Why is the story content wasted?

[Factabulous]

There is a lot of things that can be tied up by a simple chained story mission/campaign and it even does not require a separate universe/instance. And I am very confused about why it wasn't done. Such a waste of content.

There are two ways to play this game

1) Demand that the game tell you everything. Post on the forums about how the game should be changed. This sometimes works, fdev do listen, but it will probably take years
2) Go play the game, keep your eyes open, if you see something interesting google to see if it is known - and if not ask about it.

One of these sets of players is (reasonably) happy, though they still want more. The other seems to spend a lot of time shouting about the same things. Your choice

 

[BL1P]

Just read this, all of it, then get on with creating the next chapter. Or not

Elite Dangerous Timeline

For the non-canon timeline of previous Elite games, see Elite Timeline. This is the timeline of Elite Dangerous. The contemporary Elite Dangerous narrative begins in September 3300 and progresses in real-time. Currently, the year is 3311.[1] There are some timeline disparities with the previous...

elite-dangerous.fandom.com

 

[Thatchinho]

You are too focused on making things EXACTLY as they were during live events. It does not have to be IDENTICAL. Some exact things can always be made more generic for the story campaign that would fit into any universe.

I mean you don't need a specific time and place to send the player on a mission to:

• get started with a bounty hunting mission
• go to engineers for mining/explorations missions
• get a trading mission
• find out about the unknown artifact
• get interdicted by a Thargoid for the first time
• investigate barnacles
• get sent to an engineer for AX weapons
• kill a couple of Thargoids
• defend a burning station which is attacked by Thargoids (in a mission only permit locked system)
• get a mission about the guardian site
• etc.

After the campaign (or even during the campaign) you are free to play as you want in the Sandbox, but at least players would be guided through what there is in the game so that they could find their own path afterwards.

There is a lot of things that can be tied up by a simple chained story mission/campaign and it even does not require a separate universe/instance. And I am very confused about why it wasn't done. Such a waste of content.

Most of what you're asking for is there and has been for ages.

• get started with a bounty hunting mission
• get a trading mission

There already at the start of the game. You're just not forced to do them.

• go to engineers for mining/explorations missions

There already, as part of the engineer unlocks.

• find out about the unknown artifact

It's not unknown any more, which is part of the problem. Stuff leading players to the Thargoid Sensors already exists in-game.

• get interdicted by a Thargoid for the first time

Will happen naturally as part of play, once the player hits the correct conditions. Shouldn't happen before those conditions have been reached, as that effectively breaks the main game.

• investigate barnacles

Player can do that if they want to. 3.3 made them readily findable. The Felicity Farseer unlock is the lead-off into this stuff.

• get sent to an engineer for AX weapons

People already get sent to engineers for stuff the engineers provide as a standard part of the game.

• kill a couple of Thargoids

This is not something that a new player should be made to do. How to approach the Thargoids is a decision each player should make for themselves.

• defend a burning station which is attacked by Thargoids (in a mission only permit locked system)

Hasn't happened in the live game at all (except kinda for the Gnosis). Sets a false expectation for the real game.

• get a mission about the guardian site

There already. You get the Ram Tah missions from Meene, which people will generally visit when they get the Ram Tah invite.

No offense, but with that stuff all largely there already, it sounds like what you're wanting is basically a fast-forward version of it, as opposed to them actually just playing the game as a new player and finding the stuff out for themselves.

Don't get me wrong here, I can understand you wanting to get a friend engaged with it all, but personally I think it's also very understandable why what you're asking for isn't there in the form you're asking for it.

 

[Thatchinho]

Good points against story mode. I DO however remember that we were told there was a personal story. So where is it?
And all the story bits done - how else can they be told? What's the point in having a story that is only narrated once to a few lucky players being at the right place 3 years ago?

The personal story is what you experience, discover, and do as you play the game.

It starts with you being gifted a basic ship and a modest sum of money, and then you take it from there.

You're just some random member of the public in the game. The galaxy, and galactic events progress with or without you. You don't participate in things unless you make yourself a participant, and you're not the key to anything that happens unless you make yourself the key to it.

