Elite Dangerous is no more realistic than other space games

Quantis Trap

Quantis Trap
Take Tritiium fueling of Fleet Carriers just as one example.

Since Tritium has a half life of 12 years in would be long gone in ring asteroids. If anything we should be mining Lithium or other resources and synthesizing Tritium or maybe scooping it from gass giants.

So not only is Frontier wasting yet more players time and forcing mining on everyone, they're making a feature which is as unrealistic as any "handwavium" feature No Man's Sky has.

I know this has been said before in the forum, but I just want everyone to know this. Frontier and and commanders have no right to do so any more (if they ever did) when they tell players of the other space games that Elite Dangerous is more realistic!
 

CMDR Karrde Sun

CMDR Karrde Sun
People not listening to one instance where frontier were actually honest (lave radio interview) and getting mad :p..

They also admitted during that podcast that the tritium stuff was (in my words) science fiction.

Tangent: It was so painful to listen to the youtube roundtable because there was so many tears and frustration assuming the best when frontier had already fronted up to the real reason behind so many of their issues. The cynic in me is guessing the whole interview has been censored and deleted or something.. especially since they responded on officially on the forums with a totally different take at least to one question. first time they've been honest in years, was a great listen.
 
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Old Duck

Old Duck
Just don't ask for artificial gravity or wormhole travel, or all the "realism nuts" will come out of the walls like carpenter ants.

BTW - I am a realism nut myself (I don't want ED diluted down into a 3D arcade game like Galaxy Rebel Outlaws), and I'm baffled by things like our magic massless, volumeless materials that survive ship destruction, especially when massless materials can be used to create things that have TONS of mass like limpets. Still, a FSD should be able to create AG, at least while in supercruise - it's actually "realistic" 🤷
 

myothershipisacobraiv

myothershipisacobraiv
Why they didn't just use the Synthesis menu for this is beyond me. Don't our ships run on fusion reactors already? Mine lithium -> Synthesis -> Syntheize Tritium

Anyway just do like I'm doing. Pretend that's not what the rock is made of but what the rock's capabilities are recognized to be by your ship's sensors and mining equipment. So, you pick up the rock, which actually is composed of various silicates and minerals and metals, and then your bins process it to something based on the type of rock it is.

But you know... this happens... outside the main reactor of the ship... I suppose you can still make it work by saying the heavily modularized and interconnected nature of the ships means that the mining system can exchange with the powerplant as needed.
 

Riverside

Riverside
myothershipisacobraiv said:
Why they didn't just use the Synthesis menu for this is beyond me. Don't our ships run on fusion reactors already? Mine lithium -> Synthesis -> Syntheize Tritium
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Indeed it was my first thought on the mention of mining Tritium that with a fusion reactor & some handwavium we could use Hydrogen as an alternative & have it be a less effective but more easily obtained fuel.

Given how many commodities we already have, adding another and recalculating the hotspot generations of the galaxy when so many commodities are already available in the game seems like change for changes sake, and another potential point for bugs or outlying anomalies to be introduced.
 

Cheese Helmet

Cheese Helmet
[
Riverside said:
Indeed it was my first thought on the mention of mining Tritium that with a fusion reactor & some handwavium we could use Hydrogen as an alternative & have it be a less effective but more easily obtained fuel.

Given how many commodities we already have, adding another and recalculating the hotspot generations of the galaxy when so many commodities are already available in the game seems like change for changes sake, and another potential point for bugs or outlying anomalies to be introduced.
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that and the choice to make it a mineable good instead of something you can scoop from gas giants or stars is a deliberate one to create time sink.
 

Sunyavadin

Sunyavadin
Old Duck said:
BTW - I am a realism nut myself (I don't want ED diluted down into a 3D arcade game like Galaxy Rebel Outlaws), and I'm baffled by things like our magic massless, volumeless materials that survive ship destruction, especially when massless materials can be used to create things that have TONS of mass like limpets.
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Maybe material storage is filled up initially with I dunno, interstellar dust, dark matter, or whatever, which you jettison when you pick up mats, and scoop up more of when you use synthesis? :D
 

Barking_Mad

Barking_Mad
CMDR QUANTIS TRAP said:
Take Tritiium fueling of Fleet Carriers just as one example.

Since Tritium has a half life of 12 years in would be long gone in ring asteroids. If anything we should be mining Lithium or other resources and synthesizing Tritium or maybe scooping it from gass giants.

So not only is Frontier wasting yet more players time and forcing mining on everyone, they're making a feature which is as unrealistic as any "handwavium" feature No Man's Sky has.

I know this has been said before in the forum, but I just want everyone to know this. Frontier and and commanders have no right to do so any more (if they ever did) when they tell players of the other space games that Elite Dangerous is more realistic!
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure its simulation of the Milky Way and universe is more accurate than most.
 
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AkenBosch

AkenBosch
"The game is not realistic as they say it is, it doesn't take into account the half-life of radioactive elements!"

A space game set in space, with space-magic spaceships made of space-magic materials with space-magic thrusters, space-magic FTL, space-magic visible beam pew pew lazorz. Ok, it's all fine.

I'll Flimley my way out of here.

