No, if you're in an interview and in the past you have admitted your game is empty and the "furniture needs to be put inside it" (to quote Braben himself (more paraphrase)) and on top of that know your game has been reviewed as "A mile wide and an inch deep" you don't then turn around and say "everything's fine, we're not going to add any more to that" because that's going to put people off. I'm now going to assume by his lack of imagination in piracy that we're also never going to get the exploration mechanics we were promised either because he must think they're fine too?
A Game At Odds with Itself and Why
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No, if you're in an interview and in the past you have admitted your game is empty and the "furniture needs to be put inside it" (to quote Braben himself (more paraphrase)) and on top of that know your game has been reviewed as "A mile wide and an inch deep" you don't then turn around and say "everything's fine, we're not going to add any more to that" because that's going to put people off. I'm now going to assume by his lack of imagination in piracy that we're also never going to get the exploration mechanics we were promised either because he must think they're fine too?
Please don't assume you know what I want.
The changes they announced for 2.1 are exactly what I was waiting for. I clearly remember how FE2 had even less "to do" than ED and still it was more engaging because the world felt more alive and 2.1 is very likely to give us exactly that with the persistent NPCs.
So from my point of view, you want a first person EVE, player driven everything and all, and yes, you won't get that. But I am exactly the type of player you suggest doesn't exist, who mostly enjoys flying around alone and only sometimes, when I feel like it, engage in some interaction with other players, and I love how the game works.
Player driven economy and player driven stations, systems and whatnot would ruin the game for me as I hate nothing more than immersion braking min/max players in my role-playing sandbox.
More effective QA would be nice, or at least faster bug fixes, still I'm 500+ hours into the game and even if they had stopped at 1.0 I would still have gotten my money's worth.
So the most basic game mechanics you could put i na game and literally not get any simpler requires skill and brains to play them? I'm sorry but I can almost fall asleep in a CZ shooting the AI so presumably, since I find them so easy I require something a lot harder to play against whereas you are struggling to play? Also, what is it we need brains to work out - can you name 3 things?
I'm hoping that 2.1 will add some much needed context to what we do, as that can make up for the lack of challenge from the mechanics themselves to a degreeMaybe even the challenge itself will be upped with Elite missions being properly hard to do! And hopefully not just insanely time consuming...
A very long time ago a concept teased to us by FD was the idea of buying used ships. They said at the time that purchasing a new ship would be a big deal - very expensive; very rare. The majority of ships bought would be 2nd hand that came with quirks - a character if you like. This was interesting to me - even today I have never owned an Anaconda as I can't afford it, but what if I went to 'Dodgy Dave Dealers' and bough a reconditioned one at 1/100th the price ? Sure, a few of the module slots are completely destroyed and can't be used; the drives have a tendency to pitch the ship down and you manually have to compensate; perhaps sometimes there is a total power shut down every 10 minutes or so if you use anything but an E rated power plant as the wiring becomes overloaded.
Wouldn't that be something ?
Part of what is missing for me in ED is randomness / character / flavour.
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I can only speak for myself.
There is a lot of potential for ED - you like what has been presented by FD so far, but I know there can be so much more (look at the DDF archives for a glimpse of what FD were thinking back in 2014). That is why I play other things but keep coming back to the forums in the hope that something has changed.
Jenner
I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
And it will soon be at odds with SC and NMS. The clock is ticking away fast. I backed ED and SC and will be buying NMS at midnight on launch (or pre-ordering if available). If ED is going to get it right then it needs to be soon. I can almost guarantee you that the competition is betting otherwise.
That. would. be. AWESOME.
Hmm... How did Braben do it before with much less advanced hardware? It's not just the imagination. It's the conversion to graphical improvements over gameplay. Plus the console gamer dilemma that didn't grow up with PCs from the 80s; didn't play PC games through the 80-90s where many games were much too complicated for the average console gamer. Now every game has to match a certain criteria that makes it fit the entire landscape of gamers. Doing this makes many games that used to be much more fun for the PC gamer become an arcadish thoughtless shadow of it's former self...... But very pretty none the less. It will only get better........ When it does, it comes off the self and back on the hard drive. Braben hasn't finished yet.
