Do you want ED 2 or an Expansion?

[varonica]

Both Dual Universe and Starbase were huge disappointments. They are perfect examples of:

Yeah I have an account for DU, I downloaded and logged in just the once, it was a disappointment in a manner of speaking. You see when I first purchased and played ED I was flying around in space within a few minutes of actually first logging in, yes the learning curve is indeed huge for ED in that it has a lot to learn, but, you don't have to learn it all at once to actually do something in game. DU, well it took me 15 minutes just to figure out what I was supposed to do and where I was supposed to go, while its ambition is huge, it doesn't cater at all for any sort of quick log in and casual play. Some people accuse ED of being like that, but it really isn't, you can log in and casually play any time you want, but if you have a specific aim, that is take samples from the maelstrom for instance, of course tha'st not casual play.

While ED has indeed pushed a bit towards the everything type game by including for instance PvP ground combat and capture the flag type options, which I think it absolutely didn't need at all, you don't have to know or do everything about the game to actually play, whereas that's almost mandatory in the eyes a lot of "everything" games, so I will give ED a pass there for not mandating a "must do everything" direction to the game play.

 

[Hudownik]

Do you want Fdev to make ED 2 or another expansion for ED 1?

ED 2 means FD will start from scratch, focusing on graphics. BUT I dont want to play in "graphics". I want new gameplay and stuff.

The graphics don't hold a candle to current gen space sims and space themed games.

With what games you compere, Starfield? (its script focused Action-RPG, without open world?) Space Engineers? (I wound say graphics is better) NMS (I hope not), Cyberpunk? SC? (game that in development and can change its graphic engine. What they did since 2013)

But lets assume that ED have old graphics. The CORE of the game is GAMEPLAY. And in ED its solid.
ED should add more stuff, like quests, stories, notes ets.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

ED is almost 10 years old and it has aged a lot. The graphics don't hold a candle to current gen space sims and space themed games. So it would be best for Fdev to keep the good features and learn from other space games for a sequel (Elite 5).

Its actually not that bad.. because it doesn't have to be.

Stars and planets == pass, though gas giants not being animated is incredibly cheap, even mobile apps have animated gas giants.
Planet surfaces == pass, not considering optimisation for marketing / strategic reach.
Station exteriors == you could say just a minor detail pass is required, but look at the last scene in the tutorial which massively tanks the fps.. so screwed but doesn't matter.
Station interiors == level of detail is almost passable, these are just upset by poor stylistic choice not matching horizons (too close to existing space fps) and lack of variety.
Ship cockpits == this is where the only real problem is.. if the current cockpits didn't look so ps3 era, the overall graphics would be significantly elevated. If all the game was brought up to the krait / dolphin / mamba levels.. and a bit more.. its almost a pass.

Yes, if you're looking at the industry standard of games in 2023 being firmly in the ps5 gen, yeah its probably a complete rewrite of all but the stars, planets and skybox, but frontier have never been that ambitious* and as long as it doesn't look like a ps3 game i won't take issue.

*Except for in jurassic world evolution 2.. that game is stunning. Everywhere you look is like when you go to the edge of the day line in planets and oooh.

Sorry the point is... nevermind its not going to happen. Join team jurassic

 

[Hudownik]

Such as the engineers

What are you talking about? You think updating your ship is a bad idea?! People playing Skyrim, Fallout 4, Diablo because of that. Farming resources and crafting stuff.

a lack of proper story missions with voice acting

Thats true. But not only that. ED dosent have ability to RE-VISIT old story quest or event. For example: when azimuth ghost ship returned you can play in. but now you cant, there is not mention of that or something. So new or old players who missed that will never experienced that.

the bullet spongy NPCs in FPS mode

I don`t understand that argument, that type of combat is in line with game design. (Lasers against shields, bullets against armor) Plus when you use proper weapon you killing NPC with ease. And its gives FPS more tactic in PVP.
HALO have the same design.

no immersive city settlements

what?

no walking inside ships

no NPC companions, no Ship Builder to custom design ships with parts,

And why its bad? They decide to do not make interiors. Stop judjing game for what it ISN`T.

no HUD customization: only 1 orange HUD for every ship,

yeap, maybe they should give people ability to change it. Why not, in other games like STARFILD, SC, NMS we change the color or placement UI elements. Or not?

no base and station building, no macro-level Tycoon management

Lol, you said that engineer was a bad idea, and you asking more of that.

no territory control with guilds.

