Why can we only Land on Barren Planets after almost 5 years?
- Thread starter Cosmo
- Start date
Precisely why "New Era" needs to shine. Big time. There will be at least one more NMS update before then, and SC will... well, I'm not sure what SC will do.
I've no idea what they're doing, but I just hope that New Era doesn't ultimately launch with "Welcome to the New Era. Same as the Old Era."
I very much doubt it. Not because of raging fanboyism, but because I am a cynic; there is no way FD as a company (that has proven to be incredibly savvy when it comes to growing a tiny studio into a pretty massive undertaking in just a decade!) spends resources on improving the tutorials and new player experience, and then spends significant resources having a team spend two years on a DLC unless they expect many new players to jump in. For most of Beyond and whatever last year was called FD have been relatively silent on the PR front. I am very confident that FD plans Next Era to be a 'reboot' and we'll see a pretty big marketing campaign starting summer 2020.
And until then I expect not much. They will mostly be laying the groundwork and polishing a few things. But anything Next Era will touch, code-wise, wont receive much attention or bug fixing in the meantime as it'll just be a waste of their time in the long run. Simply put, it doesn't matter if you or I stop playing or 'quit'. They dont want our money now and they already committed themselves to Next Era; if it is great the overwhelming majority of disgruntled people will come back, and new players wont care about what happened year(s) earlier.
Very appropriate, given your avatar lmaoThat only applies to democracy, and Internet Explorer.
But wait, if Elite is great as it is and the amazing leading game in the industry, why do they need to stay ahead of the game?
Because of the reasons that we're talking about. Frontier knows the competition is around the corner. They know they have to stay ahead, so the question is (all our crazy speculations) that the features they have to compete with will be feet and atmo. But who knows, maybe Elite is good enough and a few more combat ships will be enough.
Or they'll be playing one of the other 10-15 games with large galaxies, base building, atmo planets, etc. It's not just between ED, SC, and NMS next year. It's DU, KSP2, and a bunch more I can't remember the name of at the moment.
They're doing the right thing though. Frontier is aiming for a huge update. And they're doing it because they know they have to to keep Elite on top.
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Actually I think it could have been closer to a sim and been exciting even with the tools they have now. The environment would need to have much more teeth however with collisions with planets being terminal, a broken canopy needing an emergency landing with repairs being made on site before time runs out, no emergency dropout if you bork scooping or fall asleep going to a planet and where random equipment failure gets more likely as wear and tear happens and where jumping to an unexplored planet which we do not have navigational data for invokes some sort of skill game (like the interdiction tunnel) where you take increasing damage the worse you do it, at the extreme forcing a missjump.
Exploration ships take less damage.
Missions would be generated to go to a planet scan it and take surface samples at specific points, mining would not just be about getting X precious metal but also depending on surrounding environment could make different sources have different value
That would feel a lot more plausible imo
But wait, if Elite is great as it is and the amazing leading game in the industry, why do they need to stay ahead of the game?
Because of the reasons that we're talking about. Frontier knows the competition is around the corner. They know they have to stay ahead, so the question is (all our crazy speculations) that the features they have to compete with will be feet and atmo. But who knows, maybe Elite is good enough and a few more combat ships will be enough.
Are you sure you quoted the correct post? You seem to be suggesting I say Elite 'the amazing leading game in the industry' and 'is good enough and only needs a few combat ships' or something? Bit confused by what you are saying/implying.
15 games and you name two, one of them (KSP2) in no way relevant to this discussion? Dual Universe, btw, hasn't updated their roadmap in a year. They had five stages, and they have so far met only the first one and are already lagging months at best. They wont release in 2020. That means you have mentioned zero credible competitors releasing within a year. And lol if you think there are some 13 other games about to compete with ED/NMS which you just 'cant remember the name right now'.
I hope so.
For me, E: D's biggest problem over the last 5 years has been lack of scope. Not the galaxy obviously, the scope of that is massive, but the scope of each update has generally been very small & very isolated. You can ignore an update if you like. I don't think I've ever played Power Play for example, and as for Multicrew or SLFs...
The entire game needs looked at. Any changes need to be followed through to their logical conclusion, and made so it's all integrated into a coherent experience. At the moment, it's just an empty sandbox that has existed since the beginning, but they've added pretty baubles around the sides.
As I said, I have doubts whether FD are up to that task, but I hope to be proven wrong.
The SRV is great. But I prefer to go by David Braben's description, "you are a commander of a ship trying to survive in a harsh world". It's a game about your commander and the adventures s/he gets up to. Currently you are super glued to your seat and magically teleport to your SRV when needed. Its not just a game about flying your ship. Sure that is a major part of it and I suspect it will always be even if/when space legs becomes a thing.
So you're saying Elite has no competition and won't have one in 2020. In other words, it's the leading game in the niche of the industry and is good enough to last for next year because there are no one to challenge it. That's how I read your last statement.
