MULTICREW: Adam Woods describing MC during the Horizons' launch stream.

Expanding route plotting from 100 light-years to 1000.
Adding route filters.
Adding bookmarks.
Surface maps added to planets.
Showing surface material composition after completing a planetary scan.

Tons of times when Frontier has gone back and fleshed out features. Seriously.

- - - Updated - - -

I think we have differing ideas about what developing a feature actually means. For example....making a few more versions of the SRV for different purposes...like one for mining or heavy assault. I would consider that a major development of planetary landings. Or making wing based missions for the Wings update when it came out. You know....actual gameplay content. I mean bookmarks are nice and all, but they just don't cut it as a major gameplay feature and they probably should have been there from the beginning.
 
Should've could've would've. I take nothing FD say in any live stream as gospel or even entertain that what I'm hearing is in fact what is going to be there when it gets here.

Saying that I really do think FD are missing the boat by a long way by not adding SRV use in MC. That alone would have or will/would boost its popularity ten fold.
(and no I dont have stats to back that up, just going on the amount of people asking for it...)

As MC is it holds no interest for me, what it could have been or what it could be, does.
 
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Those are all pretty simple additions though IMHO, and are not really adding new depth/gameplay?


Case in hand, showing the %age breakdowns of surface materials? A true "improvement" of this gameplay would have been procedural distribution of elements on surface and rings, such that you could then scan and see which regions contain more/less of these percentages, so you could decide where to go to at least skew the dice a little in your favour of what you're after.

Then add procedural distribution of materials per asteroid, so you could then scan them and mine specific surfaces areas of an asteroid to again skew the dice in your favour. Then add in rare "resource hot spots" to surface materials or elements in rings, so while out exploring(?) you could find a rich zone of arsenic which significantly increases you dice throws for that, or a zone in a ring with a rich spot of palladium. Importantly, these would be stateful, so as you extra out of these zones, they are reduced, so once down to 0, they be gone and fall back to background levels.


Now, this is a deepening/improvement to an existing mechanics IMHO. While nice/useful, the addition of the backgruond %ages in a display, is little more than a nicety - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=258294&page=8&p=4007154&viewfull=1#post4007154

http://i.imgur.com/C7T6koq.gif http://i.imgur.com/5uiugni.png

But that isnt 'depth' either. Press button for heatmap, land on red zone, press button to mine. It adds one whole button and still no challenge. :)
 
But that isnt 'depth' either. Press button for heatmap, land on red zone, press button to mine. It adds one whole button and still no challenge. :)

imo it does not always have to be a challenge (though ideally there would be a skill added to mining), but being made to feel "involved" in a process is not always the same as it being hard. having a gradient of materials on a map after a scan and then landing down in a rich region and planting your mining "flag" there.

sure, its all trivial stuff, hardly complex, but still it would "feel" cooler imo than what we have now, would make me feel that i was involved in a process, and would be a worth while additionto the game in the future imo

ED IS the easiest elite game so far, by a long long way imo (if you do not consider save scumming a feature of the old games that is)..... but i am not especially bothered about that, because ED upto and including 2.2 is by far the best game in the series at making me "feel" like I am a space man rather than just playing a videogame
 
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imo it does not always have to be a challenge (though ideally there would be a skill added to mining), but being made to feel "involved" in a process is not always the same as it being hard. having a gradient of materials on a map after a scan and then landing down in a rich region and planting your mining "flag" there.

sure, its all trivial stuff, hardly complex, but still it would "feel" cooler imo than what we have now and would be a worth while addition in the future imo

Oh, I absolutely agree. But I dont think it is really fair to pretend that such an addition would be such massive revolutionary addition of 'depth'. It used to be completely blind: now you can check which planet to land on, so you have more agency. The next step would be indeed to have different regions on each planet, and scan for those. I'd love to see it, but I just dont agree with the prevailing idea that [whatever the next step is]=depth, [current addition]=shallow. For example:

Saying that I really do think FD are missing the boat by a long way by not adding SRV use in MC. That alone would have or will/would boost its popularity ten fold.

Suppose 10% of people interested in multiplayer have an interest in trying MC when it goes live (which seems very conservative). That would mean that apparantly every single cmdr interested in multiplayer, or even more than 100% of cmdrs with a more reasonable baseline estimate, would love to drive another dude's SRV. Its completely nonsensical.