I would love that.

ED's popularity declined a lot.

Eah.. This is sad true. but its not because of the reasons you describe before.

ED has TOXIC COMMUNITY that killing the game. old players leave and new not coming.
Let me prove it to you. This issues is most notable with Odyssey launch.

Odyssey is huge milestone for ED. That ad new dimension in to the game. (imagine you playing Need for speed, and next day got update that turn it in to GTA)
Game change its genre from space sim to FPS action. I never hear of any game that made such a turn.

But game got so much hate, you can check youtube, people literary saying that Odyssey is bad because "there is now new ships" or "no flying in gas giant atmosphere". REALLY, expansion about space lags (with NPCs, space bases, star bases, on foot dialogs, quests, new PVP and PVE) and this expansion is bed because there is no new ships? Or new way to fly?
People literary creating a petition to DEV asking them make ability to sit in a bar. Yamiks sad, that "the most disappointing thing in Odyssey was inability to sit"
and do you know how much time he sited after it was added? you can gues)

For people was more important to have ability sit in a bar, than play Odyssey.


There is a stream on Obsidian Ant youtube channel, it called "Elite in retrospective". Watch it. 3 most popular ED YouTubers discussing ED from 2014 to 2021. Fro 2hrs 45min
And you know what good things they mention about ED. NONE. In 3hrs stream of retrospective they destroy a game. according to they own words "ED is my favoryte game, teht they played over 2000hrz" they didnt find anything good to say.
Imagine a new players who wants to try Elite and in 8 out of 10 video on YT they hear only bad stuff. They will not try it or they will leave it.

 

[baron_V_S]

100% support scrapping Elite Dangerous in its current state and starting a sequel.

Elite Dangerous was clearly built on a sand castle of a codebase. You release one update, it breaks a thousand features and fixes from previous updates. It's the computer engineering equivalent of whack-a-mole with bugs.

Start the sequel, make the foundations solid and use an engine maybe that developers actually want to work with like Unreal Engine. From the sounds of things, Frontier's in house cobra engine is a total nightmare to work with and the evidence of each release proves that (as well as glassdoor employee reviews).

Make Elite Dangerous the game Braben promised it would be. Cut your losses on this 10 year old game which can't be modernised or developed on at a serious pace. Make a sequel, it's been 10 years. Elite has so much untapped potential, no other game has created such a beautiful galaxy - now is the time to fill that galaxy with actual meaningful content.

 

[amigacooke]

What I want is entirely irrelevant to Frontier and they only acted like it wasn’t during the KickStarter phase.

There are no options to consider, only what Frontier choose to supply.

 

[aRJay]

…


Thats true. But not only that. ED dosent have ability to RE-VISIT old story quest or event. For example: when azimuth ghost ship returned you can play in. but now you cant, there is not mention of that or something. So new or old players who missed that will never experienced that.


…

This is because Elite runs in real time so we can’t experience anything in its past until we get time travel.

 

[Old Duck]

Since everyone is talking about graphics, I'd like to say that I think Elite's graphics are fine. In fact, I actually prefer 3.8's pre-PBR graphics, which are technically "old", because its visual to performance ratio was actually pretty amazing. It's why Horizons 3.8 could drive VR without needing a quantum computer. In any fast-motion game (which Elite was for me as a combat pilot in an engineered Cobra), framerates trump photorealistic graphics.