No, what I am saying is that you gave two examples, one of which is irrelevant (really, KSP2 is a completely different game), the other won't release anytime soon and to my knowledge there are no other new games on the horizon that will be a major threat to what exists now in 2020. If I wanted to say something else I would probably have typed different words. Games overlap to some extend. People who want a focus on building empires will prefer X4. People who prefer more survivalist/crafting will go for NMS. People who primarily want to fly spaceships will play ED. And so forth. Many of us will play some or all of the available space games.
But that isn't even my main argument. You seem to think that it matters who was 'better' in year X when predicting playerbases in year Y. That isn't the case. NMS was next to dead multiple times. But when they release a major update that looks cool people do come back, no matter how ty their experience was earlier. Nobody who has to decide whether to try NMS Beyond or not cares in any way about whether NMS was better or worse than ED or X4 last year. They 100% base their choice on whether they think they will have fun now.
The truth is extremely simple: if ED Next Era is a cool looking game and they market it well, piles of people will play it. And that is completely independent on what existing players feel, expect or hope for now. And that is something the people earning dozens of millions of dollars selling computer games understand, and many gamers dont. And that is why many gamers are constantly puzzled by what is happening, and the industry isn't.
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Starfield, Empyrion. There was some other game I saw mentioned yesterday, but that's not really my point. (Now I remember, Starbase)
Yeah, 15 might be an exaggeration, or it might not be. Also, it's not just 2020, but 2021, which Frontier is aiming for with the next release.
Also, the competition doesn't have to be exactly like Elite, it's the genre of space, planets, flying space ships, etc. None is exactly like the other, but the drain into other games doesn't have to come from another exact game but other similar. And not necessarily from a single competitor but from many. Death by a thousand cuts.
Just because the Volt car was tiny and low range didn't mean that it was somewhat a competitor in the market to Tessla.
For Frontier to stay ahead, they need to be ahead, and my point is that they do know this and that's what they're working on. They can't just stay where they are and think they'll be safe, they have to be better, faster, stronger than all of them, or they'll be shrinking to "just another one among all of them."
Agree. I do believe ED Next will be great and my view is that it won't be enough with how they've done things so far, but they have to step it up. They'll still be in business, but the thing is, regardless of the different styles of the coming space games, there's a lot more of them being developed and coming out that are similar enough and with features that Elite is missing.
I believe Frontier knows this and that's what they're aiming for, to stay current in a growing niche market. Will it be in time? Will it be enough? We'll see.
That's simply because games are not a competitive thing. It's not like selling vacuum cleaners or washing machines, where people will choose one model over another, and the other brand loses out. Most people who like these kind of games have copies of NMS, E: D, X4, SC, whatever on their hard drives or at least own licenses to install them. When KSP2 comes out, I'll buy that too (don't think it's irrelevant to the discussion btw when you look at the scope of what they're planning to release). You just have to sell it to a type of gamer, and bring enough "general" gamers in to make the game a success.
The big question really is whether E: D wants to be "the" game that many of us hoped for, or just a spaceship flying simulator. It's fine if it's the latter (done well), but if they add other elements to it they are inevitably going to be compared against games that do the same thing... but better.
Landing on planets in Elite vs landing on planets in No Man's Sky. As of right now, the difference is embarrassing from E: D's side. So if they go down that route with "New Era", that's at least the bar they have to hit.
The hard part is to keep them playing the game (which Frontier has been quite successful in with Elite, I think). And have some way of making money of them staying.
That's true. So maybe they need to come up with something else? Break new ground into areas of space-sim-game play that hasn't been done before? Not sure what it would be, but just thinking.
Yup.
Even without adding biosphere planets, at least adding barren atmo planets would be a huge step forward, and lava planets. Maybe gas planets too. Things that the other games don't have.
Release of Next Era is planned for 'second half of 2020'. Starfield is a Bethesda RPG with an as of yet unknown release date, but hopeful estimates are 2022 at the earliest. Empyrion released in 2015. I reiterate: there are not 15 games an the horizon, and 15 is absolutely an absurd exaggeration.
Ok, fair enough.Release of Next Era is planned for 'second half of 2020'. Starfield is a Bethesda RPG with an as of yet unknown release date, but hopeful estimates are 2022 at the earliest. Empyrion released in 2015. I reiterate: there are not 15 games an the horizon, and 15 is absolutely an absurd exaggeration.
But it's a growing market and Frontier has to stay current, and it's obvious they know it to be true by the fact that they're working on the Next Era release. I doubt they're doing it out of their goodness of their heart or to fulfill any promises in Kickstarter, but rather because they know they have to stay on top of it.
Talking for myself of course. Since 2.0 I've always been disappointed by each update (except partially Beyond 3.3) because I've always been waiting for more planets to explore, more planetary gameplay and atmospheric planets. I've never found interesting BGS power play c&p engineer guardians and thargoids... I'm here only for the planetary stuff
Viajero
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Not exactly true. Money is a direct proxy of what you discover. Certain finds are rarer than others and give you more money, some significantly so. So where you have been matters quite a lot.
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I guess that's why they are working on more expansions.
We'll see in a few weeks / months.