Games dead! Kornelius sounds exasperated

[CMDR-AD]

I think FD are very aware that we don't have the persistent NPCs that were put forward in the DDF, considering that for their events they've had to use "live-action" NPCs to simulate the role of persistent NPCs (such as Granger and his gang from when the first Thargoid Interceptor crash site was found).

Going on the DDF layouts, IIRC the tier 2 NPCs, which could interact with the CMDRs, were always going to be a weak link simply because CMDRs could kill them. This might work OK out in some corner of the bubble where a lone CMDR or a small group interacts with these Tier 2 NPCs as more than laughs (gaining valuable missions, etc. from them). But in areas with high CMDR traffic, where the odds are higher of finding CMDRs who simply kill every killable thing... I have serious doubt a Tier 2 persistent NPC would last more than a week.

This alone probably breaks the idea of persistent NPCs, who are widely known among CMDRs, and who may be eventually elevated to Tier 1 status.

The same idea when it comes to system population. Some small system has 1,300 population. If CMDRs could influence the system population, then many such smaller systems would have been mass-murdered to being zero-population, uninhabited wastelands within days or even hours of game launch.

 

[Stigbob]

I think FD are very aware that we don't have the persistent NPCs that were put forward in the DDF, considering that for their events they've had to use "live-action" NPCs to simulate the role of persistent NPCs (such as Granger and his gang from when the first Thargoid Interceptor crash site was found).

This also makes me wonder if these persistent NPCs or even some solo story stuff could possibly be something this year's as yet unknown "premium content" could involve. Especially if it comes hand in hand with the Q4 update and the codex etc...

The problem with a solo story is we can't all save the same princess, and it'll either be too easy for late game players or give early players a possibly game breaking leg up. Unless you remove story rewards at the end of the story, which would cause it's own problems.

You'd also set the noobs up to get ganked in open if it used the same locations for everyone.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Or
C) Work in Progress!

A placeholder many never be worked on, but I always like ro be positive!, binary choices are so lame -need the one in the middle.

They are working on multile light sources, so hopefully smuggling will improve the way you want after that!

Simon

Simon

One time, at ED's forum, I was positive too - then SOON(tm) happened and now most days I can barely summon the will to reply at all.

(No flutes were harmed in the making of this comment)

 

[Rafe Zetter]

The problem with a solo story is we can't all save the same princess, and it'll either be too easy for late game players or give early players a possibly game breaking leg up. Unless you remove story rewards at the end of the story, which would cause it's own problems.

You'd also set the noobs up to get ganked in open if it used the same locations for everyone.

This is what happends when you don't give longterm players anything meaningful to do with their big ships and billions of credits, and falls back to "200 billion stars, pretty to look at, nothing to do."

If FDev added unknown content, "stuff", and seeded it throughout the galaxy and said - "hey veteran players, we put stuff around the galaxy - go fetch" I think quite a few would be tempted to go into the black searching for "stuff", with no clues other than "it's out there".

To make it worthwhile maybe even give out some sort of persistant non monetary reward, some sort of specific recognition that they found "stuff".

examples:

find either voyager or find any other deep space satellites - maybe in space still or maybe crashed.
Get a picture of "Halleys Comet" or Hale Bopp

Rather than keep throwing out constant skins - let the devs add a whole bunch of stuff and place it "somewhere" and just keep adding to it.

Basically the biggest easter egg hunt ever.

 

[Enderby]

Yeah it's all a bit empty and pointless really.

 

[Stigbob]

This is what happends when you don't give longterm players anything meaningful to do with their big ships and billions of credits, and falls back to "200 billion stars, pretty to look at, nothing to do."

If FDev added unknown content, "stuff", and seeded it throughout the galaxy and said - "hey veteran players, we put stuff around the galaxy - go fetch" I think quite a few would be tempted to go into the black searching for "stuff", with no clues other than "it's out there".

To make it worthwhile maybe even give out some sort of persistant non monetary reward, some sort of specific recognition that they found "stuff".

examples:

find either voyager or find any other deep space satellites - maybe in space still or maybe crashed.
Get a picture of "Halleys Comet" or Hale Bopp

Rather than keep throwing out constant skins - let the devs add a whole bunch of stuff and place it "somewhere" and just keep adding to it.

Basically the biggest easter egg hunt ever.

Voyagers in the game and can be found already, I also heard something mentioned about comets recently (could have been theorycrafting didn't pay attention) and the easter egg hunt would need to be narrowed down with clues due to the galactic scale of the galaxy. You've also got the issue of a lot of players not being into long distance travel at all, to the point where they moan about about a fifteen/twenty minute run out to the thruster engineer.

I'm not saying they are bad idea's just need tweaking a bit, things like scan voyager probes for museums and antique data collectors with basic information as to about where it would be so there would some effort involved.

 

[ilo]

This is what happends when you don't give longterm players anything meaningful to do with their big ships and billions of credits, and falls back to "200 billion stars, pretty to look at, nothing to do."

If FDev added unknown content, "stuff", and seeded it throughout the galaxy and said - "hey veteran players, we put stuff around the galaxy - go fetch" I think quite a few would be tempted to go into the black searching for "stuff", with no clues other than "it's out there".

