Any plans to add content?

Kaocraft

Kaocraft
rlsg said:
ED is not a player story driven RPG, if you are after that then you got the wrong game.

ED has plenty of content, it just does not feed it to you on a silver platter with a matching knife and fork nor a servant to cut up your food for you. :rolleyes:
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Sigh. This old saw. Not what OP was asking for and not an appropriate response. And no ED has very little content no matter how hard you look or how good and patient and mature of a person you are. There's not a lot there. And what is there, is mostly flavor text which doesn't amount to much. And most of it is on websites only. Galnet? No archives in the game it only goes back a few weeks. Local news stories? All community-submitted content wiped from the game. The buzz and banter of NPCs and passing ships? All the same everywhere with nothing tied to in-game events. Nothing changes and nothing happens.

What about the ever evolving Thargoid story and the various bits of lore and backstory around the galaxy? All of it is flavor text embedded in planetary sites which you can *only* locate by looking it up on a website. There is no in-game path to finding any of these things as a player. And as long as you're looking up the location, you might as well read the text and skip the whole exercise altogether, because there's nothing at any of these sites that you can't see or do anywhere else and everywhere else, and visiting these sites will not change anything about your game experience going forward. There are no new opportunities to be found at these sites, no new consequences for having visited them, no new risks or challenges to overcome, not new paths are opened up to you. And nothing happens.

What about exploring the vast human-inhabited bubble, traveling from Alliance to Federal to Empire space, and checking out the various strange independent anarchy civilizations in between? Surely it would be interesting to observe the myriad ways that humanity as a space-faring race, has adapted to the vast array of possible political configurations, resources, and existential challenges that await us in each new location? Nope. All people, architecture, culture, visual design, criminal justice, trade, technology, space station design, space ship design, clothing, and infrastructure is the same everywhere all the time. Everybody looks, acts, talks, the same and every city is built in the same style and every local custom is the same as everywhere else. All pirates wear sunglasses, all priests wear robes and shave their heads, all wedding barges have the same two lines of chat spam, all liners are in the top 1% of all liners out there. And nothing happens.

The BGS is an ant farm where you run cookie cutter template-generated missions to try and stimulate your preferred colony of ants to spread and move to spread its population over into one of the nearby colonies. The secret to success is to be the one who does the most missions before you get bored and give up. And nothing happens.

There are no NPCs. There are no characters in the game with motivations and relationships, who can have a favorable or disfavor able relationship to you or your actions. There are no allies to help you in your time of need. There are no rivals to foil your plans. There is no interaction with anyone or anything other than shooting it or putting it into your cargo hold and selling it. That is the beginning and the end of everything in Elite. And nothing happens.

People will try to convince you that this is the way things should be, that this is the best way, and that to ask for anything else is the equivalent of demanding that the whole game world revolve around YOU. They'll say condescending things about silver platters and "saving the princess".

But I saw everyone on the forums lose their minds with excitement and shout themselves hoarse with "great job, Frontier!" when Frontier released a single voice acted CG cutscene style video on youtube right before 2.4 came out. So I think they're just as starved for content as everyone else and would be absolutely delighted to "Save The Princess" if the option were added to the game.
 

Nelzie

N
I'm excited for the content of "Space Legs", walking around inside space stations and on planets.

First Person Shooter Aspect and similar.

I would even be fine with instanced elements inside space stations that would be part of a mission, go to a space station, land, walk to an area, load into a FPS zone that has a mission objective. Get the objective through force or through stealth... get back to your ship, maybe have to avoid station security... Blast off and have to travel to a distant world, while being harassed by those who want the objective, land at another station or planet... deal with some foes either with force or stealth... Delivery the good(s) and.. Mission Payout.

Things like that SHOULD arrive sometime after "Space Legs" is available and that would be some excellent content.

I would imagine, after everything they have road mapped is in the game, they would seek to add the kind of story content that some people feel is the only thing that "content" can be. Who knows? I'm enjoying what we have now and I'm excited about things going forward too.
 

lenna

lenna
Kaocraft said:
Sigh. This old saw. Not what OP was asking for and not an appropriate response.
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Given the reference to an RPG it is an appropriate response.

