News Content Recap: Beyond - Chapter Four Livestream - Exploration and the Codex

ebbrell

ebbrell
I loved it all, only bit which I was disappointed with was the unlimited probes, even a qty of 1000 or 10000 would have been better. But unlimited, easy mode. It's a simulator, shouldn't it be realistic

Being out in the back should get harder the longer you are out there, as it would be in real life. If you need equipment to stay out there... then so be it
 
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Lucius-Darcia

Lucius-Darcia
If you are the first to fully discover and map the system to 100%, you will receive an additional bonus of credits.

WOW!!
I'm super surprised reading this. This is AWESOME! Thnks for adding that too.

Great work Frontier. With this update, you're bringing me out into the black with joy. I really can't wait to start it on my own. This will be one of the most important updates that will change the face of Elite Dangerous forever into a great direction. I love it already!
 

bagofholding

B
ebbrell said:
I loved it all, only bit which I was disappointed with was the unlimited probes, even a qty of 1000 or 10000 would have been better. But unlimited, easy mode. It's a simulator, shouldn't it be realistic

Being out in the back should get harder the longer you are out there, as it would be in real life. If you need equipment to stay out there... then so be it
Click to expand...

While that sounds like a decent idea remember they wanted people already out exploring to be able to get started right away. If you're way out in the black without an SRV or Mining laser then you'd be in trouble once you ran out if you lacked materials to resupply.
 

Turd Ferguson

Turd Ferguson
I like everything I saw.

I also like the format of these streams and how content is presented to the audience MUCH more than the previous pre-Adam streams. Both Adams are awesome and are able to talk to us, the customers like adults and I wholeheartedly approve.

Looks like they snuk the Orrey map in there after all and created some gameplay around it. That's really great. Making system maps available to everyone after discovery - this is EXACTLY what I suggested (not taking credit...just really pleased that FDev chose to do it) Suddenly it feels like FDev is listening! what next? an official PVE mode???

Although I have to say....the new lighting screenshots - just looks like someone is turning brightness on and off. I'm sure screenshots are just not a good way to demonstrate it cause I can just push a button on my monitor and create the same effect.
 
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Deleted member 38366

D
Seeing some very neat details in there (and in the Stream Demo) that'll become reality now.

Sounds very good so far :)
 

Flimley

Flimley
ebbrell said:
I loved it all, only bit which I was disappointed with was the unlimited probes, even a qty of 1000 or 10000 would have been better. But unlimited, easy mode. It's a simulator, shouldn't it be realistic

Being out in the back should get harder the longer you are out there, as it would be in real life. If you need equipment to stay out there... then so be it
Click to expand...

Agreed! To choose a probe magazine capacity before you leave for an expedition (with the appropriate credit cost) just ticks the courtesy realism box. Even if it’s a highly unrealistic amount you may never exhaust. Just enables a bit of player agency.

Flimley
 

AL TARF

AL TARF
A few words about the latest reveals. I know not everyone going to agree with the following. Just keep in mind that it's just my thoughts on what I've seen on the stream. I may be wrong at some points or all of them, but it's not the reason to get mad. With that said I proceed.

FOREWORD:
Exploration in Elite is what ultimately convinced me to buy the game. I love astronomy, space and everything that goes with that. I can say that my most important world views were shaped by that passion and Elite is just one of the ways for me to sate some of that feel of discovery. And while this game became less interesting for me because of how much time I've spent playing it, I realize that I played it for 1,6k hours and this is MUCH-MUCH more than 90% of the games I play (My favorite "long" game of all time and the second in time-spend rating TES V: Skyrim has 1117 hours and it's 6 years old!). This is the fact, by the way, that a lot of people here, including me, have "bleed" the game dry, learned every aspect and searched every corner and just got tired of it. I can share one life hack with you - give your CMDR a break! Play something else for a change or nothing at all and then, when you'll start to miss Elite (and you will, most likely) return to ED and you'll get a portion of that first experience feeling you miss. So, as you can see, I'm extremely excited about the upcoming updates which imo will refresh my gaming experience in ED. Now to the details:

