ED has next 2 Years of Content Mapped Out

[Stealthie]

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.

Just a wild stab, and a fairly cynical one at that, but I wouldn't be surprised if FDev have looked at the historical trends of ED (particularly related to the Horizons/Beyond era) and established how long the game can "coast" before it needs new content to maintain interest... and how much effort needs to be put into creating suitable content.

They've probably accepted that ED isn't going to make boatloads of money but if they can keep it rolling along it can generate enough profit to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

 

[Darrack]

the game can "coast" before it needs new content to maintain interest

The amount of content and effort put in by Fdev over the past year isn't 'coasting' its supercharged.

O7

 

[Stealthie]

The amount of content and effort put in by Fdev over the past year isn't 'coasting' its supercharged.

O7

Not sure I'd entirely agree with that but, even so, I didn't say the game is currently coasting.

My point was, FDev will know how much interest big advancements such as Horizons and Odyssey are likely to create, and they'll know how long that interest will last before it starts to subside.

Personally, I'd say the "Beyond" era of ED was the low-point in it's history.
I wouldn't be surprised if FDev have learned from Horizons and Odyssey and now, instead of spending a lot of time/effort/money on big DLCs, they'll spend less and create more frequent, smaller, cheaper updates that do a better job of retaining player interest.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Just a wild stab, and a fairly cynical one at that, but I wouldn't be surprised if FDev have looked at the historical trends of ED (particularly related to the Horizons/Beyond era) and established how long the game can "coast" before it needs new content to maintain interest... and how much effort needs to be put into creating suitable content.

I think it'd be fairer to say that they're bringing out new content as fast as the game's income allows - 2022-23 wasn't coasting, it was just things like the Thargoid War and Powerplay taking a lot more time to develop than they originally planned for, given the smaller team ED's remaining income allowed them to support. 2019-2021 wasn't really coasting - though I'd agree it felt like it from an outside perspective at the time - it was massive spending on what was becoming Odyssey very little of which we got to see until much later (and much of which turned out to be chasing a dead end, which is always a risk with big up-front investments)

I wouldn't be surprised if FDev have learned from Horizons and Odyssey and now, instead of spending a lot of time/effort/money on big DLCs, they'll spend less and create more frequent, smaller, cheaper updates that do a better job of retaining player interest.

Agreed on this - and also learning from the first year of Beyond, which was fairly successful and in the same smaller incremental setup.

"Spend less" I think is more from necessity than desire - I think if they had the money they'd quite happily spend twice as much and either release the incremental stuff twice as often or be able to include more in it - but as a strategy it certainly I think is better than big risky DLCs.

 

[Cosmo]

Agreed on this - and also learning from the first year of Beyond, which was fairly successful and in the same smaller incremental setup.

"Spend less" I think is more from necessity than desire - I think if they had the money they'd quite happily spend twice as much and either release the incremental stuff twice as often or be able to include more in it - but as a strategy it certainly I think is better than big risky DLCs.

We know that the big increase in revenue is due to:

1. Sell early access for new ships
2. Sell Pre-built Jumpstart ships
3. Cosmetics for ships, stations, outposts
4. New and improved game features increases playtime and the chance that they buy cosmetics

These features would significantly boost income:

1. Customizable Facilities
   1. Players can customize a colonization facility with (paid) cosmetics from the inside and outside (layout, decorations, rooms) etc.
2. New Planet Types
   1. Water worlds, metal-rich planets, Earth-like worlds, gas giants etc. Access requires a paid DLC.
3. Ship Interior cosmetics
   1. Furniture, Habitation modules (Habs), decorations, doors, walls, floors, plants, posters, ceilings, lighting. This could include EVA gameplay.

So ED has not yet reached full monetization.

 

[tolm]

I think we know enough to know that it is very improbable to find thriving ecosystems en masse out there. It's more probable that our galaxy sits on the back of a giant tortoise.