ED is not about giving the player a story to drive their gameplay around, it is also not about (the player) building empires, it is however "primarily" about a lone pilot making their own path through a universe that FD have created.

Your references to NPCs, and characters with motivations and/or relationships just proves my point - some in these forums are so hung up on the "story based RPG" pattern that they fail to see the depth ED does have.

There is a developer provided background story for the universe that is evolved over time with our collective actions having a notional impact on the path it takes. While there are no NPCs with motivations and relationships that we directly interact with in any meaningful way, there are major NPCs in the background: Power Play leaders, the Engineers, and some others.

Your idea of "content" is not appropriate for ED IMO.
 
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Chaparral

Chaparral
Juniper said:
No, no plans to add "content".

None whatsoever.

That's why we don't get major patches every few months.

(does M&B have 100 billion locations & trillions of literally planet-sized places to explore? Must check it out. :rolleyes:)
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I bet you would enjoy a box of sand and a microscope.
 

CMDR Brax

CMDR Brax
Man, Mount & Blade is an awesome game! I wish more people knew about and played it. That being said, it's very similar to Elite in that they're both sandboxes, just M&B is a medieval one. It's as much an RPG as Elite is an RPG, and to that end, OP, I recommend you play Elite just like you (likely) did M&B - find a faction to support, learn the mechanics of taking over systems, then help your digital people conquer a small portion of the galaxy.

Checking my Steam hours logged, I see 150 hours for M&B, 1248 hours for Elite. There's plenty of sand in this box, way more than in M&B, you just need to dig a little to figure out how to build your castles with it.
 

Loskene

L
crushdepth said:
None that we know of, and seems FD have little interest in story telling.

eg. we were supposed to find out more about 'the missing' in season 2. turned out to be the odd dead megaship with a few paragraphs of text. Could have had some epic gameplay and mysteries around generation ships but nope.

Same with thargoids. A new model or POI every few months. That's got epic potential too, but the current mechanic is to prevent stations flipping to "burning" state on a weekly server tick by fighting thargoids in isolated USS. Was hoping we'd be able to actually defend stations under attack, but nope.
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That's the name of the game. Promise big but deliver small to minimise your investment but prevent people from saying you didn't deliver at all, since technically you did. And in FDev's minds technically correct is the best kind of correct.
 

Dibble

Dibble
Stigbob said:
The OP hasn't got any stuff.
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didn't have any footballs to throw on my bonfire

that minecraft seems to be doing ok and that has no content.

and my idiotbox or television has no content and I have to pay for that bldy thing every month

at least ED has content and is an escape from the same old games. Go to a games con its FPS FPS FPS FPS FPS FPS. only a few games are different.
 
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krylite

krylite
Abadd said:
Someone on another forum bought this game, general concencus was there is no content beyond the initial grind towards a beter ship, a refund quickly ensued.

Comparing this game to another sandbox, lets say Mount & Blade, really shows off how much ED is lacking in the content department.

So, any plans?
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"Mount & Blade" gameplay will be incorporated to ED in the spacelegs future. There will be civilizations from marooned lost generational space dredger ships where the colonists went backward and gone native & feudal. So you may have a mission someday to fly and crashland over the primitives engaged in battle, shock and awing them. You will become like Mark Twain's "CT Yankee in the King's court", and pick a side to help wipe out in a mini-campaign fighting with your nanite-switch blade (https://youtu.be/-ArVBL8EgKU?t=31s) while repairing your ship, then re-integrate the rest back into the galactic civilized community. :D

[video=youtube;xx2SlTmvz5o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx2SlTmvz5o[/video]
 
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Dbrn47

Dbrn47
There's content, it just doesn't feel very inspired sometimes. Getting to the sorts of ships you want to fly is simply the tutorial, post that the rest of the game is simply what you like doing. Many open world games are like this, including Mount and Blade. We just need more polish on the systems we have and it'd be great to see things like Multi-crew fleshed out, but I'm not sure we'll see that anytime soon. Many of us are hoping that updates scheduled this year will shore up some weaknesses so we can get back to seeing more systems added, like atmospheric landings. This is one of those 'journey' type games, for some it ends when you get the ship you want (the end of their progression), for others that's when it really starts. It's easy for those of us who have played thousands of hours to pick apart flaws and talk about content, but there had to be something there for us to stick around for those thousands of hours. What's missing is a bit more depth and cohesiveness for the content that's there, a little less reliance on RNG and a lot of unrealized potential yet, that's all.
 

