Oh Max... you’re actually on my ignore list but today I’ve seen your posts when I’ve been logged out.
It’s a 2D move-to-the-blob minigame. That, my dear fellow, is why I consider it puerile. It’s pure puerility but pretending to not to be.
I mean, you say that, but personally I think they didn't go far enough in making it entirely unbelievable and shallow. It's still as believable as something you might see in the background on a monitor in the Scott Bakula era of Star Trek, when it could have been so much more deliciously worse than that.
Obviously what they should have done is put in several little gearwheels that you have to actually turn with your mouse pointer to move the inclination and angle of your telescope. Players with VR and motion control could actually experience the total immersion of winding the gears back and forth with realistic movements. Then you have another fly-wheel to physically tune in and out of the signals. You might say, well, why not just have a really trivial algorithm that tunes in for you, or one which actually does an optimised scanning pattern for you, to which I would reply, if you want kind of ridiculous black magic try Lord of the Rings, we don't believe in having computers do anything remotely useful in Elite Dangerous, we want to keep the raw adrenaline of moving a cursor around some blobs and twiddling a .
Really this design idiom should be extended to hyperspace jumps as well. Having a computer calculate the manipulation of exotic matter in order to warp the fabric of spacetime and propel a vessel across light years in an instant is for
wusses. We should have people
punching space with their bare fists until it gives up, instead.
[up].
