…it’s now. Bring on all the next content for the advancement in the story of this game!! I hate it for console folks, but I’m also excited to see what’s next!
If there was a time for the Panther Clipper…
- Thread starter Cmdr Kellett781
- Start date
Rofl, right!? I can’t speak for anyone but my self, but to answer your question… yes. Yes I shall.
I think great things are going to come this year now that Frontier isn’t trying to produce 2 versions of this game. Hoping the PC is one of them.
Now that the consoles are not getting Odyssey, it's time for FDev to unlock the new ships and Thargoid foot combat.
I love how there's all these threads springing up now going "Now that console dev is dead, they can focus on new content!"
Absolutely wrong. The demise of console development, if anything, highlights the problem of forging forward with delivery of "new content" when your core mechanics and game design are simply not up to scratch, and your design principles appearing ad-hoc at best (numerous mechanics look nothing like their launch implementation).
There continues to be significant and consequential issues with the game, and substantial deviation in base mechanics for which there is reason to differ, between Odyssey and Horizons (such as C&P and Mission Stacking). While Odyssey continues to be a standalone DLC compared to Horizons, with the latter being a valid way to continue playing the game, these outright broken and inconsistent mechanics will continue to plague future development.
Unless that gets addressed, delivery of new content will just drive the current game towards the same fate that's befallen VR and now Console development. It's what happens when you over-extend yourself in the content space.
Absolutely wrong. The demise of console development, if anything, highlights the problem of forging forward with delivery of "new content" when your core mechanics and game design are simply not up to scratch, and your design principles appearing ad-hoc at best (numerous mechanics look nothing like their launch implementation).
There continues to be significant and consequential issues with the game, and substantial deviation in base mechanics for which there is reason to differ, between Odyssey and Horizons (such as C&P and Mission Stacking). While Odyssey continues to be a standalone DLC compared to Horizons, with the latter being a valid way to continue playing the game, these outright broken and inconsistent mechanics will continue to plague future development.
Unless that gets addressed, delivery of new content will just drive the current game towards the same fate that's befallen VR and now Console development. It's what happens when you over-extend yourself in the content space.
You're not wrong. Elite's core gameplay design seems to have suffered through several eras of different design heads, leading to the schizophrenic wonder we have now. Forays into multiplayer, forays into rpg-style engineering stat upgrading (when it should have been a side-grade system for adapting ships to different roles), into pvp, into powerplay, but none really fleshed out as a central, ordering design from which everything else follows. And VR only happened because one dev knew how to get that working inside a week. This sort of 'suck it and see' approach has allowed for plenty of innovation, but has also created quite a mess.
What would you suggest by way of a design overhaul? Is that even possible now?
...or even just making the game fun to play.
It's not a "design overhaul" that's needed per se; everything mechanically needed exists, it just needs to be fixed and/or fleshed out... and by fleshed out I mean the systems actually used for the benefit of the game. I've written about this too many times to repeat nowadays... FD needs to stop putting so much effort into their core game mechanics only to be used once in a niche scenario once and never again, then broken because it simply doesn't get looked at anymore. They need to use these mechanics in-anger, everywhere.
We didn't need FCs or Space Legs, and we sure as heck don't need Base Building, and new ships simply don't matter when the core game loops stay the way they currently are. Instead, they should be investing more heavily in their procedural mechanics, doing things like:
- Building a bank of reusable pluggable dialog "blocks"
- Stitching them together into potentially never-ending procedural chains using scenarios and in-flight mission generation mechanics; and
- Once again, use these cool assets and effects in the templates offered
As an example, going to a Distress Call USS where you find a damaged ship should not just be "repair ship, job done" like it currently is.. rather once you've completed repairs, you get (as two distinct threads using those banks of "reusable, pluggable dialog "blocks") either:
- Pilot gives their thanks, says they were attacked by a pirate lord at location X; or
- They were exploring a temporal anomaly[1] at location X
... with both providing dynamically generated missions to explore Location X. If you accept, you get there and
- Find the pirate lord, who may offer a counter-proposal, or you just kill them; or
- Find the temporal anomaly, an analog of the lagrange storm clouds and a single, distorted signal ping... exploring you find a black box in amongst the most chaotic parts of the cloud.
When you do either-or, you might then get a follow-up action
- The pirate lord sent a distress just before destruction, allowing you to locate the position of their base, where you can then fly to and do a wave-based combat scenario
- The black box may have been ejected from a ship while attempting to FSD, but reports indicate the jump likely failed shortly after, and gives you a location... with the ship wreck carrying a lot of valuable engineering materials[2].
Once you do either of these, you could then receive a signal either from local authorities monitoring the pirates for a new activity with escalating rewards... conversely the same could be done by a local faction who was looking for this missing ship, with your proximity triggering a sensor alert in the wrecked ship.
This may sound complex, but the thing is none of this needs new mechanics or a redesign. Everything to do this currently exists or has been evidenced to exist. Just for some reason, FD refuse to actually use them, instead wasting their time on unnecessary "content expansions" which introduce new mechanics on top of already broken or under-utilised mechanics.
There's so many missed opportunities... those fixed people offering missions at bases? Why aren't they Tier 2 contacts, who can offer exclusive services, procedurally assigned to those contacts, like "mini engineers" but with slightly different utility.
Eh... this is getting longer than it needs to. The fundamental issue is the extant mechanics the game offers either aren't being employed by FD, or are broken (e.g Thargoid Tissue Sampling). New ships and modules won't fix that... "Base Building" won't fix that either; in fact, it would break it even more. New handcrafted story won't fix it, because it's hamstrung by the under-baked mechanics used to support said story. They just need to fix and use what they currently have. Will that get them more money? Not like an Odyssey expansion.... but they'll stop haemorrhaging players and have a larger audience for their next expansion.
[1] By temporal, I don't mean time-travel, rather, an anomaly that will only last a short length of time.
[2] You might say "but relogging exploits!". There are on-arrival event triggers in the game which can be used to complete the current phase and initiate the next phase.
Great ideas, and I agree that they could do a lot more with mission chains and fleshing out signal source events. A range of optional missions that drop when you turn in occupied escape pods seems an obvious addition too, or at the very least, some randomised blub that gives a bit of background regarding the occupant (akin to npc crew bios that we aleady have).
I like how fake that is. You can see a Vulture smashed into the side of it, and multiple bits in the back look like parts of the Type-10 stretched out in a taffy puller.
The panther clipper model in the game has been updated at some point. It doesn’t look like this. Some hackers have recently spawned it into the game.
The best time for the Panther was about 5 years ago. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't still be added ASAP.