Is FA off deliberately gimped to hell?

[Nihila Vex]

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[Schmack]

FA off flight is a learned skill. I'm still learning it years later. I can do pretty well with it and use it for mining most of the time but there are moments...

However, if they change the mechanics of FA off, we will have to relearn everything. So no thanks.

 

[Morbad]

Is that a reason now to put even more limiters on top of it or rather remove them all. Guess the answer would be very much prone to personal preferences...

Removing them all isn't practical, the game already acts weirdly near the upper end of relative velocities achievable.

Regardless, damping isn't a limiter, and if I were building the game from scratch it would certainly be toggleable.

And I thought, FA Off was meant as a challenge in the first place.

It is, which is precisely what's silly about it.

Both flight models are exceedingly gamist, and this, in and of it self, does a great deal to harm immersion.

It is possible for a game, even a fantasy one, to not take itself seriously enough. It's why I stopped playing Planetside 2...every update they made the fortifications more like playgrounds and less like fortifications...they were built to change hands frequently, for gameplay. However, for me, it just rendered suspension of disbelief impossible; I could not see any purpose to taking and holding a fortification that was a tactical and strategic liability.

To me it always was a fascination (and in the beginning quite hair pulling) challenge. I actually needed about 3 month to dock in FA Off until it slowly stopped looking like a controlled crash. A true challenge of my perseverance and stubbornness, I tell you.

I never had any issues docking, FA or not. The game I played on and off for a decade before ED was much closer to ED's FA Off than On...it just had rotational damping.

Regardless, the whole point of controls are to translate my will into action with as minimal fuss as possible, not to be a metagame. Too many aids and you lose utility, too few and piloting becomes a chore. There isn't a particularly good middle ground in ED, just modestly bad examples of both extremes. IMO, of course.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy flying in ED, I just think it could be a lot better. Though I imagine if I had my way, half the player base would never be able to manually dock again and the other half would complain that FA off aim was too easy.

Btw, I didn't mean to nitpick on the word "dampening". I genuinely wondered if it's probably more than just a typo as so many are using the word in that way. For a non native speaker who still struggles to improve his understanding of the language these things aren't always quite easy to assess, especially with all the other non natives, dubious spelling and street slang around.

Damping and dampening have slightly different meanings, but both can work in this context. Damping is probably more precisely correct.

 

[Wotthe Dickens]

I always enjoyed Asteroids. It’s pretty similar except Asteroids didn’t limit your top speed, so it was possible to appear as a flickering triangle.

 

[Nihila Vex]

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[Duc_Mallard]

The faoff flight model is one of, if not the best thing about elite. Yeah actually.it is the best thing about elite

 

[Sea_Kerman]

There’s a reason all race drones have rotational damping, and it is that rotational damping is objectively better in almost all cases if you are using a joystick.

 

[Sea_Kerman]

In fact, I prefer how Space Engineers or KSP does it, where you can (in SE) damp your speed relative to another object, and can (in KSP) damp your rotation in many different and useful ways.

 

[Hellfire85]

FA off is fine as is.
Put in the work and practice if you want to "master" it. That's how it works.
If you don't like it, don't do it.

 

[Schmack]

But isn't that the whole beauty of FA Off? Since I don't like PVP that's the only remaining challenge that still keeps me playing after 5 years. I'll never get the approach of so many modern gamers who are always longing for the chickenway. Don't they know that's the highway to boredom that potentially kills all games in the long run?

Learning it is the beauty though. Relearning it isn't.

 

[Sea_Kerman]

Also, turning faster in FA-OFF is some Bovine Excrement. The ship is capable of turning that fast, so it should turn that fast. Perhaps the computer is being stupid and prioritizing translation over rotation, and wasting thrusters that way.

 

[VR Golgot]

Here's the designer on this specific issue:

The current system is difficult to master but yields higher gains. If we corrected rotational velocity for you the game would become a FPS in space which wouldn't be difficult to master at all.

(That thread seems to have been eaten by the new forums but the post was here)

And here on the flight model philosophy more broadly, just because it's fun

Indeed, a request is just that. We don't have to do anything if we don't want to but that doesn't mean we didn't read and consider the request. Suffice to say a low yaw rate is a fundamental part of our games aesthetics and a corner stone to our flight model that we at frontier like the way it is. We're not changing it, for to do so would be to compromise our own vision for what Elite: Dangerous is and what it's going to be. I don't give a damn what all the other space games have done in the past, nor do I care that our yaw rates are apparently even slower than a plane's is (though every time I've tried doing a pure yaw turn in IL-2 I've stalled my plane before I got anything that even resembled a steady and fast turn rate). Fast yaw and pitch in a space game is a video game trope of the highest order along with banner arrows sliding around the screen and compasses telling you where to fly all the time. I'm almost certain that other developers just implement those features because they've been so prevalent rather than actually reassessing whether the game needed them or could be even better without them! We found for example that the compass that pointed you towards your target at all times made combat too easy to end in stalemate of circling. As soon as we tried removing it all of a sudden it was more exciting to fight someone because they could give you the slip whilst you weren't glancing at your sensors and even if you did pay attention to the sensors the difference in the way the information is presented can still mean you don't quite stay on the target's tail perfectly, again providing more opportunities for them to turn the tide of the battle.

