Of having convoluted minigames that everyone waits for canob to unravel then goes have a look
. Or having something point to a permit locked region 
PC Gamer - One year on, Odyssey still misunderstands what made Elite Dangerous great
. Or having something point to a permit locked region 
This is all kinda what I was trying to say. A lot of Elite is "slight of hand" (my words) or "contrived" (yours) and the difference (between space stuff and on-foot stuff) is hard to quantify or put into words but for me one's contrivances I can typically ignore and the other's I feel constantly affronted by. But ... the difference is actually very small/subtle (which is good news 'cos it could be easy to fix ... if ... like planetary tiling ... I can subsequently un-see it!)
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Soooo many ways to make exploration a more meaningful and personal activityOf having convoluted minigames that everyone waits for canob to unravel then goes have a look
Then they would have to do something about travelling in the game being devoid of any kind of gameplay...and make it something other than just a loading screen time sink.
With deep space exploration being a totally optional pointless activity players can do that nothing in the game forces them to do - nor rewards them for doing it... they can ignore the poor game experience that it leads to.
Yep, we were describing the same, with different words. I thought that also.
As for the planetary tiling thing, Yes, I've seen it, but it doesn't bother me as it isn't important to how I play, it has no direct affect apart from loking odd in the DSS for the most part. I have visited thousands of bodies in Horizons, most were bland with no redeeming features bar bio signals, there are enough similarities in blandness in Odyssey too to balance that out, just no extreme topography seen, to date, in EDO, to be exciting. (I know others are less forgiving over EDO bodies, that is their right)
I've been playing pretty much exclusively in EDO since launch (with the odd visit to Horizons to get around the 'stolen goods transfer on FC' bug) so have got used to it as my new norm, and am fortunate enough to have hardware that is pretty much unaffected (for playability) by the 'demands' EDO makes to run in 4K.
Not sure that necessarily follows. If you don't want to fly 10kLY to find something, don't fly 10kLY
Just because there's something different out there doesn't make it mandatory.
Stop being logical, it upsets the downbeat narrative! You must understand that there is nothing good about the game for someNot sure that necessarily follows. If you don't want to fly 10kLY to find something, don't fly 10kLY
the only thing added for explorers that you can't experience in the first 10 systems you visit in the bubble are the weird stellar life forms or lagrange storms or objects like crystalline hearts and all that. But these, like xeno biology "life", are entirely pointless and dont really do anything. There is no associated gameplay via missions or npc reactions from what you discover. There's no means for you to leverage your discoveries to improve your character or defeat an enemy.
Exploration is an empty role that exists only for screenshots now as it was 7 years ago. The only other purpose to the role was finding "hidden mysteries" that fdev hand placed in the game, but those are so few and far between that you can count years between them and generally really rewarding to the first person who finds it.
When you've visited many tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand systems, the lack of content ...or gameplay to the role is beyond evident. It's apparent that players aren't meant to wander deep space and you're reminded as such by the hours and hours of nothing to show for it each gaming session.
Well, he DID make me think about what would happen if the Guardian ruins were all on the far side of Sag A*, and how simply adding trading of Guardian mats (like we can trade EDO mats) would add a missing layer to the engineering 'grind'. I'd happily fly long distance to gather mats if I could trade them for other mats I don't enjoy collecting.Stop being logical, it upsets the downbeat narrative! You must understand that there is nothing good about the game for some
First and foremost this game needs to merge Odyssey into spaceship adventure game instead of being unrelated side activity.
I mean - right now we disembark into this mirrored game mode, where there are almost no contact points with our space pilot careers.
As a space pilot, why do I care to disembark and run around, doing missions? For what? Some weird crap I might need to upgrade my equipment I need only to gather stuff to upgrade my equipment? Some small credit change for reward?
They could give us options to for example raid a base and then load some goods from the warehouse onto our ship - commodities that we would later sell. Maybe we could sneak into command room and hack main computer to do that without bloodshed? There's one reason to fly somewhere, disembark and engage in on foot stuff. There are many ways on foot gameplay could be made part of spaceship game - and that is what Odyssey needs in the first place (this and slightly more interesting exploration).
I mean - right now we disembark into this mirrored game mode, where there are almost no contact points with our space pilot careers.
As a space pilot, why do I care to disembark and run around, doing missions? For what? Some weird crap I might need to upgrade my equipment I need only to gather stuff to upgrade my equipment? Some small credit change for reward?
They could give us options to for example raid a base and then load some goods from the warehouse onto our ship - commodities that we would later sell. Maybe we could sneak into command room and hack main computer to do that without bloodshed? There's one reason to fly somewhere, disembark and engage in on foot stuff. There are many ways on foot gameplay could be made part of spaceship game - and that is what Odyssey needs in the first place (this and slightly more interesting exploration).
Not sure that necessarily follows. If you don't want to fly 10kLY to find something, don't fly 10kLY
Just because there's something different out there doesn't make it mandatory.
