400+ Billion Stars but to what end?

[SeregDuin]

No, I am pretty sure my concern is with the actual game space. I can't really make myself any clearer here but I can try.

"The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.

History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.

Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.

"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.

On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms."
Douglas Adams - Life the Universe and Everything

 

[Zvanya]

I think you guys need to understand that this is a GAME. It's not Universe Sandbox.

It's NOT? Damn it, I bought it because I thought it was a universe sandbox.

Instead of 400 billion sameish star systems, the game would need more compelling ways to interact with players,

I get suspicious when people say they want to "interact with players". I guess it must be my cynical nature.

This thread, while interesting, is moot. 400 billion stars it is. It will draw some people in, and push others away.

 

[Commander Azriel]

Yes. Because there are others that do not have the same issues, meaning your issues are base in perception of the reality,
You want it to be different, and find fault with the lack of content currently,

Did the game designers fail? It's a matter of perception. I'm not kidding.

There are many people concerned with the lack of content. The lack of a truly dynamic universe, a lack of influence, factions that don't matter much. The game is truly vast, and also rather shallow. A mile wide, an inch deep.

If it were offline, there could be player made mods, if it had a smaller scale, multiplayer could be better. If your actions mattered you could shape the game.

Flying around looking at pretty stars, imagining you're Captain Kirk is great if that all you want from a game. I glad you are enjoying it, really. If their goal was to imitate the universe then they did a good job. If it was to make a interesting game, I feel they left a lot to be desired.

 

[Therris]

At first I had a romantic perspective on the size of the game...
But then I realized - after scanning 100+ systems - that it's not romantic or interesting at all.

- Nobody will ever visit all the systems, so it could just be several thousand and feel the same. I'm glad it's not just 10, but after a certain size, who cares. It's just big...ok.
- Discovering planets feels vapid after a while.... just various arrangements of different colored balls, from a limited pool of options. The visuals can be nice as far as computer graphics are concerend, but I can get those visuals in a handful of systems, and flying for hours to a remote spot just for the screenshot is not remotely compelling.

So I'm glad it's big, but the 400 billion number is useless, other than for marketing. And exploring a procedurally generated mix of systems that are completely fictional does not feel very compelling.
I'm simply here for the PEW PEW.

 

[Cathalo]

The galaxy is big, but what kind of interactions will players be able to have with the environment itself? Being able to travel into the far reaches of space, 1000's of lightyears from civilized space is very cool but there is so much more potential there. Will players be able to craft stations? Ships? Go on planetary expeditions? To me these are the natural second steps of the game. Let players create their own faction/guild and build their own stations and such, allow those stations to be attacked by opposing players and NPC's alike. Sounds like fun. Also, where are the aliens? Not necessarily face-huggers (lol that would copyright infringement) but how about putting dangerous encounters in deep space? Give explorers something dangerous to deal with.

 

[Cmdr Cheese Wedge]

I love the emptiness. Just me, my (insert ship of choice here) and the vastness of space, reading up on the various interesting astronomical phenomena and then actually going forth and exploring them at 1:1 scale, what's not to love?

 

[Wullail]

It's so I can build 400 million fast food outlets , one at each system.

 

[ollobrains]

what im doing personally is with the fringe systems is to slowly expand nearby and return the data to my factoun ( PCI in pand) a 30LY survey to start with then ill expand out to 50LY including other human systems and the emptieness just beyond civilisation at its edge. And hope this does something to the game world

 

[Bozeman42]

> scale model is notion of no longer looking up at the night sky but being IN it.

Yes that's something I appreciate too. Having seen a particular bright star through the cockpit that wasn't local, with a bit trial and error on the galaxy map I was able to target it. It turned out to be Aldebaran... loved how I was able to see it from a distance before targeting it on the map.

I found my way to Aldebaran too. I decided to head towards Orion and after a jump I noticed that there was significant displacement of one of the other stars in my view. I looked up the star online and I went there. I told my friend about my trip and he showed me this photo that he had taken a couple of years ago. Now I have a feeling of connection when I look up at night and see that one star in Taurus.



But they're all basically the same so who cares about stars? </sarcasm>

Make the night sky your friend. One down...

 

[nexxo]

"I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. Then one day... I got in" --Flynn, in Tron Legacy

 

[Mkkt Bkkt]

Now, can some one please answer at least a part of my original question:

What affect will having such a large sandbox to play in, overall, affect player experience - for better or worse from a GAMEPLAY stand point.

Alright, here is how I see it. No "because its just so big and magical", or "it's big so you can do anything you want!".

If we had 1 billion systems, would anyone notice? That depends, if the devs only had 1B systems, they could arrange them in many different ways. They could have big "chunks" or spread them evenly, or try to replicate only a part of the galaxy with them, but, does it matter? Honestly I think it wouldn't change game-play that much if at all. Perhaps only to the few that spend enough time to somehow reach every single system.

So, WHY do we have 400B systems? The short answer would be "because we can". Seeing how this game runs on a large variety of PCs, I'd say that they can be included without much fear of making the game only playable on the most extreme of PCs. Now you might think, "Okay...this still doesn't explain why we can't just be happy with 1B".

