And with this, I've unsubscribed from the newsletter, and I think my time with Elite is absolutely done.
I've worked in the industry, and on an MMO too, and I recognise corporate wonk-speak when I see it; normally staff are encouraged to never turn down any speculation but to always say "maybe!" to any question with no hard answer, so as to take advantage of the naive hopes of players who mistake how much they want something for how likely it is they are to get it... It's not phrased like that in the training or the handbooks of course, but that's ultimately the reality of why it's done; "We're listening to you!" is at least a corporate image you want to cultivate, even if at the practical level nothing your users ever say or do will influence the actual development, which comes top down from the corporate heads only.
You only say something even as a vaguely negative as "It won't be there at launch" if that feature absolutely isn't in official development. An individual developer may be kicking something similar around in their free time, there might even be a vague R&D department testing new ideas, but if publicly in an official statement it's said to not be coming, that means that from the top down, no in house support is being given to the idea.
People might spontaneously turn into trifles too; every atom in their body could suddenly turn into custardy ones. It's theoritically possible. But if nothing has been done in the lab to even begin to start investigating custardification, all you have is imagination, not a realistic chance of it happening.
And that raises a lot of questions as to why; I have my suspicions; The main one being that the engine possibly can't support the player being in two "places". It's a surprisingly hard thing to manage, look at Star Trek Online which can't manage it either, you're either a starship, or walking around on the interior, but not both. Look at Multicrew in Elite itself; it's just a different camera angle from the same player location ("gunners"), or being moved to being a seperate entity (fighters). I suspect that ED simply can't allow people to walk around a ship when its in motion. No Man's Sky? Internal mechanics to freighters that make Elite look amateurish, but those are fixed instances too. The only game trying to make internals work whilst moving is Star Citizen, which has earned 300m+, but is years behind any sort of schedule and still hopelessly alpha.
Why aren't Frontier at least allowing interiors when stationary? That's even more worrying; the article mentions that despite being months from supposed launch, and even years into development, years I remind you that they supposedly pulled staff of ED itself, put the game on hiatus for 2+ years, and cancelled features like Galnet and Community goals to supposedly support Odyssey... even core features like "how do I step off my ship and use my legs" aren't decided yet. That's shocking for a product with this kind of delay. I suspect again that the reason is they simply can't do much more with the game and they're still struggling to get any wider content in. What has been mentioned just sounds like repackaged SRV driving to nodes again.
I can explain why having internals would be a wonderful thing to me, and so many others; as someone who has designed content for a living I could certainly knock you up some simple design documents for what gameplay there could be... heck I can even answer the above question about entrance/egress in a few seconds; the option to board or unload cargo is already in game, so a potential "board to cockpit seat/board to hold" gump upon touching the airlock is staring us in the face every time we exited the SRV. Yet it's soooo bizarre watching people here deliberately hobble their own perspective because they want to somehow reframe not providing ship internals as a good thing. "No no, see, ship internals would have to be bad as it would make me walk through my ship every time, so it's good we aren't getting them!" Oh dear...
That "Neil Armstrong" moment? Let's say we can't let the player into the ship; No reason why you can't at least create a ladder at the landing point to let the player walk up and down on at their own pace... player chosen pause before deciding to take that momentous "First Step". eh...? Except the real reason I suspect even that moment is still up in the air is playtesting will have showen how much players then want to take the final step upwards and actually get in their ships... And as I say; we're not getting this. We're simply not, no matter how much people hope. And if it is because the engine is so limited, well everything since Horizon's launch has been badly designed, poorly implemented and quickly abandoned for the next headline feature, thus any hope for future quality gameplay is probably realistically gone.
But we got an in game store for microtransactions, oh yes.
And we got a second round of "Scanned By" to get players to go to the same old nebulas and scan them again. We'll get a "First Stepped Foot On" label next. All that SRV driving you did in your favourite discovery system? Sorry, retconned away now. Have to have used your Space Legs as well. Gotta stretch out what content we have, even if it means taking away other player's sense of achievement by slapping more players names on it as if they were the first too...
I've already done this enough times already though, even before it started being watered down and turned into even bigger grind just because the devs cannot or will not give us anything new. And we aren't even getting an interior to our own ships now, the most obvious and probably most desired reason for having space legs? Well I hope those of you new to the game can continue having fun with it; and the stockholm syndrome forum dads will love it no matter what the game does; but for me, and for many, many like me I suspect, this interview sealed the impression Elite just doesn't have a clue how to make the game have a wider soul; it's what's inside that counts, remember? But we're not getting any of that.
are the amount of people who think that they should have done more in two and a half / almost three years. They've only shown us the First Dev Diary. There is more they're wanting to talk about. I should have said that in last nights Lave Radio with Souverine and Shan. Yes, I'm hoping that these social hubs involve places on space stations and outposts, as well as the hinted at planetary settlements. It's Like Horizons all over again when people complained that they'd paid a lot for just planetary landings, but then they got Engineers, Fighters and all the planetary side thargoid and guardian stuff too.
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