Beyond convoluted.

[babelfisch]

Whilst I am not sure I agree with you about everything you are spot on about the logic of some about complaints about the game (wait till beta, wait till release, then finally , you should have spoken up sooner don't moan now

To be fair, these comments rarely come from the same person.

 

[Thatchinho]

I was flying around in my AspX, getting to grips with nu-mining, when I had a bit of an epiphany.

Unless I'm mistaken, Beyond brought us 4 specific changes to gameplay:-
- C&P.
- Engineering.
- Exploration.
- Mining.

In all these cases, it seems like they've taken a specific thing that was pretty simple and made it more complicated without actually expanding the scope of it very much.

C&P.
Used to be that you paid fines and ran away from bounties until they expired.
Now, lordy, I just don't have the strength.
Suffice to say, there are still fines and bounties but now there are IFs, prisons, hot ships, hot modules and all manner of nonsense.
Ultimately, we now get to pay off fines and bounties.

Engineering.
Used to be random. Boo!
Now you have to collect (or trade) a vast amount more mat's and then power-click your way through a bunch of mod's to get to the one you want.
Ultimately, we now get (usually) better mod's and we get to pick XFX's. Yay!

Exploration.
Used to be honk and then fly out to anything interesting so you can scan it.
Now you have to park in SC, switch modes, enter the FSS, twiddle a bunch of things in a UI that looks like something out of a 1990's RTS and then you fly out to anything interesting and shoot "energy bombs" at it to scan it.
Ultimately, we have to do the same stuff to complete all the possible tasks but we're now forced to look at a UI out of "C&C Space-Wars" to do it.

Mining.
We used to use prospectors to find the good stuff and then shoot at it to obtain it.
Now we have to fire "energy bombs" at rings to find the good stuff, then we have to go to it and scan it with some other doodad to find the good stuff (again) and then we have to use a heap of different gizmos to get the different types of good stuff out of the 'roids.

Now, to be clear, I'm happy to admit that I think these different things have achieved various levels of success.
The changes to engineering are pretty useful and collecting the extra mat's is a non-issue.
The changes to mining are very nicely implemented and make mining much more engaging.
The changes to exploration are useful but the procedures and tools are utter garbage.
C&P is a complete dumpster fire.

Thing is, in all these cases, what they've done is take a specific activity (mining, engineering, discovering bodies in a system etc) and make that activity more convoluted.
What they haven't done is expand the range of activities very much, if at all.
Which is, I think, what's disappointed me about Beyond. [sad]

In almost all cases, I find myself thinking that if they'd stuck with the original system and just changed it in some superficial ways then they probably could have achieved results similar to what we now have - without the effort of devoting a year of updates to it.

I guess the actual changes (with the exception of C&P) are improvements over what we had before but, overall, I find myself disappointed by Beyond and I think it's because I was hoping there'd be more stuff to do, rather than just making the stuff we already do more complex.


To finish on a high note, I have to reitterate that I am really impressed with what mining now is.
It's a really slick and immersive activity.
I just hope it doesn't become the way to earn credits in the game, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

I reckon you've probably had loads of replies already, but I just wanted to comment on the Exploration part.

So, this isn't meant in a critical way, but you're honestly drastically underestimating what was involved in Exploration prior to 3.3.

While "Used to be honk and then fly out to anything interesting so you can scan it." may be what some used to do, there was a lot more for others.

Finding those things that are revealed by the FSS and probes was incredibly difficult before. Some things would show as a tiny dot on the POI scanner. Other things wouldn't be detectable at all. Even when it was known things were there it was difficult, but consider what would be involved in just finding out that there is something to find in a system if it doesn't show in any scanner whatsoever.

Finding things could involve:

- Sheer luck
- Establishing criteria and likely locations (all done out-of-game)
- Full planet surface searches looking for things on the POI scanner
- Full MkI eyeball planet surface searches looking for things on which don't show up on scanners
- Drastic graphics settings adjustments to aid in the above
- Glide searching for things that show up on the POI scanner (with what's always appeared to be variable results depending on GPU performance)
- Increased Orbital Cruise drop times in a region with major assets.
- Location triangulation and skybox matching
- Out-of-game co-ordination and knowledge sharing for all the above
- etc.

And I'm only really covering the Surface Fixed POI side of things there.

