Kind of a moot point, they'll just tell us what we want.
Do you want ED 2 or an Expansion?
- Thread starter Cosmo
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Oooooh, thank you for the springboard! Okay, here's what I'd personally like X4 (though more likely X5) to borrow from ED:
- Stellar Forge Lite - I want planets to orbit their suns and moons to orbit their planets in a realistic fashion. I say "lite" because it would make sense for X4 to stick to a geocentric model, graphics-rendering wise, but they should at least use Kepler equations to plot where in the sky various heavenly bodies will be over time, providing a dynamic "skybox" for each system. I also want stars and nebula that coincide with an actual location in the Milky Way, not some fantasy space painting as a backdrop.
- Weighty Flight Model - the flight model in X4 isn't bad, especially with FA-Off, but small ships need more mass IMO. Comparing X4 to ED, I think ED nails the small ship flight model, whereas X4 does a better job with medium and large ships (I hate Anacondas that flip around like they are Vipers).
- More Diverse Economy - ironic, I know, since the economy is one of X4's strengths, but it's pure a trade-based economy. In Elite, I prefer running passengers over cargo, and I'd love to have that option (besides the random Uber missions) in X4. Where is the tourism industry, with space hotels and casinos and parks? Where is the "public transit" to get people to and from work? And what about exploration as a career? Tie this with my Stellar Forge Lite, open up a 1000 new gates to unexplored systems, and give us pilots a job mapping those out.
- Politics - maybe Stellaris is a better game to borrow this from than Elite, but at least Elite has some form of political "motivator" plugged into its BGS / Powerplay. In X4, all races are very insect-like in their motives to expand. Everybody just wants to build more stations so they can build more stations. I get no sense of political motivations (outside of the scripted quests) in X4, and it's one of the reasons I tend to grow bored with the game after I've progressed a certain amount.
- Costs - there are a lot of things free in X4 that I wished cost money, to add a challenge to managing even a humble fleet like my own. Fuel should cost money, ammo (which is unlimited except for missiles) should cost money. A crew should be paid a salary.
- Multiplayer
- Planetary Landings
- FTL (besides some new gates) to 400 billion star systems
- First Person Shooter (specifically thinking boarding parties to take enemy capital ships)
That would be EVE Online, although players have colonized the uninhabited parts of space years ago (NullSec and Wormhole Space). That's really the point where I think FDev missed an "easy win". With 400 Billion Star systems to explore, why not open them up for colonization by player factions? PMFs and Powerplay...nothing of that stuff interests me one bit. I don't care about some blueberry girl with cool shields or one of the other pictures. They are just that to me: soulless pictures without any purpose or meaning. But let me join a player run organization in which I can actually contribute to a common goal (nope, not just spreading some other picture across starports) and I'm sold.
My "dream game" would have EVE Online's player run economy (including the research and production chains) and it's player run organizations, all of Starfield's Space Legs content (crafting, POIs, gunplay, exploration, player housing) and Elite's scale and space flight (with some improvements to super cruise flight). That's why I am more in favor of a new Elite Dangerous than of just another expansion. You cannot simply bolt something like this onto an already existing game with causing all kinds of trouble.
So it’s case of NMS envy then. If you go by that criteria (where new stuff is added or fixed) then elite has had ;-
- Five updates for the base game.
- Five more updates for Horizons.
- Four updates for Beyond.
- Thirteen updates for Odyssey.
- Three updates so far for the thargoid war. (One more confirmed and maybe another one around Christmas or after the new year).
The thing is, if people enjoy the game, but to stop playing because feature X hasn’t been implemented yet, then the chances are that feature X will never get implemented. The game will go into maintenance mode because FDev will look at the numbers and say it’s not worth it. (I’m not saying you’ve got to grind to keep the game alive, only play if you enjoy it)
Where do i start?
We've had this before. you cant compare ED to anything else, especially not NMS.
Elite is a 'grown up' space sim, its difficult, it takes time to achieve things but that makes it rewarding.
My 9 year old plays NMS, a procedurally generated cartoon compared to Odyssey, yes NMS is a good game but HG create content because lets face it otherwise there would be naff all to do.
I really don't care what other games do, they are not Elite.
If there was no Elite someone would have to make it, because the other stuff is far too easy and some of us (yes even in solo mode) like a challenge.
O7
Not really what I'm getting at - firstly, because the colonisation has already happened, and secondly because inhabited space in EVE isn't a formality.
