I agree 100% with Drew here

[Ian Doncaster]

For example multicrew and galaxy wide telepresence.... IF players really want to use their own commander then i see no harm in meeting up ...... Made even easier with ship delivery to a station so you don't get marooned. IF you want some instant MC action well this is why it was a massive mistake to shelve ship's crew like in DDF and make it MP only without NPC's. For an instant session we should not be playing as ourselves imo but as a friend's crew person levelling them up. Cash earned could be given to the helping player but no in game mention of that needs be made.

I suspect one of the things they didn't want with multicrew - having seen how niche CQC ended up being - was to put any more barriers in the way of using it than absolutely necessary, even ones like "you must have hired NPC crew if you want to host". I've used it four times - twice as host, twice as crew - on all occasions just for tourism, and most of the ships weren't ones with anything for multicrew to actually "do".

I can see potential for holding players hostage or complains of cmdrs suiciding for lols with a full crew which is why I actually think using your own player is unnecessary .... But IF players want to take that risk and trust the captain so be it.

Well, not so much that but even just practical things when everyone's operating in good faith like "what happens if the host loses connection?" or "what happens if people want to play in two parts with a break in-between but don't log back in at the same time?". Wing missions have exactly that problem, mitigated a bit because you don't need to stay instanced throughout the mission and the wing can for most (but not all!) missions be re-established without penalty.

 

[CMDR Nathan Atterlein]

No Galnet!
No CG's!
No II's!

If that means "lore", then are we really missing out on anything? Galnet may be a little weird to go on vacation, but the rest are usually mildly interesting "save these people stuck in space" "bust that fertilizer company" grinds the devs put out to generate some player interactions. Lore is what you make of it, since Frontier won't be acknowledging any player achievements other than discoveries. I'm surprised there aren't many journalists in elite, that concentrate on the players and their achievements, conflicts, etc. There's a lot of lore to be had there, actual lore, that's happening in the game world, that truly alter the universe in it's minor level, wether Frontier acknowledges or not. You can still walk your own path, and even though you can't assassinate the emperor, you can still bleed it's systems out from the inside with outlaw behavior. Certainly, solo actions amount to little, but in a team, you can do wonders. Go make some lore for yourselves, and share it. This doom attitude is truly the thing that has the potential to kill this game. If people lose enthusiasm, the game will dry out completely. But Drew should know that, as a writer.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Frontier, I think, got their fingers burned with their initial 'seasons' approach - development setbacks and such, I think, and that in turn had the effect of slamming the brakes on the storylines, such as they were.

Yeah, this is a big problem with the really big story stuff.

If you think about how the original seasons plan was sold, Horizons would take "about a year", then New Era (or something resembling it) would have been in 2017. So it's quite possible that the assets for the next stage of the Thargoid storyline are, in effect, about 4 years behind the original planned roadmap. No wonder the story's stalled if the art and AI and everything else for the next set of Thargoid entities is piled up on someone's "to do" list.
(Again, only really a problem for "MMO" storytelling in particular)

This is one of the things I really liked about the Interstellar Initiatives - they took existing features and content and used them in creative ways with a couple of (presumably quick) additions of new stuff, so they could just go on like that. (You could view many of the previous big story events - Colonia, Dangerous Games, Gnosis, Premonition - in much the same way, even though they didn't have the II label)

 

[Stigbob]

If that means "lore", then are we really missing out on anything? Galnet may be a little weird to go on vacation, but the rest are usually mildly interesting "save these people stuck in space" "bust that fertilizer company" grinds the devs put out to generate some player interactions. Lore is what you make of it, since Frontier won't be acknowledging any player achievements other than discoveries. I'm surprised there aren't many journalists in elite, that concentrate on the players and their achievements, conflicts, etc. There's a lot of lore to be had there, actual lore, that's happening in the game world, that truly alter the universe in it's minor level, wether Frontier acknowledges or not. You can still walk your own path, and even though you can't assassinate the emperor, you can still bleed it's systems out from the inside with outlaw behavior. Certainly, solo actions amount to little, but in a team, you can do wonders. Go make some lore for yourselves, and share it. This doom attitude is truly the thing that has the potential to kill this game. If people lose enthusiasm, the game will dry out completely. But Drew should know that, as a writer.

