It's just top down 3D but it's combined arms done right, but only if you got the logistics. Fights on a hex on a big map, you get dozens of hexes per world. Starting locations get jumbled up each war. You decide which hex you go and load to that world. Transitions between hexes possible but requires load and free slots: 120 per side - engine limit. But you can shell arty across hexes. With FOs.
Lower your Expectations for ED
- Thread starter Cosmo
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Imagine if hello games were able to put their planet-side tech into this game, with a color pallet and apart style that mimics E
. We could actually explore and find new things.A crime & punishment system in a video game is really missing the point entirely, often fueled by people with a fetish for seeing people punished. A criminal system should add to the fun, not inflict suffering. Like, there should be a whole underworld side of ED only accessible if you're a baddie with its own missions, factions, and equipment that puts you at odds with the good guys. Absolutely no jail.
PvP doesn't need notoriety, it needs a rethink on most ships effectively being non-combat. A match-up of equally skilled pilots shouldn't be decided by who brought the combat ship, that's just stupid. In the real world, you'd not transport expensive cargo in a Prius, it'd be an armored car carrying dudes with guns and there'd be a real fight (in the good ol' days at least) to be had if someone comes along wanting to rob it. Can prevent pest PvP by putting some risk on starting a fight, like if the attackee wins they get one of the modules on the attacking ship or something like that. Credits as risk is dumb, credits are worthless.
PvP doesn't need notoriety, it needs a rethink on most ships effectively being non-combat. A match-up of equally skilled pilots shouldn't be decided by who brought the combat ship, that's just stupid. In the real world, you'd not transport expensive cargo in a Prius, it'd be an armored car carrying dudes with guns and there'd be a real fight (in the good ol' days at least) to be had if someone comes along wanting to rob it. Can prevent pest PvP by putting some risk on starting a fight, like if the attackee wins they get one of the modules on the attacking ship or something like that. Credits as risk is dumb, credits are worthless.
EDSY and Coriolis. ED does not have any shipfitting tools that provide us with templates for designing and testing ship builds, which is just bad.
INARA and EDSM provide some unique amalgamated data about ourselves and the galaxy, as well as search tools that aren't present in ED, logbooks, and of course crafting lists for easy planning. These aren't essential to playing ED, but a lot of what they filter for us can't be found by just clicking around in the game. Likewise, a tool like Commander's Toolbox provides guides, lists and general information that can't just be pulled up through some in-game interface.
That would be amazing, wouldn't it?
There is no sequel space games are too niche. You're probably right on the expectations front we know Elite's continuing to be developed BUT its at a slower pace. There's no current reason for Frontier to spend more time, money or resource on the game. Braben basically likended the game to a big tanker on course with no need to steer or change direction... or something akin to that statement in a finance meeting a few years ago. I'd rather the game lived on with its small niche community than died. That said over 10K players across platforms daily is still very good. EDSM figures not Steam charts btw. I do think we'll see more on foot focused game play with little changes now Odyssey for the most part is working. I just want more multiplayer stuff pve and pvp with a better crime and rank system. Long live ED
True, though it's more abstract than that for outfitting. Modules don't (except on Fleet Carriers, of course) seem to have an actual stock level, there's just a distinction between "always carried" and "stocked on rotation" so that modules appear and disappear on a weekly basis. Selling enough raw material (economy permitting) will create a Boom/Investment state which improves outfitting ... but so will selling enough exploration data.
The original system in use up until the start of Beyond worked as follows:
- fines and bounties are accrued as now
- bounties expire after a certain amount of time, and after the expiry are converted to fines on the next hyperjump (10 minutes for a single assault or trespass bounty, rapidly extending to the maximum of 1 week for anything bigger). Committing a new crime in the jurisdiction resets and extends the timer. Fines also expire on a 1 week timer.
- there was some complicated thing where expired bounties and fines could be dredged up and reinstated if you committed further crimes. It was poorly understood and often confusing at the time, and I can't remember the details now.