Its been this way since launch: every single thing added is 'meh', but the very next step will be Awesome Deluxe. Never mind that 2.3 is so much beyond what we had in S1, we keep at the same 'just the next step' attitude. Which seems odd. I'm telling you: if we get the heatmap, it wil be 'if only we had a special SRV for mining'. Then it will be 'if only we had multicrew special SRV for mining', etc etc etc. :)
 
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But that isnt 'depth' either. Press button for heatmap, land on red zone, press button to mine. It adds one whole button and still no challenge. :)
I know what you mean, but the suggestion is for a modicum of effort, gameplay can be made more involved, immersive and potentially then even lead to immergent gameplay. To be fair to the example I made, it's made on the premise that a small amount of development time could at least give mining and exploration some more depth and merit and immersion, and that just maybe a new column of %ages isn't as high as we could imagine for material gathering, even with just a small development effort available.


Knowing I need material X, Y and Z which I can get from a planet... Currently I fly to the surface, anywhere, and drive around... With a procedural distribution, I can assess the surface and decide whether to go to a single spot to try and get all three, or instead go to multiple locations.

With procedural asteroids, with a rotating asteroid, do I try and hit just the rich resource areas, or not. Multi-crew mining might actually be given a boost with secondary crew able to help shoot at surface spots of higher content. Add a mining laser to a SLF and bingo, it's potentially then given some worth given its agility.

With stateful resource hot spots, if/when you find one, do you immediately get back home for your mining vesel and come out and mine the rich zone of Palladium yourself? With friends? Or give the location to a player groups interested in such thing, who then give you a single large payment (commission).


Personally I find all these things add "depth" at possibly a small development effort. ie:-
1) The procedural distributions would be very straight forward, and their skews on the "dice throws" an easy change. The trickiest thing would most likely just be the interface enhancements to give you/show you the distribution.
2) Resource Hot posts I'd envisage a simple bolton to (1), with the only real question being how tricky would it be to store/maintain these spots "state". I'd envisage the amount of data involved as trivial.

Yes, this example of procedural distribtion and resource hots spots does not add immense gameplay depth, it's instead meant to show how a modicum of development time, can at least make an attempt at making existing gameplay deeper (to some degree).
 
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If Season 3 is as the same model as season 2, I will wait until it is completed and see if it is worth it.

I don't think we'll get another season like Horizons. FD aren't stupid.
They know that asking people to pay up front for nebulous content that's lackluster when it eventually arrives isn't going to fly again.
There's already been rustlings regards this if you pay close attention to the livestreams.

I guess their choices are
  • Continue with the season model.
  • Release a traditional expansion (e.g. something like The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine)
  • Release DLCs

Continuing with the season model is risky as they burnt their bridge with Horizons. They may not get enough sales of the season pass to fund the cost of it's development and I think they know this going off FD's comments.
Releasing a traditional expansion would mean there's a dearth of no content updates for a considerable time while the expansion is developed. Risk would be that after all that work it wouldn't sell as much as FD liked.
Releasing DLCs would mean there's less time between 2.4 and future content drops, the risk would be less than a full expansion as they're not putting a lot of work into something that might not sell.

So I'd say the future is point releases sold separately to anyone without a LTEP. This hopefully will mean better updates from FD as they will really need to sell each DLC and provide quality rather than vaguely describing something at the start of a season, asking for as much as the cost of a full price game for it and then delivering lackluster updates because you've already got the customer's money and don't really need to try hard.
 
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This discussion supports my belief that FD are some of the greatest Visionaries in gaming. And also some of the worst coders.

They have great ideas.....but they dont have the programing skill to implement their vision (or make it run without crashing or disconnecting every 5 minutes).

They also have their priorities twisted. I read that FD had "a whole team working on the cmdr creator for over a year". This seemed like a gross misappropriation of resources considering how many other areas of the game could have benefited from that extra manpower(milticrew especially). But they saw the potential to make more money without actually providing anything meaningful or gameplay related(or fixing what was broken). So....dont worry......multicrew may be a shadow of what was promised......but they made sure you can buy a 5 dollar colored jacket for your cmdr.....and dont forget the tattoos.......SMH

Apparently this is the reality.
 
I don't think we'll get another season like Horizons. FD aren't stupid.
They know that asking people to pay up front for nebulous content that's lackluster when it eventually arrives isn't going to fly again.
There's already been rustlings regards this if you pay close attention to the livestreams.

