What DDF Proposals would you like to see Frontier work on?

[Kulin]

What's the word I'm looking for? Oh yes, gameplay, I would love to see some more gameplay.

Nice pic btw

That is the thing i'm also missing about exploration. Gameplay. Flying from X to Y and pushing a button is just boring. There should be the need to read some data, think about what you are seeing there and then do things like signal triangulation. Actually a game to play and not just reading menus, using menus and steering a ship around.

 

[el_tel]

That is the thing i'm also missing about exploration. Gameplay. Flying from X to Y and pushing a button is just boring. There should be the need to read some data, think about what you are seeing there and then do things like signal triangulation. Actually a game to play and not just reading menus, using menus and steering a ship around.

Somehow I missed the exploration topic in the DDF (or read it then forgot I'd read it), but I subsequently made my own thread there detailing how exploration could be made much better than what we have currently (IMO).

I'm considering reposting it in the suggestions forum, but I'm on my phone right now, so I'll need to get my laptop out first and give the thread a quick spruce up.

Triangulation of route data is very fundamental to 'my' ideas.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

Exploration Exploration Exploration
Trading interface! Stats Stats Stats

Turn this into the "PC" game it should have been and stop the consolization of it.

 

[Alien]

Exploration Exploration Exploration
Trading interface! Stats Stats Stats

Turn this into the "PC" game it should have been and stop the consolization of it.

The poll is not about the PC version specifically, as any features Frontier add to Elite Dangerous can and should be equally available to all platforms.

 

[Zak Gordon]

A very awesome thread Alien, thanks for doing it.

I cheated. You say to pick three, but infact i could pick as many as i wanted, so i did All these initial Poll suggestions from the DDF/DDA are excellent so all are worthy of consideration from Frontier. They all would improve the overall game to a very large degree, so lets hope they all get some consideration at some point in the not too far distant future?

 

[CaptainKremmen]

That is the thing i'm also missing about exploration. Gameplay. Flying from X to Y and pushing a button is just boring. There should be the need to read some data, think about what you are seeing there and then do things like signal triangulation. Actually a game to play and not just reading menus, using menus and steering a ship around.

Time for some wishing really hard.


I wish the "Advanced" Discovery Scanner had never been built with infinite range. Maybe 5,000 LS. The "honk to reveal utterly everything" loses so much atmosphere, observation and brain usage. As you said, triangulation. Parallax. Mass effect on ship speed. All... honked away.

I wish the "System Map" didn't scroll to exactly the width of the systems that will be displayed once you tag them all. That's a major "tell" right there. An orrery with all bodies in scaled orbit would have presented known bodies, while not giving away unknown bodies... how many more there are, where they are, if they exist, etc. We would have discovered things nobody else had, in our own back yard, simply by being more thorough.

I wish the planets and bodies wouldn't magically present their in-place names on scanning, such as "Tau Ceti 7", when the ship computer knows absolutely nothing of "Tau Ceti 6".

I wish we could buy cartographic data for any system that has had data logged. Why can we only buy data within 20 LY of a station? All that deep space scanning we do is useless to any other player - our mates can't even buy it and share our little moments of glory. We're not pushing back the boundaries of known space, BECAUSE NOBODY CAN BUY THE DATA FROM UC! All players' maps are still "unexplored" outside the bubble unless they do it themselves, despite a gazillion systems being scanned.

I wish a jump to an "unexplored" star had been Not-Easy, but a jump to an "explored" star was like it is now. Paired with the above buy-anywhere mechanic, and you'd have had trailblazers forging a path, explorers using it to fast-track to a region then branching off, tourists following known paths.

I wish the background sim colonised explored systems based on merit - Earthlike Worlds with pristine metallic rings, not far from other systems? New outpost pops up.


What a game that would be...

 

[Arubeto]

Time for some wishing really hard.
I wish the "Advanced" Discovery Scanner had never been built with infinite range. Maybe 5,000 LS. The "honk to reveal utterly everything" loses so much atmosphere, observation and brain usage. As you said, triangulation. Parallax. Mass effect on ship speed. All... honked away.

