Frontier have run out of imagination

Yes the title is a bit ridiculous but I personally believe they have genuinely run out of imagination. I already detailed my thoughts on the direction/game design of Odyssey here in great detail and many people agreed that it is pretty much a separate game from Horizons: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...orry-for-me-is-the-game-design-itself.580877/

But aside from that, where has the fun gone? The crazy stuff? We waited around 3 years with almost 0 content for Odyssey, and in Odyssey we have 3 main features. Surface conflict zones, plants (atmospheric planets themselves are just the same planets but with a tint in the sky) and station interiors. The surface conflict zones are PATHETIC compared to Horizons conflict zones, in Horizons the conflict zones have multiple random objectives such as squad leaders, reporters - and this stuff makes sense as well as to why it's relevant to the battle. We even have CAPITAL SHIP BATTLES IN IT! It's fun stuff that makes sense. The Odyssey surface conflict zones is a game of ing laser tag taking random zones over and over again with no reason as to why we are even doing that, what do those zones do!?

The station interiors are passable, the bare minimum, we can't even view the ships we are interested in buying like we are a sales show.

The plants... almost exploration has had almost nothing added to it since release we get 30 different types of PLANTS that we point some random doodad at for a few seconds? We can't interact with them in any other way? They could have done so much with the plants! Maybe some of them carnivorous and snap at you, or release spores, we have so many plants on EARTH THAT ARE MORE INTERESTING THAN THESE ALIEN PLANTS. Who on Earth was in charge of game design with this, where are the fun mechanics and interactions? I might as well be playing pokemon snap without the fun or the pokemon. Every assassin's creed game has these random collectible time fillers and 99% of the whole fanbase says that it's the worst part of the game!

The points of interest are good, I'll give them that, I find them interesting to interact with.

The last nail in the coffin is that clip of the community manager apparently having no clue that ship interiors were even wanted, that they have never been looked at (despite Braben saying that these have all been planned for :D) and he doesn't even know what gameplay can be associated with interiors. WHAT?! You have a whole company of people working on space games for years and not a single designer can think of any interesting game mechanics with ship interiors? Have you never heard of Pulsar? Galaxies? Personally my friends have said to me they just want to be my crew in elite dangerous, not have their own ship, they could do so much! Maintain the modules, repair the ship, maybe do minigames to increase performance of the power plant, man the turrets/fighters, launch as boarding crew members to take over ships, DEFEND AGAINST OTHER BOARDING CREW MEMBERS. There is so much that can be done but FDEV can't think of anything? Whenever Elite and SC are brought in the same conversation, almost always the first thing said is "But SC has ship interiors" so get out of here with the whole "Not many people actually want ship interiors", it's pretty much the main thing that is driving Elite's main competition!

Honestly the best example I have of FDEV's sheer fright of anything fun or weird is the arc cutter tool. They could have had it as an actual tool that you can be flexible with, maybe carve pictures into the ground or miss when cutting panels so you have to actually aim it, or randomly burn your mates with them when messing around. But no, it literally can only be switched on when pointing at the edge of arbitrary panels cause ANYTHING FUN APPARENTLY.

This has been very much a rant but I don't care, I just can't believe that I have slowly been watching FDEV just seem to not even care about making a fun space game anymore. Years of almost no meaningful content for this...
 
Can we come up with another way to say "Odyssey launch wasn't great?" We've not got enough threads saying the same thing but with a different title or theory. Lack of imagination is good, we can work with that. Lots to discuss here. But we need more. I'll start.

How about "Odyssey is so bad because Fdev don't like fun"

Go.

Oh wait, you actually said that too. Sorry! I'm so unoriginal.

PS sorry to derail your discussion. I'm sure lots of useful things will be said about the solution to Fdev having no imagination. Perhaps we can help them by offering to give them imagination lessons from the experts.
 
