Elite Dangerous, its biggest downfall

[Hellhawk666]

There are some good thoughts in the OP, and it's well reasoned. I'd still prefer the existing system however and would rather see the development hours go towards implementing other functionality that is still missing or partly implemented. I'd disagree that this is the major cause of players losing interest - it is very likely a factor for a large proportion, but I think the majority who become disenchanted find repetition and lack of content in other areas to be more of an issue.

Personally I've cooled off a lot after having played for literally hundreds of hours since the alpha tests in December '13. For me it's a combination of simplified implementation of things that sounded much more interesting in their original proposals, plus a lack of in-game integration with other players and a concentration on development of game features that don't appeal to me. If I'd listed all the things that seem to me to be problems or missing features, supercruise wouldn't have been on the list.

 

[lysan]

I think you have some merits in your post, Cobramac. It may be not as dramatic as you make it sound and not that important when exploring an uninhabited star system but the lack of ship-to-ship interaction in supercruise(only basic scanning and interdiction is available) makes it a rather lackluster experience when it comes to busy systems. And if other ship don't have an FSD interdictor, it cannot even interact with you at all, can't even drop to "normal space" near you if you cancel supercruise if I understand the game mechanics correctly(I assume it will be a different instance for him, even if he will drop at the same location).

But it seems that it's the unavoidable flaw of the game engine that is not actually simulating the whole galaxy(or even an individual star system) as a single coherent space but rather as a "world map"-like galaxy where individual "region map"-like instances of supercruise-flyable star systems are located. And the latter in turn only have persistent instances(or rather sets of instances, they can be different for different players) of "normal" space around the stellar objects; the rest of the system seems to only have a pocket of "normal" space when someone is dropped from supercruise at a random location and in that case it's a dynamically-created instance that will be inaccessible to most players unless they are dropping to a wing member who is there or using a wake scanner to drop to follow another player. E : D gurus, feel free to correct me if I got something wrong, that's just my impression based on the observed game behaviour.

Bottom line: is "supercruise space" a bad thing? I would say so. Does it ruining the game? Not really. Does it makes ship to ship interactions lacking compared to what those could've been with star systems being uniform single-instance areas and ships in supercruise behaving in the same manner as they are under "normal" speed(deployable hardpoints, toggleable flight assist etc)? Sure. Will that be changed? No, I highly doubt that.

I do not believe this is true, you can fly in normal space to any point in the game if you have the time. So the galaxy are all there in one big map. The problem is that you need years to get somewhere whit normal speed, so its not practical at all.

 

[dayrth]

If you could travel fast enough to get anywhere without supercruise then you would never see anyone else (player or npc). Even if your scanners had infinite range they would be moving so fast you could never find them. Not to mention the whole travelling faster than light in normal space is impossible thing. Supercruise solves both problems by 'contracting space'. Lets you see and interact with others while covering vast distances.

 

[Robert Maynard]

The difference with supercruise would be that you would only be able to accelerate your ship beyond the normal space limits if there are no objects, ie ships, planets, debris etc that masslock your ship. Once you engage your sublight, you travel is normal space at high speed, but as soon as your ship encounters a mass it drops your out into your standard speed, to avoid being constantly masslocked otw to a station, some would not take the direct route as this would be naturally full of traders. police, pirates, players etc, so you would plot your course to avoid this if you wish, but the trade lanes would be there and some smart pirates could even set ambushes outside the trade routes hoping the catch you on your diversion.

As an example of this, you jump into the system, now you choose your destination and after-burn to get away from anything stopping you from engaging your "sublight", you finally notice the mass lock indicator go out and now you can engage your sublight drive, on the way to the station, you come across a pirate group/ debris/ traders etc that cause your ship to be masslocked. You automatically drop out of sublight speeds and back to normal speeds, now your options are try to avoid/ outrun them with After burners to get to the point of not being masslocked and re engage sublight, or interact, attack pirates, talk to traders, offer escort, pirate the trader, give fuel to the stranded ship that is sitting there, etc etc, the possibilities are endless. Elite used a simplified version of this. they called interplanetary drive if i#m not mistaken, you had to engage the J key to accelerate beyond normal which only worked if you were not masslocked.

