Should Frontier be more open about its development plans
- Thread starter Ghural
- Start date
Exactly this. Plenty of devs post up comprehensive roadmaps for future game development, it's a wonderful thing which can invigorate and be inclusive to the game's community when done with respect to the players. Just look at games like Kerbal Space Program, or Minecraft, or American Truck Simulator to see examples of very transparent devs who keep their players very well informed on roadmaps and future content to look forward to.
Hype isn't a bad thing when done with respect, in fact it can fuel enthusiasm and community greatly. Frontier could use a little of both.
No, it was sold as 3 completely separate paid seasons, right from the very beginning of development.
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I'll tell you what I know about commander creator.
It is, a lot of people will be disappointed.
I am a long time user of Poser. To get good results takes a lot of work and only you will see it.
It will be fun to use it for a while but I cannot see may people using it a lot.
Shameless plug.
Here is an image using Poser I collaborated in with a friend.
It is Science Fiction.
A scene where the kid first meets the Scorpions, from the book Dhalgren.
You are disappointed with the Commander Creator already. Maybe if Frontier posted more detail and design about the Commander Creator, you could feel doubly disappointed!
Lies.
"telling us absolutely nothing about the future of the game"
The headline features for the seasons are right there on the Frontier website, there are Q&As, there are beta periods for each milestone release with no NDAs for anyone involved (unlike SC). It's all done right in the open, warts and all. Not one single planned feature has been dropped since release.
Maybe the OP does have a point though and maybe I'll take the bait - perhaps Frontier ought to hire a tragically bad film director and his failed hollywood actress ex-wife, along with a morbidly obese one-eyed semi-literate buffoon with a weird speech impediment selling pictures of spaceships for a game that's three years overdue, and we can finally have a forum filled with empty meaningless hype followed by sheer disappointment after each release.
The better argument that the OP and others could make, and the one I would make, is that during early development and into the first year after launch, there was direct developer involvement with the community on the forum followed by a couple of clear moments when this was quite obviously shut down by Frontier. I remember two clear examples of this.
However - given the atmosphere of the forum right now and the meaningless argumentative drivel and demands, I could not imagine anyone managing a studio telling their people anything other than "don't even go there".
I don't see a single post on here right now regarding the recent Dav Stott video. There hasn't been a video with that level of detail in a long time. What Dav Stott gets to see in the BGS sounded absolutely amazing, and there is an important and obvious conversation to be had around why the client isn't delivering this same excitement that Dav gets to see - or where someone like me needs to look, or what players are perhaps missing.
The fact that Dav's video isn't being discussed, is a clear signal to Frontier that producing detailed content like that probably isn't worth doing for this particular forum community.
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Let me ask you a question and then I'll tell you your answer, and we can have a fruitful and meaningful debate.
I definitely don't want constant hype like NMS or SC produced. Nor a super detailed road map of features, half of which change and the other half which get cut. I would like more out of the newsletter though. They used to show us little tidbits of development. Tease some small things which were close to being released, and just communicate what's going on in the offices. I always looked forward to it. But it's been getting lazier and lazier. The tidbits and sneak peaks have stopped entirely. Now it's just a copy/paste from the previous weeks GalNet and a few player submitted articles that don't mean anything to anyone else. Oh look, CMDR Blahblahblah is driving his SRV on a brown planet. Yippie.
Gonna hop on the wagon here and say I'd love to see a monthly "Here's what we're planning for the next 30 days...". I'll even accept the disclaimer: "What is planned and what comes to pass may not be the same".
Nope.
Play with what you've got, not what you're getting.
You know people would only complain about it(whatever is coming,) before it even gets implemented, or start saying "I'm not going to play/buy the game until X is released in version Y.Y"
Also, think of how much less hype there would be around things like Alien Interdiction if we all knew it was coming out at approximately <date> instead of everyone losing their sh_t when it did actually happen
I'd love to know everything now, because I'm human, but I look at it like a movie; If you tell me everything that's going to happen, the movie loses a lot.
