We were promised atmospheric planetary landings

[BurnyBurns]

So landing on interesting, atmospheric worlds is probably at the botton-end of their to-do list.

Frontier is a company. What does a company do? Sell products, earn money, feed employees. Atmospheric planets, space legs etc. are all sellable addon material. 'Goids in their current form, are material of an addon they already sold to probably most people who're interested and therefore offer limited potential to earn more money.

Unless they want Elite to slowly fade out, it'll be hardly at the bottom of their priorities list. Thing is, we have no idea how far along they are and how long they take to develop certain features. If Horizons updates are anything to go by however, potentially longer than they'd like themselves.


Unless management decides to let Elite fade out or that atmospheric planets and space legs won't be a profitable investment of dev effort, we'll be sold these features before long. Question seems to be more about "when".

 

[Enderby]

Frontier is a company. What does a company do? Sell products, earn money, feed employees. Atmospheric planets, space legs etc. are all sellable addon material. 'Goids in their current form, are material of an addon they already sold to probably most people who're interested and therefore offer limited potential to earn more money.

Unless they want Elite to slowly fade out, it'll be hardly at the bottom of their priorities list. Thing is, we have no idea how far along they are, how long they take to develop certain features. If Horizons updates are anything to go by however, potentially longer than they'd liek themselves.

Too late can sometimes be as bad as never at all.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

The biggest barrier to atmospheric planetary landings, isn't lack of devs, or lack of willingness to do so, but lack of decent enough equipment throughout the player base. Simulating a variety of planetary environments with randomly generated aliens, flora and fauna and whatnot to the level of graphical/audio/physics level that ED players want would cook the average home computer and be impossible on a console.

No Man's Sky, Mass Effect Andromeda, Osiris New Dawn all would like to have a word with you. Also please stop with that console bashing unless you're tightly familiar with PS4 / XBox One architecture. They are quite powerful machines, not quite as the PC crowd which advances faster, but still powerful and also dedicated to gaming.

 

[BurnyBurns]

Too late can sometimes be as bad as never at all.

Too late to you may be early enough for everybody else or too late for them as well. I don't know and without a crystal ball, you probably don't either. The only thing we can probably assume at this point is: If Frontier had more sellable addons ready, they'd not be hiding it and sitting it out just out of spite. They'd sell them to us or at least advertise a release to support eventual sales.

What are we lamenting then? That we can't have things right now? We can just as well take our HOTAS and see what we can do with them in any of the other available Sims (not space, flight sims in general), to come back to Elite in two years or three to see what has happened since. We won't speed up their progress much anyway and the other Sim devs won't complain to get your money if it's burning a hole in your pocket and you can't throw it at Frontier for an addon.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

And now FD is saying it's too hard, that it's "extremely difficult." Well, I don't care how difficult you believe it is, hire the right people and get it done. We want atmospheric planetary landings. We want flora and fauna. We want to be able to scan them and obviously kill them (what's the point of leaving them alive?) We want to find primitive cultures and corrupt their society. We want to find advancing civilizations on the verge of deep space travel and cripple their research so they can't progress. Who wants competition? Right?

So, FD; the only thing I want to hear from you is "we are releasing atmospheric planetary landings. We have hired quite a few people to specifically address the difficulty of creating this advanced content, and we hope to have a release in the near future."

Make it happen.

we ARE promised them...... but it was always going to be as an optional paid for DLC a number of years down the line.

i will admit, i do not think anyone expected the progress to be at the pace it is now... but this is not a problem unique to ED... SC was launching in 2014 remember

I fully expected to be digging into season 3 by now, as did many others here. it was not to be, and it would seem after season 2 the next few major patches will be aimed at improving the features already in the game rather than adding new (which imo is a good thing)

with all this in mind imo we wont be seeing any all new content until mid 2018 (total guess) - and even then it may not be atmopheric landings, as there is ship boarding, EVA and getting out of our ships on planet surfaces which are also on the roadmap at some point.

 

[Aashenfox]

Fdev, please, please ignore these requests that have nothing to do with fixing the core mechanics, I wouldn't have even bought horizons if it wasn't needed to accept/stack a decent number of missions. What this game needs is development of...

* PvE mode
* Piracy career options
* PvE mode
* Meaningful multiplayer encounters of significant difficulty
* PvE mode
* Meaningful deterrents for griefing in open
* PvE mode
* Missions which have some basis in lore or obvious storyline, rather than a means to make money and rep in a robotic way.
* PvE mode
* Player guilds
* PvE mode
* Cargo storage (make it expensive, I don't care)
* PvE mode

What you can please just forget about...

* Multi crew
* Other planetary landings
* CQC
* Power Play
* Thargoids, if I'm honest, bring them back later, when the core game is better

Thank you!

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

The biggest barrier to atmospheric planetary landings, isn't lack of devs, or lack of willingness to do so, but lack of decent enough equipment throughout the player base. Simulating a variety of planetary environments with randomly generated aliens, flora and fauna and whatnot to the level of graphical/audio/physics level that ED players want would cook the average home computer and be impossible on a console.

i beg to differ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlKz6r1uCfw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bOFpptP0sY

and the one half here love to hate on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlV3nYxuTZw

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

i beg to differ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlKz6r1uCfw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bOFpptP0sY

Agreed. There are no hardware limitations at the moment for PG generated atmospheric planets and that includes the consoles.

 

[Zebaoth]

Regarding earthlikes, well yes, I expect this to be a long time down the road.

Well they better hurry.
Release has been in december 2014.
We're almost 3 years into their 10 year plan.

They're going to run out of time by that rate.