Suffice to say we wanted Elite to feel like star wars in terms of how the ships move by banking/rolling and pitching through manoeuvres opposed to the yaw and pitch based FPS style movement most other space games offered (where roll plays little or no part). That limitation to having to do your main directional change manoeuvring by pitching makes the flight path taken to be more cinematic and means a skilled player can predict the manoeuvres of an opponent in advanced by observing their current roll position relative to themselves only. So long as they match the roll quickly enough they can always follow through the inevitable pitch manoeuvre effectively and maintain the chase. If the target could yaw or pitch effectively then it's much harder to assess what they're going to do as they're current roll position doesn't really matter any more.

Finally realism has played no part whatsoever in any of our design discussions about the flight model. We don't care what would be realistic as we only care what the game play experience is when flying these ships and so far we feel we're hitting the right notes for the majority of our audience.

 

[Nihila Vex]

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[Ian Doncaster]

Frontier Elite II and First Encounters modelled this really well, along with planetary landings; not to mention being able to set up your own (albeit clunky) orbits - but ED couldn't have any of that cool stuff because apparently people didn't like having to 'joust' in combat.

Though that always struck me as something that kind of solved itself once you clicked onto that exact principle: that the only measure of motion that mattered was your vector in relation to the other ship. All the other thousands of kilometres per second you might both be doing barrelling towards the planet were completely irrelevant.

FE2/FFE combat only worked because the NPCs were so incredibly bad at it, would try to fly at you as if you were their autopilot target, and would never ever try to decouple the way they were moving relative to you from their facing. So you could take a more agile ship, close quickly, then flip and get behind them where they just couldn't shake you. And let's not talk about what happened if there was a planet nearby.

If they'd been at all sensible you'd have died as soon as you went into weapon range of any of the ones with a 20MW beam laser, for example, because they wouldn't have let you get close enough to get behind them before they'd torn you apart. And if you did get behind them they'd just have cut thrusters, spun on the spot, and set fire to you from there. Or used the aft laser mounts or turrets half of these ships allegedly had.

It would all very rapidly have become a "who can facetank long enough for the other one to explode" contest - which is presumably what Frontier quickly discovered when making Elite Dangerous and having an actual competent player on both sides of the Newtonian fight.

 

[Nihila Vex]

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[Nihila Vex]

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[Hellfire85]

All I can see in this thread is:
"I am bad at FA-off and I don't want to learn, plz fix"
And some others that actually praise the FA-off mechanics and are willing to put in time to learn it.
The current flight model is set in stone, so to speak, and no suggestion or feedback will change that.
Get over it.
The only thing that needs fixing in this game is a rebalance of ship statistics and weapons as well as a sever nerf to defense stacking.

 

[Neutrino Sunset]

The quotes from Mike Evans are interesting.

"If we corrected rotational velocity for you the game would become a FPS in space which wouldn't be difficult to master at all"

I don't agree with this at all. Firstly FA on does perform rotational damping, making it's absence in FA off a glaring and immersion breaking incongruity, and FA on being easy to master is apparently not a problem for Frontier so that argument simply doesn't stack up. Also FA off is a lot easier with a joystick since that naturally auto-centers, but with a mouse trying to cancel rotation in multiple axis by waving it around trying to find the right spot is torturous. FA off with a mouse is only remotely feasible with the mouse auto centering dialed up so high that it completely disables mouse control with FA on, but you're not going to want to fly FA off 100% of the time so you'd need to reconfigure the mouse auto centering every time you switch FA mode. So the control configuration doesn't even support the flight model they've implemented! This isn't just an issue with rotation control but with thruster control too, you may want to use the same controls for the throttle in FA on as for the forward and reverse thrusters in FA off, but there is no way to switch control scheme based on the FA setting, so you need two separate sets of controls for each mode. This is just plain bad.

Secondly the idea that the controls are something that is supposed to be onerous because that's where the challenge comes from seems grieviously misguided to me. Many games have implemented a variety of space flight models, Elite, Tie Fighter and Freelancer using airplane flight and Elite 2, FFE, Pioneer and KSP using Newtonian flight. These are all great games that are a blast to fly, and none of them needed make the flight model a contrived annoyance in order to 'add to the fun'. In a well designed simulation game the challenge comes from being able to pilot well, the navigation, the environment and the tactical situation, not from having an input scheme that makes it as difficult as possible to achieve the simplest thing.

"Suffice to say a low yaw rate is a fundamental part of our games aesthetics and a corner stone to our flight model that we at frontier like the way it is."

Fair enough. If you want spaceships to fly around like airplanes like they did in sci-fi films from the 70's for the 'cinematic' value that's your call. But without optional rotation damping in FA off flight mode, FA off which should be the most rewarding flight mode is just needlessly painful and inaccessible, maybe not with a HOTAS but certainly with a mouse.

If you implemented rotation damping you'd still have no yaw control, so you'd still avoid the FPS in space flight model so I don't see any reason not to do it, other than wanting to appease those players that have spent so many months learning how use FA off that they now have to try and convince everyone that the current implementation makes sense.

 

[Morbad]

The quotes from Mike Evans are interesting.

Evans was speaking largely conceptually at the time and almost all of his points were either misconceptions or quickly rendered moot.

It's evidence of intent, but it all sounds pretty silly in hindsight.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

All I can see in this thread is:
"I am bad at FA-off and I don't want to learn, plz fix"
And some others that actually praise the FA-off mechanics and are willing to put in time to learn it.
The current flight model is set in stone, so to speak, and no suggestion or feedback will change that.
Get over it.
The only thing that needs fixing in this game is a rebalance of ship statistics and weapons as well as a sever nerf to defense stacking.

FA Off isn't a flight model - it's a control method. And it sucks.