Your Top 5 (and only 5) Wishes and/or Fixes for the game

[IndigoWyrd]

A few of the things I would want I know exceed what can be done, but I'll throw them out there anyways.

*1. Truly seamless transitions from station/outpost/installation hanger to space, to supercruise, to hyperspace, to planetary surface. That is, no more loading screens, or cleverly designed loading screens.

*2. Deformable terrain. Pock-marks from missile fire or explosive rounds on the ground. The ability to tunnel through a mountain, rather than going over or around it.

3. Beta testing that actually includes all the content of an update to ensure it actually works.

4. Fixed, not relocated, bugs.

5. Atmospheric Landing.

* These things exceed Cobra's capabilities, in its current incarnation, but a full engine overhaul is an extreme process to say the least.

Looking forward to when I no longer get : plug my hotas in, start ED up, and for a split second wonder why i'm not controlling the menu with it... before realising yet again that I have to go in and remap ALL my keybinds again for 3rd time randomly in a month.

(anyone else have that issue?, anyone know what causes it?)

You've plugged it in to a different USB port and Windows thinks it's a different device. If USB space is at a premium, I suggest investing the $5 in a reasonably decent USB hub and leaving your HOTAS plugged in.

 

[Funny]

Complete rebalance of income vs risk, to actually scale better into the endgame and be fun.

 

[andrak]

1. Remove all placeholders (USS, POI, shootable rock piles on planet surfaces, weaksauce mission board)

2. Make galactic changes have player interaction. If station takeovers are happening create a war zone around stations with objectives. If thargoids attack stations let us see it and defend against it.

3. Obey your own rules! Instant telepresence anywhere in the galaxy to another ship but we still can't be paid without returning to the mission giver. Weightless, magic pockets of materials that follow us around even in death but we lose our crew member and all exploratiom data. Stop with the inconsistency, arcade horse crap and breaking of immersion.

4. Remove or lessen RNG. Give players agency in tracking down what they want with an array of scanners, with detailed planetary scans showing material hot spots.

5. Give us a place to call home like a megaship or ground settlement. Let us build it up, pay for overpriced cosmetics that you are now so big on, let it generate small amounts of income or materials and provide some nice conveniences with appropriate credit sinks.

 

[GunnerBill]

These people have a third fire button, I only think it's fair that we have that too.

 

[V.Shepard]

1) QOL Revamping of modules (making scanners as part of the grades - A grade has all the fixings, E grade at least lets you see what's in the area) and having docking be a menu toggle.
2) More robust player communication mechanics as well has improved information sifting in the menus. When I'm in VR it kills the immersion to take off the goggles just so I can go to second screen to google basic stuff.
3) A ground-up rethink on mission structure and design, and especially for Engineer requirements and unlocks. I wish we could do quests to unlock tiers instead of grinding. (Note: if you're just giving me a fetch quest, you're doing it wrong.)
4) Planetary navigation and bookmarks
5) More in-depth lore delivery via planet audio with regional differences. Think something like the BBC: deep in the black you old get GALNET Galactic service, but in the bubble you hear about the Empire or Federation. No one cared about Salome because she existed only in wiki entries.

6) Integrate CQC into Open with "Arena" systems where you can either do the ladder with like-for-like combat and the option to "bring your own" with relaxed rebuys. I'd love to do a slugfest in my T10 or a knife fight in my Imperial Eagle, but I have no desire to be That Jack4r$3 Murder Hobo.

 

[Hellakitty]

5. Give us a place to call home like a megaship or ground settlement. Let us build it up, pay for overpriced cosmetics that you are now so big on, let it generate small amounts of income or materials and provide some nice conveniences with appropriate credit sinks.

This, absolutely this.

Not only because I'd absolutely love it and I'm a marketers wet-dream, I'm so weak when it comes to cosmetics and buy everything, but the way the community in general goes gaga over new paintpacks and shipkits, I believe Fdev would make a killing on it, while also giving players a reason to log in other than doing the latest goldrush or whatever.

I'm very surprised they haven't gone down this avenue yet. I'd be less surprised if one of the paid content releases we get this year is some iteration of it.

 

[Oss133]

1. Sortable/Groupable modules in the modules panel.

2. The ability to group and/or sort the modules in the modules panel.

3. Give us the power to rearrange the modules in the modules panel.

4. Provide the facility to group the modules together in the modules panel.

5. Jennifer Aniston

 

[swiftsure]

1. Like others have mentioned - a purchasable carrier for individuals, that can carry our ships and use as a home
2. Space legs to walk around the carrier and ships!
3. Cockpit customisation, with NPC crew in the seats etc.
4. Open PVE mode or PVE flag for open.
5. Atmospheric landings.

