Alien Races?

[nicomak]

I'd rather see the Thargoid thing done really well, rather than having a whole host of sentient factions. There has been plenty of decent sci-fi with one (or less) sentient alien race in it. Alien, Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Dune (I believe) and more.

Generally media which uses multiple races ends up making each one hugely stereotyped, which I often find a bit lame. Mass Effect was guilty of that.

Would love to see plenty of non-sentient alien life though, and it would be really cool to have creatures that are just on the cusp. Kind of like the alien equivalent of chimpanzees, or maybe even slightly cleverer.

imagine them being curious about your ship, maybe steal a little part then your landing gear has trouble retracting or whatever

anyway i agree about fewer sentient species being better.
if there are everywhere, finding new ones will quiclky get old, especially if they're all humanoid like.

I'd rather have one specie like in 2001/2010 with the monolyths or something as mysterious and somewhere else another specie far less advanced rather than a star-trek like galaxy full of quasi-humans with a very similar technology level for the vast majority. "Ok you found the 152th species, so what? it just look like half of the others".

And precisely because it's a game, it's much harder to make many species interesting and distinct enough than just a few.
with thargoids and perhaps another one, you can take the time to do it right.

though the galaxy is big enough to make a few more than just 2 or 3, but that may come later in time, the unexplored region is likely to stay quite big for a while.

 

[AtomicHorror]

I'd rather see the Thargoid thing done really well, rather than having a whole host of sentient factions. There has been plenty of decent sci-fi with one (or less) sentient alien race in it. Alien, Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Dune (I believe) and more.

Generally media which uses multiple races ends up making each one hugely stereotyped, which I often find a bit lame. Mass Effect was guilty of that.

Would love to see plenty of non-sentient alien life though, and it would be really cool to have creatures that are just on the cusp. Kind of like the alien equivalent of chimpanzees, or maybe even slightly cleverer.

Perfectly put.

Oh please, knowing the difference between a game and reality is what is important here. Some of these discussions on here just try my patience with the absurdity of it all. I can only keep on stressing the fact that this is only a game. All these discussions about reality, it's about time some people returned to it.

That's the attitude already on show in practically every triple-A sci-fi themed game on the market. Elite was crowd funded for a reason. It intends to take risks. And a healthy relationship with scientific reality and plausibility is a part of that and has been since the start. Hence David Braben's position on things like planetary orbits, the star catalogues, artificial gravity, Newtonian movement etc. Take a look at the poll on sound in space- a healthy majority were interested in realistic representations. Realism was and is a major draw for the backers of this game. They want something more than the same old Hollywood style space opera.

It's really not any of our problems if you don't relate to that sentiment, so please stop demanding that the conversation move in the direction you want it to.

 

[Obadiah]

Colonisation is a very human concept and aliens are unlikely to even remotely match our thought patterns.

I disagree. I can think of few species on earth that do not seek to expand their range. Further, I doubt that any species that did not could ever hope to attain the economy necessary to support a space programme. Imagine if humans did not, we would all still be clustered around the rift valley in Africa, wondering why we couldn't grow enough food to support more than a tiny population.

 

[scrufferpops]

I disagree. I can think of few species on earth that do not seek to expand their range. Further, I doubt that any species that did not could ever hope to attain the economy necessary to support a space programme. Imagine if humans did not, we would all still be clustered around the rift valley in Africa, wondering why we couldn't grow enough food to support more than a tiny population.

Well maybe they HAVE already colonised dozens of systems, Just in other dimensions...Indeed, some think they're already 'here'...

 

[scrufferpops]

Besides space is unimaginably vast. If 1 in 10 worlds can support any particular life form and a particular life form has spread to 1000 worlds, thats much less than .001% of the galaxy...

 

[scrufferpops]

I also agree with the guy that mentioned that FD are striving for a quasi-realistic holistic scientific model that adequately explains various things. Ok so we havnt got 100% newtonian physics model (yawn) but this was sacrificed for playability...I completely agree with DB on this one favouring playability over ultra realism though he does side with science in a majority of the games content purely to add that word again. It begins with 'I'.

 

[Flavio]

Am sure that one of the other sentient life forms that we will find are ai that managed to escape when ai became banned.
Another spin on the alien thing would be one of the generation ships actually making it to a planet but they are now stranded and try to build a world for themselves - after all this time in isolation and inbreeding they may look or behave differently and only after a bit of investigation and conflict do we find out that they originated from earth.
Also we might have put animals on a planet for terraforming purposes and forgot about them and when rediscovered, we find that they are becoming sentient. Or maybe another alien race returns to earth to find that we are now sentient much to their annoyance as they wanted those fierce dinosaurs to hunt instead.