Elite Dangerous plans for 2024

[Ian Doncaster]

Do PMF's have a home system from which they cannot be removed from?

Every faction, PMF or otherwise, has a home system which it can't be retreated from, and which it will ordinarily be present in (though Frontier can hand edit faction placement how they like and the consequences of a faction not being present in its "home" system are very subtle)

I have seen various arrangements between various PMF's over the years to not challenge ownership of an owned system.
As part of the 'new' Thargoid Odyssey system it is possible to remove a faction, including I assume PMF's which you have stated return once the Thargoids have been removed.
This double instancing indicates the Odyssey 'overlay' DLC is divorced from the underlying BGS and the original states still exist.

(I assume you mean Live rather than Odyssey here, since the Thargoid War is also there in Live Horizons)

In a very old (pre-Odyssey!) livestream, Frontier staff made reference to there being four BGSes: Political (the one players think is the BGS), Economic, Outfitting and Thargoid. They've always interacted with each other to some extent - e.g. a Boom state in Political improves the modules available in Outfitting and changes prices and quantities in Economic. Update 14 obviously extended the Thargoid Simulation substantially.

Any Thargoid state applied to a system suspends all Political state and influence movement in that system (this isn't the only way this can be done; Frontier have various forms of "lock" that they can also apply by hand to prevent some or all normal Political activity, and all other known forms predate Odyssey). Under Thargoid Control state the factions themselves apparently disappear, though return with their previous state and influence if the system is recaptured.

Does this mean that at one level the BGS can be overwritten completely resetting the state of the Bubble? If so, then my conjecture is valid that a new BGS using the Odyssey system can be used to reset in line with 'emergent gameplay' PMF's.

Frontier could do that, certainly - but whether any particular post-Odyssey change is required is probably something we'll never find out: the BGS rewrite in 3.3 was extremely substantial, even if it didn't directly change any factions.

The thought experiment would be the removal of the 'Goats' in Shinrarta Dezra who once were I believe were a PMF which due to a BGS failure got access to SD and therefore impossible to remove.

Not quite a BGS failure - it was an entirely normal outcome under the very early versions of the BGS, where a faction expanding out of a system would displace a faction from that system into its original system. It's not clear why it worked like that but it meant that when the Pilots Federation expanded out of SD a few times, they brought other factions in.

Since then, the Pilots Federation have been converted to a non-influence faction (which hides them on the system-level displays but allows them to retain station and system ownership) and the rules have changed so that expansions aren't swaps, so you couldn't do the same thing nowadays (the other two NPC factions which aren't the Dark Wheel got into Shinrarta in the same way)

The PMF in Shinrarta isn't technically impossible to remove, either - there are four factions in the system, so the Retreat state could be started if it got below 2.5% influence. It's just that passing player traffic through the system is huge, so doing that is extremely impractical even should someone want to.

 

[Darkfyre99]

May be I'm a bit of a contrarian, but I still can't get what could be the advantage of having ship interiors except for making clips/screenshots... as from a gameplay perspective such a feature would not really add anything different (should a CMDR be allowed to stand up and walk to a damaged section/module to repair it?). I mean, instead on stockpiling more stuff on the baseline game, which still requires a number of fixes, why not refining the existing stuff for better QoL (like the useless board/passenger selection menu), deepening squadron/powers/PMFs relationships (=coalitions?), adding ship loadouts (as asked so many times), etc. etc.

The main appeal of ship interiors for me isn’t my own ship interiors. If Starfield is any indication, if there’s no gameplay reason for going inside my ship, I’ll rarely do it after my initial tour. It’s other people’s ships that I’ll be boarding. Whether it’s a hostile invasion, in search of salvage, rescue or retrieval missions, theft or sabotage… I do love exploring unfamiliar environments.

There’s plenty of gameplay to be had inside ship interiors, just as there is plenty of gameplay to be had inside Odyssey settlements. Having access to my own ship’s interior is just a bonus for me. For others, it’s vital component towards verisimilitude. Personally, exploring living worlds is higher on my priority list, but not by much. I bought Odyssey to gain access to thin atmospheric worlds to explore. That Odyssey includes a decent first-person RPG combat system was a bonus I indulge in from time to time.

I’d indulge more often if Odyssey settlement missions were:

• Instanced
• Pause-able
• Not on a real life timer to failure

That last one describes Elite Dangerous in general. It demands large blocks of time and attention if I’m going to play it the way I enjoy, and that doesn’t describe this stage of my life.

