This is going to be the first idea dump thread I post on a variety of topics. The other one will be Supercruise & Scale vs A Living Galaxy, and it will come later.
I've been thinking recently about a number of aspects of ED, and I'm not usually the one to offer up many suggestions as others tend to get there first, or put in something more articulate than I can. However, the more I thought about these areas, I tried to think of what the real problems are behind the complaints and whether there were ways of solving those problems that would also cure the common complaints. This topic is all about the loot & craft system in Elite. I'll break this down into sections and I expect this will be lengthy - by the time I post this, I'll probably have worked on it over several hours.
So, here goes:
Engineers - Looting & Crafting
I am very late to the party making any suggestions about Engineers, or more generally, the looting and crafting system in Elite - I know that you (FDEV) are set on the path you've chosen for Engineer upgrades, and honestly, I'm not going to ask you to remove it. But there is something about loot & crafting that is missing in Elite Dangerous that is present in other games that makes the whole thing a more natural, enjoyable part of the game. I like the concept of loot & crafting in games generally, and I like the idea in Elite of being able to tinker with your ship to make it just the way you want it to be - makes me feel a little like Han Solo making his own personalised adjustments to the Millennium Falcon; turning a bog standard off-the-shelf Corellian Freighter into the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
However, as I said, there is something missing from the whole looting and crafting process to make said upgrades. Lets have a look at a selection of other games from other genres and styles and how they implement the mechanics and maybe see if we relate these back to Elite Dangerous. Looting & Crafting generally is the concept of A) finding materials in the game world in order to B) make things that are either otherwise unavailable, or too expensive to purchase.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Cooking
Looting - Collecting fruit, vegetables, meat and monster parts in various and appropriate places in the game world
Crafting - Going to a cooking pot, or making an open fire and combining the materials to make foods that provide various buffs
BOTW's method is so intuitive because it emulates what we do in everyday life and makes sense - combine common sense ingredients to make a common sense meal. Got rice, milk and mushrooms? Combine to make a mushroom risotto. And so on... It also helps because, though you can get these materials from a variety of containers - in the wild where you'd expect them (trees, fields, lakes); in crates and treasure chests; random drops from enemies - there is a heavy element of certainty about them. You know that there are lots of apple trees, and you know it will contain 3 apples; you know that there are ample fish in the lakes and rivers, and you get that fish's meat when you pick it up; you know that if you kill an animal, you'll get the appropriate type of meat in quantities dependent on the animal's size etc...
The crafting aspect is also very tactile - each item has its own very distinct design, and you can see those designs in the menu and in the world as 3D assets. You see those items get chucked in the cooking pot, and it really engages you with the crafting process. The sound is SO good as well - just look up the BOTW cooking sound if you don't know what I'm talking about. It's all about deeper engagement with what you put in one end of the process and what you get out of the other end.
Minecraft & Stardew Valley
Mining and Crafting
Looting - Collecting raw materials like wood, types of stone, ores
Crafting - Using either your own limited personal crafting menu for simple recipes, or making a crafting bench and furnace to combine the materials to make tools, equipment and advanced building items so you can mine higher level materials and build bases.
The real boon of this method is that you can craft the basics on the go, which will then allow you to craft the more advanced stuff from there. In Stardew Valley, you unlock recipes that you can make wherever you are, but will often require you to craft another material first - like you need to craft a furnace to put in some coal and ore to make a bar, and to make a top-tier sprinkler, you need 3 bars from rarer ores. Collection in Minecraft and Stardew have a good mix of certainty and RNG. The certainty comes in the overworld in the form of trees and stone - you know you're going to find that stuff in abundance wherever you look, and the RNG gets more and more pronounced as you go further down into mines to find veins of rare materials. In short, common materials are hardly affected by RNG at all, but the rare materials are heavily affected by it - causing them to be rare.
Crafting, like in BOTW, is a direct and tactile thing - you take the materials that you can see and interact with in the game world, and combine them to make a tool that you can use there and then - like a pickaxe - with the quality dependent on the level of material used.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Layers upon Layers of Crafting
Looting - Investigating easily marked "collection points" or doing a "salvage" mini-game, or playing the TigerTiger mini-game to collect a huge amount of randomly generated, yet thematically appropriate materials for use in the various crafting menus.
Crafting - Certain materials found are used to directly upgrade character abilities, certain raw materials are combined to refine manufactured items that can then apply buffs to selected characters, still other materials can be traded in shops for other stat-boosting items, and still other materials can apply direct upgrades in weapons.
