It's like arguing that the FSS made any interesting orbital relationships you find 10x more valuable because it takes that much longer to scan for them now they don't show up in the honk, thereby making discovered ones that much rarer....Anti-logic at its finest.
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
I agree with you. It does!
Anything with an arrow and a "here it is" is like being in a House of Mouse theme park - It's cheap, made of paper mache and run be people who want your money but have no real values!
You prefer the "sense of pride and accomplishment" that comes with being permitted to play as Darth Vader after grinding for 40 straight hours.
Please do us all a favour and never join a Frontier focus group giving feedback on how many of a new engineering mat it should take to unlock new content.
If I played as Darth Vader...
wait - is that choking I hear?Not all the game is about the grind.
Hmmm - probably you speaking about this?
And yes, evidently there is no any kind of quick fix to this.
But the poster used all caps, they must be more important than that, right?
Was it different before? What have you found deep space that was new or unique? Correct me if I'm wrong, but there was nothing more than now. Actually now there is some new stuff, at last, for example the new biologicals.
Oh yes, I do quite an intentional stretching in my conclusion=)Anti-logic at its finest.
However my primary question is still valid - where is the "victim"?
Yep, that mentioned by OP "Exploration" of the surface features that has been killed by Odyssey?
I have no intention to defend Odyssey on that matter, to be honest - there is a load of related bugs and issues, some of them probably solvable/fixable in future, but some others are part of the core of the new mechanics, yes.
Probably I've just seen too many threads discussing dullness/sameness of the planets in Horizons way before Odyssey? Icy - Rocky-Icy problem, all that? And I don't like the that tendency of the modern myth creation on the base of Horizons, "dream that was killed".
Just for analogy - one could zoom,and zoom, and zoom in Mandelbrot's set, admiring the results and saying "Wow! Ahh! Uhhh!". But at certain point - sooner or later - the feeling of the sameness of that "diversity" is pretty inevitable. With all that zooming you are still in that same Mandelbrot set. In terms of elite this could be translated to jump-honk-FSS/supercriuse-... - about the same, but way more time-consuming. Or one can conduct a little experiment - log into Horizons, visit a couple of the nearest systems with 30-40+ bodies, go to system view, filter the most common lanbdable body class, pass to planetary view, get a couple or more screenshots of each body of that type from different views, store and mix the results in one folder, then browse them and try not to became bored up to toothache... (and once again, I do not state that in Odyssey it will be anyway better, more even worse).
Yeah, I could be subjective, but already for years the planetary exploration for me relies mostly on "external factors": events, friends, POI's - both procedural and handplaced - storylines and own narratives - and not on planet generation mechanics on itself.
Now, more technical part, about some Odyssey planetary tech drawbacks I see
Absence of planetary - or continental - scale features that we became so habituated to in Horizons. All those half-planet long canyons, a bit grotesque mountainous ranges... Probably with the exception of those copy-pasted mega-impact craters =)
Another candidate could be all these notorious and repeatedly observed patterns. However according to my own observations those patterns do no give any real idea about the underlying landscape. They are linked more to terrain coloration, could be probably affected by spawning of certain terrain tiles types (I'm far not sure in the latter) or - probably - to some low-frequency low-amplitude landscape perturbations that are hardly recognizable at close range. I mean, they are more the source of confusion in an attempt to judge the underlying terrain than practically helping in prospecting particular planet for any interesting landscape "features".
The above is understandable if we take into account that the main effort of Odyssey planetary tech is seemingly concentrated around "fine details" in order to better accommodate the environment for on-foot perspective and scale. And all these fine details are indistinguishable when viewed from the orbital distances.
However with the "fine details of landscape" we have the same problem of tiles/copies. Yeh, it's not so rare that from one peak of a mountain one could see another very similar just in few kilometres. They will be not exactly same looking due to blending with another features, but still quite recognizable (the same applies to mega-craters that do look identical from the orbital plane - they are not exactly same "in situ", but - once again - recognizable as having exactly same origin model).
(Was) Is it different in Horizons compared with Odyssey? Yes in fact it is: you see rings around Gas Giants in FSS - for one thing - but I think there is a far wider color palette for Horizons worlds than in Odyssey…
In Horizons - many planets have a variety of features - and the occasional “needle in the haystack” strange outlier feature (ex Mount Neverest) that the Stellar Forge spits out after a hard night of boozing on Lavian Brandy…
So far today - Earth is the only confirmed bodiy to harbor life - and similarly biological signals - while not absent - are typically rare in occurrence…Geological activities- like we have witnessed in our own solar system (Jovian moons with various geysers - and Olympus Mons on Mars) are commonplace…
In Odyssey it seems we have the opposite: bio-signals seem to be found in - perhaps 30-50% of systems (perhaps lower - I would still argue an order of magnitude more prevalent than in Horizons) - but now the geological variations have been tamped down and (planetary) colors seem less variable (I call it the “beige steamrollerification” of the galaxy)…
To an earlier post that “really unique geological formations will be rarer - and therefore more interesting to visit” is basically what we have now in Horizons - but the status quo is far more interesting to look at I think - than “great plains of oatmeal”…
Look - I think everyone wants Odyssey to be huge success (I have 3 Elite accounts and bought Odyssey for all 3) - but what is so painful - is that the Odyssey “enhancements” - rather than build on / complement the well established- and truly unique Stellar Forge galaxy - come at the expense of those beloved features in Horizons….
