What about the loach?
Major Feature Overhaul - Question
- Thread starter Gleitfrosch
- Start date
They are symbiotic so its a given.
This would be a good one to see expanded upon.
I'll respond with another question: what isn't an option, when it comes to game features deserving of a major feature rework? (Even counting out revamped mining and exploration, both of those have elements that deserve further attention...)
Oh, I hadn't considered that they might actually rework supercruise. Imagine not spending the majority of our time in space travel trapped by acceleration rate caps that make in-system travel take many times longer than actual interstellar travel! What an intriguing possibility...which is a phrase applicable for everything else in Elite really....
It's described in Bruce's post as a "long-standing feature", which I think rules out anything from Odyssey (at least, in itself: a bounty hunting rework could cover space and foot together), the Thargoid War, and probably also Fleet Carriers.
With the ending of new PMF addition a second rewrite of the Political BGS seems very unlikely.
It's described as a "rework"/"overhaul" which rules out the wilder fantasies about base building and system colonisation ... but technically could still allow ship interiors, I guess.
Other than that, as you say it's not like any of the features are in a "perfect, can't be improved" situation.
If they did a supercruise overhaul (and it's a long shot!), I'd probably want it to involve more time spent travelling, not less. But go back to the previous games' purpose with it.
The nature of the Elite series - at least, the first three games in the series - is that the in-system travel more-or-less is the game. Pick up some trade goods at A, fly to B, sell them for a profit (in the later games, reskin the trade goods as passengers or mission packages). If you weren't getting shot at along the way between A and B, it'd just be an extremely unsophisticated market simulator (and they also existed on the BBC B - some even had colour graphs!). The stations only really exist as checkpoints.
In Elite Dangerous, travelling between A and B doesn't involve being shot at. Unless you stack a lot of missions, you'll get 0-1 interdictions per trip, and if you do get interdicted the NPCs are so weak that you can just break it (or submit+low wake, but breaking it isn't any slower and gets them off your back) ... and also, unlike the previous games, you can see the attacker coming from a long way off, so you know if you need to go "hands on controls" this minute or not. So the stations remain boring checkpoints ... but the travel between them is now also boring - even if you're actively seeking out combat, the travel is mainly just a way to get from one "combat hotspot" to another.
(A recent exception, of course, is Thargoid-occupied systems, where the interdictions are common, succeed, and can easily destroy an unprepared ship)
I can't imagine, having established for so many years that this is "Elite: Combat is entirely optional", that that would be their plan. But they've been taking more risks with the game direction in the last year, so who knows...
Slight tangent - wouldn’t mind sort of ‘difficult’ interdictions, but the Thargoid stuff takes it a notch too far imo. They are practically unbeatable.
If human NPCs ever got that behavior, that wouldn’t be very fun.
(People also should prepare an appropriate ship for a task likely to be dangerous. I don’t see how taking a fragile ship with practically zero defensive attributes into Thargoid territory is anything - like those AX reactivations - but a recipe for disaster.)
Apparently we will see some sort of hint / preview of U16 next month on the next livestream.......
Dare I say Powerplay? 
Dare I say Powerplay?
I'm sure the activity between points A & B could be improved while also removing acceleration rate caps.
None of the previous games in the series had an interdiction-equivalent - if an NPC wished to initiate combat with you, they could, and your options for escaping the fight were essentially hyperspace or kill them. In the original Elite, also "try to reach the station without fast travel" since it didn't have realistic scale - but you'd have to dodge a lot of their shots along the way.
All of the previous games, if you went to an Anarchy system you could expect a pretty-near continuous fight all the way to the station; even mid-security systems would probably involve two or three battles with small pirate wings. Unarmed ships (Panther Clipper Ramming Speed aside) were entirely unviable outside the absolute safest systems.
Those games were fun enough for there to be huge demand for a fourth in the series!
The idea that combat must be avoidable before even getting to weapons range and "winnable" without firing back is an Elite Dangerous "innovation", and was the thing that most surprised me when I first started playing.
And I don’t think Elite as it is needs more tedium - unbeatable chain interdictions by pirates in the regular gameplay would be just that. Where is the combat or engagement in a mechanic where you simply submit, boost away and go back into supercruise in say, a Cutter with an appropriate prismatic shield?
If they were beatable but difficult, fine, but what may have rolled in a game of the 80s or 90s is not as likely to roll now.
I don’t mind it for the Thargoids because it’s unique to them, but constant interdictions in the regular gameplay spaces by pirates can stay in a box. Do you think it would be enjoyable if they could rip you out of hyperspace at any moment, too?
