What's the Brand New Feature for ED in 2024?

What if, if it's not going to be a big huge feature like base building ... what if the new feature is you being able to walk up the steps or a ramp or a ladder to the door of your ship and THEN have the blue circle and the BOARD icon to click on?
 
Off topic: one of the main complaints about Starfield with non-space nerd gamers is that the planets are empty with not enough POI-s. Goes to show how making a realistic-scale space game is really hard and never going to fill the expectations of everyone. For the record, I agree with your opinion that there needs to be empty space in a space game or it just breaks my suspense of disbelief.

If base building came to Elite I think it would definitely mean that there will be some player towns spring up but with the realistic sizes of planets I don't think it would be a problem. And even if there was the ability to Coruscant a planet there's billions of others out there. I like the idea of life in the galaxy personally and think it's a bit of a non-issue overall, but to alleviate the issue of clutter in nav panels etc., I think bases should be unlisted by default, better to discover on your own or keep as bookmarks for friends/squadron.
 
If base building came to Elite I think it would definitely mean that there will be some player towns spring up but with the realistic sizes of planets I don't think it would be a problem. And even if there was the ability to Coruscant a planet there's billions of others out there. I like the idea of life in the galaxy personally and think it's a bit of a non-issue overall, but to alleviate the issue of clutter in nav panels etc., I think bases should be unlisted by default, better to discover on your own or keep as bookmarks for friends/squadron.
Fine as long as we get this:
GQVDAX1.png


:ROFLMAO: O7
 
IIRC the "new" planet surface generator was introduced so that it's height map could be used to differentiate environments, for example putting ice sheets on higher ground. The surface bio scanner seems to use the height map as well, with the blue areas looking very much like seas and lakes from high up.

So my wish is that the height map is used to create proper seas and lakes , and therefore thicker atmospheres and weather. A few species of fauna would be welcome as well.
 
If base building came to Elite I think it would definitely mean that there will be some player towns spring up but with the realistic sizes of planets I don't think it would be a problem. And even if there was the ability to Coruscant a planet there's billions of others out there. I like the idea of life in the galaxy personally and think it's a bit of a non-issue overall, but to alleviate the issue of clutter in nav panels etc., I think bases should be unlisted by default, better to discover on your own or keep as bookmarks for friends/squadron.
If the basebuilding is coming, I'm sure there will be limits to how many settlements can any player build, how many settlement can a player build on one planet, how many settlements in total can be on a planet, how big can any single settlement be and how close can settlements be from one another. If it's going to be like fleet carriers, there'll be 16 total player settlements on any planet. If we assume that any player can build 8 settlements in total and 2 or 4 settlements on any one planet, that the minimum center-to-center distance is, say, 2 km and maximum diameter of a settlement 1 km, any squadron with around 10 members can build a handful of decently sized cluster-towns for themselves, but even huge groups can not Coruscant a planet or colonize the whole Bubble with a 16-settlement cluster in every system.
 
Just had a thought, which is kind of scary on its own...

New feature, which would kind of include ship interiors, would have to do with all those pre-FSD exploration and colony shiups tha twent out into space and disappeared over the years. I think it would be a lot of fun to go exploring near and far space looking for all of those lost generations. We have enough of the galaxy that hasn't been disexplored yet, that it shouldn't be too much of a problem to 'plant' the ships around without causing rework of existing planets and systems.

Mechanics of the move would be locating and exploring the ships when found. Where did the crews go? Is the ship floating in space? Good time for a boarding mission (ship interiors at least for colony and megaships). Are there possibly hidden colonies out there somewhere, where a dmaaged colony ship went down and several generations of survivors have managed to eke out an existence?

Would you get salvage rights for discovered 'lost' ships? Go eva to cut your way into a derelict in space.

I see limitless possibilities here, and it would definitley make exploration more interesting.
The majority of the ‘lost’ ships will of course be unreachable to us as they won’t be in a star system at all but out in normal space somewhere between the stars where we can never really go.
 
