Is there anything worth discovering
- Thread starter rfxcasey
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Did you find any signs of intelligent life? Ancient ruins? A strange anomaly like they'd find in Star Trek? Some previously unknown chemical element?Last night in a single, previously undiscovered, system I found a ringed water world, a ringed water giant, an ammonia world and a Class II gas giant with several moons showing a multitude of biology signals. Several of these moons are very, very close to the rings of the planets they orbit and therefore great photo opportunities. That system alone should entertain me for a few days. Another system a few days ago had a moon with a diameter of only 137 km, again in a very low and fast orbit and therefore a great photo stop and interesting place to drive around on.
Then there was the star orbited by three black holes, the neutron star systems before that, ...
Heaps of stuff to be found out there. Check any of the photo threads and the exploration forum if you feel uninspired. That you posted here suggests you are easily uninspired.
S
Or was it all just a random placement of the same things you can find all over the galaxy?
That's what I mean. There's nothing really to discover out there. This is a sci fi game with a serious lack of sci fi.
Who knows if there is intelligent life, ancient ruins or starnge anomalies in THIS universe?
KSP is similar, nothing to discover, and yet I can't get enough "exploration" done on the Mun or Minmus or Duna or wherever.
Not sure what you mean, except if your definition of sci fi is very narrow and limited to a prime time TV-style naive version of it. There is plenty of alien life, although it is not placed in an amusement park-style setting with a thrill-a-minute script running to keep us glued to the screen. There are even more alien landscapes including some very impressive and outlandish vistas to be found, and they can be found easier with a little bit of research into how different planets and moon interact and where the most craziness can be expected from tidal effects etc.
There is alien life more or less hand-placed specifically for the players to interact with, in form of Thargoids and Guardian stuff. That's your intelligent life and ancient ruins right there.
S
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So you can go out in the black and discover a Thargoid base or planet? Or Guardian?Not sure what you mean, except if your definition of sci fi seems very narrow and limited to a prime time TV-style naive version of it. There is plenty of alien life, although it is not placed in an amusement park-style setting with a thrill-a-minute script running to keep us glued to the screen. There are even more alien landscapes including some very impressive and outlandish vistas to be found, and they can be found easier with a little bit of research into how different planets and moon interact and where the most craziness can be expected from tidal effects etc.
There is alien life more or less hand-placed specifically for the players to interact with, in form of Thargoids and Guardian stuff. That's your intelligent life and ancient ruins right there.
Those kinds of things I would guess are manually placed, and I would also guess have never been placed.
Exploring for me gets real boring real fast. Ooh I found a water world, ooh this scan says there's biological signs. It's all so underwhelming. I want more sci fi in my sci fi games. I want alien species to discover, new technologies, wormholes, anomalies. Otherwise it's 400 billion star systems, 399 billion of which are more or less the same with nothing interesting beyond the way the stars and planets orbit each other.
Being able to fly to another star system and discover new worlds is not sci fi enough?
If I was able to go out and discover thing at 100% certainty it wouldn't really be discoveries; I would just be finding stuff for myself for the first time. I have done that aplenty by visiting any of the Thargoid/Guardian areas such as the when the Witch Head locations were first introduced, for example. Or the Coalsack stuff. The Coalsack was my first exploration stop back in 2014, but I'm not even sure we got tags back then. Maybe we did. I almost found Jacques station when it was first lost, as I was passing through the area west of the galactic core when the discovery of the lost station was announced. Unlike the guy that discovered it, I didn't think of looking for non-natural stuff as I was flying through.
To me, finding the Guardian bases and Thargoid stuff, even when I'm not the first to discover them, is finding new stuff. Finding crash sites etc is similarly new stuff and interesting to explore when it is rare enough. Near populated space, crash sites and signal sources are not very rare and very similar. But I have now done a hundred or so jumps without seeing a single human signal so when they come round again, they will be interesting again.
NSPs could be made more common - they are often LaGrange point messes anyway, which should not be rare at all in the first place. No wormholes or alien tech please. That is just fantasy. We have that already. More could be interesting but apparently requires a lot of effort to implement.
There are other games for constantly finding hand-crafted and hand-placed stuff. Or are you suggesting that FD should also come up with a procedural generation method for placing such stuff?
What FD could do is make a bit more of a feeling of history in the game. We could be finding more remnants of earlier human activity within the bubble, and we could find fossilised signs of life on other planets, especially terraformable planets that are landable might have a chance of having had life in the past. That life could have been intelligent or just organised enough to leave traces. That wouldn't have to be more than odd symmetrical patterns on the planet surfaces; something that would have no use beyond archeology or astro-paleontology.
