General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System

[angusmadmac1]

Getting to beagle point & traversing the galaxy from star system to star system is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things as mundane as visiting various stations in multi-star systems within the Bubble - that could arguably take longer than a dedicated player could get to Beagle Point nowadays riding a neutron highway....

Ok the extreme is Hutton orbital which if I remember was a mistake by fdev which was taken onboard by players to be a rite of passage ? Or to get the free anaconda () when it was hard to get .
In my BGS years we had a few stations which were far away and you drew the short straw to run those missions in those systems .
Do we now do fast travel ? Its nice in Starfield and NMS but in Elite ?? I'm really not sure .
You don't have to take a mission to go to Hutton you can look for others .
The question is how far is too far ?
I would come across systems where some players wouldn't go above a set distance rom the main star and others where others an icy body far far away was discovered .
I'm an old player who has accepted the time taken in super cruise to get my name on that solitary planet or to do that mission far far away .
I have often wondered what percentage of my play time is in super cruise and would assume its going to be close or more than 50/50 .

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

On this topic, I don't think Morbad is in the minority at all, nobody expected or asked for the massive power creep injection we got from Engineering. Vanilla Elite was a whole different animal, and it was even balanced & fun, for a time. Nothing about Engineering has ever been close to that point of balance.

The jump range thing... I have mixed feelings, because obviously players are going to want to make a massive 1:1 scale galaxy feel 'smaller', because space is really big and even with abstracted wormhole travel it really did take a long time to traverse. I think neutron + synthesis went too far, but the guardian FSD booster is pretty nice. I think supercruise is by far the bigger problem with 'travel time sink', but here we are.

I don't think this is at all the game players wanted, however - the mountain of discussions and feedback just in these forums, let alone the reddits & discords, is a testament to that. I feel there's been a distinct issue with clarity of vision & direction with the game that has manifested in all the problems that active players have all learned to live with, to whichever varying degree.

I dont think an average player really wants a 1:1 galaxy. Nice to have a look a couple times but then they rather want to play a game instead of watching loading screens with very little action in between for uncountable times.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

And the loading screens are likely due to networking restraints. Ticks dictate MP games, not seamless worlds.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I thought the FSS only worked in SC or do you mean at speed which would be bad as you can’t see where you are going while in FSS.

That's not all that big a deal - it's not like your chances of hitting something are particularly high, since you'll need to clear the primary star anyway to get a good view of half the system.

Anyway, that just adds choices: do you stop to FSS, getting a much more stable platform for zooming in and making sure you won't run into a planet you hadn't scanned yet - but at the cost of being a sitting duck for interdictions and taking longer if you were planning to map planets as well, or were scanning for signals on the way to a station. Or you could fit supercruise assist and guarantee you won't hit anything.

Ok the extreme is Hutton orbital which if I remember was a mistake by fdev which was taken onboard by players to be a rite of passage ?

Only a mistake in the sense of "the Empire's capital is Achenar" is a mistake - worked fine in FE2, some unintended consequences when transferred literally into ED but it was certainly a deliberate action.

Alpha-Beta-Proxima Centauri in FE2/FFE had the only station in the system be around Proxima Centauri.

In FE2 the maximum possible system radius was around 1000 AU, so that's how far Proxima was - about 500,000 Ls, so large but not unusually so for an ED proc-gen system - and with FE2's ships that would take about a month - or with 10000x time acceleration about four minutes, less if you had a fast ship and flew it manually for most of the duration. While it took a while, it wasn't that long in real time ... though the in-game time used would likely fail most of your missions!

In Elite Dangerous, the radius of the Alpha-Beta-Proxima system was increased to the realistic 0.12 LY value as part of the general "make the galaxy more realistic" changes from FE2.

Shortly before the release of Elite Dangerous, the DDF convinced Frontier to abandon their plan for in-system jumps (which would probably have made the exact star separation largely irrelevant) and replace it with supercruise [1] (where it becomes very relevant whether it's 4,000 Ls, 400,000 Ls, or 4,000,000 Ls). Not the only case - nav beacons, USS, piracy - where that late change in a fundamental mechanic left a lot of the rest of the game a bit disconnected.

So all the individual steps - going back to 1992! - are reasonable, but the combination of them has some issues.


(The adopted mistake you might be thinking of is Mitterand Hollow - another object carried over from FE2, but with the orbital period accidentally entered in minutes rather than days in ED - clearly ridiculous when you see it, but fun enough that they never bothered to fix it)


[1] Strictly the original announcement by Frontier was that they were going to have both supercruise and in-system jumps be available; I'd guess that they ran out of time to implement two separate travel mechanisms before release and always had something more urgent to do after that since supercruise mostly works well enough in most systems.