One of the things I noticed about Odyssey is that there is way more detail in places like settlements than really is needed. For example, there is a lot of geometry where simple texturing would have sufficed. If I was modeling my house for a 3D game, for example, I could get away with having a flat wall texture with the electric sockets being part of that texture (especially using various lighting maps to provide a 3D effect). Odyssey instead reproduces all these outlets (figuratively speaking) as actual 3D geometry, which is a level of graphics fidelity I personally do not need, especially at the huge cost of performance, aliasing, etc. And I'm not convinced that Odyssey looks that much better with all these extra polygons to warrant that performance hit.

Long story short, be careful what you wish for. "Modern graphics" often provide incremental visual improvements at a serious cost in performance. If Frontier were to release an Elite V game (or rework ED), I'd much rather see them focus on lighting rather than insane polygon counts. I still dream of a day when Elite has well-done raytracing, one of the few graphical improvements that I actually might invest in new hardware for. Just look at a game like Minecraft (which has rubbish geometry) with raytracing enabled - the difference is night vs day. Imagine sitting in your cockpit, seeing the reflection of you and your surroundings in the glass canopy, all with proper raytraced illumination and shadows. You wouldn't need a billion polygons for this to look absolutely amazing. And unlike geometry, it would be easy to turn off (in theory) to regain framerate for those lacking expensive hardware.

 

[Old Duck]

ED has TOXIC COMMUNITY that killing the game.

[...]

There is a stream on Obsidian Ant youtube channel, it called "Elite in retrospective".

[...]

they didnt find anything good to say.
Imagine a new players who wants to try Elite and in 8 out of 10 video on YT they hear only bad stuff. They will not try it or they will leave it.

Godwin's Law of the forum - as a thread grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of blaming Obsidian Ant for the failure of Elite Dangerous approaches 1.

 

[zimms]

Godwin's Law of the forum - as a thread grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of blaming Obsidian Ant for the failure of Elite Dangerous approaches 1.

And it's a complete lie as well, but who cares.

 

[xzanfr]

Have they changed the audio in obsidian orbital so it only says "doom", yet?

 

[CMDR KCalo]

Ofc it is focused on ships, the game is about flying ships. Feet are an extra, not the main focus of the game
Even when Horizons launched and it added planetary ladings, the focus was still on ships.

The main focus of Odyssey was about setting foot, seems the focus was intended to expand, but 16 updates later and we're still fighting thargoids from our cockpit. Since you mentioned it's a game about flying ships and focused on ships...when was the last new ship? Would anyone even care if they took an Anaconda, or any ship, and reskinned it to look like something else? No! Well probably yes, but it would at least be a new look, a new option. So the focus is on ships...good...give us some!

 

[Northpin]

So the focus is on ships...good...give us some!

Honestly i expected them to release some Odyssey only ships, like it happened with Horizons.
It was a missed opportunity IMO.

 

[Eric Palmer]

Its kind of funny, all the what ifs and what could have been. Regardless of whether if it's an add on expansion or a new worked game I will play Elite Dangerous. If it is an activity that I don't enjoy, I won't participate in it. But I will still play it. My hopes for the future are that the game will be enjoyed by millions of people, and it will continue to be the amazing game that it is.

 

[dubsdj]

I beg to differ on the aging of graphics. I have been trying out 'sfield' like a lot of others probably and the graphics on 'sfield' don't even come close to the quality of Elite. 'sfield' has made me appreciate the details in Elite much more than I did.. I still think whoever designed the station interiors for Elite were on another level. I don't think they should make ED2 but just expand on Elite instead. I do think at least one of the devs for 'sfield' must have been an Elite player as it seemed they tried to add all the features that we hoped for in Elite. I just don't think the quality is really there in 'sfield'. I have played for many hours trying to get into it but so far haven't.

 

[Christopher Roberto]

I beg to differ on the aging of graphics. I have been trying out 'sfield' like a lot of others probably and the graphics on 'sfield' don't even come close to the quality of Elite.

Starfield isn't the best example to use of modern graphics, though.

Game on the right is 16 years old. Both pics at max settings, no mods. Who wore it better dot jaypeggers

 

[sidereal6]

I would pay money for either. I dont think there is anything wrong with the current engine, and an expansion would be quicker.