In other words, the personal story isn't something that gets told to you, the personal story is a story you have to make for yourself.

(That works fantastically well for some, and doesn't really work for others, but hey-ho, it's literally what the game is, and the best way to deal with it is to understand what the game is and approach it accordingly.)

(Oh, and from what I recall, the personal narrative stuff was just really a response to people complaining about things being too community focussed - with new things being unlocked for everyone by CG's rather than being unlocked for individual players as a result of their individual efforts, for example.)

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

The personal story is what you experience, discover, and do as you play the game.

It starts with you being gifted a basic ship and a modest sum of money, and then you take it from there.

You're just some random member of the public in the game. The galaxy, and galactic events progress with or without you. You don't participate in things unless you make yourself a participant, and you're not the key to anything that happens unless you make yourself the key to it.

In other words, the personal story isn't something that gets told to you, the personal story is a story you have to make for yourself.

(That works fantastically well for some, and doesn't really work for others, but hey-ho, it's literally what the game is, and the best way to deal with it is to understand what the game is and approach it accordingly.)

(Oh, and from what I recall, the personal narrative stuff was just really a response to people complaining about things being too community focussed - with new things being unlocked for everyone by CG's rather than being unlocked for individual players as a result of their individual efforts, for example.)

That is a really lame excuse for something that isn't there. If someone offers personalised story I expect one to be narrated, not one making up by myself. You can't go and promise a story and then it's magically up to the player to invent one. It's false advertising and exercise of newspeak in a display of outright re-definition of well-established meanings to words used for centuries. That just don't work.

 

[Thatchinho]

That is a really lame excuse for something that isn't there. If someone offers personalised story I expect one to be narrated, not one making up by myself. You can't go and promise a story and then it's magically up to the player to invent one. It's false advertising and exercise of newspeak in a display of outright re-definition of well-established meanings to words used for centuries. That just don't work.

There's no excuse being made, it's just a statement of how things are.

A story not being narrated to you doesn't mean you have to make it up yourself. You aren't making up the story, you're experiencing it and driving it. I've not made up any of my game story, it's all happened.

And well, if something was said, you've got a choice. You can:

• Apply whatever your general understanding and expectations are of that term
• Understand the context and apply an according understanding and expectation

One of those is going to result in you getting a lot more out of the game.

At the end of the day, the fundamental nature of the game is what it is, and you need to expect the concept of personal story to fit within that, not for it to mean that the fundamental nature of the game is going to be changed to fit your pre-existing concept of what a personal story is.

*I'm saying 'you' a lot there. Just to be clear, I'm using 'you' in the impersonal sense and I'm not telling you personally that you have to do what I've said.

 

[hems303]

Ahh 'hiSTORY'.... I well remember the wee small 'capsule' or 'pill' sized 'bubble' in which we could roam in those very first 'Alpha' days of Elite Dangerous.... Hauling fish or coffee in our Sidewinders for minuscule profits; as if our very lives depended on it! Those early, now evocative named star systems and space stations like iBootis, Aulin Enterprise, Eranin... oh so few back then, but now-a-days so many.

All the 'history' that has flowed through ED since those early days can be read about, but replayed? .... not so sure... you really, really had to be there.
However you can read about it ALL if you have the inclination.... everything that happened has been meticulously recorded and documented from the earliest days in 3300 to present day.... here be the 'archive':

INARA

The community site for Elite: Dangerous, Starfield, Kingdom Come: Deliverance with the game databases, information, gaming news and other handy content...

inara.cz

Starting here with page 532; the 'first days'. Page back in descending page numbers to the present day! Fly Dangerously. o7

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

...

*I'm saying 'you' a lot there. Just to be clear, I'm using 'you' in the impersonal sense and I'm not telling you personally that you have to do what I've said.

No problem, I do the same. In the end I don't blame anyone using headcanon or role-playing to make it up for themselves. I did that, too. But that doesn't mean I excuse the crappy advertising and misleading info FD gave out to sell ED. If someone sells a story, there better be one. You can't sell me a story that I'm making up myself.