What’s aroused so much “venom” in the greater community is that these changes are immediately obvious as soon as you started playing - and that we’re now 6 weeks + 5 Updates and several hotfixes into Odyssey- just to get back to something resembling normality in Horizons- seems to underscore that the FDev development managers are/were horribly out of touch with the game and community that they are ostensibly developing for…
In Horizons - many planets have a variety of features - and the occasional “needle in the haystack” strange outlier feature (ex Mount Neverest) that the Stellar Forge spits out after a hard night of boozing on Lavian Brandy…
So far today - Earth is the only confirmed bodiy to harbor life - and similarly biological signals - while not absent - are typically rare in occurrence…Geological activities- like we have witnessed in our own solar system (Jovian moons with various geysers - and Olympus Mons on Mars) are commonplace…
In Odyssey it seems we have the opposite: bio-signals seem to be found in - perhaps 30-50% of systems (perhaps lower - I would still argue an order of magnitude more prevalent than in Horizons) - but now the geological variations have been tamped down and (planetary) colors seem less variable (I call it the “beige steamrollerification” of the galaxy)…
To an earlier post that “really unique geological formations will be rarer - and therefore more interesting to visit” is basically what we have now in Horizons - but the status quo is far more interesting to look at I think - than “great plains of oatmeal”…
Look - I think everyone wants Odyssey to be huge success (I have 3 Elite accounts and bought Odyssey for all 3) - but what is so painful - is that the Odyssey “enhancements” - rather than build on / complement the well established- and truly unique Stellar Forge galaxy - come at the expense of those beloved features in Horizons….
What’s aroused so much “venom” in the greater community is that these changes are immediately obvious as soon as you started playing - and that we’re now 6 weeks + 5 Updates and several hotfixes into Odyssey- just to get back to something resembling normality in Horizons- seems to underscore that the FDev development managers are/were horribly out of touch with the game and community that they are ostensibly developing for…
So, played a bit of SC today and decided to do some exploring. I wanted to scrutinise the planet tech to compare it with Odyssey. In order to make this a fair examination, I went to a non heavy trafficked area on a planet (forget which one) and I was surprised what I discovered. I know there are many complaints about tiling and repeating patterns in Odyssey, but SC is quilty of the same thing. In this picture you can clearly see the same patterns used over and over. Even on the surface I see the same technique being used. If the SC devs truly spent 5 years on Planet tech alone, it must have been spent mostly handcrafting areas where most players would visit, like New Babbage ect. I even witnessed render popping on the surface flying over mountains etc. It's not as bad as Odyssey but it's noticeable.
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It's been mentioned. But at least SC is in Alpha, so it's understandable.So, played a bit of SC today and decided to do some exploring. I wanted to scrutinise the planet tech to compare it with Odyssey. In order to make this a fair examination, I went to a non heavy trafficked area on a planet (forget which one) and I was surprised what I discovered. I know there are many complaints about tiling and repeating patterns in Odyssey, but SC is quilty of the same thing. In this picture you can clearly see the same patterns used over and over. Even on the surface I see the same technique being used. If the SC devs truly spent 5 years on Planet tech alone, it must have been spent mostly handcrafting areas where most players would visit, like New Babbage ect. I even witnessed render popping on the surface flying over mountains etc. It's not as bad as Odyssey but it's noticeable.
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The planet you can land seems massively better than Odyssey though. But so far it's limited.
That is true. At least they are in Alpha.
Didn't realise it had been mentioned. There's too many posts in this thread to read them all
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That is true. At least they are in Alpha.
Didn't realise it had been mentioned. There's too many posts in this thread to read them all
Eg. Post #3 of this thread.
Ah, yea. Missed it. Oh well, i just provided some physical evidence to support itEg. Post #3 of this thread.
I wonder if Odyssey is reaching too far.
I mean - going from mathematically created bland/coloured surfaces with predictable rock scatter - to landscape that looks like I could actually be landscape from the bones to the surface. Are they reaching too far and our current devices are just not up to the job. They are culling objects from behind your view now to allow low end devices to cope. You turn around too quickly and they materialise into being once more.
I feels like those early games that try too hard to do fantastic things by stretching the limitations... Photorealism and generation on the fly. You don't mind it in NMS because you know it's just a game, but somehow there is an expectation on ED to be more. It's reaching...
I mean - going from mathematically created bland/coloured surfaces with predictable rock scatter - to landscape that looks like I could actually be landscape from the bones to the surface. Are they reaching too far and our current devices are just not up to the job. They are culling objects from behind your view now to allow low end devices to cope. You turn around too quickly and they materialise into being once more.
I feels like those early games that try too hard to do fantastic things by stretching the limitations... Photorealism and generation on the fly. You don't mind it in NMS because you know it's just a game, but somehow there is an expectation on ED to be more. It's reaching...
there are tons and tons of them... but, hey! Denial is the new fix.