Hooo boy, this one is heavy, heavy RNG, and JRPGs generally are renowned for their massive grindy nature, and XB2 is no different in that regard. However, you don't need to spend time doing things that you wouldn't normally do as part of your playthrough to get some materials. You need to travel extensively in this game, and all the way along your path you'll find these collection points that have a random chance of spawning a material appropriate to the surroundings (so, you'll get varying rarities of wood if your collection point is next to a tree). The crafting in this game is a little weaker than the previous two examples because the items themselves don''t have their own designs, and you're crafting through menus all the time. That being said, you can easily engage with it because the crafting locations take the form of little shopping districts that you can walk around and engage with, and you can apply the upgrades and buffs largely at any time you want.
Wolfenstein: The New Order & The New Colossus
Simple straight upgrades
Looting - Find the hidden upgrade packs scattered throughout the game world
Crafting - Apply an upgrade pack to a weapon to unlock one of up to 3 extra weapon buffs - done right from the pause menu.
This is the epitome of simple loot and crafting. The developers hand-placed upgrade packs that take a little off the beaten track exploring (usually no more than heading into an adjacent room) to find, and those upgrades can be instantly applied to the weapon of your choice. The really nice thing is that the upgrade screen has a really cool technical drawing of the weapon, showing the area of the weapon that you've applied the upgrade to (like a suppressor, or a scope, or extended magazines) and what it does. Very simple, barely looting and crafting at all, but just a very nice example of engaging the player with the creation.
Nier: Automata
Straightforward application
Looting - Locate randomised but respawnable collection points or destroy enemies to get materials
Crafting - Fulfill the requirements of a blueprint or recipe to apply an upgrade to a weapon, or find stat-buffing chips to apply directly to yourself as long as you have the capacity. The former is done in shops, the latter is done in the pause menu.
Being a JRPG, this very similar to Xenoblade Chronicles, but with extra elegance added. The benefit here is the the vast majority of it can be done in the pause menu. I haven't gotten very far through this game yet, so I'm not going to dwell on it too much, but I think the design aesthetic really helps to immerse the player into the upgrade and crafting process. It makes you feel like you're applying a RAM upgrade to a machine, rather than just being text-based. Also, you're pretty certain where and when you're going to get materials and the ones that come from destroyed enemies auto-collect. The collection points don't auto collect, but they're a one-stop-shop for several items at once, meaning you only have to interact with the point once to get the items added to your inventory.
Dead Space
Risky Crafting
Looting - Locate the hand-placed upgrade items in the game world
Crafting - Find a crafting bench and apply upgrades one at a time to your weapons, and hope you don't get killed when you leave the crafting menu.
Very, very similar to the Wolfenstein games - hand placed upgrade items that you need to search around for. The crafting is pretty dangerous as you can get ambushed while using one, and the upgrades themselves only really provide minor buffs, but they are straight buffs with no downsides.
Relating these to Elite
On the face of it, Elite has many of these elements already, but they still don't provide quite as pleasing an experience as these games manage. From this list, Elite has:
- Varied and appropriate containers for materials
- Materials have largely their own individual designs, or thematic designs
- Enemy drops
- Designated places to go and do crafting
- Limited crafting on-the-go ability (coming in 3.0)
- Fulfill the blueprints to get the upgrade
- RNG-based rarity
However, what Elite does not have from this list:
- Pleasing sound design for crafting
- The tactile sensation of handling materials
- Guaranteed hand-placed materials
- Aesthetic engagement with the crafting process (no technical drawings, the designs for the materials are not used in the GUI etc....)
- Auto collection of dropped materials (barring limpet controllers and basic scan data)
- Designated collection points along your route (Signal Sources are very, very close to this, but you're not guaranteed they're going to give you appropriate materials, or any at all depending on the scenario)
- Actual new tools being crafted - only upgrades to existing tools.
- Upgrade slots
I also forgot to mention Skyrim as an example above, mainly because I never played much of it, but from what I have played, the one thing I really liked was the ability to see the individual design of the item in your inventory and enter a view mode to look all around it. It is a crying shame that artist time was spent on the designs of the material families in Elite, and the designs can only be seen when they're on the outside of your ship - once collected, they're never seen again. They're listed as text in your inventory, and as text in the engineers screen - there's even a little flavour text about them, which is really nice. But I think it would engage people in the collection and crafting process if it were a little more visual.