I would pay money for a modable version of ED that was single player only and ran on my own machine.

I’d also pay money for a “strategic” version of the game where I could act as the leader of a minor faction and send out multiple NPCs to do missions. If the NPCs actually showed up in game and were killable, that’d be fine, but not strictly necessary

I’d also pay money toward a kickstarter or gofundme to release horizons as open source. Let fdev decide how much they think it’s worth, and if we reach the goal, fine. If not, we’ll we tried.

 

[CMDR-AD]

I beg to differ on the aging of graphics. I have been trying out 'sfield' like a lot of others probably and the graphics on 'sfield' don't even come close to the quality of Elite. 'sfield' has made me appreciate the details in Elite much more than I did.. I still think whoever designed the station interiors for Elite were on another level. I don't think they should make ED2 but just expand on Elite instead. I do think at least one of the devs for 'sfield' must have been an Elite player as it seemed they tried to add all the features that we hoped for in Elite. I just don't think the quality is really there in 'sfield'. I have played for many hours trying to get into it but so far haven't.

I will add my voice to those in support of ED offering (IMO) very nice graphics. There have always been weaker points, but on the whole, I think very nice. And I think that the detail and variety of assets added with Odyssey are even better.

Thinking about reasons for an addon or new release...

If I were to pick just ONE major downfall for Odyssey for me... it's that all those fantastic ground assets are almost entirely off limits for me trying to play as a "legal" good guy. The only way I could see inside many of these sites was... to shoot my way in (or steal IDs and hack in). Crime. Which breaks my CMDR role play.

If only these sites would sometimes offer missions to visit legally. Complete XYZ task inside the buildings. Clear out pirates which have taken over a site. The pirates are interdicting me everywhere in my ship, why not have them occasionally take over a surface site? Then I could enjoy seeing and interacting with the site interiors, use all those personal weapons I bought, and gather the materials. All legal and good guy.



PS... *I'm not letting myself hope that mutant Thargoid-human-zombies could take over surface sites and need clearing out. Even if they did, I fear I'd need to unlock something or another, or have to acquire a special thing or another, to participate. Or survive a gauntlet run to reach the site. Please... I've already got nifty upgraded personal weapons. Let me just show up and help the human cause!

 

[varonica]

Starfield isn't the best example to use of modern graphics, though.

View attachment 369612

Game on the right is 16 years old. Both pics at max settings, no mods. Who wore it better dot jaypeggers

Fortunately there are already graphic mods that improve textures and character appearance for Starfield, I mean if Starfield's graphics were so amazing there wouldn't be mods to improve it, right?

 

[EdzUp]

The main focus of Odyssey was about setting foot, seems the focus was intended to expand, but 16 updates later and we're still fighting thargoids from our cockpit. Since you mentioned it's a game about flying ships and focused on ships...when was the last new ship? Would anyone even care if they took an Anaconda, or any ship, and reskinned it to look like something else? No! Well probably yes, but it would at least be a new look, a new option. So the focus is on ships...good...give us some!

I think for me having played in Odyssey since it's inception I can say I have left my cockpit for around a dozen or so times, the on foot section of the game for me is mostly for "first footfall" bonuses to planets that's it. I NEVER get out into stations etc as it's all in the cockpit.

ED is a space combat game, as was Elite, Frontier: Elite 2 added the galaxy and landing on planets and FFE refined it somewhat. ED added multiplayer to it but Odyssey derailed the entire franchise by adding on for combat. We didn't need COD in Elite what we needed was more ships like FFE. All they have done is split the community, kill off two HUGE sections of it (XBox and PlayStation) and make it harder for the those left to play Elite with huge performance hits and patchy VR.

What we all just wanted is more options for ships, less focus on engineering and more focus on what made Elite great the space combat dogfighting not the engineering a one hit murder boat.

It's one of the reasons Horizons refuses to die because it runs so well for loads of people where Odyssey runs on for a select few.