Jenner
I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
How FD undermined their own creation
- Thread starter MadDogMurdock
- Start date
Have you ever done any overland driving?
The only way you "point at a thing and go" is at 10mph, staying constantly on the alert for mud, sand, rocks and other obstacles.
Which, again, is analogous to how exploration really should be in ED.
That's kind of my point. You're not looking at the map constantly. I think we're actually in agreement but I may have worded things poorly.
Yes it is quite interesting how FDev undermines its own game. I found it quite funny to watch the recent "New Beginnings - Reborn Commander" community lifestream. Exactly at 14:00 min I had the impression they realized what they did when they introduced Supercruise Assist into the game. Instead of making in-system travelling more interesting, i.e. give us something to do during that time, they implemented a tool that frees the player from the need to play or at least to do something while the game is running by itself.
(Perhaps this is only a preparation for the time when space legs arrive and we can walk around the ship during supercruise??? – hopefully)
(Perhaps this is only a preparation for the time when space legs arrive and we can walk around the ship during supercruise??? – hopefully)
Looking on the bright side, it's more fun in a Vulture at least. 
For your consideration. → https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...te-followup-continuation.396449/#post-6238654
But yeah, not a fan of parking my ship in supercruise to use the FSS instead of exploring and discovering things in first-person in my ship.
It also says something that this is the only thing I recall DSSing on this side of the galaxy...
But anyway, as I alluded to, finding ways to get to things in my Vulture is often a bit of fun.
For your consideration. → https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...te-followup-continuation.396449/#post-6238654But yeah, not a fan of parking my ship in supercruise to use the FSS instead of exploring and discovering things in first-person in my ship.
It also says something that this is the only thing I recall DSSing on this side of the galaxy...
But anyway, as I alluded to, finding ways to get to things in my Vulture is often a bit of fun.
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At least some percentage of regular players are probably bots. I guess they were just trying to cater to that segment of the community.
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Arctic exploration is a good historical example of pointing at a thing and going onwards in a flat and mostly boring landscape.
However, it was also quite challenging due to a wide variety of different reasons. It was more of an exercise in survival rather than simply tedium, whether it was trying to keep warm, stave off hunger or simply fending off wildlife.
Same principle can also be applied to sailors looking for the Americas on the open ocean, or explorers attempting to traverse the Sahara the first time. Long durations in a largely featureless expanse? Check. Extremely dangerous and requiring a combination of extensive preparation and specialist skills? Check.
Exploration could be made far more interesting by going full-on survival mode for it. Ship components wearing down form general use, stellar phenomena being quite dangerous and requiring extensive surveying before daring to jump to a new star, material gathering being more than just half an hour tooling around in an SRV or stocking up before the trip, synthesis being more involved than casting fully-functioning AFMU pellets out of nothing but metal dust and our own saliva etc...
![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
Searching HGEs for duct tape
Anyone still remember Diablo 2? Bots liked that game so much they are still playing it, in 2019. I understand most of the playerbase has been bots for the last decade. They actually might have developed artificial intelligence by now...
The main issue I see with such an approach is that the more tools you require of a player the more tools stop being viable. How do you do it? If you just make more stop to gather more mats to combat wear you've only added tedium aside from those who really like the SRV. Do you need repair limpets or an AMFU for wear and tear? What is extensive surveying? How does it work, just pointing at the start and waiting for a scanner to finish or an type minigame? I'm trying to imagine how this game play would actually work given the options we have.
The way I was seeing was about making it more like a full on survival game once you leave civilised space, more Don't Starve than Terraria as far as surviving goes. Think more Apollo 13 rather than routine car journey.
Short trips of only a few dozen jumps would be okay as components would manage, medium trips of up to 100 jumps or so would require some AFMUs, reinforced modules and maybe a bit of redundancy, but trips beyond 10,000 light years would require you to live off the land, harvesting a variety of resources from a wide variety of different sources and generally trying to keep things running on a shoe string.
For the extreme survival scenario, I'd expect that almost every scanning, hangar and processing module would be required in order to keep things running. Pretty much every ring type would be required to visit on occasion, utilising every type of mining for different minerals (including commodities, not just micromats). Perhaps requring allowing scooping from the corona's of gas giants and the upper atmospheres of atmospherics (yes, I know that actually landing on the atmospherics is far off, but this would be still from supercruise above them) for additional commodities and micromaterials. Synthesis could be modified to require certain conditions in order to create certain things, such as certain local levels of radiation, certain strength gravity wells, specific local light spectra etc so that you have to track down the right locations to make repairs once you have found the required materials and commodities.
