How to deliver an in-game narrative (John Jameson)
- Thread starter Globusdiablo
- Start date
So, let's recap....
So far you've accused me of being passive-aggressive, condescending (twice), unconstructive, taking the "low road", baiting you, being boring and being irrelevant.
Because I made a post which contradicted your opinions.
Without any malice or sleight intended, I'd suggest you learn to deal with differing opinions without resorting to insults and personal attacks.
It's perfectly possible to disagree with somebody and have a thoughtful, interesting AND good-natured discussion about the topic.
You should try it sometime.
Let's just leave that point hanging, as we all know it to be true...
...and it's not necessarily a criticism...
This is fine, except that's not what's happening. As my previous post mentioned, most significant finds have almost always relied on bugs. This doesn't mean there isn't some credit to be given for the people who find at the very least the right planet, but the techniques used by players involve relying on bugs (e.g the search area for JJs ship was reduced because the pilot observed a texture glitch, which is indicitive of something non-procedural placed on a surface. First set of 101 Guardian ruin codex entries was obtained by open/pg mode glitches, and was impossible for Solo. Pre-scanner guardian sites were located by timing lag. Formadine Rift sites were narrowed down because loading the assets on approach within a few 100km caused a CTD).
There's a few things players have worked out with the power of hindsight, but it's still far from an exact science in those cases.
Compare that to the Thargoid Structures which, notwithstanding your perception of these mechanics, involve:
- Finding a TS, TP and TL
- Finding various listening posts/wrecks around the Pleiades, which are all visible within 1000Ls on scanners which have hints to a small selection of structures including one or two active ones
- Using the recovered signals with the TL to get a triangulation onto the next site, right down to it giving a laser-pointer to the exact location in that system
I don't expect everything to be that complicated, but that's an example of not needing any bugs or glitches, but still invest a considerable amount of effort, to produce a result. Sure, it still may be inaccessible to someone wanting to go on and "check something out" in a 30 minute game period, I honestly don't think making everything that accessible is a good idea. But there's a very clear path to be followed there, provided you have all the pieces of the puzzle. Again, some of those pieces are the result of "simply stumbling upon them" which shouldn't be the case when we have so many mechanics that could give us the nudge in that direction after "just playing the game" for a while.
But at the crux of most major discoveries going on these days is someone exploiting a glitch, and that sucks, both for the game and the people putting in the effort to discover these things. It's the equivalent of getting to the end of a really difficult game and facing off against the final tough boss, only to have it glitch on some terrain so you can happily dispatch it without any tactics.
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Scan the beacons and you will get a mail for each one. Read the mail and the audio log will play while you have that mail entry open.
Not so sure about the "easy" part there... recording the Thargoid Link sing and playing the video back over and over while trying to figure out if a sound was H or L and jotting it down in a notepad was hard. And I wouldn't have known how to trigger that or what to do with the results without closely following the Canonn thread, it's not remotely realistic for an independent player operating on their own to figure any of that out. Which stinks.
All that said, it was also, admittedly, extremely fun.
I actually don't mind some of these deep puzzles requiring collaboration... but I think a lot of the *content*, e.g. locations of unique sites, audio logs, etc. should all be very discoverable for individual CMDRs. There's even a tip-off mechanism in the game already that could theoretically point you to systems / planet coordinates where there's something to find, although it needs serious tuning (most of 3 years playing the game and I've never seen a SINGLE tip off, while those who stack&grind missions get so many they're bored of them).
It drives me crazy that there are dozens of unique locations with cool lore, hidden in a way that means I'll only find them through Google. Frankly I've had enough of it and refuse to play along anymore.
Yes please to all of this. There are a lot of mechanics that are really close to delivering, but not quite there! Keep your Engineers tuning and your Squadrons with motherships, this is what I was hoping to see in Beyond.
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I'm not a casual player but I still feel alienated by how inaccessible a lot of the lore content is. I don't mind having to work for it... but for goodness sakes, give me some in-game threads to pull on.
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My observation is that "youtube game features" outnumber gameplay mechanics pretty heavily in Elite.
I've seen some games where one part of the development house is far more productive than the other parts.
For example in some theme park mmo's the raid developers will produce content faster than the world versus world developers.
It seems like the puzzle/mini-story guys seriously outperform the core mechanics, primary narrative guys.
Galnet = ambiguous paragraph, Jameson crash site = compelling voice-acted narrative. Power play faction leaders = single jpeg, generation ships = fascinating stories with awesome voice acting.
I wish they'd flip the staffing and put the mini-story puzzle guys on the core game.
I've seen some games where one part of the development house is far more productive than the other parts.
For example in some theme park mmo's the raid developers will produce content faster than the world versus world developers.
It seems like the puzzle/mini-story guys seriously outperform the core mechanics, primary narrative guys.
Galnet = ambiguous paragraph, Jameson crash site = compelling voice-acted narrative. Power play faction leaders = single jpeg, generation ships = fascinating stories with awesome voice acting.
I wish they'd flip the staffing and put the mini-story puzzle guys on the core game.