I don't think it's a concept that'd work as a MMO - singleplayer or small-server multiplayer only, randomise generation seeds on initialisation - because if you go for the logistics side to make travel less routine than ED's scoop-jump, that limits how far you can go without intensive preparation. So you need a universe that hasn't had 100,000 other players get there first for everything remotely plausible to reach.
You can't do it as a new game either. It's just too many things to fit into a single game and have work coherently together. ED is already pushing well past the coherence limit as it is (which is part of the charm, of course).
You can either have players forced close enough together to have interesting interactions between them, linked economies, etc. or you can have a giant galaxy where every player can build their own thousand-system empire without getting in anyone else's way. ED already has at least ten times as many inhabited systems as it should - why colonise another one (or another ten thousand) that no-one's going to visit?
I also suspect that given EVE, Starfield and ED have a bit over four decades of combined development time, and that's with them all being allowed to just ignore problems from merging in features they don't have but the other ones do, it's literally impossible to develop a game like that anyway.
Honestly, if we could have the planetary landing variety from Frontier Elite 2 with either the ED or a more modern graphics engine, that's enough extra features for me. More (lots more!) exobiology would also be nice.
It's kind of sad to me that a game that has its roots in space exploration has kind of forgotten to be about space exploration.
Doesn't have to be perfect, could start with lifeless worlds with dense atmospheres, fog, clouds, precipitation, lakes and oceans and move onwards. If there's no appetite to do earthlike worlds in high detail, then say that there's a flight corridor above spaceports; ships must ascend and descend within a narrow cone, and we don't get to just buzz over the housing estates because it would be deeply annoying to have that going on all night. Detailing of cities beyond the starports can thus be much simpler, and landscaping and life doesn't have to be modeled carefully because we won't be allowed within 2 miles of the surface anyway.
For unsettled ELWs... they could be 'later'. For now say there's a galaxy wide ban on landing there due to contamination concerns. But we could still be allowed to fly through the cloud layer and loop the tallest mountains. I do understand that implementing a full biosphere on procedural generation is quite hard work - but it's also not impossible. Another popular space game already did it.
It's kind of sad to me that a game that has its roots in space exploration has kind of forgotten to be about space exploration.
Doesn't have to be perfect, could start with lifeless worlds with dense atmospheres, fog, clouds, precipitation, lakes and oceans and move onwards. If there's no appetite to do earthlike worlds in high detail, then say that there's a flight corridor above spaceports; ships must ascend and descend within a narrow cone, and we don't get to just buzz over the housing estates because it would be deeply annoying to have that going on all night. Detailing of cities beyond the starports can thus be much simpler, and landscaping and life doesn't have to be modeled carefully because we won't be allowed within 2 miles of the surface anyway.
For unsettled ELWs... they could be 'later'. For now say there's a galaxy wide ban on landing there due to contamination concerns. But we could still be allowed to fly through the cloud layer and loop the tallest mountains. I do understand that implementing a full biosphere on procedural generation is quite hard work - but it's also not impossible. Another popular space game already did it.
All code has technical debt in it. But if you want to have a successful product you need to pay it down. That's the difference between Abode and FDEV. But to have the development budget to pay down debt you need a successful product. Abode has one. FDEV had one back when Elite was bringing in a lot more revenue and that's when they should have done the work. It's too late now when the game is barely making money and the company needs to focus on returning to profitability.
No, what I'm saying is that they can't fix the anti-aliasing issue. If it was trivial, it would have been fixed long ago. Most likely, every fix they tried broke something else. This is what happens when you let technical debt pile up. You get to the point where you can't fix something without incurring huge costs elsewhere.
If the license required that they use the Unreal engine, then why on earth would they start development with Cobra and switch later? That meant rewriting a massive amount of code and leaving many game features nonfunctional. The costs of switch alone probably burned up all the profits from the game. They switched because they were forced to; the Cobra engine was not getting the job done.
No, I'm working on a large project with the Rust language.To be fair, Old Coder is part of the development team of a little known base-building game called Rust which you might have heard of, so not your average armchair dev@old Coder, please correct me if I'm mistaken.
Ha! Fair enough, my bad.
This happened?
Yes, to F1 Manager 2022. They announced the game as using the Cobra engine and later said so again in a shareholder update less than a year before launch. But when it was released, they had switched to the Unreal engine and the game was in terrible shape. Many of the features didn't work and they abandoned all attempts to fix it. That killed sales of the game and of F1M2023.