 

[CMDR Yates]

1. More diverse missions, with more natural branching and chaining, and more realistic social simulation. I want more missions to arise from non-mission board stuff. For example, consider escape pods: rescue some and maybe one of the survivors will later offer you a revenge mission to kill their attacker; or one of them is a wealthy businesswoman whose husband didn't make it and she wants to pay you a lot of money to drop his ashes into a distant black hole. Just more of the unexpected, more inspiration. Mission details should fuel the imagination to flesh out the sense of a living galaxy, not undermine it with formulaic text and rigidly predictable mission formats.

2. More exploration tools and content. Scanners should give you heat maps of areas of potential geological interest, or areas where potential anomalies are detected. Volcanism etc. is far too difficult to find currently, and crashed ships/cargo far too easy to just stumble on: randomly spawning all over the place as you drive around in the SRV. I reckon we should be detecting these things from orbit (not precisely, but seeing areas of high and low probability), then flying down and narrowing the search using the finer tools like the radar circles and wave scanner. Planetary scan -> heatmap zone -> radar signal (blue circle) -> wave scan signal - that seems like the obvious workflow for detecting surface POIs, and it would be much more involving than either scouring surfaces for hours in your ship looking for geology or pointing your SRV in any random direction to find cargo. While out exploring, we should also be rewarded for closer scans of certain parts of planets (geological sites, areas of high mineral content, life signs) to give it more variety and stop exploration being all about pointing the ship at distant dots. Maybe even some missions coming through from the Pilot's Federation while we're out in the black, tipping us off that there's an interesting body they want scanned in a nearby system, for extra rewards. It also wouldn't hurt to have some rare, low-danger enemies to fight out there: for example, metal-eating void life living in planetary rings, or some Von Neumann exploration probes with basic defences that you can kill to steal their data.

3. More ships including old favourites from game lore. I'd like a Zorgon Panther Clipper that barely fits on the large pad, turns twice as slowly as the next most lumbering ship but bristles with weapons, and fits more cargo than the Cutter. I'd like to see that military Asp Gunship with more medium hardpoints, a tankier hull, and a fighter hangar, albeit with maybe a reduced FSD range (but still like the fourth or fifth longest in the game, so we can use the fighters for tearing up canyons while out exploring). What about the limited edition Saud Krueger FDL? Also, I'd like more small ships to bring back the sense of scale with all the new, big ones being added recently. Maybe a Krait Starstriker (based on the original dinky Krait), an Ophidian multipurpose yacht (from The Dark Wheel), a standalone fighter based on a beefed-up Taipan. I'm not adverse to seeing multiple ships fitting almost the same role with just minor variations, kinda like how we have cars from different manufacturers vying for the same market share: even if have little reason to "upgrade" from one to another, just seeing more variation in models flying around would help the universe feel more alive.

4. AI that can handle driving on the surface and flying in close quarters. This is why we don't have AI SRVs and tanks at surface sites and starports, and the lack of them makes these places feel empty and dead, IMO. I want to see maintenance vehicles driving around planetary ports, lorries hauling cargo from A to B, SRVs that pop out and chase me when I try to hack a settlement. And have you ever tried fighting NPCs near those CQC asset space stations? They're scared to chase you anywhere near the structures, so you just end up fighting them in open space anyway. If FDev could crack this, it might also open up bots for CQC itself, and potentially bring that back from the grave. It also opens the door to things like surface conflict zones.


5. Atmospheric landings. I can't say much more about this that hasn't already been said.

 

[SentineI]

Here's five wishes, but I'd actually be happy with just the first one being fulfilled:

1. An option to stop the SRV turret's rotation being independent of SRV's actual rotation (so the turret turns as the SRV turns).
(Currently I get confused which direction my SRV is driving in, when I'm in an intense battle with several skimmers. I never had that problem with tanks in Battlefield 1942, and I think this is the main culprit.)

2. Show the mass of a ship next to the ship's type (e.g. Eagle) in the HUD. ED has too many ship types, and I honestly can't remember all the ships that are much bigger/smaller than me. But if I could see it's mass then (a) I'd quickly know if I was probably outmatched, and (b) I'd quickly learn their relative sizes. Yeah, I could just spend ages trying to memorise them on some web page, but I play ED for fun. Bonus points of it changes colour depending on whether it's heavier or lighter than my ship.

P.S. It only needs to be the mass of an unladened factory-spec ship, not it's actual mass.

