Yes, this so much. Assuming it's not just a game mechanic poorly thought out in lore terms, it's a pretty dystopic take on how wars are fought in this timeline.
Drew Wagar's Thoughts
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The problem, as nearly always, is that when you are not part of a project it is very hard to imagine project-specific challenges caused by something like covid. For example, a major dev studio (might find the link tomorrow) posted a blog where they explained they had an extensive QA testing lab with a host of different rigs for testing performance and compatibility. By law it had to be locked, and employees had to do the same testing with their laptop at home. Obviously this is going to cause issues.
I was personally able to adjust to covid very, very easily in my own work environment. Pretending that has any relevance to how other projects in other companies struggled is, honestly, naive at best and clownesque at worst.
To be perfectly blunt, he sometimes really sounds like a 12-year old pretending to sound really insightful.
I haven't seen any arguments, least of all any evidence, to suggest that Frontier are out-and-out altruists either, so I'd be interested what the evidence is for coming to this conclusion
Nobody is pretending that, and they aren't allowed to by law anyway.
Yeah, putting more visual detail in definitely works both ways. More chance for details to not quite work whether through not paying attention or it just being too difficult to implement technically.
I'm not sure Elite was designed with "no FTL comms" in the lore - even back in 1.0 they allowed interplayer comms to be more than "same instance", the original description of the Imperial Senate noted that it often met by teleconference except on ceremonial occasions, Drew's Premonition novel, for that matter, has various realtime conversations between parties in different systems. It's a nice idea for a setting but doesn't work in a multiplayer game. [1]
Certainly the existence of sufficiently high-bandwidth FTL telepresence to control a ship, on the other hand, raises uncomfortable questions about why anyone would fly them in person. They should just have completely ignored the issue for Multicrew and said "there's no in-universe explanation [2] for how you help crew their ship, assume it happens in a flashback or something if it bothers you" - since Odyssey's physical multicrew is demonstrating why "require meetup in advance" would never have worked as a game.
[1] Way off-topic question: are there any singleplayer games that implement communications delays as a mechanism and make it fun? I can certainly imagine a 4X sort of game (either in space or a pre-telegraph setting) using it as a fog of war mechanism, but I can't actually think of an example.
[2] I'm assuming here that my "all CMDRs are AIs kept under control by telling them that AI is banned and of course they're human" conspiracy is not in fact what's going on.
I didn't say that. Only that there are more likely possibilities than it just being the end of the financial year, so ship it whatever. Frontier have other games in their portfolio and in development, so a press release, "Covid has delayed Odyssey" would have been perfectly understandable in that scenario, keeping both ED players moods and market / shareprices up, as interest rates are extremely low, tiding you over until EDO does release, on the back of those other titles and company value.
I believe framerates were unforseen but if you factor that wild card out, for me it looks more likely that ED development reverted to the Horizons model, of smaller regular updates, to make departmental workloads less choppy, FD managing company overheads by keeping all departments in production. If framerates had not have tanked, the coast would have been clear for news of new SRV, megaship interiors and so on, sooner .. helping to cover for the Odyssey release being smaller than might have originally been expected without pandemic disruption. 'Pure greed' definitely doesn't wash.
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There are more possibilities, but given the state of Odyssey at release (and right now) the "end of the financial year" theory is ironically enough a better reason than anything else I can come up with right now.
There are more possibilities, but given the state of Odyssey at release (and right now) the "end of the financial year" theory is ironically enough a better reason than anything else I can come up with right now.
I don't know what all the fuss is about anyway. I'm elite rank deadeye with all sorts of G5 goodies in my wardrobe.
I believe there were and are strategy games out there (for instance set in medieval times) which apply that delay with message couriers. It's been ages since I played any of those, but I can recall sending a courier in probably Castles I/II with a peace treaty to a neighbouring warlord. Unfortunately that warlord decided to attack me before the courier made it to his capital.
If only they'd shot the messenger!
My dreamtime theory - for FTL comms and holome - is sending coded information through entangled quantum particles. Ultra high frequency morse code, on any particle, will be detected by all of them but is only decryptable by the intended recipient, who has the right spin ID.
It could work! Maybe.
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Deleted member 182079
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Naive and clownesque, I see.
And then you use QA as an example, while discussing issues with Elite.
But I should clarify, I never said covid is not a problem at all (at least I didn't mean to, so am happy to walk back on prior posts if they came across that way) and I absolutely accept it can cause problems, but also do think that some people, companies, and heck, even entire countries are all too happy to use it as a handy excuse when things don't go to plan for entirely unrelated reasons. How true it is here, neither of us know but I remain sceptical here.
Other devs released better products in the same timeline just fine.
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I was thinking CP2077....Better than Elite !?!
Wash your mouth out?
Pics .. or it didn't happen!
Or COVID delaying the release of Lone Echo II for over a year...
No two companies are the same, Bit of a weak argument imo.
One of the more interesting things surrounding the "they had to release EDO for money" comments is that Frontier had "better than expected" income during the FY and were already ahead of their own projections before EDO was released - so delaying the release if it was considered 'unfit' could have happened without upsetting the shareholders over much. I still have no idea why it was released quite so 'broken', before anyone asks...
FWIW I think it was broken up into more bite sized chunks probably so each of the teams could be assigned immediate tasks they could do from home, when suddenly they couldn't come into the office. If EDO had been released as a slightly undersized update as a result but FD had been immediately able to say, "but don't worry; emotes, megaships, SRV more to come, because covid", the community would have rolled with that I think. Then framerates came walloping in from left field .. and mullered everyone.
Yeah - watching the streams before the launch they were completely unconcerned by the performance in alpha so thought it was all going to be fixed. If they had known they could have been rolling out Dave's "we're aiming for 30 fps" message to set expectations, but they didn't.
Even I'm still confused by it - most settlements I get 40-50 fps (fires excepted), but then I had one last night (a layout I've done a lot and is always fine) that dropped to 10 fps and then stayed below 20 until I left. I suspect it was to do with the assassination mission that bugged out a bit. Not had one stay low like that (without fires). Glad I'm not the one trying to work it out
The "alpha" tag so close to release should have been a red flag. Didn't they even drop "alpha" for the "public beta"? Imo it was them telling: This is not ready for release but we're releasing anyway, but people just don't read between the lines and take pretty pictures for real.Yeah - watching the streams before the launch they were completely unconcerned by the performance in alpha so thought it was all going to be fixed. If they had known they could have been rolling out Dave's "we're aiming for 30 fps" message to set expectations, but they didn't.
Even I'm still confused by it - most settlements I get 40-50 fps (fires excepted), but then I had one last night (a layout I've done a lot and is always fine) that dropped to 10 fps and then stayed below 20 until I left. I suspect it was to do with the assassination mission that bugged out a bit. Not had one stay low like that (without fires). Glad I'm not the one trying to work it out
There wasn't a public beta... Not that you'd know this, of course...
Guess you'll come back with the silly "what do you think this is?" response that some individuals need to cling to, when, exactly did you last play Odyssey, or even Horizons, again?
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