Let's say you take over complete control of development of E.D. - what would your roadmap be...

[RooksBailey]

Wow, so many ways to go with this one.

1) Announce that Odyssey will be coming to consoles but it might take some time to get there.
2) Fix anti-aliasing
3) Rebalance all Odyssey missions (threat levels seem like placeholders right now)
4) Implement natural resources on landable planets that can be mined
5) Implement the ability of cmdrs to build player-owned resource collectors on planets that will passively generate income by mining. However, these collectors will be expensive to purchase and maintain so prospecting (exploring) for a "gold mine" will be important. These mining outposts can be hacked by other players if discovered.
6) Add more things to discover in space/planetside even if it is nothing immediately game-changing (i.e., ancient ruins, crashed/derelict ships, strange monuments, etc.)
7) Completely change engineering. I would have it that each engineer requires the player to perform a quest to access his inventory. Once that requirement is met, then the player can purchase (randomly generated within limits - this will add exclusivity to mods) modified equipment from any station at full price, and at the engineer's location at a sizable discount. If purchased remotely, there is a delay (hours) before the modified equipment is delivered. No more mat farming only to discover that you still don't have enough for the mod you wanted!
8) Completely change PowerPlay. There have been lots of good suggestions for this one, so see those.
9) Limited weather on currently landable planets
10) MOAR SHIPS!
11) MOAR Odyssey mission-types: one-way missions (i.e., no need to return to the mission origin); rescue missions for lost colonists; survey missions...the potential list is endless for both ships, SRVs, and on-foot.
12) Thargoid foot combat (I fully anticipate this already )

Good topic, OP!

 

[Cmdr Eratosthenes]

#1 Ship interiors

That's it.

 

[HRDiagram]

Nice thread, feels like a true electoral campaign!

My top three priorities would be:
-de-magnetise pizza boxes
-engineers selling drinks
-abolition of counter-clockwise roll

How to achieve this?
-Introduction of death penalty for devs who don't achieve minimum KPIs
-forced shifts for cleaners, caterers and artists to work on optimisation, as they should
-daily streams where the devs descibe their favourite single line of code

 

[EdzUp]

Bounty kills payable there and then not when you dock and turn it in, for a brief demonstration how this works look at ffe

Basically you kill them and then get an award message

 

[Aidan Brooder]

Hm... OK, so I'll be in that enviable position to have limited resources and a whole forum full of people that all want different stuff.
Half of my team are probably creating cute, realistic looking animals and angry looking dinosaurs 60% of their time.
My budget is further threatened by the mounting amounts of calming drugs for the community team.
So let me think...

For many of the things I would do, I think that train has come and passed.
1. Engineering & the Grind: I like that you can tune your ships, but the inevitable end result should not be 500% more effective than the original ship. Any improvement should also come with a significant downside. All in all players should have to be selective about what they engineer and the final bonus should not be higher than 25% or so. The grind for materials should be removed or replaced by something more fun at least.
Like searching for parts on a scrapyard or a ship's graveyard. Something that doesn't take hours of praying to RNJesus.
2. Some changes/additions to exploration. Like e.g.: Exploration contracts. Large companies & governments will offer long term contracts e.g. to chart a specific cluster of space or find a specific planet type in a region, take soil samples from a list of planets, put robot workers/initial equipment for a future outpost, set up a communications array (which could also be used to sell your own data without going to the bubble), etc
3. One carrier per squadron, not one per player. Also make it so that carriers are something that need a certain number of players to maintain. Personally I'm fed up with carriers everywhere and everyone having a carrier. It should be a cool squadron base, not a space taxi. Certainly also should have defense guns.
4. Bartenders sell drinks.
5. People I never saw before don't offer me shady jobs on space stations.
6. Revised crime & punishment. More relaxed for small crimes, but larger crimes like murdering other ships (doesn't matter if PC/NPC) without a reason will result in both a bounty, that can be paid off, AND a more permanent record (each major faction keeping it's own record.) After a while you can no longer legally travel in high security systems of the people you pestered. This increases if you continue down the piracy route.
But: I'd also add hidden bases - like the pirate bases of old - in the periphery where wanted players can repair/refit and which also sell certain items that make piracy a bit more endurable. (Like a limited time signal scrambler, so you can travel to other systems without being hunted immediately).
I think playing a pirate should offer it's own reward and feeling with it.
7. Make it much harder again to earn credits. Make more realistic prices for gear. How can a gun cost more than a starship, pls? The NRA also wants to know.