It's not envy, it shows that Hello Games has been more succesful with adding good content to attract players than Fdev.
Horizons and Odyssey were the biggest updates for ED. Both had a price tag (Fdev added Horizons to the base game for free later). After all those updates, the negative reception and lower than expected sales of Odyssey; ED still has a low active player base. Such a financially disappointing result and stagnation are enough reasons to put ED in maintenance mode.
Maybe Fdev could add new planet types to explore... but that won't fix all the other bad game design features of ED. It won't bring in lots more players, it won't generate much more revenue either. ED needs an overhaul and a facelift the equivalent of a new game.
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How would providing Horizons and Odyssey for free have led to a less "financially bad result"?
Ok. I hadn't paid attention until it was already UE. Thanks.
If an expansion is good then charging a fee is justifiable, because players and fans would buy it. The addition of Horizons to the base game made little difference for the popularity of ED though. There are other space games on the market that are more popular and fun. ED's best days are long behind it.
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You know, I almost posted awhile back that this thread isn't a doom thread like some people claim. Good thing I didn't!
Not that I disagree or agree with your latest statement, but you definitely just turned this into another doom thread if it wasn't already.
I've been looking forward to ED2 or whatever they call it for a long time.
It has seemed to me, for a while now, the old Cobra engine has been pushed to its limits and ED must be at its maximum now. The game is chock full of placeholders. Every dock station has the same paint/scuff marks on the pillars, for example. And it makes sense they intended to upgrade these to individual unique items, because why have a galaxy filled with unique planets, only to have the same placeholders around it? But, along the way, they find the limitations of the current engine and though it only seems an inch deep game, they've maximized that inch and have a lot of good placeholder stuff. I can only imagine when they first hit some limitations (uhm, beige planets anyone?) they'd have begun work on Cobra 2. Engines dont just pop up, though, and it makes sense that they keep pushing with Cobra 1 as long as possible before making the switch because so much is changing daily in that area. If they had released Cobra 2, a couple years ago, for example, they'd kick themselves after seeing U5 and what it can do.
That being said, after seeing UE5, Starfield, other games around, I dont think anything could handle ED like Cobra has so Im hoping for ED 2 in Cobra 2, or an enhanced Cobra, more than U5 or something.
About F1 manager, if that game required more than what Cobra could handle or more time to make it work, that is not a shock. I was shocked when they showed walking around, in EDO. As in, what they're doing in EDO is more than what should be expected. Seeing they used UE5 though, means they have something they can fall back on, while making cobra 2.
NMS needs that added content, or it'd sink off steams list. When SF came out HG was swift enough to release a big update and it bumped them quite a bit. After a few weeks, they're back to the usual drop. That's not a diss, more sort of how it should be. Hopefully when it gets the bumps up the list, they sell way more and it pays off. Looking forward to NMS 2, for sure.
It has seemed to me, for a while now, the old Cobra engine has been pushed to its limits and ED must be at its maximum now. The game is chock full of placeholders. Every dock station has the same paint/scuff marks on the pillars, for example. And it makes sense they intended to upgrade these to individual unique items, because why have a galaxy filled with unique planets, only to have the same placeholders around it? But, along the way, they find the limitations of the current engine and though it only seems an inch deep game, they've maximized that inch and have a lot of good placeholder stuff. I can only imagine when they first hit some limitations (uhm, beige planets anyone?) they'd have begun work on Cobra 2. Engines dont just pop up, though, and it makes sense that they keep pushing with Cobra 1 as long as possible before making the switch because so much is changing daily in that area. If they had released Cobra 2, a couple years ago, for example, they'd kick themselves after seeing U5 and what it can do.
That being said, after seeing UE5, Starfield, other games around, I dont think anything could handle ED like Cobra has so Im hoping for ED 2 in Cobra 2, or an enhanced Cobra, more than U5 or something.
About F1 manager, if that game required more than what Cobra could handle or more time to make it work, that is not a shock. I was shocked when they showed walking around, in EDO. As in, what they're doing in EDO is more than what should be expected. Seeing they used UE5 though, means they have something they can fall back on, while making cobra 2.
NMS needs that added content, or it'd sink off steams list. When SF came out HG was swift enough to release a big update and it bumped them quite a bit. After a few weeks, they're back to the usual drop. That's not a diss, more sort of how it should be. Hopefully when it gets the bumps up the list, they sell way more and it pays off. Looking forward to NMS 2, for sure.
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