The games been doomed on a permenant basis since pre-launch, it doesn't mean anything. Its just odd frontier forum terminology :

Doom=give me what I want right now
Open only=I didn't do any pre-purchase reading
Whiteknight=it hurts my feelings that you are enthusiastic
MOD conspiracy=I got an infraction for calling people names
Star Citizen=I spend unwisely

 

[Valorin]

The games been doomed on a permenant basis since pre-launch, it doesn't mean anything. Its just odd frontier forum terminology :

Doom=give me what I want right now
Open only=I didn't do any pre-purchase reading
Whiteknight=it hurts my feelings that you are enthusiastic
MOD conspiracy=I got an infraction for calling people names
Star Citizen=I spend unwisely

But... the game is DOOOOMED all the time! For various reasons n stuff!
ED's gone through at least five dooms in its life time already. Maybe it's like a cat, having nine lives.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I suspect one of the things they didn't want with multicrew - having seen how niche CQC ended up being - was to put any more barriers in the way of using it than absolutely necessary, even ones like "you must have hired NPC crew if you want to host". I've used it four times - twice as host, twice as crew - on all occasions just for tourism, and most of the ships weren't ones with anything for multicrew to actually "do".


Well, not so much that but even just practical things when everyone's operating in good faith like "what happens if the host loses connection?" or "what happens if people want to play in two parts with a break in-between but don't log back in at the same time?". Wing missions have exactly that problem, mitigated a bit because you don't need to stay instanced throughout the mission and the wing can for most (but not all!) missions be re-established without penalty.

Well the decisions were made and obviously I am just waxing lyrical now but imo "choosing" to have npc ships crew should not be a thing anyway. It saddens me that ships dont HAVE to have crew beyond a certain size - and (bang on point for a change from me) the lore has us covered there as well... The biggest ship flyable without crew is the Cobra III which even that optionally can take a crew person. Of course the amount of money the crew demand would need to be balanced a bit, if they took the salary of the current SLF pilot any player with an anaconda would be bankrupted

The only thing i personally would change from the older games however is rather than hanging around waiting for staff to fly your ship I would suggest on buying a ship they come with a basic crew - which we can replace as we see fit.
Do that and if the worst happens you would never get stuck on a players ship because you were technically never on it.... it would be just as accessible as what we have now, for me personally more so. One of the reasons I dont MC (I tried it a couple of times) is because of the telepresence disconnect. Dont get me wrong i would not use it often anyway, but would be far more likely to use it if it was in the knowedge that i was helping someone level up a crew person.
honestly for me legs is interesting if we get that in the new era that is great, but i would definitely trade that for a re factoring of the core game with a far bigger emphasis on internal consistency, and lore as well as stuff like the above.

but like i said, just waxing lyrical...... What ever we get or dont get in 2020 will already be decided imo.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

That's what happens when you replace stroy-telling with looter-shooter gameplay and slap "personal narration" on it.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

The games been doomed on a permenant basis since pre-launch, it doesn't mean anything. Its just odd frontier forum terminology :

Doom=give me what I want right now
Open only=I didn't do any pre-purchase reading
Whiteknight=it hurts my feelings that you are enthusiastic
MOD conspiracy=I got an infraction for calling people names
Star Citizen=I spend unwisely

You realise that your posts like this are exactly as bad as the ones you chastise tho right? You may not see it but you equally reinvent history to reinforce your own narrative that FD have never missed a deadline and that all features are in the game that they said would be .....

The truth i suspect as usual is somewhere in the middle..... The game is (hopefully) not doomed, there is a lot to enjoy in the game, but equally the game is behind schedule and parts of the game dont work as they were meant to and have been left out in the cold for significant amounts of time....... ridiculing those who are concerned by that helps no one either.

