If we're talking probabilities, given what we know about the size of the universe and how life propogates even in the harshest environments here on Earth, the balance of probability is and always has been on the side of life.
ED has next 2 Years of Content Mapped Out
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
Another necro thread?Wait its not dead?
O7
With all of the optimisation done since EDO launch (which was, shall we say, trying...) and the fact that I can run EDO on my gaming laptop (which is 6 years old), reasonably well, I wouldn't be surprised if it could run on the current Gen consoles (but not my ancient PS4) quite well. It all relies on FD being convinced the outlay to do so would actually be returned, preferably with a nice profit... And making play cross-platform along the way would be the icing on the cake!Hey maybe we can get EDO on console ??
Just after I bought a pc ,
That I think would be a sensible expectation (as would "it actually takes 3-4 years to deliver, because these things always take longer than Frontier expects") based on this bit
7% of ~£91 million total revenue is a bit over £6 million.
The spending rate on Elite Dangerous during Odyssey development was close to £10 million/year, and that was before we had a few years of high inflation, so that would be more like £12 million/year nowadays.
It's not impossible that continued successes could get the game to a position where it can afford that much again, but it won't be easy or quick.
Depends how much constraint you apply.
I mean, you can start off by being selective about the planets where fauna spawns.
After that, you look at what else is there. If a planet already has something that could plausibly be considered a nutrient then it might be able to sustain life.
Then you'd look at how much "food" there is on a planet, and how it's distributed, to decide where, and how many, creepy-crawlies to spawn.
As for the beasties, themselves, "realism" could easily be maintained by creating a library of suitably realistic body parts - legs, heads, eyes, abdomen, thorax, mandibles, antenna, greebles etc - and then scaling/morphing them, mixing and matching them and colouring them all within set limits to generate unique but similar-ish lifeforms.... which, again, would be plausible insofar as it's likely similar environments would evolve similar creatures.
Also, we're not talking about the sort of goat-elephants that appear in NMS, here.
I'm thinking more about things like flatworms, lamprey, crabs, insects, spiders and tardigrades.
Not sure what the marketing/PR people would think about that.
Cancel the console version of ED, bring it back again for next-gen' consoles and then, in a couple of years, ED gets another major update that consoles can't handle?
If they did release it for the PS5 (or whatever) I could see FDev rejecting potential future updates that new consoles couldn't handle simply because they wouldn't want to go through the same mess again.
Agreed. For a mixture of reasons (including this), I'd give VERY long odds that ED will never go near consoles again.
Well the other option I suppose is planets with denser but extreme atmosphere like Neon and Argon where life would be limited and leave ELW and Ammonia planets as non-landable, that would be unfortunate but would enable us to have even more planets.
This might
This might be a moot point if future xbox consoles are essentially a PC with a skin of console gui. I hope to play ed natively again on my future xbox by logging into steam
Hi 
Tardigrades?
...I've just had to look that up as I'd not seen that word before!...
Ok..[1] Known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, [2] are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals.
I like the term 'Moss Piglets'...They sound kinda friendly
...but not if they were 6ft high!
Jack
Tardigrades?
...I've just had to look that up as I'd not seen that word before!...Ok..[1] Known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, [2] are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals.
I like the term 'Moss Piglets'...They sound kinda friendly
...but not if they were 6ft high! Jack
Couple of interesting points I thought:
- the Executive Board doesn't have a space for David Braben
- In FY25 Elite Dangerous made less revenue than F1 Manager, a franchise that FD have cancelled
Development of life; (based on sample size of 1)
Unicellular life is likely to appear almost as soon as the conditions are right and may have developed multiple times within the Solar System.
The big jump of course is to multicellular life, the Drake Equation views this as a factor of time but appears to be linked to planetary conditions;
On Earth we had unicellular, chemotrophic life upto the end of the Cryogenian Period ("Snowball Earth") During this time ice blocked light from reaching the liquid oceans blocking photosynthesis and generating anaerobic conditions.
When the ice broke light got through and organisms were able to use photosynthesis, this released free oxygen.
Free oxygen is a prerequisite for Collagen production which holds cells together making multicellular organisms possible.
Evolution of multicellular life to now has taken ~600 million years so rather quick in the timescale of the galaxy.
The Jovian satellites are still locked in ice and thus likely to have only unicellular chempotrophic life untill the ice breaks though that will be when the Sun switches to Helium fusion and expands.
As such multicellular ecosystems might be expected where water is liquid at the surface and able to release free oxygen in the atmosphere.
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As you may be aware, the original Xbox was essentially just a PC with some MS funkiness added on top in an attempt to prevent people from buying them (discounted hardware, remember) to use as budget PCs
People found ways around that of course.(I actually have one in my garage, but I never got around to converting it to PC duty; it was good fun for actual Xbox gaming though!)
I'm hoping that this is because the revenue it generated was not proportionate to the cost of operating the team. That's one thing that I didn't see in my quick skim through the video, and I'm assuming wasn't present - a breakdown of the costs of the devs, operations and support for each title.
...
I like the term 'Moss Piglets'...They sound kinda friendly
I'd like to see where Elite ranks based on just the PC numbers of other games.
It made a rod for its own back in that respect. When you have a narrative that requires players to reach a certain stage before it advances, it creates very obvious pacing problems and you can't tell a dynamic story by definition. But they could have fleshed it out with more backstory, more things to discover that revealed more lore etc.
F1 Manager needed an IP license, which was probably an expensive cost - the breakdown given is revenue, rather than profit.
They've never gone into that much detail and I wouldn't expect it, but previous presentations have sometimes shown net franchise cashflow as well as revenue. (Broadly speaking from that: Planet Coaster and Zoo seem to have the lowest ongoing costs, Jurassic World's is higher - the IP license again, presumably - but it brings in the most gross revenue too)
Elite Dangerous has basically spent all its income on operations+development since about mid-2018. Since the income has changed fairly substantially up and down during that time, the flexibility there has presumably been mostly on the development side. It's not clear whether Frontier are running it as a "non-profit" franchise for sentimental reasons or because they genuinely believe that sufficient investment on that basis could return it to a state where it brought in more revenue than it could reasonably spend on itself.
Might make it into 4th since it wasn't that far behind F1 Manager. (Of course, ED is still sold on consoles, so if you take out its console sales to be fair it might fall back to 5th again, who knows)
The other three franchises had 3.5-4 times the total revenue, so are still going to be well ahead even on PC sales alone.
lets just hope they deal with the annoyances rather than just add more monetization content like ships. Supercruise assist button, rework of limpets, per-player not per-ship cargo, rebalance of the meta engineering and all those modules that are effectively useless unless you really like wierd builds, and so on.
Some of these really need to be addressed.