Any indication on planet landing?

. I realized that what would make it infinitely more interesting to me is the so called "Planet landing" update although nothing has been set about what that would actually entail.

So, has anyone heard anything new about when they are planning to implement this or am I just going to end up giving up on the game in the next few days (provided the Powerplay thingy doesn't pull me back for good)?

What I would like to see is landings on the planet anywhere you like, make appointments with smugglers for contraband. illegal trading, like weapons and such to factions on the planet. cities you can visit. and do asasinations etc even out of the ship. Maybe a bit much, but that would be great.
 
Well, a first-person module should have a lot of valuable features, even without setting foot on planets.

For instance - You could take the time to repair your ship yourself instead of looking for a place to dock. Just suit up, grab a blowtorch and seal up some holes. Next - you could explore derelict ships floating in space for the sake of finding valuable salvage.
 
The expansion you refer to is EVA not FPS, the two are very different (there is no FPS expansion planned for Elite Dangerous as far as we know). Elite has never been a FPS game even though it's ships shooting at each other.

Doesn't one inevitably lead to the other? If you can float around in your ship and run around in stations (and eventually planets) and you can have a gun (Braben has already mentioned Big Game Hunting) then you've got a FPS whether you want one or not.

I suppose you could have a galaxy-wide ban on handguns (many stations have such ban), but then you're removing one of the simplest ways of adding good gameplay content to the expansions. Which seems like an odd thing to do.
 
Doesn't one inevitably lead to the other? If you can float around in your ship and run around in stations (and eventually planets) and you can have a gun (Braben has already mentioned Big Game Hunting) then you've got a FPS whether you want one or not.

I suppose you could have a galaxy-wide ban on handguns (many stations have such ban), but then you're removing one of the simplest ways of adding good gameplay content to the expansions. Which seems like an odd thing to do.
Yes, after I wrote that post, I did think that Frontier would probably add first person shooter to the EVA expansion, but Frontier have said nothing about the expansions (since the kickstarter) so we don't know what they have planned.
 
you must be new to gaming in general if you still buy into developer videos telling you about their ´big plans for the future´.

Been burned too often to believe any ´future plan´ interviews by any developer.

I'm not new to gaming at all. Which leads to the realization that I'm probably incredibly naive on my expectations from game developers... Only time (and patience) can tell really, although if my laptop could run the Witcher 3 we wouldn't even be having this conversation right now.
 
I too am looking forward to landing on planets and walking around my ship. What I don't understand is why you would expect such a thing to relieve your boredom?

If one doesn't enjoy flying through space making their own adventures, I fail to see why doing the same thing while walking would be an improvement.

Agree, you do the same that you did before. But for me walking around my ship and walking on planets, talking to people brings a lot more immersion or realism.
Virtual living and working in space and do all the things I have to do by scrolling left and right through a screen makes the universe of ED not very challenging. You only fly to another place, to scroll the same lists over and over again. It is a start, but walking around should make ED way more interesting for me.
 
I too am looking forward to landing on planets and walking around my ship. What I don't understand is why you would expect such a thing to relieve your boredom?

They can't charge for an expansion where you just walk (or I imagine, float) around. They'll be giving you a whole load of new gameplay that you can't do when you're inside your ship.
 
The expansion you refer to is EVA not FPS, the two are very different (there is no FPS expansion planned for Elite Dangerous as far as we know). Elite has never been a FPS game even though it's ships shooting at each other.

These three above quotes have no source to go on.

YAY, someone else who remembers Frontier saying this.

Have faith, my young Padawan.

I agree 100% with this.

I'm glad you used the word "opinion", a word not used enough on this forum.

Elite isn't Mechwarrior, Eve, SWTOR or any other games you mention, and Frontier Developments are not those studios. Don't tar everyone with the same brush. David Braben is not like Peter Molyneux.

The first 3 quotes do have things to go on. In print interviews and video DB clearly spells out that they are looking at a phased approach to things like planetary landings, with airless moons coming first, followed by planets with atmospheres, followed by planets with life, followed by planets with teeming cities and none of it sooner than a full year after V1.0 release. Easy enough to find by some googling. This Reddit thread has lots of links to relevant quotes including the phased approach about 10% into the list.

As for SC, they haven't made a single release date announced yet so the PU alpha at the very end of 2015 is pretty questionable. SC in any event they will not allow free-roaming planets as they are not using PG for the systems but POI hopping to the "level maps" in CryEngine (maybe PG in the future as CR bought a team to work on it). Although CIG have been updating CryEngine to allow much larger maps, when you have to "hand craft" everything there is a definite limit to the amount (and CIG is using lego block approach and some PG for missions and putting bases together and not 100% hand-crafting everything, contrary to some fanboy posts). Opposite concern of PG, where you can get massive amounts of galaxy but having little unique details everywhere is much harder. Another trade-off is that hand-crafting requires more asset loading from disk- already SC is much larger build than Elite and there is talk of the game using 1GB of disk at launch.