None at all - again, in the previous games, you actually had to beat the pirates to move on (or high wake, which you would generally have serious fuel limits on and was likely to lead to missions failing due to timers - it was a desperate move, not a routine one). Running away was generally impractical - usually if they could intercept you at all, then they were faster than you so you couldn't run away.
If you got intercepted, you stood and fought, because there really wouldn't have been much of a game if you didn't.
Well, "beatable but difficult" is going to depend on your loadout and skill. In the earlier games they weren't difficult to beat, though - especially not once you'd upgraded your ship a bit - the point was for there to actually be a game to play.
But this is why everyone is surprised over the Glaive: it's escaped from being a fairly standard pirate encounter in FE2 where "kill it to proceed" is the rules.
It's not about whether it was an 80s game or a 20s game - it's about where the gameplay is in the game design.
In Elite/FE2/FFE, the gameplay was largely in the journeys between your various destinations. So things attacked you while you were going from A to B. Lots of modern games also use this mechanic - for example, ARPG games where the aim is to get across the map without being killed, and the interaction at the destination is a few lines of dialogue or the staircase down and the next destination gets set for another running battle. In journey games, the destinations can be very thin because they're just progress markers.
In Elite Dangerous, the gameplay is largely at the destinations - you go to a combat zone for combat, or a POI for a mission, or a station to change trade goods, etc. There are lots of modern games which are about "what you do when you get there" - and lots of very old games about that, too: something like the 90s X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, you're dropped straight into the action, you do your job, and then you get debriefed. In destination games, the travel is usually skipped over entirely - if there's a world map at all, it'll just be a loading screen - or has some sort of fast travel mechanism so that you're not wandering through vast amounts of empty space (or full-but-seen-countless-times-before-space) unless you really want to.
Elite Dangerous has the very awkward problem of trade [1] still being the journey-based gameplay it was in the previous games and everything else being destination-based (at least once you're in the right system). So supercruise travel has to take a while - or trade would just be a matter of buy goods, teleport to destination station, sell goods, repeat until you have all the money. Even making it twice as fast just means halving all the per-unit payouts to compensate. But travel can't be risky as it was in the old games, because for the other gameplay types that just gets in the way of the destination-based gameplay. Explorers don't like having to fight off ships while scanning plan(e)ts; even combat pilots find interdictions on the way to the combat zone an inconvenience (or worse, if it's on the way back). Apex/Frontline emphasise this even further: they're absolutely guaranteed safe-in-transit, but they still have to take just as long so that you can't use them to get advantage on any of the journey-based gameplay. It's a mess.
I very much doubt dealing with any of this is the "major feature overhaul" - though either switching trade to be destination-based and enabling inhabited-space fast-travel or switching combat to being journey-based and making fighting from A to B a routine way of life would be impressively radical!
[1] Including trade missions, and reskinned trade like courier or passenger missions. All the "take a thing from A to B, payment on delivery" stuff. But not, of course, mining even though it still involves cargo handling.
I can't say I like the picture you're painting here - forced combat would exclude a great many CMDRs who enjoy the game not being an endless fountain of murderhobos. And I doubt Fdev is ever going to walk back from hitpoint overinflation.
There's not much journeying involved in trading anymore, either. Just hopping back and forth between carrier & station, or wing 'mining' mission stacking, either way it's not much of a 'journey'. Supercruise travel "having to take awhile" is already a non-factor there.
If Fdev had gone the direction of making individual kills matter more for combat, instead of leaving combat XP gains untouched even after all these years of combat-focused changes to the point that combat is unrecognizable compared to the state it was in at game release, then those interdictions on the way to things would be of a lot more worth in terms of time/fun/engagement.
What I will agree with is that it is all a mess. But I don't see there being any benefit to continuing to trap players in supercruise tedium.
I would be super happy if we could just do something.... anything... during supercruise and hyperspace jumps. God almighty, why can't I review my missions or read some codex stuff while entering/exiting hyperspace? Why do all menus have to shut down and my eyeballs get violently snapped back to the ship canopy? Internet Bandwidth? Instead I am task swapping to watch youtube videos. Apparently my crumby internet can handle some traffic. -> end of rant.
It would be amazing if Frontier actually gave us information about what they were doing to manage player expectations. It's beyond frustrating whenever they hype up some update or patch without giving us details, just to find out they fixed a handful of interface bugs or rearranged the UI again. Let us get hyped up about actual fixes, content and overhauls - give us the real information, not just misleading hype and exaggerated marketing, please.
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1: Way back in March IIRC
2: Most likely no, back in March FDEV were still in the "investigate what needs to be reworked" after well over a year. Probably still in that investigation phase to this day.