In effect, making it so that full survival off the land is limited to only the most skilled and best equipped pilots. Novice or underequipped explorers would instead have to steadily practice their trade by making steadily larger jaunts out of civilised space, testing and learning while tweaking their ship and modules before eventually their ability to maintain their ship exceeds the galaxy's capability to damage it. It would add skill and investment to exploration, without completely shutting out beginner players as there would be a smooth gradient going all the way from edge-of-bubble exploration out to galactic reaches exploration and everything in-between.
In-depth surveying doesn't have to simply another waiting game or another terrible minigame, but it could involve proper investigation work, requiring a player to do extensive work in nearby systems to find out what is happening in a particular system. For example, looking at interstellar comets that originate from a star could give you more information about what their Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belts are like. Checking the star from a variety of distances gives you multiple snapshots from different times due to the speed of light, giving a potential pool of information with regards to things like sunspot cycles and coronal ejections which could then be used to help gauge drop-in distance (get it wrong and you could be dropped right into the exclusion zone or catapulted into the far reaches of the system before your FSD overheats and drops you out of witchspace). Likewise, extensive checks from a variety of distances and angles will help you track down if there's any objects transiting the star, letting you figure out the ecliptic plane of the system to avoid crashing through any gravity wells or being thrown off course. Similar calculations could be made with regards to calculating redshift and blueshift to further tune our jumps if our drop-ins were to be affected by the velocity of our originating star relative to the target, a star with a large degree of blueshift would result in us potentially crashing into the star while too much redshift would result in our FSD not being able to focus. Further information could be obtained by gathering samples from asteroids and planets from nearby stars, telling us more about the various radiation cycles the star might have and whether it has undergone any notable ejections millions of years ago - information that would be used to optimise our jump further rather than jumping blindly. Checking similar stars in the same nebula would again give us more information regarding likely compositions. Thargoid infested regions could be even worse, with witchspace disturbances requiring identification, studying (which may involve hunting down local Thargoids and chasing them around to figure out their movement patterns and general Thargoid Traffic) and accounting for the extra stresses and deviations it would cause for our jumps.
Basically, we should have to act more like real-life stellar explorers before pressing the big red button, gathering as much information as we can from a huge variety of sources before actually travelling there, then breathing a sigh of relief that our calculations are correct and we haven't just crashed into a transiting gas giant or coronal ejection.
Give us time to reverse engineer some thargoid tech and who knows how fast we'll cross the galaxy. It might be a vast improvement.
Except most of the RL exploratory travel is rather tedious: One foot in front of the other, or, as we did in Antarctica, set a bearing on the GPS for the Pisten Bully, lock the steering and lean back to watch the featureless landscape rush past at a whopping 10 km/h.
Supercruise has nailed the feeling of excitement of ground travel in Antarctica.
Exploration is rather long stretches of tedium hopefully not too often interrupted by the excitement of survival. Most polar exploration is a slow grind towards breakdown, and the explorers could only hope they would be back safely before everything ran out or broke. The most exciting exploration tales are from people with good language skills, but not much planning skills: Scott and Shackleton's Antarctic diaries are full of bravery that could have been avoided with a bit of common sense and forward thinking. Nansen's diary on the Fram expedition is pretty dull until he and Johansen hop off the boat and try to ski the rest of the way to the North Pole. Amundsens south pole trip is a cool, logic read showing how it is done, in stark contrast to the flowery language of the unsuccesful Scott. Hillary's drive to the south pole in a tractor basically reads: "Day n - x litres of fuel used.". Rinse and repeat.
Most of the research expeditions I have been on have been similarly dull: Every day for weeks or months seem the same slow slog while we gather data, and the excitement may be just from changing stations or getting some results back. Or when something breaks or the weather turns to custard. I had one trip end 200 m from the dock when the engine of the boat blew up and left us adrift. Another trip to the high arctic almost didn't take off because the people using the boat before us had run it aground and we spent 2 weeks cleaning mud out of contacts and patching leaks.
