Bravo.
Am I the only person who is utterly unenthused right now about a generic FPS being shoehorned into my spaceship game?
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Disagree. Think about it - there was no paid expansion in 5 years now. And Horizons allegedly was a flop (<50% uptake rate, based on hearsay and supposedly own fdev comments noone has a source to). FDev has become a publisher where its different franchises (ED, PC, JWE, PZ) form a steady income for the company. They utilise this synergy to keep the lights on on their poster child, and fuel new franchises.
When I post on Steam forums about any Early Access game I usually use the same mantra: never have expectations because they ruins everything...
(Before going on, I have bought this game on frontier web store and not using my Steam account)
Anyway you, and every one here, don't see me posting my complaints here very often, neither bashing the game, because a part of that time in the year I am going to come back to play, read it to try the new features of the games, I am not here insisting that this game should be what it should have ought to be, whining about a contemporary game that is subpar in comparison with other games from a past era, game design wise, by a once upon a time genius game author of the franchise...
...Mostly I post here just for memory....
Nothing that I am aware of...
...I have just posted something, but the text was partially from another post of mine... ...simply weird
What next game? A first person flying a spaceship in realtime VR with planetary landings and a decent representation of our galaxy where shooting things isn't the only gameplay component...
Well, there's Evochron Legacy, but... well... the graphics are kind of ... y'know, not the best (gods I'm so superficial).
Space Engine - great but no real spaceship gameplay
SC / X4 / End Space 2 - no VR (tho X4 is fun)
SW Squadrons etc - shoot things in various gorgeous locales
???!!! It's an RPG because the CMs were playing pretend spec ops?
oh, definition of RPG, you have truly fallen far.Black Hole.
???!!! It's an RPG because the CMs were playing pretend spec ops?
Black Hole.
Here's that Horizons 50% attach stat. And I wouldn't call that a flop to be honest, over its lifetime. Actually seems to be well above average. (And you consider this is £30+ DLC here, that's genuinely not bad.)
Yeah but the point is that that's probably unsustainable no? Even as Braben's babby ED has got to pay its way long-term.
Napkin maths has the franchise itself running damn near the red. If EDO were to do poorly, and ED not see a long-term influx in revenue, I can't see them spending another $12m approx pa, for several years, to have one more punt at another PDLC. FDev isn't doing that well
I reckon EDO will probably do fine long-term. But another full-fat DLC def isn't a given at this point.
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???!!! It's an RPG because the CMs were playing pretend spec ops?
Play your way baby
(I for one shall be roleplaying a pair of legs...)
But yeah in seriousness, strictly speaking I'd call it an RNG RPG-lite. But that's a bit of a mouthful
.It's definitely not a single-player RPG in the sense of Fallout etc, and the online + proc gen means it absolutely never will be. But filling in the gaps, making your own fun, these are practically the staples of ED gameplay
. And in theory they do provide many roles for you to fulfil, within the echoing open world provided. It's an RPG-lite. Right now. As much as it's anything 
A black knight would seem the obvious answer. None shall pass!
I don't know - I wouldn't call ED a RPG for it's crappy story presentation and abysmal progress mechanic. Yet, it let's you easily head-canon a character to perform your own story in. Find some friends who tick similar and it's like a self-reinforcing dynamic setting.Play your way baby
(I for one shall be roleplaying a pair of legs...)
But yeah in seriousness, strictly speaking I'd call it an RNG RPG-lite. But that's a bit of a mouthful
It's definitely not a single-player RPG in the sense of Fallout etc, and the online + proc gen means it absolutely never will be. But filling in the gaps, making your own fun, these are practically the staples of ED gameplay
Calling it RPG would give most people quite a wrong impression. Then again some may find it's a very good one.
Now, you are just being pedantic.
Walking in ships should have been possible years ago TBH.
Other games back in the 80's allowed you to walk around in a station, even though it was teleporting from place to place due to the hardware limitations of the time.
The locical progression would have been to walk in ships to 3 or 4 locations in the ship and checking various consoles on the bridge. That would have allowed for more detailed things like repairs to be done more efficiently. Even allowing for physical repairs, take out a circuit board and replace it or weld a broken seal on a door. (More immersion).
Then disembark by going through an airlock and down the steps onto the landing pad and walk across the landing pad and to various locations in any station. Ie: Contacts office and go to a desk for the person you want to contact, (that could have made way for voice responses from the person you are talking to and choices similar to Skyrim with a view to future resonses being done by your voice as well). Walk from there to the shipyard, (physically and not just teleporting) and browse on the console what ships they have, which ones you can have transferred and such. Walk to the fitting shop and browse the parts you can fit.
Once that was possible, the next logical step would have been to allow cycling an airlock to go outside on a planet station. Or disembark your ship via the airlock to walk around if you land on the planet. Possibly EVA as well so you could do repairs on the outside of your ship if necessary.