What is bothersome about ED planet landings is only that FD have made zero statements that they are working on anything but point releases. I wish they would say something! My expectations is not until after Xbox, E3 will probably focus on Xbox release which will likely roll with point update 1.4 before PC gets it (few weeks maybe), which will obviously be big for FD, and also their coaster park game.

Anyone playing ED for 300 hours got their money's worth. The ongoing updates make it worth coming back and I expect development to continue for some years. They have enough cash now to run the current team another two years without any Xbox or expansion sales and exceeded their internal "bull" projection, which is a very good thing.

There are to me two main issue outside of the known plans for expansion.
How to make the current persistent world, multi-player PG galaxy feel more alive without just player intervention in PowerPlay. To me, the Mission system update combined with persistent NPC could do a lot. We really need the point update after the Xbox rollout to have persistent NPC which if done right has potential for more "normal" game story-line based play.
How to get PvP wanting players together for lower-cost (lost ships, etc), arena-type game-play in interesting environments. I think the Project Proving Grounds leak from the last update may take care of this, but we will see... probably that will be the Xbox rollout thriller and maybe 1.4 update.
 
Doesn't one inevitably lead to the other? If you can float around in your ship and run around in stations (and eventually planets) and you can have a gun (Braben has already mentioned Big Game Hunting) then you've got a FPS whether you want one or not.

I suppose you could have a galaxy-wide ban on handguns (many stations have such ban), but then you're removing one of the simplest ways of adding good gameplay content to the expansions. Which seems like an odd thing to do.

It's called 'FPS' by the players only, it's not even 'EVA'. Frontier usually refers to it as walking around within your ship/stations, see newsletter 29 or 32 for instance, it will later be expanded to planets surface, when we can land. The DDF on Crews mentions marines. And yes sure Elite never was a FPS, but it never was multiplayer either. And speaking of the newsletters they do mention combat on foot(in station, boarding etc...).

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=5112
 
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It's called 'FPS' by the players only, it's not even 'EVA'. Frontier usually refer to is as walking around within you ship/stations, see newsletter 29 or 32 for instance, it will later be expanded to planets surface. The DDF on Crews mentions marines. And yes sure Elite never was a FPS, but it never was multiplayer either. And speaking of the newsletter they do mention combat on foot(in station, boarding etc...)

It will be FPS by default if you can attack NPC or PC avatars; really the ship-to-ship combat is FPS, it just isn't normally referred to in that way.

However, just like piracy the PU rules won't allow a player to run around indiscriminately killing folks on foot. The system authorities will respond (as well as possibly other players) and the cell-phone of 3300 will allow murder or robbery reporting just like the ships do.
 
It will be FPS by default if you can attack NPC or PC avatars; really the ship-to-ship combat is FPS, it just isn't normally referred to in that way.

However, just like piracy the PU rules won't allow a player to run around indiscriminately killing folks on foot. The system authorities will respond (as well as possibly other players) and the cell-phone of 3300 will allow murder or robbery reporting just like the ships do.

In a way yes, but it does matter how much they emphasis on the 'Shooter' Aspect. Calling it FPS changes what you might expect from it.
 
In a way yes, but it does matter how much they emphasis on the 'Shooter' Aspect. Calling it FPS changes what you might expect from it.

Good point. I think then that we will have First Person Point of View (FPPoV?) most of the time and FPS a small amount of the time. Obviously having conflict is a lot of what many players want and central to story, so I would expect defense against native wildlife, ship boarding, hijacking, assassination missions and the like to be easy to find in the game, but like running from ship-to-ship combat, also somewhat easy to evade/avoid.
 
The first 3 quotes do have things to go on. In print interviews and video DB clearly spells out that they are looking at a phased approach to things like planetary landings, with airless moons coming first, followed by planets with atmospheres, followed by planets with life, followed by planets with teeming cities and none of it sooner than a full year after V1.0 release. Easy enough to find by some googling. This Reddit thread has lots of links to relevant quotes including the phased approach about 10% into the list.

As for SC, they haven't made a single release date announced yet so the PU alpha at the very end of 2015 is pretty questionable. SC in any event they will not allow free-roaming planets as they are not using PG for the systems but POI hopping to the "level maps" in CryEngine (maybe PG in the future as CR bought a team to work on it). Although CIG have been updating CryEngine to allow much larger maps, when you have to "hand craft" everything there is a definite limit to the amount (and CIG is using lego block approach and some PG for missions and putting bases together and not 100% hand-crafting everything, contrary to some fanboy posts). Opposite concern of PG, where you can get massive amounts of galaxy but having little unique details everywhere is much harder. Another trade-off is that hand-crafting requires more asset loading from disk- already SC is much larger build than Elite and there is talk of the game using 1GB of disk at launch.