\o/...|o/....o=...engage Flimley Drive...*
 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Robert Maynard
Mike Evans said:
It's a romanticised science fiction game akin to Star Wars. The only realistic thing about it at this point is the location and scale of some of the stellar bodies (that we know about) with everything else being made up with procedural generation or left overs from previous procedural generation runs on the old games. Everything else breaks down pretty quickly when cast in a realistic light.

Yes there are and can be nods to realism where it makes sense to do so but that decision is based on whether is makes the game more fun and entertaining to do so, not if it makes the game more realistic (unless it's just fiction work that doesn't actually affect game play).
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Thorian Baalnorn

T
AkenBosch said:
"The game is not realistic as they say it is, it doesn't take into account the half-life of radioactive elements!"

A space game set in space, with space-magic spaceships made of space-magic materials with space-magic thrusters, space-magic FTL, space-magic visible beam pew pew lazorz. Ok, it's all fine.

I'll Flimley my way out of here.
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They talk about how unrealistic tritium fueled FCs are and other minor inconsistencies and then totally overlook:
1) How easily a ship reaches the speed of light using an Alcubierre drive.
2) That it uses heavy water to achieve this.

FYI, to all you realist out there nuclear fusion doesnt produce enough energy even at 100% efficiency to propel an object to the speed of light. It would have to be fueled by at least antimatter at the bare minimum (twice the energy of fusion @100% efficiency) but more likely by dark matter or if you really want get on the edge of possibility, zero point energy. But fusion is a flat out no go for the energy required to bend space time around a spaceship.
 

zombieapocalypse

zombieapocalypse
No science fiction space game will ever be realistic. Who knows what future technology, civilization, and space exploration will look like, especially in a 1000 years time. Besides, even in the best simulation games, there always has to be a balance between "realism", gameplay, fun, convenience.

Otherwise, we might be waiting for hours or even days for ship repairs, module installation, cargo transfer, etc. Maybe we'd be floating out in the deep void in our escape pods for days or weeks after our ships explode. And where do our ships go when we log out? etc, etc, etc, etc
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
Sourced quotes from FDev themselves on the game's realism:
Mike Evans said:
Indeed, a request is just that. We don't have to do anything if we don't want to but that doesn't mean we didn't read and consider the request. Suffice to say a low yaw rate is a fundamental part of our games aesthetics and a corner stone to our flight model that we at frontier like the way it is. We're not changing it, for to do so would be to compromise our own vision for what Elite: Dangerous is and what it's going to be. I don't give a damn what all the other space games have done in the past, nor do I care that our yaw rates are apparently even slower than a plane's is (though every time I've tried doing a pure yaw turn in IL-2 I've stalled my plane before I got anything that even resembled a steady and fast turn rate). Fast yaw and pitch in a space game is a video game trope of the highest order along with banner arrows sliding around the screen and compasses telling you where to fly all the time. I'm almost certain that other developers just implement those features because they've been so prevalent rather than actually reassessing whether the game needed them or could be even better without them! We found for example that the compass that pointed you towards your target at all times made combat too easy to end in stalemate of circling. As soon as we tried removing it all of a sudden it was more exciting to fight someone because they could give you the slip whilst you weren't glancing at your sensors and even if you did pay attention to the sensors the difference in the way the information is presented can still mean you don't quite stay on the target's tail perfectly, again providing more opportunities for them to turn the tide of the battle.

Suffice to say we wanted Elite to feel like star wars in terms of how the ships move by banking/rolling and pitching through manoeuvres opposed to the yaw and pitch based FPS style movement most other space games offered (where roll plays little or no part). That limitation to having to do your main directional change manoeuvring by pitching makes the flight path taken to be more cinematic and means a skilled player can predict the manoeuvres of an opponent in advanced by observing their current roll position relative to themselves only. So long as they match the roll quickly enough they can always follow through the inevitable pitch manoeuvre effectively and maintain the chase. If the target could yaw or pitch effectively then it's much harder to assess what they're going to do as they're current roll position doesn't really matter any more.

Finally realism has played no part whatsoever in any of our design discussions about the flight model. We don't care what would be realistic as we only care what the game play experience is when flying these ships and so far we feel we're hitting the right notes for the majority of our audience.
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Mike Evans said:
I'm not a programmer or engineer (I'm a designer) and I never worked on the original games and they're massively old. What worked and was perceived as good then doesn't necessarily apply any more so it's up to us to reassess what works and what doesn't in the now. Often what worked then still works but not always. I've said many times here on the forums that total realism really isn't what any of us (the design team) are going for. Elite is a romanticised science fiction and other than the realistically populated and scaled galaxy and star systems everything else is designed to provide a good game. If it happens that it comes out seeming plausible or even realistic then that is a bonus. Also if we can use fiction to make a mechanic more realistic or plausible then we will. I get slightly annoyed when I see fans declare that we're trying to make the most realistic space game possible because we really aren't (Kerbal Space Program is probably the most realistic I've played). If I had my way I'd have scaled the universe and star systems down to a comic scale (something akin to the way No Man's Sky is doing it) but obviously that wasn't a decision the design team got to make but it's something we've had to deal with (and meant that super cruise became a thing as it was needed to ensure there was a point to the massive scale of everything; all that realistic space would be wasted if it were just boxes and corridors ;) ). Look at any mechanic or feature in our game and it quickly becomes apparent that any veneer of realism is paper thin and doesn't stand up to close scrutiny but the game play is pretty good for it (in my opinion).
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