 

[Jack Winter]

You're not wrong, but PvE is also structured to be purely about quantity vs quality. Why Fdev have never seen fit to change the combat rank experience point system is utterly beyond my ken, it's by far the longest grind in the game - which means it only makes sense to try and optimize for it.

But why grind combat rank? It comes all by itself from just playing the game..

HGE relogging means having to only go through the tedious process of locating one once or twice per material, as opposed to have to repeat the process as many as 15 times as often (if my rough math is right?), so I mean... that's an awfully sizable difference. Guardian sites, it's kind of the same deal... you can relog at 1 site, or go to multiple sites and take up time travelling from one to the next & looking up a map guide for each to make sure you're not missing any of the things you're there at the sites to collect.

I did relog on my main due to tutorials.. On my alt I'm slowly achieving the same without relogging and IMO it's way more fun!

I've yet to dive into on-foot things, outside of exobiology, because I can't cope with the aliasing. Maybe someday if I ever get a new PC that won't struggle with the unreasonable amounts of supersampling the aliasing problems require; anyway, I can't comment on the Odyssey grind - I only have the observation that it's almost universally reviled as being unreasonable.

Not universally as I don't share that opinion.

 

[Jack Winter]

I thought the FSS only worked in SC or do you mean at speed which would be bad as you can’t see where you are going while in FSS.

Something like that. I'm not making any design proposals, it's just a comment that I've often wished that I would have something like that to keep me busy while the ship is underway on a longer supercruise.

 

[Factabulous]

It's always funny when they post 'every agrees' in huge repeating circular threads - as if they only read their own posts

 

[Jack Winter]

I dont think an average player really wants a 1:1 galaxy. Nice to have a look a couple times but then they rather want to play a game instead of watching loading screens with very little action in between for uncountable times.

I suppose they can always stay in the bubble, no need to go to beagle point if you don't want to..

 

[metatheurgist]

With ten years of hindsight I can see the problems that I couldn't at the time, and probably so can Frontier, but most of them are baked in too deep now.

Experience is like hindsight but forward looking. When engineering was announced I wrote on the forum somewhere that I'd be surprised if engineering improved anything by more than 5%. That came from years of experience of playing games. Shouldn't need hindsight to know wrecking the economy was bad either. And the 3 ring plant-scan, I can't even....

 

[Greasetrap42]

Most players that have bounced off this game have done so because the barriers to entry to many of these activities involve too much of doing things said players do not want to do.

When speaking of "most players" that have quit playing the game... well obviously most players quit games because they don't want to do the activities anymore. Isn't that true of every game that people don't play anymore?

This could be in the first 30 minutes of gameplay because they simply don't like the genre, gamestyle, steep learning curve, cryptic and frustrating UI, or overall game quality (see Odessey launch!).

This could be after 500 hours of gameplay because they are just simply tired of the activities they have played.... for 500 hours!

And of course many players are just casual. They don't explicitly quit the game. They just play for a while then move on. And maybe revisit periodically. Or just completely forget.

Every RPG game I have played has barriers to enter further content. This is a generally accepted concept in video games, not much surprise to anybody. It is completely normal for a game character "level up" requirement in some method to progress and engage in further content. As a gaming concept I don't see this as a major contributor for players quitting ED.


I'm not saying engineering is perfect or couldn't be improved upon. I just disagree that the specific activities surrounding engineering is the reason why "most players" have quit playing ED.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I suppose they can always stay in the bubble, no need to go to beagle point if you don't want to..

Yes, they don't need that big a galaxy. I think FFE or FFE2 also had procgen parts where factions genned based on the seed. It went on and on and wasn't very plausible how humanity spread so fast. We're like locusts. It was so many galactic empires it became kinda pointless. Exchangeable. It doesn't need a near infinite amount of stars, factions and planets to make a good game. NMS is also too big really - I suspect it's done to dilute players so they don't grief each other in MP. NMS location are so interchangeable that it's really no big deal going to the centre, In ED there isn't much of a a point going anywhere else than the bubble.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Experience is like hindsight but forward looking. When engineering was announced I wrote on the forum somewhere that I'd be surprised if engineering improved anything by more than 5%. That came from years of experience of playing games. Shouldn't need hindsight to know wrecking the economy was bad either. And the 3 ring plant-scan, I can't even....

You see mistakes being repeated again and again in game dev. It's like there is no "common sense" or collective memory about what works or doesn't and many devs try to invent the wheel completely new again.
Which makes sense for hardware dependant issues when computing power allows things that were impossible in the past - but it doesn't make sense for basic game design principles.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

With ten years of hindsight I can see the problems that I couldn't at the time, and probably so can Frontier, but most of them are baked in too deep now.

