I never tried it, but isn't it possible to use SCA and orbit a planet while using the DSS?
How FD undermined their own creation
- Thread starter MadDogMurdock
- Start date
I never tried it, but isn't it possible to use SCA and orbit a planet while using the DSS?
...and then add to this how FD have seemed to undermine combat too, with an ever increasing number of weapons, with questionable huge upgrades to them (eg: doubling their power), with the ability to insanely tank ships, needlessly causing outfitting issues for human vs Thargoid combat, and even adding magic spells to weapons and the like just to complicate and make balance all the more impossible.
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whilst i do not feel it is game over..... i will still come back to ED now and then..... ultimately i fully agree with all of your 1st 3 points.
there was meant to be a "fog of war" of some description outside of the bubble.
we were meant to have to explore systems and map out Hyperspace jumps which were not available to everyone until we sold back to UC
(iirc UC was going to then charge a small fee if we wanted to buy the updated nav data)
this would have been so easy to implement.... if jumping to a non mapped system our ship takes a small amount of damage (damage which should not be reparable with a simple button press). exploration ships would take less damage but still take a small amount, thus meaning the galazy would not have been travalable to the centre within 24 hrs of going into gamma.
i remember the excitement of explorers on here organising mass route planning projects for when the game launched, and it was fully expected to take a serious amount of time before a highway to sag a would be created.
oh well.........
honestly at this point i hope 2020 brings us Elite Dangerous 2, and we all start from scratch with 100 credits and a sidewinder but with a massive amount of time spent on making the game more sensible. that said i no longer thing FD are building a game for the likes of you and I. Our kind was needed to get the KSer passed and have enough money in to get the project going. IMO the game is going exactly the way that FD said they did not want it to go, and the excuse they needed to KS it was so that it would NOT go that way.
The FSS was the final straw unfortunately - I do have uses for it as a body scanner and USS locator, but as a system scanner it completely blocks my desire to play the game at all.
The implementation of it as an Analysis Mode view out of the cockpit instead of a camera and being able to use it on the move would mitigate that, but ultimately I have no use for Fog of War in a space game - populating the system layout on an individual body basis using it just isn't something I want to spend a chunk of my time doing.
But that is well discussed and has now finally been dismissed by FD, so I'll not dive down that rabbit hole again.
Instead the thread is about the general direction of travel which does culminate in the FSS.
That FSS view does make every system the same size (effectively zero) for the purpose of system exploration.
The defining feature of Stellar Forge is variation, and effectively the FSS makes every system look the same - blue blobs inside a generic one-sized sphere.
That flattening out and generification of the galaxy now extends into individual systems, and actually removes the need to go anywhere at all because everywhere is more or less the same. Getting there and back is to be done as quickly as possible because it doesn't present any challenge at all.
As for something to do, the FSS itself represents an obvious missed opportunity - as suggested, the Analysis Mode seems like a natural solution but no-one told the FSS dev team.
I've previously suggested non-linear paths of least resistance that would provide improved SC acceleration if you were following them - they could be generated by the current layout of bodies in a system and thus be somewhat dynamic as the bodies move in their orbits.
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it is an opinion that what we have now is inferior to what the OP wants... it is a fact however that what we have now is NOT what was used to hook those early backers into paying sometimes obscene large amounts of cash in. I like that you like what we have now but that does not make OP wrong.
Personally i do prefer the new exploration mechanics over the old ones, if i had to choose i would take the new one but neither is what i was expecting and what i was hoping for for ED.
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My OP is a set of absolute statements about what FD have done and my views on their consequences.
But this idea that everyone has an opinion and that they are all perfectly valid is horse-dung though.
People should just come out and say what they think and why they disagree instead of this passive-aggressive 'well, that's just your opinion' nonsense, as if that somehow addresses what I said.
If you have an opinion, state it, and let the peanut gallery pass judgement.
Thought-provoking stuff.
With hindsight, it might've been better if FDev had, somehow, made it so ships could only travel a limited distance "into the unknown".
Set it up so that, perhaps, you have long-range sensors that can only detect new systems within a limited range - until a system is discovered and entered into the UniCart database.
That way, the game would have started off with people charting courses, and discovering routes between popular locations, along fairly narrow "pathways" and then it'd be up to the explorers to build their jumpy ships and go out and expand the number of systems in the UniCart database so that everybody else could plot courses to them.
Basically, a kind of galactic "fog of war".
I guess you're not going to get the toothpaste back in the tube, though.
With hindsight, it might've been better if FDev had, somehow, made it so ships could only travel a limited distance "into the unknown".
Set it up so that, perhaps, you have long-range sensors that can only detect new systems within a limited range - until a system is discovered and entered into the UniCart database.
That way, the game would have started off with people charting courses, and discovering routes between popular locations, along fairly narrow "pathways" and then it'd be up to the explorers to build their jumpy ships and go out and expand the number of systems in the UniCart database so that everybody else could plot courses to them.
Basically, a kind of galactic "fog of war".
I guess you're not going to get the toothpaste back in the tube, though.
I think any player can still choose to travel in a low jump range ship, or a ship optimised for more than just fast travel can now be used where before there was only really a few practical ships to choose from. That texture of the galaxy is still there to be enjoyed at leisure by the willing player. I have done this, I spent 18 months doing it.
The unpopulated majority of the galaxy is more accessible now & I see that as a good thing, in making it easier it has highlighted to those less tenacious players how little there is to do in unpopulated systems once you've collected your fill of mats and seen an example or two of geological & biological POIs.
The galaxy feels smaller now, even with a lower jump range ship because what variety there is, is now so easy to find that the sense of achievement is lost. But it was too hard before, and if it must be one extreme or another (and it doesn't need to be) then I suppose easy with the option for self-imposed limitations is the way forward.