  1. Adaptive game lighting — at first seemed a bit to much, like what the hell? It's too bright. But then a realized this actually looks a lot better and realistic. Like your eyes are getting used to the light, but only to some extent, so bright light is still a bright light. Amazing work on that one! However, I didn't like interior changes as much. It looks like when you turn gamma settings all the way up, so that black becoming gray. Perhaps this is something team should consider working on a little bit more imo. Everything else in the visuals part - great!
  2. The UI changes are my favorite (not really). They always nice to have even if the old ones were OK. Important thing is to note make them a: way too different, b: bugged. We'll see about B, but A is here, as I can tell by the stream. It looks more convenient, clean and comprehensive. Your intention to replace some words with pictures will with 95% probability make a lot of pilots playing Russian version of the game very happy, as there're SO many clipping words, letters, strings etc. right now, that even people who don't understand English well prefers that version.
  3. Exploration data share - awesome. I'm eager to see how it'll work, but the idea of exploring space to benefit everyone warms my heart as it is. There are some websites that help do this right now, like EDSM. But having the same or better mechanic in the game is very nice. Thanks for that.
  4. Spectral Analysis. I'm going to say probably the obvious thing, but for me it looks genius. Why is that? Because you at the same time simplified the exploration and made it more complex. In other words you made it more complicated in interesting way and more convenient in boring or routine way. Flying to the bodies you wish to do detail scan of had some magic, especially in the very beginning. But as my Exploration rank grew, certain things started becoming more...stale, and some things are much more than others. Flying to planets is one of those. So I say - bravo to the team. I like it A LOT. I'm not 100% sure I got everything right, will have to try it myself (can't wait), but so far - wow.
  5. Probe mapping. Reminded me Mass Effect 2, another one of my favorites, a lot. We'll see if it ever get boring, but another couple of hundreds of hours it will surely work well. If more that that - even better. Orrery — one of these little nice things you can have and enjoy from time to time. Codex is cool as well, I like the UI a lot. Voiced logs are good to have. It's about time we have something like that in the actual game. The discoveries menu is very cool. This is like the whole new level exploration. As a completionist I find all these changes and updates very promising, interesting...and frightening :D Just a little bit. The one thing I'm concerned about is that Galaxy map already have names for certain regions. Perhaps you could take it into consideration, because I think a lot of them are really cool and anything is better than just numbers.

Looking forward to see this update go live. My regards to the team. I already can see there are reasons to start playing Elite as a "main game" once again and thank you for that. I hope all future updates in will be as pleasant and cool as these, whether it be PP, BGS, Minin or something else.
 

Ebel

Ebel
AL TARF said:
...
  1. Exploration data share - awesome. ...
Click to expand...


No, I don't think so. I don't want to share anything until such time as I dock. Just what I want when I have no plans on being anywhere near a base for possibly months; people saw something where I am and then then you have others rolling in scanning the area and poaching your data. No thanks. Just think of all the potential for griefers and other "emergent content" killers to capitalize on real time location data.

Not thrilled about all the dial twiddling just to see if there is something I am interested in. Dev's seem to think it is all about the credits. Nope, I have plenty of those. The high value cherry picker explorers should love it though. Heck, you can just suck up those high values from 200kls out now! Yep, that part will be much quicker indeed.

Liked everything else though. Not sure if exploration will suck enough to hang it up yet though. No doubt play time is going to diminish for me.

There, target painted on me for the usual cast of fanboi/white knights. Wonder which one will be first?
 

Tori Yamazaki

Tori Yamazaki
This looks absolutely wonderful!

I hope some of the longstanding bugs are fixed as well... and at least the ability to manage the ignore list.
 

Irisa Nyira

Irisa Nyira
Ebel said:
No, I don't think so. I don't want to share anything until such time as I dock. Just what I want when I have no plans on being anywhere near a base for possibly months; people saw something where I am and then then you have others rolling in scanning the area and poaching your data. No thanks. Just think of all the potential for griefers and other "emergent content" killers to capitalize on real time location data.
Click to expand...
I'm sure they said it was only available to all after it had been sold.

Plus I think they implied that you'd only see the existing data when you actually visited a system (but I could be wrong about that; probably need to watch the stream again).
 

Spacecat

Spacecat
Nice! I'm glad discovery data will be persistent and available to everyone. Most of the other stuff looks good too.
 

Ziljan

Ziljan
AL TARF said:
  1. ...
  2. ...
  3. Exploration data share - awesome. I'm eager to see how it'll work, but the idea of exploring space to benefit everyone warms my heart as it is. There are some websites that help do this right now, like EDSM. But having the same or better mechanic in the game is very nice. Thanks for that.
  4. Spectral Analysis. I'm going to say probably the obvious thing, but for me it looks genius. Why is that? Because you at the same time simplified the exploration and made it more complex. In other words you made it more complicated in interesting way and more convenient in boring or routine way. Flying to the bodies you wish to do detail scan of had some magic, especially in the very beginning. But as my Exploration rank grew, certain things started becoming more...stale, and some things are much more than others. Flying to planets is one of those. So I say - bravo to the team. I like it A LOT. I'm not 100% sure I got everything right, will have to try it myself (can't wait), but so far - wow.
  5. ...
Click to expand...