It's harder to see the problems that we don't have, but if things were balanced wrong - or are balanced wrong after so many request to remove the grind we could end up with a situation where everyone is full on every type of material (even the commonly used ones in useful recipes) and materials become meaningless much like credits. Having caps on the amount of materials helps prevent this, but things could be bad, but in a different way too.

I'm not saying engineering is perfect or couldn't be improved upon. I just disagree that the specific activities surrounding engineering is the reason why "most players" have quit playing ED.

"Most players that at the point where engineering becomes the main barrier for most players will quit because of engineering" is how I read those original statements, but as I said earlier it's basically meaningless rhetoric at that point and it becomes nitpicking about the correct form of an argument which most people don't give a about.

You're also not providing valid examples for other stuff that could be the prime reason for quitting (because that would be off topic) in a thread full of arguments why people dislike engineering, potentially enough to quit, but there's obvious survivorship bias here too so to me it comes off a bit like just saying "nuh-uh, you're wrong" even if I know neither side is factually or objectively correct here.

The other stuff that results in a lot of people quitting the game is mostly a lost cause (performance, terrain generation, maybe tutorials) with FDevs current resources seemingly.

 

[Greasetrap42]

"Most players that at the point where engineering becomes the main barrier for most players will quit because of engineering" is how I read those original statements

But of course that is not what was said.

Edit:
I agree with your reframed statement though. Similar to other games I have played some players reach a roadblock preventing them from progressing further. IMO thats okay. If games were designed otherwise everybody would be wearing ultimate gear fighting the ultimate boss.

 

[aRJay]

...

I've yet to dive into on-foot things, outside of exobiology, because I can't cope with the aliasing. Maybe someday if I ever get a new PC that won't struggle with the unreasonable amounts of supersampling the aliasing problems require; anyway, I can't comment on the Odyssey grind - I only have the observation that it's almost universally reviled as being unreasonable.

The thing I have found about the Odyssey grind is that it is almost totally ignorable, the fact that you can by G3 suits and equipment from the shops on the concourse with special effects fitted means that unless you want to go higher the engineers are unnecessary obviously chasing around the shops looking for something specific can be considered a grind if you want to.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Experience is like hindsight but forward looking. When engineering was announced I wrote on the forum somewhere that I'd be surprised if engineering improved anything by more than 5%.

The particularly strange thing there is that Frontier had already implemented CQC, where the "upgrades" are genuinely mainly well-balanced alternatives - with the exceptions being too weak rather than too strong - which can help with a particular play style or goal but don't make the ship as a whole more powerful in general.

That came from years of experience of playing games. Shouldn't need hindsight to know wrecking the economy was bad either. And the 3 ring plant-scan, I can't even....

The economy was broken from the moment they introduced ships beyond the Sidewinder - and while they added some new mistakes compared with FE2, mostly in the same way as it was in FE2 as well. It's just that how that's experienced has changed, and the fact that the MMO environment puts different constraints in compared with FE2.

For all my experience of playing other games, I'm fairly sure it took me at least five years to figure out why ED's economy and credit balance was such a mess, though I can't be bothered to search through my old posts to find out.

 

[Frankymole]

Something like that. I'm not making any design proposals, it's just a comment that I've often wished that I would have something like that to keep me busy while the ship is underway on a longer supercruise.

It's 15 minutes in a fleet carrier. Go make a cuppa.

 

[Frankymole]

In ED there isn't much of a a point going anywhere else than the bubble.

Hmm, after three waves of player-faction colonisation and spending most of the past 8 years in Colonia... I disagree.

 

[JR250]

Maybe engineering doesn't have to entirely go but be modified by, as OP suggests, allowing players to trade engineering mats. Some love getting on an SRV and shoot at rocks all day, while some of us on VR get dizzy to the point of being sick after just a few mins on the buggy. Let those that like collecting rocks do so and make a killing selling it at their carriers. This alone would help engineering a lot as we could then run our favorite roleplay to make the necessary credits and pay for upgrades that way.

That said, I played my first ~9 months without a single engineering upgrade while exclusively bounty hunting. I turned Elite in Combat without any engineering, Powerplay, or Guardian module. And it was a (literal) blast, not at all a grind. Engineering is great but not a must to enjoy the game. Being able to upgrade our ships beyond common specs should entail significant work and require proper experience progression.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Hmm, after three waves of player-faction colonisation and spending most of the past 8 years in Colonia... I disagree.

Let's replace "bubble" with "civilised space". I knew someone would bring up colonia.