3. A quick way to get an (external) rear-facing view from my ship. This took 1 button press in Frontier: Elite 2, and it was so incredibly useful:
e.g. Helps ensure you are facing exactly 180 degrees from whatever you are leaving, such as an planetary ring or a space station.
e.g. Helps ensure your SRV will be heading straight towards something after you land.
e.g. See what's happening behind you. What's that ship doing behind you?

(I know you can *sometimes* work-around this by selecting a target, and then getting a hollow dot in the middle of your HUD thingy,
but seeing things would still be so much more immersive. And seeing a station retreat into the distance is just so cool!)
Even cars from 1921 had rear view mirrors!

4. Make the 'no fire zone' around starports much much smaller for SRVs (which have puny weapons any), so it's actually feasible to go prospecting for materials around starports. I really miss the days I had a reason to enter/leave a starport in my SRV, and see all the details up close!

5. Fix the space station menu not letting you click a button, just because you knew where it was going to be & so moved your mouse pointer there before it had finished appearing.
(e.g. Commonly occurs with some Back/Exit buttons, if you keep the mouse pointer over the button, because you know you'll want to press the next Back/Exit button too.)

6. Fix the red/blue 3D glasses mode, so the left eye's image isn't partially visible in the right eye (and vice versa) using standard glasses.
(It would be an awesome addition to head-tracking, and a cheap man's Oculus Rift.)

Errr, OK, I can't count! [noob]

 

[DarthRavadge]

1.) A new larger size class of ships and weaponry (Huge size vessels). These would obviously be too large to enter a station so would require docking arms, landing shuttles, or dry dock facilities similar to capital ship docks. Also due to the size it should require an NPC crew to which you would need to pay wages.
2.)More stellar objects and phenomena. Comets, black hole acretion discs, etc.
3.)Atmospheric landings and Oceanic Landings to be explored via submersible SRV's
4.)All weapons including experimentals to be available in all sizes, mountings, and be engineerable.
5.)More non-sentient alien life. Ideally for atmospheric and oceanic planets. Plantlife, fungi, fish. Maybe even something big enough to do some damage to an SRV or ship if you tick it off. It would all need to be fairly rare and even more so for the more complex organisms. How awesome would it be to say you discovered a space shark that nearly ate your submersible? Or an alien rhino herd that trampled your SRV? Or even just a colony of mushrooms in a crater?

As for fixes? Nothing.

 

[SkyB]

Atmospheric landings

Instead of removing USS I'd rather keep them and add something additionaly.
They don't do any harm.

More huge weapons

Every POI on a planet surface scannable to find it easier again

Removal of repetitive events like obelisk activation for blueprint fragments. After the third time it got very, very boring.

 

[Hank]

Holo-Crew. Iow, I want crew members sitting in my co-pilot(s) seat(s), looking around and maybe wink at me occasionally. (and of course I want to be able to customize them like I do with Holo-me)

Landing on all planets (gas giants excluded but with gas giants the ability to scoop elements from their atmospheres).

More SRV's to chose from (larger capacity ones, more fuel efficient versions; armed and armored ones, etc.) ; and be able to refuel the SRV by re-docking with the mother ship.

The ability to move modules between ships or from storage to ships w/o having to switch to the destination ship to either remove the module or install the module. (been suggested before and described better than I did - and of course you can only swap modules with ships docked at the same station)

A rear facing camera and a downward facing camera view.

(there are more but I'll limit it to 5 for now)

 

[Kaocraft]

There are all kinds of big dreams I could request but I'm not gonna do that here. At this point there are certain things, like persistent NPCs, robust and varied AI, or a dynamic galaxy where different locations are meaningfully different from one another; which I no longer believe that Frontier are capable of delivering no matter the resources and time available to them. The following is a list of fixes which I believe that Frontier could actually implement if they were willing to do the work. Some of it might be a lot of work; but it's at least the kind of work that they have done before and theoretically know how to do:

• All clue-hunts and breadcrumb trails give coordinates. Anything involving listening posts, comms beacons, tip-offs, etc; must eventually culminate in a revealed set of coordinates that you can actually use to get to whatever planetary POI the mystery is supposed to point to. Clue trails which culminate in merely the name of a system or name of a planet, with no additional methods for finding the relevant surface POI other than "fly across the entire surface and eyeball it" will no longer be tolerated, and existing clue-trails will be reworked to include coordinates. Same goes for Galnet articles describing "a crash site was discovered" or "so-and-so would like people to investigate the guardian ruins" or whatever.