Tech Broker - A Thought
Just before I make my suggestion fully, I'm also going to talk a little about the new upcoming Tech Broker. In my mind, THIS is what the looting and crafting system in Elite should always have been. Bring the required materials to a specialist and you get a new type of weapon or tool. So, the suggestion I'm about to make applies just as much to the Tech Broker as it does to Engineers, maybe even moreso (for the visual and tactile aspects). With regards to the tech broker, I am willing to wait for 3.0 to release before I start making loads of suggestions for it, but initially I think the material unlock quantities should not be astronomically high, but I do think the materials should be relevant, appropriate, and comprised of harder to come by materials and commodities. Just food for thought.
Suggestion
So, here we are, after that little analysis of how some other games do the deed, what do I suggest to improve Elite's system?
So, there we have it. I hope FD read this and agree with some of my thoughts on this. I would also welcome input from others to flesh out some of the ideas a little more, or point out some better variations perhaps. I hope this thread will be useful.
I've been thinking recently about a number of aspects of ED, and I'm not usually the one to offer up many suggestions as others tend to get there first, or put in something more articulate than I can. However, the more I thought about these areas, I tried to think of what the real problems are behind the complaints and whether there were ways of solving those problems that would also cure the common complaints. This topic is all about the loot & craft system in Elite. I'll break this down into sections and I expect this will be lengthy - by the time I post this, I'll probably have worked on it over several hours.
So, here goes:
Engineers - Looting & Crafting
I am very late to the party making any suggestions about Engineers, or more generally, the looting and crafting system in Elite - I know that you (FDEV) are set on the path you've chosen for Engineer upgrades, and honestly, I'm not going to ask you to remove it. But there is something about loot & crafting that is missing in Elite Dangerous that is present in other games that makes the whole thing a more natural, enjoyable part of the game. I like the concept of loot & crafting in games generally, and I like the idea in Elite of being able to tinker with your ship to make it just the way you want it to be - makes me feel a little like Han Solo making his own personalised adjustments to the Millennium Falcon; turning a bog standard off-the-shelf Corellian Freighter into the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
However, as I said, there is something missing from the whole looting and crafting process to make said upgrades. Lets have a look at a selection of other games from other genres and styles and how they implement the mechanics and maybe see if we relate these back to Elite Dangerous. Looting & Crafting generally is the concept of A) finding materials in the game world in order to B) make things that are either otherwise unavailable, or too expensive to purchase.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Cooking
Looting - Collecting fruit, vegetables, meat and monster parts in various and appropriate places in the game world
Crafting - Going to a cooking pot, or making an open fire and combining the materials to make foods that provide various buffs
BOTW's method is so intuitive because it emulates what we do in everyday life and makes sense - combine common sense ingredients to make a common sense meal. Got rice, milk and mushrooms? Combine to make a mushroom risotto. And so on... It also helps because, though you can get these materials from a variety of containers - in the wild where you'd expect them (trees, fields, lakes); in crates and treasure chests; random drops from enemies - there is a heavy element of certainty about them. You know that there are lots of apple trees, and you know it will contain 3 apples; you know that there are ample fish in the lakes and rivers, and you get that fish's meat when you pick it up; you know that if you kill an animal, you'll get the appropriate type of meat in quantities dependent on the animal's size etc...
The crafting aspect is also very tactile - each item has its own very distinct design, and you can see those designs in the menu and in the world as 3D assets. You see those items get chucked in the cooking pot, and it really engages you with the crafting process. The sound is SO good as well - just look up the BOTW cooking sound if you don't know what I'm talking about. It's all about deeper engagement with what you put in one end of the process and what you get out of the other end.
Minecraft & Stardew Valley
Mining and Crafting
Looting - Collecting raw materials like wood, types of stone, ores
Crafting - Using either your own limited personal crafting menu for simple recipes, or making a crafting bench and furnace to combine the materials to make tools, equipment and advanced building items so you can mine higher level materials and build bases.
The real boon of this method is that you can craft the basics on the go, which will then allow you to craft the more advanced stuff from there. In Stardew Valley, you unlock recipes that you can make wherever you are, but will often require you to craft another material first - like you need to craft a furnace to put in some coal and ore to make a bar, and to make a top-tier sprinkler, you need 3 bars from rarer ores. Collection in Minecraft and Stardew have a good mix of certainty and RNG. The certainty comes in the overworld in the form of trees and stone - you know you're going to find that stuff in abundance wherever you look, and the RNG gets more and more pronounced as you go further down into mines to find veins of rare materials. In short, common materials are hardly affected by RNG at all, but the rare materials are heavily affected by it - causing them to be rare.
