place your stupid high hopes " major feature overhaul for 2023 "

I would like a bit more VR (yeah I know, I know)....it does seem like its not that much of a push when you see the third person camera. But I know sod all about how the game works so what do I know (sod all). Its all magic in an electric box to me.
New ships
A big surface vehicle that only fits in the largest ships (think the SHADO mobile vehicle)
More players in CQC (yeah, I know!)
 
My money is on Thargoids as a new faction in Power Play.
I knew it!
New Sol.jpg
 
I'd say that Engineering qualifies as a Major Feature.

They did a forum inquiry on this matter
We have Horizons Ship engineering and Odyssey on-foot engineering which are completely different animals, so i would expect some unification.
If i'd have to make some wild guesses:
- i'd say one of them will suffer a massive change, either on-foot engineering will get changed to ship engineering or the other way around (and i'm affraid the ship engineering will be on the losing side)
or
- both ship and on-foot engineering will change.

net result of those changes: lots of people will quit Elite 😂
there, i've said it: Doom inc.
 
ok i said i wouldnt do it but cant resist..... i think if there was 1 feature i would like to see get a major overhaul which has not had much love for a long time.......

the economy....... i dont just mean adding an extra zero onto payouts, but actual supply and demand mechanics. i would love to see for larger ships them consider limits put on some export goods, so that they wont contunually sell me 750 tons of i dunno, computer equipment unless i take them significant numbers of tons of stuff they need.

the whole system should be an eco system, starting at aggricultural buying food so that we create proper trade routes, and there would never be a situation where i am flying with an empty ship. this would mean profits on the cheap goods would need a boost but it should be considered and not just boosts for everything... obviously in this instance we would be trading the top tier goods less, which is why it would need real thought

I would also like to see a quick button added to the mission board, so once i have picked my next destination i can quickly filter for missions i may be interested in to this destination without having to browse the board.

related but separate i would also like to see engineers offer missions which would result in them paying via materials which they use in the engineering they specialise in....

an example of a mission could be "I lost contact with a mining ship which had a hold full of materials for me, the last i heard it had redirected to LV-426 after picking up an SOS. Please could you go and investigate, rescue the crew if they are alive and also return the cargo, if you do 5% of everything you collect is yours.
 
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1) As others have said, it's described as a "key feature overhaul", so of something existing already. It's also not labelled as an Odyssey update "U15", unlike U13 and U14, so is probably not Odyssey-specific (though presumably is 4.0 specific)
2) One of the major potential reasons for them to be this vague about it - which even for Frontier's normal secrecy is unusual this close to release if you compare with the Beyond-era roadmap - is if knowing what it was would allow conclusions to be drawn about where the narrative was going.
3) We've also got the split between 3.8 and 4.0 features which may place some limitations on what the change is - something where you could get an advantage by switching back and forth between 3.8 and 4.0 implementations would be messy. Probably not a major constraint for most things.

Based on that I would guess work on the BGS and/or Powerplay to try to integrate them better into the storyline / have story effects more prominent on them.
 
Based on that I would guess work on the BGS and/or Powerplay to try to integrate them better into the storyline / have story effects more prominent on them.

PowerPlay would be my second guess after engineering.

To be fair, given the story arc we had in the last 2 years, where all superpowers suffered all sorts of troubles, i would expect some sort of turmoil with the net result of all superpowers collapse and this will have direct repercussions in how PowerPlay works - so a complete revamp of PowerPlay (with no survivors from the old PP figures)

Edit:
and if changes to engineering (especially ship engineering) will have the chance to see people rage quitting, at least a Politics revamp will have the chance to attract more players (even if only in the form of returnees)
 
To be fair, given the story arc we had in the last 2 years, where all superpowers suffered all sorts of troubles, i would expect some sort of turmoil with the net result of all superpowers collapse and this will have direct repercussions in how PowerPlay works - so a complete revamp of PowerPlay (with no survivors from the old PP figures)
I wouldn't expect anything quite that large - there have been disagreements within each superpower, but they've been about the direction of travel or even just who should be in charge of the current direction, rather than about whether the superpower should exist at all. Similarly, replacing all the old PP figures at once just means having to establish - and hope people care about! - some new ones.

Hudson's probably on the way out ... but replacing him with Archer could just be as simple as a new portrait and name badge for the Power so wouldn't require any major overhaul of Powerplay.

I'm hesitant about expecting it to be Powerplay related just because the obvious reason to do something to Powerplay is so that people like Kaine or Rackham or other people currently prominent in the plot can be featured in it ... while people like Torval or Antal who really aren't all that plot-relevant nowadays can be gracefully retired - but both implementing that sort of change and/or letting the Thargoids into the Powerplay environment would require not just an overhaul (e.g. Sandro's old proposal) but a "burn it down and start over" which would be potentially very interesting but also potentially really annoy its current fans who want "like now but better".
 
It's really unfortunate because he's one of the more interesting characters (and organisations) in general, but they just don't actually seem to be able to find him anything to do! Most of the others have an obvious niche that can be made to fit into most stories...
He is the techno wizard, he should be heavily into high end modules and engineering. Sadly FD got others to be super brainy too.

I mean, he is a future Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs rolled into one, in a crazy dystopian future like ED we need more crazy dystopian Utopians :D
 
I have mixed feelings about "major feature overhauls". If a feature truly needs an overhaul, and the overhaul is good, then I'm all for it. Mining in Elite is a perfect example, where the overhaul really did improve on a barebones gameplay loop (bugs notwithstanding). Yet another tweaking of Engineering, however... One of the things that has driven me nuts with Overwatch over the years is that they just couldn't leave that game alone. The constant tweaking messed with my muscle memory and general "doing X results in Y" instinct. I also feel a lot of the tweaks were not for the better, but even if they were, the improvement was marginal and really didn't offset having to relearn my favorite characters. Bringing this back to Elite, I have my complaints about Engineering*, but on the other hand I have ships that I have an instinctual feel for, and if the stats were changed (assuming no "legacy" modules like the first Engineering revamp), that could be more disruptive than helpful.

Now I wouldn't mind a general balance pass on combat-related modules, as I hate the bullet-sponge nature of higher-level NPCs. Something like limiting HRPs and MRPs to military modules slots only (or at the very least, limit the number per ship like AX weapons), limiting shield boosters or giving them some offset penalty (heat / power consumption), etc. Other people would likely hate such changes, however, so I'm not expecting this to be the revamp, especially since it hasn't been a major topic here in the forum.

But enough about what I don't want or expect. My high kinda-realistic hope is for an exploration revamp. Give me procgen flora and maybe even some simple fauna (even if they are Mr. Potatohead like NMS) along with a more fun, less grindy way to scan, catalog, harvest, and interact with this life (including setting up ground-based observation stations). Or / and, maybe it's something totally different like providing access to Guardian city interiors, like dungeons in a typical MMO. Whatever it is, I just ask that the developers watch David Braben's video on the important of procgen over reusing the same dozen hand-crafted assets over and over and over again. Put the same energy into a Flora Forge and Guardian "Dungeon" Forge as you originally put into the Stellar Forge, and I'll be like 🤗 💓

* Horizons

💓
 
power play, and ensuring power play impacts on BGS missions available INF
boost a factions missions INF when faction linked to a system owned supoer power for example. make it harder for none aligned faction to gen INF when system owned by an different super power
finally linking things together.

or maybe squadrons
 
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