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Just to clarify, the octal Thargoid Link and Thargoid Probe signals are quite different in sound to the Thargoid Sensor. I for one cannot understand the Thargoid Link/Probe signals and have had to live vicariously through others in that regard. But the morse in the Thargoid Sensor is much easier to hear. That said, some people claim to "clearly" hear the H/Ls in the octal.
I'm definitely happy to call it a grey-zone, not everyone is going to know or recognise octal or morse for sure. But even then I stick by the idea that only the UL provides any actual consequence in-game (finding other structures). It should really be the remit of "nice to haves" rather than controlling the crux of the puzzle.
Jenner
I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
The planet navigation system does need some TLC, yes. I also agree that content in the game is often times very obscure in-game, and that's why many people rely on out of game resources to locate and/or experience them. That's not ideal.
I'm pretty 'casual' too, even though I've been playing this game since alpha. I know the ropes and how to do most things, but I do recognize that delivering story content has always been something of a challenge for Frontier.
I'm pretty 'casual' too, even though I've been playing this game since alpha. I know the ropes and how to do most things, but I do recognize that delivering story content has always been something of a challenge for Frontier.
I don't ED currently is designed or intend to deliver story content.
My analogy is that it is a large Museum experience with POIs and interactive exhibits with a specific set of available interaction.
You visit the Museum over the years to see what new POIs and interactive exhibits have been added.
But this is fine with me. I didn't view the JJ crash site and audio log as a mechanism to deliver a narrative or story. It's just a POI.
This is unfortunate and agree that it sucks.
There isn't in-game tools for exploration and unraveling things.
So the suggestion for improvement is to add these tools to make it more accessible. I think accessibility is a worthy feature to have for ED.
Jenner
I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
Well there is truth to that. I mean, Elite is never going to be on the same level as Witcher or something as far as delivering story content. It's not that kind of game. I do sympathize with those who would prefer a little more than what we have at present, however. And I do absolutely think that ED needs to be able to deliver whatever story content it does choose to deliver in-game.
I completely agree with the OP. As far as story content delivery goes ED just doesn’t seem to deliver.
FDevs main in game, story delivery mode seems to be CGs or sometimes some specific item would pop up at a certain faction’s system. But most times the story delivery is made via YouTube, Reddit or Forums.
As a filthy casual none of these mechanics really appeal to me. Maybe some CGs. But by and large, I usually don’t get caught up in the story.
For me, the Salami story was the worst way to deliver story content to a “massively” multi-player, player base spread out across the world.
FDevs main in game, story delivery mode seems to be CGs or sometimes some specific item would pop up at a certain faction’s system. But most times the story delivery is made via YouTube, Reddit or Forums.
As a filthy casual none of these mechanics really appeal to me. Maybe some CGs. But by and large, I usually don’t get caught up in the story.
For me, the Salami story was the worst way to deliver story content to a “massively” multi-player, player base spread out across the world.
The Codex coming in 2018 worries me. In theory it sounds like a nice feature, but I fear that Frontier will simply use it to guide players to all of the hidden stuff in the game instead of developing new game mechanics which allow players to search for them via gameplay. I want tools that allow me to hunt and explore for things, not an achievement book that holds my hand and leads me to it all.
I agree with all of these.
1. The canonn, EDDB, INARA, Youtubers & Reddit posters are doing all the hard work. FD is just sitting back eating crumpets. They've got it figured out.
2. We can fly 10,000+ times the speed of light but we can't type in planet waypoints?
3. See 1 & 2
Side note about those bases people are "finding". Ive not tried any of those graphic hacks but I pretty much have to be almost crashing into it to see one. I'm out in the Rift area checking out some of those bases and the last one I was 1 degree off from where it was and I still couldn't see it.
This comes to mind.....
I hope FD doesn't use it as a shortcut to proper game design and mechanics.
I imagine basic info stuff like the new AX weapons, sensor fragments are or can be utilize as the equivalent of the previously termed 'unknown fragments' Palin is looking for.
I don't expect it to list out all the PoIs like the Cannon website nor the Engineer details in Inara.
I imagine the equivalent of CIVopedia in Civilization game franchise.
I am an advocate for better exploration tools such that even a 'casual' player can spend 1 hour in a system to pin point a PoI to investigate.
Example: I get that on planetary approach there are these blue circles pointing to POIs. It's not obvious enough for me to quickly figure it out (I'm not SRVing 10km radius to look for it; why can't we have ship-bases scanners or surface skimmers at least).
Any ways, the narrative is just background info for me. It's not like you can really do anything with them.
The JJ shipwreck is just a museum exhibit. It has informed point where you can scan the equivalent of a QR code to get info on the POI. One would imagine that the real shipwreck would have been hauled off already. Same goes for the Thargoid crash sites.
I agree. I don't think being a casual player is actually any part of the problem, a friend of mine plays almost every day and rarely knows about any of these discoveries because they don't follow reddit/forums/youtube. It's insanity that there's an in-game news delivery service (Galnet) that Fdev can update at a moments notice, and yet it's hardly ever used. Players are expected to use outside sources to keep themselves informed - while I think this is a great idea for some elements of gameplay, it's just crazy to do this for virtually every aspect of the game.
However, the good news is we've been told that next year Galnet is getting an update, and there's going to be a new "Codex" system - hopefully a combination of these will help to keep people actually playing the game up to date