It made the interaction so much better and yet there were ways to avoid it if you so wished by flying around the trade routes (shortest distance).

The only difference between what we have and what you propose is that players would be pulled out of super-cruise by any other ship that in close proximity - a lot like the Torus drive in the original game which could only be engaged when no other ships were nearby.

As to travel in normal space at high speed:

When I see people refer to the 500m/s speed limit as "arbitrary" do you think we just plucked that number out of thin air and claimed that'll do? Well in case you do let me assure you that it's a purely technical limitation. Any faster and the slightest bit of network lag or packet loss between peers would render the experience unplayable and crap.

The most interesting discovery to come out of this however is that it's too fast for a good dog fight and something like 150m/s is actually far more appropriate and fun.

I would also like to reassure people that you'll be able to yaw in E D so there's no need to compare the flight model to that of a broken car.

There is a difference between Newtonian Physics and Newtonian flight model. One is built on top of the other. Yes we have taken control away from the player to truly move their ship in a Newtonian way for game play reasons (except for being able to drift along at your current velocity but arbitrarily point your ship where you want).

However my post was clarifying that we do in fact have a Newtonian physics engine which the post I was replying to implied we didn't. What we don't have is the control method layered on top to make it fully available to the player to use. Instead we provide more traditional controls and various flight assists that shape the flight model how we want it to be.

"Will you have Newtonian physics in the game?

Yes. The degree of the fly-by-wire to override the feeling of skidding is something we will carefully tune."

Nothing about that statement is a lie. We have Newtonian physics, and we have fly-by-wire control method layered on top. We have carefully tuned your ability to move how you desire using the fly-by-wire system out of the flight model because we believe it's a better that way.

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).

 

[WR3ND]

I do not believe this is true, you can fly in normal space to any point in the game if you have the time. So the galaxy are all there in one big map. The problem is that you need years to get somewhere whit normal speed, so its not practical at all.

I'm doubtful of that. I'm pretty sure the backdrop is calculated and drawn when you go between instances. I know you can't supercruise between systems though, as I've done it before, supercruising the distance without actually getting to another system, having an empty target in front of me.

 

[kilvenny]

I actually think Supercruise is a nice mechanic for representing the challenge of traversing large distances, where it fails is in what you do in it. I actually preferred it without the interdiction aspect because you could actually enjoy space for what it was, travel round and sightsee. Now I spend more time on the radar thinking about possible interdictors. I think interdiction should only occur when you are relatively close to system bodies or points of interest. Then i would make the scanning process more user intensive. Make me deduce things rather than serve it on a plate. Let me find the combat zones the first time I enter a system.

 

[streki]

I like supercruise - it lends the galaxy a sense of scale, and I don't know what exploration would be without the SC mechanic. Certainly I wouldn't want Jump Gates, fast travel, wormholes or teleportation....not in this game.

 

[Riedquat]

Wow, OP, that could of been me writing that post, I have written similar several times in the past.

I have sat and thought many times about what I think causes Elite to suffer from the 'mile wide inch deep' syndrome that people talk about.

I think one of the main perpertrators is SuperCruise, for the reasons you state.

It detaches the player from the game world, allows them to zip through systems in little or no time, with little or no danger, it literally takes away the gameplay that made Elite so special in the first place.

I would of preferred to of seen a system where you accelerate, but drop out when you enter the vicinity of another 'object', much like the mini jumps in the originsl game.

 

[Gimi]

Just a small historical point here.
Supercruise was originally not the intended mechanic for in-system travel. Originally Frontier had planned to use micro-jumps between points of interest within a system. Much like what we see in some Star Citizen videos. A design proposal for this setup was put forward in the DDF (design decision forum) in april 2013 and caused a huge uproar.
One of the much beloved features in the original games was that the player could go wherever he/she wanted and change his/her mind while underway, so that was almost unanimously put forward as a wanted feature by the DDF. Now that causes some challenges when you are operating in a true to scale multi-player universe.
Frontier went away with the feedback from the DDF and came back 6 months later with the frame shift drive and supercruise which was, in my view, a brilliant solution.
Supercruise is not perfect, and I'm sure it could be tweaked to make it better, but considering the alternatives and the technical limitations imposed on the game (true scale universe and multi-player) it's brilliant.

