Elite Dangerous & South Park episodes

[CMDR L0L]

So, I like everything in this game but one thing is about to make me ragequit. I'm not the call of duty arcade type gamer by any means, pc gaming since I built myself a commodor64 in the 1980's, and the harder games are, the more I like them, usually, but hard <=> boring. I got myself this game for christmas yesterday, just did a multi part trading mission.

Get some water purifiers in a station 120.000Ls away from its star, drop them off in a station 40.000Ls from it's star => Watched one south park episode while in supercruise.

Get some marine gear in a station 70.000Ls away from its star, drop them off in a station 80.000Ls from its star => Another south park episode while in supercruise.

Get some crop things in a station 60.000Ls from its star, drop them off in a station 500Ls from its star => Checked my emails while in supercruise, I was happy to finish it off with a short supercruise. I thought i'd get payed right away, forget it, had to pick up my reward in a station 140.000Ls from its star, I literally went upstairs, took a dump and read the paper while in supercruise.

So one mission allowed me to watch two southpark episodes, read my emails, take a dump and read the newspaper. Is this normal or am I simply not finding a mechanism that lets you travel places faster? So far the game has been at least 75% staring at supercruise for me. To the point where I actually look forward to docking.

How do you avoid it? I'm assuming sane people avoid it. There is no difference between 15 mins of supercruise or watching 15mins of watching paint dry. At least let the pilot read some ingame news/lore or some kind of minigame, anything besides literally staring at space like a dog staring at a sick cow.

 

[captain slow]

For some reason they won't allow in system hyper jumps or a (much) faster supercruise for those long treks. Some people actually support the slow supercruise that we have now. Something about immersion. My preference would be for the ability to choose an exit point for hyper jumps. As that isn't going to happen then I do everything reasonable to stay away from starports that far away. 5 min supercruise is ok (ish) but any more is just too mind numbing. I accidentally take missions to far away ports sometimes, but I'm getting better at not doing that so much now.

 

[Thebadmf]

Look before you leap. There are tools like eddb.io that will tell you the distance from arrival point if you haven't got the system in your map.

 

[CMDR L0L]

Some people actually support the slow supercruise that we have now. Something about immersion.

The , what's immersive about a game that you should play while playing another game. So, game is better if avoid all stations far away from star? So far i've been getting really unlucky, almost everywhere I go is 10-20 minutes staring contest.

 

[mossfoot]

The , what's immersive about a game that you should play while playing another game. So, game is better if avoid all stations far away from star? So far i've been getting really unlucky, almost everywhere I go is 10-20 minutes staring contest.

As stated above - look before you leap. Definitely bad luck on your part, because 9 times out of 10 the station I want to go to for missions (without checking) ends up being less than 2000ls away.

 

[captain slow]

The , what's immersive about a game that you should play while playing another game. So, game is better if avoid all stations far away from star? So far i've been getting really unlucky, almost everywhere I go is 10-20 minutes staring contest.

I personally think the long supercuise thing is tosh, however, I have seen people sticking up for it in the forum. There are some odd people around .....

 

[DNA-Decay]

Join a player group.

If this game gets its hooks in you, it doesn't let go easily.

Elite doesn't require a lot of skill to fly and dock, although you do make mistakes at first.
It sort of trades your time and attention for advancing your cause and tries to keep you engaged from moment to moment while you are trading your time. But yeah - sometimes it's a chore. Fortification is another example.

It does reward you for your time. Big ships are expensive and require a lot of rank with major factions. The planets and systems are pretty and interesting. There is a big mystery around the UAs. There is a huge territorial war going on. There are personal jealousies and rivalries. Things that players do in game and say on the forums are noticed by the developers, and the game reacts. New stuff comes in, and old stuff gets changed. There is a background sim that you can mess about with governmental change. Player groups have in game factions that they are pushing.
Theres a lot of stuff going on.

But it a lot of it happens out on the intenernet. The fun of the game is not all inside the game.
But the outside game fun, isn't fun unless you are inside the game.

Join a player group.


itz other people who help you get going. Picking better mission types. Choosing good load outs.
Trade routes. They've looked so you can leap.

 

[Thebadmf]

I personally think the long supercuise thing is tosh, however, I have seen people sticking up for it in the forum. There are some odd people around .....

No one made you take the mission, so only you are to blame for taking the long trip... Or do I need to dig out the South Park human centipede/Apple contract clip?

 

[BattleMetalChris]

I personally think the long supercuise thing is tosh, however, I have seen people sticking up for it in the forum. There are some odd people around .....

These are the same people who want you to watch an hour long, unskippable animation of your cargo being loaded and unloaded...

 

[SGT TickleFight]

"Real time" travel within the rules of ED add to this game greatly. There are some activities that make Euro truck sim look like COD, but the game starts slow. You will learn what is most worth your time and things like bounty hunting, smuggling, mining keep you brain more engaged.

 

[cluelessforumuser65578]

best thing a new player can do is completely ignore missions

 

[Guard_Gnome]

No one made you take the mission, so only you are to blame for taking the long trip... Or do I need to dig out the South Park human centipede/Apple contract clip?

You need to dig something out... Pretty clear from reading the OP that he/she accepted one of these new "multi-part" missions. No checking the map is gonna save you from that letdown. New players need to simply avoid the game, until someone with an imagination gets hired by frontier.