Then I'd organize a team event, where we build a bunker together with food & water for the next five years. And I'd go into hiding there.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I'd come up with a proper SP iteration of Elite instead.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

If I brought my own development studio to relieve frontier:

• A single player campaign like tie fighter. Released in chapters for quickness.
• Gas giants, they look like ping pong balls and i think they're so much more fascinating than trees on earth like worlds.. really? worst idea ever.

If frontier continued to build it:

• Backport fps content to horizons. The playerbase should be unified somehow, not truncated. In may 2022, the gameplay sadly might be more valuable than the graphical changes.
• Ship interiors released and sold individually to justify continued development. Just start with placeholders for dashboard bobbleheads. If the concept is popular, develop a feature patch with cosmetic items that require discovering blueprint items via all the gameplay pillars (combat, trade, mining, exploration, fps) and materials from all the gameplay pillars. This is especially valuable for new fps content as its dead to you if you don't care about suit upgrades.
• This should recover from odysee and they can continue on the original plan afterwards.

Hows that sound?

 

[bruce1337]

No holds barred balancing pass to Engineering (and some ships).

Overhaul C&P (and get rid of the utterly ridiculous "anonymous access").

Undo the mutual exclusivity of regular and AX combat.

Make the issue tracker not a convoluted graveyard of bug reports and actually commit to fixing long-standing bugs.

Share the sensor spaces of mothership/SLF and wings.

Enable community input for cosmetics. Worked fantastically for e.g. Dota 2.

Give hired NPCs more functions than flying one SLF. Why even have 3 slots?

Give the Thargoids more depth. They are obviously intelligent, why have there been no attempts whatsoever to communicate other than down barrels?

8B long range sensors weigh more than an Anaconda's hull, for about 10% better performance than a 10 ton 3A LR module. It's ludicrous.

How can one 1.3 ton heat sink module purge the coolant from a Cutter 3 times? Should be an optional module, not a utility.

Oh, and I would make subtargets persist when retargeting, and move the "cargo acquired" pop-up away from the scoop reticle so it doesn't block it.

 

[Muzz UK]

Probably stop threads like this and we're doomed threads ever making it onto the forums.

 

[Brrokk]

Probably stop threads like this and we're doomed threads ever making it onto the forums.

This. We've all got some favourite ideas, which is only natural, but skimming this thread should demonstrate very clearly that FD can't expect to get a good idea for the way ahead by listening to players! They can compile a huge wish list of good things but there's no way to prioritise any of it.

 

[BDelacroix]

Examine the code and despaghetti fy it. (Refactoring). This way any future updating is made a lot easier.

Groom the backlog and pick some showy things as well as some of the recurring bugs. Thing is, those bugs have to be repeatable. Not possible to have every combination of computer that is out there so don't get too excited. Hopefully some of the reasons for these can be found through the refactoring.

One thing I'd like to do is add little stories sprinkled everywhere. They don't even have to be huge game altering stories. As an example, Stellaris has all of these anomolies to investigate. A lot of them end with nothing substantial but they have interesting things going on. It adds flavor. We have 4 some billion systems.

We have a few of them in the game, very few and you have to almost run into them by accident. That's a big lottery to find one on accident.

 

[Leadfoot]

Undo the mutual exclusivity of regular and AX combat.

This, more than anything, yes. One should not need "special" weapons to fight thargoids. As I understood it, in the original game, you already had the weapons that could defeat them. It was SKILL, not "AX weapons" that determined if you survived or not.

I was doing the thargoid clearout CG in Novas last night. I have full AX weapons on my ship except for one laser beam. On my way to an AX Conflict zone I get interdicted by some thargoid hugger (he never said WHY he interdicted and then shot at me but I assume he's a bug hugger, so I'll leave it there). My Krait only has one "human" weapon. If I arm for HUMAN fighting, I don't do well against Thargoids.

One should be able to do it well with ALL weapons. At the very least, add engineering to make them all effective against both so we don't have to keep switching ships, and weapons.