What is bothersome about ED planet landings is only that FD have made zero statements that they are working on anything but point releases. I wish they would say something! My expectations is not until after Xbox, E3 will probably focus on Xbox release which will likely roll with point update 1.4 before PC gets it (few weeks maybe), which will obviously be big for FD, and also their coaster park game.

Anyone playing ED for 300 hours got their money's worth. The ongoing updates make it worth coming back and I expect development to continue for some years. They have enough cash now to run the current team another two years without any Xbox or expansion sales and exceeded their internal "bull" projection, which is a very good thing.

There are to me two main issue outside of the known plans for expansion.
How to make the current persistent world, multi-player PG galaxy feel more alive without just player intervention in PowerPlay. To me, the Mission system update combined with persistent NPC could do a lot. We really need the point update after the Xbox rollout to have persistent NPC which if done right has potential for more "normal" game story-line based play.
How to get PvP wanting players together for lower-cost (lost ships, etc), arena-type game-play in interesting environments. I think the Project Proving Grounds leak from the last update may take care of this, but we will see... probably that will be the Xbox rollout thriller and maybe 1.4 update.

Great post, and repped for it.
This is the sort of counter-position post I appreciate reading and not the "I disagree cause you smell so ner" that I normally get.
I'll certainly check out that reddit thread
 
Also that Reddit thread had the quote I've been going on about for a while now ...

[h=1]When can we expect planetary landings?[/h]From the development Q and A:
The most notable and anticipated of these is of course seamless planetary landings. Whilst it wouldn’t be sharing anything new with you to confirm this feature post-launch, I can confirm that we hope to implement it within a year of release, if possible:
Sandy: Definitely yes. Hopefully (barring issues) within the first year post-release
Michael: Yes, we’ll be looking to add landings in updates after the game’s intial release. We’ll provide more details nearer the time.
TL;DR, they are aiming for one year or so after initial release. Keep in mind this was in 2013 and things can change, but we can still hope!

I knew they'd said a year after release and this part of that thread not only states it, but gives the source. And it also states this in 2013, so things have probably changed, but what I take from that is, they've been working on SPL for 2 years now, so it should be some way into development.
 
Also that Reddit thread had the quote I've been going on about for a while now ...

I knew they'd said a year after release and this part of that thread not only states it, but gives the source. And it also states this in 2013, so things have probably changed, but what I take from that is, they've been working on SPL for 2 years now, so it should be some way into development.

Yeah, it's the silence that is deafening though. Hopefully FD are making it worth the wait and post-kickstarter secrecy. TBD. Probably a very small team is working on PL and no-one is tackling FPS mode yet. The Stellar Forge group should be focused on planets for sure. We are also still missing comets, which MB posted ages ago were already in the internal builds but not satisfactory for release.

Hopefully Xbox sales give the cash on hand a great boost and management feels good enough to hire at least another 50 devs to ramp up some speed.
 
Also that Reddit thread had the quote I've been going on about for a while now ...

I knew they'd said a year after release and this part of that thread not only states it, but gives the source. And it also states this in 2013, so things have probably changed, but what I take from that is, they've been working on SPL for 2 years now, so it should be some way into development.

Thanks, nice find, but "I disagree so ner"! So, there you have it: no planetary landings for you in 2015 .
 
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Thanks, nice find, but "I disagree so ner"! So, there you have it: no planetary landings for you in 2015 .

LOL. I think by the end of the year we could have landings on airless moons. But it is all quiet and uncertain at the moment since FD are not talking... hopefully after Xbox release they go for bigger announcement than PS4. ;-)
 
LOL. I think by the end of the year we could have landings on airless moons. But it is all quiet and uncertain at the moment since FD are not talking... hopefully after Xbox release they go for bigger announcement than PS4. ;-)

They said one thing early this year, in one of the first dev updates, which is that they were hiring more people to work on expansions, it's possible it mostly "started" then(planets are already there arent they? ^^). But still, landing on airless barren worlds might be released some time this year. It's obviously not as complex as other planets, and it doesnt need to have the "walking around" part right away. We'll have to wait and see of course.
 
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I think landing on the surface of a sphere is the easy part. It's just figuring what to give us to do there that's going to be difficult.

I think the "landing on moons" start is quite realistic as lots of these barren airless rocks will look fairly similar to each other and gas giants etc would only really need one model and they could just vary the scale and palette to virtually infinite degrees.

It's when you get to the earth like and terraformed worlds that the challenge really starts. The requirement for variations of flora and fauna and any man or alien made settlements is really important because any distinct lack of variation will become glaringly obvious and tiresome pretty quickly.
 
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