Having logged back in recently for the first time in several years, that's fair.as we are currently adding more monetisation i dont want fdev to look at eve...
Pay2Win made it to Elite
- Thread starter Einar Donarsson
- Start date
Haven't there always (supposedly) been zones in Elite? Shouldn't an Anarchy system really feel like an Anarchy? That, to me is one of E: D's big mistakes. Anarchies don't really feel that different in terms of the numbers of, and difficulty of, interdictions. Another mistake, to me, is almost completely tying interdictions/difficulty to the missions you take (and stack). It feels so much less organic than the previous games.
Especially after a lot of drinking.
The idea of safe/dangerous parts of the galaxy are already built into the game and are frankly common ideas from any space fiction you want to read. The idea that EvE originated that is hilarious. This leads back to my main complaint about the game, the background sim is too simplistic, just not credible. Without that base to work from the game has always felt off to me. Game was built on wobbly foundations and no amount of monetization is going to fix that.
I think the right approach is to make progression fun and not a hassle.
They mentioned SWTOR, a game I had been waiting for for a long time and when it arrived in my hands it was a big disappointment. SWG was much better and you could see evolution in each expansion, SWTOR on the other hand is getting worse every day. Every once in a while I try to go back to swtor and it's impossible to beat his combat, it's so simple you could spam just one skill and you'd get to the final level no problem. It's monotonous and boring. Bioware has wasted the best existing franchise on the planet.
A better example may be the Planetside 2 system, its progression is entertaining and it has an optional subscription system that has allowed the game to have a lot of life even today.
But in the end the best thing is to have a distinctive point compared to others, not aspire to be a copy. If there is something that has always worked, it is being original in the world of video games. Copies always fall sooner or later into the trash. Look at Fornite, wow, Nms, they have a degree of originality in the market, Elite has it too. Elite is one of its kind, that requirement is what keeps it current. Therefore, if you are going to copy something, copy those who are doing it well.
And thank God they didn't. Launching the Thargoid war would have buried Elite. Despite everything they say about Odyssey, its only problem was poor optimization, but as an expansion it has given us a lot of gameplay and new experiences in this universe. It cannot be compared to a war that adds practically nothing new to what has already been done. Odyssey is something totally new and an evolution to the ELite universe.
Whoa.
Well, it changed rendering (for the worse IMHO) and restructured the galaxy to a point were many old explorers just threw in the towel. Now they are gone, and the exploration community feels pretty stale. But I guess these are just minor issues to you.
I don't agree. I like Ody more than old Horizon. Didn't play "old" since day 1 even if I had problems with optimizations. Now I land a lot more than in Horizons because of bios. Planets look like real ones (while in Horizons it looked like cartoons for me), and driving there is much more challenge.
How was the galaxy restructured? (I have no idea)
I'm a sightseer, certainly not an "Explorer" and EDO appeared to bring much more to do & see in my little jaunts, taking much longer to arrive than previously as there was more to do along the way.
The loss of those "old explorers" is normal wastage, surely? Look how many rage quit when 3.3 Horizons brought in scanners that allowed plebs like me to find stuff that previously required the tenacity of a Jack Russel Terrier in flying upside down over much of a body looking for a hint of disturbance in the force...
Another thing worth noting is that before the Thargoid War AX was more of a niche activity and even when totally free and much more accessible than before there were complaints about all the new content being AX focused and there being nothing new for the core gameplay. I still wonder if unlocking caustic sinks etc for free after titans became assailable was due to not enough people unlocking them in the first place or just to get even more players to participate.
The SCO and new ships are the first actual steps in the direction of adding on to more general Elite gameplay.
You say more of a challenge, I say SRV driving has become annoying to the point of me no longer wanting to. Some planetary surfaces are now plain impossible to traverse in the SRV. Either you fly over them or walk/climb on foot, which means you can not collect raw materials there. More realistic ? Maybe. Fun ? Less so. And let's not even start on the Odyssey engineering grind, which is way worse than ship engineering. And on top of that you can't even swap weapon/suit mods out. I love tinkering, I have builds for several suits and weapons to fit specific roles. I ended up making one of each with a generalist setup and wish to never touch that aspect of the game ever again until a major revamp.
In Odyssey? Those must be as rare as Hen's Teeth! (Not saying they don't exist, just never found one in a couple of thousand bodies visited since)
I have mostly G3 purchased suits / weapons which may be up to G5 (but no new engineering effects added) by collecting tat along the way... (not from Anarchy settlements, oddly)
If it is grind, it is certainly the choice of the player in this case. I may also have unlocked foot engineers in Colonia, rather than the bubble...
And we were told that when EDO came out, so it isn't as if it was a surprise move added as an afterthought.
Maybe, as hinted recently, EDO engineering will be simplified along with ship engineering, who knows?
I think I read or saw something about a BGS and I immediately expected an EVE-like system with lots of player agency. Now what we have is definitely something you can manipulate but I guess I expected things more like EVE where you can build and sell a ship because you ensured that a particular factory is properly supplied with the mats it needed etc.
Note it's been quite a while since I played EVE, but I recall it being something along those lines and certainly it had real supply lines and player's interaction with the 'world' was very tangible. ED's BGS feels 'fake' for want of a better word.
This I think is very much down to supercruise - as a way of freely exploring a system (especially an uninhabited one), it's great, but it just doesn't work for the "encounters along the way" style of gameplay that would have been expected from the previous games [1].
