I still don't understand why Elite had to have a FPS bolted onto it to begin with. A tremendous amount of work went into gameplay that has nothing to do with flying space ships in the traditional Elite fashion. I personally wish all that effort would have gone into making Elite a better space game instead.
I actually have mixed feelings on that. On one hand, i could just dig out many of my old postings on space legs, and plaster this place with piles of "told you so". As it was very obvious for me, that an FPS module added to ED would be compared to other FPS games out there, and would quite certainly fall vastly behind.
In hindsight when looking at all the many threads: no surprise there, but in my grand (
cough) prophetic powers, i have predicted this to happen many years back in very old space legs threads.
At the same time, i can't really condemn the idea. Would FD have taken some more time and done things well, they could have proven me wrong. Badly. My "prophetic powers" were not so much on the potential of the idea, but rather on how FD implements things: barebone.
I do see the potential of space legs. I mean, imagine the first Star Wars movie (the actually first one, called "A New Hope", not the other garbage), with Han never leaving the Falcon. Imagine the epic scene, where Luke and Obi Wan go to a terminal and set up "wanted persons need a flight from the planet" announcement. The grand scene where Greebo looks at the ship, looks at his blaster pistol and leaves again. The great part where Han and Chewie sit in the Falcon on board of the Death Star, watching their panels and waiting for their passengers to tell them that they can launch again.
Now change the focus to the Expanse, how great would that have been if the crew never left the ship, but rather just got a text message on what the ship has found in their surroundings. Think about Firefly and how awesome it would have been when all the characters always sat on board of the ship and only interacted with the rest of the world over a terminal...
Being able to leave the ship and do things outside of it theoretically add a lot of possibilities. It really opens up the world. And as the world outside of your ship also can hold some danger, combat must be possible and can add a lot to the world.
And i say that as somebody who currently, when playing ED, again never leaves his ship. Because while leaving the ship has a lot of potential, Odyssey does not use any of it. It merely gave us a few minimal breadcrumbs of gameplay and then called it a day. In their infinite wisdom, FD decided that if the game had enough problems, they could keep us busy without needing actual content. They miiight have been slightly wrong, though.
Just to write another random example on what could even be done with the mission chain mechanics we actually have, by merely adding a few text messages.
Picking up a "recovery" mission, which has a text part along the line of "Pirates abducted our brother and will sell him into slavery. We want to hire a spaceship with pilot to rescue him".
1. Mission sends you to space, to interdict a ship. Use hatch breaker, collect the container with a slave.
1a: Jackpot! It is who they wanted. Go to step 3
1b: Not the jackpot. The slave is another person, but he can tell you where the pirates have their hideout. Going on.
2. Mission changes to "land near ground base of pirates". The group of brothers then leaves the ship and heads towards the pirate base.
2a: Optional objective: "Cover us while we attack the pirates!". Get your SRV and destroy turrets and pirates running around in the open.
2b: Optional problem: "The pirates called for support!". A small combat spaceship turns up over the base. You better lift off and destroy it, before it shoots your parked ship to bits.
2c: Optional objective: "Clear the way!". Some pirates stealthed (technically spawned) to the extraction point. Eliminate them or at least give them heat till the brothers return with their rescued brother and make it on board of the ship.
3. "Now let's get the hell out of here!". Fly to a starport of choice. Perhaps the one you started from.
3a: Optional objective: Some pirate ships are on your trail and interdict you. Eliminate them.
4. Cash in. Profit! And be happy that you did not just "steal random red herring" from a base, but you actually got a story along with it.
And almost all of that the current system already supports. I am merely not 100% certain on the brothers attacking the ground station. But as ground CZs can handle spawn points and factions of NPCs fighting each other, that also should be fine.
And this is merely something i threw together in a few minutes, most of it being missions which in one way or another already exist, just chained together... and mission chains are also something the system can do. The only really new stuff would be the more info on why something would be done. So the "trick" is merely to not just describt the actions, but also add an agenda to them, no matter how basic if still is.
And yes, of course, this also is not "unlimited content". Even if you write dozens of such adds-agenda-to-the-task pieces of text, it'll get stale after a few hundred missions. Which is hundreds of interesting missions more than we currently have, though.