So yeah, in the case of Exploration, overall, things have become much much simpler, easier and less complex in 3.3.

 

[Stealthie]

So, this isn't meant in a critical way, but you're honestly drastically underestimating what was involved in Exploration prior to 3.3.

While "Used to be honk and then fly out to anything interesting so you can scan it." may be what some used to do, there was a lot more for others.

Finding those things that are revealed by the FSS and probes was incredibly difficult before. Some things would show as a tiny dot on the POI scanner. Other things wouldn't be detectable at all. Even when it was known things were there it was difficult, but consider what would be involved in just finding out that there is something to find in a system if it doesn't show in any scanner whatsoever.

Finding things could involve:

- Sheer luck
- Establishing criteria and likely locations (all done out-of-game)
- Full planet surface searches looking for things on the POI scanner
- Full MkI eyeball planet surface searches looking for things on which don't show up on scanners
- Drastic graphics settings adjustments to aid in the above
- Glide searching for things that show up on the POI scanner (with what's always appeared to be variable results depending on GPU performance)
- Increased Orbital Cruise drop times in a region with major assets.
- Location triangulation and skybox matching
- Out-of-game co-ordination and knowledge sharing for all the above
- etc.

And I'm only really covering the Surface Fixed POI side of things there.

So yeah, in the case of Exploration, overall, things have become much much simpler, easier and less complex in 3.3.

Fair comment but, as is starting to become a pattern in this thread, people's defences of the new features only reinforce my core argument: we're getting existing activities re-worked rather than getting new activities.

To address my criticims of exploration, specifically, I absolutely understand why the new system is better - and I agree that it's better - but I really don't like the way those activities are represented in-game.
The FSS, itself, is garbage and it's absurd to think that the same technology that allows us to identify a ship a thousand Ls away, can provide us with the type of ship, it's orientation, it's tactical state, it's name and even the name and rank of it's pilot but can't manage to resolve an entire planet into anything more coherent than a squiggle which you have to manually locate and zoom in on to identify?

The fact that these squiggles are in different places on the scanner, and always the same place for specific types of planet, means the scanner does know what sort of planet the squiggle represents so why the hell can't it actually identify them rather than just leaving them as a squiggle?

The answer, of course, is "gameplay".

Which is where my criticism comes in again.

The whole procedure is, basically, just "busy work".
People complained that it was unrealistic to think you'd be able to just arrive in a system, send out some kind of energy pulse and get information about every planet in the system.
So now, instead, you can arrive in a system, park, honk, and manually establish exactly the same information you could previously obtain automatically - using technology that is obviously capable of providing us with this information automatically but chooses not to for reasons.

They've taken something which, in the ED universe, could quite easily be an automated process and turned it into a long-winded manual one in order to make it seem more elaborate.

The DSS isn't quite as bad.
At least you get to see planets, even if it's with a cheesy overlay, but that's still better than looking at the FSS UI.
So you launch a bunch of probes, complete the surface map and then you get a bunch of surface POIs.
Yay!

In a nutshell, it seems like the same improvements could have been provided simply by leaving the ADS as it was but setting it up so that honking also detected USSs & anomalies and then changing the operation of the DSS so that it identified surface POIs.

Everything else about it is simply "padding".

 

[Enderby]

Fair comment but, as is starting to become a pattern in this thread, people's defences of the new features only reinforce my core argument: we're getting existing activities re-worked rather than getting new activities.

To address my criticims of exploration, specifically, I absolutely understand why the new system is better - and I agree that it's better - but I really don't like the way those activities are represented in-game.
The FSS, itself, is garbage and it's absurd to think that the same technology that allows us to identify a ship a thousand Ls away, can provide us with the type of ship, it's orientation, it's tactical state, it's name and even the name and rank of it's pilot but can't manage to resolve an entire planet into anything more coherent than a squiggle which you have to manually locate and zoom in on to identify?

The fact that these squiggles are in different places on the scanner, and always the same place for specific types of planet, means the scanner does know what sort of planet the squiggle represents so why the hell can't it actually identify them rather than just leaving them as a squiggle?

The answer, of course, is "gameplay".

Which is where my criticism comes in again.