As I have stated many, many times, this tedium of travel is what makes the Elite galaxy great, both in size and content. It would be absolutely awesome if as part of the travel we had to deal with the wear and tear on the ships. We do to some extent, but mostly we just have to fire up the old AFMU and then run a reboot/repair when things get a bit hairy. If we could get out of our seats and do a bit of patching and maintaining along the way, if we could break down modules for weight and materials, if we could shave off weight from hull and structure for the price of integrity and stability, it would start to feel like real exploration. And if we had to deal with radiation so that the galaxy would actually be a bit dangerous, that would be great. And it would make the crazy unshielded builds unviable, and maybe even make it impossible to get to the galactic centre for some builds, and even to neutron stars and such.
So much could be done, but so much that could be done to make things more challenging would also feel like limitations to most. Yes, FDEV made things too easy from the outset. Hard to believe, really, when people talked about a learning cliff rather than curve for this game when we set off... And considering the outcry from some when the gathering of exploration data suddenly required a bit of effort, I don't see how they can improve things further without even more toys getting thrown from prams. Hopefully they are fine with that, and the game-play additions will balance out the added difficulty and complexity.
S
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Much of the early exploration was very dangerous though. Amundsen spent a huge amount of time and funds setting up depots and camps before the final expedition began, which is more in line with the typical resupply bases that now support the Colonia trip or the PRE's resupply stations towards Maia. The point is that Antarctic exploration, without basically getting infrastructure set up in advance, was extremely dangerous and difficult. There's also a big difference between bringing supplies to last a journey and living entirely off the land for a journey.
Nowadays, South pole expeditions are fairly routine to the point of almost being a tourist destination and I'd say are more comparable to a trip out to Maia than to a 100 kly journey out into the black. There's infrastructure nearby, it's possible to bring supplies to last the entire journey and the equipment is more than capable of surviving the journey without significant maintenance.
It's one thing to leave civilisation for a brief period to venture into a hostile environment after a bit of preparation, but it's another thing to casually waltz through said environment with no real effort, preparation nor support indefinitely.
Yep, and the keyword is "indefinitely". We should be able to jaunt around indefinitely between stations and bases as we can get basic servicing there. Longer trips (100s of jumps) should result in wear and tear we will have to deal with along the way. Somehow. Preferably in a fashion that makes for interesting gameplay.
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They will...
....look at it while sipping their coffee. Have a chuckle then move onto the next post
I agree with 95% of what the OP said by the way. Like the OP I don't think anything will change.
The main thing is, for me, exploration shouldn't just be a case of clicking on some random star and then being able to gallop toward it without any concerns.
Again, going back to the "fog of war" thing, there isn't anything to stop you just clicking on a random dark patch of the map in an RTS and sending all your tanks there but if you do that you're probably going to get stomped by something on the way.
So, instead, you click on somewhere a little way into the dark, move your tanks and then go a little further, and a little further - one step at a time.
It'd be nice if ED did have hazards that might interfere with exploration - and which could be overcome rather than things that just kill you if you're unlucky - but, given that it doesn't, the only thing that really could provide that sense of "one step at a time" would be if the galmap was limited in what it showed you.
And, if that meant you might schlepp 1000Ly in some direction, only to find it's a "dead end", so be it.
That's all part of exploration IMO.
That dead end might be novel the first time, I'm not so sure it would hold up well after that though.
My main concern about hazards right now from the descriptions is that it seemingly amounts to more of the same, only with a a bit more of a mandate rather than the prior option. Some of the more slot limited options would be out for long range expeditions, but I suppose the idea of needing to be prepared might make it seem worth it to those of you looking for hazards. We don't really have interesting ways of doing repairs yet either.
With the hazards themselves, I'm not sure what we'd be looking for. It doesn't seem fair to throw them at random, so we'd be back to looking at maps and scopes to avoid them in a system designed with that intent. If they're random, they can do damage or interfere with systems as options really, either of which seem to circle back to going into menus to fix your ship, possibly after harvesting more mats. Dunno, feels like engineering 4.0 but without the perks.
Seems like it would take a lot of thought to work well and not break long range travel for all but the most dedicated while still being of value to those looking for more.
Yes, because the majority of players have a couple of hours a week to play the game and don’t want a simple gameplay content accomplishments to take months, or years, of real world time due to a small amount of players with endless hours to do nothing but play a game crying about the game feeling too small!
I want to play the f’ing game content, not stare at my screen waiting to travel or waiting for travel, doing nothing or barely anything, for most of my limited gameplay sessions. I want to have something to do.
There are 400 billion stars. Even if you could pick any of them and insta-jump to it, it would take thousands of years to map them all. The distance is arbitrary and our limits to travel are there simply to create time sinks into the boring and unimaginative game mechanic called traveling in this game.