Back to lore, the thing is, some of it is done beautifully as well.

the narrative behind finding jamesons crashed cobra is great, and those logs really were poignant . They prove that it IS possible to have some form of consistent narrative even in an mmo like ED. Yes all they are are a few audio logs and reusing some old assets but I really enjoyed it (even if this timeline is not how mine ran, but that isnt a complaint at all, FFE had an either / or decision to be made and FD had to choose 1 as canon..... For the purposes of ED I do think they chose the correct one rather than happiness, peace and fluffy bunnies that happened in my FFE.

 

[Stigbob]

You realise that your posts like this are exactly as bad as the ones you chastise tho right? You may not see it but you equally reinvent history to reinforce your own narrative that FD have never missed a deadline and that all features are in the game that they said would be .....

Has that ever been my narrative ?. I'm far more likely to have said delays happen and I'm OK with it.

As for reinventing history I'm not showing you the Kickstarter quotes that comprehensively prove your assumptions wrong again. If that was likely to work it would have worked the last few times I did it.

The truth i suspect as usual is somewhere in the middle..... The game is (hopefully) not doomed, there is a lot to enjoy in the game, but equally the game is behind schedule and parts of the game dont work as they were meant to and have been left out in the cold for significant amounts of time....... ridiculing those who are concerned by that helps no one either.

Is this schedule just the usual forum theorycrafting or something substansive ?.

 

[Stealthie]

For example multicrew and galaxy wide telepresence....

That, right there, is two examples of how to do everything wrong in terms of lore.

Imagine if, say, Marvel made a "Spiderman" game and stated that it was canon within the Spiderman lore.
The dev's, in a bid to maintain immersion, set it up so that the player character couldn't die and, instead, when your health reached zero you got cocooned in a spider-web and emerged fully healed.
Perhaps the game takes place over a large area so the dev's create a mechanic where Spiderman can spin a huge web and use it as a trampoline to "bounce" himself all over the country.
Maybe there are parts of the game where you need to get information from criminals so they set it up so you can shoot a spider-web into an NPC's ear and do some kind of telepathic brain-suck.

The game is canon so those abilities are now canon too.
Spiderman is immortal because he can cocoon himself and be restored to life, he can bounce across the world on a web-trampoline and he can brain-suck people if he want's to.
Erk!

Sometimes a game dev' needs to be capable of deciding when to make use of suspension-of-disbelief rather than trying to come up with implausible lore, in a bid to maintain immersion, that ends up being so convoluted that it creates more problems than it solves and conflicts with a heap of pre-existing lore.

There's no hard & fast "rules" to this stuff but a smart writer (and a competent game design team must include somebody in that role) will have a good understanding of the subject-matter and will be able do make decisions which are sympathetic to the lore of a franchise.

 

[iFred]

Ignoring the posts of the well known forum whiteknights does help a lot.

 

[JesusRocks1988]

I carved out some time and watched Drew's stream yesterday. Have to say, for the most part I'm in agreement.

I am one of those who used the term "fluff" for the non-interactive Galnet pieces, and I was highly critical of them. I was also fairly glad when Frontier made the decision to retire them in favour of covering things that you can do in-game.

However - and I want to be perfectly clear about this, because maybe I wasn't when I was being critical of Galnet - I did not want or expect the "fluff" to disappear completely. I recognise how important that stuff is to adding to the lore of the game and making the galaxy feel like it's being lived in. My feeling was that the Galnet articles that looked like they should have related to interactive content (such as giving specific systems for CMDRs to go to etc...) should only be used for interactive content. We can all plainly see that Aisling's wedding dress shopping is background story, but a professor going missing in a specific system could feasibly be something CMDRs could investigate.

What I really intended by that was for those stories to have the assets added to the game, rather than stopping them altogether. Certainly didn't want all of the backstory stuff to disappear.

All that really needed to happen is for the writers to be more careful about making the implication that players could interact with the stories.