Play with what you've got, not what you're getting.
You know people would only complain about it(whatever is coming,) before it even gets implemented, or start saying "I'm not going to play/buy the game until X is released in version Y.Y"
Also, think of how much less hype there would be around things like Alien Interdiction if we all knew it was coming out at approximately <date> instead of everyone losing their sh_t when it did actually happen
I'd love to know everything now, because I'm human, but I look at it like a movie; If you tell me everything that's going to happen, the movie loses a lot.
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That's how I feel too but perhaps it's simply less dispiriting for Frontier to wait until they're happy with it in-house before opening it up to constructive criticism (or more usually, abuse) on the forums.
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Have to say I'm on the fence too. As much as I love update/dev news, it's obviously best practice to keep schtum for PR/expectation management (two nasty terms) reasons. Big part of the problem is it's easy to use one's intuition/gut reaction to evaluate an expected feature rather than waiting to actually test it out. A general outline of where we're headed in the next quarter/half/year would still be more than welcome though. We're a little too in the dark for my liking, even for a space sim.
Wait, are you being a poser poser?
I had a bash at making a Terry avatar in MakeHuman a while ago. The results were rather hilarious/poor:
Wait, are you being a poser poser?
I had a bash at making a Terry avatar in MakeHuman a while ago. The results were rather hilarious/poor:
I don’t think anyone wants to know everything, and certainly surprises like alien encounters and such should never be released prematurely. However, a basic roadmap of planned upcoming features would be very nice. 2.3 is still very secretive and we know absolutely nothing about 2.4 even though we’ve already paid for it. That’s not a great relationship to have with your paying customers who are keeping the game alive.
For example, Frontier has been saying for two years now that they’d like to give exploration mechanics some development time. When? Is it even planned or scheduled? What are their concepts and thoughts on it? Do they like any of the community suggestions? We know absolutely bupkis about Frontier’s plans to improve exploration, or if they even actually have any such plans. Such behavior is not conducive to positive morale, especially when you have a large percentage of your playerbase desperately desiring such improvements. Even a smathering of information could go a very long way to improving player happiness.
I don't draw that connection, where we are somehow entitled to know the plans just because we bought it in it's current state - with pending updates. I got exactly what I paid for.
I get what you're saying, but to me the bold bit answers the other questions you asked... 'Like to' means not now, but they'd like to. As a side bar, I don't think the 'large player group' you're talking about is as large as you think. It may be on the forum, but with 7447 people playing in just the Steam version, right this second, and 2.1 million units sold - the forums, while vocal, don't account for large percentages of anything
[edit] Sorry if that reads blunt, that isn't how I mean to type. I just mean, as I said, I think people should just play the game they have, not the one they're getting. We can alway revisit, and I see plenty of threads about people coming back after a break and applauding the updates since the last time they played. I agree that any bug related fixes should be advised
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Yeah, nobody expects FD to keep an entire open book on things, as sometimes surprises are nice and important to the game's overall mystery.
However, a continual and relatively vague stream of information from the developers would give a nice amount of insight into what they are doing, even if we can't guess the content of it all. It could be something as simple as every week they pick 3 guys from the dev teams at random and ask each one for a single sentence or a screenshot on what they are up to, as it would give us a vague idea of what's coming but without spoiling much of the details.
For example, explorers would love to hear Devs complaining about simple things such as they haven't studied atmospheric chemistry this much since highschool or that they never know how much effect bacterial life has on planetary geology, as it would let us know that at very least the Devs are working on atmospheres or that they are planning to simulate microbial effects on surface minerals.
Would also generate large amounts of discussion on the forums as every week we will have people trying to figure out whatever the Devs are likely to be working on based on clues of varying degrees of crypticness.
Oh yes. I've been using Poser since I got a free copy in a magazine in the 20th Century. Then I used that to upgrade cheaply.Wait, are you being a poser poser?
It was rendered using PovRay.
I don't know. It is full of character which can be better than bland.