To make it worthwhile maybe even give out some sort of persistant non monetary reward, some sort of specific recognition that they found "stuff".

examples:

find either voyager or find any other deep space satellites - maybe in space still or maybe crashed.
Get a picture of "Halleys Comet" or Hale Bopp

Rather than keep throwing out constant skins - let the devs add a whole bunch of stuff and place it "somewhere" and just keep adding to it.

Basically the biggest easter egg hunt ever.

there are a bunch of guardian places not found yet that sure they are in the game, go fetch!!

 

[Ignition]

Way people max their ships is a bit to blame too though. Engineers were never meant to go after fully Engineered ship. It was something many players decided to go after.

It doesn't matter how much time it takes to do something IF the mechanics are interesting, entertaining and interactive.
With more complex and involved mechanics it wouldn't be boring to fully engineer a ship OR do anything else in the game.

Problem is..., the game was built around placeholders.

 

[NeilF]

I can see how it could be more immersive in terms of detail, if for example an NPC trader followed a trade route with cargo good for that route and you could pinch the route after following them or come back and pirate them. But then I remember 66,000 stations starports and outposts and who knows how many NPC's. It sounds unrealistic to me to expect it all to function together as a cohesive whole. The game because of it's sheer size isn't going to include that sort of fine detail it's going to be largely RNG based with the limits that brings. Just too much area and too many NPC's, take Skyrims NPC's as an example a few lines of dialog a few simple walk between house and forge and biff things for set times lie on bed for set times and that's it so simple it doesn't stand up to the scrutiny Cornelius is applying. And there are only a few hundred of them not hundreds of thousands.

Missions are the same.



I bounty hunt by doing wing assassinations solo and thargoid hunting, I do res sites and CZ's but only when I feel like it. I've had the game four years so I try to vary what I do as there's not much at all that's going to be new to me and there are too many burnt out thousand hour grinders around for me to make the same mistake.



I doubt it ever will for this kind of thing, but that doesn't bother me as I bought ED as was not for something I thought would happen later. It's a huge galaxy sized game that relies on RNG not well fleshed out individual characters.



They turn up in res sites mine then leave, their escorts protect them. That's fine for me, during the video when Cornelius mentioned he wouldn't find a good mining spot by following the NPC he mentioned there were res sites in the system. So for me he's asking for an overcomplicated solution to a problem that only exists if he deliberately ignores his nav panel and the gal map.

In short he's asking for NPCs that make up part of a more realistic, interesting, dynamic and deep BGS. Of course the pinnacle of which would be heading towards stateful NPCs as part of your "personal narrative"...

eg: You save an NPC in a random encounter and over the coming months they periodically offer you more and more involved missions as they come to trust you more and more. At one stage they contact you telling you they need to move all their family to say an asteroid belt and they're being threatened and they're likely to be attacked en-route. Not wishing to risk this one, you Wing up, and escort the convoy to the system in question, and then in normal flight on a 10-15 journey from a nav beacon to the Asteroid Station, during which there will be a number of attacks. etc etc...

So the NPCs, rather than be mindless dots on a scanner, provide and offer some depth.

Add in ship-to-ship docking and add in stealth gameplay - akin to what was implied in alpha - and now you can pick up and deliver NPCs to destinations without being detected (ideally)... If you get destroyed the NPC is gone forever.

etc...

 

[UmbraRex]

8<snip>8
Unidentified signal source anyone?

WARNING: Incoming headcannon!

So, I'm flying along in a bubble of distorted spacetime and my ship's sensors pick up an anomalous signal.

I can a) ignore it or b) assign my ships computer (that is busy identifying more recognizable signals, you know, like powered ships, planets, stars) to analyze the Unknown Signal and give me an evaluation of the most likely source for that anomalous signal.

/headcannon

Sorry, but the USS system makes sense to me. *shrug

What would you suggest as an improvement?

I will say the various types of scanners (kill warrant, cargo, wake) should all be upgrades that can be bought for the basic ships' sensors, higher models able to fit better/more upgrades)

 

[Stigbob]

In short he's asking for NPCs that make up part of a more realistic, interesting, dynamic and deep BGS. Of course the pinnacle of which would be heading towards stateful NPCs as part of your "personal narrative"...

eg: You save an NPC in a random encounter and over the coming months they periodically offer you more and more involved missions as they come to trust you more and more. At one stage they contact you telling you they need to move all their family to say an asteroid belt and they're being threatened and they're likely to be attacked en-route. Not wishing to risk this one, you Wing up, and escort the convoy to the system in question, and then in normal flight on a 10-15 journey from a nav beacon to the Asteroid Station, during which there will be a number of attacks. etc etc...

So the NPCs, rather than be mindless dots on a scanner, provide and offer some depth.

Add in ship-to-ship docking and add in stealth gameplay - akin to what was implied in alpha - and now you can pick up and deliver NPCs to destinations without being detected (ideally)... If you get destroyed the NPC is gone forever.

etc...

