I beg to differ. Certainly gameplay comes first, but there is plenty of lore behind the way things work in Elite. I know from firsthand experience how much 'lore' work was done to ensure there was context around the gameplay. That's one of the things that differentiates Elite from <insert generic space game>.
For example.
- No anti-grav, thus centipetal force providing pseudo gravity in spinning space stations and some ships
- All ship instrumentation is holographic
- Many ships are named after snakes
- Those adverts you see have stories behind them, company histories etc.
- The Federation, Empire and Alliance all exist because of a complex intertwined history
Specifically to combat
- The FSD has a specific justification in lore
- Weapon heat, power and convergence are genuine 'real' issues in space
- The weapons themselves are based on established lore from the original game and manuals
In short, there is a rich tapestry behind the game and the way it works. You don't have to notice it, or even acknowledge it. But it's there.
Cheers,
Drew.
I'm aware of the lore and the game history, and not a single thing you mentioned touches on why the gameplay is the way it is. FSD, lore reasons aren't even needed, that's a viable current theory for potential FTL travel, that's been discussed many times on these forums. Doesn't explain why combat is what it is however, not even remotely. Heat for the weapons, yes, mostly realistic, but again, what's that got to do with how combat works ingame?
I fire a bullet in space, which you can do right now btw, that bullet will continue to travel in a straight line at the same speed it left the muzzle at, no slow down, no drop due to gravity, no lateral drift due to windage or planetary spin, it'll just keep on moving at full speed until it hits something. There is no practical limit on range for a ballistic weapon in space, nor on a rail gun for that matter. Lasers, well there are limits on range, but they tend to be thousands of kilometers, not a few kilometers. Missiles, well, depending on how you do the propulsion system and guidance systems, ranges of thousands of kilometers are the start, they can easily go millions of kilometers. And there's nothing the lore explaining WHY we can't hit a target beyond a few kilometers in the game. I've been able to tag targets 3km out, close to 4km sometimes, but the damage done definitely seems to be less than it should.
I can pick up ships on my sensors in supercruise from billions of kilometers away, despite the fact that both myself AND the other ships are all moving at superluminal speeds in what is essentially another dimension thanks to the bubble of warped spacetime we travel via. And yet, in normal space, I'm lucky to get a target beyond a few kilometers, the upper limit I've seen is 7km with A grade sensors on an Anaconda, which currently(1.4) has the largest sensor module in the game. That difference is a bit off, to put it mildly. We evidently have FTL communications, and our sensors definitely are FTL, so there's something very off about this difference. And I'm not seeing a lore reason for it, but I do freely admit I'm not an expert on the lore of the Elite universe, so there may be something I've missed. You definitely didn't list anything that covers it, so if you have lore reasons, I would love to hear them. I always enjoy being able to understand the reasons behind gameplay mechanics that are lore based, as in the BattleTech universe, where 1km is generally beyond the range of any weapon, when I'm sitting in a 100 ton walking tank with enough weapons to literally devastate a country, but I need to get really close to do that. In BTech, it's simple, a futuristic Dark Age setting, end times originally, and nothing works like it used to, no one knows how to make them work properly anymore, so you simply can't aim for jack and that makes ranges very very short. 90m for high powered machine guns, not even a kilometer for a gauss rifle and less 500m for guided missiles...silly but at least they gave some lore for the gameplay mechanics.
So what's the lore behind the gameplay mechanics in Elite? Previous Elite games didn't have the same ranges and sure didn't have the same mechanics, it's not consistent at all, so...what gives?