SYes, this. It's sounding like other than the hand placed stuff, which is most likely not going to be on the outer fringes, what constitutes "interesting" is rather extremely rare and limited, which is sad.
There could be a whole other profession for finding such stuff. However, what constitutes interesting seem to differ a lot among players. Also, what exactly are we proposing should be findable? It should be no more useful than single socks and ruptured single-use plastic bags.
SWe're not discovering "new worlds", we're finding minor variations of the same planets we find everywhere. Even the rare ELWs can't be used in any way.
Everything we "discover" is used mainly for selfies and screenshots. It's mainly exploring out in the black so we can post some pretty screenshots.
There's a limit to what one can do with a cloud of dust and a few billion years. Stars and planets tend to form around similar patterns since the forces acting on them are similar everywhere. So we would expect similarities overall, which is what we see in ED. However, there is near-infinite possibilities for variability over those themes, and the planet generation in ED already shows that quite impressively: We have many types of landforms showing, which everybody should be super excited about as everybody should really be super excited about geology just like I am. But alas, not everyone is.
However, to allow for the thrill of discovery, some things need to be stay somewhat rare, or it wouldn't make for much of a thrill. With 400 billion stars, that means quite rare in some cases. Some such are oddities of Stellar Forge (GGGs - do they still exist?) and certain weird orbital mechanics including where systems have been hand crafted to fit the older Frontier games leading to mishaps. That means that explorers in ED has to do what explorers have done on Earth for centuries: Long periods of slogging through sameness to find the interesting bits, or come upon the interesting bits during expected long slogs.
Stellar Forge is an absolute marvel, but has some major issues that exaggerates this feeling of sameness. One such thing, a pet peeve of mine, is that there is no interaction between star systems. That means the galaxy is exactly the same everywhere. You can travel from Mars to Beagle Point and back and have exactly no difference in experience in your basic interaction with space. FD could really make the galaxy feel like a real thing by implementing such difference. I have before suggested making radiation dangerous. That means that unshielded ships would be a poor choice, as the crew would not last long nor would interior elements of the ships - especially near enough to stars to fuel scoop. The most basic shielding should stop that being an issue, however. But when stars are close together, radiation would be more dangerous and perhaps require better shielding. And when we approach the regions of very high star density such as the galactic core, radiation and solar wind should be raging at such levels that shielding would have to be really amazing to be able to survive there for any length of time. Space would be truly exotic to be in there.
The above could be turned around Vernor Vinge-style for the galactic edge: Due to the low star density, unshielded ships could survive and jump drives might even work differently.
Having space travel and survivability work slightly differently based on solar wind/radiation/star density would have added a feeling of variability to space, and even given us the need to explore for the paths through the galaxy as we were discussing during the Kickstarter and early design decision days: Regions with few stars and mostly brown dwarves would be the safest to travel but require careful fuel management; denser regions would be easier to fuel up in, but would require radiation management and similar precautions.
Still not too late to implement this in my opinion. Might have to retcon a few stations out of the game and remove a whole bunch of First Discovered tags, though, or change how these things work.
It would be nice if there were at least some random poi's out there in the black. Instead they all seem to disappear not long after leaving the bubble.
There should be crashed ships - explorers who never made it home.
There should be small planetary settlements where a group of deep space scientists have set up a lab.
There should not be too many of them though. Just enough to find one, every 100 or so planets explored.
I like exploration sometimes, but it does get very 'samey' after a while.
I'm on Horizons BTW so there is even less out there to find compared to Odyssey.
There should be crashed ships - explorers who never made it home.
There should be small planetary settlements where a group of deep space scientists have set up a lab.
There should not be too many of them though. Just enough to find one, every 100 or so planets explored.
I like exploration sometimes, but it does get very 'samey' after a while.
I'm on Horizons BTW so there is even less out there to find compared to Odyssey.
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there is nothing out in the 400 billion systems save for the handful around the bubbles.
just procedurally generated pointless system after pointless system. There are no hazards, no risks, no gameplay purpose and nothing interesting outside of eye candy when it comes to exploration.
black holes are just barely above comets when it comes to being implemented in the game... As opposed to not having any physical mesh like a comet, a black hole is implemented as a black sphere with an additional distortion effect. that's the extent of black holes.