 

[Rebel Yell]

The main appeal of ship interiors for me isn’t my own ship interiors. If Starfield is any indication, if there’s no gameplay reason for going inside my ship, I’ll rarely do it after my initial tour. It’s other people’s ships that I’ll be boarding. Whether it’s a hostile invasion, in search of salvage, rescue or retrieval missions, theft or sabotage… I do love exploring unfamiliar environments.

There’s plenty of gameplay to be had inside ship interiors, just as there is plenty of gameplay to be had inside Odyssey settlements. Having access to my own ship’s interior is just a bonus for me. For others, it’s vital component towards verisimilitude. Personally, exploring living worlds is higher on my priority list, but not by much. I bought Odyssey to gain access to thin atmospheric worlds to explore. That Odyssey includes a decent first-person RPG combat system was a bonus I indulge in from time to time.

I’d indulge more often if Odyssey settlement missions were:

• Instanced
• Pause-able
• Not on a real life timer to failure

That last one describes Elite Dangerous in general. It demands large blocks of time and attention if I’m going to play it the way I enjoy, and that doesn’t describe this stage of my life.

That would require a very deep rewriting of the game code, which doesn't allow for "pausing" it as the time flows in the Galaxy. I'd like to have board/piracy assaults on ships, but even in Starfield the ship interiors hosted parts of the main story, or just offered some different approach in certain situations (i.e. don't destroy Crimson Pirates ships, but board/loot/steal etc). On the other extreme, tossing a frag grenade into hatches or down into ladders didn't produce any structural damage so was a bit meh from that point of view... and same happens in ED, for settlements.

 

[Arioch]

That would require a very deep rewriting of the game code, which doesn't allow for "pausing" it as the time flows in the Galaxy…

Years ago I suggested having a short-term pause function for solo mode only - and I was able to achieve a semblance of it (just over a minute or so) by saving high resolution screen shots onto a slow USB memory stick.

Still one of the main reasons I don’t play ED as much as I’d like, though recently the VR bugs have overtaken it

 

[Darkfyre99]

That would require a very deep rewriting of the game code, which doesn't allow for "pausing" it as the time flows in the Galaxy...

Which is main reason why I don't play this game as much as I would if it was a single player game. I don't play this game because it's a real-time MMO. I play this game despite the fact that it's a real-time MMO, because I like the setting, I like the genre, and I like the game mechanics. The real-time MMO aspect can keep things interesting and dynamic, but mostly it's an annoyance that keeps me from enjoying this game fully.

I don't expect Frontier to do a "very deep rewriting of the game code" just to suit my needs, nor would I want them to. There's a ton of things I'd rather them work on. But it's a fact that there's a lot of aspects to this game I don't regularly participate in, simply because I'm not at a stage in my life where large blocks of uninterrupted time are a thing. I have plenty of other games, single-player games, that are a better fit for my life.

A small, confined volume like a space ship, with a small crew, would be a better fit, time wise, for the kind of stealth missions I enjoy than the large sprawling complexes containing dozens of NPCS that I have to deal with in Odyssey. In a single-player game. I can spend a week on such a stealth mission, dropping in and out as time allows. In Odyssey, if I see a mission I'd like to do, I have to decide if I can do it in limited time I have available during my play session. Most of the time, that answer is "no," and it's really disappointing that I can't even just accept the mission and do it at a later time, because it'll probably expire before I get another opportunity to play. And that makes me sad.

 

[Kallipar]

Every faction, PMF or otherwise, has a home system which it can't be retreated from, and which it will ordinarily be present in (though Frontier can hand edit faction placement how they like and the consequences of a faction not being present in its "home" system are very subtle)


(I assume you mean Live rather than Odyssey here, since the Thargoid War is also there in Live Horizons)

In a very old (pre-Odyssey!) livestream, Frontier staff made reference to there being four BGSes: Political (the one players think is the BGS), Economic, Outfitting and Thargoid. They've always interacted with each other to some extent - e.g. a Boom state in Political improves the modules available in Outfitting and changes prices and quantities in Economic. Update 14 obviously extended the Thargoid Simulation substantially.

Any Thargoid state applied to a system suspends all Political state and influence movement in that system (this isn't the only way this can be done; Frontier have various forms of "lock" that they can also apply by hand to prevent some or all normal Political activity, and all other known forms predate Odyssey). Under Thargoid Control state the factions themselves apparently disappear, though return with their previous state and influence if the system is recaptured.