No black screen transitions or teleporting and loading of the environment could be done while the airlock was cycling.
Any company worth a dime would outlay the steps they are taking to do this, not keep it all under wraps until the final release, thereby giving rise to disappointment due to hype from leaked information and teasers. It would be much better to have people pick up the info on a DLC and see exactly what is planned and be looking forward to it, not be looking forward to hype made up by others from the tiny bit of information we are given.
It probably was possible years ago. But they decided to do other stuff first. If they had done walking in ships then other things would have been pushed back.
Sure, we can argue what FD could have dropped or pushed back. Powerplay for example (hehe, i've summoned Rubbernuke) but its not like devs can magically just do stuff without assigning time and resources.
Everything comes at a cost.
They will add water when it makes sense, and if the economy is good after launch it will push for an expansion of EDO, if it's a flop not so much.
For them to return, they first have to know about in which way EDO is changing - I had no clue about that for example. Just that FDev called it Odyssey and there is an Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which I'm playing, brought it to my attention that something is changing in EDO -that is why I had a look, otherwise I would have been totally ignorant of what is going on in EDO -and so it will be for a lot of other former CMDRs - so to count on those numbers without proper marketing to make it known, would be wrong.Targetting the 'FPS PvP crowd' is too narrow a way of looking at it.
For one thing, that report also cited millions of inactive players, and they'll be expected to make up some of those projected mil sales for sure. (The specific stats have been redacted now, but last FDev said they've shifted 4 mil units of the core game. That's 3.5m potential players right there, before even getting to the 8m Epic sales.)
Secondly, EDO seems to be as much an RPG as an FPS, so it could attract from that fandom as well. (As much as it might end up losing everyone, from Battlefield fans through to Fallout freaks, by being a jack of all trades, master of none
The third thing though is... ED isn't going to change. As much as I'd like it to in some ways, and for the influx of new players to be part of that. It's just too fundamentally pegged to its ponderous scales and RNG realities. It's still gonna be ED. And the players it's going to most appeal to, are gonna be the ones it's attracted already
Guess we'll see. (I can still see an uptick in the demands for 'tempo' in the verse though. As much from returning Cmdrs as anywhere
Made me laugh.
How many decades was it since FD announced ED to when it was released?
Announced as Elite 4 in the early 90's and then shelved by FD until early 2000 at least.
Finally released in 2014 as an online only game that a lot of people were severely disappointed about.
That's 24 years of potential development time, at least half of it wasted while DB waited for tech to catch up to do what he wanted. They could have assigned a small team of 3 to work on it during that time to do most of the things like this. It's not like it had never been done before, the original Freelancer from the 80's went to different places in the station, even though it was teleport to each location. WOW and many other similar games allowed walking seamlessly around a huge map. No, instead, Elite 4 sat on a shelf gathering dust for most of those 24 years.
IF DB was serious about producing a mind blowing game when tech allowed it, he would have worked on it, even on a small scale, to get it ready. Instead he sat on it, doing nothing until over 10 years later. When it did hit the market, even Star Citizen was doing stuff like walking in ships and on the landing pads that ED should already have been able to do.
A little back history:
After a lengthy legal battle to wrest the rights to Elite from Ian Bell, DB then announced Elite 4 under the name of Frontier Developments.
This announcement was shortly revoked and the web site taken down, much to the disappointment of many fans while DB said he "wanted tech to catch up with his vision of the game."
Frontier Developments went back to creating quick and simple games, many being developed for mobile gaming industry.
Any contact with Frontier about Elite 4 were met with silence.
Many fans speculated that the original announcement was DB flexing his muscles to tell Ian Bell that he wasn't needed to make the game, but DB grossly overestimated his own skills, realising that he wasn't actually skilled enough to do it on his own after all. He needed more skilled programmers etc to help. When I read that speculation, I did see the logic in how people had come to that conclusion.
This speculation by fans was supported by the release of other online games with a persistent map (Eve Online in particular) and detailed graphics that had been in heavy early development during the time DB shelved Elite 4.
Fast forward a little under 10 years and FD suddenly announced Elite Dangerous. A lot of fans were a bit jaded from the previous false announcement.
What was finally released was similar to Eve Online with a cockpit view and minus the jump gates, but still warping in to a set location. No ability to get out at a station (even though Eve Online had already cracked that with WIS, albeit with a black screen transition and SC had already developed walking around seamlessly from ship to station).
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Tis pretty Epic no
(But yeah, those are the numbers apparently. And they are sales too FWIW, Epic cough up for their freebie titles.)
Like, 2m of them are probably alt Colonia accounts... But there's gotta be some confused noobs in there somewhere
. Seems a pretty smart move by FDev to me, alongside the Horizons combo job. And it softens the 'Wait I have to buy 2 games??' blow too...They'll be hitting up that email list some more heading towards launch day, no doubts
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