So, what (major) added features were "good" in your eyes? Asking for a friend.
ship interiors - will they happen
- Thread starter Woakes
- Start date
Wouldn't it be fun if the newer ships already had their internals fully modeled, just not accessible yet, while behind the scenes the redesign of the older ships with wrongly scaled entry points is going on ? And then the unannounced feature end of the year are the finished interiors with assigned gameplay for them ? Though I imagine if that was so, the VR players would have told us by now, since they are the only ones already able to move around their cockpits and actually peek behind the doors.
I think a lot of their more narrative content has been good as it can be fun despite the poor underlying mechanics. Guardians, thargoids the abandonned sites all pretty good stuff. Even that lastest thargoid war was mostly fine. Before you go well that's horizons landings so that must be good. They're decent despite the horizons landings not because of it and if they'd have made the sites orbital installations you fly around that would have been better because no SRV to suffer.
Since the door on the corsair is scaled strangely. I think you need to drop that dream.
Oh I did long ago. It's still fun to thing about "what if", but I'm also pretty sure that it's something out of scope for FDEV. If Odyssey had been a smashing success, maybe, that would have been the logical extension of that. But Odyssey bombed. Ship interiors depending how they'd be done would require a lot of basic systems that just aren't there. In the current game as it is, walking around inside the ships restricted to when being landed or at least not moving would be doable. But once you combine a moving object within another moving object, things fall apart. The physics programming for that simply isn't there. This becomes very apparent when trying to fly around in a ship while someone else is standing on top of it or even with an SRV on top of it. Or when trying to jetpack onto a skimmer/goliath to ride that.
Just look at all the Saud Kruger ships. None of them have any visible way of entry (in fact, they didn't even bother implementing working canopies). Unless Frontier were to continue down the path of internal inconsistencies, they'd have to go back to all ships, including the aforementioned worst offenders, and design the necessary models and mechanics (lift? ramp? ladder? "beam-me-up-Scotty?") before we even get into 'meaningful interiors gameplay'.
Meh. If I want reasonably seamless, working interiors, I just play X4 instead.
I still miss Dual Universe. It was the main reason I quit Elite for five years.
Fully voxellised personally designed ships. You could dock an XS ship on an S ship and dock the S ship on an M ship and then dock the M ship on either an L core ship or an L core stationary base.
All interiors were planned out and you could walk around fixing parts of your ship after a battle while you were flying between planets.
But holy hell was the fully physicalised ship design great.
Just check out a few of the popular player made ships (click on the "LIKED" tab at the top) on this in game player run marketplace.
And the fact that you could program everything using LUA to autimate security, landing gear, autopilot etc... the game was epic.
Main Problem was they suffered from the "Frontier Elite II Combat Problems" with max speed being about 50,000kph... so fighting was kinda crap...
and there was basically zero PVE which people had demanded since day one.
Nobody ever said ship interiors got old.
Fully voxellised personally designed ships. You could dock an XS ship on an S ship and dock the S ship on an M ship and then dock the M ship on either an L core ship or an L core stationary base.
All interiors were planned out and you could walk around fixing parts of your ship after a battle while you were flying between planets.
But holy hell was the fully physicalised ship design great.
Just check out a few of the popular player made ships (click on the "LIKED" tab at the top) on this in game player run marketplace.
And the fact that you could program everything using LUA to autimate security, landing gear, autopilot etc... the game was epic.
Main Problem was they suffered from the "Frontier Elite II Combat Problems" with max speed being about 50,000kph... so fighting was kinda crap...
and there was basically zero PVE which people had demanded since day one.
Nobody ever said ship interiors got old.
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OK, if you don't find anything really 'good' which has been added to ED since release, I am getting your point but I don't share it.
I love the added content, even if I don't play some of it (Colonisation). Every addition makes the ED universe bigger and more attractive to players and adds to the longevity of the game (and no, we don't discuss bug fixing in this thread). If FDev hadn't added content, the game would have been abandoned a long time ago.
