Dude... it's all under the hood. You just can't see the meaningful changes... honest...
I am compelled to speak...
- Thread starter Islata
- Start date
Dude... it's all under the hood. You just can't see the meaningful changes... honest...
Something I would like to see is to bring up NPC tier 2 characters when viewing missions (and the contacts page)... a Corporate faction could have man in a suit, the criminal faction some shady looking character, a military officer, a security officer, government officials... I can hardly tell the difference between the factions right now. Once your reputation increases, maybe you're introduced to higher level NPCs, like the President of a Faction or Head of Security for the System, with an increased difficulty of missions for that faction. Would love to see messages from friendly/allied factions when you dock, "Haven't seen you in a while", "Welcome back Commander", "We need your urgent help...".
The bulletin board needs much more variety and impact... adverts, propaganda from Powers, missions from commercial companies (fast food, banks, etc.), police (security) missions, crew vacancies, hooky gear, passenger missions, long haul missions, more internal system missions between stations, tourist sight-seeing, assassination missions in the same system, pirate missions (given a tip or manifest about a ship with a high valve of cargo), ship recuse missions, missions from individual NPCS (bring medicine to my family, help me escape the system, asking for money), and of course some progressive scripted missions.
The Bulletin Board and Missions are still in an early beta phase with no sign of an update in the near future... thought I would love to be surprised!
The bulletin board needs much more variety and impact... adverts, propaganda from Powers, missions from commercial companies (fast food, banks, etc.), police (security) missions, crew vacancies, hooky gear, passenger missions, long haul missions, more internal system missions between stations, tourist sight-seeing, assassination missions in the same system, pirate missions (given a tip or manifest about a ship with a high valve of cargo), ship recuse missions, missions from individual NPCS (bring medicine to my family, help me escape the system, asking for money), and of course some progressive scripted missions.
The Bulletin Board and Missions are still in an early beta phase with no sign of an update in the near future... thought I would love to be surprised!
Seems to me that CQC is to console players what Powerplay is to PC players, i.e. another layer on top of the base game to keep you entertained. Porting the game to reach a wider audience is apparently the priority the last few months. I wonder if it is worth it, and what effect the crude state of the game will have on the playerbase. Will it alienate people?
Imagine having an awesome cake described to you, paying for the cake and watching as cake gets baked. As you're watching, the cake doesn't seem as awesome as initially described. Also the cake needs to be connected to the internet. Then you realize that the reason the cake isn't as awesome is because of the cake server. There's possibilities of people exploiting the online multi-eating, and they need to keep the cost of running the cake-server down - effectively setting a limit to the complexity of the ingredients of the cake. The cake is now officially done baking. You realize that the cake will probably always be rather stale. The baker says: "Don't worry about about that stale cake foundation. We're now working on a new cake layer which will let you interact with each individual hazelnut in the cake. The new layer will cost extra, though".
Don't forget they already added another layer to the stale cake, but it turned out they burned it (PP).
I don't see PP as burned, I see a very soggy bottom.
This
I've suggested similar missions in other threads before, it's not necessarily about the content of the mission, more about the context and the situation.
This kind of mission implementation would add bucket loads of immersion and atmosphere to the game - it means you never know when/where the next mission is going to come from. Will your next jaunt into an RES result in a new mission or interaction, maybe the next trade run, next interdiction, landing at a station could trigger a whole series of events. It's not knowing what's around the next corner that would make it exciting and immersive.
Going beyond this, there should be consequences to your actions - if you decimate a certain faction in a system by boosting trade with another faction or simply destroying their ships it seems entirely reasonable that they would send someone out to 'deal' with you, maybe to kill you, maybe to offer you alternative solutions?
Once we have this sort of depth to the game it becomes a whole lot more interesting.
I've suggested similar missions in other threads before, it's not necessarily about the content of the mission, more about the context and the situation.
This kind of mission implementation would add bucket loads of immersion and atmosphere to the game - it means you never know when/where the next mission is going to come from. Will your next jaunt into an RES result in a new mission or interaction, maybe the next trade run, next interdiction, landing at a station could trigger a whole series of events. It's not knowing what's around the next corner that would make it exciting and immersive.
Going beyond this, there should be consequences to your actions - if you decimate a certain faction in a system by boosting trade with another faction or simply destroying their ships it seems entirely reasonable that they would send someone out to 'deal' with you, maybe to kill you, maybe to offer you alternative solutions?
Once we have this sort of depth to the game it becomes a whole lot more interesting.