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

You are too focused on making things EXACTLY as they were during live events. It does not have to be IDENTICAL. Some exact things can always be made more generic for the story campaign that would fit into any universe.

I mean you don't need a specific time and place to send the player on a mission to:

• get started with a bounty hunting mission
• go to engineers for mining/explorations missions
• get a trading mission
• find out about the unknown artifact
• get interdicted by a Thargoid for the first time
• investigate barnacles
• get sent to an engineer for AX weapons
• kill a couple of Thargoids
• defend a burning station which is attacked by Thargoids (in a mission only permit locked system)
• get a mission about the guardian site
• etc.

After the campaign (or even during the campaign) you are free to play as you want in the Sandbox, but at least players would be guided through what there is in the game so that they could find their own path afterwards.

There is a lot of things that can be tied up by a simple chained story mission/campaign and it even does not require a separate universe/instance. And I am very confused about why it wasn't done. Such a waste of content.

I kind of feel the same about the wasted content - there could be more done to direct you to it and make it feel like a living remnant in the game.

The issue to me is how you do it so it works, can work independently of the original event timeline, and independently of the other content, in order to make mission design straightforward and low dev overhead.

Simple example - first-discovery/mapping a planet. It only happens once but we're able to repeat scan it over and over, once per CMDR and make (less) money from cartographics. My head-canon says this is because "more scans are better than one". No scientific experiment just measures things once and calls it done. Also, things might have changed - we have geological and weather satellites in the present day that aren't decommissioned after one orbit.

What if missions sent you back out to, say, story megaships (e.g. Adamastor), to "scan them again", or scan a bunch of them, for "research" - for data that "didn't come out in the original scans". To notionally solve issues that came up after a period of research on the original findings and needs checking. Whatever, just an in-game reason to go get. And in the process you naturally go through the logs or whatever motions of the original story - you might as well. Ties it all in with a present day viewpoint. It's simple mechanics, with just a bit of very minor narrative work to couch it in a mission context and explain a reward. The number of pirates that I kill that I wouldn't if I hadn't been given a mission to do it...

 

[zimms]

Well, basically there is no place for him to get started with these things. I mean there is no connected narrative which once you start, will take you through the game. I mean I get that it's a "Sandbox", but would be great to have a campaign that takes you through all the aspects of the game (exploring, mining, bounty hunting, material gathering, engineer unlocking, Thargoid interdictions, Unknow Artifact, Barnacles, Guardians, etc.). There should be a campaign that guides you through all of this, and you still would have the option to play it as a Sandbox if you want at any time, or once you finish it.

Right now I have to hold my friend's hand in anything basically because otherwise he just gets lost and loses interest because you either need to go to the forums to look for stuff or try to figure out what to do on your own with all the interesting stuff hidden.

I think you are overestimating how much "handholding" we got back then.

Your friends could just start reading the Galnet articles starting in Dec 3300. That's basically all we got too. There's no big interactive campaign in Elite.

Sure, we got the forum/other people to talk to and try to figure out some of these mysteries. But you could bunch up with other newcomers. Sure, it's not exactly the same and you'll know you're not the first ones experiencing this, but that would also be the case with "story instances".

 

[Arthur Z.]

Most of what you're asking for is there and has been for ages.

No offense, but with that stuff all largely there already, it sounds like what you're wanting is basically a fast-forward version of it, as opposed to them actually just playing the game as a new player and finding the stuff out for themselves.

No offense, but I think you totally missed the point of my post I know that this content is in the game. What I want, is some sort of a campaign (however long) that will link ALL these things together (at least some of the things, other things may remain secret for people do discover themselves). Right now, a new player has literally no place to start and nothing to kick off their journey.

 

[dribnairb]

I wrote this a while ago:

GitHub - dribnairb/ed_mission_creator: Testing an idea for creating story/mission things for Elite Dangerous

Testing an idea for creating story/mission things for Elite Dangerous - dribnairb/ed_mission_creator

github.com

It has an example "mission" that ends up sending the player to something in-game (I won't spoil it). I have to admit it's a pain to setup and is very basic, but I think it's the principle of what the OP (and me too!) would like in game. In theory anyone could use this to create their own story based missions either following the lore or completely independent.