If you put things out away from the bubble, people are going to go to it. If most of your stuff isn't near the bubble as you suggested, then you are guaranteed many players are going to need to travel far from the bubble.
Sure it's not mandatory still, as long as everything you're placing not within 500ly of the bubble are common things found all over the bubble anyway. But "we do it because it's there to do" will always exist in games and lead to a lot of poor feedback from those players. And it will matter.
Exploration might work better as an intrinsically motivated thing anyway. Having a driving external motivation for it might just turn it into another unenjoyable grind for many people. How do people who aren't into exploration feel about the 5000ly from start engineer unlock requirement?
It's my recollection too that when people were finding crashed SRV's in EDH, 10,000Ly from civilisation there were complaints that things like that had no business being there .. and that one of the joys of exploring was NOT finding traces of human beings in hitherto unexplored space?
Come on explorers, which is it??
I think it gets muddied with the performance problems. Obviously the tiling issue got zeroed in really quickly too, but again, if everything else was fine maybe it would have not been seen as a major issue, in a similar way in that the sky box issue is? With the amount of procgen being in the hundreds of billions, checking it all is not really feasible, so it kinda comes with the territory.
Curious choice of words there, I'm not sure what you mean or why there would be malice?
I don't think that's really a quantifiable point. We know that Frontier have upcoming releases that will in all probability have a knock on effect to Elite's development compared to a single game developer. Are Frontier taking advantage of the fact that Elite is a continuously developed game to give them flexibility to polish up a one and done type game at crunch time? Quite likely, though that doesn't make Elite a pet project or anything, though at some point if the priority its given is low enough it will begin to resemble one, but that's a subjective viewpoint as to what constitutes that, I say we don't really know and that judgement is highly susceptible to the bias of wanting everything at once. I'm not going to argue that weekly updates would be a bad thing or unwanted, just whether it's realistic given the greater circumstances, or even the better option to go with.
Therein lies the rub. The first thing that people are going to want to do after disembarking from a ship is shoot stuff, FPS mechanics are proven in this role, hence their inclusion as a means to provide meat to the onfoot experience.
Who are we talking about though? The Elite playerbase or the COD playerbase? I don't think anyone who's only looking for an arena shooter is going to consider Elite, or another elaborate space game with onfoot gameplay and shooting, and I would be surprised if that was one of Frontier's goals for Odyssey.
We're back to comparing Odyssey to COD, which is a problematic comparison as it's a frame that Odyssey just isn't going to win in because it narrows everything down to only what COD wholly specializes in but leaves everything else that Elite can do out of the picture. They're two completely different experiences. I don't play arena shooters and have almost zero interest in COD type games, I played Titanfall 2 with my son for a while and enjoyed that quite a bit but the singular focus on being an FPS limits my enjoyment of the game, whereas on the contrary, with Elite, I love flying the ships, visiting different systems etc.. and now I can get out of my ship and shoot people either randomly or as part of a mission, or do other things onfoot. That's way more engaging to me than any static Arena FPS shooter will ever be. It's a different frame of reference but it's the one that encapsulates the whole of Elite Dangerous.
I guess my angle on it is a lot wider as to what I consider to be 'acceptable' mechanics. For example, people play PVP in Minecraft and I'd daresay it's likely more popular than Elite as a whole, but the combat mechanics of that are ridiculously bad if you were to compare it to COD (or Elite for that matter), but it's not COD, it's evolved from Minecraft players turning the ingame mechanics towards PVP scenarios and while the combat part is very basic, the addition of the Minecraft mechanics gives it its own unique spin to it. It's certainly not for everyone, not me either, but my son has spent many a session in one of the popular servers, along with games like Titanfall II etc.. There are shades of gray in this area.
Grind is a problem if one engages in the grind. I've been playing Elite for a long time, I was a backer but I think I only started playing around the time of Horizons, and I still haven't unlocked all of the engineers or visited Colonia, but I have a Fleet Carrier and unlocked a good few Guardian items, all the Imperial & Federation ships etc.. I'm one year into Odyssey and thanks to the Pioneer supply drops I haven't even unlocked a single engineer yet, and I stress yet. I don't know what to say, I'm in no hurry and am trying to enjoy the game as it presents itself. Though I do completely get that some are min/max pvp enthusiasts and for them the grind is not as optional. Though I guess there's no onfoot PVP groups?
I mean, that's one way to look at it.
It must be very drafty on that high horse, I too remember the other games and how they played but the EDO gameplay does seem more FortNite than Elite. Also at 48 im not that far off you, I for one would like a more complete walking game where there was no minigames but more exploration. For the narrow minded of us look at Deus Ex 1 where there are LOADS of ways to complete the objectives its down to personal choice
. After all we dont all go in guns blazing do we Thanks, I agree that it can feel a bit arcadey and a little disjointed though I don't think it's as blatant as some may see it. I also agreed with Buur Pit's assessment that attention needs to paid to keeping missions feeling like they are part of the galactic tapestry, specifically with the mcguffin defence mission. Maybe a solution would be to actually have an onfoot CQC so that those who want to just blast can without having to be concerned about consistency? Pick a planet or two with some great views and create a space where it we can partake in battles and it be looked as a sport, telepresence can be used to get around respawning etc.. even have a leaderboard or something, earn some credits etc.. But that's for the future and that's not next month future.
