I think you are wrong. Elite is (or it was up until now - older games included) a space ship simulator with trade/mission elements (the pilot part; I didn't mean the simulation like in Sims or in FPSs). But again - it's not like I'm AGAINST combat in suits. I think the game should focus on something else tho' or at least it shouldn't be prioritised in development.
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey Q&A - Interface and NPCs
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
- Start date
Which is fine, but going back to the original plans Braben had for ED and the images and designs in the Digital Art Book (from 2016?) it was always part of their plan. It's their game, I think it's what they intended.
Of course we may never get all the things they intended.
Can we loot that gear and use it for ourselves?
Where to respawn after dying on foot ?
Can we go out of ship in space ?
I think that is very disappointing. Elite needs more customisation, not less.Lacking the ability individually tweak different elements of the hud, through at least colour and size is a glaring mistake.
I get peoples desire to change the colours, I do, but tweaking different elements, sizes etc, I don't really get. It's not really important is it?
I'm colour blind and am having a hard time imagining what could possibly be considered game-breaking about Elite Dangerous use of colour, even envisaging someone with an extreme (and exceedingly rare) case of fully monochromatic vision.
Enemy ships on the radar are readily identifiable even if you take the image and convert it to greyscale, because the red contacts are a very different luminosity. Friendly are a little trickier to differentiate from neutral, but it's a very mild disadvantage and I've honestly never felt it impacted me noticeably at all.
Don't get me wrong, a colour blindness mode would be very helpful, but "can’t play cuz thy can’t make out color differentials on important stuff" is a hard one to wrap my head around. To me it smacks of people looking for something to complain about.
When devs do a rhetorical dodge like this, I think it's generally safe to assume it would have been the "bad" answer.
I feel this sentiment. It bugs me because as far as I know, ship NPCs largely follow the same rules players do. Although, there is one important question I have regarding NPCs: will their weapons follow the same rules ours will (reloading, overheating*, running out of ammo)? I honestly think we need more in depth info on the suits themselves (we already know there are different types, but what sets them apart from one another?) and individual suit functions (like the power draining ones outside of what we already know). What ultimately I want to know more about is outfitting, upgrading, and consumables*. With all the "we are still discussing blah blah blah, we will have more details later" makes me think that either they are just being their usual sketchy selves OR we are going to be immensely disappointed with the final (most likely bug ridden, mile wide/millimeter deep) product.
*weapon overheat and consumables (for players) has not been confirmed afaik
Odyssey was announced in June 2020 and we're STILL only being shown pre-alpha footage...I know Covid is making things difficult and caused the delay but I feel like after 6 months we would have see a more recent build by now. I mean, the third Dev Diary came out IN MID DECEMBER still showing pre-alpha footage. Even though it seems like they've been working on it since at least mid-to-late 2019.
Tuning down things that aren't important for what you do (over the top in your face icons such as "drop supercruise" or hiding the text of what material you pick up behind a shader telling you picked something up...), changing the crosshair, making things smaller so they're not obscuring important parts of the screen during combat... Maybe it's not important to you, but it shouldn't be that hard to think of reason why it might be important to someone.
I knew I'd find you eventually, all that tasty comment.
Okay, so I can see all sorts of things might be important to someone, but are they worth doing? Compared to the gameplay things the dev team are presumably working on?
I suspect the best we could ever hope for with ED would be changing hud colours sometime in the future.
I was quite surprised they confirmed that the HUD in EDO is not configurable. I guess that makes it consistent with the existing HUD, but given the consistent demands for the option over the years in the base game I would have though they might want to avoid the same thing for the next 5 years. Ah well.
Well, at last we shouldn't run into the same trouble as when facing a star eye-to-eye as shown here in the Tactical Face Plant:
Source: https://youtu.be/T7snj8TRmyQ?t=95
"Nothing to see here, move along" ...
Well as long as we don't get huge volcanoes, that is.
"Nothing to see here, move along" ...
Well as long as we don't get huge volcanoes, that is.
Customizability enables a wider range of people to enjoy your game, so if you want to keep people onboard then yeah it's pretty worthwhile. Like how many people would drop this game immediately if Frontier dropped HOTAS support and disabled rebinding of controls? HUD configurations and UI/UX issues are just like this, and game devs ignore them at their peril.
I think a better question to ask is what is the benefit that Frontier gains by failing to include customization and accessibility options? That's the tradeoff to consider, not what they gain by adding it.
Companies like Nintendo will often lock all of their controls to one configuration and offer zero customization of HUDs, difficulty, keybinds, or anything of that sort. What they gain in exchange is the opportunity to hone their game mechanics and user experience to a razor's edge, ruthlessly cutting any content which might not appeal to their target market, endlessly refining and optimizing everything else to hold the player's hand and be as broadly accessible and appealing as possible.
That's not the kind of game Frontier is making; it's probably not the kind of thing they will ever be capable of making; and if they were capable of making it they still wouldn't have the market dominance to get it into the mainstream. Elite is for sure never going to be a Nintendo-style authored experience, no matter how many tutorials or mandatory popup windows Frontier adds; it will remain a large, open-ended, tangled experience of interacting systems in which the player is expected to "make their own experience." This type of entertainment hinges on the player being the author of their own journey. It hinges on it A LOT. Customizability of the HUD, being able to use VR or not, being able to play with a Joystick or a Hotas or some custom rig you've built in your garage; these are things Elite needs to support in order to facilitate this kind of self-directed play.
Question from my side, will we be able to use smoke grenades to create cover and even use colored one's to prepare a place in a settlement for an Air strike? >_> or even place a beacon on foot so a wingman can find us in the system?
also what about grenadier modules for the suit? i want my Backmounted Grenade launcher <3
also what about grenadier modules for the suit? i want my Backmounted Grenade launcher <3
Wow. I just reached the planetary exploration scene in Alien: Isolation (not even the newest of games), and if Odyssey would come even close to this both by planetary atmosphere (yes, both meanings) and hud, then I'd be totally sold. At least for really really unhealthy planet types 
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