FDs other projects - Atmospheric Landings/Space Legs?

[Memnoch]

I can't believe no one has yet mentioned X: Rebirth yet as an example of how not to do space legs. It was abysmal. Now imagine what they could have done to make it more fun and you have to actually stop and think. What exactly was wrong with it? Well. let's see.

Copy/pasted interiors that all look the same. This could certainly be made to look better with more varation in the environments.
Horrible looking NPCs to interact with. Same as above, get better artists! ;-)
Why do I have to board these damn stations in the first place just to trade. This was the killer for a lot of people. You had to hunt down a POI on the station and then find that person inside. So painful to do that IIRC there were mods so that you could interact and trade directly without getting out of your ship.

This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done but it has to be done right or people will just hate it, just as people did with the the Engineers and its RNG silliness. FDEV have already shown that they can., on occasion, get things spectacularly wrong and without involvement from the community and asking us what we want, they may once again forge their own path and have history repeat itself.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I can't believe no one has yet mentioned X: Rebirth yet as an example of how not to do space legs. It was abysmal. Now imagine what they could have done to make it more fun and you have to actually stop and think. What exactly was wrong with it? Well. let's see.

Copy/pasted interiors that all look the same. This could certainly be made to look better with more varation in the environments.
Horrible looking NPCs to interact with. Same as above, get better artists! ;-)
Why do I have to board these damn stations in the first place just to trade. This was the killer for a lot of people. You had to hunt down a POI on the station and then find that person inside. So painful to do that IIRC there were mods so that you could interact and trade directly without getting out of your ship.

This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done but it has to be done right or people will just hate it, just as people did with the the Engineers and its RNG silliness. FDEV have already shown that they can., on occasion, get things spectacularly wrong and without involvement from the community and asking us what we want, they may once again forge their own path and have history repeat itself.

Hopefully they will look at these woefull examples and know not to go down that route.

 

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

Somewhere in the world there is a game being pitched that will have the features of ED, SC, GTA and Arma all rolled into one. Plus the potential player count of Planetside.

It's frustrating because all I wanted was a modern version of Wing Commander. That's it.

You have ships and few systems and a bunch of campaigns. Maybe you can play the campaigns coop. And you can play multiplayer maps against other players just as you can with modern combat flight sims. That's all I wanted.

Instead, we got a bunch of companies creating an entire galaxy of boredom.

 

[krylite]

I'm pretty much in agreement with the main points of the OP too. Frontier has also been growing and expanding during this time period and they managed to make two more games , build and move into a new office building to their specifications, and also are reaching the billion dollar capitalization mark as an up and coming contender of a game dev company. It's quite a good first time record Braben has done having never managed this level of all but excellent growth, as a ceo and in his 50's. I think JWE and PC are great examples of future atmospheric and crowd npc work that will someday segue into ED's fpp aspect. I've mentioned it before, but for those who haven't seen it, the job listings of a month ago showed a lot of reference in their position descriptions for candidates to work in "cross development" among their titles. So eventually someone who works on the design and the movement of the foliage and run in JWE could help with ED's future atmospherics of alien trees ,grass and such.

And I feel Frontier has already made a decision to continue to work on ED for years to come. There was a very short segment in the June 28th 3.1 release livestream a few days soon after the spacelegs-teasing Krait trailer, where Braben talked about making the game better and new things for the game they were enthusiastically working on and couldn't wait to tell but only at the assigned announcements probably later this year. In the following below, as Braben was making those statements which lasted in all a quick few minutes, Ed made humorous but meaningful glances at the audience conveying expressions of "see , told you guys so", "have hope, ED is here to stay and getting better!". For Frontier it was about getting into a good financial and resourceful position before they could afford to and be ready for new grand improvements to ED which is all good and hopeful, imo.

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f7Zx7WUwF0&feature=youtu.be&t=18m42s

(3.1 launch livestream, 6-28-18 , 18m42s)

"
BRABEN: What's really good now in those four years in, is actually all those agonizing thoughts and decisions we had in the earlier days, if you know , how big space is. And, you know that we've actually gone full size on space and players still can find each other. You know, it's not..I think things have worked very well, but that's not to say we cant make them a lot better. I think what we'll see, over the next months, over the next years, the game continuing to get better as we put things and to make those things more enjoyable and more fun. I don't want to spoil it. I mean, many people can guess some of the things that are coming. But, it's great, it's good fun to keep that guessing game going.. I don't mean that in a bad way.

Ed: Yeah, and also before we explain and tell people about those things we're going to make sure that's it's all kind of ready and in a good position to be actually like hey! There you go..

BRABEN: Absolutely.

Ed: And we can't wait to touch about this sort of thing, and any plans for the future.
"

 

[krylite]

It's frustrating because all I wanted was a modern version of Wing Commander. That's it.

You have ships and few systems and a bunch of campaigns. Maybe you can play the campaigns coop. And you can play multiplayer maps against other players just as you can with modern combat flight sims. That's all I wanted.

Instead, we got a bunch of companies creating an entire galaxy of boredom.

Interestingly without going into the evovled out of control shenanigans since their kickstarter exploded, StarCitizen's original plans for Squadron 42, was supposed to be just that, a single player updated Wing Commander like campaign game which would you could take your character and assets into the supposedly finished developed MMO SC universe later. (and SQ42 originally was announced to be released 2015, then delayed to 2016, then now vague comments or silence as 2018 rolls on) In contrast ED was intentionally going to be traditional to it's franchise following up with a modern updated take on FE2 & FFE which had their smaller but then unprecedented thousands of galaxy travelable stars, where for ED then, the sim astronomy aspects and gigantic scope was the first priority as the continuing traditional franchise's unique primary features. Though of course FD have also done a fantastic job on the ships in their characteristics and overall space combat.