The unpopulated majority of the galaxy is more accessible now & I see that as a good thing, in making it easier it has highlighted to those less tenacious players how little there is to do in unpopulated systems once you've collected your fill of mats and seen an example or two of geological & biological POIs.
The galaxy feels smaller now, even with a lower jump range ship because what variety there is, is now so easy to find that the sense of achievement is lost. But it was too hard before, and if it must be one extreme or another (and it doesn't need to be) then I suppose easy with the option for self-imposed limitations is the way forward.
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There were supposed to be "dark" systems around, which were really undiscovered. I could imagine using an FSS like scanner to find such system and then decide to dare a jump to them. Would be much more interesting for exploration and we would be able to actually discover new routes.
The biggest problem is everything looks the same and there is not much variety. How many different things are there in the galaxy, you only have to look at the codex to see how little there is.
Finding big discoveries by following a build up of breadcrumb trails was a missed opportunity in my opinion, I thought that was going to be the way the codex worked.
Finding big discoveries by following a build up of breadcrumb trails was a missed opportunity in my opinion, I thought that was going to be the way the codex worked.
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You won't find any disagreement from me OP, I also wholeheartedly agree with Iskariot's post (#22), about more agency for the pilot during supercruise.
Elite D's, and as a result Frontier's, problem is that far too often in this game you are not piloting the ship you are just a passenger on it. After all this time, (a loooonnnggggg time), I still get a nice buzz from landing at my destination, (no DC here folks!), but for the most part supercruising from entry point to destination is a 'sit back and wait' affair. I often go off route looking for fights and points of interest/vistas etc but even then there's a little too much 'waiting watching numbers decrease' and not enough fine tuning and engagement with the actual ship. I know, I know, there is a fine line there too in terms of over egging the pudding but there are, (were?), a lot of possibilities between where we are now and reaching that over egging stage.
Elite D's, and as a result Frontier's, problem is that far too often in this game you are not piloting the ship you are just a passenger on it. After all this time, (a loooonnnggggg time), I still get a nice buzz from landing at my destination, (no DC here folks!), but for the most part supercruising from entry point to destination is a 'sit back and wait' affair. I often go off route looking for fights and points of interest/vistas etc but even then there's a little too much 'waiting watching numbers decrease' and not enough fine tuning and engagement with the actual ship. I know, I know, there is a fine line there too in terms of over egging the pudding but there are, (were?), a lot of possibilities between where we are now and reaching that over egging stage.
Mechanics aside, yes that is exactly (conceptually) how they should have designed exploring/charting the galaxy.
Space is big, things are far from each other & part of the game is deciding whether a particular place is worth the travel time to get to.
I'm doing an election at the moment, mostly just delivering data missions to distant ports. I am prepared to put that time in to complete those missions where anyone opposing me may not. I don't mind if there are other things to do during those trips but I certainly don't want to have to do other things. I don't habitually go to Hutton Orbital because there isn't enough benefit for me, but others do because they make their own choice. You can too.
Thats how they DID design it. However, its not how they implemented it.
Since that initial "simpler" implementation, most changes have been to make it even MORE simple, rather than more engaging, but as someone else so eloquently put it, you cant put the tootpaste back in the tube.
Sure!
1) Open galaxy - i like. We can see the stars in the sky and with advances in tech by the 30th century its not unreasonable to think the whole galaxy wouldn't be mapped, especially with FSDs to move around.
2) In the middle here. I like how big the galaxy is, but after 4 years of play i can't complain if the increased range lets me hop around the bubble a bit quicker. I've been an explorer since before launch, so i'm quite familiar with travel times around the galaxy. Its still a big galaxy, even if we can get around it twice as fast as at launch. I'd rather ranges not get any bigger though.
3) Sorry, got to disagree. I very much like the ability to scan the whole system. People already complain about the new FSS not revealing the whole thing. I understand more hardcore players want realism and some people want to find planets by paralax rather than ping, but for me that would be incredibly tedious.
I never tried that either. Can you use the SCA and set the throttle to zero? Also, orbit is not exactly what would interest me too much. My line of thought is more along the line of "fly towards the first interesting object, use the FSS to scan the rest while flying there".
No it only does so for the surveyor. Jump in, FSS everything (instead of honk), move on. Which actually in a way means that the system got bigger. Full FSS scanning a system takes longer than honking. Which is what some of anti-FSS people were and are all about: it takes a little longer to achieve the same thing.
In contrast the system size remained the same for explorers. Instead of "fly there to scan (with or without the old DSS)" you now "fly there to scan (with the new DSS)". But scanning isn't "point your nose at it for a few seconds" but a minigame of sending probes. (The quality of the minigame can again be discussed, but it sure is more than "point nose, wait". )
And even that's still more of surveying than exploration. Nothing of what I wrote involves going down and actually taking a look on what you found. Which still requires as much flight as before, now with a little more gameplay (and thus effort) to locate.
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Of course the OP isn't wrong. But everything in the OP is opinion, which is why it isn't wrong.
If FD had rigidly stuck to some of the DDF stuff, they'd have broken the game. The DDF was over five years ago now - times moves on, and constant calls referring to things that were in the DDF but aren't in the game now aren't helpful (in many cases, they were added to the game and then found to have huge flaws, which is why they aren't there - or as in the case of offline mode missing, which is because it simply wasn't feasible to implement).I bought into the Kickstarter. If people chucked thousands at it and are now upset, then to be honest I have little sympathy. If they didn't have the money to throw away, they probably shouldn't have done it.
FD never suggested that putting more money in would allow those backers to control the way the game is developed (at least, not beyond the initial development, which finished years ago).