Pro tip: I recommend that you play 'classic' base game without Odyssey - that removes most of the content you don't like. It won't ever get interios
My idea (suggestion) is that if FDev is moving forward with interiors, they would make them only for the new SCO enabled ships (living with the outcry of players who want to fly the classic ships) first.
In a second step, they could rework some parts of the classic ships, if there was enough demand.
Monetization could work as follows: "Interiors DLC, including all new SCO ships", ARX based add-ons per classic ship.
This is the problem. There's plenty of areas where ship gameplay could exist, but in the meanwhile Frontier had to make a game where you can do everything from a chair. AMFUs and many other things got added as a placeholder, now any possible repair gameplay space is being squatted on by a button, you press it and repair happens.
Any meaningful change would have to completely strip out and replace the placeholder, but there's no good way to do that. It would surely not be viable except as a paid expansion, but then you have to leave the placeholder in for those who don't have the DLC which defeats the whole point
There's still options. For the AFMU to work, you have to set the module to be repaired offline. Hands on in ship manual repairs could work with the module still online and include fixing the powerplant.
I always have a quick look around new ships, and while there have been a few cool things to see that would be difficult/impossible to see with the fixed internal camera views there’s never been any secret ship internals added as far as I can see.
There’s also nothing blocking them either, like really badly placed vehicle bays
It would be such a typical Frontier style move, it could well happen some day
And at least the outcry would be quite entertaining, even though I'd rather get my entertainment from the game itself as opposed to online drama. Beggars can't be choosers though...Joking aside - if they did that, I'd consider it the worst of both worlds... I'm sure the whales would gobble it up as per usual, but more casual, less involved players could (and should) ask themselves "why do I pay for the ship, and then have to pay more to get access to its interiors".
My biggest issue with that approach would be inconsistency. I don't know if anyone here remembers or knows, but Gran Turismo 5 on the Playstation 3 shipped with two tiers of vehicles, 1) highly detailed exterior and interior models and 2) lower polygon models with no cockpit (just a black background in the shape of one) as those cars were ported from the Playstation 2 predecessor. I hated 2) and despite wanting to drive a lot of those cars, because of how they were inplemented I didn't touch them. A little how I treat Saud Kruger ships in Elite. Immersion is an important aspect for me, YMMV of course, I know many people play racing games via the bumper cam still.
Long story short, the only way I would spend money on any Interiors DLC (which in itself is already a poor value proposition, it'd have to be amazing, or come with additional features to be worth any real cash for me) is it'd have to be available for all ships in the game.
They only have external damage modelling for the Anaconda, so you can probably imagine how likely it is they'd do different interiors for different ships.
Depends on your POV. You are a person IRL who can fly a spaceship ingame (which is something you cannot do IRL).
Walking around is something you can already do IRL.
(BTW you cannot really walk around ingame, you can only control an avatar who probably does not even look like you.)
That is same with Odyssey DLC or any paint job: Added value may justify an extra price. If one doesn't see the value, they don't have to buy it. Interiors may have little potential to 'win the game'
My argument against 'whales' is that this term is a hyperbole: How much did we spend for our gaming rigs? Other games? A cup of cappuccino? Would a very casual player miss anything if they hadn't the Interiors DLC? N.b. I am considering myself to be a casual player because I spend between 3-9 hours per week in ED.
That is a fair point. But would it really make sense from a commercial perspective (yes, FDev needs to make money to pay their employees, etc.) to develop a ship interior for e.g. the Asp Scout? (Sorry players, don't beat me, it is an example). FDev has the telemetry to make a good guess which ships may be the most popular not only in terms of flight time but also how much players are spending on their respective ship kits and paint jobs.
I agree I want to have ship interiors with added game play - not just for the sake of having some walkable cabins and corridors.
Keeping the module on isn't going to be of much benefit when it requires you to stop using the rest of the ship. Even if we went the whole way and gave NPC/player crew the ability to do that while you pilot (which would be a way better placeholder until interiors were implemented) its still a pretty marginal benefit. There just isn't much room to improve over Magic Repair Button.