Well the next reason would be that, in order attract more customers, advertising the game as having "the complete Milky Way" would be much more attractive than saying "we have 1B stars, which makes up a fraction of our galaxy". Now this could be reworded to be more attractive but since having a full galaxy seems to have a smaller impact on performance than one would imagine, the devs could have said.. "Why not?"


However, discussing why did the devs choose to include the whole galaxy at this point is fairly pointless. Perhaps if this was talked about during the very early development stages, this may have a greater use. But the point is now, even if there was no performance impact on removing the rest of the galaxy, it would be a bad idea, for the potential customers and also for the players.

 

[tim74uk]

What comes to the stars and such, it's meant to depict our galaxy more or less scientifically accurate - thus... it's BIG.

being able to zoom in on the center of our galaxy and see endless amounts of stars really brings it home to you just how small we really are, and that there is no way we are the only life!

Peace,

CMDR NeoN HaZe

 

[Gibbonici]

From gameplay perspective it doesnt matter at all. The game can work in the same way with 1000 sectors and some may say it will work better. But is cool to have all that space if you want to just fly there.

It totally matters from a gameplay perspective. One of the main activities would be over already if the game had 1000 systems.

 

[ollobrains]

Alright, here is how I see it. No "because its just so big and magical", or "it's big so you can do anything you want!".

If we had 1 billion systems, would anyone notice? That depends, if the devs only had 1B systems, they could arrange them in many different ways. They could have big "chunks" or spread them evenly, or try to replicate only a part of the galaxy with them, but, does it matter? Honestly I think it wouldn't change game-play that much if at all. Perhaps only to the few that spend enough time to somehow reach every single system.

So, WHY do we have 400B systems? The short answer would be "because we can". Seeing how this game runs on a large variety of PCs, I'd say that they can be included without much fear of making the game only playable on the most extreme of PCs. Now you might think, "Okay...this still doesn't explain why we can't just be happy with 1B".

Well the next reason would be that, in order attract more customers, advertising the game as having "the complete Milky Way" would be much more attractive than saying "we have 1B stars, which makes up a fraction of our galaxy". Now this could be reworded to be more attractive but since having a full galaxy seems to have a smaller impact on performance than one would imagine, the devs could have said.. "Why not?"


However, discussing why did the devs choose to include the whole galaxy at this point is fairly pointless. Perhaps if this was talked about during the very early development stages, this may have a greater use. But the point is now, even if there was no performance impact on removing the rest of the galaxy, it would be a bad idea, for the potential customers and also for the players.

The devs need to add an interactive element to the 400b solar systems. Or even just background candy. We need to have a way of expanding the colonised space - but need colonies to be able to fail if they arent properly supported ( make it a player effort to either help succeed or fail npc expansion)

 

[ankhorion]

To what end does it matter how big this place really is?

I wonder if you could reach all of them anyway. I don't think there will be stations near most of the further stars so If
you try to reach the furthest your ship would run out because of mechanical faults of old age and wear and tear.
So we might need the capability to build spacestations otherwise most of the universe isn't reachable anyway.

 

[Ulysses_W]

The devs need to add an interactive element to the 400b solar systems. Or even just background candy. We need to have a way of expanding the colonised space - but need colonies to be able to fail if they arent properly supported ( make it a player effort to either help succeed or fail npc expansion)

I understand that the human race WILL be colonising new systems. Although its fun to head into the galactic centre to view a super massive black hole, scanning systems on the way, more effort needs to be put into scanning local systems. Closer systems will be colonised way sooner than some system 2000ly+ from our bubble.

That's the way I see it anyway.

 

[schuesseled]

The sight of my mates jaw dropping as I zoom out and pan across a 1:1 scale milky way. Priceless.

 

[MrPrise]

It's got 400 billion stars because the real galaxy has 400 billion stars. They were not created with a purpose in mind either, AFAIK.
.
No other space sim conveys the unimaginable vastness of space and also its unimaginable beauty. You can set off and fly for weeks, if not months, on a solitary journey and suddenly come across a sight that is so unexpectedly beautiful that it leaves you speechless. And nobody has seen it but you. These procedurally crafted systems lay dormant in the server, possibly never to become shape and light on a screen; to remain undiscovered and unwitnessed forever, just some unknown bytes in a machine. But you found them; only you, and like a waveform collapsing under your observation their quantum state shifted from bytes to pixels and blazed into being. Their sight is yours alone. They dance for no one but you.
.
It is as close as you can get to what it must feel like to explore the stars. For that alone Elite Dangerous is not just a game; it is a work of art.

Well said. They should hire you to craft some marketing material for them.

 

[Gibbonici]

*high five* Scouts, a la Traveller. Can't damn wait.

The First Imperial Survey was the inspiration for the First Great Expedition

 

[Ʃsh]

The stars there for the explorers, arguably there are more pvp'ers who have no intention of leaving colonised systems, so don't fret about player population