The whole procedure is, basically, just "busy work".
People complained that it was unrealistic to think you'd be able to just arrive in a system, send out some kind of energy pulse and get information about every planet in the system.
So now, instead, you can arrive in a system, park, honk, and manually establish exactly the same information you could previously obtain automatically - using technology that is obviously capable of providing us with this information automatically but chooses not to for reasons.

They've taken something which, in the ED universe, could quite easily be an automated process and turned it into a long-winded manual one in order to make it seem more elaborate.

The DSS isn't quite as bad.
At least you get to see planets, even if it's with a cheesy overlay, but that's still better than looking at the FSS UI.
So you launch a bunch of probes, complete the surface map and then you get a bunch of surface POIs.
Yay!

In a nutshell, it seems like the same improvements could have been provided simply by leaving the ADS as it was but setting it up so that honking also detected USSs & anomalies and then changing the operation of the DSS so that it identified surface POIs.

Everything else about it is simply "padding".

Yes, yes and, furthermore, yes.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Yes, yes and, furthermore, yes.

I concur.

 

[B1rdy]

I reckon you've probably had loads of replies already, but I just wanted to comment on the Exploration part.

So, this isn't meant in a critical way, but you're honestly drastically underestimating what was involved in Exploration prior to 3.3.

While "Used to be honk and then fly out to anything interesting so you can scan it." may be what some used to do, there was a lot more for others.

Finding those things that are revealed by the FSS and probes was incredibly difficult before. Some things would show as a tiny dot on the POI scanner. Other things wouldn't be detectable at all. Even when it was known things were there it was difficult, but consider what would be involved in just finding out that there is something to find in a system if it doesn't show in any scanner whatsoever.

Finding things could involve:

- Sheer luck
- Establishing criteria and likely locations (all done out-of-game)
- Full planet surface searches looking for things on the POI scanner
- Full MkI eyeball planet surface searches looking for things on which don't show up on scanners
- Drastic graphics settings adjustments to aid in the above
- Glide searching for things that show up on the POI scanner (with what's always appeared to be variable results depending on GPU performance)
- Increased Orbital Cruise drop times in a region with major assets.
- Location triangulation and skybox matching
- Out-of-game co-ordination and knowledge sharing for all the above
- etc.

And I'm only really covering the Surface Fixed POI side of things there.

So yeah, in the case of Exploration, overall, things have become much much simpler, easier and less complex in 3.3.

So your point is, before 3.3 you needed no real game mechanics or rather workarounds in order to make exploration work. With that as a basis for reviewing the newly introduced mechanics, they can only look great, of course! But that doesn't alter the fact that FDev only changed the process, but not the outcome. It still results in "things to look at". There are not even missions.

 

[Thatchinho]

Fair comment but, as is starting to become a pattern in this thread, people's defences of the new features only reinforce my core argument: we're getting existing activities re-worked rather than getting new activities.

To address my criticims of exploration, specifically, I absolutely understand why the new system is better - and I agree that it's better - but I really don't like the way those activities are represented in-game.
The FSS, itself, is garbage and it's absurd to think that the same technology that allows us to identify a ship a thousand Ls away, can provide us with the type of ship, it's orientation, it's tactical state, it's name and even the name and rank of it's pilot but can't manage to resolve an entire planet into anything more coherent than a squiggle which you have to manually locate and zoom in on to identify?

The fact that these squiggles are in different places on the scanner, and always the same place for specific types of planet, means the scanner does know what sort of planet the squiggle represents so why the hell can't it actually identify them rather than just leaving them as a squiggle?

The answer, of course, is "gameplay".

Which is where my criticism comes in again.

The whole procedure is, basically, just "busy work".
People complained that it was unrealistic to think you'd be able to just arrive in a system, send out some kind of energy pulse and get information about every planet in the system.
So now, instead, you can arrive in a system, park, honk, and manually establish exactly the same information you could previously obtain automatically - using technology that is obviously capable of providing us with this information automatically but chooses not to for reasons.

They've taken something which, in the ED universe, could quite easily be an automated process and turned it into a long-winded manual one in order to make it seem more elaborate.

The DSS isn't quite as bad.
At least you get to see planets, even if it's with a cheesy overlay, but that's still better than looking at the FSS UI.
So you launch a bunch of probes, complete the surface map and then you get a bunch of surface POIs.
Yay!