I agree that context and situation could be used to much improve the missions.
It is not easy, for sure. But minor factions can easily be used to build situations (conflicts) that make
sense and get the player involved. Also, having more backdrops for the missions would help with immersion
(casino station, space elevator, mining station in asteroide, com arrays, junkyard, smuggler cache in asteroid ring and so
on...). Having complications/twists during the missions would be a huge plus, and using modular mission elements
would not be insane to do.
Last, payouts could be diversified, such as get updated map/trade data for sys in 50lyr radius, get a discount on
weapon outfitting in the station for a given time, gain one time/one unit access to a restricted item (PP module e.g.),
get info from pirate lord blackbox on a smuggler cache location...
Having scripted modular missions element that you can combine in many ways depending on the context would
be awesome to be honest.
It is not easy, for sure. But minor factions can easily be used to build situations (conflicts) that make
sense and get the player involved. Also, having more backdrops for the missions would help with immersion
(casino station, space elevator, mining station in asteroide, com arrays, junkyard, smuggler cache in asteroid ring and so
on...). Having complications/twists during the missions would be a huge plus, and using modular mission elements
would not be insane to do.
Last, payouts could be diversified, such as get updated map/trade data for sys in 50lyr radius, get a discount on
weapon outfitting in the station for a given time, gain one time/one unit access to a restricted item (PP module e.g.),
get info from pirate lord blackbox on a smuggler cache location...
Having scripted modular missions element that you can combine in many ways depending on the context would
be awesome to be honest.
This 100%. In fact, it's what I naively thought PP was going to entail before they properly announced the giant board game thing.
indeed it is 2015, it seems the era of text speak and poor grammar
Are you suprised - when people complained that Shadowrun Returns had too much text and they should have more voice actors because reading text was too much effort.
People have been saying things like ED is a "great basis to build a great game" for quite a while now. Maybe it's time we faced the possibility that that is all it ever will be.
I think Elite is a 'Great Game' already, in much the same way that Vanilla World of Warcraft was also a 'Great Game', as was EvE Online on release.. etc.. my point is. I think it will be an even better game over the next year or two. Software Development takes time, and money, and all Agile projects seem to fall short of original expectations, but deliver 80% of what the user wanted from the outset. From that point of view I think the Frontier Dev team have done a fantastic job so far, and I am really excited to see how things develop. Planetary Landings will be something new, and I suspect we will see the beta of that some time very soon indeed (my bet is that it will be announced at gamescon), once that is in place, we can expect the Thargoids, once thats done we have in effect Frontier Elite. From there, we can expect a lot of work on the economics systems to make those much more realistic. Of course every thing I just said is conjecture, but the Frontier Dev team have made an incredible sandbox so far, and in the same way EvE Online developed into the behemoth that it is today - in eleven years time who knows what Elite would look like.
My only worry is that Frontier will be able to make enough money to carry on developing the game, looking at their recent accounts, they have only made £1.2m in profit, with a turn over of £22m. There is hope that Xbox release will bring in much needed revenue, but I am of the opinion that it probably wont. I just don't see Xbox players being the kind of people who will hang around for very long in our galaxy.
For me, I think the future of Elite: Dangerous, might well lie in a low-cost-subscription (works for EvE Online) or mmo/free-2-play business model - the later being my preferred option. Why? because Frontier need cash-flow like any other business and at the moment they only get that from copies or expansions sold. I also suspect that the demographic of the people playing Elite Dangerous on a regular basis would be the over 30's and I suspect a majority of over 40s - those guys usually have a higher disposable income, so as a result a subscription model might indeed be the best way forward. It certainly has ensured that EvE Online is still with us, 11 years later, and with only a tiny user base (sub 350,000 accounts - and the average is 3 accounts per user). I would also mention that on release EvE Online didn't have any missions at all, they came along nearly a year after release and when they did, they were not fun. 11 years later, EvE Online missions are some of the most complex missions you will see in any MMORPG.
Anyhoo, enough of me rambling on.. my point is, that I think Elite already is a great game, if you have some frustrations at this point, its understandable, some parts of Elite are not yet very well rounded, but this is normal for a game which has such immense scale. For the moment, enjoy the sandbox as it is, and look forward to the best bits that will be knocking around in a year or two from now.
@Ozimandeus
I think they screwed up here. Basically, it started as a conventional game creation in reverse - instead of investing money to build a game, then sell it and cover the investment, they sold it first and then created the game. So there should not be any need for cash flow to at least deliver what was originally promised. A graphically appealing re-make of Elite, with offline mode and possible player interaction.