I really hoped when I wrote it that someone with more time/creativity might take it on and come up with something much better

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

I wrote this a while ago:

GitHub - dribnairb/ed_mission_creator: Testing an idea for creating story/mission things for Elite Dangerous

Testing an idea for creating story/mission things for Elite Dangerous - dribnairb/ed_mission_creator

github.com

It has an example "mission" that ends up sending the player to something in-game (I won't spoil it). I have to admit it's a pain to setup and is very basic, but I think it's the principle of what the OP (and me too!) would like in game. In theory anyone could use this to create their own story based missions either following the lore or completely independent.

I really hoped when I wrote it that someone with more time/creativity might take it on and come up with something much better

That has some potential! Given the 3rd party community around the game, there would probably be some groups who'd make something of this... not sure I have time, mind .

It's a little bit immersion breaking that you could just go into the file and look at the text of course . One idea there - you could encrypt stages of the quest and require some info from in-game, not available on 3rd party tools (e.g. the name of an ice moon in an unmapped system, or a syschat transmission from a player in a system, or callsign of a carrier the quest maker jumped there), to decrypt a new quest file or the next part... I'm not really familiar with the workings of EDMC, and if you could integrate this on the fly, but given everything is going on in python, it feels like something would be possible. If not (or as well), then at least offline for a follow-on quest.

 

[Aidan Brooder]

I understand, that FD wants to create a living galaxy, but it is such a waste.

It would be great if any new player that joins Elite could play through all the events that happened over the years (e.g. discovering Unknown Artifacts, first Thargoin interdiction, Barnacles, The Guardians, etc.). If you compare it to something like Sea of Thieves, the story content can be played and re-played many times!

While making these events "live" is great for people already playing the game (or living in the game rather), it's an absolute waste for casual players or news players and leaves the game empty for like 99% of the remaining time.

Please FD, can we have all past events bundled into a quest line or something? It's really embarrassing to invite friends to play Elite, and actually having NOTHING for them to do, because they don't know the game, and have no way of experiencing the Elite story to get emotionally started

I play Elite Dangerous as my time allows. I surely loved the early stories around the death of the Emperor and now the revival of Galnet. And I also missed out on some interesting events because I was somewhere at the end of the real world.

But that's what gives this game some charm. It's not WOW, if you miss something, you simply weren't there. Good is. Other people enjoyed it and can tell you stories about it. Don't turn this into another "Everyone is THE ONE!" theme park. The game doesn't deserve it.

Cherish the time you play in and let Frontier steer it's efforts towards making them interesting. Not constantly relive the past or live in all moments at the same time. It's a bad idea and you should feel bad. Unless it's a Sidewinder Simulator...

 

[zimms]

No offense, but I think you totally missed the point of my post I know that this content is in the game. What I want, is some sort of a campaign (however long) that will link ALL these things together (at least some of the things, other things may remain secret for people do discover themselves). Right now, a new player has literally no place to start and nothing to kick off their journey.

Again, there never was "some sort of a campaign (however long) that will link ALL these things together". The people who were around back then to experience it when it happened didn't have much of highlighted path to follow either.

 

[Achtung-Goomba]

Again, there never was "some sort of a campaign (however long) that will link ALL these things together". The people who were around back then to experience it when it happened didn't have much of highlighted path to follow either.

To quote the game’s lineage, of which I understand this is a direct successor and the culmination of Saint David’s vision, nor did the original Elite or Frontier, though I never played First Encounters that did have somewhat of a ‘story’ didn’t it? And they were offline single player games from the misty days of yore. Of course, that’s not saying that things must always stay the same, but ‘campaign’ gaming isn’t really in the series’ genetics.

 

[Jmanis]

Again, there never was "some sort of a campaign (however long) that will link ALL these things together". The people who were around back then to experience it when it happened didn't have much of highlighted path to follow either.

And to be honest, it would be a proverbial move to retcon some half-baked story to replace the actual events that happened.