If the basebuilding is coming, I'm sure there will be limits to how many settlements can any player build, how many settlement can a player build on one planet, how many settlements in total can be on a planet, how big can any single settlement be and how close can settlements be from one another. If it's going to be like fleet carriers, there'll be 16 total player settlements on any planet. If we assume that any player can build 8 settlements in total and 2 or 4 settlements on any one planet, that the minimum center-to-center distance is, say, 2 km and maximum diameter of a settlement 1 km, any squadron with around 10 members can build a handful of decently sized cluster-towns for themselves, but even huge groups can not Coruscant a planet or colonize the whole Bubble with a 16-settlement cluster in every system.
So, I'm going to be the broken record here... but the billion credit question nobody has really answered is, just like ship interiors... why?
Why build bases?

"To allow strategic resupply and xxxx"... but we have FCs, which do exactly that, and you can plonk them anywhere you like within reason.

"You could have Feature X operate out of the base"... so, you're not asking for base building, you're asking for Feature X. That's a different value proposition, and one asking for Base Building won't get you (as proven by Odyssey). There's also a very strong argument that whatever that function is should be made available in extant stations too.

"As an extension of the BGS so squadrons can... "... can't happen. Squadrons are small groups of like-minded players. Factions are the NPC population split by ideology. If you set up a base for a squadron in a zero pop system, there are zero people. If you set up in a populated system, you won't get any influence because squadrons are players, factions are NPCs. If a squadron had X% influence in a system, that means X% of the population is part of that sqaudron. That's not how it works.

So... base building is a bad idea, flatly. It won't offer what players actually want, and what players actually want should happen with the extant mechanics... or is incongruous with current mechanics so won't happen. Questions of how to limit it and stop players "polluting" the game environment aren't worth considering when the fundamental reason for base building doesn't have an answer.
 
safe haven for you collection of power cells ? :)
i think the game is just copying other ideas now and ploping them in ED, base building was mention in starbourne 2 (1 developer) that seems to know what he doing.
 
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So... base building is a bad idea, flatly. It won't offer what players actually want
Its always folly to think you know what players actually want. What if I want my own landing pad with a couple of buildings attached to it that I can put my feet down on solid ground after a long day's mining/trading/massacreing, watch the sun set over the horizon then make myself some dinner and arrange my collection of potted exoplants before going to bed. Or I want to set up a mining operation on a particularly rich body I've found and have the mined material put in a warehouse that I can land near and transfer to my ship when I'm passing by. With some defenses set up to protect against intruders. And some solar panels to power the miners and defenses. Not that I'm personally asking or expecting these features but they would require some concept of base building. I can't set up mining in stations or fleet carriers.
 
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Any discussion about base building is bound to be way off without knowing what the design intent is..

Is it a pretty place to chill out, is it some kind of sim where you have to care about logistics, industrial output, economy, is it some kind of automatic plant you flag and annoy your neighborhood with BGS shenanigans, etc...
 
What if, if it's not going to be a big huge feature like base building ... what if the new feature is you being able to walk up the steps or a ramp or a ladder to the door of your ship and THEN have the blue circle and the BOARD icon to click on?
I'd take that feature, if that's what it is. I refer to Starfield, yet again, which has shown players are fine with loading screens, transitioning from exterior of ship to inside, or right to the cockpit, and other loading screens wherever needed. One thing Starfield doesn't have is a ridiculous blue tube to walk into, before being teleported into the cockpit. Although, I suppose this worked well for the whole Star Trek thing.
 
safe haven for you collection of power cells ? :)
i think the game is just copying other ideas now and ploping them in ED, base building was mention in starbourne 2 (1 developer) that seems to know what he doing.
Your trying to construct a false narrative. All games copy each other. All space games are pretty much copies of Elite - it being the first of the genre, and most, including the developers of Eve & Chris Roberts, have said that Elite is their inspiration. So I don't (or maybe I do) know where you get the idea that what is common in other games is forbidden for Elite. Ultimately if adds to the game then it's good and there's a lot of potential for things to be added to this game.
 
