not all balancing needs new game play loops, true. But the kind of balancing that it really needs does. The small balancing available now will only magnify the the other unbalanced things more.
Like if you did improve dirty and clean drives, to open up stealthy gameplay. You'll be even more incensed as a player when your rewards for being a stealthy player are no different from those who aren't. Because in the end they'll still only have credits and materials to give you that ends up being the same no matter how you got it.
The 'reward' is creating a more varied game to play, what else can you have? A big badge or something?
in a finite economy ...a lot of different commodities serve a purpose because they can be used to leverage crafting or be used in determining the spawning of npcs and the outcome of the bgs activities.
In an infinite economy like we have, they are useless filler. They are being used strictly to either get credits or to be mission objectives. They serve no meaningful purpose unique to what they are in any other way.
You can easily eliminate all but maybe 3-5 of them and have the exact same game.
You could quite easily- as long as they have some property attached to them that ties lore, or a need (money or an objective) in some way.
updates for screenshots and video captures isn't for exploration. That's where most of the non-combat foot play updates have been directed. Not at improving the exploration mechanic.
Then what is it for? PvP? BGS?
The procedurally generated galaxy hasn't been leveraged for the benefit of exploration. That's what was used to sell the game. Fdev hasn't leveraged these nearly limitless systems for exploration at all. It's just one empty system after the next. An endless disappointment followed by a loading screen and another pointless empty system to be disappointed about.
Call me crazy, but to explore you need stuff to find, and that not everywhere is going to be a ruined Temple or stuffed full of stuff.
exploration as a role and game mechanic is more incomplete than powerplay ever was.
To
you maybe. The sheer amount of dev time (new assets, features) plus unending CM attention suggests otherwise. How many livestreams did we have about Powerplay?
Exploration has no purpose to exploring. Not only is most content completely missing from most systems, but the systems that do have content tend to be very close to populated systems.Exploration has no impact to the rest of the game. That's your missing "pp promotion and pp collapse" type functionality there.
I agree it needs reasons, but people want to go out and wander and they have huge swathes to do it in.
Exploration and powerplay are similar in many ways in how incomplete they are. But exploration is an empty shell consisting only of loading screens and staring at meshes. There's a lot more for PP.
Powerplay is certainly incomplete, and demonstrably so. Exploration
is complete in game. Its delivered whole, you just don't like it. And like I said, Powerplay
had more to begin with, but over the last six years has had things taken away and has remained static feature wise.
those basic bolts are still more engaging than staring at an object and watching loading screens.
Empty systems just like the previous empty system is not "something to find". You're finding nothing.
Improved moon surfaces dont add anything to exploring. Exploring doesn't get easier or harder because the surface of the moon has a slightly different texture applied to it.
To you, maybe. But FD did not upend EDs surface generation for PvP or BGS players.
Fdev doesn't improve visuals to help or even for exploration. They do it to look good in videos on youtube and twitch. Because that sells games. (which obviously helps everyone, but still.. it doesn't do anything to exploration as a game mechanic or in the role)
Just like putting 400 billion systems in the game wasn't done for exploration ... it was a marketing gimmick to sell the game to players for kickstarter.
if it was done for explorers, there would be a point to actually going to them by now after 7 years.
Well people seem quite happy to do stuff out there, FD listened and created Colonia, Jaques, mysteries to find and solve, The Gnosis etc. There has been
loads of exploration content.
i dont think it's that. Because otherwise we would have disjointed but effectively complete aspects of the game (since each update tends to be mostly self contained). Instead, we always get incomplete things that never get any follow thru.
i think it's something common that has existed throughout all of these leads tenures. because that "wanting to be everything to everyone when you know such things aren't possible" mentality has existed since kickstarter ...and this directive to make everything optional has followed since release. You know, on top of all of the other development/process problems that seems to be embedded deeper than just the elite dangerous game in the company.
Making things optional has always compromised the game in some way.
But FD are not set up for a GaaS game like ED is. Powerplay is an example of that (compared to the self contained BGS) because internally the teams appear to hot desk around games rather than being one or the other. The do a job, and are retasked, possibly returning if its popular. The problem is, for some features to be popular they need extra work and I think after yesterdays Braben telegram they start to get it.