Can we come up with another way to say "Odyssey launch wasn't great?" We've not got enough threads saying the same thing but with a different title or theory. Lack of imagination is good, we can work with that. Lots to discuss here. But we need more. I'll start.

How about "Odyssey is so bad because Fdev don't like fun"

Go.

Oh wait, you actually said that too. Sorry! I'm so unoriginal.

PS sorry to derail your discussion. I'm sure lots of useful things will be said about the solution to Fdev having no imagination. Perhaps we can help them by offering to give them imagination lessons from the experts.
Did you read anything that I put? You'll see that I gave hard examples of every point I made. Or is making completely pointless comments that add no value to a discussion your only thing? It's not about the state of the launch.
 
Yes the title is a bit ridiculous but I personally believe they have genuinely run out of imagination. I already detailed my thoughts on the direction/game design of Odyssey here in great detail and many people agreed that it is pretty much a separate game from Horizons: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...orry-for-me-is-the-game-design-itself.580877/

But aside from that, where has the fun gone? The crazy stuff? We waited around 3 years with almost 0 content for Odyssey, and in Odyssey we have 3 main features. Surface conflict zones, plants (atmospheric planets themselves are just the same planets but with a tint in the sky) and station interiors. The surface conflict zones are PATHETIC compared to Horizons conflict zones, in Horizons the conflict zones have multiple random objectives such as squad leaders, reporters - and this stuff makes sense as well as to why it's relevant to the battle. We even have CAPITAL SHIP BATTLES IN IT! It's fun stuff that makes sense. The Odyssey surface conflict zones is a game of ing laser tag taking random zones over and over again with no reason as to why we are even doing that, what do those zones do!?

The station interiors are passable, the bare minimum, we can't even view the ships we are interested in buying like we are a sales show.

The plants... almost exploration has had almost nothing added to it since release we get 30 different types of PLANTS that we point some random doodad at for a few seconds? We can't interact with them in any other way? They could have done so much with the plants! Maybe some of them carnivorous and snap at you, or release spores, we have so many plants on EARTH THAT ARE MORE INTERESTING THAN THESE ALIEN PLANTS. Who on Earth was in charge of game design with this, where are the fun mechanics and interactions? I might as well be playing pokemon snap without the fun or the pokemon. Every assassin's creed game has these random collectible time fillers and 99% of the whole fanbase says that it's the worst part of the game!

The points of interest are good, I'll give them that, I find them interesting to interact with.

The last nail in the coffin is that clip of the community manager apparently having no clue that ship interiors were even wanted, that they have never been looked at (despite Braben saying that these have all been planned for :D) and he doesn't even know what gameplay can be associated with interiors. WHAT?! You have a whole company of people working on space games for years and not a single designer can think of any interesting game mechanics with ship interiors? Have you never heard of Pulsar? Galaxies? Personally my friends have said to me they just want to be my crew in elite dangerous, not have their own ship, they could do so much! Maintain the modules, repair the ship, maybe do minigames to increase performance of the power plant, man the turrets/fighters, launch as boarding crew members to take over ships, DEFEND AGAINST OTHER BOARDING CREW MEMBERS. There is so much that can be done but FDEV can't think of anything? Whenever Elite and SC are brought in the same conversation, almost always the first thing said is "But SC has ship interiors" so get out of here with the whole "Not many people actually want ship interiors", it's pretty much the main thing that is driving Elite's main competition!

Honestly the best example I have of FDEV's sheer fright of anything fun or weird is the arc cutter tool. They could have had it as an actual tool that you can be flexible with, maybe carve pictures into the ground or miss when cutting panels so you have to actually aim it, or randomly burn your mates with them when messing around. But no, it literally can only be switched on when pointing at the edge of arbitrary panels cause ANYTHING FUN APPARENTLY.

This has been very much a rant but I don't care, I just can't believe that I have slowly been watching FDEV just seem to not even care about making a fun space game anymore. Years of almost no meaningful content for this...
The primary focus of Frontier Developments is now publishing and new IP.
Meaningful content requires meaningful resources.