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The need for cash flow came up because they used up all the money to please the "I want a community space action shooter" MMO crowd. Baysically, IMO, what we have now is rather a specialized Elite spin-off. So they spent a lot of money creating something else that they thought would sell better, and now need to still generate money just to be able to deliver what they originally promised (or rather most of it) and to keep the current thing running. They created PP, which wasn't originally intended at all. They created CQC, which wasn't intended either and seems quite removed from Elite in the first place. To quote Dogbert: "A paradigm shifting without a clutch."
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If the game doesn't sell in the future, they'll have to shut down the servers. If they had delivered what they originally promised, we'd now have planetary landings, ship damage models, probably Thargoids and an offline mode so that wouldn't even matter that much. Instead, they went a different way, and if it goes wrong (and I don't see it going right at all from the eyes of a solo player), I'll end up with nothing but a memory of something I didn't even want to have. That's why I'm a bit bitter about it.
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I think they screwed up here. Basically, it started as a conventional game creation in reverse - instead of investing money to build a game, then sell it and cover the investment, they sold it first and then created the game. So there should not be any need for cash flow to at least deliver what was originally promised. A graphically appealing re-make of Elite, with offline mode and possible player interaction.
.
The need for cash flow came up because they used up all the money to please the "I want a community space action shooter" MMO crowd. Baysically, IMO, what we have now is rather a specialized Elite spin-off. So they spent a lot of money creating something else that they thought would sell better, and now need to still generate money just to be able to deliver what they originally promised (or rather most of it) and to keep the current thing running. They created PP, which wasn't originally intended at all. They created CQC, which wasn't intended either and seems quite removed from Elite in the first place. To quote Dogbert: "A paradigm shifting without a clutch."
.
If the game doesn't sell in the future, they'll have to shut down the servers. If they had delivered what they originally promised, we'd now have planetary landings, ship damage models, probably Thargoids and an offline mode so that wouldn't even matter that much. Instead, they went a different way, and if it goes wrong (and I don't see it going right at all from the eyes of a solo player), I'll end up with nothing but a memory of something I didn't even want to have. That's why I'm a bit bitter about it.
Don't get me wrong, I do not dislike the game, I'll log in for a bit of lazors, or the occasional trade run, but more often than not, I daydream about this wonderful engine and assets being reskinned to the new Xwing/Tie Fighter series (now with extra bounty hunters and smugglers!). It's a nice foundation(im not a 84'er but the ships both on SW and Elite hhave their own personalites) , but I need those awesome fleet on fleet moments that culminate usually in a giant explosion and star systems being captured/liberated! Frontier get some more cash and send reps to Disney.
The 1.3 missions update was a groundwork for the future. They certainly aren't finished with it
I wish I shared your optimisim mate, I don't think naval ascension will ever get any attention as there always seems to be something new and shiny to work on.
1.4 might be something like 'Thargoids' leaving issues with Powerplay unresolved. 1.4 Thargoids will be left incomplete and many won't care because all the excitement will be 1.5 Planetary landings...
How about some actual suggestions then, rather just say that you want the quality level raised?
How about asking FD to do that as they are paid for it?
Exactly.
And all comes back to the lack of persistency in the universe. It's hard to set up meaningful missions when there's no meaning in the whole ED world as it is.
If no player would log in for about 2 weeks, the game world would stay the same.
There's no NEED in this game so there's nothing a mission could do for the universe.
I was really eager to to see the "big mission overhaul" in 1.3. An ice bucket challenge it was...
You ol' Thargoid hugger you!
Mission complexity feeds into all aspects of the game. For example Powerplay can't offer any more mission types than you find on the bulletin board, only the payoff is different. It's all just kill, steal, find, take,... one-step missions at the moment.
Once multi stage, branching missions are implemented the game will improve in every aspect. It will come I'm sure.
Once multi stage, branching missions are implemented the game will improve in every aspect. It will come I'm sure.
You'd think they would have taken the opportunity to use it for Powerplay then given it was done in the same release?
Can but hope...They certainly aren't finished with it
The mission quality is severely lacking given we're 6+ months into the game now. FD clearly had a bucket of development time available to add in Powerplay but we still have missions offering little more than take X to Y, or go to X and blow up Y.
So I have to agree, missions need a huge lump of attention to make them more involved and interesting... As does general space flight and exploration, both of which also need a solid set of enhancements/improvements added IMHO.
Here's hoping V1.4 (FINALLY) delivers these long overdue improvements.
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