Turtle interiors confirmed!

 

[Jumpin' Jack Flash]

Hi All

View attachment 432065

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Just a wild stab, and a fairly cynical one at that, but I wouldn't be surprised if FDev have looked at the historical trends of ED (particularly related to the Horizons/Beyond era) and established how long the game can "coast" before it needs new content to maintain interest... and how much effort needs to be put into creating suitable content.

They've probably accepted that ED isn't going to make boatloads of money but if they can keep it rolling along it can generate enough profit to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

I've mentioned this before (so sorry for being a pendant) but I'm surprised Frontier haven't (as yet) capitalised on colonisation and offered the players some in station cosmetics, for example maybe some preconfigured themes or various items to tart up the stations foyer, bar and other areas. The possibilities are obvious in the sale of arx cosmetic items I would think?
I'd certainly buy some of 'em if the items were of a 'professional' nature. It would also be interesting, and I'm pretty sure some players would take more pride in what they've built. Human nature being what it is I think a good majority of players would like other players to visit their stations to have a look see, maybe even comment on the forum and possibly within the game.)
There's also the added interest in seeing how players will have 'decorated' a station, from modest designs to extravagant palatial interiors. The thing is...have the development team had any ideas in this direction?...If I've given this some thought then I'm damn sure they have already. They've started the ball rolling by giving us some exterior station cosmetics, interior cosmetics though...that is where the money is imho.

As for planet wise stuff, new flora and fauna is possibly a good thing but if Frontier added water to some planets, as others have mentioned in this thread, (small shallow lakes or pools initially might be a good place to start) that we could land on this would really open up the game for more content, especially new plant life and maybe some simple wildlife that we've been describing above.

Jack

 

[Cheese Helmet]

The real question is does FD have time to properly maintain and tweak what they make? New content and updates are always welcome, but FD must understand by now broken content / unbalanced features are more detrimental long term.

As an example, PP2 is in dire need of (a lot of) adjustments (still)- otherwise its going to slide into gardening again.

Spot on. The trend of release/tack something on and then not continue to tweak it out side just disabling parts that are critically broken needs to change too. Integration of new features with old is important.

 

[B0K]

ship interiors - only if there was maintenance to do in the ship to keep it running at its best. limping home or "chip rats" might not be so much fun though.
fauna - yes but this adds explosive costs in terms of design. what happens when something chews on your landing gear? does the ship fall over? this would be way more effor tthan the entire Odyssey addition

for a game that's heavy on exploration, having more things to find seems like an easier way to grow the game. in this vein we have
-incrementally denser atmosphere to explore, possibly with denser plant life
-adding regions with more concentrated materials, metals, like a 50% gold planet, some new ring feature to scan for that allows placing an extraction station to produce CMM
-new mining tech like a gen 2 pulse wave / more finding jackpots and less grinding

basically building on the existing parts of the game like Odyssey on-foot that so much time was spent on.

it's a bit difficult to update exploration because so much has been set in stone, and anything new to find has to have some purpose back home, but that's more a mental effort to plan how it fits into the game than a calendar effort to implement it.

 

[gbjbaanb]

Ship interiors makes a lot of sense - the game is based mostly around "space sim" and not "space arcade game" so interiors would be awesome. I'm surprised they're notr already a feature simply because of Odyssey settlements are well done in terms of being base interiors. Ship ones shoulnd't be more effort than what they've done already.

But, what might make it a big deal is to put more ship interiors for bigger ships - and then allow boarding actions via the odyssey gameplay. Now that would be cool - more linear progreession through the ship to the bridge where you can shoot the captain and take it all over for large ships,. The mega and capital ships would be more like a settlement raid.

As the game features are in place already, I can't see that costing a significant amount of dev and art time, but the extra feature for players might be significant in bringing players in to play more and hype up things for new plaers to come too.

