Did FD just retconn all the lore when they made ED? In FE2 your ships speed is not limited by any handwavium. You can use your main engine (not hyperdrive and it doesn't have "supercruise") to accelerate to whatever speed you like. There was no lore that capped the top speed of your ship.
Just curious - was that a single player game? I didn't play it, so I don't know for sure, but there are a large number of things that can be done in a single player game that cannot be done in a multi-player game. If one is able to continuously increase their speed with no real upper limit, then the Combat could very easily devolve into a situation of long stern chases. This isn't to even mention the NPC's being able to do this. Does that sound like it would be fun, or have the possibility of feeling epic? Frontier wanted dogfights, and jousting - something akin to what you see in Star Wars, hence the upper speed limits, and flight model. We can talk about those speeds being too slow (and I would definitely be on board, it's hard for me to consider that my car goes faster than a lot of our ships), but past Elite games really aren't relevant to this particular topic (ship speed and flight model) if they were single player.
This thread is about Exploration, though:
I am curious as to what people think new scanners/scanning mechanics would add to what is currently available in the game. I would say that shortening the time it takes to find things is quite obvious, so what things outside of that?
What would you expect/want to find out by Beagle Point? Does it make sense to find whatever it is out there?
What would you expect/want to be able to do with whatever you found that you cannot currently do?
If they did add (or have already added) something like a Crystalline Entity, would it be ok if it nuked your ship and 6 months worth of Exploration data? Would you really be ok with that rebuy screen?
If they added environmental hazards on planets, would you be ok looking at that rebuy screen knowing that you just lost 6 months of data? I actually think this one is coming at some point.
How often do you expect/want to actually find anything at all?
I have seen a number of ideas in a number of these threads, and while some are really good, most have clearly not been fully considered. I myself have had ideas that fall into both categories, but the issue has more ramifications than a lot of us realize. Some things that people are wanting just aren't feasible because they would be trees that have too many branches.
I would very much like my Exploration experience to be something similar to Star Trek. You get to a place, you find something neat, cool things happen, I can do fun things, maybe some danger, etc. This just isn't feasible, though.
I would also very much like to be in my SRV on a planet, get a notification that a storm is coming, and have to race to get back to my ship (and up out of the storm) before bad things happen. I think there are a lot of people who would also like this kind of experience, but there are also a lot of people who would find it to be annoying, at the very least. Different strokes.
Whether people like it or not, Exploration in this game as it currently stands is pretty close to what actual exploration entails. Except, explorers of our past didn't have Netflix, and current explorers probably don't either. If you disagree, then I think you are perhaps romanticizing exploration a bit too much. Perhaps Frontier agrees, and as such, feels that Exploration is in a good place.
I would say this though - the sandbox is very big, and I do feel that there is a valid point to be made regarding the speed with which we can Explore, and I do think that Frontier should do something that makes sense to address this. The new Engineered scanners are a start, but more is needed.
Riôt