Its always folly to think you know what players actually want. What if I want my own landing pad with a couple of buildings attached to it that I can put my feet down on solid ground after a long day's mining/trading/massacreing, watch the sun set over the horizon then make myself some dinner and arrange my collection of potted exoplants before going to bed.
So, you don't want base building, you want a private, decoratable space for your character to "relax" in. That's a different thing.

Or I want to set up a mining operation on a particularly rich body I've found and have the mined material put in a warehouse that I can land near and transfer to my ship when I'm passing by. With some defenses set up to protect against intruders. And some solar panels to power the miners and defenses. Not that I'm personally asking or expecting these features but they would require some concept of base building. I can't set up mining in stations or fleet carriers.
So, you don't want base building, you want expanded mining features. That's a different thing.

Like I said... why do you want base building? The reasons people want it aren't actually fundamental reasons for base building, and could be facilitated by any number of means that aren't base building.

EDIT: To go a little deeper... building an entire base building system for a one-shot function like "mining into a warehouse" or "a private decorative space" is total overkill... unless the response is "well, base building it should do all these things (and more)"... to which you're no longer asking for base building, you're asking for a suite of non existent features. Planetary surface mining would be one feature in the sense I feel FD mean here, and they're only delivering a new feature, not a suite of features.

Conversely, base building simply allows you to create extant systems within it, much like the carrier, to which I go back to "but we have FCs, which are essentially mobile bases... so base building in that sense is already made redundant by that, unless there's a distinguishing feature". That distinguishing feature is the "why"... and I sure don't know of a reason I'd want to build a base, couched in extant game mechanics. I can think of plenty of features I want, but none of them must have a base building system.

tl;dr base building is a framework, not a feature.
 
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ED won't become EVE for multiple reasons:

  1. EVE has just 7800+ star systems with 4 security classes. EVE's Concord (NPC faction) increases safety in high sec systems by punishing players who do crimes. EVE has more concurrent players than ED (currently online 17,588, max 29,299 (2024-02-08) in a relatively smaller sandbox. ED has around 400 billion systems and 10 times less concurrent players which are sparsely, spread out in the Milky Way. The chance of player encounters is tremendously low.
  2. EVE has jump gates which are chokepoints for ships entering a system. In ED players can jump to another system from nearly any point in space. So players who dislike Powerplay can't be barred. System permits are set by the devs.
  3. EVE has only one game mode: open MMO. The corps (guilds) can claim Null sec systems (0.0) while players are safer in high sec. If you're in Null sec and encounter other players there's potential for PVE or PVP. In ED players can switch to solo mode (single player) to circumvent aforementioned interaction.
  4. If base building is added to ED, 1 base would cover a fraction of a planet. Most of the planet remains free to explore. The bases could contribute to the sphere of influence of major and minor factions. As a result the Bubble expands and changes. ED has too few concurrent players to effectively patrol a handful of star systems.
  5. In January 3308 (2022), players explored a total of 222,083,678 systems which is merely 0.05% of the Milky Way. There hasn't been anyone in 99% of the galaxy. If you put EVE in ED it would cover less than 0.000001%.

TLDR: base building + powerplay 2.0 wouldn't prevent players who abhor PP from doing their usual activities.
Update: corrected descriptions
ED has that with Nav beacons and primary stars 🤔
 
Fdev will add a brand-new feature to the core gameplay of ED. The tentative release date is end of 2024.

What could it be? Such as:
  1. Ship interiors
  2. Base building, mining resources
  3. Station management
  4. New planet types and biomes
  5. EVA outside a ship in space
  6. Deep NPC interaction with AI voices
  7. On foot VR mode
  8. Procedural cities on planets
  9. Guild system for player groups
  10. Hunt procedural alien wildlife
  11. Something else
Looks like it’s number 2 unfortunately, but that appears to be the feature that can be monetized best.
 
In doing my rounds of exploration for the past month or two, I noticed a lot of planets that have thicker atmospheres we cannot land on still list resources that we should be able to collect.👍

Well yes, this list is generated as part of the system generation process, the procedural algorithm works out what mineral each planet will have and what percentage, they have been there for a long time so I wouldn't put your hopes on that, but it doesn't rule out the possibility either way.
 
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