------------------------

Also, add other civilizations in other parts of the galaxy would be interesting. Maybe trade or something like that. Maybe they're afraid of us "aliens" and maybe shoot first and we'd have to find some way to show we're not something to be afraid of (maybe bring chocolate or something with us).

We can't go down to ELW's but having mining droids to go down for us would be nice. Maybe mining food, etc. Other planets, mining minerals, ores, etc, on an industrial scale.

Gas giants we can dive into and find space whales. Come on, we can do something like this:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xInC7RKuyuo


Planets with walking creatures. FD has planet zoo and Jurassic World. Keep the skeletal formats and put different skins on them. Or just remove the skeleton and let things "squirm" around. Samples of things would be nice. I'm sure we could sneak right up to them (if you can figure out where the back is) and snip a little bit off to take back home for SCIENCE.

 

[Old Duck]

In order of execution:

1. Supercruise (key feature) Overhaul - details here. (Horizons and Odyssey)
2. Powerplay Overhaul (Horizons and Odyssey)
3. Exploration Overhaul (Odyssey)
   • Replace hand-crafted assets with procgen assets
   • Complete rework of scanning / "scientific discovery" gameplay
   • Added risks and challenges
4. NPC Crews (Odyssey) *
5. Rudimentary Ship Interiors (Odyssey) *
   • Bridge, access ramp, customizable captain's quarters on large ships
   • Artificial gravity thanks to Guardian Tech (no more magnetic pizza boxes)
   • Short range teleporter or option to telepresence oneself to a concourse to avoid walking for those who hate walking
6. Gas Giants (New DLC)
   • Subnautica-like gameplay (submerge into clouds rather than water, dangerous giant living creatures, abandoned sky bases, etc)
   • A new type of mining (gasses) for trade
   • Storms!!
7. Proper Atmospheric Worlds (New DLC, but also regen of Odyssey planets while at it)
   • Includes water worlds
   • Biomes (deserts, ice caps, oceans, etc)
   • Very basic life on some planets, but don't get carried away (not NMS)
   • Basic weather (doesn't need to be Microsoft Flight Simulator accurate)
8. High Altitude Flyable ELWs (New DLC)
   • "Prime Directive" and "No Fly Zones" prevent landing on these planets, but at least let us fly above them at a flight simulator altitude, where vegetation can be textures rather than individual assets. This allows for ELWs without totally breaking the current Cobra Engine or requiring a super computer.
   • Special ELW high altitude exploration gameplay loops (atmospheric sampling, high-res mapping, etc)

I could go on and on and on, but this is good for now. If nothing else, a roadmap like this would get people exciting I think, even if it doesn't scratch everyone's itches. It would definitely scratch some of my itches. Note that I'm not including the implicit "fix bugs, improve UI (like that terrible carrier-infested system map), sneak in new little feature here and there" stuff that usually doesn't go on a roadmap but we all want and expect.


* X4 Inspired

 

[Ian Skippy]

I'd start with 'small' stuff:

• Fix engineer grind. No real explanation needed I suppose.
• Rebalance shield/armor. There is a great system of armor/module damage that we'll never see due to shield tanking.
• Rebalance system security. Make high-sec spawn a wing of uber-engineered ships instantly. Increase rewards for anarchy factions, reduce them in high-sec systems.
• Reset logout timer when taking damage.
• Increase bounties for killing ships (NPC and cmdrs) by 50x, and triple income for criminal missions. Make it so you earn a lot, but you cant pay off the bounty with a fraction of the profits. You gain a lot, but will be hated by that faction.
• Chain EDO and ship missions. Eg. the 'find assassination target by hacking terminal' should become an EDO template by hacking a data port instead of the Horizon SRV mission.

Then the medium stuff:

• Thargoid on-foot missions without requiring special thargoids-only weapons.
• Proper player trading: everything should be tradable, and prices freely set. Let players buy/sell opinion polls for 10 million each.
• Pet wish: Sell drinks in FC bars, based on carrier stock. 1t of a drink (including rares)=100 drinks. Prices freely set. Let players create cheap free4all anarchistic dives, or fancy invite-only clubs with nothing but lavian brandy and the likes.

