Nah, don't worry about it. I'm ignoring the obvious fallacy.I sense another derailing.
I felt a great disturbance in the Forum, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Do you want ED 2 or an Expansion?
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Egosoft has its own forums: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=152
I think that's too optimistic - the key is that it's not possible at all.
On a simply practical level, Starfield cost an absurd amount of money and time to develop and is still missing (intentionally!) major features of all the other big-name space games. Sure, it might be theoretically possible with a few billion dollars and a few decades to develop a game with all those combined features - but no-one's going to try. And this is going to get worse rather than better over time because every advance in graphics technology adds another layer of unavoidable costs. (Well, unavoidable if you don't want the wine snobs going "this runs on a Nvidia 6090? who wants that sort of junk nowadays" when you finally release it)
On a conceptual level, the real world is terrible from a game design perspective - leaving aside anything outside forum rules to discuss, the main problem for space sims is that space is really big and really empty. So the more "realistic" the game gets, and the more things a game tries to do at once, the less good a game it's going to be.
And on an absurdist level, actually releasing a BDSSE with realistic physics would be entirely pointless because who wants to spend the next 6 months real time at least flying to Mars, but of course we will have space ship interiors to entertain us on the journey, very small space ship interiors! You are basically left with releasing something that's good enough, or never releasing anything at all. The few successfully released space games have placed the "good enough" barrier in different places, and have all done well with that restriction, some better than other of course but that's always going to be the way of things, something comes first, something comes last, some things don't even enter the race, but it's pointless comparing them and saying, well this one is doing better because......!
Bringing something from X game to Y game doesn't automatically make Y game as good as X game because often the entire game is built around feature Z, and just bringing feature Z in doesn't change the basics of the game, it just adds one more feature for people to potentially complain about.
It doesn't even make sense to talk about BDSSE, because that term has a different meaning for each individual player.
I agree...
It is an impossible challenge as literally everything in the BDSSE would have to be optional and removeable from the game by those who have no wish for fripperies... (e.g. Ship Interiors)
With, naturally, goal posts moving as game XYZ introduces something not seen elsewhere and the 'fans' demanding it appear in BDSSE.
Of course, a framework could be released and then the modding community can add in their own content, pleasing everyone.... Oh, wait, isn'th that the domain of another very large games studio already?
No point at all, in anything.
Theme song for this is of course the theme from M.A.S.H.
I've commented in this thread but don't think I've responded to the OP. What I'd like is for Frontier to continue developing ED. Fix bugs, improve existing features, and keep working on improving the graphics (shaders, textures, lighting, shadows, etc).
Keep working on the Thargoid war, introduce more cool space combat stuff, introduce "reskinned humans (thombies)", and add proper on foot thargoids.
Add space EVA and boarding of (in space and/or crashed) derelict ships, be it mega ships or normal ships with interiors. Finish the optical damage models for all the ships.
Add denser atmosphere planetary bodies with liquids and weather. Add more flora and lower level fauna. Add flight inside gas giants with mining, refueling and possibly life forms to explore.
Revamp the BGS and if at all possible make it more skill based and not only a game of attrition where the biggest player group wins.
Add base building and let us start colonizing the galaxy to build new bubbles.
Revamp the crime and punishment and add a path for career criminals.
Etc, etc. I think my dreams.txt is probably just as large as anyone else's. But I do think that many of these points are probably more realistic and some could most likely be added much easier than trying to create a brand new game. In fact I'd suspect that this is Frontier's plan if they continue improving the game.
To add fully populated ELW with full flora/fauna/weather/etc, CP2077 level of city game play, big game hunting, etc, seems to me like nothing more than a pipe dream even if Braben mentioned it as possible future DLCs in the by now infamous kick starter video.
Keep working on the Thargoid war, introduce more cool space combat stuff, introduce "reskinned humans (thombies)", and add proper on foot thargoids.
Add space EVA and boarding of (in space and/or crashed) derelict ships, be it mega ships or normal ships with interiors. Finish the optical damage models for all the ships.
Add denser atmosphere planetary bodies with liquids and weather. Add more flora and lower level fauna. Add flight inside gas giants with mining, refueling and possibly life forms to explore.
Revamp the BGS and if at all possible make it more skill based and not only a game of attrition where the biggest player group wins.
Add base building and let us start colonizing the galaxy to build new bubbles.
Revamp the crime and punishment and add a path for career criminals.
Etc, etc. I think my dreams.txt is probably just as large as anyone else's. But I do think that many of these points are probably more realistic and some could most likely be added much easier than trying to create a brand new game. In fact I'd suspect that this is Frontier's plan if they continue improving the game.
To add fully populated ELW with full flora/fauna/weather/etc, CP2077 level of city game play, big game hunting, etc, seems to me like nothing more than a pipe dream even if Braben mentioned it as possible future DLCs in the by now infamous kick starter video.
