Apart from the times games had a sequel or a remake?
Horizons to Odyssey whats the path where are we going this expansion?
- Thread starter Muzz UK
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Apart from the times games had a sequel or a remake?
Sure, imagine a game like ED but better and I'd buy it even if I couldn't copy my ED CMDR.
The thing is, both the economics and the alienation issue are much easier for anyone except Frontier to solve.
- if it's being developed by another company entirely, it's not competing with support for Elite Dangerous. If ED gets put on hold entirely for five-to-ten years while ED2 is developed, no-one's going to care what it's like by the end or whether they can import that dusty ED1 account from years ago. If ED doesn't get put on hold they're now trying to fund development of two entirely different but competing games and can't "release" ED2 until it's got all or at least most of ED's ever-increasing feature set.
- if it's an entirely new game by a new company, no-one's even going to seriously consider importing ED or Freespace 2 or Space Invaders savegames. Any game which fixes most of ED's serious issues while still being close enough to ED-style gameplay ... isn't going to have a meaningful commander import option anyway.
- if it's not being developed by Frontier, the fact that Frontier isn't capable of developing a better ED-like game than Elite Dangerous doesn't apply either. Admittedly most other companies aren't capable of doing that either, but maybe there's some.
- better graphics is if anything exactly the thing ED doesn't need, because modelling and texturing to the quality level required even by the current engine is already a really obvious bottleneck for them. Deliberately moving away from photorealistic style to something more stylised and easier to draw (perhaps easy enough to partially hand-off to procedural generation, even) would probably be a better move.
None of ED's big issues - slow and often-delayed release cycle, underwhelming headline features, core gameplay based on 40-year-old hardware-limited designs - are going to be fixed by Frontier having another go. But they've also all been really obvious since 2016, so if anyone else was going to bring out an actual competitor ("you can also fly spaceships in this game" isn't sufficient) they could have done that already.
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Thank you for taking the time to write out my exact opinion - I was much too lazy to do it
Derek Smart - he's the only one with the vision
Completely disagree Odyssey is nearly fixed... for most part anyway
if problems mean lack of content that'll surely come in the future quicker than writing and making a new game. In order for your character / CMDR to be imported to a new game that new game would need to share a lot of the same features and content anyway. If I want to play another space game I'd want something that is largely different to what Elite and Star Citizen has which would take years to create. As for graphics and Engine... things like Minecraft proved otherwise this games gorgeous and has years of life
I want to comment on this point directly - that would be one of the worst moves they could do. The authentic looks of Elite is one of its best points. What you describe is literally just No Man's Sky. I would not give a second thought to this game if the art style changed to anything like that.
I'm not saying it was the wrong decision for Elite Dangerous - but every "why are there only 40 ships" / "why are there only 100 plants" / "why are there only a few station interiors" / "why are there only a few building types" complaint does come down to "because they don't have time to draw more than that". It's a big thing that gets forgotten when people say "but other game has all this with a team of three people and a dog" that they didn't go for that sort of effort-intensive style of graphics.
Obviously Elite Dangerous isn't going to change art style now - neither to a stylised one nor to 2020's photorealism from its 2010's photorealism - I was talking about what a potential ED-like game might do to avoid literally being "ED2 with the same issues".
It's not like NMS is any better in those regards. The illusion of variety is mostly achieved through a switch in color palettes in that game. And while it's taken place over time, the variety in stations in Elite has improved greatly. 40 ships is actually quite a lot, as well, in my view - the issue is more of a balance concern wherein each ship has a justifiable niche to fill.
I'm supremely weary of the super-saturated "Fortnite" look appearing in games, and doubly so when it comes to space games where so many seem absolutely frightened of displaying the void expanses of space as exactly that, and not a bunch of clouds and color-splashes filling the view as though one is playing a mystic-realm fantasy RPG as opposed to a game involving a ship making interstellar journeys through space. The further we can stay away from that, the better.
Sure, so is Elite having several hundred rather than ~100 plant types.
My point is that people are calling for millions of plant types and the only way to do that is to make the graphics style simple enough that they can be generated procedurally. (As you say, NMS is still too complex for that)
This is I think more about consistency of setting. Even just considering the bubble, populated Elite Dangerous space is huge. There should be endless variety of ships even if they're all pretty much the same specs. Major interstellar companies make ... three or four types of ship total and barely attempt to compete with each other for the same niche? There's one (1) plasma weapon manufacturer in the entire galaxy? Superpowers taking up a third of populated space don't have their own starport construction companies?
It's one of the reasons that most space games don't have very many star systems - there's enough actual variety of assets, styles, etc. in Elite Dangerous to maybe make 100 somewhat distinctive populated systems ... and what it actually makes is 20,000 entirely interchangeable ones.
Obviously, again, Elite Dangerous wouldn't be Elite Dangerous without the ridiculous "because we can" scale. Not suggesting Frontier should change that. This is again going back to my point that we already have "the best possible Elite Dangerous" and the next generation of space games is going to have to try something different.
There are lots of ways to do stylised that isn't hyper-saturation, though. (Others I'm also not suggesting for ED: grayscale, sepia, pixel art, oil painting, cubism, over-darkened horror, etc)
A "realistic" style but with a lower polygon count (not quite FFE level lower, sure) would look much like Elite Dangerous in most space situations - where 90% of the pixels are black and most of the rest are high-speed ships seen from a kilometre or more away - while being quite a bit easier to draw.