Pulsars and white dwarfs have jets that spin with the star. That's the extent of pulsar/wd implementation. Otherwise all stars share the same behavior.
Exploration is a non-role role in the game. The game doesn't care about it, it's a time sink to give players things to screenshot and a lure to create interest in unlimited mysteries and important discoveries hidden in the hundreds of billions of systems but ultimately has zero payoff.
You do it when you want to look at pretty scenes. OR if you are role playing your own descent into insanity. Dont do it to search for hidden/rare/undiscovered content. You will be disappointed.
just procedurally generated pointless system after pointless system. There are no hazards, no risks, no gameplay purpose and nothing interesting outside of eye candy when it comes to exploration.
black holes are just barely above comets when it comes to being implemented in the game... As opposed to not having any physical mesh like a comet, a black hole is implemented as a black sphere with an additional distortion effect. that's the extent of black holes.
Pulsars and white dwarfs have jets that spin with the star. That's the extent of pulsar/wd implementation. Otherwise all stars share the same behavior.
Exploration is a non-role role in the game. The game doesn't care about it, it's a time sink to give players things to screenshot and a lure to create interest in unlimited mysteries and important discoveries hidden in the hundreds of billions of systems but ultimately has zero payoff.
You do it when you want to look at pretty scenes. OR if you are role playing your own descent into insanity. Dont do it to search for hidden/rare/undiscovered content. You will be disappointed.
I've seen astronomers excited about certain stellar forge oddities, geologists excited about planets.
Me? I'm playing a game. There's not a whole lot of "game" in this game. When I log in it's mostly haz rez and CZ combat, because everything else feels like a boring chore. You won't catch me trading in a Type-9, exploring anymore, doing passenger missions (which is trading with different-named cargo). I fight NPCs and I occasionally go material hunting. That's it. That's the most engaging gameplay this game offers.
I never installed Odyssey due to the truly awful performance it had in beta with my ancient PC, and even so it doesn't add all that much. Looks like some uninspired FPS combat with that space-combat energy vs kinetic damage dynamic which IMO works well for spaceships but terribly for FPS combat.
While pledged to powers, I’ve definitely been a derelict vassal at times.
Seems like parts of the game is for you, parts of it is not. That's probably the feeling of many. I find the parts of the game where it really Elites are great, while the parts where the game tries to tack on elements from other genres work a lot less well.
S
the avg is like only 1 to 2 every hundred years in a given galaxy.
OP, have you found any of my stuphz yet?
Reading this thread it becomes obvious that some people get this game and some don't.
What can be discovered? Everything.
It's supposed to simulate the real life Milky Way. As far as we know in real life there ain't no Thargoids out there but maybe there are. In real life we don't know what is still out there.
Perhaps someone in-game will finally find Raxxla or the Thargoid homeworld/Thargoid bubble (all those permit locked systems around Witch Head?)
This isn't Star Trek. Live long and prosper... or don't.
What can be discovered? Everything.
It's supposed to simulate the real life Milky Way. As far as we know in real life there ain't no Thargoids out there but maybe there are. In real life we don't know what is still out there.
Perhaps someone in-game will finally find Raxxla or the Thargoid homeworld/Thargoid bubble (all those permit locked systems around Witch Head?)
This isn't Star Trek. Live long and prosper... or don't.
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Well, I don't mean to sound like a jerk but I feel there is just a lack of creativity in the procedural generation. No Man's Sky seems to have a better procedural generation which applies to not only systems but the plants and animals themselves. Don't flame me, I don't really know, I don't have thousands of hours in each but it just gives that impression. The problem with no man's sky is it's a bit cartoonish or "kiddie" where as ED is a bit more "adult" or "sim" in nature. Once again, not trying to defecate all over the game, I just think more effort should be put into the variety allowed by the generation engine. Another thing that would be cool is if when someone is destroyed or dies from lack of fuel, if their ship/debris/cargo remained persistent in the universe. That would at least be a start. I don't know, is Star Trek online a more lively, varied universe. Is there even dust clouds or nebula you can fly through, does that exist anywhere in the game or is it just see forever crystal clear space for eternity? I mean it would be cool if you could find the aftermath of planetary collisions or even observe the occasional shooting start or meteor strike. I've seen fireballs descending from the sky in real life on earth, I don't ever see anything like that anywhere in game, with all the meteors that make contact with earth atmosphere on a daily basis you'd figure on a planet with almost no atmosphere you'd observe strikes on a regular basis especially minor ones. This is something No Man's Sky also seems to do well.
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