I guess their choices are
  • Continue with the season model.
  • Release a traditional expansion (e.g. something like The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine)
  • Release DLCs

Continuing with the season model is risky as they burnt their bridge with Horizons. They may not get enough sales of the season pass to fund the cost of it's development and I think they know this going off FD's comments.
Releasing a traditional expansion would mean there's a dearth of no content updates for a considerable time while the expansion is developed. Risk would be that after all that work it wouldn't sell as much as FD liked.
Releasing DLCs would mean there's less time between 2.4 and future content drops, the risk would be less than a full expansion as they're not putting a lot of work into something that might not sell.

So I'd say the future is point releases sold separately to anyone without a LTEP. This hopefully will mean better updates from FD as they will really need to sell each DLC and provide quality rather than vaguely describing something at the start of a season, asking for as much as the cost of a full price game for it and then delivering lackluster updates because you've already got the customer's money and don't really need to try hard.

Well, I think FDev earns more in skins and ship kits rather than the game itself.
People are so hype with the ship kits.

I hope they opted to a traditional expansion so that they have more time to revisit the old features (if they could)
 
I think we have differing ideas about what developing a feature actually means. For example....making a few more versions of the SRV for different purposes...like one for mining or heavy assault. I would consider that a major development of planetary landings. Or making wing based missions for the Wings update when it came out. You know....actual gameplay content. I mean bookmarks are nice and all, but they just don't cut it as a major gameplay feature and they probably should have been there from the beginning.

Yes. It sounds like we do have differing ideas.
 
In 15th of December, 2015 (MC was planned to come in Fall/Winter of 2016), during the Horizons' Launch live stream, Adam talks with Ed about Multicrew. In it, MC is described to be like this:

  • Max 4 per ship, limited by seats:
    (1) Helm (piloting & fixed weapons),
    (2) Fire control (turrets/weapons),
    (3) Tactical (shields, countermeasures, sensors, targets prioritization),
    (4) Engineering (power management, repairs).

Would anyone actually enjoy sitting in a ship you don't control except for managing the power and rebooting/repairing damaged modules? I can sort of see the appeal of 1 person flying, 1 person shooting. But more than at most 3 players on the same ship will result in some very boring gameplay for one of them (or all of them if jobs were divided equally). More roles for players would be great if we had huge capital ships duking it out, but we have mostly agile dogfighters and combat with engineered ships lasts just a couple of minutes in most cases.
That said this entire multicrew update is wasted on me, since I doubt I'll ever use this feature as I don't play with friends. But I suppose I'm happy for the players who do look forward to it.
 
Would anyone actually enjoy sitting in a ship you don't control except for managing the power and rebooting/repairing damaged modules? I can sort of see the appeal of 1 person flying, 1 person shooting. But more than at most 3 players on the same ship will result in some very boring gameplay for one of them (or all of them if jobs were divided equally). More roles for players would be great if we had huge capital ships duking it out, but we have mostly agile dogfighters and combat with engineered ships lasts just a couple of minutes in most cases.
That said this entire multicrew update is wasted on me, since I doubt I'll ever use this feature as I don't play with friends. But I suppose I'm happy for the players who do look forward to it.

They missed the obvious role of a chicken soup vending machine maintenance technician.
 
Would anyone actually enjoy sitting in a ship you don't control except for managing the power and rebooting/repairing damaged modules? I can sort of see the appeal of 1 person flying, 1 person shooting. But more than at most 3 players on the same ship will result in some very boring gameplay for one of them (or all of them if jobs were divided equally). More roles for players would be great if we had huge capital ships duking it out, but we have mostly agile dogfighters and combat with engineered ships lasts just a couple of minutes in most cases.
That said this entire multicrew update is wasted on me, since I doubt I'll ever use this feature as I don't play with friends. But I suppose I'm happy for the players who do look forward to it.

Well there are games out there that have multicrew gameplay which players actually enjoy.
E.g. Pulsar Lost Colony
http://store.steampowered.com/app/252870/

Lots of people enjoy the different roles in Pulsar since it has well developed roles.
If ED multicrew had well developed roles for Engineering, Tactical, Navigation etc... then no people wouldn't be bored.

FD admit that multicrew is as it is because of time/resources not that the roles they planned (and announced) would be in this update weren't fun.
 
Why the first thing what i got on mind was No Man's Sky?
Maybe Sean moved to FDev ;)

What we should learn from these lessons?
NEVER PREORDER

And not support any KS actions. If someone does not have money for a business, then he should not do a business. Good product will sell itself, however a good promise is not a good product.
People is a creature who will working better if they get a money after work done, than before.

Let imagine a situation - You are leaving a car at a mechanic. Do You pay after he do his work or before?
If you are buying a milk, then you pay before the cow is milked, or after you take it from the shop in bottle?
 
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