Couldn't agree more. Send that damn ADS to hell, I say! Took away the last bit of manual work - detecting far away stars via the parallax method - from exploration. But I suppose the whining would be intense if they ever decided to remove the ADS or at least reduce it's range.

I wish the "System Map" didn't scroll to exactly the width of the systems that will be displayed once you tag them all. That's a major "tell" right there. An orrery with all bodies in scaled orbit would have presented known bodies, while not giving away unknown bodies... how many more there are, where they are, if they exist, etc. We would have discovered things nobody else had, in our own back yard, simply by being more thorough.

Again, agree. In this case I think it wouldn't even be a big deal for FD to adjust the system view as an afterthought (as opposed to the limitless ADS). I wouldn't rule out that we eventually see this "tweak".

I wish the planets and bodies wouldn't magically present their in-place names on scanning, such as "Tau Ceti 7", when the ship computer knows absolutely nothing of "Tau Ceti 6".

This always irked me, too. The names of discovered celestial bodies in a system should never be final, instead they should be updated once another body is discovered within the same system. Some planet could be called "LFT 926 1" until you discover another planet in the same system that's nearer to its star, which then would adopt the name "LFT 926 1" while the former "LFT 926 1" would be renamed to "LFT 926 2"

I wish we could buy cartographic data for any system that has had data logged. Why can we only buy data within 20 LY of a station? All that deep space scanning we do is useless to any other player - our mates can't even buy it and share our little moments of glory. We're not pushing back the boundaries of known space, BECAUSE NOBODY CAN BUY THE DATA FROM UC! All players' maps are still "unexplored" outside the bubble unless they do it themselves, despite a gazillion systems being scanned.

I don't get the reasoning behind the limitation in what data we can buy from UC, either. But again, I hope this might be changed in the future since it seems like quite a small technical change (e.g. a low hanging fruit) while having tremendous value for exploration game play matters. Or is there some important reason why the devs went for the current design?

I wish a jump to an "unexplored" star had been Not-Easy, but a jump to an "explored" star was like it is now. Paired with the above buy-anywhere mechanic, and you'd have had trailblazers forging a path, explorers using it to fast-track to a region then branching off, tourists following known paths.

I think this is the biggest issue I have with exploration in it's current form, too. All systems in the galaxy being visible from the beginning, no need to discover systems, and the whole process of exploration is so absurdly simplified that exploration lost a large chunk of its fascination in ED, IMHO. Sadly, even though this is the most important aspect about exploration that needs changing, its also the change that is least likely, I fear. The whining about exploration being to difficult could be tremendous, and frankly I don't think FD has the boldness to risk such a big change now.

I wish the background sim colonised explored systems based on merit - Earthlike Worlds with pristine metallic rings, not far from other systems? New outpost pops up.

Still hope this will come, the current exploration and station building community goals are already a step in this direction, aren't they?

Anyway, I could have written "I agree with all your points", but I thought that each and everyone of them deserves a lot attention and should at least be considered by FD.

What a game that would be...

Damn you, now I want that beautiful world of exploration that as a whole we will probably never get

But at least some of those points don't seem too unrealistic and hopefully will be addressed in the future.

 

[Darkphoenix]

I chose in order:

Passengers
Ship Crews
Salvaging

To be honest though if Ironman had been an option that would have been my #1 choice.

 

[Sanderson]

The poll is not about the PC version specifically, as any features Frontier add to Elite Dangerous can and should be equally available to all platforms.

Unless, of course, it's more profitable to make a "timed exclusive" deal and you don't care that you off your customers. Wonder if that will ever happen? Nah, can't be, I watched David's videos and we have nothing to worry about....

 

[Ben Ryder]

Id like to see them work on these

[h=2]"I'm looking for Mr. Bribe. Wink. Wink." Smuggling[/h]
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6562

 

[Tinman]

Can you explain how for e.g "investigating reports of something" is the same as fetching and carrying? I understand that I will have to go to the location, see what I can see and then possibly return with the info ( unless by some miracle we get the ability to communicate - we already have FTL travel so why not FTL communication? ). This is not the same as collect 'x' boxes of commodity 'a' from the menu, run the loading screen a couple of times until I arrive at the destination station, dock and then sell 'x' boxes of the commodity in the same menu. Then buy 'x' boxes of commodity 'b' from the menu and repeat until you can't take anymore?

