Love for Exploration

[MajorM3ss]

Greetings Commanders,

Though I am relatively new here, I'm an older generation gamer, I went to the #FX2017 expo, because of my love for ED, and since then, i have been trying to work out the best way to make a constructive post that everyone understands, especially FD themselves.
While i greatly enjoyed the expo, I felt like I was left wanting, and not in a good way, the forecast for ED, while being extensive, is in my opinion, being dragged out, it feels like FD is resting on it's lorels somewhat, and to better explain that, it felt to me like the whole thing was a meet and greet for the community, paid for by the community, and FD, while hosting the event, did little to excite and engage the community, there is SO MUCH LOVE in the elite world, i felt it as soon as i got there, people from all over europe, making the journey like some kind of pilgrimage, i was truly humbled by this, and it was meeting these fellow commanders that made the show for me.
Amongst all this, was the big speech at the end of the day, the "reveal", you could have heard a pin drop in that place, everyone silent as the "Beyond" update program was unveiled, this is where i paid the most attention, I, like so many of you out there in the ED world, LOVE exploring, I am currently the other side of the galaxy doing just that, exploring, given that there IS so much POTENTIAL in Elite, it is rude not to venture out and take a look, now then, DB said there would be more love for both the Alliance, and exploration, i want to focus on exploration.
EVERYONE keeps banging on about atmospheric landings, it was all everyone I spoke to was talking about, and, while i think it would an awesome thing to experience in the game, it is not the most important.
I think that the whole navigation interface needs a complete overhaul, it is crude when you consider these things, we are exploring space, we are capable of faster than light travel, and we have a plethora of ship combinations to do it in, and when your done considering what the game promises, get in your ship and try to navigate the stars AS YOU WOULD EXPECT TO BE ABLE TO, not how FD has laid it out, after all, what about way points, what about a sectioned galaxy, what about "been to" history?
I have found that, for the most part, the community wants atmospheric landing for the graphical content it could promise, but what about getting the flight dynamics in order first, most of us don't really know what we want until someone explains it, and look at it another way, could we really fly these crates in space with what we have, i know it comes down to imaginatio, but, there is ahuge amount of reality plumbed into elite as it is, so there it is, my 2 cents.

o7 Commanders
Majorm3ss, out!

 

[PiggyPiggyPig]

Atmospheric landings. And when do we want them? Now!

A lot of people who bought Horizons are eligible for free content when it arrives. I wonder if FD are motivated by free. It could be that they are under staffed because they cannot afford to employ a larger pool of talent. Maybe its time to throw some coin their way.

This is probably why atmospheres are a long way off. I'd happily pay for it. It would be more than nice to get buffeted by atmospheres, to see the nose of my ship glow white hot on entry. It would be nice to give myself a break form the eternal black sky and skim the lakes, forests and mountain ranges of far off worlds.

 

[MajorM3ss]

Hey Piggy, well, firstly, look at the stock exchange, FD are NOT short of coin, secondly, i think that the over all sim is evolving at a pretty steady rate, but the new content they are planning to roll out for the whole of next year, "Beyond", is ready now, if it were not the case, how on earth could they schedule it with that degree of accuracy?
I'm not complaining, i'm criticising, as for the Navigation rework, i think that is essential, just to bring the "Tech" to a reasonable state of application, after all, any flight sim you use today, has an advanced hud and nav sysytem, more so than ed, by a long light year, that is all i meant.

o7.

 

[varonica]

Atmospheric landings. And when do we want them? Now!

A lot of people who bought Horizons are eligible for free content when it arrives. I wonder if FD are motivated by free. It could be that they are under staffed because they cannot afford to employ a larger pool of talent. Maybe its time to throw some coin their way.

I think it's not about the pool of talent, I think it's about the vision. The last thing to do is to have a massive increase in people who don't share the same vision as the existing team. I would rather a smaller team focussed on the game than a larger team with a fuzzy outlook on what they should be doing. Heck it's hard enough to get two people here to agree on what is important, a bigger dev team might lose sight.

Personally I am not too worried about atmospheric landings, what I want is to be able to fuel scoop from gas giants and land at drifting cloud cities. Of course atmospheric landing would be nice, but ultimately pointless if all we get is the current planets/moons with air. I suspect this is where the slowdown is, atmospheric planets...nice, atmospheric planets with lots of new content...much nicer.

 

[marx]

Personally, I'm actually glad that at the Frontier expo, they promised improving the existing planets first. I've always said that before landing on atmospheric planets, even on barren ones, they'd need to improve the gameplay on current ones. (To say nothing about the "beige", heh.)
Navigational improvements should come as a part of that though, because like you said, planetary gameplay is in dire need of those. I believe that FD have realised that by now too.

But as always, they're holding their cards close, and only showing stuff when it's almost finished. They could do it like other developers do, and show off prototype stuff that might not be in-game a year or even two later. I'm not sure I'd like that, but for better or for worse, they are locked in to their approach by now.

As for new hires and the talent pool... There is the problem that FD is based in the UK, and while I don't know much about the state of the games industry, from what I heard from friends in other highly-skilled areas, all the uncertainty surrounding Brexit made the country much less attractive. As such, employers have to make considerably better offers than elsewhere, and even then, people are still wary about the general mood. Now, I have no idea about the available talent pool in the games industry in the UK, but as with other places, I imagine that companies now mostly have to choose from domestic talent, as it became much more difficult to find foreign ones. For the time being, at the very least.

What's ready and what's not: outside of FD, who knows? Perhaps atmospheric flight and planets are mostly ready by now, and they are just held back for the planetary rework. Perhaps it's only prototyped yet. But for content updates, there is an important factor: if the deadline's nearing, and not everything is complete yet, you can just hold some stuff back for the next one. For example, is the Krait not ready in time? Well, let's put it out in the next update. Did we promise gas giant flight, but it's not ready yet? Well...
There are of course different teams working on different stuff in FD, and these above would be why the biggest new stuff is scheduled for Q4, not earlier quarters. They probably learned about quarterly plans from how Horizons turned out.

 

[RolloTreadway]

I think there's an issue with any part of the ongoing development: if you look around these forums, it won't take you long at all to find a dozen different people citing an urgent need for a dozen different things.

One of the best aspects of this game is that there's such a wide range of activities, of ways in which you can approach your Elite career. But the upshot of that is that they have to add a bit here, a bit there, try and move in a direction that doesn't leave any segment of the community feeling abandoned. That means fairly slow progress in any particular development branch.

Essentially, we all have to remember that FD are not just building the game the we, as individuals are hankering for. They're building a whole bunch of different games that mesh together.

 

[MajorM3ss]

I think it's not about the pool of talent, I think it's about the vision. The last thing to do is to have a massive increase in people who don't share the same vision as the existing team. I would rather a smaller team focussed on the game than a larger team with a fuzzy outlook on what they should be doing. Heck it's hard enough to get two people here to agree on what is important, a bigger dev team might lose sight.

Personally I am not too worried about atmospheric landings, what I want is to be able to fuel scoop from gas giants and land at drifting cloud cities. Of course atmospheric landing would be nice, but ultimately pointless if all we get is the current planets/moons with air. I suspect this is where the slowdown is, atmospheric planets...nice, atmospheric planets with lots of new content...much nicer.

Yeah, like you, i am not to fussed about atmospheric landings, more so because of the platform i am on, xbox is great and all, but i think that such reworks would add tremendous lag and a graphical burdon that, only the most elite set up would cope with.