• Make scanning planets and finding POIs into a good and interesting system. I'm not gonna say how to do it, just make it at least as good as No Man's Sky (ps I do not consider No Man's Sky to have a good system but it is the bare minimum quality standard).

• All missions are wing missions. You can share any mission with your wingmates and once the mission is shared, each member of the wing is eligible to contribute to the mission's completion, and receive an equal portion of the reward. If any single member of the wing completes any single aspect of the mission objective (scan a nav beacon, blow up a skimmer, collect a floating canister of rare artwork, etc), then it updates the mission status for all participants. You'll be able to do base assaults and have three people each drive to a different hackable control panel to disable base defenses while a fourth member engages with ships overhead. No more special "wing missions" - ALL missions are "wing missions" if you want them to be. Which brings me to:

• Wings and multicrew are all part of the same thing. I don't care if it has to be a max of 4 CMDRs total, but let us wing with multicrewed vessels. It can be two ships with 2 CMDRS each, or one 3 person crew with a solo escort, or whatever. And hey if you can make it work then YES let's allow a wing of 4 SHIPS with whatever combination of CMDRS can fit in those ships. As part of this, all missions are now multicrew missions. Same deal as with wings. Your crew can take on the mission with you and earn a portion of the rewards, not just get some random cash payout when they sign off. That's over. Now you get actual bounty vouchers, actual materials, actual combat bonds, etc.

• Full multicrew functionality. I'm not even talking about expanding the range of possible capabilities a ship may have when multicrewed. That would be great, and I would LOVE if that happened too, but that's not what I'm talking about. I just want every person onboard my ship to have the option of controlling *any* interface that I the pilot am able to control, if I choose to grant them that permission. I'm talking plotting routes on the galmap. I'm talking about picking scan targets, subtargeting (why can't turret gunners already do this?), changing power priorities, performing synthesis, enabling and disabling orbit lines, making docking requests, loading and unloading cargo, piloting the ship, driving the golly-gee-gosh-darned SRV; EVERYTHING. And I want to be able to control who can and can't do which thing. And I want to be able to save my own little bundles of permissions and restrictions and give those bundles of permissions labels, so I can easily toggle between "playing with my lifelong best friend" settings vs "playing with a total stranger."

 

[jasonbirder]

let it generate small amounts of income or materials

Ah yes, the eternal wish of the "EvE type Player" earning money/materials AFK...

 

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

1. I can just buy upgrades. No traveling to engineers. Just upgrade my ships as I make more money whenever I feel I need an upgrade. Imagine that.

2. Replace USS with a panel that lists distress calls and other activity in the system that I can choose to investigate or possibly need to flee from.

3. Fast travel to places I've already been. There's a reason almost every game has fast travel. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. Let people choose. I don't have time to spend 40 minutes traveling to an engineer and another 40 minutes going back.

4. NPC wingmen. I wish I could grow attached to my wingmen and then see them get blown to bits and have a good cry.

5. Small enemy bases in orbit and on planets that have fighter and turret defenses that I have to take down.

6. An online game browser that I can use to easily join games with other players.

7. EDDB database and search should be available inside the game.

 

[Urbanski101]

Remove the BGS and start again
Some context and local narratives for missions
Bounty hunting to include some element of 'hunting'
Salvaging, more interesting locations, hidden pirate bases
Make system security status means something, anarchy = very dangerous, High Sec = safe

 

[jasonbirder]

1. Better Enemy AI
2. New AI Ships...no need to make them flyable (from tiny Shuttles to Large Cargo Ships too big to dock and all sorts of utilitarian Ships to flesh the world out)
3. More involving Comms/Station activity and ATC...assigned a course, maybe made to wait in a stack etc etc
4. Get rid of the "God Mode" 360 degree infallible scanners...restrict it to say Front 90 or 120 degree arc...make players take notice of whats going on around them...
5. AI Wingmen...with comms/commands etc...and that can knock on to more co-operative AI generally (whether its with Players or on its own) IE: Flying in Convoys/Escorts etc etc

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

Hard keeping it to 5, so I'll only do 4

1. In stations with blocked rare goods, allow these rare goods to be purchased from the blackmarket
2. Fix the "Refinery Full" error when mining
3. Display the materials available in planetary rings
4. Redo how limpet controller modules scale

 

[RooksBailey]

1) Improved anti-aliasing
2) Reworking Powerplay so it is part of the core gameplay
3) Reworking CQC so it is part of the core gameplay (in-game CQC stations, betting, observation of matches, etc,)
4) More station and lunar city types
5) NON-eathlike atmospheric landings (i.e., planets like Pluto or moons like Titan)