Major Feature Overhaul Prediction (Next, Last or Never?)

[EmFire]

In 2016, Braben announced that there is a 10 year roadmap for larger feature implementations.
According to the press releases and official announcements, the major things planned we have yet to see are:

-Accessing richly detailed populated planets with atmospheres and large procedural 1:1 cities
-Explorable/interactive ship interiors
-Inter-ship boarding and combat inside ships

Being generous with that roadmap timeline, we're looking at another 3 years to implement those features. It is my belief that Frontier could still reach those goals, perhaps even in one more large update or DLC in late 2025. Even if Frontier abandons those plans, or delays them for a couple more years, one glaring thing still remains; as of January 2023, according to this email: only 0.05% of the Galaxy has been explored.

If they abandon any more major updates, one thing they could still overhaul to make the end-of-life phase more exciting and be a decent send off, would be improved interstellar flight and system navigation. Think along the lines of much larger, as well as, more granular jump distances, automated interstellar routes, worm holes, and deeper automated planetary landing, and maybe even a couple new specialized ships. This way we could accelerate discoveries, even if it just brings down that completion time from 40,000+ years to 40- years. Imagine if they did that and also completed the procedural cities, intra-ship combat, and then put the game in maintenance mode with just narrative and minor content updates (like it kind of feels now). It would make a great race to put your stamp on the game in it's "final hours." It might even bring in a surge of new players, and those whom left the game due to tedium and grind / loss of wonder / content drought.

At this point, anything they can do to decrease the grind, and increase the sense of accomplishment for the dwindling player base would be a massive improvement.

It seems more likely that they would finish the previously announced features before opening up the galaxy, but I wouldn't mind if it were the other way around.

If you like this prediction, or would like the galaxy to be more open / explorable in this regard, please comment or give this post a thumbs-up.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Being generous with that roadmap timeline, we're looking at another 3 years to implement those features.

Reading the quote in context, there's a few things to bear in mind:
1) He's talking about the "8-year, 10-year" plan in vague terms and explicitly says he's hoping for longer
2) He's re-iterating earlier statements about the size of plan there, so the start time should probably be considered as 2012 or maybe 2014
3) 2016 was about a year into Horizons, and still at the point where Frontier was being very optimistic about development schedules

In terms of "how long will it take for them to implement their initial set of ideas" I'd expect at least another decade, and probably quite a bit longer (if at all, of course)

Think along the lines of much larger, as well as, more granular jump distances, automated interstellar routes, worm holes, and deeper automated planetary landing, and maybe even a couple new specialized ships. This way we could accelerate discoveries, even if it just brings down that completion time from 40,000+ years to 40- years.

Higher jump ranges would barely affect the completion time. One of the most well-explored parts of the galaxy [1], in terms of systems scanned versus (estimated) systems existing is the far outer rim. Conversely, the stars within a thousand LY of Colonia - where anyone wanting to go there can get on a FC ferry service and get, effectively, wormhole/automated travel there from their perspective are relatively lightly explored despite it being a major hub and base for explorers.

The slow rate of discovery isn't that people have trouble getting to undiscovered systems - there are plenty of those only 2000 LY from Sol in some directions - it's that there are 400 billion systems and a basic "jump to system in hyperspace, do minimal exploration of the system by honking the FSS to pick up the stars, jump on without even checking for planets" - which is sufficient to count on that statistic - takes about a minute.

So: 400 billion systems = 400 billion player-minutes, if done "optimally" (no-one visiting an already visited system, no-one actually exploring any of the systems they're logging as visited). So that's 275 million player years (with no breaks for sleep!)

If we assume that there are 500,000 active players, and each plays an average of an hour a day (which is a substantial overestimate!), and each player is given by Frontier a "jump to nearest unexplored system" drive with infinite charges and range, and each player solely does honk-and-move-on exploration of the systems using that drive rather than any more interesting gameplay of any sort at all: purely grinding out that "systems [technically] explored" counter ... then we could be "discovering" 30 million systems a day. And at that point, yes, we could be "done" in 40 years, just about. But obviously, "It's a game where you play a nearly-fully automated exploration probe. Every minute you press the J button to move to the next system and that's the entire gameplay. It does have a nice hyperspace animation, though" is not going to get 500k player-hours each day for decades.

Obviously, Frontier could - as you suggest, deeper planetary landing - give more things to do in a system to properly explore it, and that might well attract more players to exploration: honking a system takes seconds, running an FSS plan to catalogue the planets takes a minute or so, mapping the planets could take half an hour for a mid-sized system, cataloguing all the exobiology can take hours if the system has multiple atmospheric landable planets and some of the plants are stuck up a mountain. But that increases the amount of time taken exploring systems, and decreases the rate on the "systems visited once" counter substantially.

[1] Source: https://edastro.com/galmap/ (set "saturation" mode in the top right menu). Because of how systems are named in Elite Dangerous, once you have a sample of discoveries in a region, it's relatively easy to approximate the total number of stars in the region, and so figure out how well explored it is

 

[Sera Scratch]

I'll go ahead and doom it up in here. None of that is going to happen. I'm pretty sure we've reached the end of the big development cycles. After Odyssey flopped like a fat man into a pool, a new DLC or update seems untenable. Ody was a complete disaster, shattering players faith in FDev and even the investors faith. Developing these things would be unpalatable because at best it brings back a handful of players and engages the remaining, dwindling playerbase. If it's not a huge sucess, or worse, fails, then they risk losing more share value and players.