With the original microjumps idea, you'd have appeared at the nav beacon (a natural bottleneck) and then could also have had encounters as you jumped to the planet, and then to the station (appearing, as in the early builds, a lot further out). So it would have been really easy to have Anarchy systems - as in the previous games - involve a lot more encounters, as well as a lot more hostile transient signal sources to investigate if you were into the bounty-hunting side of things. Combine that with the original idea that the "honk" would make you superluminally visible and therefore even just the act of doing that to check out the system might get a bunch of pirates down on your head, and distinguishing systems by security level is very straightforward.
Supercruise has multiple disadvantages:
- the acceleration curve means that a vaguely competent pilot can only be intercepted at the start or end of the journey
- fixable in theory, but the lack of NPC pre-population if you're the one creating the supercruise instance (which is almost all the time) means "at the start" is unlikely for non-mission enemies
- a fast spiral approach has a good chance of losing interdictors at the end of the journey too
- you can also (unlike the previous games) win the interdiction to skip the fight entirely [2] and submit to the interdiction [3] to allow a quick escape.
So if you look at the general supercruise NPCs in a low-sec or Anarchy system compared with a high-sec one, all the zoning is there: the low-sec has more pirates, they're in bigger ships, they're higher-ranked ... but if you're just dashing straight to the station the chances are that you'll have got there before any of them can notice, get a suitable intercept course, and interdict. You have to really work at stacking mission enemies (and also deliberately submit and fight each time) to get to the "five or six fights to get to the station" that an Elite or FFE-style Anarchy system would have had.
[1] While of course still enforcing multi-minute gaps between the "seek out POIs" encounter gameplay that most ED professions have ended up as. Trade is basically the only bit of the game where the travel time is still important, but instead of being as in the old games "you make a profit on the goods because you had to spend 10 minutes getting them past pirates", it's reversed so that "the travel time is how the profit is limited to be in line with other professions".
[2] And as a measure of how different ED is to the previous games, now people have got used to that, the possibility of not being able to win an interdiction as the defender - Thargoids, PvP attackers - is highly controversial. (My view: first interdictions should auto-succeed and always have the long drive cooldown, but if you escape any subsequent re-interdiction by anyone from that instance has a massive bonus for the defender giving them essentially free choice of escape or submit)
[3] This wasn't an original part of ED either. It got introduced to allow clean players interdicted by security forces for checkpoint scans to submit, be scanned, and be quickly on their way again ... without I think the impact on players being interdicted by actively hostile NPCs being fully thought through. And then of course even with that the frequency of checkpoint scans got toned down a lot anyway.
Surfaces with rocks to big to drive over and too dense to drive between are common. But what I was mainly thinking about are planets with massive mountains all over the surface, too steep for the SRV to climb and valleys so narrow that the SRV gets stuck.
That would be nice, but I doubt it.
Icy planets, which are very common have easy to traverse surfaces, rocky/HMC planets can have biomes with extreme terrain, but you'll usually only stumble on that when visiting mining settlements or hunting a few types of exobiology (that aren't even the high paying ones despite how hard it is to land near them).
Having to pay some sort of encounter tax before being able to freely do stuff in-system (or having a prolonged, tense chase) would be cool in theory, but Elite doesn't do that, it's all random. Glaives and pretty much forced hypredictions when going into thargoid territory kinda felt like that, but killing them doesn't matter since it doesn't affect your chances of getting hyper/interdicted the next time and taking damage in the fight could ruin whatever you were trying to do, not to mention wasting your time if the fight itself is uninteresting.
If it was more fair and predictable instead of random and if evading an interdiction provided a different, lesser effect to killing the enemies you'd get encounters people might actually want to do.
There's of course also the problem of having too few ship designs or interesting wing configurations to fight.
To bring it back to the Python MK2, I'm not even sure if we'll see NPCs flying it on launch - I don't think anyone in the beta has seen a NPC python mk 2.
The galaxy wasn’t restructured, but the surface of every planet was redone. Personally, I prefer Odyssey’s planet generation over Horizon’s. There’s a lot less proc-gen failures than beside, but some people felt those failures were a feature, not a bug.
Still, I do understand why some people were upset. Just about every planetary tourist beacon was rendered nonsensical due to no longer being associated with their original Horizon planetary feature. It’ll speak of a cliff overlooking geysers with a gas giant as a backdrop, but there’s no geysers to be found. Most of those were found pre-FSS, and so represent a lot of effort and quite a bit of good luck.
I haven’t really noticed, but then again I spent a month doing nothing but gathering geological samples before Frontier moved that function to the surface scanner.
I still have fun flyving my SRV In Odyssey, and there’s now much more to find on the surface of planets. Now if Frontier made it possible to get planetary info in cockpit, rather than having to deal with that soul crushing system screen, I’d be in exploration heaven.
Agreed. But the good news there is that you can get G3 modded equipment for credits if you search for it. I’m kitted out in G3 equipment for multiple roles, and G3 is more than sufficient for NPCs unless you Leeroy Jenkins an entire settlement.
I have many desirable mods in reserve, should Frontier decide to take a saner approach to on-foot Engineering, like they did in Horizons. I’ll buy any suit or weapon I find with a mod, just in case.
I remember the bump map errors in EDO alpha... They were quite fun, but then, for a few hours the Scarab had the handling of the Scorpion and made the silly surfaces quite fun.
Me too
Mt. Neverest and the heavily ridged bodies, I remember those... Can't honestly say I miss such extremes, but they did add character.