How does one person saying "Elite's best days are behind it" on page 12 convert the entire thread into "doom"? Reducing literally everything negative to "doom" is silly, a tactic to make it easier to argue against by oversimplifying it to the extreme. I didn't think you did that.
Do you want ED 2 or an Expansion?
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The problem with modern high-graphics games is the sheer amount of time it takes to model, texture, shader, animate, etc. etc. etc. every single model.
And of course, once you've done so, you end up with issues like "but all the scuff marks look the same" which games of the 1990s didn't have because there weren't enough pixels to see the scuff marks in the first place. Or complaints that the game doesn't have as many ships as FFE, when I (definitely no 3D artist) could make a ship to FFE graphics standards in less than a day, and wouldn't get one anywhere near ED standards if you gave me a year.
We used to have a single station interior design for all orbital starports (plus the near-secret palm-tree one). It was a few years in before we got one design per economy. Not because the engine couldn't cope but because it all needed putting together and there were higher priorities early on.
Similarly Odyssey plants. There's - discounting recolours - a bit over 100 different species, most of which have multiple models for growth stages or just variety of a cluster. So that's hundreds of models which probably represent thousands of person-days of development ... to be nowhere near sufficient for people's expectations.
This isn't an engine limitation, this is a budgetary limitation: Frontier are big compared with "two programmers in an attic" independents, but not the sort of big that can afford to throw several hundred graphic artists at the problem for a year or two either like a AAA producer might. So the number of distinct assets which can exist is very limited.
(If they did at some point do an Elite 5, they might learn from this and deliberately pick an art style which doesn't require quite so much fine detail. Or they might feel that they had no choice but to go for even more detail with every ship modelled to the centimetre inside and out, and go back to the "you can fly the Cobra III" tradition for a year or two.)
It makes me laugh aloud when people complain that a space flight simulation contains... space flight.
Have you any idea how BIG space is?
Try reaching the nearest planet in sub-supercruise speed like a lot of newbies do.
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Hmm yeah. I found NMS via a trailer, I downloaded, played it obsessively for maybe 5 months then basically completed it. I then searched for more space games and found ED. That was in March of 2020. It's now 11pm and I am logging into ED although I am knackered because I still want to play. I've checked back into NMS a few times to look at the new content, but I don't really play it.
ED is a completely different thing.
I think for a lot of people (including me), if you ask them what games they enjoy the most they will say 'that one I played eight years ago' and 'the one I'm buying in six months time.' It's human nature; so few people are able to just be content with the now.
I would ask for ED to be made completely bug free instead
That's because nearly every single developer doesn't want us to be.. if we were content with now, they couldn't sell anything extra, or "nurture" their games as some like to call it. Therefore they flash signs and say directly to us things to create expectations of better things in the future. So unless you go out of your way to avoid these or are completely cynical you can't help but expect things. As the game makers intend and spend their own money to try to make your brain think so.
Looking at the past is probably just a linear ramp back in time to when games were more art and less commerce. If you go back 20+ years you get to about 50/50... Either that or the only thing you remember from back then was something made by cdpr or rockstar, and therefore think all gaming was like that.
No. All frontier had to do was commit to ship interiors, but have they done that? No. At one point someone has to break up these deadlocked relationships.
Ship interiors... its a simple thing... direct correlation... can we have it? Do we keep playing?
Indeed. It's always good to remember that these days, the key goal of making games is to make profitable games, not good games... and the two are definitely not the same thing.
Incidentally, in 2009, i made two predictions on the future of games, inspired by Dragon Age's NPC at base camp who literally goes "hey, i have a quest for you... just buy this DLC and we can go"... and Call of Duty MW's release.
- That games would slowly move towards being a "core mechanic" with a base character, and most "side quests" or other nice to haves would be paid DLC; and
- we'd see a stifling of creativity from big name developers, who would rely purely on the name of their game and better graphics/ sound, but offering fundamentally nothing new.
With the rise of Indy devs and the current state of skins/microtransactions/dlc, I don't think that's far off the mark... and it's kinda sad.
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My rebuttal to that is I'm replaying "that one I played eight years ago" right now (and loving it), so I guess that means I'm content with the then, now?
That's not to say I feel this way about ALL games. I prefer X4 over X3, for example. I'm also very much looking forward to the sequel to the old game I'm currently playing, and I'm hopeful (in a "the one I'm buying in six months time" sort of way) that it will be even better than the original.