With the current pace of development and the features they've worked on since Ody's release, it's a safe assumption that this is all we're getting. FD has mentioned a rework at the end of the year, but we don't know on what or how large. It could be something huge like reworking ships and atmospheric planets, could be something smaller like tweaking the BGS or adjusting the Engineering grind. Either way, interiors, cities, boarding ships and battling on deck, all things players desperately want and some things were promised in the Kickstarter roadmap and Barbens youtube video will likely just be pipe dreams.

 

[DemiserofD]

Also, new content does not constitute a feature rework.

Pragmatically, there is a very short list of possibilities for what the upcoming rework might be. They are not going to rework things that are already working fine. They are not going to add major amounts of new content for free. No landable earthlikes, no big cities, no ship Interiors.

The three main possibilities I see are engineering, powerplay, or crime.

 

[Danieros]

I don't believe accelerating discoveries is a matter of jump range, but instead of directing players towards them. That said, we are still in a hundred billion star system galaxy, and we do not have millions of players purely dedicated to exploration.

So much exploration gets overlapped by "road to riches" or similar methods of exploration... of already explored places. For example, we could have a more useful "exploration" mission category that would direct players towards missed DSS mappings, unexplored systems, systems not fully FSS'd.

Another point is that the game has no BGS towards colonizing unpopulated systems, unlike the thargoids. So player hubs continue to be mostly the bubble and colonia.

 

[Pville_Piper]

Didn't we just have a thread on this?

 

[Jack Winter]

We've had several..

 

[DjVortex]

So: 400 billion systems = 400 billion player-minutes, if done "optimally" (no-one visiting an already visited system, no-one actually exploring any of the systems they're logging as visited). So that's 275 million player years (with no breaks for sleep!)

So the vast majority ED's galaxy will remain undiscovered and a mystery pretty much forever. That sounds really exciting. There will always be undiscovered systems if you want to explore. There will always be the potential of the devs (or some algorithm) having put something interesting in some yet-to-be-discovered system. Sounds genuinely fantastic. I would not want it to be different.

 

[amigacooke]

Sorry, no dreams anymore, only cold hard reality.

Coming next? We have nothing to go on other than supposition. It’s more trick or treat with the Titans or something else to do with the Thargoids.

 

[Rubbernuke]

The three main possibilities I see are engineering, powerplay, or crime.

Redoing engineering again to me is a waste of time, simply as this will be the third attempt.

Crime? As in C+P, black markets, pirates etc I think is far too big a thing to redo now (IMO it depends on a huge amount of interlocking and overlapping parts of the game).

Powerplay would / can springboard from the current Thargoid war sim and reuse a number of things from it, not to mention add more to the BGS.

Plus if its not Powerplay I'm going to break the world record for toy throwing from prams.

 

[amigacooke]

Plus if its not Powerplay I'm going to break the world record for toy throwing from prams.

Just interested to know who your toy supplier is going to be?

 

[23RD]

Hmmm... I can put my nothing on devs will come out of silence by the end of the year and say something like "sowwy, we don't have resources for any overhauls at all, so no... you know, overhauls for you. See ya! And buy some arx"

 

[angusmadmac1]

Just remember that the rework hasn't been investigated yet and we may get information on what their investigation has found at the end of the year not the actual rework. I'm sure they will lettuce know in due time but there will be a few disappointed commanders if and when that rework comes out .

 

[Rubbernuke]

Just interested to know who your toy supplier is going to be?

Tomy are the most aerodynamic.

 

[molgrips]

Exploration would be far more fun if you had sensible autopilot to get places and if they seeded the galaxy with cool stuff.

I would love to sit here chilling, watching YT or NF or whatever whilst my ship jumps and scans, and then it goes 'Commander, I think you should see this' and I go 'holy crap' take my feet off the desk and sit bolt upright spilling popcorn all over the console etc, you know like in movies. That would be awesome.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Exploration would be far more fun if you had sensible autopilot to get places and if they seeded the galaxy with cool stuff.

I would love to sit here chilling, watching YT or NF or whatever whilst my ship jumps and scans, and then it goes 'Commander, I think you should see this' and I go 'holy crap' take my feet off the desk and sit bolt upright spilling popcorn all over the console etc, you know like in movies. That would be awesome.

The galaxy was seeded with good stuff, and still is.

Stop being lazy and fly your ship.

 

[baron_V_S]

The galaxy was seeded with good stuff, and still is.

Stop being lazy and fly your ship.

The same stuff that's been there for years. A proper live service game would have expanded on the absolutely minimal amount of lifeforms they've seeded the galaxy with.

trillions of planets and a dozen or so plant species. it's the minimum viable product, the classic Frontier development goal.

The planets we can land on haven't changed dramatically - they're still empty barren lifeless worlds with no significant exciting features worth exploring. Adding tenuous atmospheric planets has been the only major exploration change in the last 5 years it seems and that's just a simple graphical effect on the sky, it hasn't added any real content or gameplay.

My prediction is that the gameplay overhaul will be something unexciting like engineering. They're not making major changes to anything substantial that would require new ships or 3d models or gameplay loops, they are absolutely one of the worst developers around in terms of output and management.

 

[Comandante]

Tomy are the most aerodynamic.

Always choose toys with sharp edges. If I suffer, so must others...

Back on topic though: It's not going to happen - probably.

Their turn-around time for fixing Shodyssey was abysmal - and they're still reeling from it.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Always choose toys with sharp edges. If I suffer, so must others...

Back on topic though: It's not going to happen - probably.

Their turn-around time for fixing Shodyssey was abysmal - and they're still reeling from it.