Because it could come with a lot of great gameplay mechanics and a makeover for planetary surfaces in general, since when they are working on planets, I'm pretty sure they will all profit from it.
Subtly Shaded Skys, Sinister-looking Storm Systems, Sweet Sunsets, under which we can just scan shoot scoop? Atmospheres on their own add next to no gameplay, if you are stuck in a Ship, a Ship Launched Fighter or an SRV from whcih your only interactions are the scan/shoot/scoop. Sure there will be a new module (atmospheric shielding, possibly even a new flying technique for atmospheric entry, but once you are in the atmosphere, what can you do with it? I know, lets include earthlike worlds with full Biomes & diverse Ecosystems....
Hmm, we'd only get to scan/shoot/scoop anything contained there in. Legs first, then full planets with full interactivity, hunting alien species for sport / special meat for missions, swimming in the lakes and harvesting pearls from alien oyster equivalents, taking scientific research parties into the rainforests and climbing the trees there in, or delving into the depths of cave systems, on remote planets to take samples of new exotic xenobiological plants... To me that is what atmospheric planets ought to be, and that vision can never be created with the player symbiotically attached to a pilots seat.
I would love to get atmospheric landings.
I could go on all day long saying why I believe being able to access all the planets in the galaxy would be absolutely fantastic.
But then I noticed the OP created this thread in a "atmospheric landings instead of spacelegs" tone...
... so I can't in due conscience contribute, because I want both, not one at the expense of the other.
AMEN brother, I also want both, but I want them in a specific order, I want Legs first so that when atmospheric planets are done, we can properly interact with everything contained there in, not just scan/shoot/scoop from the pilots seat of our Ship / SLF / SRV.
At first glance I thought that was a bagpiper.
Me too - and I'm Scottish.
[Snip...]My one worry is that ED's current rendition of foliage in the game is horrible. Go to a station that has parks with various trees and ponds, and they look pretty rubbish - Flight Simulator 2000 graphics. VR makes this "fakeness" even more evident. If Frontier gives us worlds with vegetation, I hope they give us something a bit more realistic. [...Snip]
I know exactly what you mean, any tourist economy station and the trees are hideous, flat sprites cocked at various angles to represent "foliage", and its been like that since 2.1 :-(
I fear that you may be disappointed, with Flight Assist FDev already have an inbuilt, lore friendly, excuse for the handling to be the same. The only caveat to that would be the burning stations that could get quite turbulent
If you look at the shapes of ships in game just now, they are aerodynamically horrific, not just your extreme cases like a Lakon Type {No.} but even more mundane stuff like a conda or an asp, or a vulture... Even something inherently aerodynamic, like a 737MAX uses the MCAS computer systems to
crash the plane compensate for the fundamentally different handling characteristics the 737 MAX has from other 737 variants because of the repositioned engines. Now put something like a fed drop/assault/gun-ship in a wind tunnel and tell me thats not going to need some fly by wire assitance in a thick atmosphere with weather systems and crosswinds etc.
While I entirely agree we should be careful - we don't want to see Frontier posting something like this ..
We've listened to the community and we've decided to delay the 2020 update (and fleet carriers) until 2022 so we can re-prioritise the efforts of the development team and get them working on exciting new atmospheric landing content. In the meantime ... join us tonight as Stephen and Paige go bug hunting with the Anti-Xeno Initiative.
I still think it was a bit of a move to blame our opinions for (further) delays to content, surely they wouldn't do that again?
If Atmos is not in the new era someone can have my stuffz
Just PM me your username and password, I'll haz its.
Honestly I have little interest in atmos if its just going to mean the same gameplay but with trees/sand/ice.
Same goes for legs if its just going to be more boring mini-games.
The first part of that is pretty much what atmospheres before legs would be, it would be different coloured sky, varied coloured ground with more things on the surace for us to scan/shoot/scoop.
The second part, well that would be much more subjective, boring-mini-games could be anything, you could say docking your ship is a boring mini game, or if you are obsidian ant flying the space ship any notable distance is a boring mini game. So First Person activities that are deemed excellent you some might be mere boring minigames to another? I'm looking forward to stealthily infiltrating and sneaking my way through a planetary settlement and stealing the data files my mission giver is after before stealthily exfiltrating said place, rather than just rock up in m SRV, splat the turrets and skimmers shooting at me, scan the "terminal" then bug out 4km so I can recall my ship and head to an interstellar factor to pay off my tresspass & assault bounties. To me the inevitability of getting caught doing such things in an SRV is a boring, and the repetition of do mission, go to IF and clear name, go hand in mission, is a grindy mini game. Would be much better if I had more agency in my approach to getting the data, and had a chance of not getting caught by using SKILL.
I want Atmospheric Landings because it should be in the game, and I think it's ridiculous that it isn't.
How did this company go from releasing a game in 1993 that simulated the Milky Way galaxy, allowed you to buy and sell different ships, hire crew, had Thargoids in it AND you could land on any planet AND it fit on a 1.44Mb floppy disc (I'm not exaggerating. I had FEII for the Amiga and it was a single 1.44Mb floppy disc)
TO
Elite Dangerous and all the things we moan about?
First off, FE2 was AWESOME! So was FFE in my opinion, but we need to clarify a few things here. Thargoids were not in FE2, other than a cameo as static octagonal ships on the surfaces of some bases where they were nothing other than background scenery. They were in FFE as the end game contentwhere a player could get a thargoid ship?
As for the data size of ED, go, look at the graphics in FE2/FFE, while great at the time, look at the absolute lack of detail compared to dotays standards. Just the polygon count for any asset you can think of goes some way towards our 20gb game of today. Take a staport interior with all those buildings, the shaddows, the lighting, the to-ing and fro-ing of NPC ships, and thats even more data. Then there is the more complex socio political system with the BGS, and to a lesser extent powerplay, Then listen to the sounds, we are a world away from the nokia ring tone midi music files and atari 2600 level of engine sound effects of those games. All those things are contributors in how we went from one floppy disk to ~17,000 floppy disks.
Now we have bang whizz up to date graphics, shame about the anti-aliasing but hey ho, and Fantastic sound design, great ship models and a much more complex flight model, allowing us to partake in the complex socio ecomomic systems that underpin our galaxy, and you can see why its taken so long ans so much development resources to get to this point, now players are bickering amongst themselves about which major feature to add next, legs or atmospheres.
A lot of veterans from the first installments, for the record I'm a FE2/FFE veteran, don't want to leave the pilots seat, and would prefer skys clouds and atmospheres, legs proponents, of which I am one, want to get out the pilots seat and be acharacter in the galaxy, notjust a spaceship dashcam. The best outcome is we get both, but the game would be better if Legs came first, allowing us to have access to some RPG style content interacting with NPC's, starports, and any environment we can visit. Then after legs the developers could properly do planets with atmospheres and ecosystems and cities.