Elite Dangerous, its biggest downfall

[Robert Maynard]

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......

.... yet the driver of the car on autopilot will still be prosecuted in the event of an accident where they are deemed to be at fault - being on autopilot does not absolve the driver from the responsibility of being in command of the vehicle - they will require to be alert to take control in the event....

 

[peter101cycle]

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......

I think Autopilot could be possibly done but there would need to be some risks to using it, otherwise it would become over-simplified and make the game worse.....

e.g. if you get interdicted when on Autopilot, you automatically get pulled out of SC, and loose any chance of playing the mini-game of fighting interdiction. And there could also be a failure in autopilot, meaning that you crash into a sun or planet, etc. Autopilot would also take a slot somewhere on the ship, like the docking computer does.

 

[lysan]

I can't find the link, however I am sure DB talked about making it easier to travel within a system. So as I understand it the SC is not set in stone.

 

[Riedquat]

I can't find the link, however I am sure DB talked about making it easier to travel within a system. So as I understand it the SC is not set in stone.

Yes, he has said a lot of things in the past.

 

[kastaldi]

I think Autopilot could be possibly done but there would need to be some risks to using it, otherwise it would become over-simplified and make the game worse.....

e.g. if you get interdicted when on Autopilot, you automatically get pulled out of SC, and loose any chance of playing the mini-game of fighting interdiction. And there could also be a failure in autopilot, meaning that you crash into a sun or planet, etc. Autopilot would also take a slot somewhere on the ship, like the docking computer does.

I agree with that, maybe DC could be expanded with a class 2 version that allows this "major" use without using another slot or FD could introduce something separated like ADS + DDS. Crashing into a sun or a planet sounds a little too punishing, I hope you mean "dropping too close".

 

[stad_]

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

Oh yes, that's where you get interdicted once, then interdicted twice, then the NPC magically vanishes BUT then shows up when you drop SC at a station.

I would use this as another example of bad SC implementation.

 

[Kowboat]

I like the scale SC adds, but interdictions and signal sources aren't much better than random encounters. Add the already overlong travel time on top of that, and you end up with a system that basically rolls some dice to see how much of your time it feels like wasting today.

 

[Ydiss]

The only thing that would definitively improve SC fundamentals is if ED wasn't instance based; being able to jump into and exit super cruise without loading an instance, being able to see all other ships (within range) whether in or out of super cruise, being able to interdict a ship from super cruise or from normal flight.

That would be awesome.

Sadly, it's not possible without redesigning the entire game from scratch and changing everything about its net code.

What we do have is a pretty damned well executed way to enable free travel around huge distances without time dilation or making distance trivial.

It can be improved. There are some kinks and issues. So my suggestion is to start talking about those, rather than suggest something that isn't ever going to happen.

Another post mentions semi persistent events and way points (no more random uss style game play). That's a step in the right direction.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Sadly, it's not possible without redesigning the entire game from scratch and changing everything about its net code.

Would it be possible even then? The game ultimately relies on consumer internet connections after all....

 

[Arindor]

Wasn't there talk of a in-system jump, so that Hutton Orbital distances (for example) can be traversed a tad quicker? I fully understand why FD has kept SC the way it is, but what I never understood is why on earth would anyone jump to a system (such as Alpha Centauri), then build a station 0.22LY away?

Oh well, keep on trucking!

 

[Roybe]

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.

I disagree with this...Supercruise makes the size of space understandable, and manageable...it IS big. To me it is the equivalent of walking around on a map in a MMO/RPG...the only difference being that in this game you actually have to work to get some of your random interactions. Or fight to not be dragged into one.

Where the complaints of superficiality come from is that nothing the game offers FEELS connected. The story line of the game has little affect on anything. Take the Emperor and succession. There could have been a lot of different local flavor missions dealing with that- 'kill x secessionists' for example....or, a little more complicated, in-system political fighting 'this faction requires y to be in position of power when Z takes over'. The lack of this type of connectivity between the top tier NPC's, and the stories they are creating is what hurts more than anything...as this scaffolding allows players to 'plug in' and become invested.

PP attempts to do this...however, there is still no localization of storyline to invest players...so it feels shallow and detached.

Think about the problem like this...in elder scrolls...you have a dragon to kill. If it was Elite...you would be able to work to upgrade your weapons, armor, skills, etc. without EVER hearing about how your training is related to the end quest...or any other story in the game...the game would just tell you that the Wizard Guild is having a party...and nothing in the game world would be used as either exposition or driving force/through rewards.

I am not asking for an on rails MMO experience by any means. However, the necessity for story/lore to infiltrate local events provides scaffolding within the game for groups to come together and have 'reason' to do so.

 

[Ydiss]

Would it be possible even then? The game ultimately relies on consumer internet connections after all....

That's what I meant by net code.

It would need to be server-client based, for a start. Each system would need its own server (much like zones in other MMO games).