Rafe Zetter

Banned
Rafe Zetter
Juniper said:
No, no plans to add "content".

None whatsoever.

That's why we don't get major patches every few months.

(does M&B have 100 billion locations & trillions of literally planet-sized places to explore? Must check it out. :rolleyes:)
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Sorry Juniper - normally you're ok (ish) with your replies, but had you not noticed that of the billions of planets blah blah there are not that many variations - will going to the other side of the galaxy to see that same "generic lava planet v5" make that exploration any better?

I'm sure someone or group of someones have been cataloging all the different planet classifications. If there was more than 30 base types I'd be amazed, because so far there isn't even that many in RL. If there was more than 100 including subgroups of size "big one / little one" I'd buy you dinner, someplace nice - even if you throw in "one polar icecap / TWO polar icecaps" - you won't even be able to smell 500 let alone hit it.

Out of 200 billion.***

But please do prove me wrong - I like being educated.

And to repeat myself again - apart from going and looking - what else is there to do when you get there? Can you go mining or pick up any thing? Well yes you could, but you won't be able to get back because of the whole "ED uses a fuel system that for exploration means most of the time you are running on empty to save mass."

So collect anything and your jump distance reduces, coz "mass".

Yes yes ofc - "this is how it is in reality".

but isn't is so odd that when I introduce "reality" into an argument about why a mechanic of ED IS NOT LIKE REALITY - all I ever hear is "ED IS A GAME NOT REALITY" and "handwavium" is the better option, or the other favorites, "you can't use GalNet to pay fines remotely, or get trade information outside of a very small sector," even though galnet stretches across both bubbles.

There's a fact that players of ED like yourself that have the mindset of "ooooh 200 billion things to look at" always conveniently forget - It'll NEVER amount to anything, it can't, the task of making even 5% of the galaxy more interactable than "honk and jump" would take decades, and using the currently limited set of generic procgen variables won't be the answer because it'll fall into the same trap "it will still ALL LOOK THE SAME", and a different nametag won't ever make up for that.

It would need a procgen system with a signifcantly larger set of visibly different variables, and I'm talking HUNDREDS, not dozens, all interchangeable so you really might see something particularly odd on occasion somewhere far away (or next door) if they also fiddled with the spawn values to add another layer of factors into the procgen.

For all it's flaws NMS at least tried to do this, and yes although the animals occasionally look bloody odd, wasn't that the idea? People all pointed and laughed, and no-one noticed that NSM had had the balls to try to do something no-one else had. I think the bloody stupid looking animals ADDS not detracts from NMS, because now you're in "box of chocolates" territory.

*** Which, BTW you STILL can't do anything other than, "honk and jump" or if you've got a few spare millennia to waste, you could even land and have a drive about in your SRV - just don't get stuck like Bomba Luigi did (man that was so epic - I still think the guys who helped should be given a decal or something). in ED it is quite literally a waste of space.

PS - I've not played M&B but amount of playarea has NEVER BEEN the primary reason why a game is successful. A real gamer would know this. If you think I'm wrong, imagine ED with just twice the volume of play area - 2 whole galaxies worth of volume, but still just 2 bubble zones and outliers. Has the game suddenly become twice as playable? Let ask the viewers......

PPS I've just realised I've got M&B in my GoG library - lets go!
 
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playfuldreamer

playfuldreamer
Jukelo said:
I'd rather Frontier focused on making interactions with the world deeper, more complex and more believable than adding content which people will burn through in a matter of hours and ask 'is that it?' eventually anyway.

Also you talk about content and bring up...Mount and blade? M&B is a pretty good example of a game with interesting core gameplay making up for a dearth of content. (also I would hardly call either ED or M&B sandbox games)
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This. A thousand times this.
 
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