It doesn't matter if its a "physical commodity" or "information". It's still "a thing" you fetch at one location and then bring to another. To finish a mission of that sort you still need to find/discover "something", in this case information, and then bring that back and hand it in.

The process of finding that thing and collecting it might have some "mini-game" attached to it. Mining laser for resources, using scanners for data, scooping cargo, taking a photo of a enemy base and so on...but at it's core it's still: Go to A, get something (through some mechanism), go back.

 

[Sanderson]

It doesn't matter if its a "physical commodity" or "information". It's still "a thing" you fetch at one location and then bring to another. To finish a mission of that sort you still need to find/discover "something", in this case information, and then bring that back and hand it in.

The process of finding that thing and collecting it might have some "mini-game" attached to it. Mining laser for resources, using scanners for data, scooping cargo, taking a photo of a enemy base and so on...but at it's core it's still: Go to A, get something (through some mechanism), go back.

So, you're happy with the the current missions or are you just arguing on FD's behalf for fun?

You know what the poster is trying to say and are derailing his comments with walls of text for what purpose?

Every game ever invented anywhere that has "missions" is a "go here" "do that" "get this" "A/B" type of thing, some just suck a lot less and at least attempt to mask the nature of the task. You know damn well what the poster is struggling to get across.

I agree with him, it would be nice if FD attempted to make the simple "A/B"missions seem like more than a simple task and actually had meaning in the bigger picture.

 

[Alien]

Unless, of course, it's more profitable to make a "timed exclusive" deal and you don't care that you off your customers. Wonder if that will ever happen? Nah, can't be, I watched David's videos and we have nothing to worry about....

To quote Oddball (Donald Sutherland) "There you go with those negative waves"

 

[Sanderson]

To quote Oddball (Donald Sutherland) "There you go with those negative waves"

I didn't invent these things or make them up, they are real things that has happened. Any "negative waves" were created when FD dropped this crap in the pool and not by me. Fact is, FD created this mess, not me.

But, yeah, hurray for hopeful updates to the KS game.

 

[Alien]

I didn't invent these things or make them up, they are real things that has happened. Any "negative waves" were created when FD dropped this crap in the pool and not by me. Fact is, FD created this mess, not me.

But, yeah, hurray for hopeful updates to the KS game.

I'm not saying you were wrong ... I see this thread as our way of saying to Frontier "Hey, we still want this stuff in the game". If all they see on the forum is moan moan moan whine whine whine, they aren't going to have our interests in the minds when they decide what to add next.

 

[Sanderson]

I'm not saying you were wrong ... I see this thread as our way of saying to Frontier "Hey, we still want this stuff in the game". If all they see on the forum is moan moan moan whine whine whine, they aren't going to have our interests in the minds when they decide what to add next.

......like PP and CQC? Sorry, that was just too easy

 

[Cody]

... they aren't going to have our interests in the minds when they decide what to add next.

No comment!

 

[Alien]

......like PP and CQC? Sorry, that was just too easy

No comment!

I'm not going to resort to childish name calling ... but you're both meanie meanie sad sacks, so ner ner ner ner ner
(Disclaimer: This post is meant in total and complete humour and should not be taken seriously in any way shape or form, so ner )

 

[Sanderson]

I'm not going to resort to childish name calling ... but you're both meanie meanie sad sacks, so ner ner ner ner ner
(Disclaimer: This post is meant in total and complete humour and should not be taken seriously in any way shape or form, so ner )

LMAO, sorry for derailing your thread, there's a lot of angry customers out there.

But, yeah, FD needs to flesh out the bones a LOT more. Hopefully this thread will help.

 

[Elgered]

Persistent passengers and crew are very, very much appreciated as they are a big part of the FFE fun missing in ED. P2P trading would specially be beneficial to a P2P System that also integrates storage and better communication / collaboration.
On the other hand exploration with salvaging in mysterious remnants of ancient cultures would be nice too (imagine using your mining laser to cut an ancient wreck, to get inside^^)