- having a fine or bounty does not restrict station access (so no need for detention centres, handing yourself in, or similar) but accumulated ones still must be paid on rebuy (including, depending on jurisdiction, on the hidden expired ones)
- crimes were attached to the player (as in Live but not in Legacy) but there was no concept of a "hot" ship or module either
- no notoriety and therefore no ability for notoriety to boost the size of a bounty or fine above its base level
- interstellar factors weren't in the original but weren't needed either (and from memory, on introduction were mainly liked for their ability to hand-in all those tiny bounty vouchers you'd collected 30 systems ago and forgotten about)
It was balanced about right for accidental and petty criminals - stray RES fire, minor trespass on a scan mission, piracy without murder - where the aim was to get you out of the jurisdiction but not worry about what happened after that. It didn't handle higher-level crime particularly well - too many easy exploits to either ignore or clear a bounty cheaply, and only marginal reason not to just live with them. Following regular complaints that it wasn't punishing enough, they adjusted it in Beyond 3.0 to be something approaching what there currently is.
Now that regular complaints are reasonably evenly split between "this isn't punishing enough, people still play the game after committing crimes" and "I committed a minor trespass offence and then was transported 3000 LY to a detention ship when I handed myself in, this is ridiculously harsh" I doubt Frontier has much motivation to look at it again.
[What it really needs is a ground-up rewrite that does one of two things. Either a) start from the premise that criminal gameplay is supposed to be as fun as legal gameplay and therefore "punishment" is entirely the wrong mindset to have ... or b) remove the implementation of criminal acts from the game, if they're not supposed to be fun]
The trick would be finding one competent enough to do more with it but still stupid enough to buy it in the first place.
Based on Frontier's financial reports, ED probably cost about £40M to develop - not counting the costs of running it as a live service for ten years.
In a good year, it brought in a bit over £10M in revenue, and presumably these hypothetical competent developers could expect every year to be a good year. So that's a pretty good cost-benefit balance.
But anyone capable of maintaining and extending ED better than Frontier can is also more than capable of making their own similar game that doesn't have ten years of accumulated bugs, abandoned features, weird but irreversible design decisions, etc. stuck to it ... so unless they can get Frontier to sell ED for considerably less than the amount of money Frontier could expect to get from it over the next five years even in a pure maintenance state, they're far better off doing just that.
I recently bought X4 on Sale and got bored during the tutorial.
Too many keys to remember in a short time."Press Ctrl-LShift-Space-Tab to bring your seat into an upright position". I promptly forgot how to get back into the ship from EVA.
I might give it another go. My personal best space game ever is starting to look pretty cool with a few mods.
Putting all the blame on the players is a lazy cop out and not true at all.
Can you show me where these veterans all asked for putting bounties on ships instead of CMDRs for example?
That's not what happened, they didn't listen to their players. They simply continued to follow their own vision and kept improving the game.
I am not blaming the players.
Originally I wanted to add another paragraph where I explain just that, but I thought it would be too silly. Thanks for proving me wrong though.
Whilst i agree the templates are a nice idea they are still not needed, the outfitting screen shows changes depending on what modules you swap out with.
O7
Every time I get back into X4 I have similar thoughts. Then I have to look up some stuff like Shift-d (to get out of seat) and Bob is the uncle. There is some obscure stuff, but it is totally fine when you figure that out after couplee dozen hours. This time it was "z" (target nearest enemy) that I failed to remember.I recently bought X4 on Sale and got bored during the tutorial.
"Press Ctrl-LShift-Space-Tab to bring your seat into an upright position". I promptly forgot how to get back into the ship from EVA.
I might give it another go. My personal best space game ever is starting to look pretty cool with a few mods.
They didn't ask for that solution, but they did - repeatedly and loudly - ask for a problem to be solved to which that was the solution.
The stated problem was: people can run up a bounty in a large ship (the infamous "player-killer in a Cutter", say), then switch to a Sidewinder, self-destruct, and declare bankruptcy. They lose the Sidewinder, and clear the bounty without any consequence to their large ship or their bank balance. There's a teleport back to their starting system to deal with, but unless you're committing crimes in Colonia (and most weren't) that's not that big a problem if you're planning ahead.
Attaching the bounties directly to the ships was - at least in the pre-Odyssey days when CMDRs couldn't just walk around independently committing crimes - a reasonably effective solution [1]. Yes, you could switch to a clean ship to avoid the bounty temporarily, but you could switch to a disposable Sidewinder to lose the bounty permanently before that change, and if you wanted to use your Cutter again you still had to deal with its bounty somehow.
There may have been a better way to close off that exploit (ignoring the players asking for C&P reform in their entirety and keeping the exploit along with the rest of the pre-2.4 crime system, in retrospect, might have been the least bad option) but I've never seen a workable one suggested in the various C&P ideas threads players have started.