Fun idea in concept, how would ship rebuy work after your flying hunk-o-junk explodes? Another quirky ship? Or the low ship price means you don't get a replacement?
You my friend need to start running Robigo shadow missions, you will be able to buy a decked out anaconda in less then 5 days.I love that idea! (And not just because I'm poor, lol).
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I'm sort of hoping that it might be possible to have it both ways in a way. To find a middle ground. For human occupied space to have it generated once and have it persistant (or at least parts of human occupied space) and for the rest of the galaxy to be proceduraly generated. Having it all proceduraly generated is probably a complete programing or mathematical nightmare when it comes to making it dynamic.
Off topic, but do you guys remember Jane's Combat Simulations!?! I LOVED Longbow Gold... But yeah, the era of book length manuals on how the game worked.
I would imagine that you would get back the cost you originally paid for the heap-o-junk minus the insurance fee (5% or whatever it is). Then you could be presented with another screen of local junk sold at the station to purchase or if nothing took your fancy, for a fee, transported anywhere you have visited in the past. All this aside, I suspect FD chose the path they did as I think it would have been simpler and easier to code / release for the Xmas deadline they picked.
Maybe one of the season pass upgrades could introduce such a concept of junk ships (along with many other things people have suggested over the months) - maybe all ships you own are immediately sold for full value (so in effect reset the universe); prices on new ships reviewed (10x - 100x) and junk options introduced; now go knock yourself out ... imagine the uproar though
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And the bounty hunting, combat zones, base assaults, minor factions, power play and every silly game the community has come up with...CQC.. you missed out CQC
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Or does the OP mean its still a bit of a work in progress perhaps?
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I'm not french either, this was the only image I could have found of that screen lol.
But I can explain what is what on picture.
M3, M4 and so on are classes of ships, the triangle thing is a symbol representing the type of ship , green is the ship name (you can rename them), Base represents the ships home base, on pic none has them assigned. If assigned you have an option to simply send the ship back to home base or if I remember corectly to rearm or you need it assigned for your trade ship as home so that it knows from where it is trading and then it shows you the possibilities of home base, what you can sell from there if you're producing something, if it's gona keep doing that, or how many times it will do it and so on.
After that you have a system in which the ship is in, followed by ships shields (blue dots or no dots if it doesn't have shields, gren dots are hull), followed by the action ship is curently performing, followed by the order ship has assigned. you can pick any of those ships and it gets highlighted in green and then click on it and you enter a submenu with options to assign commands for the ship (patrol, send to, attack, defend, protect...), configure ship, load ship and so on and then you can click any of those submenus and you end in another submenu (for example if you clicked weapons, you end in submenu with all the weapons and you can assign for every situation how will weapon react. You can for example assign weapons on back of your ship to protect from missiles or shoot smaller fighters, 1 front weapon to shoot at biggest threat, what's % to fire missile, how many missiles to be fired, ... ).
If I'm not mistaken, the last ship on the list is the ship the player is curently in.
To make it short, anything you can think off or would want from your ship to be done or in any way you want it to be done it can be done including the systems it has fitted can be configured in any way you would prefer them to be configured.
If the ship is trading for example you have options to buy or sell something. It can buy the amount of goods you want it to buy at a certain station or it can find a station and buy that amount of goods alone. It can try to find that good for lowest price if you choose so. If fitted with jump drive and cells (fuel) it can jump to the destination, or it can drive through systems to get there. But in case of jumping, the npc pilot it's driving the ship needs to rank up first to appropriate rank to learn to use jump drive. It can skip a system or systems you don't want it to go into, it can wait on station until it gets all the goods it needs or it can skip the waiting and grab how much of goods it's on the station and proceed to the next station. It can buy some stuff on one station and sell some on other. You can for example meet that ship in some system, order it to stop, fly out of the ship you was curently driving and when you get close to it jump into it and drive that ship yourself, or just ask the ship to come to a station and then just switch the ship.
You can also own a carrier or multiple carriers (or some other big ship) for example which you can fill with fighters. In that case you can assign the way carrier acts in some situation and also assign how all or each of those fighters or their weapons or how they're fitted and how they act in some situation. Also if carrieer is soloing or what support it's with it, if it's carrier and support ship 1 wing, or if it's whole thing more wings, if it's multiple wings, each wing can have it's own way of behaving or role assigned.