Frontier could do that, certainly - but whether any particular post-Odyssey change is required is probably something we'll never find out: the BGS rewrite in 3.3 was extremely substantial, even if it didn't directly change any factions.


Not quite a BGS failure - it was an entirely normal outcome under the very early versions of the BGS, where a faction expanding out of a system would displace a faction from that system into its original system. It's not clear why it worked like that but it meant that when the Pilots Federation expanded out of SD a few times, they brought other factions in.

Since then, the Pilots Federation have been converted to a non-influence faction (which hides them on the system-level displays but allows them to retain station and system ownership) and the rules have changed so that expansions aren't swaps, so you couldn't do the same thing nowadays (the other two NPC factions which aren't the Dark Wheel got into Shinrarta in the same way)

The PMF in Shinrarta isn't technically impossible to remove, either - there are four factions in the system, so the Retreat state could be started if it got below 2.5% influence. It's just that passing player traffic through the system is huge, so doing that is extremely impractical even should someone want to.

Thank you Ian. Maybe we get power play version 2 lol...

 

[Hopix]

May be I'm a bit of a contrarian, but I still can't get what could be the advantage of having ship interiors except for making clips/screenshots... as from a gameplay perspective such a feature would not really add anything different (should a CMDR be allowed to stand up and walk to a damaged section/module to repair it?). I mean, instead on stockpiling more stuff on the baseline game, which still requires a number of fixes, why not refining the existing stuff for better QoL (like the useless board/passenger selection menu), deepening squadron/powers/PMFs relationships (=coalitions?), adding ship loadouts (as asked so many times), etc. etc.

Immersion is enough of a reason alone, for me. Oh, and multicrew without telepresence.

 

[Schmack]

May be I'm a bit of a contrarian, but I still can't get what could be the advantage of having ship interiors except for making clips/screenshots... as from a gameplay perspective such a feature would not really add anything different (should a CMDR be allowed to stand up and walk to a damaged section/module to repair it?). I mean, instead on stockpiling more stuff on the baseline game, which still requires a number of fixes, why not refining the existing stuff for better QoL (like the useless board/passenger selection menu), deepening squadron/powers/PMFs relationships (=coalitions?), adding ship loadouts (as asked so many times), etc. etc.

I somewhat agree but it would give you the feeling of having an actual ship especially for people who don't own carriers. I guess if your canopy was ruptured you could run and hide in the head, and poke a white surrender flag out.

 

[Shadowsnog]

I somewhat agree but it would give you the feeling of having an actual ship especially for people who don't own carriers. I guess if your canopy was ruptured you could run and hide in the head, and poke a white surrender flag out.

im going to ignore the thing that actually having a fleet of ships that you can fly, fight, mine, or get absolutely lost in space with is not enough to feel like you have a ship...
im already tired of running from my ship to the concourse and back and if there was an option to bypass it, i would use it 9/10 times.
i am a proponent of walkable cockpits. id like to sit in my chair, put a plushie on my dashboard, hang a smelly tree and have a tea. running around halls? meh.

 

[Schmack]

im going to ignore the thing that actually having a fleet of ships that you can fly, fight, mine, or get absolutely lost in space with is not enough to feel like you have a ship...
im already tired of running from my ship to the concourse and back and if there was an option to bypass it, i would use it 9/10 times.
i am a proponent of walkable cockpits. id like to sit in my chair, put a plushie on my dashboard, hang a smelly tree and have a tea. running around halls? meh.

You can relog upon exit of your ship and you'll be at the elevator when you reappear. I use this when flying the Cutter, instead of walking 40km.

Having multiple different ship types and functions doesn't do that much more to create the feeling of immersion. It's probably the same for having all those empty seats even if you have hired an NPC pilot or 3. The more dimensional the experience the greater the immersion. VR is a good example in that you can look around inside your cockpit area and it genuinely feels like a much larger environment, you get a sense of scale with stations and other ships. The Sidey feels pretty big in VR. So even if you only had one ship with one function, doing it in VR would be more immersive than not having VR and having multiple roles and ships. Maybe not as enjoyable though.

 

[Shadowsnog]

You can relog upon exit of your ship and you'll be at the elevator when you reappear. I use this when flying the Cutter, instead of walking 40km.