[1] And Frontier's second attempt at it; their first attempt was simply to invisibly add the current ship rebuy onto the bounty, but then discount the bounty paid on rebuy by up to the value of your actual rebuy (so if you died in the ship you committed the crime in, or a more expensive one, no visible effect). This lead to silliness like people picking up trivial assault or trespass bounties in their big ships (200 cr + 25 million), running away "as intended" for minor offenders, then happening to die in a smaller ship and having a sudden and unexpected extra 20 million on their rebuy because the (usually by then expired) bounty suddenly became due.
C&P is nothing but red tape plastered over gameplay. It is an excellent example how games end up when you have no clue about designing them.
By now the whole thing would have been largely meaningless, and indeed - who cares for bounties today anymore but the noob who can be easily griefed into a bounty? No one basically, but the red tape is still there.
By now the whole thing would have been largely meaningless, and indeed - who cares for bounties today anymore but the noob who can be easily griefed into a bounty? No one basically, but the red tape is still there.
These two are good ideas!
Imo tho, notoriety should be expanded upon, not removed or limited.
(combined with your two suggestions and you suddenly have what amounts to an "underworld rank")
So glad I bought the lifetime pass expansion back in the days /s
I never tried odyssey anyway...
I never tried odyssey anyway...
Some of them clearly do. Whether it is the right people that are, that’s open for interpretation.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...e-time-line-feed-removed.616100/post-10127979
You're going to get me in trouble again! This topic is taboo. But to briefly answer your question, I greatly alleviated this by mapping most of my controls and keys to match Elite and / or vice-versa. This, and many similar game loops (trade, combat, ship outfitting and engineering, "BGS", etc) is what made X4 the best "What do I replace Elite with?" game for me personally. Anyway, best to keep the X4 talk to the X4 thread.I recently bought X4 on Sale and got bored during the tutorial.
"Press Ctrl-LShift-Space-Tab to bring your seat into an upright position". I promptly forgot how to get back into the ship from EVA.
I might give it another go.
BTW, I have the same problem you do when switching from ESO back to RDR2 after any length of time, so I think this is just the nature of complex games. It's also why I gave up on Infinity Battlescape early on, because I didn't have a clue what I was doing and wasn't in the mood to go back to college to learn how to play it, LOL. Someday I'll try it again.
Speaking of games that require college degrees!
I think this all proves the initial point some of us were trying to make, that just because Elite is a "niche" game doesn't mean it can survive on that fact alone. If people who are dissatisfied with Elite are able to find alternatives that are "close enough", then that can and will cut into Frontier's bottom line.
You greatly underestimate the importance and impact of the Stellar Forge. Without the Stellar Forge, your precious Bubble would be the size of Colonia (not that this is a bad thing IMO) because artists are not going to paint up 10,000 separate skyboxes for all the different systems in the Bubble. Nor would you have planets and moons in orbits, or even landable planets for that matter, unless again the Bubble was a tiny fraction of its current size. When I miss the Stellar Forge in my "other space games", I'm not missing the 400 billion systems to explore (okay, maybe sometimes), rather I'm missing:
- a dynamic, unique skybox that realistically represents the sector of space a solar system is located in
- planets and moons that actually revolve, orbit the main star(s), with night and day, seasons, eclipses, etc
- depending on the game, realistic planet surfaces and atmospheres and gravities
- probably other things that I'm not remembering in my decaffeinated state
I have zero issue with equipment being the deciding factor when there is a parity of skill. Tools are hugely important, and should be.
I also don't think the armored car analogy is a good one; transport vessels in Elite: Dangerous can easily be quite heavily protected. My CMDR's T-9, Krait, or Corvette can reliably absorb fire from a wing of combat vessels while escaping, and smaller vessels are proportionally more maneuverable/less exposed. A real-world armored transport van is no match for any combat vehicle; it's armor and guards are there to deter/slow down those who might ambush it with civilian vehicles and small arms. One shot from a recoiless rifle, burst from an autocannon, or even lighter weapons that one might strap to a technical could shred most armored cars...there would be no battle just a smoking wreck and a bunch of dead guards. Try pitting one against a purpose built AFV and it gets even more lopsided. The reason armored cars are used are because they're street legal and it's generally not easy to plant IEDs on their routes through, or bring heavy arms to bear against them in, civilized areas. In hostile territory, you wouldn't rely on a lone armored car, you'd have escorts clear a path.