FD might claim that there's a 100 person team but I'm skeptical of this, in anycase FD have admitted that this does not mean that there's 100 people cutting code, but some of the team members sort out the marketing and promotions etc, likewise ED doesn't really generate enough of this to justify permanent members of staff doing very little all day so the implication is that there people in support roles are working across other teams and doing the marketing for Planet Coaster et all. So one member of ED's team can be a member of the team for Planet Coaster and Jurassic World all at the same time which means that they cannot give 100% focus to ED.
I disagree. 100 person staff is a relatively small team for a game like ED, and they are not going to push out tons of work. There will be programmers, Coders, Designers, 3D artists, AI writers, server admin etc. They wont be all working on the same stuff as each other. ED has had a lot of updates and in my view it does justify it. I also have a feeling that some of the updates have been tough to implement (such as multicrew). People that have been to Fdev towers know how many are working there.
Likewise I think there's something deeply immoral about partly crowd funding a game, promising the world and then not delivering whilst using the money raised to fund other projects. This might be normal operating procedure but I still don't approve of it.
They didn't promise the world. They stated what they wanted to add and achieve. Whether it ends up being acheivable is another thing. They have not done anything immoral.
Also exploration gameplay for multicrew with spacelegs would be no different to that which we have already, instead of parking of the ship and taking a screenshot, you'd park your vac suit and take a screenshot. All you'd actually get is a slightly closer look at the in-game assets.
It will allow more methods of interaction. Exploring the inside of alien bases for instance. We can't do that currently apart from SRVing around the Thargoid structure, but it could be far more fun being able to do more stuff on foot.
Exploring the insides of generation ships or other derelict ships, exploring the inside of abandoned planetary bases for missions or because you can, instead of just pressing a button to listen to a story, we may have to hack the computer system inside to find out what has happened and get some useful data.
Going to those space bars and getting unique missions that are not faction affiliated from them etc.
There is loads that space legs can add. But I would prefer them to focus on one aspect such as missions for space legs. I don't want it spread out too thin over a number of activites, as then it will feel half baked again. The main issue with FDev is that they keep adding little bits for everyone with each update when in actuality they should concentrate on one aspect of the game at each update. For instance, when 2.0 came out and we got planetary landing, it was good as an inititial start. Every update to horizons after that should have concentrated on planetary gameplay instead of releasing a hodge podge of different features. It made horizons as a whole a very disjointed update, that added a lot, but none of it was fully baked.
3.3 could have been all about exploration instead of, exploration, mining, guilds, combat, etc. Concentrate on one aspect and make it as good as possible is what I think they should have done. I think that is why the development has seemed slow. I really do not like NMS, but if you look at how they go about the updates, its all concentrated, which makes the update seem much bigger but really are not. It's something FDev should be looking at.
Finally game development takes a long time, so even if FD are watching and like some of the ideas espoused in this thread it's already too late to implement them.
Yes it does. The next era will not be released for over a year so depending on how difficult it is to implement they may have the time. But as you and I said, lets wait and see.