I agree on pretty much every point. Btw, if you're concerned about it, I fixed the gamma washout by lowering the brightness down to ~20% and increasing the contrast to 100. Brought it right back to where it was before without killing the background stars or other new visual effects. I usually play in a dark room so this is kinda perfect.
 

Micha

Micha
So I just watched it after waking up this morning, have come to work, and haven't had time to go through all the threads yet or review the write-ups or community reactions.

I do expect to find quite a few mountains of salt in the threads though just based on the discussion threads over the last few weeks and what was shown; we'll see... :)

TL;DR: Overall pretty good, but I have some reservations.

------

First impressions:

"Visuals"
* Will have to wait and see what it looks like in-game, but from the screen-shots, a lot of it looked like gamma increases (ie, it didn't just make the planets "pop", but also the skybox; the latter should not "pop" even more close to a star.)

* Night-vision; wow, overall looks great! Could have been done differently (eg, leverage the "landing radar" display and instead of night vision make it a computer-generated terrain map, so looking more abstract) but no real quibbles. Not sure why people are concerned about the SRV here; why wouldn't the SRV have it too? It wasn't mentioned either way...

"Honk"
* Wish we could "Honk" in the ship interface after changing modes but before bringing up the interface. Dislike the fact you always have to bring up a full-screen overlay (very jarring and especially bad for VR).
- this still leaves the old questions about what happens in populated systems unanswered. You're completely vulnerable to interdiction and completely lose environmental awareness.

* Love the fact pre-discovered systems populate the Nav Panel and System Map; at least as far as has been discovered already. Love the fact discoveries are shared when they are handed in now. Purely from an immersion perspective I'd still very much like a mini-NavBeacon to be deployed in these systems which _should_ have almost zero impact on performance. It'd also be nice if there was a galaxy filter for "discovered systems" but that likely -would- have a major performance impact so unlikely.

* FDev -really- missed the point of "Travellers". Travellers do NOT honk for credits (mostly), they honk to get a quick overview of the system to see whether or not it'll be interesting enough to spend more time in. But we knew this and we knew that FDev had completely missed the point here. It was more just stray hope that they had addressed this. Giving "honkers" more credits is almost completely pointless.

"Discovery Scanner"
* Overall really love what they presented, except that it's a full-screen interface. Really dislike these full-screen interfaces.

* FDev, again, totally missed the point of what people consider "interesting". Finding -specific- types of planets is only one type of interesting (and often just coupled to making money quickly), and this is the only use-case which has gotten a speed buff. Yes, we'll be able to quickly scan systems for ELW's etc, but we will NOT be able to quickly scan a system for interesting alignments or orbits or <insert interesting thing of your choice here>.

* Very concerned about how it'll handle in VR. All that panning and zooming. The System Map and Galaxy Map are already quite nausea-inducing in VR. Will have to try it.

* 100-body system takes 20-ish minutes to scan at full speed. Hmm. So before I can see whether or not there's anything interesting in the system (other than specific types of bodies), I have to spend 20 minutes now. Bummer :(

"Probing"
* Overall mechanics looked great

* Disappointed about "unlimited" ammo; large ammo for sure (10's of thousands perhaps?), but would be nice to have to stop and restock occasionally (say every hundred systems?).

* Disappointed about "precise locations" - PLEASE consider limited search areas instead...

"System Map"
* Didn't see anything new except the Orrery?

* The Orrery is great! Thanks so much for adding it, completely unexpected addition!! :)
- Suggestion: Add a "Toggle logarithmic scale" button.

"Ship UI Changes"
* Overall looked pretty good.

* Will have to see how nicely it all plays with Voice Attack; tiny bit concerned about "context sensitive" menu items. Hope some of the new features will get dedicated hot-keys.

"Codex"
* From what we were shown: Great Stuff :)

------

So my take-away is that overall it's looking pretty good; yes, there are concerns, but we'll see how it all shakes out in the beta.

But I did get the strong impression that the lead guys don't really play the game, or at least, these aspects of it, in any great deal of depth. Andy saying "he'll relax on the couch and try exploring" is a case in point.
 

Micha

Micha
bagofholding said:
While that sounds like a decent idea remember they wanted people already out exploring to be able to get started right away. If you're way out in the black without an SRV or Mining laser then you'd be in trouble once you ran out if you lacked materials to resupply.
Click to expand...

Previously suggested: Basic free-floating mats around comets and/or in rings and/or in special deep-space USS's, and probe resupply only needing those basic mats.

(Yes, it'd mean adding comets in the game and a way to interact with them, but they are already part of the stellar forge apparently..)
 
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