You can read the original proposal here: "go straight to LUDICROUS SPEED!!" Travelling between planets in Elite: Dangerous
The supercruise/frame shift drive proposal is here: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling." The Frame Shift Drive

There are also several more threads covering this topic in the Design Decision Archive (DDA). FD put a huge effort into this, and I'm glad they did.

 

[nexxo]

Thank you for your comments, i dont think there would be any need to shrink the the distances as with "sublight" thrusters could accelerate your ship to massive speeds in normal space.

The difference with supercruise would be that you would only be able to accelerate your ship beyond the normal space limits if there are no objects, ie ships, planets, debris etc that masslock your ship. Once you engage your sublight, you travel is normal space at high speed, but as soon as your ship encounters a mass it drops your out into your standard speed, to avoid being constantly masslocked otw to a station, some would not take the direct route as this would be naturally full of traders. police, pirates, players etc, so you would plot your course to avoid this if you wish, but the trade lanes would be there and some smart pirates could even set ambushes outside the trade routes hoping the catch you on your diversion.

As an example of this, you jump into the system, now you choose your destination and after-burn to get away from anything stopping you from engaging your "sublight", you finally notice the mass lock indicator go out and now you can engage your sublight drive, on the way to the station, you come across a pirate group/ debris/ traders etc that cause your ship to be masslocked. You automatically drop out of sublight speeds and back to normal speeds, now your options are try to avoid/ outrun them with After burners to get to the point of not being masslocked and re engage sublight, or interact, attack pirates, talk to traders, offer escort, pirate the trader, give fuel to the stranded ship that is sitting there, etc etc, the possibilities are endless. Elite used a simplified version of this. they called interplanetary drive if i#m not mistaken, you had to engage the J key to accelerate beyond normal which only worked if you were not masslocked.

It made the interaction so much better and yet there were ways to avoid it if you so wished by flying around the trade routes (shortest distance).

Nope on all counts. It takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth. Think about it: eight minutes. That is how big space is. Sublight travel would simply be too slow.

Second, SC is there to an extent to hide instancing. Because again space is big, and many players can visit one system, and the challenge is to communicate all their movements and interactions between players on a peer-to-peer network, so the whole thing has to be broken up into instances. You no like? You pay monthly subscription to feed a central server then, like in Eve Online.

Third, the J key in Elite just moved your ship in stepwise jumps. There was no sense of cruising through space. It was jump-jump-pirates (fight!), jump-jump-pirates (fight!), jump-jump-station, dock.

In Elite II travel in system was slow. It took days, even at top sublight speeds. But the player could manipulate the passage of game time and just fast-forward the clock. This made for awkward navigation as you could easily overshoot a target and dogfights became 'jousting' as you shot past each other, desperately trying to land a shot.

In Elite Dangerous we have no jump drive, thank god, because it would totally ruin the sense of space. We cannot manipulate the flow of time because players need to stay in step with each other. SC really was the best way of managing traversing the vast distances of space while still feeling connected to it. I'm not a big fan of the comet flare graphics of other ships in SC --they are much too big, for one, and I agree that a thin trail would be better, but apart from wishing that the transition in and out of SC was smoother, I have no complaints at all.

EDIT: and the thread title: 'Its biggest downfall!'. Dude, drama much?

 

[Zieman]

2. Any NPC threat in SC can be removed by dropping SC. And any normal space threat can be removed by re-entering SC. The cops in this game are too stupid to chase you from normal space when you jump to SC. And they are too stupid to wait for you in SC to re-enter. THIS IS WHY MURDER IS SO EASY to get away with especially in high-sec space. The cops literally disappear due to the currently implementation of SC.

I guess you have not done high paying smuggling missions many in a row then?