 

[Aashenfox]

As an amateur (sic: crappy) developer, I cannot see us EVER landing on earthlikes, The coding effort blows my mind, and to keep it in line with other elements of elite (you'd have to have a model where the gas created friction so if you came in too fast, you'd melt, just like reality), you'd have to have cities that could be flown over or even down to street level, there's also no reason a spaceship could not fly underwater, so there's that to consider as well.

Please, I beg you, don't ask for this, ask for things that will make more of a difference to the core game.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

If Frontier had more sellable addons ready, they'd not be hiding it and sitting it out just out of spite. They'd sell them to us or at least advertise a release to support eventual sales.

if you can't throw it at Frontier for an addon.

we ARE promised them...... but it was always going to be as an optional paid for DLC a number of years down the line.

i will admit, i do not think anyone expected the progress to be at the pace it is now... but this is not a problem unique to ED... SC was launching in 2014 remember

I fully expected to be digging into season 3 by now, as did many others here. it was not to be, and it would seem after season 2 the next few major patches will be aimed at improving the features already in the game rather than adding new (which imo is a good thing)

with all this in mind imo we wont be seeing any all new content until mid 2018 (total guess) - and even then it may not be atmopheric landings, as there is ship boarding, EVA and getting out of our ships on planet surfaces which are also on the roadmap at some point.

I am of the same mind. They don't have anything ready because Horizons snail pace hopefully indicates that they used up time and crew to port to consoles and release planet coaster. If not and it was due to problems in the engine, bye bye Elite: Dangerous, hello Elite: Deadly.

I also don't have a problem with purchasing a DLC at a full price AAA but only if this DLC delivers. Horizons didn't deliver, they dissapointed. The ages old mantra "we do not preorder" should be applied to it too, but I was taken by the hype train and impulse bought.

As for "new content when" I hope to see some kind of roadmap promising things I can wait for, otherwise the game would probably get deleted from my harddrive for now. I also hope that with console ports outta the way, we can expect rapid development. If not... #sadpanda.

 

[tafkabb]

As an amateur (sic: crappy) developer, I cannot see us EVER landing on earthlikes, The coding effort blows my mind, and to keep it in line with other elements of elite (you'd have to have a model where the gas created friction so if you came in too fast, you'd melt, just like reality), you'd have to have cities that could be flown over or even down to street level, there's also no reason a spaceship could not fly underwater, so there's that to consider as well.

Like I posted in this thread already, they did all that twenty years ago. Over land, under water, through towns, all in the same craft. The only difference being, it wasn't procedurally generated. That was on a PS1 where the clock cycle can be measured in minutes

 

[Aashenfox]

I'd happily pay a subscription if they would spend the money making the core game better rather than tacking on mechanics that only 10% of players want.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

I'd happily pay a subscription if they would spend the money making the core game better rather than tacking on mechanics that only 10% of players want.

I think it's quite a bit higher than 10%. I would imagine the bulk of the Explorers would appreciate such a facility.

 

[Aashenfox]

Like I posted in this thread already, they did all that twenty years ago. Over land, under water, through towns, all in the same craft. The only difference being, it wasn't procedurally generated. That was on a PS1 where the clock cycle can be measured in minutes

And tell me, was that in the original design and release of the game back then? Or was it an afterthought, like now? Can you imagine the coding effort required to land through an atmosphere in a realistic way, expecting the same physical and graphical fidelity with which the rest of the game is represented?? I can, and it literally blows my mind. Do you really want that much effort dedicated to THAT, at this point in the game's life cycle? That's all I'm saying, that the resources would be better directed elsewhere at the current time. I do have an issue with people asking for results on pie-in-the-sky promises, when there are so many aspects so much more desreving of Fdev's attention, such as PvE content that isn't deliver this or kill that, and piracy as a career.

I think it's quite a bit higher than 10%. I would imagine the bulk of the Explorers would appreciate such a facility.

If they knew what was involved, I don't think they would. Especially explorers who need their 'game' fleshed out nearly as much as pirates.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Well they better hurry.
Release has been in december 2014.
We're almost 3 years into their 10 year plan.

They're going to run out of time by that rate.

There is no ten year plan. They hope to continue to support the game for at least ten years, hopefully longer. There is plenty of time.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

If they knew what was involved, I don't think they would. Especially explorers who need their 'game' fleshed out nearly as much as pirates.

It's a non-trivial task yes, but it's far from insurmountable. Just look at NMS. It consists of practically nothing but landing on atmospheric planets. The trick will be making it suitably Elite-y.

There is no ten year plan. They hope to continue to support the game for at least ten years, hopefully longer. There is plenty of time.

Also, plans are (or should be) flexible. Anyone who rigidly sticks with a plan they conceived {mumble} years in the past is either very, very right or very, very wrong.

 

[Aashenfox]

It's a non-trivial task yes, but it's far from insurmountable. Just look at NMS. It consists of practically nothing but landing on atmospheric planets. The trick will be making it suitably Elite-y.

Agree completely, just asking for them to leave it til later, after some of the more important issues have been addressed. As another said, I expect rapid improvements now the console ports are done. By the way, NMS is NOT representative of what we are asking for here, it was the same planet you landed on every time.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I'd happily pay a subscription if they would spend the money making the core game better rather than tacking on mechanics that only 10% of players want.

Need some citation of the 10% please. I strongly suspect there are different teams working on the planet tech and the core gameplay improvements that we know are coming anyway. Also Frontier need to sell expantions otherwise there will be no ED down the road. I am just hoping that when they do sell the expansion it will be fully featured.

 

[Zebaoth]

There is no ten year plan. They hope to continue to support the game for at least ten years, hopefully longer. There is plenty of time.

DB also said this:
"We don't want it to be a dull experience, where you just go down to get essentially the exact same experience wherever you land." about landable planets.

https://youtu.be/EM0Gcl7iUM8?t=131

And that's exactly where we're at right now, beigified, all terrain looking the same except ice worlds.