If those in charge of money were truly interested in what most of the Elite Dangerous player base would like and it was technically feasible, it would probably already be in game.

And years old bugs would have been fixed.

:(
 
Sorry for not being mature. Sarcasm isn't always clever. But you take the point being made? Nothing personal.

His point wasn't about "Odyssey launch wasn't great?", it was about the design behind Odyssey. They are related, but quite different elements of the Odyssey product as a whole.

It's nice you're trying to build a YouTube brand as StealthBoy(tm) by finding the one thin slice of semi-decent settlement gameplay in Odyssey.
Good for you!

A lot of us, however, are questioning the whole point of Odyssey. A lot of this questioning is coming from very experienced ED players, they're not noobs. They understand the ED design ethos, and the tedious grind that flows through a lot of it, where you have to deep core mine the game itself to expose the Void Opals of gameplay fun in order to make it worthwhile to continue to invest precious time into it. But even in their wildest dreams I don't think anyone expected FDev to double down (triple down?) on such a terrible grind design ethos, yet they did.

Even the outcome of stealth gameplay still leads to very little in the end, but hey, if you can play stealth for another 6 months without getting bored to death double good for you.

In Its current form, Odyssey is just multiple loosely linked disparate systems grind designed to waste player time in lieu of fun and engaging content.
That's a design flaw, not a launch flaw - bad as the launch was.

I get what the OP is saying (and it has been made by others, as have the launch issues) and agree with it.

Unfortunately, I highly doubt it's going to change at this point. EDO is a series of OCD loops dressed up as a space game, and FDev appear to know exactly how big a target market that is they can mine. They've made a business decision to deploy that solution, instead of a more expensive option to develop a more open and expansive vision that would satisfy the larger group of potential players who crave more than those shallow repetitive Pavlovian OCD grind loops.

I can understand that decision on one level (business/financial) but on a creative level it's not going to advance the game or genre, no matter how much Mr B waffles on about it, without some serious design changes. I don't think that's going to happen. The core engine probably needs a rewrite to enable that for the medium/long term, and that in itself is a big expensive undertaking. They've likely decided just to keep this alive as long as they can with the systems they already have bolted on, so it's suck it up or move on.

But who knows? Maybe they'll surprise us with a new roadmap. Not holding my breath on that though.
 
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His point wasn't about "Odyssey launch wasn't great?", it was about the design behind Odyssey. They are related, but quite different elements of the Odyssey product as a whole.

It's nice you're trying to build a YouTube brand as StealthBoy(tm) by finding the one thin slice of semi-decent settlement gameplay in Odyssey.
Good for you!

A lot of us, however, are questioning the whole point of Odyssey. A lot of this questioning is coming from very experienced ED players, they're not noobs. They understand the ED design ethos, and the tedious grind that flows through a lot of it, where you have to deep core mine the game itself to expose the Void Opals of gameplay fun in order to make it worthwhile to continue to invest precious time into it. But even in their wildest dreams I don't think anyone expected FDev to double down (triple down?) on such a terrible grind design ethos, yet they did.

Even the outcome of stealth gameplay still leads to very little in the end, but hey, if you can play stealth for another 6 months without getting bored to death double good for you.

In Its current form, Odyssey is just multiple loosely linked disparate systems grind designed to waste player time in lieu of fun and engaging content.
That's a design flaw, not a launch flaw - bad as the launch was.

I get what the OP is saying (and it has been made by others, as have the launch issues) and agree with it.
Sorry, I don't agree that they ran out of imagination nor that Odyssey lacks it.
 
Sorry, I don't agree that they ran out of imagination nor that Odyssey lacks it.

You're the target market, of course you wouldn't. Good for you.