Having multiple different ship types and functions doesn't do that much more to create the feeling of immersion. It's probably the same for having all those empty seats even if you have hired an NPC pilot or 3. The more dimensional the experience the greater the immersion. VR is a good example in that you can look around inside your cockpit area and it genuinely feels like a much larger environment, you get a sense of scale with stations and other ships. The Sidey feels pretty big in VR. So even if you only had one ship with one function, doing it in VR would be more immersive than not having VR and having multiple roles and ships. Maybe not as enjoyable though.

just relog and call for more immersion in one post ^^ though saying you can just relog does feel to me kinda like you can go play other games for ship interiors
no beef, just funny...

 

[Fizzatron]

That would require a very deep rewriting of the game code,

While Elite is online multiplayer there's no way to implement a pause. Though that doesn't necessarily mean missions can't be broken down into bite sized pieces, the Christmas mission shows that Frontier can have non-linear missions that branch out to multiple locations that are active over a period of days. Perhaps something could be done there to effectively allow for more shorter rounds of mission objectives that add up to something bigger.

 

[Darkfyre99]

just relog and call for more immersion in one post ^^ though saying you can just relog does feel to me kinda like you can go play other games for ship interiors
no beef, just funny...

I’ve noticed that there seems to be quite a few definitions of “immersion” out there. Quite a few times, people use “immersion” to describe what I would call “verisimilitude,” aka the illusion that a fictional world is real. Meanwhile, the definition of “immersion” I’m most familiar with is getting so engrossed in the media you’re consuming that you lose track of externalities… including the fact that you’re playing a game at all.

What breaks verisimilitude, which in turn can ruin immersion, varies from person to person, and even from genre to genre. I don’t need to act out the “mundane” portions of my Commander’s life, which to me includes routine trips between cockpit and the end of the boarding ramp. OOTH, Fallout 4 I play in Survival mode, because those mundane aspects like clean food and water are important in that setting.

It’s all very much a YMMV thing.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The problem I think with Odyssey missions isn't that the game isn't capable of giving longer time limits - after all, there are passenger missions with 4 week limits already, and plenty of others with multi-day timers - it's that the longer the mission time limit, the greater the chance that something will happen to invalidate the mission.

For a Horizons mission that's generally pretty rare - the issuing faction being Retreated is about the only way to stop most of them, though CZ massacre missions can get into trouble more often. For an Odyssey mission, though, pretty much every tick could bring a state change which switches the settlement between online/offline/on fire/at war and makes the original mission either impossible or very weird.

The ideal solution would probably be for missions to have much longer time limits but also "fallback" clauses if something invalidates them - which could happen even with a 30 minute timer if you were unlucky! ... if the faction retreats, you get a mission update to hand it in somewhere else ... if the base changes state then you get a mission update saying "our target has moved - go to this base instead" ... but that's potentially quite a bit of work to figure out what external-to-the-player failure cases exist and make sure there's a countermeasure for all of them.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Most people don't have a clue about what makes game fun. So they pull up something, declare it the holy grail of gaming and do never really explain how it would work and improve the game. One of these holy grails is interiors. Another is C&P. Yet another is Offline mode.
Most of the time it's also ignored that you have to design games from the ground up to be good. You can't just pop on any "modules" to every game. A good example is supercruise and why we can't have time dilation because of MP and networking.
X4 has some limited interiors and it indeed does add to some immersion. Sometimes it's nice to sit back and get flown somewhere. Would I need that in ED? No. I can do my management things while being ferried around. I could do those anywhere - I just don't need to have hands on sticks and throttles. An autopilot does the same job.
Starfield did an excellent job with ship customisation. You can have lots of interiors. Most are dead space, though and useless, until you do a boarding operation. And there we are again at the desing from ground up. Starfield is a game to run around on foot, that's it's core gameplay, that's why it works. There simply isn't enough of gameplay, assets and mechanics to support that in ED, because it was built as a different thing. And a different thing doesn't magically transform into something you think might be fun. Chances are that transformation is entirely impossible. What you want is play a different game experience.

 

[Elpapo]

I can see one plan for elite at 2024 (or 3310)... Maintenance mode + who knows whats gonna be broken next, in case of update if any.

Seems like elite going into maintenance mode again indeed. Last one had been almost 2 years long. And also, last one started exacly same as current one, but atleast back then, frontier still kind of announced it, that they gonna stop galnet and only focus at maintenance for "while" wich just took them almost 2 years.

1 CG per month or none at all. Even if we got one, its just random, without any meanigfull rewards (Pre-enginnered modules etc.). 2 years after oddy relase, still not even single dedicated CG for it.

1 galnet article per week or two. Story is feel like stoped moving a (long) while ago. We got spires and we did beat the spires, and what next? Something, "soon".

