This thread just popped up. Just gonna drop it here ;-)
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=103513
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=103513
400+ Billion Stars but to what end?
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To a degree, I'm with you. The idea is that the background simulation generates dynamic stories through it's internal conflicts and responses to player actions, on both individual and larger scales. Of course that's not how it's working at the moment and just like other epic games took years of development to get to where they were intended to be, so does Elite and its background simulation.
I've played loads of player-driven PvP games over the years and as fun as they were, they almost always comes down to the same thing in the end: numbers and timezone coverage. If you can't match your opponents on both, you're not going to get anywhere. And if you beat your opponents on both, it's really just an illusion of skill when you win. Sure, there are few games that buck that trend, and there is something incredibly special about the very few that make losing a heroic, worthwhile experience (WW2OL... a graphical dog with shocking controls and a learning curve that makes EvE look like Candy Crush Saga, all running on server hardware that was built for dial-up - but man, holding out for hours or even days against massive odds with a bunch of strangers in a town that only has three upright walls left among dunes of rubble, knowing you're all going to die no matter what you do and fighting just to hold that moment off... best gaming experiences I've ever had), but apart from those very few, very special and very luckily designed games, it's all much of a muchness. You can't even predict which player-driven games are going to work and which are going to fail. It's as much luck as judgement, I think.
That's one of the reasons I love FD's plans and ideas for the background simulation. It could really shake up the tired old formula and present whole new ways for players to to group, to cooperate and to fight together. It needs a lot of work doing to it, and it needs to be much more responsive and dynamic with more outcomes and unpredictability, but the potential for shaping how multiplayer plays out is amazing. With a few years of development behind it, it could be that rarest of things in modern gaming - a true, game-changing innovation.
The worst thing FD can do right now is drop that and put everything in the players' hands. It would be a massive missed opportunity and another decade of regretful conversations about what could've been.
/nod
The impression I get from many of these "the world is too big" threads are that of a coop of chickens that still clump after the coop is removed and they are free to roam. We are so shaped by the games that we are used to playing that we expect these elements even in games like ED which promised to follow different paths.
For example: The USS discussion. I've seen posts wanting them to be different, to be perhaps all available when one enters a system and one could just fly to the ones one is interested in. That's theme park thinking, a la World of Warcraft, where it is all laid out when we enter a new map. I see the USS as little signal blips near the ship that the onboard sensors are able to pick out of the torrent of noise from the nearby star(s) and possibly from the warping of space going on in SuperCruise. The space warping allows us to sense more distant signal anomalies at higher SC speeds, but we then suffer having to brake to meet them. We should probably just be glad there are not more false signal anomalies. One could argue that when approaching a USS it should be possible to scan down the type (thruster emissions (ships) vs metallic objects only (cannisters) vs other stuff) when we get close or after a while. But that's a suggestion for future design.
Yes the mechanics need work and fleshing out, but it's happening while we sit here on the forum and bicker about it (although it being midnightish back in old Blightey may mean Frontier folks are hopefully at home sleeping). I for one am happy about the direction things are heading. We as players will however need to get out of the standard MMO mindset and try working with this game as it is, not as we had hoped the other games would have been.
S
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That is truely an amazing story in that link....and the cool thing is even if several dozen people make similar trips, in all likeihood none of them would ever visit the same systems on the way there and back....News of trips like this should be posted up on Galnet
I think some people were hoping for "rats in a bag" gameplay.
you're taking my question out of context. It's hardly a "beef". It's a legit question in regards to how a game map of that size affects game play. There have been several players who have responded with excellent points and counter points. My opinion on the matter doesn't factor in. It was an open ended question with no right or wrong answer. Someone just posted about a commander who traveled all the way to the very edge of the galaxy and it took them about a month to do. That is some incredible dedication and is very inspiring to people. That would be a good example of the interest in having a large galaxy. Others have stated that is may put player and social interaction in jeopardy. Others have said it makes absolutely no difference one way or the other. I have no "beef", but if you think that I am sorry you got offended in some way.
I want to be one of those few that goes out there and returns to tell about it.
What I see is that there will be a local sphere of activity which the devs will improve, leaving the exploration of the far flung systems as procedural generation, if people are exploring it need be not much else unless the devs through some aliens in to challenge humanity.
but I'm guessing and it's a good guess that they will start to flesh out the local area lave, earth etc, once they get the base code stable and get some mass social interaction tools.
They need a hangout HQ area with avatars and walkable planets.
It can be done, Trek online has done it for some time.
It's not here right now, but this is an exciting time. Years down the road we wil ahve stories for the new players.. man back in the day, they put in upfdates and 1000 players from australia werre blocked out.. people lost money in updates, and the forums were full of talk of "everything in space is boring colored balls."
Looking forward to those days. When we are all elite, the founders of the galaxy.
What I see is that there will be a local sphere of activity which the devs will improve, leaving the exploration of the far flung systems as procedural generation, if people are exploring it need be not much else unless the devs through some aliens in to challenge humanity.
but I'm guessing and it's a good guess that they will start to flesh out the local area lave, earth etc, once they get the base code stable and get some mass social interaction tools.
They need a hangout HQ area with avatars and walkable planets.
It can be done, Trek online has done it for some time.
It's not here right now, but this is an exciting time. Years down the road we wil ahve stories for the new players.. man back in the day, they put in upfdates and 1000 players from australia werre blocked out.. people lost money in updates, and the forums were full of talk of "everything in space is boring colored balls."
Looking forward to those days. When we are all elite, the founders of the galaxy.