Finally the Big Two:

• Ship interiors
• Atmo planets

 

[Ian Skippy]

Remove all ship based gameplay (except for Apex) and focus solely on first-person features.

I'd change it from first person to second person. Lets be innovative here, not everything needs to be 1st or 3rd person perspective!

 

[Alec Turner]

Pure pie in the sky ...

Whatever it costs - get Michael Brookes, Zac Antonacci, Kay Ross, maybe Sandro (and probably a few others from ED's hayday who's names I don't know or have forgotten) back on board, throw out most of Odyssey, have a day long meeting headed by D.Braben (if he still has the passion for this) where we explain/remind people what the ethos behind the true heart and spirit of Elite is, and then start building Odyssey again.

Edit: oh, and if DB lacks the motivation then put Souvarine in charge.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Pure pie in the sky ...

Whatever it costs - get Michael Brookes, Zac Antonacci, Kay Ross, maybe Sandro (and probably others from ED's hayday who's names I don't know or have forgotten) back on board, throw out most of Odyssey, have a day long meeting headed by D.Braben (if he still has the passion for this) where we explain/remind people what the ethos behind the true heart and spirit of Elite is, and then start again.

Edit: oh, and if DB lacks the motivation then put Souvarine in charge.

Oh, what I wouldnt give for our bearded Axeman to answer all questions with "No", "Unlikely", "Interesting idea, but no" or "no comment" again. Those were the days!

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I'd get rid of the stupid jumperitis. There is no reason having to feacture space into tine segments how far your FSD reaches and then be stuck repeating this sgyte over and over for every player.
Obviousky MP is one of the reasons and guess what I think about MP and Elite.

 

[HRDiagram]

• Pet wish: Sell drinks in FC bars, based on carrier stock. 1t of a drink (including rares)=100 drinks. Prices freely set. Let players create cheap free4all anarchistic dives, or fancy invite-only clubs with nothing but lavian brandy and the likes.

Actually, it would be nice if drinks were introduced and they had an intoxicating effect that fades over time and seriously affects piloting and aiming skills, like blurred/wobbly vision and imprecise, erratic controls.
That would be fun!

 

[Gleitfrosch]

In order of execution:

1. Supercruise (key feature) Overhaul - details here. (Horizons and Odyssey)
2. Powerplay Overhaul (Horizons and Odyssey)
3. Exploration Overhaul(Odyssey)
   • Replace hand-crafted assets with procgen assets
   • Complete rework of scanning / "scientific discovery" gameplay
   • Added risks and challenges
4. NPC Crews (Odyssey) *
5. Rudimentary Ship Interiors (Odyssey) *
   • Bridge, access ramp, customizable captain's quarters on large ships
   • Artificial gravity thanks to Guardian Tech (no more magnetic pizza boxes)
   • Short range teleporter or option to telepresence oneself to a concourse to avoid walking for those who hate walking
6. Gas Giants (New DLC)
   • Subnautica-like gameplay (submerge into clouds rather than water, dangerous giant living creatures, abandoned sky bases, etc)
   • A new type of mining (gasses) for trade
   • Storms!!
7. Proper Atmospheric Worlds (New DLC, but also regen of Odyssey planets while at it)
   • Includes water worlds
   • Biomes (deserts, ice caps, oceans, etc)
   • Very basic life on some planets, but don't get carried away (not NMS)
   • Basic weather (doesn't need to be Microsoft Flight Simulator accurate)
8. High Altitude Flyable ELWs (New DLC)
   • "Prime Directive" and "No Fly Zones" prevent landing on these planets, but at least let us fly above them at a flight simulator altitude, where vegetation can be textures rather than individual assets. This allows for ELWs without totally breaking the current Cobra Engine or requiring a super computer.
   • Special ELW high altitude exploration gameplay loops (atmospheric sampling, high-res mapping, etc)

I could go on and on and on, but this is good for now. If nothing else, a roadmap like this would get people exciting I think, even if it doesn't scratch everyone's itches. It would definitely scratch some of my itches. Note that I'm not including the implicit "fix bugs, improve UI (like that terrible carrier-infested system map), sneak in new little feature here and there" stuff that usually doesn't go on a roadmap but we all want and expect.


* X4 Inspired