore, gameplay options, and other systems.
It would overall be nice if there were more diegetic ways to find out stuff, rather than from forums, third party tools, and what can be gleaned from the codex and player manual.
Absolutely, although those are plants that have evolved naturally in a certain environment with certain conditions, and even then you can see things happily grow sideways in order to reach light -- who knows what they might cultivate on a space station in the future... :7
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I’d like to think Obsidian Ants idea of expanding the BGS is what’s caused the delay.
^^^
Pretty much this.
When Supercruise was introduced, the “slope” (for lack of a better term) of the effects of mass lock was steeper, which resulted in systems having terrain: corridors where travel was faster, volumes were speeds dropped precipitously, and most importantly if you could successfully “thread the needle” at your destination, “six seconds” out could be truly be about six seconds. Between the possibility of blacking out due to extreme maneuvers, inflicting expensive damage to your ship if you cut things too close, and losing valuable time due to having to do an actual loop of shame by being too timid, gravity braking was IMO a gloriously fun ride.
Especially since the sound design team went all out, and it sounded like your ship was about to fall apart due to the stress, while your engines whined in protest. “Orbital Glide” is the toned down version of it.
However, the “wisdom” of the Alpha forums at that time had reduced Supercruise travel to “Keep your throttle in the blue zone, and point straight at your destination,” which was the slowest way to reach your destination. The “ten second” rule hadn’t been invented yet, let alone the “six second” rule, which meant that the majority of players were experiencing long travel times (longer than today), while those of us who had learned how things worked were zipping around the place even faster than we do today. Combined with the lower top speed when traveling to distant secondary stars, and there were a lot of complaints about travel times… most of which were self inflicted.
So Frontier increased the top speed to 2001 times the speed of light (good) but also flattened the “slope” of the effects of mass lock. This made the “slow and straight” crowd happy, because they were getting there faster than before. Those of us who understood the system found our travel times increased. Thanks to the “eye of the needle” moving below of the surface of most worlds, the “best” approach to a station became what used to a technique to recover from a failed gravity braking attempt, and the few seconds gained during transit was tiny compared to the tens of seconds lost due to losing the stronger braking effect.
Still, while much diminished, Supercruise is still the best FTL flight model on the market IMO. And the latest Buckyball Race, the Empire Hustle, starts in 7 hours, and everyone’s welcome!
The Buckyball Racing Club presents: The Empire Hustle 8th - 16th April 3309 (Swift Sixteen Championship, Race 1)
The Buckyball Racing Club Is proud to present The Empire Hustle 8th April 3309-16th April 3309 Hosted by Commander Sulu As part of the Magic 8-Ball 2 Swift Sixteen series of events Please use Horizons 4.0 if possible. (Although it is not strictly essential for most races) Welcome to the...
Well, I don't know what his idea was, but let's fabulate for a moment...
Let's imagine the "core feature overhaul" is in fact the background simulation, evolved...
Let's imagine Powerplay being folded into this new BGS, and adapted to it, rather than remaining something separate.
Let's imagine it is more responsive to player actions.
Let's imagine it creates more gameplay options and scenarios, spawning a greater range of relevant missions and points of interest.
Let's imagine the "old" BGS implementation was a rather monolithic system, and the new allows new things to easier be "plugged in", in the future...
...Now imagine maybe the extant Thargoid war could be an isolated implementation of an earlier "snapshot" of a hypothetical general "faction war" plugin module for the new BGS, customised bespoke for the thargoid war, and baked- and somewhat jury-rigged into the old hypothetically monolithic BGS.
In such a case, I could very well imagine a scenario where the various components of the overhaul could in fact pretty much be completed, but where the developers might be wary about making the swap-over before the Thargoid war has finished playing out, and there is a bit of quiet, given everything that could get seriously screwed up when replacing something so fundamental, and so multi-pronged...
Well he thinks that given the PMF are closing that ED will instead allow individual players as well as groups to really influence what happens in the galaxy. The other part to this - and which if I am honest I buy into - is the work done on both the engine and the gal map for Thargoid war can be effectively repurposed for players and factions. Then - and this is real reading between the lines - should any group get traction that may over influence what’s happening ED can bring in a Thargoid counter strike at whatever level of hardness they like, alternatively- and again reading between the lines - they could just leave the group and see what happens while the rest of humanity relocate outside the bubble. And all this will be nicely displayed and communicated on galmap just as the thargoid war is now.
Lastly I expect team A doing the rewrite had not really spoken to Team B doing the thargoid war. It was only by chance that someone looked at both teams and the “ahaaaa” moment happened which derailed Team A and put the “change” back a few months.
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I find your lack of faith...
ehrm....
Remember people with their "mile wide inch deep"?
Because it was "deep".
But not this type, which vocal minority wanted.
They want "immersive, deep game", but each time, if "deep" means "more effort" it is bad.
At this point I'm not sure, what "deep" means for this people, maybe drinking beer in pixel bar?
ED has the makings for something incredibly deep, the trouble is the C+P, faction, power, s.power BGS interplay is still stuck ultra local. Anarchy systems could open up criminal networks when we become feared via notoriety, factions could hold vendettas, all sorts of little hooks and links that bind the game. As it stands EDs depth is made shallow because all these disparate systems don't mesh enough to really make you take it further.
Another example, ship sensors. At one time FD were keen on linking them to gimbals and turrets- so that the range of sensors would improve accuracy. Engineering could have allowed hardened chaff resistance, better tracking...all sorts. Trouble is the usual's bleated and it was canned, so today sensors are A or D and as deep as a fishtank.
Yeah that's the infuriating thing about Elite. It already has everything in place to be very "deep" - there are lots of play systems within the game it's just that everything is silo'd off from everything else. It's like there are 10 very shallow games all running in parallel and they are stacked one on top of the other. If the consequences of action in one area were more connected to opportunities, rewards, threats in another area; if in other words you could play all the way up and down through all the layers, then we'd have a sophisticated game on our hands. But instead we have these isolated cross sections which barely talk to each other outside the medium of credit balance and a meaningless reputation grind; and even THAT was considered too much interoperability by the devs at one point, so they gave us a whole separate set of reputations for Odyssey, materials and a million other one-shot currencies for every type of engineering, etc.
This kind of stuff, by the way, is exactly the kind of thing you would see fixed in a rebalance/overhaul mod if ever there were a moddable offline client, because it's actually incredibly easy to fix - the critical missing ingredient is a sense of coherent vision and a willingness to stick to that vision, which, y'know barring Braben coming back is just never going to happen.
The other was the hull / shield rebalance that was squealed into the bin- fast forward to today and its held deeper outfitting back.
Not that it matters in this tinker-toy economy where EVERYONE has Class A modules on day one unless there's a reason (like weight or integrity) to use something else.
For me it would be excellent and logical:
Not that it matters in this tinker-toy economy where EVERYONE has Class A modules on day one unless there's a reason (like weight or integrity) to use something else.
Gimbals would be naturally more bulky, require more power (with heavier sensor sets) to offset the advantage they give- but, via engineering you could have really dialed down to mitigate those compromises- sensor weight, chaff resistance, engagement angle (akin to interdictor wide angle v long range)..
Fixed would make for lighter less complex ships that were more powerful, at the expense of requiring skill to use.
You could have made all sorts of edge case tech broker weapons- for example homing torpedoes that had a laser guide them in (taking up two slots), night vision that was upgradeable.......the possibilities you could do would be incredible.
The sad part is the above is possible right now, and is (armchair dev) easy to do, since its just adding new relationships between modules.