Crafting, like in BOTW, is a direct and tactile thing - you take the materials that you can see and interact with in the game world, and combine them to make a tool that you can use there and then - like a pickaxe - with the quality dependent on the level of material used.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Layers upon Layers of Crafting
Looting - Investigating easily marked "collection points" or doing a "salvage" mini-game, or playing the TigerTiger mini-game to collect a huge amount of randomly generated, yet thematically appropriate materials for use in the various crafting menus.
Crafting - Certain materials found are used to directly upgrade character abilities, certain raw materials are combined to refine manufactured items that can then apply buffs to selected characters, still other materials can be traded in shops for other stat-boosting items, and still other materials can apply direct upgrades in weapons.
Hooo boy, this one is heavy, heavy RNG, and JRPGs generally are renowned for their massive grindy nature, and XB2 is no different in that regard. However, you don't need to spend time doing things that you wouldn't normally do as part of your playthrough to get some materials. You need to travel extensively in this game, and all the way along your path you'll find these collection points that have a random chance of spawning a material appropriate to the surroundings (so, you'll get varying rarities of wood if your collection point is next to a tree). The crafting in this game is a little weaker than the previous two examples because the items themselves don''t have their own designs, and you're crafting through menus all the time. That being said, you can easily engage with it because the crafting locations take the form of little shopping districts that you can walk around and engage with, and you can apply the upgrades and buffs largely at any time you want.
Wolfenstein: The New Order & The New Colossus
Simple straight upgrades
Looting - Find the hidden upgrade packs scattered throughout the game world
Crafting - Apply an upgrade pack to a weapon to unlock one of up to 3 extra weapon buffs - done right from the pause menu.
This is the epitome of simple loot and crafting. The developers hand-placed upgrade packs that take a little off the beaten track exploring (usually no more than heading into an adjacent room) to find, and those upgrades can be instantly applied to the weapon of your choice. The really nice thing is that the upgrade screen has a really cool technical drawing of the weapon, showing the area of the weapon that you've applied the upgrade to (like a suppressor, or a scope, or extended magazines) and what it does. Very simple, barely looting and crafting at all, but just a very nice example of engaging the player with the creation.
Nier: Automata
Straightforward application
Looting - Locate randomised but respawnable collection points or destroy enemies to get materials
Crafting - Fulfill the requirements of a blueprint or recipe to apply an upgrade to a weapon, or find stat-buffing chips to apply directly to yourself as long as you have the capacity. The former is done in shops, the latter is done in the pause menu.
Being a JRPG, this very similar to Xenoblade Chronicles, but with extra elegance added. The benefit here is the the vast majority of it can be done in the pause menu. I haven't gotten very far through this game yet, so I'm not going to dwell on it too much, but I think the design aesthetic really helps to immerse the player into the upgrade and crafting process. It makes you feel like you're applying a RAM upgrade to a machine, rather than just being text-based. Also, you're pretty certain where and when you're going to get materials and the ones that come from destroyed enemies auto-collect. The collection points don't auto collect, but they're a one-stop-shop for several items at once, meaning you only have to interact with the point once to get the items added to your inventory.
Dead Space
Risky Crafting
Looting - Locate the hand-placed upgrade items in the game world
Crafting - Find a crafting bench and apply upgrades one at a time to your weapons, and hope you don't get killed when you leave the crafting menu.
Very, very similar to the Wolfenstein games - hand placed upgrade items that you need to search around for. The crafting is pretty dangerous as you can get ambushed while using one, and the upgrades themselves only really provide minor buffs, but they are straight buffs with no downsides.
Relating these to Elite
On the face of it, Elite has many of these elements already, but they still don't provide quite as pleasing an experience as these games manage. From this list, Elite has:
- Varied and appropriate containers for materials
- Materials have largely their own individual designs, or thematic designs
- Enemy drops
- Designated places to go and do crafting
- Limited crafting on-the-go ability (coming in 3.0)
- Fulfill the blueprints to get the upgrade
- RNG-based rarity
However, what Elite does not have from this list:
- Pleasing sound design for crafting
- The tactile sensation of handling materials
- Guaranteed hand-placed materials
- Aesthetic engagement with the crafting process (no technical drawings, the designs for the materials are not used in the GUI etc....)