Yes, I get all that. I just don't think it's possible the bigger the game the less fine detail you get. In Mount and blade warband NPC's don't even have facial expressions, but that's the sort of shortcut they took so you can have massive battles which is what that games all about.

ED's huge the numbers just don't support semi handcrafted NPC's, and if handcrafted permadeath NPC's were a thing you'd just have salt farmers competing to kill them as quickly as possible and tell everyone what they'd done.

It's a nice idea, but it's probably not practical or realistic a relatively simple RNG based version that recycles them may be possible I suppose. Getting miffed because it hasn't happened isn't something I can see the point of though.

It doesn't matter how much time it takes to do something IF the mechanics are interesting, entertaining and interactive.
With more complex and involved mechanics it wouldn't be boring to fully engineer a ship OR do anything else in the game.

Problem is..., the game was built around placeholders.

We are four years in they are not placeholders, that's just how the game is.

 

[Enderby]

Yes, I get all that. I just don't think it's possible the bigger the game the less fine detail you get. In Mount and blade warband NPC's don't even have facial expressions, but that's the sort of shortcut they took so you can have massive battles which is what that games all about.

ED's huge the numbers just don't support semi handcrafted NPC's, and if handcrafted permadeath NPC's were a thing you'd just have salt farmers competing to kill them as quickly as possible and tell everyone what they'd done.

It's a nice idea, but it's probably not practical or realistic a relatively simple RNG based version that recycles them may be possible I suppose. Getting miffed because it hasn't happened isn't something I can see the point of though.



We are four years in they are not placeholders, that's just how the game is.

That’s a shame.

 

[Garris]

Like Others have said and I have said before. I wanted an up to date Elite. I got that. Everything else is just gravy. Of course I'd like it just a smidge harder, like the old days in Elite flying to anarchy systems you were met with groups of 3 pirates on the way to a station, But hey ho, it is what it is. Hard was tried, tears flowed.
I don't play every day I'm not that kind of person but when I do get stuck in for a 6 hour or so session. I enjoy every moment. If I didn't I wouldn't load the thing.

 

[Genus]

That’s a shame.

For all those that met a girl and "settled".

 

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

I think they should just start working on ED:2. I think the current engine limits what they can do.

I also wouldn't mind an ED single player or coop spinoff campaign.

ED, Sea of Thieves, NMS all suffer from the same problem. If you create a big map, it's difficult to fill that map with interesting stuff. It's hard to make procedurally generated stuff compelling.

ED is like big open world map where you have to fast travel but you can only fast travel from one node to the next. No spontaneous encounters or dynamic gameplay.

Also, it's a space game without any interesting alien races. Just some faceless menace.

I think it's a victim of it's strict adherence to its sandbox philosophy and boring lore.

 

[Genus]

I think they should just start working on ED:2.

If FD did that now, Braben would go from "luminary" to "simply wealthy" overnight.

And not much more wealthy after that, if not a little less well off.

 

[Stigbob]

The game isn't dead, it's just s-h-i-t-t-y .

No amount of word spinning and arguing can change the simple fact that the design promises were never fulfilled.

What they described in those early promises had depth of design and sounded correct, what's in the game is not even a shadow of it.

Even without full persistency which would require a server etc there would be ways of improving on current systems greatly to give at least an illusion of persistency.
The video does illustrate how incredibly basic that current illusion is.

I just don't think 5 years on FD will even bother trying to really (really, not the little reworks currently suggested) improve things because they know they'd effed up laying the fundaments. It's not motivating to know that.

Those placeholders are sadly not placeholders at all, there are a game design pillar of ED and can calmly be described as here to stay.

Anyone with any basic understanding of game design (not even coding) can see it's done, there's just going to be new skins coming and nothing majorly better, simple cause it's too late to change fundaments.

It's much easier to wait out the 5 years on some bare minimum then say oh well, time for ED2, with more great promises, hopefully also some lessons learned, but for me at least FD has burned my trust in their abilities.

So yes, game's not dead, it's just a bit... basic, and the reason people come and complaint still is because those promises were made but not kept, and because the game does have some good aspects if you squint your eyes a bit and make-believe, they just disappear under the mediocrity of overarching design.

The DDF was just people paying to theorycraft with the devs "it would be cool if" isn't a promise it's a conversation. They got exactly what they paid for the chance to shoot the breeze, not understanding what it actually was is the individuals fault.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I think they should just start working on ED:2. I think the current engine limits what they can do.

I also wouldn't mind an ED single player or coop spinoff campaign.

ED, Sea of Thieves, NMS all suffer from the same problem. If you create a big map, it's difficult to fill that map with interesting stuff. It's hard to make procedurally generated stuff compelling.

ED is like big open world map where you have to fast travel but you can only fast travel from one node to the next. No spontaneous encounters or dynamic gameplay.

Also, it's a space game without any interesting alien races. Just some faceless menace.

I think it's a victim of it's strict adherence to its sandbox philosophy and boring lore.

And how would it make the game any different to what we have now?

 

[Darty]

After four years calling things placeholders is being very unrealistic.

Yeah its way too generous.

 

[lysan]

Yep, that crap is here to stay now.

sadly I agree, hence not playing for the moment.