But I have no interest in Overwatch 2, and I would never be content playing it, especially after so many joyous hours playing the original Overwatch. Sometimes sequels are just objectively (or subjectively by majority vote) worse than the games / movies / books / whatever they replace.
Interesting point. Over the weekend i bought the two expansion dlc's for jurassic world evolution 2... while i don't regret the purchases at all, and still think incredibly highly of what they have produced...
I did do a double take seeing so many dlc's post launch, and finally became self aware of the chumpiness of buying games while they're still in development. I bought the entire dlc collection for the original JWE for the price of ONE of these expansions from humble bundle when frontier decided they were finished with the original game... and somehow seeing a the sequel already having 2 expansions, 5 content dlcs, and a deluxe upgrade, and probably more coming.. that was enough content behing a paywall to trigger asking the classic question of whether the developers just left it out of the game intentionally so they could sell it... well obviously they do it proudly if you read the annual report.
I have a personal hook into it, i wanted a modern jpog since frontier announced the original in 2017.. and only now in 2023 am i playing something that qualifies, so happy about it.
Well look, gaming is just falling into all entertainment in life, its just getting worse and you have to let it go. Like star wars as another example.
Yeah everything is rosy until you get out your wallet to pay for it, isnt it?
WIth the increasing trend for developers to prefer digital only.. you just have to in turn become aware that all you're paying for is access date after a while, because the other side of that coin is the moment they've finished milking it it will just race down into being a commodity or part of a subscription service, or given away by epic games etc.
Indeed, which is why most space flight games don't set the gameplay in realistic-sized systems.
There are major advantages to doing so on the exploration-and-screenshots side (where ED remains unbeaten) - but they come with substantive costs on the trade-and-combat side in terms of both concrete mechanics and immersion which it's reasonable (given that they subtitled the game after the combat rank, not the exploration one, and largely market on that basis) that people might feel a bit annoyed about them from time to time.
Or they could commit to not doing ship interiors, which they did two years ago, and have given no indication whatsoever of having changed their mind since.
I don't think the deadlock is on their side any more.
Remember at the time they wanted to put Odyssey onto console and there was no way that the PS4 or the Xbox could have handled ship interiors, heck they couldn't even handle Odyssey. That's why ship interiors where never included. However, that doesn't mean Ship Interiors are closed off on the PC version. We know the ships have been designed so that they can put the interiors in, so they still could be implemented in the future. heck I would be happy if you could only access ship interiors if you had landed (Que whining about boarding actions, EVA or in ship repairs etc). However, We'll never get that if Fdev think its not worth their while (as you well know about e.g. Powerplay, CQC, the multi-crew gunner role, etc)!No. All frontier had to do was commit to ship interiors, but have they done that? No. At one point someone has to break up these deadlocked relationships.
Ship interiors... its a simple thing... direct correlation... can we have it? Do we keep playing?
The question is are you still enjoy playing the game or are you missed out on the new stuff because that one thing you didn't want hasn't been confirmed yet?
Because Fdev haven't commented on the future of the game after update 17 (aside from this feature rework investigation), and the language used in their shareholder's statement, its got the community rattled.
Which bit are you thinking of? I've checked through the various recent financial reports and can't find anything particularly concerning there:
- they are refocusing on four genres where they believe they can be competitive: management sims, real-time strategy, turn-based strategy, and Elite Dangerous
- ED continues to receive sufficient development (unlike Jurassic World 2 or Planet Zoo - which still get expansions released) that they can claim tax credits for it
- ED continues to be supported
- ED continues to bring in material revenues
Sure, by omission, it's clear that there's no plans for a major paid expansion any time soon ... but that was true of the last two annual reports as well, and we're still here.
They also said they would pass on if we wouldn't play without ship interiors... Maybe the mods are doing too good of a job moderating prior threads?
Yeah i guessed today that they might have genuinely planned on doing ship interiors after console release, it was in the ceo's plan after all. Probably the lack of target users put the feature to question. It also might be curious on why they didn't target next gen consoles, maybe they had data that the bulk of console players were still on previous gen rather than current gen in compatibility. Over the last 3 years, there have been a few samples to invalidate the suggestions that sony were giving them an ultimatum of all versions or nothing.