All that being said, the same confusion was felt with some of Drew's background stories that appeared in Galnet - the disappearance of the asteroid base and the theft of the meta alloys, the MetaDrive stuff etc... It wasn't immediately clear that this was related to Premonition and was the galaxy reporting on the events of the book. In some ways, the subsequent reading of those events in Premonition made for some great lightbulb moments, but I do remember CMDRs trying to investigate some of that stuff in game at the time the articles came out.

In short: Bring back Galnet lore fluff; be more careful about implying interactivity.

 

[Ozric]

Can we not turn this into a discussion about people's lives and what they may or may not be doing!

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Can we not turn this into a discussion about people's lives and what they may or may not be doing!

(tongue in cheek warning, I DO know exactly what you mean!)
But...... this post is perfect for these forums, you should apply for a job at FD..... because depending on how you read it you could be asking people NOT to do something...... OR just as viably be suggesting that we do do it.

ie..... "guys, could we not blow it up and see what happens?".

hence you end up with 2 groups of people both with completely opposite interpretations based on what you said and neither objectively wrong..

like I said, classic Elite Dangerous

(I suppose the ! rather than a ? at the end somewhat sinks my argument however)

 

[Ozric]

I am one with the forums

 

[Old Duck]

Story and gameplay are important, and they go hand-in-hand. Space Engine, which I do not own, has much better graphics, atmospheric worlds, comets, proper black holes, realistic nebula, etc. But without actual gameplay and story, I just don't see it as "fun", anymore than I find Google Earth "fun". I'd love to experience all these things in VR, but I just don't think it's worth the current price for me since I'd likely get bored pretty quick, despite the awesome experience of instantly teleporting to any world in the universe.

 

[Stigbob]

Story and gameplay are important, and they go hand-in-hand. Space Engine, which I do not own, has much better graphics, atmospheric worlds, comets, proper black holes, realistic nebula, etc. But without actual gameplay and story, I just don't see it as "fun", anymore than I find Google Earth "fun". I'd love to experience all these things in VR, but I just don't think it's worth the current price for me since I'd likely get bored pretty quick, despite the awesome experience of instantly teleporting to any world in the universe.

With a sandbox stories frequently just get in the way. Its the last thing I bought ED for.

 

[Old Duck]

With a sandbox stories frequently just get in the way. Its the last thing I bought ED for.

Rubbish. Skyrim is FULL of stories and lore, yet there is nothing stopping you from ignoring the vast majority of it and living your virtual life as a hunter selling pelts and meat. Same goes for ED. I already ignore a ton of stories / lore - I've never been to Formidine Rift, I don't care about Thargoids, I don't care about PowerPlay, and the list goes on. But the existence of all these stories and lore don't in any way prevent me from doing my own thing in ED.

Wait, are you saying Frontier did something WRONG by including these stories in their sandbox? Surely not, that would go against your programming! The first law of Stigbotics - Frontier is ALWAYS right!

 

[Stigbob]

Rubbish. Skyrim is FULL of stories and lore, yet there is nothing stopping you from ignoring the vast majority of it and living your virtual life as a hunter selling pelts and meat. Same goes for ED. I already ignore a ton of stories / lore - I've never been to Formidine Rift, I don't care about Thargoids, I don't care about PowerPlay, and the list goes on. But the existence of all these stories and lore don't in any way prevent me from doing my own thing in ED.

Doesn't the fact you can totally ignore the story in skyrim prove my point in that open world games don't actually need one ?

Wait, are you saying Frontier did something WRONG by including these stories in their sandbox? Surely not, that would go against your programming! The first law of Stigbotics - Frontier is ALWAYS right!

Nope, that only happened inside your head. Which seems to be my superpower.

 

[Rubbernuke]

With a sandbox stories frequently just get in the way. Its the last thing I bought ED for.

Without lore and some backstory, whats the context of anything? Why are Imperial ships white and curvy? Why should I support the Feds? With no context everything becomes superficial and differences meaningless.