Hi guys,
Great to be here. I grew up playing Elite on my ZX Spectrum
. It essentially ruined my enjoyment of other games -- damn you, David , because since then, I've always tended to compare every playing experience I have with how I felt as a kid playing Elite... with most everything I've played since then coming far short of that experience.
So I was very glad to discover the E: D project, and have been lurking the forum on a daily basis since.
Great stuff. I'm excited.
With that out of the way, just a very small grouse and proposal, if I may.
I was a little surprised and slightly dismayed by the body in the cockpit thing that seems to have appeared in one of the alphas. It's for me a slightly kitsch departure (if that's not too bruising a criticism) from what made the Elite games great. It's the kind of thing that made it very difficult for me to get into games like Edge of Chaos (uch... remember that creepy-looking kid?), because I'm not that kid and I could never imagineware him away lol.
I'm expecting to find that body in the cockpit a similar immersion-breaker, as that spacesuit-clad figure isn't me and never will be. I'm me staring at my computer screen (or TV as it was in my Spectrum days), the computer is my viewport and I'm piloting my craft. And that's it. And that's what I adored about Elite: the casual, almost tongue-in-cheek setting of the mise-en-scène in the instruction booklet (God, I miss that booklet)... and then it's just you out there in space with no further attempt to define who you are or what you are or what you look like or what you dress like. That made Elite great and the experience unduplicable. So, yeah, this 'individual' who's supposed to be an extension of me in the cockpit, but who isn't me, because I look different to him, is something I'm not really feeling. It's very difficult to imagineware a scenario for a third-person figure like that who's dressed differently than you are! I remember, I always even had a problem with the external third-person chaser-cam views of my ship when I was a kid . I eventually sort of just imaginewared it as advanced technology that could extrapolate your position in space and print it on the HUD. But this third-party figure in the cockpit is not something that's as easy to do that with and is a bit of (that word again...) an immersion-breaker.
So I personally would really love there to be a setting in the options setup to turn him on or off ("Enable figure who's not you in the cockpit: y/n"), especially considering what a departure this figure is to the spirit of the Elite franchise. I wouldn't especially mind an empty seat or whatever, I don't know, but this guy sitting where I'm so good at imagining myself sitting is the kind of thing that can shorten one's interest in a game.
Yeah, so just putting that out there. And again, glad to see this reboot going along so well. Frontier is pure class.
Great to be here. I grew up playing Elite on my ZX Spectrum
. It essentially ruined my enjoyment of other games -- damn you, David , because since then, I've always tended to compare every playing experience I have with how I felt as a kid playing Elite... with most everything I've played since then coming far short of that experience.So I was very glad to discover the E: D project, and have been lurking the forum on a daily basis since.
Great stuff. I'm excited.
With that out of the way, just a very small grouse and proposal, if I may.
I was a little surprised and slightly dismayed by the body in the cockpit thing that seems to have appeared in one of the alphas. It's for me a slightly kitsch departure (if that's not too bruising a criticism) from what made the Elite games great. It's the kind of thing that made it very difficult for me to get into games like Edge of Chaos (uch... remember that creepy-looking kid?), because I'm not that kid and I could never imagineware him away lol.
I'm expecting to find that body in the cockpit a similar immersion-breaker, as that spacesuit-clad figure isn't me and never will be. I'm me staring at my computer screen (or TV as it was in my Spectrum days), the computer is my viewport and I'm piloting my craft. And that's it. And that's what I adored about Elite: the casual, almost tongue-in-cheek setting of the mise-en-scène in the instruction booklet (God, I miss that booklet
)... and then it's just you out there in space with no further attempt to define who you are or what you are or what you look like or what you dress like. That made Elite great and the experience unduplicable. So, yeah, this 'individual' who's supposed to be an extension of me in the cockpit, but who isn't me, because I look different to him, is something I'm not really feeling. It's very difficult to imagineware a scenario for a third-person figure like that who's dressed differently than you are! I remember, I always even had a problem with the external third-person chaser-cam views of my ship when I was a kid . I eventually sort of just imaginewared it as advanced technology that could extrapolate your position in space and print it on the HUD. But this third-party figure in the cockpit is not something that's as easy to do that with and is a bit of (that word again...) an immersion-breaker.So I personally would really love there to be a setting in the options setup to turn him on or off ("Enable figure who's not you in the cockpit: y/n"), especially considering what a departure this figure is to the spirit of the Elite franchise. I wouldn't especially mind an empty seat or whatever, I don't know, but this guy sitting where I'm so good at imagining myself sitting is the kind of thing that can shorten one's interest in a game.
Yeah, so just putting that out there. And again, glad to see this reboot going along so well. Frontier is pure class.