- Auto collection of dropped materials (barring limpet controllers and basic scan data)
- Designated collection points along your route (Signal Sources are very, very close to this, but you're not guaranteed they're going to give you appropriate materials, or any at all depending on the scenario)
- Actual new tools being crafted - only upgrades to existing tools.
- Upgrade slots
I also forgot to mention Skyrim as an example above, mainly because I never played much of it, but from what I have played, the one thing I really liked was the ability to see the individual design of the item in your inventory and enter a view mode to look all around it. It is a crying shame that artist time was spent on the designs of the material families in Elite, and the designs can only be seen when they're on the outside of your ship - once collected, they're never seen again. They're listed as text in your inventory, and as text in the engineers screen - there's even a little flavour text about them, which is really nice. But I think it would engage people in the collection and crafting process if it were a little more visual.
Tech Broker - A Thought
Just before I make my suggestion fully, I'm also going to talk a little about the new upcoming Tech Broker. In my mind, THIS is what the looting and crafting system in Elite should always have been. Bring the required materials to a specialist and you get a new type of weapon or tool. So, the suggestion I'm about to make applies just as much to the Tech Broker as it does to Engineers, maybe even moreso (for the visual and tactile aspects). With regards to the tech broker, I am willing to wait for 3.0 to release before I start making loads of suggestions for it, but initially I think the material unlock quantities should not be astronomically high, but I do think the materials should be relevant, appropriate, and comprised of harder to come by materials and commodities. Just food for thought.
Suggestion
So, here we are, after that little analysis of how some other games do the deed, what do I suggest to improve Elite's system?
Lessen the RNG in the Collection Process
Magnetic Auto-Collection for Manufactured Materials from Enemy Drops
Aesthetic Engagement with the Upgrade Process
There is a place for RNG in the material collection process; the rarity is a very good example of the right place for it. I know this is the kind of suggestion that has been made hundreds of times, this is why I'm starting with it. We need guaranteed places in the galaxy to get specific materials. Now, I know the Material Trader goes a ways to help this, but extending this to the actual collection that people do is better.
When I'm hacking a network on a planetary settlement, instead of giving me a random chance of a range of data items, guarantee me the data item appropriate to the security level of the base. Security+++ should be giving me a guarantee of Grade 5 hacked data. Security++ should guarantee me Grade 4. Security+ should give me Grade 3. Grades 1 and 2 should be guaranteed available from scanning networks that are legal.
When I'm driving around on a planet's surface looking for materials, let me use the composition of the planet to determine where I'm likely to find certain elements - that big red patch? it's going to be rich in Iron. That small yellow crater? Sulphur. And so on...
When I'm looking for the rarest manufactured materials like pharmaceutical isolators, guarantee me collection from distribution centres in outbreak systems - not high grade signal sources. Core Dynamics composites? Let me pirate a Farragut in dry dock for a small yield (1 or 2), or pirate an active Farragut stationed around a planet for a higher yield (4 to 6).
Imperial Shielding? Same deal as before, but with Imperial Capital Ships.
Searching for Exquisite Focus Crystals? Guarantee that I will find them all the time from blowing up NPC Corvettes and Cutters in Conflict Zones only. They're rare enough spawns as they are at the moment - get me lower grade focus crystals from NPC Assassination Target Corvettes and Cutters. Maybe even extend this to CMDR Corvetttes and Cutters to give people another reason to PVP if they want to.
And so on, and so on and so on.
Have RNG collection like we have by all means, but please put in some guaranteed, and sometimes challenging or dangerous sources for specific items. Don't make their appearance RNG based either. They need to be from persistent sources.
When I'm hacking a network on a planetary settlement, instead of giving me a random chance of a range of data items, guarantee me the data item appropriate to the security level of the base. Security+++ should be giving me a guarantee of Grade 5 hacked data. Security++ should guarantee me Grade 4. Security+ should give me Grade 3. Grades 1 and 2 should be guaranteed available from scanning networks that are legal.
When I'm driving around on a planet's surface looking for materials, let me use the composition of the planet to determine where I'm likely to find certain elements - that big red patch? it's going to be rich in Iron. That small yellow crater? Sulphur. And so on...
When I'm looking for the rarest manufactured materials like pharmaceutical isolators, guarantee me collection from distribution centres in outbreak systems - not high grade signal sources. Core Dynamics composites? Let me pirate a Farragut in dry dock for a small yield (1 or 2), or pirate an active Farragut stationed around a planet for a higher yield (4 to 6).
Imperial Shielding? Same deal as before, but with Imperial Capital Ships.