Last ship added for players was like a 5 years ago. At begining of elite, we would get new ships every year, more or less. Oh wait... we did get scorpion wich even devs admited it was something that was in "shelf" from time when they relased horizons (do I need remind that during horizons we where "promised" atleast 3 SRV's?). But this hardly count as a ship, or new thing. What keep almost every space sim out there alive, is constant stream of new ships. There should be atleast twice as much playable ships than currently after nearly 10 years. Its really shame.

Horsehead nebula being locked away for like 8-9 years now? I would like to come back to that place again (yes Ive been there), but I might die sooner (or game itself) before that happens. Same as for some other locked regions for supposedly "narrative" wich there is almost non-existend at that point. And thats just tip of iceberg.

Upcoming update 18? Yeah.. One or two new half-baked feature, in cost of new plenty bugs and broken things because of game code spagettification, and new lads at frontier seems not really get it either(Im sure they are bunch of skilled ppl but still). The ones who created it, either not working in frontier anymore, passed away or had been moved to some other "exciting" projects wich turned to be failures anyway. Now If I think about it, I dont recall any other game wich thier updates broke more things than features added on regular basis, wich like Froniter did.

There is also lack of respect of (cmdrs) legacy of game itself. Things like first barnacle site or conda graveyard, its all gone, just among tons of tourist spots, that became empty, since oddy relase. Now its just text flavours for many of them.

 

[Afterglow [SecB]]

It's been more than 9 years since its release, the DLC didn't go as expected at all, all of FD's other games were economic disasters. Frontier is almost bankrupt and has to lay people off. what else is there to come?

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I

im going to ignore the thing that actually having a fleet of ships that you can fly, fight, mine, or get absolutely lost in space with is not enough to feel like you have a ship...
im already tired of running from my ship to the concourse and back and if there was an option to bypass it, i would use it 9/10 times.
i am a proponent of walkable cockpits. id like to sit in my chair, put a plushie on my dashboard, hang a smelly tree and have a tea. running around halls? meh.

I’m sure frontier could leave us the the express lift from the steps to the cockpit as a fast option with the scenic route via the cargo bays if we desire that. I would like to have the option of damage models, ship invasion, management of crew, maintenance and repair gameplay etc etc. it seems to be the next logical step after odyssey

 

[Shadowsnog]

I’m sure frontier could leave us the the express lift from the steps to the cockpit as a fast option with the scenic route via the cargo bays if we desire that. I would like to have the option of damage models, ship invasion, management of crew, maintenance and repair gameplay etc etc. it seems to be the next logical step after odyssey

i mean... i would like landable earthlikes and explorable water worlds with special ships for that. but santa said be realistic, wish for a pet dragon instead.

 

[Fizzatron]

Most people don't have a clue about what makes game fun. So they pull up something, declare it the holy grail of gaming and do never really explain how it would work and improve the game. One of these holy grails is interiors. Another is C&P. Yet another is Offline mode.
Most of the time it's also ignored that you have to design games from the ground up to be good. You can't just pop on any "modules" to every game. A good example is supercruise and why we can't have time dilation because of MP and networking.
X4 has some limited interiors and it indeed does add to some immersion. Sometimes it's nice to sit back and get flown somewhere. Would I need that in ED? No. I can do my management things while being ferried around. I could do those anywhere - I just don't need to have hands on sticks and throttles. An autopilot does the same job.
Starfield did an excellent job with ship customisation. You can have lots of interiors. Most are dead space, though and useless, until you do a boarding operation. And there we are again at the desing from ground up. Starfield is a game to run around on foot, that's it's core gameplay, that's why it works. There simply isn't enough of gameplay, assets and mechanics to support that in ED, because it was built as a different thing. And a different thing doesn't magically transform into something you think might be fun. Chances are that transformation is entirely impossible. What you want is play a different game experience.

Not much to disagree on any of that, though I think while the conclusion can certainly be valid, I think there's also the fact that lack of initial 100% success in integrating a 'new' feature doesn't mean that it can't succeed. Specifically, I'm thinking about how platform games transitioned into the 3D era and how it's kind of accepted that Super Mario 64 was the first game to really succeed in that area and get it right. I think Odyssey's onfoot integration with the rest of the game isn't as full as it could be but I don't preclude it from getting better as time goes on. For the most part, and taking all things into consideration, I think that Frontier's first effort to bring feet to Elite has been a success, despite the less than stellar reception it received for variously and very well discussed reasons that aren't necessarily relevant.