In a nutshell, it seems like the same improvements could have been provided simply by leaving the ADS as it was but setting it up so that honking also detected USSs & anomalies and then changing the operation of the DSS so that it identified surface POIs.

Everything else about it is simply "padding".

Well, just to be clear, I wasn't exactly defending the new features.

I was just making a comment on what seemed to be the theme of the original post - things being made more convoluted and complicated - with the point of the comment being that in the case of Exploration that overall it's kind of the other way round.

My own major feedback on it all in the Beta was that it had actually gone too far on that front, and needed a range of difficulties rather than having everything be the same (easy) level of challenge. (Oh and that despite that being the general case, some things were still being made artificially difficult, the SysMap not containing the surface signals from the FSS for example). In the unlikely event that anyone wants to have a look, that thread's here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...o-the-other-Detailed-Feedback-and-Suggestions, but that was based on the assumption that the main FSS mechanism wasn't going to change.


In terms of the actual mechanism itself, then personally I've put forward essentially what you're saying before, specifically that the ADS should highlight the presence of any unusual signals, and that there should then be mechanisms to locate them (with the exact detail varying depending on factors such as whether that type of signal had been encountered before, or whether it was something that was being deliberately concealed). Can't track down the actual posts at the moment though, but there's from well before 3.3.


On the other hand, as much as that's what I said should happen, other people have said there should be more involved in the general process, and I can certainly remember the threads asking for something akin to radio tuning, for it to be more active, etc. etc...


And when you say "People complained that it was unrealistic to think you'd be able to just arrive in a system, send out some kind of energy pulse and get information about every planet in the system.", while I agree that some people said that, I don't think it was a universal thing, and I don't think that was the actual complaint - as far as I can recall, it was only usually said as something to provide some rationale to support their requests for there to be more involved in the discovery process than just holding down a button.


Anyway, I'm certainly not going to say anyone's actually wrong for not personally liking the FSS mechanic. There's definitely some spurious criticisms thrown around (people saying they can't do X when it's entirely possible, etc.), but just plain not liking it isn't one of them.

However, just coming back to a key point from the start of your reply:

Fair comment but, as is starting to become a pattern in this thread, people's defences of the new features only reinforce my core argument: we're getting existing activities re-worked rather than getting new activities.

I've not really read the rest of the thread in detail, but wasn't getting existing activities re-worked kind of a key part of Beyond?

 

[Thatchinho]

So your point is, before 3.3 you needed no real game mechanics or rather workarounds in order to make exploration work. With that as a basis for reviewing the newly introduced mechanics, they can only look great, of course! But that doesn't alter the fact that FDev only changed the process, but not the outcome. It still results in "things to look at". There are not even missions.

No, my point was what my point was - that overall Exploration had been made less complex and convoluted, not more so.

Not really any need for you to make up some other point.

But that doesn't alter the fact that FDev only changed the process, but not the outcome.

Pretty sure I didn't say anything different to that. But when you talk about changing the outcome, what is it you're looking for?

It still results in "things to look at".

Yes, it still does. And it still results in all the other things beyond that which were there beforehand too. They've just been made more accessible and easier to spot. This is to the extent that if anything its gone too far as player agency has been taken away from varius things which is a shame.

There are not even missions.

It's a foundational change and we're only just in to the new mechanics. Missions can come later when people are comfortable with the new mechanics. Not saying they definitely will, just to be clear. The new stuff has opened up new possibilities for community based stuff though.

 

[Stealthie]

I've not really read the rest of the thread in detail, but wasn't getting existing activities re-worked kind of a key part of Beyond?

I seem to recall the phrase "consolidating core-gameplay" was mentioned.

To me, that means, well, consolidating everything (or, at least, a bunch of things) related to core-gameplay - getting rid of bugs, standardising similar features, balancing the risk vs reward of different activities, fixing things that have been removed due to unforseen circumstances and supplementing core-gameplay mechanics in a variety of ways.

The point is, the majority of what they've actually done with core-gameplay mechanics is to take a simple thing and add extra steps to that thing.

No bug-fixes, no standardisation of features, no balancing and no fixes.
Fundamentally, I don't see a lot which says "We've created a solid foundation for the current game and future updates".
Instead, I (mostly) just see a bunch of things that are now more complex than they were and a bunch of other things that are still unbalanced, disparate, broken or missing entirely.

