Why can we only Land on Barren Planets after almost 5 years?
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
I'd like ED to have more than dull realism, and I thought Frontier did too. Surely 2020 vision will sweep all these doubts away?
And I don't object to richness, as long as its realistic richness. I'm all for atmospheric worlds, including water worlds and ELWs. I just want them to more closely resemble FSX than NMS.
I'm also totally fine with base-building and more complex "cities" on airless moons. If Elon Musk has his way, we'll be base-building on Mars by 2050. Just not in a giant cave filled with sentient pineapples
This is turning into a debate similar to xbox vs PS. It really doesn't matter which game any of you, subjectively, think is better. They are separate games that marginally have common points, and cater for different types of gamers.
Each have their own merits and in some cases are, rightly so, criticised for their shortcomings.
Neither is better than the other one. Sure you can have preferences, in my case that being ED. But that's it.
Now why we don't have landable atmosphere planets ingame yet is not relevant to NMS. More to do with how Fdev think the game should develop.
I personally can't wait to have atmos, love the idea. I mean exploration is mostly sight seeing so that would contribute a lot to the whole process.
Like others have said it might be a complicated process given that ED is more complex than any other space sim out there (released one).
Hopefully the 2019 update will include them.
As for space legs, meh...
Each have their own merits and in some cases are, rightly so, criticised for their shortcomings.
Neither is better than the other one. Sure you can have preferences, in my case that being ED. But that's it.
Now why we don't have landable atmosphere planets ingame yet is not relevant to NMS. More to do with how Fdev think the game should develop.
I personally can't wait to have atmos, love the idea. I mean exploration is mostly sight seeing so that would contribute a lot to the whole process.
Like others have said it might be a complicated process given that ED is more complex than any other space sim out there (released one).
Hopefully the 2019 update will include them.
As for space legs, meh...
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Guess what, so do I (though I don't want Elon Musk fly tipping in space again).And I don't object to richness, as long as its realistic richness. I'm all for atmospheric worlds, including water worlds and ELWs. I just want them to more closely resemble FSX than NMS.
I'm also totally fine with base-building and more complex "cities" on airless moons. If Elon Musk has his way, we'll be base-building on Mars by 2050. Just not in a giant cave filled with sentient pineapples
That statement doesn't make any sense.Let's hope the leak about base building isn't factual then, eh?
I do find it amusing that in an old vid, Braben says something like "our planets wont just be a series of heightmaps"... Seriously, if you want to depress yourselves, go watch the Alpha, Beta, Gamma era vids.
And ED has more to offer then mostly lifeless planets too. What you find dull others may not. That is purely subjective. Personally I find NMS utterly boring, the exploration is devoid of any wonder as it all can be found on the next planet.
I find ED loads of fun, even driving around mostly lifeless planets and shooting the odd rock/geological feature from time to time.
Comparing the two is very difficult because they have so very little in common. Deciding who has developed he most is also difficult to work out.
To me, while NMS updates look big, I find when you get down to it, they are not as big as they look.
People keep saying it's been developed by a small group, to me it seriously shows. I don't get that feeling when playing ED.
Why. Surely that depends on how it's implemented.Let's hope the leak about base building isn't factual then, eh?
If it's anything like NMS I would consider it a fail.
Depending on the nature of the game that's not always a bad thing. Player demographics change, technologies become viable, new features in rival games threaten market share and need to be countered. New brooms, fresh ideas. Many games have the flexibility to evolve and change, and need it to survive.
But the problem with Elite, at the risk of reducing it into a cult of personality, is that it began as the vision of two men and for the next three decades largely followed the vision of one. Everything both official and unofficial, from the original game and its conversions through FE2 and FFE to Oolite via licensed and fan fiction, more or less stuck to that vision. Sure, the further back you go the fuzzier the vision was, and the simpler representation on limited technology meant it was easier to hang new stuff on without breaking continuity. But in general there was very little presented in games or other materials that couldn't be slotted into the existing narrative right up to the genesis of ED. There's never been perfect consistency, but the retconning and cherry-picking always felt justified to me. It reminded me of The Hitch-Hikers Guide's various incarnations; constantly in flux but never to the point where it felt like something totally different or disconnected.
But despite the apparent singular vision that was still driving things through the KS and early development, to me it feels as though ED has drifted further from its origins as development has continued. Perhaps it was inevitable given the size of the project compared with the relatively simpler requirements of the earlier games and their audiences, and indeed the demands of modern audiences, but it's felt increasingly less coherent as time has passed. It's still an amazing product, capable of delivering some mind-blowing experiences, but sometimes it just doesn't feel right and not just because it hasn't reached the dizzying heights of the KS/Dev Diary hype (which were, in retrospect, a very tall order). It's that it feels less like an evolution and more like a spin-off. I've never felt that with any of the earlier material.
Which I guess is a very long-winded way of saying, as I've said a few times in recent years, if this game is still David Braben's vision then where is David Braben? As far as I can tell his last post on these official forums was in May 2017. He's more active on Reddit and Twitter, but his output seems to be mostly a mixture of nostalgia and astronomy and retweets of the PR accounts. At the end of the day, I'm seeing little to suggest he's even overseeing any ED design decisions any more.