This is also where I think the clamor for stuff right now can cause issues rather than solving them, obviously Frontier are under the kosh to push out stuff for Odyssey and that's largely on them, with extenuating circumstances that need to be taken into account, to be fair, but giving them some more breathing room might help. It seems to me that the mcguffin defence does stretch the suspension of belief, whereas I think defending a settlement where the attackers are trying to breach the power building to shut the base down makes a lot more sense. Maybe the mcguffin mission could be knocked up in a month but a defend the base from shutdown may take three, which would you prefer? I'm spitballing, but still, this is part of the balancing aspect of finding the right groove for the onfoot mechanics that are in place, and it's one of the reason why I look at Odyssey as the beginning of realizing much greater potential and not this static, this is it forever type thing.
It's my recollection too that when people were finding crashed SRV's in EDH, 10,000Ly from civilisation there were complaints that things like that had no business being there .. and that one of the joys of exploring was NOT finding traces of human beings in hitherto unexplored space?
Come on explorers, which is it??
There are other options other than human that would be expected out in deep space.
Natural things. Alien things.
It's not a stretch of an expectation that if something is entirely unexplored in the cartographic database that there would not be signs that a number of humans had been thru the area.
The main issue with alien things is that they are generally limited to just the two species that seem to only exist around the bubble. And any other alien life that's discovered is generally non-interactive and you can't acquire things from them. In comparison to human wreckage, which does yield loot sometimes. And natural things are usually not exploitable either.
I would think a major launch mistake was not introducing (at least in a dead form) hundreds if not thousands of alien species to the game. Providing subtle or perhaps rare significant benefits from certain artifacts from them with their territories spanning the entire galaxy (not all existing at the same time - so many overlapping). If these could be procedurally created from some base elements, it would be impossible to data mine and so provide a nearly infinite gameplay reason to explore and while reducing how much fdev has to hand-design and place into the game. This would allow the galaxy to be filled with procedural and rng content (interactive content)... without contradicting the game by forcing that content to always be human.
But again, that would really force fdev to address their travelling gameplay. Jumping great distances being a boring gameplay-less time sink and loading screen is something fdev can leave alone because it's self inflicted grind by the player and they dont create any reason to need to do it. But if they've created all of this content that encourages such activity, then they'll have to address it and make it fun. They wont be able to just bandaid it like they did with the neutron highway and carrier stops to colonia. They would have to find some way to make travelling in the game entertaining since players would frequently spend a large portion of time doing it. Something i dont think they are prepared to do, since they've tried every other option to avoid doing it since the game was launched.
a. it's there for bragging about 1:1 galaxy and you're not meant to really play that "role" in deep space, just take pictures and act as a time sink for hand placed narrative content.
b. It's intended gameplay but fdev is just really bad at making games and so forgot to add gameplay mechanics to the role like they've added for combat and trading/mining
c. It's intended as a non-gameplay role kind of like CQC. Allowing players to just do nothing and look at pretty environments and interact with those environments sans elite dangerous gameplay (no hostiles, no mission timers, no objectives at all or skill requirements).
I think it's actually C, but started out as A and wish it was just B so there was some hope that it will change.
The fact that the game's loops ultimately have a contextual end (you've seen it all) and are ultimately for no purpose (there's no goal in the game anyway) doesn't really argue the premise nor conclusion of my statement:
People complain about Exploration content no matter how much FD have added to it. You're just taking the position that the content is bad anyway, irrespective of how much of it there is and so I don't disagree nor agree on the basis of that being your opinion and not in any way furthering what I said.
Which actually wasn't even really that serious. I was mostly just being facetious.
I did spend over 2 months in total doing nothing but exploring, by the way (space exploration, not planetary - the latter of which I've spent hundreds of hours doing). And I don't count myself an explorer at all. So, weird huh? Why would I invest so much time doing something that was just bad? Then again, I have spent thousands of hours playing the game and so "exploration" is just one tiny fraction of what I've done. So I'm unsure if the author of the article really has any place suggesting they alone know what Elite is actually about.
Thats said, I'm technically exploring all the time I play (I don't sit in one location forever). Almost everything I do is technically exploration, even learning all the settlement layouts and how to complete the missions within each. I just don't have to label myself an explorer and take pretty pictures to validate my game play experience. Nor should you. You should just play games you like, not ones that are, in your opinion, created by developers who are bad at making games.
If that's your position, why even play? I've never, not once in my lifetime, admitted to playing games made by developers who I thougth were bad at their jobs. If that was my thought, I wouldn't spend any time anywhere near the game nor its forums.
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