Yes.
OK.
Mostly yes.
Yes!
OK?
Only if it doesn’t involve player ownership of bases and bubbles.
Yes.
That does sound like the basis of a separate game.
Good Bad Games
Since squadrons became an actual in-game thing, over time discussion has shifted over to various Discords, more and more away from the forums. For example, I hang around on most major exploration Discords, and there's plenty of talk going on (well, except at ones for angry exes), meanwhile the exploration subforum here has had little discussion for quite a while now. From what I can tell, the situation is similar with the other forums as well - and of course, PowerPlay itself had most discussions moving off from here far sooner than the other areas, for reasons which I think are fairly obvious.
Especially when you consider that somebody posting here isn't wholly done with the game, evidenced by the fact they read the thread and replied to it. Somebody who is over completely wouldn't come here and then also take the time to post. So, "I'm done with ED but I would like to see a sequel" also translates to "I'm done with Elite: Dangerous but I'm not done with Elite(s)".
Oh, good catch. It's interesting to put numbers to the various games' development and marketing. To be frank, as it is now, Starfield's a perfect candidate for a 7/10 game - and as you said, that's after about nine years and hundreds of millions of dollars, and enormous money spent on marketing, which matters a lot.
Some months back, I looked a bit into Hello Games' financials, see this post: as it turns out, the power of massive marketing (financed by Sony) was such that they made enough money that even if all income was cut afterwards, they could have kept developing the game for over ten years. I don't think that all those copies sold were based on the state of the game at launch, because really, it was quite the debacle.
So, sure, they developed the game quite well over the years, but they did so at practically zero financial risk, and an original reception that was poor enough that they could really only go higher. It's a good thing the developers kept at the game and improved it over all the years, of course.
Anyway, back to those two games and comparisons. I wouldn't compare them to games focusing on spaceflight like ED or SC, or even KSP, even if the latter is all about (mostly) realistic spaceflight. Both NMS and SF are in different genres, the former focusing on open world survival-crafting, a much more popular genre than space sims, and the latter on single player RPG, again a much more popular genre. For NMS, a better comparison is with Minecraft, for SF, lately... the Outer Worlds. (I mean, one could compare it to Baldur's Gate 3, but one is a turn-based isometric single player RPG, the other is a real time first-person single player action-RPG, and the two subgenres have vastly different audience draws.)
At the end of the day then, unfortunately there aren't many games which are fair to compare Elite: Dangerous with. It has to be multiplayer, and MMO even (persistent, dynamic game world, and so on), so there's... Star Citizen, and nothing else. SC is an interesting comparison because it is said to have received much more money than ED (not on the Kickstarter campaigns though, and I trust those numbers much more than CIG's unverified numbers), and with more than ten years of production, it's still in a superposition of "not released" and "released". Which eigenstate it collapses to depends on who's asking and the context. One could argue then that it's not fair to compare a launched game to an "alpha", but I'd say that Star Citizen can be played now, so it's a fair comparison: as a matter of fact, the game's site has "Play now" written front and center. As far as I can tell, you have to proceed quite some way into the purchase before you get told that this is an alpha / early access / testing / etc version.
However, could this niche even support more than these two games? I wonder. But well, suppose ED did get a sequel: then there'd be three games in the (sub)genre. Whee.
I tended to use range bands as per The Traveller Book and Basic Traveller, though also played the Mayday (hex map and counters) version of space combat. But yes, High Guard (2nd edition mainly) was great.Have you ever drawn out the planetary gravity templates in Traveller? I have.
It was a great relief when High Guard came out.
Most of the players moved to other games, because 99.9% of people don't play one computer game for ten years.
There is no real "ED killer" on the market. Doesn't mean most people dont eventually get bored of it. When they release something new, some will play it a bit again. Meanwhile I will be more interested in BG3, Forza Motorsport, MSFS, Starfield or whatever shiny new thing catches my eye.
Even a perfect FD cannot churn out content faster than I can consume it, so I will always just drop in and out at times.
I'm not sure I understand that, please elaborate.
Happily:
You were responding to a poster who made a snarky comment to another - when said poster appeared to be here for exactly the reason they suggested Black Jack was...
British saying - with a foundation in coal burning kitchen ranges. (which were / are (as one of my more eccentric relatives still uses one - and oil-lamps) messy) which coated all of the utensils equally in soot.
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Didn't say that anyone in particular said that, but someone (not going back to look) made an observation that people were falling into two camps. Those that want to see changes and those that don't (paraphrasing heavily).
Broadly speaking, yes, two camps, as suggested by the OP.
Outliers, naturally, in a few cases, which is to be expected on any forum.
I'd suggest the Expansion suggestion has more supporters overall, which isn't particularly surprising.