Searching for Exquisite Focus Crystals? Guarantee that I will find them all the time from blowing up NPC Corvettes and Cutters in Conflict Zones only. They're rare enough spawns as they are at the moment - get me lower grade focus crystals from NPC Assassination Target Corvettes and Cutters. Maybe even extend this to CMDR Corvetttes and Cutters to give people another reason to PVP if they want to.
And so on, and so on and so on.
Have RNG collection like we have by all means, but please put in some guaranteed, and sometimes challenging or dangerous sources for specific items. Don't make their appearance RNG based either. They need to be from persistent sources.
Magnetic Auto-Collection for Manufactured Materials from Enemy Drops
This one is very specific... let me fly through the debris field of a destroyed ship and activate a magnetic collection device that sweeps up only the manufactured materials that have dropped from the destroyed ship. This might be accused of being an "easy mode" instead of making you use limpets or taking the time to target and collect manually, BUT this has the main benefit of cleaning up the battlefield. As we know, our sensors can get very busy with all the floating materials and such, so having some kind of limited lore-friendly auto-collection can alleviate this problem. Maybe even limit it to a range of 300m or something, which will make sure you only collect if you fly through the debris field. It would also alleviate the perceived time-gating problem somewhat.
Aesthetic Engagement with the Upgrade Process
This is the really big one, and I think this is the real underlying problem with the loot and crafting system with Elite - there's a disconnect between player and activity here.
The art team has done a wonderful job on these material family designs that are never used again once they're brought on board your ship. Coincidentally the inventory panel, if you click to view more information about a specific material, you get the whole panel with a little flavour text on it, and a lot of blank space. Put a wireframe image of the material right there on the panel, so we can see what it looks like. Then put a button to enter a holographic view mode, where you can see the 3D model in its full glory, and look around it as you please.
This might require the art team to go back and individually design each material, or at least material sub-families (maybe the focus crystals could all have the same model, but the lower grades have cracks in, or the higher grades are different colours?)
Following on from this, I'm going to say it, the new Engineer upgrade screen is lovely and all, but it's again a lot of wasted space. If I'm crafting an efficient beam laser, by all means give me those wheels with the numbers on, but also give me a technical drawing of the beam laser and highlight on the drawing what part is being affected by the upgrade - like the heat vane section or whatever. Then as the numbers go up, change the highlight colour from being blank (no upgrade) to deep red (low tier upgrade) through orange shades (mid-tier upgrades) up to green (grade 5), then have maybe a white shiny highlight for reaching 100% G5. All on the technical drawing; not on the beam laser model itself.
Something visual to connect us as players to the upgrade process and make us feel like we're actually doing something. Some nicer completion sound effects wouldn't go amiss too - something even more in the direction of the sound of an F1 car having its tyres changed.
These visual improvements should also be extended to the commodities we carry in our cargo holds - I want to be engaged with what I'm carrying.
The art team has done a wonderful job on these material family designs that are never used again once they're brought on board your ship. Coincidentally the inventory panel, if you click to view more information about a specific material, you get the whole panel with a little flavour text on it, and a lot of blank space. Put a wireframe image of the material right there on the panel, so we can see what it looks like. Then put a button to enter a holographic view mode, where you can see the 3D model in its full glory, and look around it as you please.
This might require the art team to go back and individually design each material, or at least material sub-families (maybe the focus crystals could all have the same model, but the lower grades have cracks in, or the higher grades are different colours?)
Following on from this, I'm going to say it, the new Engineer upgrade screen is lovely and all, but it's again a lot of wasted space. If I'm crafting an efficient beam laser, by all means give me those wheels with the numbers on, but also give me a technical drawing of the beam laser and highlight on the drawing what part is being affected by the upgrade - like the heat vane section or whatever. Then as the numbers go up, change the highlight colour from being blank (no upgrade) to deep red (low tier upgrade) through orange shades (mid-tier upgrades) up to green (grade 5), then have maybe a white shiny highlight for reaching 100% G5. All on the technical drawing; not on the beam laser model itself.
Something visual to connect us as players to the upgrade process and make us feel like we're actually doing something. Some nicer completion sound effects wouldn't go amiss too - something even more in the direction of the sound of an F1 car having its tyres changed.
These visual improvements should also be extended to the commodities we carry in our cargo holds - I want to be engaged with what I'm carrying.
So, there we have it. I hope FD read this and agree with some of my thoughts on this. I would also welcome input from others to flesh out some of the ideas a little more, or point out some better variations perhaps. I hope this thread will be useful.
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