I'm going out on a limb here in saying I doubt there's a lot of server clusters that could happily host all the systems that might need booting up when a player jumps in (potentially thousands). And even if it was practical, that's a cost I seriously doubt FD's initial financial/marketing model could have sustained.

P2P was the only sensible approach, given the game's heavy reliance on procedural generation. And there's the reason we have instances. And there's the reason things need to be loaded.

Given very few people wanted instant jumps through systems (might as well not be playing in a 1:1 scale galaxy if we had that, you'd have no sense of scale anyway) and given no one has the time to spend several hours travelling from the star to the station, super cruise was the result.

The mechanics of super cruise can (and in some cases should) be improved. But no number of well written posts is going to change any of the above.

 

[Baleur]

No, the biggest downfall are servers that dont work properly.

 

[Kicks]

Interesting thread.

Reading through I can definitely see why they decided to go down the SC route. It does give us a sense of scale without cheating.

I whole-heartedly agree with signal sources being unidentified at first, but then scannable. I know many don't care about immersion but they feel so random and nonchalant. Disconnected from the rest of the universe. I feel there's a lot more that could be done with SC and look forward to the future.

 

[Noctover]

I see what your saying, i do agree, i think SC is a necessary evil unfortunately, but maybe compromises could be made. I remember Freelancer (the game that got me into space games), they had like boost zone things that made space feel very social, very full of traders etc and full of life. wouldn't work in Elite though.

 

[cmdr sandman]

Interesting ideas OP. I'd like to keep SC but I agree that the experience could be enhanced. Some good ideas from others here: the signal sources being scannable while in SC (encouraging more interaction with them), NPCs being more readily visible upon arriving in a system (less delay related to spawning), and more info being displayed regarding the ships detected in the system. It does currently feel sort of lonely in SC, even with blips on the scanner.

However, if we had the mechanic of the original Elite (jump drive?), where you could be mass locked out of SC, then I don't think anyone would risk flying a T9 or similar. Not solo anyway. It worked in the original game because you were flying a fast, potentially-powerful ship. If you'd been flying a cargo ship with poor manoeuverability you'd have been dust.

It could also be a matter of increasing the difficulty of avoiding interdiction in order to make SC more dangerous (didn't this happen with 1.4 and then it was nerfed back again?). Provided the number of interdictions if you're pledged in Powerplay is reduced that could be tolerable. Based on the original, you could maybe expect to have to fight off 1-2 interdictions each trip.

 

[ShimEnki]

Agreed, supercruise is a completely unnessesary game element.

By the year 3000, nevermind; even the year 2015 it is known that "Space and Time" is merely psychological, related to habitual linear event referencing. So by the year 3000 where you want to go is most defiately not about some long dawn out supercruise...or any for that matter.

 

[insanephoton]

That just sounds like super cruise to me. The problem with the SC game is it's a bit boring and opaque. You see USS, SSS and WSS and you have no idea what they're about so odds are you ignore if you're trying to trade or deliberately dive into every one if you're doing a mission. I've long argued that the SS should resolve, they should start as unidentified but as you scan them they should resolve in things like - black box, ship distress signal (may be a trap), unattended cargo (may be a trap), firefight, system authority call for assistance, etc. You can then choose how to react. This is basically what you're describing except it's still in SC.

Most of what you suggest is coming in 1.5

 

[Cobramac]

Interesting ideas OP. I'd like to keep SC but I agree that the experience could be enhanced. Some good ideas from others here: the signal sources being scannable while in SC (encouraging more interaction with them), NPCs being more readily visible upon arriving in a system (less delay related to spawning), and more info being displayed regarding the ships detected in the system. It does currently feel sort of lonely in SC, even with blips on the scanner.

However, if we had the mechanic of the original Elite (jump drive?), where you could be mass locked out of SC, then I don't think anyone would risk flying a T9 or similar. Not solo anyway. It worked in the original game because you were flying a fast, potentially-powerful ship. If you'd been flying a cargo ship with poor manoeuverability you'd have been dust.

It could also be a matter of increasing the difficulty of avoiding interdiction in order to make SC more dangerous (didn't this happen with 1.4 and then it was nerfed back again?). Provided the number of interdictions if you're pledged in Powerplay is reduced that could be tolerable. Based on the original, you could maybe expect to have to fight off 1-2 interdictions each trip.

Most of us seem to agree that SC in it's current form is not working in terms of enhancing or complementing interaction, whatever the solution, and some posters have mentioned some excellent ideas, something needs to change in my opinion.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Most of us seem to agree that SC in it's current form is not working in terms of enhancing or complementing interaction, whatever the solution, and some posters have mentioned some excellent ideas, something needs to change in my opinion.

There are 45 unique posters in this thread - not all of them agree with you. As a proportion of over 825,000 sales of the game that's not a compelling case for change.