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Braben is very aware of his position - he knows he is beyond criticism with a good percentage of his target audience because of past Elite games and he's very good at spinning things, not quite the reality distortion field Steve Jobs was capable of engaging but down the same path.
We'll see how many of these placeholders get fleshed out over time, but when you have things that haven't changed since release how can you still sell them as placeholders?
What annoys me is something being dressed up as something it clearly isn't then using the ten-year-plan-get-out-clause to fob people off over things that aren't quite working as intended. It doesn't wash.
We'll see how many of these placeholders get fleshed out over time, but when you have things that haven't changed since release how can you still sell them as placeholders?
What annoys me is something being dressed up as something it clearly isn't then using the ten-year-plan-get-out-clause to fob people off over things that aren't quite working as intended. It doesn't wash.
This is what worried me the most about his interview too. The firm belief that there, as the game stands, is a lot to do, means that the current repetitive mechanics are in fact not place holders, but the final product. This concerns me greatly... however, I have purchased Horizons and will give Frontier the benefit of the doubt for the time being
I must also say that the belief that there is anything driving us to move around within the bubble is also puzzling. If you put me in a space station anywhere in the bubble I would have no way AT ALL to know where I was. Not a clue, until I checked the Galaxy Map. There are no regional differences, no cultural differences, nothing, just randomly varying space station designs. Absolutely bare bones...
Appreciated - I haven't played the X-series so not only a foreign language but alien looking too
Anyway - what you're describing is fleet management : an interesting concept that could be introduced one day to ED but I doubt it. Their aesthetic so far has been "you" being the actor, flying in a ship, not controlling them from afar with autopilots / NPCs. However the X-series is something I have always wanted to get into but something else always grabbed me (damn you Rust / Diablo 3 !!)
Appreciated - I haven't played the X-series so not only a foreign language but alien looking too
Anyway - what you're describing is fleet management : an interesting concept that could be introduced one day to ED but I doubt it. Their aesthetic so far has been "you" being the actor, flying in a ship, not controlling them from afar with autopilots / NPCs. However the X-series is something I have always wanted to get into but something else always grabbed me (damn you Rust / Diablo 3 !!)
the nice thing about x3 was you had options. You could play the whole game as flying and owning one ship as in elite all manually not using any of those things or build a huge fleet, get yourself 50 carriers to fly with you or do something else, whatever you chose. But even if you played it like one ship elite style and you wanted to get from point A to B and didn't feel like flying manually you could have assigned commands to the ship you're flying and just passively let the ship autopilot you and mess on the stock exchange market with stocks until it drove you to your destination or do something else. You could have driven a ship like in elite for example and plan a route where you want your auto pilot to stop, dock,what systems to avoid, ... it could automaticly buy the stuff when you docked you assigned it, or use any action you could assign if npc pilot would be driving it and retake manual control of it at any time you chose so. The options you could have picked were scripts and community made a lot of those scripts themselves and probably still makes them, cause there's always someone who finds another posibility of how it wants something to be done or hundreds of options just aren't making it done for him.
but x3 for todays standards looks terrible, regarding system size and graphics and building huge factory complexes was quite terribly done. But back in the day it was quite good.
But some of that stuff is already in elite, for example how turreted weapon acts, does your weapon fire in front or direct. Well there was just more of that and you could assign for every weapon individualy or in group what it does or how it's controlled, if it shoots target you have selected, biggest threat, support ships, ...
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Bounty Hunting: Well the bread n' butter for most players but essentially every RES is the same with slightly varying levels of difficulties and a different backdrop.
Combat zones: Endless waves or whatever cookie cutter factions are fighting each other, the off chance for a capital ship spawn.
Base Assaults: financially unrewarding
Minor Faction: they come in 5 flavors :The Criminals, the corporation, the nationalists/authoritarians, the democratic-agenda and the hippies.
Powerplay: The attempt to uphold a backer promise that a player or group of players could have an "impact" on the galaxy.
CQC: Died within months after release and without an substantial rewards that tie into the main game its probably going to stay that way.
A lot of work in progress methinks