To go back to exploration as a specific example, I do accept that the tools we now have are better than what we used to have.
My issue is that, as I said, they could have simply made it so Honking reveals USSs and orbital POIs (which would be displayed in your Nav HUD) and then changed the function of the DSS so that you could "ping" a planet/rings to get the data we currently get.
That would have required minimal work, provided players with all the extra tools they wanted and left FDev with a lot more time to address other issues and/or add genuinely new activities.

 

[Kaocraft]

Fair comment but, as is starting to become a pattern in this thread, people's defences of the new features only reinforce my core argument: we're getting existing activities re-worked rather than getting new activities.

To address my criticims of exploration, specifically, I absolutely understand why the new system is better - and I agree that it's better - but I really don't like the way those activities are represented in-game.
The FSS, itself, is garbage and it's absurd to think that the same technology that allows us to identify a ship a thousand Ls away, can provide us with the type of ship, it's orientation, it's tactical state, it's name and even the name and rank of it's pilot but can't manage to resolve an entire planet into anything more coherent than a squiggle which you have to manually locate and zoom in on to identify?

The fact that these squiggles are in different places on the scanner, and always the same place for specific types of planet, means the scanner does know what sort of planet the squiggle represents so why the hell can't it actually identify them rather than just leaving them as a squiggle?

The answer, of course, is "gameplay".

Which is where my criticism comes in again.

The whole procedure is, basically, just "busy work".
People complained that it was unrealistic to think you'd be able to just arrive in a system, send out some kind of energy pulse and get information about every planet in the system.
So now, instead, you can arrive in a system, park, honk, and manually establish exactly the same information you could previously obtain automatically - using technology that is obviously capable of providing us with this information automatically but chooses not to for reasons.

They've taken something which, in the ED universe, could quite easily be an automated process and turned it into a long-winded manual one in order to make it seem more elaborate.

The DSS isn't quite as bad.
At least you get to see planets, even if it's with a cheesy overlay, but that's still better than looking at the FSS UI.
So you launch a bunch of probes, complete the surface map and then you get a bunch of surface POIs.
Yay!

In a nutshell, it seems like the same improvements could have been provided simply by leaving the ADS as it was but setting it up so that honking also detected USSs & anomalies and then changing the operation of the DSS so that it identified surface POIs.

Everything else about it is simply "padding".

There's no reason a turreted weapon should be weaker than a fixed weapon and there's no reason our ships shouldn't be able to target and annihilate anything 100K away easily and automatically. There's no reason, really, that we should even be manually steering our ships, and we certainly shouldn't be landing manually. The whole premise of Elite is that we the pilots spend a cognitive dissonance inducing amount of time manually manipulating, tuning, configuring, and operating technology which on paper is far too advanced in its capabilities to warrant that kind of direct manipulation. Everything should be "executive control", automated and chosen via menus, and exponentially more powerful and versatile than what we have.

If you accept the base premise of Elite, which is that we have technology most closely resembling something from the 1960s but just more powerful versions of it, the FSS and DSS fits perfectly into that framework. In a sense, it can be construed as busywork, but no more so than manually piloting your ship or pip management or all the rest of it. The whole idea here is that it's more fun to be directly involved in the moment to moment mechanics of the activity than it is to simply choose an outcome and get a result instantly (or after a timer ticks down with minimal interaction). Now, if you don't think the FSS is fun, or ought to have been implemented differently, that's a conversation; but I think it's a bit much to dismiss it as padding or busywork when this is after all a game very much oriented around process.

 

[Stealthie]

There's no reason a turreted weapon should be weaker than a fixed weapon and there's no reason our ships shouldn't be able to target and annihilate anything 100K away easily and automatically. There's no reason, really, that we should even be manually steering our ships, and we certainly shouldn't be landing manually. The whole premise of Elite is that we the pilots spend a cognitive dissonance inducing amount of time manually manipulating, tuning, configuring, and operating technology which on paper is far too advanced in its capabilities to warrant that kind of direct manipulation. Everything should be "executive control", automated and chosen via menus, and exponentially more powerful and versatile than what we have.

Which is fine but if somebody accepts that they forfeit the right to defend the new system by saying that it's "more realistic" or to criticise the old system as being "unrealistic".