Two posters (I think) suggesting ED/O is fine as it is, probably an equal number suggesting that everything FD touches turns to ashes (heavily paraphrased) so nothing too radical here so far.
apart from that do we want to wait another 10 years for the expansion. Has them joining it to the already one will probably be disastrous.
you mean there a space sim out there that a louds you to fall threw elevators, i fought that was elite dangerous where i fell threw a carrier elevator.
Overall more DLC content would make more marketing and technical sense than a sequel.
Stellar Forge just needs iterating to include new astronomical objects if they want to attract customers from that angle, it has successfully created a decent portrait of the Milky Way, I dont think we would ever need Andromeda or a different interpretation of accuracy in the Milky Way, the rest of the Universe is basically repeats of the chemical composition and dispersion pattern of this galaxy. A Portal to a Thargoid galaxy? In theory could just be tacked onto Stellar Forge.
Gameplay Mechanics, resetting costs, credits and engineering mechanics would be easier with a sequel but not exactly impossible as a current iteration, they have changed before. Would such a reset in a sequel really make a big Marketing headline or that much of a problem if put to a declining existing playerbase as an update to the existing game?
Graphical Assets, a big time sink, I dont personally see how a remodelling with more detailed 3D objects with the scale of this game-verse would be such a big marketing feature to warrant the effort of a sequel, might as well concentrate on creating new assets for new content, the reverse side of that coin is imagine the marketing if you release a sequel the same 3D assets? Textures can have a new detail pass which has been done several times before. Odyssey showed an update to existing 3D models e.g. the addition of social hubs.
I think that with the recent doubling-down on their core business strategy, I see this as a long term focus on development of emergent gameplay from chaotic systems, e.g. the management sim. ED as an open space sim fits into this development focus with various chaotic systems at play from economics to crime, they just need to come forward more to the players gameplay experience. The Codebase 4.0 feature showed us the Thargoid War, a type of new chaotic system with direct-gameplay emergent properties even if it is somewhat restrained for pragmatic reasons.
The continued development of ED with enhanced chaos for emergent gameplay makes sense, to me the most obvious candidates are:
Stellar Forge just needs iterating to include new astronomical objects if they want to attract customers from that angle, it has successfully created a decent portrait of the Milky Way, I dont think we would ever need Andromeda or a different interpretation of accuracy in the Milky Way, the rest of the Universe is basically repeats of the chemical composition and dispersion pattern of this galaxy. A Portal to a Thargoid galaxy? In theory could just be tacked onto Stellar Forge.
Gameplay Mechanics, resetting costs, credits and engineering mechanics would be easier with a sequel but not exactly impossible as a current iteration, they have changed before. Would such a reset in a sequel really make a big Marketing headline or that much of a problem if put to a declining existing playerbase as an update to the existing game?
Graphical Assets, a big time sink, I dont personally see how a remodelling with more detailed 3D objects with the scale of this game-verse would be such a big marketing feature to warrant the effort of a sequel, might as well concentrate on creating new assets for new content, the reverse side of that coin is imagine the marketing if you release a sequel the same 3D assets? Textures can have a new detail pass which has been done several times before. Odyssey showed an update to existing 3D models e.g. the addition of social hubs.
I think that with the recent doubling-down on their core business strategy, I see this as a long term focus on development of emergent gameplay from chaotic systems, e.g. the management sim. ED as an open space sim fits into this development focus with various chaotic systems at play from economics to crime, they just need to come forward more to the players gameplay experience. The Codebase 4.0 feature showed us the Thargoid War, a type of new chaotic system with direct-gameplay emergent properties even if it is somewhat restrained for pragmatic reasons.
The continued development of ED with enhanced chaos for emergent gameplay makes sense, to me the most obvious candidates are:
- Continued Gated PDLC Content based on planet type access
- Continued development of Geomes (the Codebase 4.0 planet tech) to generate more varied emergent properties via Stellar Forge on new planet types
- Simulated flight and onfoot survival Gameplay centred around the emergent properties of the new Geomes and Denser Atmospheres (more complex planet types will give them a route for them to reverse the simplification of onfoot gameplay in Odyssey which I feel was an anti-thesis to their core company philosphy).
- Proc Gen generation of living organisms, this would be a big headline feature but would equally suit an expensive DLC as it would ultimately only be relevant to a new more complex planet type, they have clever reproduction algorithms in Planet Zoo but based on life-like hand-crafted 3D models. It seems that ED would need something more chaotic with proc gen elements to the modelling to link it with Stellar Forge for the scale of ED, would that sort of development investment be worthwhile ie useful in other titles?
- Base Building and player mining/production economy seems like an obvious way to generate emergent gameplay from multi-player activity linked to planet variety (would cover Gas Giants also)
- Codebase 4.0 "Thargoid War" enhancements applied to other areas of the BGS such as politics and crime in free updates to create a more dynamic bubble and beyond
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