 

[MUTILADOR]

I don't think elite has ever been in such a good place post odyssey, as it is now.
Yes there's alot to fix with PP2.0. Yes colonisation needs work which is ongoing. In particular the ability to undo stuff @ whatever price FD merits is nessesary.
The ships are just amazing!
And were all eager to see the latest addition to the stable.
Ill forecast that the New Clipper will out sell at roll out (arx purchases) all the other ships combined.
But there's so much more that we the playerbase would love to see.
Ship interiors for one.
I know not everyone is up for it but it'll unlock so much potential for new gameloops, new ships like salvage etc.
And piracy which has been utterly overlooked needs a pass. With a tractor beam or grappling hook as standard.
But the biggest thing for me personally would be exploration. To diversify the galaxys planetary content. Would be nirvana.
Let's hope the devs vision is as optimistic as ours.

If the Clipper comes with interiors, I think we'll be shelling out money.

 

[aRJay]

Ship interiors makes a lot of sense - the game is based mostly around "space sim" and not "space arcade game" so interiors would be awesome. I'm surprised they're notr already a feature simply because of Odyssey settlements are well done in terms of being base interiors. Ship ones shoulnd't be more effort than what they've done already.

But, what might make it a big deal is to put more ship interiors for bigger ships - and then allow boarding actions via the odyssey gameplay. Now that would be cool - more linear progreession through the ship to the bridge where you can shoot the captain and take it all over for large ships,. The mega and capital ships would be more like a settlement raid.

As the game features are in place already, I can't see that costing a significant amount of dev and art time, but the extra feature for players might be significant in bringing players in to play more and hype up things for new plaers to come too.

I see that causing a huge increase in players selecting Horizons rather than Odyssey when launching.

 

[Cheese Helmet]

Ship interiors makes a lot of sense - the game is based mostly around "space sim" and not "space arcade game" so interiors would be awesome. I'm surprised they're notr already a feature simply because of Odyssey settlements are well done in terms of being base interiors. Ship ones shoulnd't be more effort than what they've done already.

But, what might make it a big deal is to put more ship interiors for bigger ships - and then allow boarding actions via the odyssey gameplay. Now that would be cool - more linear progreession through the ship to the bridge where you can shoot the captain and take it all over for large ships,. The mega and capital ships would be more like a settlement raid.

As the game features are in place already, I can't see that costing a significant amount of dev and art time, but the extra feature for players might be significant in bringing players in to play more and hype up things for new plaers to come too.

I agree. Fleshing out the spaces we "have" that aren't utilized would be big.

Boarding would be awesome, but the consequences of being boarded would be need to be reasonable. Also balancing the viability of it, as a high risk, high reward thing, where choosing to board leaves the boarded ship vulnerable to attack from outside threats as well, so the decision to board would need to be made wisely. But it would be awesome and add a lot for the Odyssey stuff they're building.

 

[gbjbaanb]

I agree. Fleshing out the spaces we "have" that aren't utilized would be big.

Boarding would be awesome, but the consequences of being boarded would be need to be reasonable. Also balancing the viability of it, as a high risk, high reward thing, where choosing to board leaves the boarded ship vulnerable to attack from outside threats as well, so the decision to board would need to be made wisely. But it would be awesome and add a lot for the Odyssey stuff they're building.

I'm not convinced there's space to board a sidewinder. Only megaships and carriers and similar sized stuff would be practical.

 

[Cheese Helmet]

I'm not convinced there's space to board a sidewinder. Only megaships and carriers and similar sized stuff would be practical.

Honestly that would increase the novelty. Board a sidewinder and it's basically just the cockpit lol

 

[thistle]

Ship interiors: all your threads are belong to us.

 

[Elyssaen]

I'm not convinced there's space to board a sidewinder. Only megaships and carriers and similar sized stuff would be practical.