I absolutely agree here. The dark, realistic look of ED is my jam. I'm sure it's not totally authentic, but when I sit down to play this game I'm trying to imagine being a space pilot navigating our galaxy in the future, not a stylized fantasy like the art portrays in NMS. Probably wouldn't still be playing this game if it didn't scratch that itch for me.
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There is a high degree of faith, trust and goodwill in that statement.Completely disagree Odyssey is nearly fixed... for most part anyway
For any space game to overthrow Elite Dangerous in my game library, it must have, at least as good as ED or improved version of, the following features, in no particular order.
- VR + Robust Controller Support. This is going to be a “must have” for any future Elite competitor, or any flight sim in general. There is no stronger sense of immersion than the feeling of the perception of actually sitting in a cockpit, controls in hand. I’ll play other games for stuff ED doesn’t have, but any replacement expecting to fill its niche is going to need this.
- Realistic simulation of space, including orbital mechanics. A big part of ED’s appeal for me, as an astronomy fan, is it’s realistic depiction of space. The thought it might be possible, in principle at least, to calculate orbits from the dance of planets and moons across the heavens, or derive a planet’s radius from the shadows objects cast. Any ED replacement should have similar attention to detail as this.
- Realistic procedurally created worlds to explore. A huge part of the appeal of procedurally generated games for me is their replayability. With a game whose mechanics I enjoy, the process of uncovering the secrets of a newly generated map can be almost as good as playing a game for the first time ever. Within the Bubble each new BGS campaign against the Evil Galactic Federation was accompanied by dozens of systems to explore. Outside the Bubble, the additional EDO content can make each new system an evening’s adventure in their own right.
That being said, the fact that we can't land upon, and explore, what should be the most interesting worlds in Elite remains a major source of disappointment for me. Even if Frontier doesn't have the time to work on procedurally created alien life, terraformed worlds have the advantage of consisting of life from Terra. I want to relocate my home base to the surface of Emerald, dang it!!!
- Interesting interplanetary and/or interstellar travel mechanics. One of the greatest unexpected pleasures I got from ED was just how much fun Supercruise is, especially the Alpha Four version, where bold flying could get you faster to your destination a bit faster than you can today, and much faster than the forum recommended methods. One of Frontier’s greatest disappointments was how they responded to complaints that Supercruise was “too slow” (it wasn’t if you used good technique) was making bad technique faster by obviating the effects of good technique, rather than introducing an optional module that had similar effects. Any ED replacement should have something of similar depth, as opposed to point to point jumps, or purely linear travel.
- A dynamic economic sim that is comparable to Alpha 4's original economic sim in depth. ED’s economic sim should be a headline feature. The original version had enough depth to allow for a thriving player-augmented economy. When complaints from Alpha backers about operation costs and the “speed of progression” arose, Frontier decided to fix the problem by treating ramping up income by taking a sledgehammer to their economic sim, as opposed to fixing the underlining problem: ship and module gradually increased in capabilities logarithmicly, while costs (including operational costs) exploded exponentially.
- A dynamic political simulation. I’m not talking PowerPlay here, nor am I talking about the current BGS system. I’m talking about the original version, whose only flaw IMO was that you didn’t lose reputation by working for a factions’s alleged rivals. I very much enjoyed my time as an “Imperial Agent” before Frontier filled in the BGS’ depth. My only regret was that my anti-Federation activities left me on almost as good terms as my pro-Empire or pro-Independent activities did.
- A dynamic procedural mission system. I’m not a fan “You are player #537,217 to save the city” style missions, especially in MMOs. There’s no replayability there, no uniqueness IMO despite being hand crafted. Procedurally generated missions means I could visit the same mission giving NPC on multiple occasions, and be offered a different mission each time.
- First Person Role-Playing Game elements. What I’m talking about here isn’t things like skills, stats, or levels. What I'm talking about here are things like dialog trees and meaningful consequences. EDO was a very tiny step in the right direction, but I would love to see something far more robust.
The path is always escape velocity. You don't want to fall back to the ground.
Interstellar travel remains one of the biggest disappointments for me in Elite Dangerous. The game is designed in such a way that a single system does not have a lot of content or investment opportunities to offer a player (sadly), so a large part of your time is spent traveling between stars. But the way you do that is to point your ship, press a button and teleport. There's no depth to it. Nothing you have to calculate, nothing to adjust between stars, nothing interesting to manage - particularly if you have a decent fuel scoop.
It's primarily a spaceship flight game, but the bulk of long flights are abstracted away into fancy loading screens. It doesn't have to be flashy, but it should offer opportunities for greater engagement. I wouldn't even mind longer interplanetary flight if it was beefed up or given some extra degree of complexity too.
There's also some personality missing from the different regions. If you take a long drive on Earth, you can pick up the different local radio stations and see a variety of landscapes and architecture and all sorts of winding roads to follow. If you go sailing, you have weather to contend with; from thunderstorms to dead calm hot and windless afternoons. Space travel by comparison is relatively uninteresting, but there could be ways of implementing similar things.
If something like regional radio would be too much to maintain for the development team, they could at least add some rudimentary modding support that lets people plug in extra functionality in-game. It would also help in other areas. Want to report data for your faction? Bring up an in-game third party panel attached to your ship's existing panels, and do some simple data entry - instead of resorting to something outside the game like a google doc or discord.
As for space weather, you could get magnetic fields, bursts of energetic particles, space dust and debris, more temperature interaction.
Other than that, my biggest desire for ED has always been atmospheric flight/landings with varieties of weather. Imagine the kind of ambience (and struggle!) you could get from landing on something like the Kamino platform from Star Wars.