You forget multicrew. This would expand that mechanic quite a lot. More jobs than turret gunner or fighter pilot means more (or even anything) to do on a ship not specifically built for multicrew, i.e. not having turrets or fighter bay.
Good point... it does show they have form throughout the game's history - the mining revamp shows they can if they want to, but unfortunately there's way too many half-baked/semi-finished aspects and placeholders in the game... I wonder if their theme park IPs suffer from the same problem or whether this is specific to Elite. Maybe they outsource a lot of the content (the 4.0 UI revamp certainly gives me that vibe).
I spent north of 600 Euros on Elite. Is that sufficient? Too much? Not enough? Do I qualify as a whale (personally I'd say yes, but maybe only SC level spending does to some people?).That is same with Odyssey DLC or any paint job: Added value may justify an extra price. If one doesn't see the value, they don't have to buy it. Interiors may have little potential to 'win the game'
My argument against 'whales' is that this term is a hyperbole: How much did we spend for our gaming rigs? Other games? A cup of cappuccino? Would a very casual player miss anything if they hadn't the Interiors DLC? N.b. I am considering myself to be a casual player because I spend between 3-9 hours per week in ED.
Either way, I tend to answer that question by looking at what other games (i.e. the competition in terms of products vying for my entertainment time & budget) offer... and on that basis Elite isn't a good deal in pure money terms, even if I take hours played into account (and I can say for sure that a sizeable chunk of the 5k hours in Elite were not particularly fun, though the end often justified the means).
Elite is often sold at heavy discounts (or even given out for free), while other games still sell at full fat prices. That's really on Frontier though... I'd prefer if they kept the base game and DLC pricing stable, while including at least some of the cosmetics in the price for free instead of making such an industry out of it. They decided otherwise and it is what it is.
You could look at it from another perspective. Are people that scored the game from the bargain bin sale more likely to dump dozens if not hundreds of notes for often questionable-quality cosmetics? I'm not talking about enthusiasts like you or me, but your regular play-game-for-20-hours-then-drop-it types.
Hehe, poor Scout, good example. Both for your argument, but also my counter-argument... They could maybe make it less rubbish by overhauling its characteristics? It's their game, there's nothing keeping them from changing it, and they would also sell more cosmetics for it as I'm sure people who are/were willing to fly other beauties-in-the-eyes-of-their-beholders would do the same with the Scout if it had any redeeming features at all.
You know, I really am split on this need for gameplay associated to interiors. I get why people would want it... but...
In X4, there's no real gameplay to walkable ship interiors - well, there is, but it's pretty light touch, mostly story driven (i.e. meet xyz on bridge or crew quarters to talk to), but it adds so much to the scale and character of each ship, even if there are only few rooms available (although ships like the Astrid also exist).
It's just nice to be able to walk towards the ship, see your pilot through the canopy, climb up the ladder/ramp, and walk towards the pilot chair to relief said pilot from their duty (or command them to lift off). It really gives me the sense of physically stepping into a spaceship. Despite some jank at times.
I still find it fun and immersive, and even after 1,200 hours in the game don't usually short-cut (button combo to skip to ship cockpit is available) unless I'm in a hurry, or eventually tire of it so it's a good an necessary option to have still.
My skepticism around Elite interiors comes from how FC interiors were designed - there's just one layout, built from recycled Odyssey assets, and still glitches out now and then. I wouldn't be against it per se but I don't see Frontier having the ability to pull it off properly, with the level of attention to detail that it clearly deserves.
There is no saving the Asp Scout without altering it quite substantially. It's got the guns and the Maneuverability of a Cobra class ship, but it has a hitbox like a fat medium, because it is a medium ship. And all it gets over the old Cobras for that is a size 5 optional slot, a slot that already exists on the small DBX. And now the Cobra V beats the AspS in literally everything. It is smaller, flies better, has more firepower and a size 5 internal as well.
There are no C5 slots on the DBX, just 2 off C4.(if it had a C5 the fuel scooping could be speeded up considerably!)