 

[Antoniius]

I think the SC mechanics is related to the "istanced" space we "live" in. In ED there is actually not a full space (that, honestly would be empty for 99,9999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the available space) but just a mix of istances linked by a ruleset (call it SC, docking etc etc..).

Anyway i have to admit i dont like at all the SC environment, it is really too static (unless you carry a lot of missions and got interdicted every 15 seconds )

 

[Dr. Uzi]

PvE player is obvious.

 

[robbyp]

Most systems the supercruise time to the station is short. Most of the systems the main stations are within 1000ls of the sun.

Its only the ones with stations far away or multiple star systems which cause the long SC time. I tend to avoid those.

SC itself is fine. I don't feel the need for any changes.

 

[lysan]

The only difference between what we have and what you propose is that players would be pulled out of super-cruise by any other ship that in close proximity - a lot like the Torus drive in the original game which could only be engaged when no other ships were nearby.

As to travel in normal space at high speed:

Originally Posted by Mike Evans View Post
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).

I'm so happy David Braben stepped in here, and put the foot down. Jesus that would have been a disaster for the game. If that was the case I would never buy it or support it for sure.

 

[Cmdr Ig]

Supercruise is not an inherently bad idea - you only have to look at I-War2 to see how it can be done expertly. In that game, the change from real-space to using the cruise engine was totally seamless, you never felt you were changing between "instances" at all, and there was just enough persistence that everything felt solid and real, a sense greatly added to by what is still the the most engrossing and enjoyable flight model of any combat space game (yeah, that's flame bait, I know...) I've ever played, ED included.

Looking back at the likes of I-War2 with Rose tinted specs, it's clear what ED's failures are - the lack of seamlessness, the lack of a feel of control in SC, and the lack of any sense of persistence or solidity to the universe. Too often in ED the random number generator is simply too obvious - so obvious you just start meta-gaming for it. Indeed, ED ends up a collection of mini-games with a really awkward menu system to select which one you want that day. SC to the RES site to farm pirates, SC to the Nav beacon to pirate traders. The fact that we even talk about the "interdiction mini-game" just smacks of the lack of coherence between the various parts of the game.

Anyway, I get off point slightly, but the solution to the supercruise "problem" is not to remove it or even massively change away from the concept, but to improve the seamlessness, to reduce the "meta" around the random number generator, and to give the player a skill to master in SC, whether that's as simple as fine control over where you drop out to real space, or a sense that you can optimise your approach and minimise your travel time. I think it might also be interesting if the different ship types displayed different characters in SC as well - how about different acceleration rates in SC? Or being able to get closer to planets etc before the gravity well tugged too hard on the ship? I'm fairly sure a better interdiction approach might also be possible - perhaps something more like the interdiction missiles of I-War2 rather than the (imho) kludgy tunnel following game.

 

[tawittle]

I just don't see how we could possibly get rid of supercruise. That sounds like an insanely complicated project to combine the normal space with SC space.

 

[Riedquat]

I just don't see how we could possibly get rid of supercruise. That sounds like an insanely complicated project to combine the normal space with SC space.

Well, obv it wont happen, SC is no doubt here to stay, I just hope we see some changes in the future.

Being able to enter 'dangerous' systems and zip your way to the station entrance with no danger of death whatsoever has got to be wrong?, right?

So in my opinion it definitely needs looking at.

 

[peter101cycle]

Good OP.....

Supercruise is a necessary evil I feel, but I think there is more that could be done to make it "feel" a bit more seamless that just random SS popping up and NPC's seemingly to pop into space at random.

Note - just noted that other people have also posted words around "seamless" so I think this is again the issue that needs to be improved on!

 

[Sim Maker]

Super Cruise is incredibly dull and boring.........line up on a target and sit there for however long making micro corrections to your course......utterly ridiculous....No Autopilot?
.
On the planet Earth, today....we are working on cars that will share roads with millions of other cars, that can drive themselves.....yet we are supposed to believe that 1000 years in the future, when flying through SPACE...that the driver will have to be sat at his steering wheel the whole time......LOL......