I can see some potential in certain elements of it, but it's nowhere near the vision that was painted, and is unlikely to get there in its current form due to certain constraints placed on it from above. Without some core design ethos changes, it will remain a tedious grind fest with little gems of gameplay scattered throughout. It should be the inverse of that, in order to achieve the vision that was painted.

It always comes down to implementation, not ideas.
 
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Do you think the game should have been targetted at someone else? Why?

And if so, what has that got to do with someone's imagination?

The game was sold as a vision to many. Going by steam reviews (as one proxy) it delivered to only ~30%. You appear to be in that 30%. Good for you.

As for the other 70%, they're SOOL. I've said my take on it above. That's all.

We'll see how it pans out.
 
The game was sold as a vision to many. Going by steam reviews (as one proxy) it delivered to only ~30%. You appear to be in that 30%. Good for you.

As for the other 70%, they're SOOL.
I don't doubt that there was a large negative reaction to the game. I'm unconvinced that the proportion of people who enjoy it is 30% though. That's not how it works. I know that (and I know I'm not part of this fictional 30% who "like the game" because I didn't review it)

And I'm not actually denying that it has flaws (just because I choose not to discuss those on my Youtube videos, which have nothing to do with what I think about the game, doesn't mean I'm not critical of the game; the niche of Youtubers giving their opinions is pretty much saturated and doesn't need me to fill it further). I've spent a ton of time trying to get feedback across. Actually, I've probably spent more time doing that since Alpha than anyone in this thread combined, so I don't think my "thin slice" has anything to do with my comments in this thread.

What I haven't done is do stuff like "they have no imagination" as if it helps anything or anyone. So, as I said.... sorry for the sarcasm but I fail to see how my comments here are any more or less valuable than a rant about Fdev and the fact that the game isn't the game someone wanted. By all means, if it's your perogative to support that, don't mind me.
 
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I would say it's more "they have no imagination because the financial constraints imposed on the development severely limited what could be implemented".
Which is why all you have is a bunch of repetitious tedious grind loops dressed up as gameplay, which you can burn through quite quickly before you have to ask "ok, the entree was nice, now where's the main meal?"

EDO/ED is now a money printing machine and is maintained on that basis, not a creative vision first approach (that's expensive). If it only needs to implement x to keep y players happy to generate z dollars/yr with w churn rate then it will only get x level of development allocated to it. To go beyond that is a creative business decision, and it looks like FDev has decided to shelve that at the moment.
 
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I would say it's more "they have no imagination because the financial constraints imposed on the development severely limited what could be implemented".
Which is why all you have is a bunch of repetitious tedious grind loops dressed up as gameplay, which you can burn through quite quickly before you have to ask "ok, the entree was nice, now where's the main meal?"
Have you not been around here for the last 6 years? :D You must be new ;)
 
For real...if you don't like grind and/or don't like making your own narrative, this game is not for you.

The scientific creativity that went into Stellar Forge has and will always impress me...However, I think there have been a lot of missed opportunities in using the Forge in better or different ways
I've raged against the grind for years. Still don't think there's some cunningly disguised lack of imagination that Fdev have somehow been holding back from us that only the insightful can discover and reveal for us all. Anyone who thinks Elite as a whole is a shining example of lacking imagination is just stretching for something new to say about the fact they don't like the game.
 
This is the point where the standard WK arguments get tossed out in an effort to invalidate anything I just said.

slow hand clap No cigar kids.

I've invested enough time into ED/EDO to see it for what is it. A very flawed gem. Some parts are great, others - quite a bit - leave more than a lot to be desired.

Odyssey is like they decided to play Russian Roulette, but they loaded all 6 chambers.
 
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This is the point where the standard WK arguments get tossed out in an effort to invalidate anything I just said.

slow hand clap No cigar kids.

I've invested enough time into ED/EDO to see it for what is it. A very flawed gem. Some parts are great, others - quite a bit - leave more than a lot to be desired.
Kids shouldn't smoke.
 
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