The greatest single aspect of ED is without doubt Stellar Forge and the recreation of a 1-1 galaxy with all the variety that RNG can muster with 400 billion potentially unique outcomes.
Unfortunately, almost every single decision made about exploring it has been wrong and has undermined the glorious scale and variety of our home, the Milky Way.
Blunder 1. The Open Galaxy
By making travel unrestricted, FD immediately and irrevocably removed the wide possibilities of path-finding as an exploration mechanism.
A huge amount of gameplay could have been built around the idea that hyperspace routes between systems need to be established before they can be used.
Imagine a hard frontier around the bubble of explored space, as there was on a smaller scale during Beta. A key gameplay mechanism could have involved some form of route discovery to both push the frontier outwards, and improve transport links inside the bubble.
Instead, the #1 attraction in the entire galaxy, the centre of it, was reached before the game even officially launched.
Rather than an exercise in path-finding led expansion, travelling our galaxy became an exercise in endurance.
Blunder 2. Ever-Increasing Jump Ranges
Space is big, really big, you wouldn't believe... you get the idea. Prior to Engineers, jump ranges maxxed out at about 40ly. The top range from 30-40ly was in a sweet spot that gave the galaxy a structure - the difference between the core, the spiral arms, and the gaps between them was clearly noticable and represented a genuine navigation challenge.
Possibly due to pressure from this community, instead of addressing the very poor jump ranges of certain ships, engineering grossly exagerrated the jump ranges of ships that were already the best at it.
Sure, getting around the bubble is now a lot more convenient, but the cost was the removal of any texture in the galaxy.
Prior to this change, a trip to the next spiral arm posed minor route finding problems, and the further out you went, the more tricky it got. This is arguably, the only navigation problem the game has ever contained. Removing it trivialized the scale of the galaxy, and made it a generic unstructured clump of stars instead of an interesting stuctured spiral requiring route planning.
That route finding gameplay does still exist, but now it is very much a fringe activity out on the extreme edges of the galaxy, with a rapidly diminishing set of unreachable locations.
Blunder 3. The Full System Scanner
Space is big, really big, you wouldn't believe... oh, I already said that. Yup, even individual systems are big. Supercruise was a late change to the original design but it is absolutely essential to getting even the slightest sense of the vast distances even within a system.
Yup, it is not fully fleshed out, it seems like a timesink in very large systems, and there isn't enough to do on one of those trips to Hutton Orbital. But just think about Hutton Orbital - the most iconic outpost in the game - only because it is so far away.
The glory of Stellar Forge is the variety it creates, some systems are big, some systems are tiny, and everything in between. There is no lack of choice available, and the truth is that if you don't like long SC trips, you can easily avoid them.
What's that got to do with the FSS - it's the wrong solution to something that isn't actually a problem.
The problem with SC isn't so much the time it takes to get to secondary stars, it's the lack of things to do on the way there.
Instead of making an in-flight scanner, the FSS brings us to a standstill, removes us from the cockpit, and then commits the worst offence of all - it flattens out every system into the same generic sized strobing blue sphere containing the same generic blue blobs.
System discovery becomes an exercise in camera panning where distance is irrelevant - somehow the developers surrendered to the idea that SC is a problem and created a mechanism to avoid it instead of adding it as something to do while you travel.
So where does that leave us.
A galaxy where almost every trip is a straight line due to excessive jump range, where there are almost no geographical barriers to negotiate (except permit locks), where we don't even need to move within a system to discover its content.
That's an awful long way from the original vision set out in the dim and distant past that was the DDF.
Sadly ED hasn't come close to its potential, and from day one, was heading in the wrong direction.
That direction has become more embedded as time passes and with the confirmation that the FSS is the final word, with no alternatives to be offered, the generification of the galaxy is now complete.
Game over man, game over
Unfortunately, almost every single decision made about exploring it has been wrong and has undermined the glorious scale and variety of our home, the Milky Way.
Blunder 1. The Open Galaxy
By making travel unrestricted, FD immediately and irrevocably removed the wide possibilities of path-finding as an exploration mechanism.
A huge amount of gameplay could have been built around the idea that hyperspace routes between systems need to be established before they can be used.
Imagine a hard frontier around the bubble of explored space, as there was on a smaller scale during Beta. A key gameplay mechanism could have involved some form of route discovery to both push the frontier outwards, and improve transport links inside the bubble.
Instead, the #1 attraction in the entire galaxy, the centre of it, was reached before the game even officially launched.
Rather than an exercise in path-finding led expansion, travelling our galaxy became an exercise in endurance.
Blunder 2. Ever-Increasing Jump Ranges
Space is big, really big, you wouldn't believe... you get the idea. Prior to Engineers, jump ranges maxxed out at about 40ly. The top range from 30-40ly was in a sweet spot that gave the galaxy a structure - the difference between the core, the spiral arms, and the gaps between them was clearly noticable and represented a genuine navigation challenge.
Possibly due to pressure from this community, instead of addressing the very poor jump ranges of certain ships, engineering grossly exagerrated the jump ranges of ships that were already the best at it.
Sure, getting around the bubble is now a lot more convenient, but the cost was the removal of any texture in the galaxy.
Prior to this change, a trip to the next spiral arm posed minor route finding problems, and the further out you went, the more tricky it got. This is arguably, the only navigation problem the game has ever contained. Removing it trivialized the scale of the galaxy, and made it a generic unstructured clump of stars instead of an interesting stuctured spiral requiring route planning.
That route finding gameplay does still exist, but now it is very much a fringe activity out on the extreme edges of the galaxy, with a rapidly diminishing set of unreachable locations.
Blunder 3. The Full System Scanner
Space is big, really big, you wouldn't believe... oh, I already said that. Yup, even individual systems are big. Supercruise was a late change to the original design but it is absolutely essential to getting even the slightest sense of the vast distances even within a system.
Yup, it is not fully fleshed out, it seems like a timesink in very large systems, and there isn't enough to do on one of those trips to Hutton Orbital. But just think about Hutton Orbital - the most iconic outpost in the game - only because it is so far away.
The glory of Stellar Forge is the variety it creates, some systems are big, some systems are tiny, and everything in between. There is no lack of choice available, and the truth is that if you don't like long SC trips, you can easily avoid them.
What's that got to do with the FSS - it's the wrong solution to something that isn't actually a problem.
The problem with SC isn't so much the time it takes to get to secondary stars, it's the lack of things to do on the way there.
Instead of making an in-flight scanner, the FSS brings us to a standstill, removes us from the cockpit, and then commits the worst offence of all - it flattens out every system into the same generic sized strobing blue sphere containing the same generic blue blobs.
System discovery becomes an exercise in camera panning where distance is irrelevant - somehow the developers surrendered to the idea that SC is a problem and created a mechanism to avoid it instead of adding it as something to do while you travel.
So where does that leave us.
A galaxy where almost every trip is a straight line due to excessive jump range, where there are almost no geographical barriers to negotiate (except permit locks), where we don't even need to move within a system to discover its content.
That's an awful long way from the original vision set out in the dim and distant past that was the DDF.
Sadly ED hasn't come close to its potential, and from day one, was heading in the wrong direction.
That direction has become more embedded as time passes and with the confirmation that the FSS is the final word, with no alternatives to be offered, the generification of the galaxy is now complete.
Game over man, game over
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