Beyond that, as I've already said, my main concern is simply that FDev seem to be concentrating on adding "padding" to existing things instead of actually expanding the activities we can do with the tools we have.

 

[sollisb]

Fair comment but, as is starting to become a pattern in this thread, people's defences of the new features only reinforce my core argument: we're getting existing activities re-worked rather than getting new activities.

To address my criticims of exploration, specifically, I absolutely understand why the new system is better - and I agree that it's better - but I really don't like the way those activities are represented in-game.
The FSS, itself, is garbage and it's absurd to think that the same technology that allows us to identify a ship a thousand Ls away, can provide us with the type of ship, it's orientation, it's tactical state, it's name and even the name and rank of it's pilot but can't manage to resolve an entire planet into anything more coherent than a squiggle which you have to manually locate and zoom in on to identify?

The fact that these squiggles are in different places on the scanner, and always the same place for specific types of planet, means the scanner does know what sort of planet the squiggle represents so why the hell can't it actually identify them rather than just leaving them as a squiggle?

The answer, of course, is "gameplay".

Which is where my criticism comes in again.

The whole procedure is, basically, just "busy work".
People complained that it was unrealistic to think you'd be able to just arrive in a system, send out some kind of energy pulse and get information about every planet in the system.
So now, instead, you can arrive in a system, park, honk, and manually establish exactly the same information you could previously obtain automatically - using technology that is obviously capable of providing us with this information automatically but chooses not to for reasons.

They've taken something which, in the ED universe, could quite easily be an automated process and turned it into a long-winded manual one in order to make it seem more elaborate.

The DSS isn't quite as bad.
At least you get to see planets, even if it's with a cheesy overlay, but that's still better than looking at the FSS UI.
So you launch a bunch of probes, complete the surface map and then you get a bunch of surface POIs.
Yay!

In a nutshell, it seems like the same improvements could have been provided simply by leaving the ADS as it was but setting it up so that honking also detected USSs & anomalies and then changing the operation of the DSS so that it identified surface POIs.

Everything else about it is simply "padding".

In relation to Exploration I agree 100%

 

[CmdMarty]

If it wasn't for the credit booms in certain areas I think more would be complaining. I do like the codex but it does have too many spoilers in it imo.

 

[Hullreaver]

Fair comment but, as is starting to become a pattern in this thread, people's defences of the new features only reinforce my core argument: we're getting existing activities re-worked rather than getting new activities.

To address my criticims of exploration, specifically, I absolutely understand why the new system is better - and I agree that it's better - but I really don't like the way those activities are represented in-game.
The FSS, itself, is garbage and it's absurd to think that the same technology that allows us to identify a ship a thousand Ls away, can provide us with the type of ship, it's orientation, it's tactical state, it's name and even the name and rank of it's pilot but can't manage to resolve an entire planet into anything more coherent than a squiggle which you have to manually locate and zoom in on to identify?

The fact that these squiggles are in different places on the scanner, and always the same place for specific types of planet, means the scanner does know what sort of planet the squiggle represents so why the hell can't it actually identify them rather than just leaving them as a squiggle?

The answer, of course, is "gameplay".

Which is where my criticism comes in again.

The whole procedure is, basically, just "busy work".
People complained that it was unrealistic to think you'd be able to just arrive in a system, send out some kind of energy pulse and get information about every planet in the system.
So now, instead, you can arrive in a system, park, honk, and manually establish exactly the same information you could previously obtain automatically - using technology that is obviously capable of providing us with this information automatically but chooses not to for reasons.

They've taken something which, in the ED universe, could quite easily be an automated process and turned it into a long-winded manual one in order to make it seem more elaborate.

The DSS isn't quite as bad.
At least you get to see planets, even if it's with a cheesy overlay, but that's still better than looking at the FSS UI.
So you launch a bunch of probes, complete the surface map and then you get a bunch of surface POIs.
Yay!

In a nutshell, it seems like the same improvements could have been provided simply by leaving the ADS as it was but setting it up so that honking also detected USSs & anomalies and then changing the operation of the DSS so that it identified surface POIs.

Everything else about it is simply "padding".

