I'm still stumbling around in a daze trying to take in everything from the initial beta.
And there's already been this many updates to it?
I worry about you guys - it sometimes feels like you've been running white-hot updating the game since the first release in 2014.
Absolutely incredible job. It's hard to even give feedback with so much coming at once. There's a thousand tiny things - have the cockpits been improved somehow as well? Everything seems sharper - the stippled faux-leather plastic materal in my Cobra Mk III looks so real it's a little frightening. That's not even to mention the planet surface improvements. I don't even know what to say about those because my eyes still well up when I fly down to a planet and it feels like I'm sitting in a photograph.
The traffic control at ports and stations is simply perfect. I remember the discussions about this and the primary problem with trying to implement it being repetition. I remember thinking 'yeah, if it's the same thing every time that'll get old fast' ("FREELANCER ALPHA ONE DASH ONE"). And none of us had any idea that you listened, went away, and started trying to solve it, taking your time, working it out and then recording... and oh god, I love the solution. Different voices for different places, related to the faction. And then instead of a single canned response, a series of generated phrases that can be strung together, recorded so they can mix and match in different ways, called in at certain points depending on context and responding to pilot action. It's like a kind of procedural generation for voice audio. It's such a beautiful elegant solution, and so... Elite.
I'm one of those weird people who always loved the missions and how they were tied to the background sim. It's primarily how I play the game - found a home system (well, found three before and decided to change each time), and decided who I was doing work for. The missions and the NPCs now are just fantastic. I did my first base attack a few days ago, and it was ridiculous hair-raising fun. Everything about how things tie in even more strongly to the BGS just bring it to life.
To everyone at Frontier - thank you.
PS I didn't realise that Ed tried to follow me when I bombed the stream... that was a modified racing Courier (nothing like as fast as some others have made it though!)... I feel bad that he crashed following down that canyon ;-;