I've personally stopped at the moment. Don't bother asking why
Im extremely hooked on jurassic world evolution 2 now.. the jurassic game after 2 full releases, 5 expansions and 10? content dlcs is mature and a very worthy modern replacement to jpog (for my hardcore casual measure anyway). That's why i've fallen here. And the nice crowd of people who moved over to the non frontier games discussions.Re the thargoids, i stopped a few hours after the first patch. My roleplay was to be friends with them... :/ When it became clear the actual content was just combat and rescue missions, i completely switched off the whole offering. Yes i did have an enjoyable drive around the far god cult base, and of course the pre patch community stuff with the barnacles and starmap before launch, that was great.
That's okay, seems that most people have moved on? There used to be magnitudes more commentary even for a popular or unpopular new feature when there were still players.
If one spends just one minute thinking about boarding, they would come to a realisation that in Elite's multiplayer setting where there is no magitech gravity generators and inertial dampeners boarding actions would either
a.) be absolutely suicidal—all the pilot of the boarded ship needs to do is boost once after the ship reboot brings engines online and the boarders will become a mangled mess on a bulkhead. 20...30 G-s tend to make even a 1 meter fall quite deadly.
or b.) open avenues for endless griefing by introducing a way for any player to disable the engines of another player for a long time, say 5 or 10 minutes, to facilitate boarding. Just imagine gankers interdicting you and disabling your ship almost immediately with some EMP weapon so you can't even high wake out. Or a griefer disabling your ship as you enter the mailslot, leading to trespassing and rebuy.
Here is my 3k hours /launch day feedback that nobody will ever use anyway, but i feel i want to talk:
let me just say first that i in love ED, OD gave me a great feel, its a real great game.
There is really no need of ED2, just a good revamp of the actual :
And then, please :
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.- TELL ME WHERE THE HELL IS RAXXLA
o7
let me just say first that i in love ED, OD gave me a great feel, its a real great game.
There is really no need of ED2, just a good revamp of the actual :
- CGI are nice, no need to touch them again, i dont want more rtx and so on
- Revamp PVP (punition system and bounty needs to be improved, its not like i can destroy another player and get 200 creds bounty......)
- Space legs, well yeah why not, i would really care more if i could fix/upgrade my ship subnautica like while walking, let me have a real multiplayer co-op friends that fix the ship with me sweating it, give me an extinguisher and an o2 mask, else i'm just a soft body with colisions in a useless and empty space house
- Give me some stars epic battle with actual player factions fighting each others for control and money and powers that you can only get this way
- Less grind, more players activities, i don't want to bring 10000000k copper for some random faction, i want grinds that is hardcore, that only a few of us pilots elite (maybe not me) will get
- The story is nice, but needs improvements, i want to see results of my actions economy wise
- give us more control, i want to hide, fell hunted because a band of pilots is ruling this part of the galaxy, i want to spend money on insurance cause i got destroyed going on a player faction owned planet, as i hoped fighting them with my best pilot mates. I want to wake up at 3 am cause we prepared a raid on their base, fail miserably cause they knew, then go to bed again crying about it.
And then, please :
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.- TELL ME WHERE THE HELL IS RAXXLA
o7
They did.
It's now two years later, player numbers have been up and down but not massively out of line with where they ended up after the pre-Odyssey hype met reality, they probably concluded that the people for who "lack of ship interiors" either always was or has since become a dealbreaker aren't large enough in number to justify the costs of implementation. What few hints they've given of future development direction remain elsewhere (on things which probably have a "more coding less art" balance to keep costs down). At any rate, I don't think we need a regular update from them that "no, we're still not planning anything with ship interiors" to conclude that they aren't, any more than we need them to respond to Hotel California every six months to say "we've heard your feedback but are happy with how things are".
X4 has ship interiors and has fewer players on Steam than ED ... NMS doesn't have ship interiors any more than ED does and has more players on Steam than ED ... Star Citizen has ship interiors and fewer players than ED. There are obviously reasons for all of that which are mostly unrelated to ship interiors - I'm not saying ED would lose half its players if it added interiors! - but it's hardly evidence that they're the key feature every space game needs either.
You don't have to suffer speculation or subjective assertions, just try starfield yourself. They're great, and... odd... nevermind. If it ever becomes a point, pretty sure they have starfield available on cloud gaming (at low detail
), which is available with gamepass ultimate, which you might even be able to get a trial for. Frontier doesn't need squirm, spend or risk to raise the bar, its already been done, so its also not that much of a far off impossibility anymore. They just need to spend to simply make them
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