This is kind of where I find myself with Elite today. I have been playing less and less Elite lately and more of other games. With Elite I explore 90% of the time, maybe more, but Dear Lord exploration hasn’t changed since release, and it truly needs some updating and new content added. Horizons gave me hope in the beginning, with planetary landings I surely expected for there to be SOMETHING for deep space explorers to do on surfaces, but alas, other than hunt jumponium there is not. Nothing, nada, zilch. There is so much incredible potential for exploration in Elite yet they have completely ignored it so far, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon.
This frustrates me greatly, and I find myself wanting to play Elite less and less because of it.
I find exploring great fun in Starbound, so lately I’ve been playing that instead of Elite, mixed with a bit of good old Minecraft exploration too. And I’ll most likely be buying NMS next week because it looks like exploration is a huge part of the game, and rewarding. I’m not giving up on Elite or anything, but it may be sitting untouched for a while, and unless Season 3 promises some love for exploration I just might skip it entirely, and not buy another season until they spend some development time on the aspect of the game that I like to play: exploration.
Yes but *what* are you exploring? And *why*?
I've been playing ED since XBOX Public Preview. In that appx. 1 year time, they have added a LOT to exploration:
- planetary landings, which is technically, extremely well done but needs much better random encounters for explorers (the existing random encounters are super lame)
- jumponium
- the various UA and UP stuff, if you could say it's for explorers
- lots of new proc-gen nebulae
But more importantly ED has a galaxy (the Milky Way) that is a much more interesting subject to explore IMHO because I have learned so much about real life science and astronomy from this game. It is not just that I want to explore any old randomly generated space which feels generic. In ED I can explore my home! It is transcendental in a way that I could never feel from NMS, which is more like a fun acid trip than space exploration.
Why I enjoy exploration in ED is to discover something that might actually exist in our galaxy here. Game developers inevitably have no idea what kind of weird stuff I will enjoy doing in their game. Like how I really enjoyed organizing bookshelves in Oblivion, or how in Titanfall I particularly enjoyed luring people into an enclosed space where I would be clinging to the upper corner of the room with a shotgun. The devs just build an awesome playground and we choose our own adventure.
NMS got a lot of things right, like how you can uncover an alien language, catalog new species, name things, etc. There is plenty to geek out on. However you are getting hit with a big old crafting baseball bat in the face the entire time. It sucks, royally, to have the crap inventory space. There needs to be hundreds of slots. But these developers are so quintessentially British.. everything must have its little bin, we must micromanage the player, etc. Frontier did a similar thing with only 1000 capacity for crafting materials. Whyyyyy?! I know a modern computer can have a 64-bit integer. Do something with that so I can play the dang game!
But the thing about NMS is just the overall lack of quality it has. Textures on water = bad. The music may be random but it usually sucks and is just annoying as a result. I have seen the same exact plant fifty times now but it's a different species every time, due to what.. the color changed? Can't even tell. The ships may be random but most look like badly rendered garbage transport ships with some hoses sticking off random places. The ship handles not much different from Sega Afterburner II. Every time I find an alien civilization they have the same kind of obelisks... it's always an obelisk... I don't even have to look for it, it just autofinds it for me.
Cool but... I get the same feeling about NMS's procgen as I did about the proc-gen guns in Borderlands. Yeah, they said there were a bajillion possible guns, but really, there were far fewer, and mostly, they were exactly the same as each other. Then they give you crap for inventory space so you spend 90% of your time agonizing over what to sell or what to keep. For awhile there was novely and then before too long you'd basically seen it all. Now time will tell if NMS manages to keep the proc-gen surprising people or not.
Frankly what you will see with NMS once it hits PC, is that this was a game invented for the sole purpose (whether the devs knew it or not) of being hacked to all oblivion. Bethesda always left ways for players to get infinite inventory and they never patched it because LET THE PLAYERS PLAY. Come on. But these new British space games use online connectivity to police how we play games, even in solo mode, probably because in Britain, every 10 feet there is a CCTV camera and your domestic spying program puts NSA's PRISM to shame. So it's just how you roll: 1984 style. So they use online play in NMS not to let people play together but just to monitor, track, and control what everyone does and how much stuff everyone can have in their inventory.
But so far I have not been nearly as impressed with planetary exploration in NMS, despite all its bells and whistles, because ED feels REAL. I feel like I am actually on another planet with ED. I believe that the strength of British people is that they hate being shown up and they believe in never letting your opponent get the better of you from any angle. So NMS will force FD to buckle down and kick out the best updates we have ever seen, to the degree that exploration will be in for a huge boost. The UA/UP and barnacles stuff was just a taste of what is coming.