My complaint was why change the "honk" procedure at all? If you want to add the additional layer of the DSS, fine, but I was 16,000 LY from the bubble when the update came through and then I had to fiddle with the stupid FSS ever newly explored system I entered just to see if there was anything worthwhile to explore in detail. What...a...waste...of...time.... I eventually gave up and just headed back. This killed exploration for me. They should have left the "honking" as is to show up on your system map, and then allow you as the explorer to decide if further exploration was warranted. Instead, they dumbed down the system? Why did the technology go
backwards?

 

[Kaocraft]

Which is fine but if somebody accepts that they forfeit the right to defend the new system by saying that it's "more realistic" or to criticise the old system as being "unrealistic".

Beyond that, as I've already said, my main concern is simply that FDev seem to be concentrating on adding "padding" to existing things instead of actually expanding the activities we can do with the tools we have.

All automation aside, one big difference in the new system is you have to have line of sight, but OK.

You can still argue anything within the framework of the kind of gameworld Elite is supposed to be. Straight appeals to some kind of objective real-world realism are rarely made by anyone. It's Ok to invest yourself emotionally in the fiction of the game, and to discuss things in terms of "realism" (internal consistency) without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But as a general rule I agree that the realism conversation is mostly a dead end. I think it's often more helpful, when discussing a particular play mechanic, to discuss what it feels like to use, what the risk/reward and feedback mechanisms are, how it fits into the flow of your moment to moment decision making, and how the system interfaces with the other systems in the game. The big questions for me, when evaluating a mechanical process in a game, are "do I need to pay attention?" "Can I direct my intent in a way that matters?" "how many degrees of success and failure are there?" "do the results matter to me?" "does it feel like I am DOING something?" "Does it make me feel more or less like I am in the game world?'

For me, the FSS and DSS systems as they are now, combined with the way they interface with the codex, USSs, mining hotspots, new mission signal sources, etc, are much more of a win than a fail. As a methodology, it reminds me of the original Far Cry, where you had binoculars which you could use to "tag" different enemies and objects in a given area, allowing you to keep track of them afterwards even when you no longer have direct line of sight. In the original Far Cry, you would arrive in a new area and it would be a good idea to seek a vantage point from which to assess the "lay of the land" as well as tag relevant points of interest and possible threats using your binoculars. You did this manually by literally pointing at and visually resolving a target. Nothing was automated, and if you didn't tag it with the binoculars well you just had to make a mental note of it and hope it didn't catch you off guard. Oftentimes you would find a tower or high hill from which to survey your surroundings, other times you might skip this step initially and just wade into the jungle and try to make sense of things as they came at you. Most often you would do a mixture of the two, traversing the region while assessing the situation locally until you could ascend to a good spot to survey the region, tagging some but probably not all of the targets and maybe noticing a better vantage point from which to survey the rest of the area.

Later games, including other Ubisoft games like Assassin's Creed, gave us the now-standard "tower" play system, where you would find a special spot (usually a tower) designated by the game as a "vantage point," climb it, and then trigger a cutscene which would populate your map with all the NPCs, POIs, and relevant regional geometry for a given area. I always felt this was a step back from the original game, where *you* would use the geometry of the environment to find an actual real vantage point to make actual real observations, and you would traverse an area while bearing the implications of your particular in-the-moment decisions. There's an argument to be made that the "tower" system is better, that all the pointing and aiming and tagging and seeking out of specific vantage points is "busy work" which should be automated, that it is only the intent and decision that should matter, and that the outcomes should be instantaneous, comprehensive, and frictionless. I personally appreciate and seek out games with "frictional" play mechanics, and for me the new scan system, while perhaps not the best most perfect possible solution, is as an experience miles ahead of the old system, be it busywork or otherwise.

Anyway I've been running around the Pleiades Sector triangulating locations from listening posts, following clue trails and bit by bit narrowing down search areas to locate interesting unique planetary POIs with audio logs while also stumbling across things like volcanism, anemones, ships in distress, floating installations under attack, etc, and the new systems have been intrinsic to this experience. I'll drop into a system which seems like a search candidate and I'll FSS scan just the 5-6 out of 44 planets that I think might fit the profile of what I'm looking for, then supercruise over to anything which gives promising initial signals. While some of this would still be achievable with your proposed solution of keeping the old FSS but just having the honk tell us whether or not there are bio/geo/xeno signals on a planet, it would be a fundamentally different and less intentional experience, and ironically would feel *more* like busywork to me.