 

[DragoonKnight]

My rule of thumb is that it takes 1-2 minutes for every 1000 ls you travel. Anything more than 1000 ls or so promptly gets ignored by me. Best thing to do before accepting a mission is to open the galaxy map, find the system it wants you to visit, and check the system map for where the station is.
And if you ever get a mission to visit Hutton Orbital in Alpha Centauri.... run away. Run very far away. Pretend that mission is the ebola virus.
Hutton orbital (in Alpha Centauri - there are other Hutton orbitals that were not placed by crazy hermits) is something like 6,000,000 LS away. That is not a typo. Some people visit it the way others climb Mt.Everest.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

Yeah probably about 80% of the time when you play Elite you'll be able to do other things, I tend to have episodes, podcasts and news articles on my 2nd monitor for those cases.
Then from a split second to the next your are sipping tea laughing at Marmaduke and suddenly the screen flashes red as another ship pulls you out of supercruise. Tea promptly flies everywhere, smile is replaced by game-face and the fight (or in many cases running for survival) is on.
What i'm trying to say here is that the encounter that left you with 3% health and 30 seconds of oxygen left wouldn't have been quite as amazingly thrilling and epic if that was the run of the mill thing that occurred every 10 minutes. In games with storylines it's called pacing, for example portal 1 had pretty amazing pacing building slowly to the big finale that left you drained yet satisfied. Other games do it less well.

In any case I'm drifting off topic, you can opt to go for combat and have a more thrilling time, especially if you try for a no-shields build or PvP combat. On the other hand you can play space-trucker or explorer and spend literally hours without anything happening that raises your heartbeat although those do have their own merits (amazing vistas and sights or roleplay).
As others have said there are also ways to trade and do missions avoiding such long distance treks but it takes a bit of getting used to, Elite does not like to hold your hand. It kicks you into the sandbox muttering something about there being a shovel somewhere and promptly goes to the adult table to get drunk (for better or worse ).

On the whole realism thing I honestly believe it would take a lot away from the game. Look at Hutton Orbital and the community goal that it spawned as well as the rather excellent player-group called the Hutton Truckers. That stuff would never have occurred if you could choose your jump-in star and be there within 30 seconds, also it'd take a bit away from exploration and the challenge of mapping that sprawling system completely. I want to feel like a tiny spec in space and currently the travel time adds to the feeling significantly.

 

[Kandarus]

I had this exact conversation tonight. Why can't we have inter system jumps between stars?

A clan-mate I was talking to said why not be able to select what planet you want to go to? I said I'm fine with interplanetary travel but between two systems stars that are 100k+ light secs apart is just travel time for the sake of traveling.

You can lock onto nav becons, why can't you lock onto high gravitational objects, i.e. stars or black holes, when in the same system? Hey you grind everything else why not have a time sink for good measure?

Ugh.

Hey David, watching a count down to arrival does not equal depth, content or gameplay. It's just a time waster. But hell, maybe I'm wasting my time even telling you this.

 

[JoeShmo]

The supercruise system is in and of itself flawed..which means players waste time inside it all the time.

Traveling in a barren system to reach a station 40,000ls away, you should always be accelerating. Instead...once you reach a point near 100c the game just decides to throttle you down for no reason...and then when you get close to your destination...you speed back up.


/Sigh.


I always call it the "6 seconds out" system.

Because FD figured out how to make supercruise always calculate you to be 6 seconds away from your destination. Regardless of whether you have it locked on or not.

 

[Khazid]

Freelancer had a really good implementation of system transport, basically every known planet was connected by a series of gates that sped your ship up.

 

[babelfisch]

1. I am not against mini jumps.
2. Payouts should take system distance AND station distance into account if we don't get mini jumps.
3. Always check your target location before taking a missions via system map.

 

[Kezha]

Taking a dump, reading a newspaper AND checking mails all within 5 mins, now that is efficient, quite possibly faster than your average quest in a random game like gw2, wow, gw, swtor, Wildstar, ao, calypso, lotro snd many many more

5 minutes from a to b in a quest isnt all that bad, and it sure doesnt take much longer, at least not that i recall, and i dont mind it, wanting shorter would be to give in for the uktra convenience gamers seem to want these days, many people even support botting, wanting to play the game, yet not play themselves.

soon we will be buying a game and watch it play like a movie where all we do is have a char instantly log on and teleport around with godmode xP

just be glad it seems fd is not your average dev and dies not seem to give in to these things, because if you want a boring game, look at other mmos, just look at the cesspool forums they have, it sadly is not pretty anymore where hatred leads and you will get shunned upon for any opinion and idea you might have.


or you coukd think of a compromise, jumping would be a too big of a compromise, what about planetary slingshotting to go faster, a risky thing requiring skill and is used today to efficiently reach deep space.

or perhaps be able to streamline a ship to go faster (i know theres no resistace out there BUT) shutting off systems allowing more power to the engines and faster, ie shields guns, scanners, life support and so on. Allowing you to go twice as fast in SC for a short period of time, but would poses a danger becAuse you have shut down everytging, if someone manages to intersict you, you better be prepared as your a sitting duck till its up again.

just two ideas that keep the immersion up without making it uktra convenient and inevitably making it a tenfold times more dull

 

[Jay_ombie]

I have to come in and agree, the long travels within systems can be mundane. Its not as if there is much scenery in space to gorp at.

As said above me, a fast travel gate system or jump points from nav beacons would be handy. I can not believe with technology at this stage in the game there is not any other option but sloth travel.

I can understand in a way why you can not jump everywhere, I mean there has to be times for conflict and other events to materialize, so I guess for now we will need other in game distractions or ship activities to wind away the time.