Which is fine; he's the CEO and he can delegate whatever and to whomever he wants. It's just that, for me, it was easier to reconcile all of the various aspects of the design when there was a single individual calling most of the shots (or at least steering the group of people who were). Whereas these days it's far less clear where many of these increasingly inconsistent ideas are coming from.
Perhaps that's inevitable for the reasons already mentioned, but it's a shame. For me playing ED is like watching Star Trek: Discovery or The Last Jedi. There's a lot of enjoyment to be had, and technically all of these productions are far ahead of their forebears. But there's an underlying tickle at the back of my brain pointing out the inconsistencies both internal and with prior art, and wondering whether those inconsistencies are rooted more in necessity or indifference.
Or maybe I'm just old.
Imho it's realy a pointless discussion since the two games are so different and it comes down to personal preference.
ED is much more realistic, NMS is more fantasy and it shows.
What does matter to me is how much gameplay a game delivers, what the devs bring into the game for me to interact with and not just to look at.
In that respect NMS gives me a lot more versatility then ED does, there's much more to do.
ED looks way better, but is pretty shy of things to do, empty planets may look nice but they're still empty.
In NMS planets might be not so different from eachother when it comes to finding resources but I can land on all of them, visit caves, go out diving.etc.
In ED the planets you can land on aren't so different from eachother either, it's either rock or ice and the resources you can find aren't so versatile either and the only way to get them is to shoot at rocks.
The things that realy shine for me in ED compared to NMS is the graphics, the science involved regarding the galaxy as our playground, the sound and space flight/combat.
Further interaction in ED is way to minimal imho, that's where NMS shines for me.
In the end I like both games and am glad I have them both.
ED is much more realistic, NMS is more fantasy and it shows.
What does matter to me is how much gameplay a game delivers, what the devs bring into the game for me to interact with and not just to look at.
In that respect NMS gives me a lot more versatility then ED does, there's much more to do.
ED looks way better, but is pretty shy of things to do, empty planets may look nice but they're still empty.
In NMS planets might be not so different from eachother when it comes to finding resources but I can land on all of them, visit caves, go out diving.etc.
In ED the planets you can land on aren't so different from eachother either, it's either rock or ice and the resources you can find aren't so versatile either and the only way to get them is to shoot at rocks.
The things that realy shine for me in ED compared to NMS is the graphics, the science involved regarding the galaxy as our playground, the sound and space flight/combat.
Further interaction in ED is way to minimal imho, that's where NMS shines for me.
In the end I like both games and am glad I have them both.
I don't consider airless moons in ED to be "just a bunch of height maps". There's serious realism in these moons, from craters to canyons and everything in between. Are they a bit "boring"? Sure, but so is the moon and Mars if you're comparing them to hand-crafted fantasy worlds like Skyrim.
If anything, NMS feels more for "artificial" once you start seeing the patterns. Yes, NMS has caves (lots and lots and too many caves), but that same terrain engine gives us islands floating in the air and other nonsense. That's not what I want ED to turn into.
Airless moons in ED are exactly what I would expect airless moons to look like IRL based on humanity's experience with these so far. Now the geological POIs, those are admittedly very weak IMO. But that's a different story.
Now when it comes to atmospheric worlds with hydraulical systems, I expect much more exciting terrain than even NMS gives us. Realistic rivers, lakes, oceans, erosion-created geology, along with snow-covered mountains and poles - this is the variety I look forward to!
Precisely. Bad game design in an essence.
The whole game is like that. It provides very limited basic lacklustre simplistic outcomes by the use of overly complex mechanisms
Essentialy like this:
Impressive idea, but very bad design that is horrible to use
I hate the bugs in ED, and I have some ideas of how to polish the rough edges, but all-in-all ED is one of my favorite games of all times, just like it is. That's why I'm here.
So why are you here? Assuming your comments are about ED and not NMS, of course.
You could try to play the ball rather than the man.
I'm here because, despite the fact that I also like NMS, ED is the best spacegame ever made imho.
Yes it has bugs, lots of them and the lack of fixing is disturbing, it also lacks interaction/stuff to do but still I think it's the best out there.
The atmosphere, the ships, the sounds, the graphics, the sience, the rpg value or immersion, the size of it all, ED is my dream come true when I was playing Elite back in 1984.
I just hope that one day the bugs will get fixed and more interaction will be brought in, either planetary atmospheric or not or through spacelegs or regarding the Thargoids/Guardians, etc.
Some of you have kicked the ball out of the court!
At least we're still playing while you try to throw the opposition off the court.
Play the game!
Not really. All it takes to realize the genius of the Stellar Forge, and shatter the illusion of NMS, is an amateur enthusiasm for science in general, and astronomy in particular... two traits that frequently go hand in hand with sci-fi fans.
In ED, I can can travel south on a world’s Southern Hemisphere in local winter, and expect the days to get longer... assuming the world isn’t tidally locked. In fact, I’ve frequently done calculations to determine if a POI I want to explore will be in sunlight when I log back in the next day.
In NMS, I conducted similar experiments, and discovered the day and night cycle doesn’t vary at all on any planet in the game. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that I can take a ship into “space”, fairly easily circumnavigate a planet, it fairly easily passed many of the Flat Earth tests, despite obviously being spheres.