There is:

Source: https://youtu.be/bjApqmIALd8?si=HCPaJR0I-_FXZyRv

Source: https://youtu.be/RfGfBX2gj2g?si=Fz7o0dJ5XkzqN29J

 

[Sylow]

I think it'd be fairer to say that they're bringing out new content as fast as the game's income allows - 2022-23 wasn't coasting, it was just things like the Thargoid War and Powerplay taking a lot more time to develop than they originally planned for, given the smaller team ED's remaining income allowed them to support. 2019-2021 wasn't really coasting - though I'd agree it felt like it from an outside perspective at the time - it was massive spending on what was becoming Odyssey very little of which we got to see until much later (and much of which turned out to be chasing a dead end, which is always a risk with big up-front investments)

If it currently is coasting or not can be discussed. What is clear is that we had periods where the game basically WAS dead. Nothing happening for years. With FD stating that they would not give us new content for a while, so they would do some bugfixing. The promise of no content they kept. The bugfixes we got... some developer definitely spent a week or two there, fixing old bugs and introducing a bunch of new ones, which again were here to stay for years...

Agreed on this - and also learning from the first year of Beyond, which was fairly successful and in the same smaller incremental setup.

"Spend less" I think is more from necessity than desire - I think if they had the money they'd quite happily spend twice as much and either release the incremental stuff twice as often or be able to include more in it - but as a strategy it certainly I think is better than big risky DLCs.

Mixed feelings here. On one hand, yes: we had more updates. But their quality still was, hmm... varied. With Michael Brookes even at some point admitting, that the intended version of the engineers upgrade was dumped six weeks before the rollout, and a much simpler replacement was made instead. And most of the other things seemed the same way: tossed out of the doorway, no matter if they were finished or not.

Mind you, we players often had no release date. They merely did that to meet internal delivery milestones, sacrificing quality that way. (It felt very common to me. At an employer where i was for a limited time, things were done the same way: toss the software out of the doorway, no matter what, and then deliver a row of patches. The reason for that was, that some managers had some financial bonuses for on-time delivery. And no bonuses for customer satisfaction. And to the utter surprise of the management, while no surprise to use developers, the customer decided to switch to another software after a few cycles like that. )

Also, the faster delivered DLCs all existed very much next to each other and did not work together. I mean, even wings and multicrew for quite a while were -seperate- mechanics, excluding each other. As if the guys designing the different DLCs had no idea of each other, development was completely seperate and they in the end were surprised of the existance of the other DLCs. Which is an astonishing thing, considering that one team supposedly built this all.

So yea... to attract players and create more attention, faster new released would be good. On the other hand, i don't know if the game can survive yet another streak of additional content which does not connect with anything else in the game, is delivered with a pile of bugs and will, if at all, be fixed ages later. In the longer run, and most people who play ED are here for the long run, quality matters. A lot.

 

[Morbad]

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.

On Earth all we have to do is predict thermodynamically plausible biochemistries and we invariably discover life that's already exploiting it when we go looking for them.

While we need more than the single point of comparison we have to evaluate any of our predictions and hypotheses, my money is on simple life being extremely common in the universe.

Just a wild stab, and a fairly cynical one at that, but I wouldn't be surprised if FDev have looked at the historical trends of ED (particularly related to the Horizons/Beyond era) and established how long the game can "coast" before it needs new content to maintain interest... and how much effort needs to be put into creating suitable content.

They've probably accepted that ED isn't going to make boatloads of money but if they can keep it rolling along it can generate enough profit to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

They've stumbled upon the monetization of colonization and I think they are really going to run with it...after all, it worked for the British Empire (and Pornhub).

ED will probably see something of a revival as they find new ways to squeeze us (and by us, I mean definitely not me) for revenue, but that the priority will always be the product, not the game.

 

[MUTILADOR]

I'm not convinced there's space to board a sidewinder. Only megaships and carriers and similar sized stuff would be practical.

I think if all the ships were designed like a fighter like NMS, all the requests for ship interiors would have been avoided. It was a design error, unless they had it planned from the start.