Inspired by some recent discussions and how the aliens were "discovered", I've decided to write a lengthier piece on my thoughts on exploration in Elite. So, allow me to get on my soapbox and say my piece.
First off, as a bit of introduction, while most people know me as the ELW list guy, ever since the alpha I've actually done plenty of things besides exploration. Powerplay, wing mining in HazRES, high security planetary base assaults, you name it, I've done it - at least tried it out a handful of times. I like combat, and I regularly return to the bubble, spend a few weeks there doing various things, but I inevitably find some reason to go out into the black again.
To me, this last part is quite interesting: regardless of the many flaws of exploration in Elite, fundamentally it still does the core of it right - at least, for me it does. Obviously not for everyone.
But of course, there are aspects of it which aren't done well. Most of these have been discussed already, so I'm not going to go into detail about how inconsistent exploration data payouts are, not to mention small, nor am I going to go on about how traveling is often boring.
No, I'd rather talk about what's missing from exploration and how it could be better solved. Well, besides content. One can pretty much always say that something could use more content.
So, what's missing from exploration? Better tools to find things and actual danger. How could these be solved? By adding optional active scanning which would also eventually attract attention to you. That way, travelling through the galaxy wouldn't be more dangerous than it currently is, but poking at things with a stick might lead you to disturb a hornet's nest.
Now that I've made my point, let me elaborate on these.
Frontier have steadily been adding exploration content to the game, although the rate at which they've done so isn't terribly big. However, the rate at which said new content is discovered(!) is much less than that. Why? Because they are rare, and we don't have good enough tools to find them. Most of the time, one needs to almost literally stumble into something to find it without hints. And Frontier's problem with hints is that due to the community method of solving stuff, once they give out hints to locations they are solved and/or found within a day, if not hours. If they aren't, then either the hints are vague enough to be nigh useless (*cough* Formidine Rift *cough*) or the thing to be found is rare enough to require far too much luck (*cough* Unknown Probe convoys *cough*).
This does sound bad, but it could be solved by explorers having better tools to find rare things. The solution would be scanners which provide information about whether special stuff can be found somewhere, and scanners that require more than just pointing your ship somewhere and finding out everything about it based on one scan. Something that's more like the excellent SRV wave scanner than the lazy Detailed Surface Scanner. Personally, I'd most like to have an orbital scanner that sends out a ping towards what's in front of you, and you get a pong back if there's an anomaly down there somewhere. If you want to narrow down its location, you'd have to fly closer and ping again. That way, you'd have to be more active, fly your ship and send out pings to narrow down the location of the anomaly, instead of getting the precise location of whatever might be down there.
And these pings could lead to something else too: more danger. I'd say that if exploration will be more dangerous (and FDev have warned that it will be!), then active scans should lead to increased danger, and not just passively travelling through the galaxy. (There would be plenty of loud complaints if the current methods of exploration were suddenly much more dangerous, and frankly, those complaints would have a valid point.)
About the current state of danger and exploration. Basically, exploration is one of, if not The, least dangerous things you can do in Elite. Yes, we've had the devs saying that explorers should be armed in the future because things might turn dangerous, but these warnings were done so long ago that they sound like the boy crying wolf. But right now, outside of the immediate vicinity of populated systems, you can travel through the galaxy peacefully, with the only real danger coming from your own mistakes, and some very rare bugs. You could say that exploration is Mostly Harmless. However, universally increasing the danger level everywhere would be a lazy and bad decision. Rather, it should be a risk-reward thing: higher risks are tied with higher rewards.
And if you just want to travel undisturbed, you should continue to be able to do so. A good designer should not raise risks for existing activities without raising rewards too.
Now, I talked about active scanning earlier. The principle should be relatively simple: the more active scans you do, the more likely you are to attract attention. The form of said attention, and the time it would take for them to arrive, should depend on your distance to various special regions: pirates from human space, aliens from other regions (perhaps the permit-locked ones?). So once you fire off your D-Scanner, orbital scanner or anything that involves active scanning, then an invisible timer should start until some NPC(s) come looking for you. With a single DS ping, this should take fairly long. But with repeated orbital pings, it should keep decreasing.
This could also add a good use for Basic and Intermediate D-Scanners: the less energy emitted by them would attract much less attention than the Advanced's system-encompassing honk.
For example, an ADS ping could start an invisible timer at, say, 15 minutes. (This should vary depending on distances to regions.) Each orbital ping could reduce the remaining time by one minute, for example. This way, you'd have a good reason for avoiding constant pings (which could cheapen the planetary search) and for being more conservative with them - and you'd also have a good method of attracting attention if you want it to come!
And this way, if you just wanted to look at some planets, find Earth-likes and so on, you could do so with one ADS ping and move on before anyone came.
Of course, if ADS pings lead to increased danger too, then so should the reward for scanning things be increased. Alternatively, the D-Scanners could be kept the way they are, and only orbital scanners should draw attention.
Introducing such a new gameplay mechanic would also be useful for other stuff. For example, you might find automated probes, which you could scan to receive useful data but then you'd have to evade pursuers that the owners of the probe would send after you. Although I think that the current NPC pursuit would have to be improved before this were really feasible.
In closing, let me just mention that the current exploration mechanics pretty much failed when it came to discovering aliens. The current encounter was said by FD to have been present since release, but nobody ever found the original location of the aliens, so the developers eventually had to add them to the Pleiades and thus pretty much force them to be discovered. The whole thing would have been even more interesting if it didn't first happen in the most obvious location.
The other alien discovery, that of the first ruins, was quite interesting: Frontier unintentionally gave out a difficult hint, and the site was discovered within days. Meanwhile, the red plants(?) shown in the same trailer are still yet to be found.
However, on the whole how the content is distributed is pretty good. Personally, I like that there are many barren worlds, and ones without any special features: it's realistic, and makes the rare finds more special. It's certainly better than if every planet housed something, because if there's "special" stuff everywhere, then no such stuff is actually special.
I would make volcanic sites more frequent though.
More content would be good, but for people to have more fun looking for more content, I think better exploration methods are needed. Having the option of better rewards at the price of increased tension and increased danger would also be good.
Thanks for reading all this! Feedback and comments would be quite welcome.
First off, as a bit of introduction, while most people know me as the ELW list guy, ever since the alpha I've actually done plenty of things besides exploration. Powerplay, wing mining in HazRES, high security planetary base assaults, you name it, I've done it - at least tried it out a handful of times. I like combat, and I regularly return to the bubble, spend a few weeks there doing various things, but I inevitably find some reason to go out into the black again.
To me, this last part is quite interesting: regardless of the many flaws of exploration in Elite, fundamentally it still does the core of it right - at least, for me it does. Obviously not for everyone.
But of course, there are aspects of it which aren't done well. Most of these have been discussed already, so I'm not going to go into detail about how inconsistent exploration data payouts are, not to mention small, nor am I going to go on about how traveling is often boring.
No, I'd rather talk about what's missing from exploration and how it could be better solved. Well, besides content. One can pretty much always say that something could use more content.
So, what's missing from exploration? Better tools to find things and actual danger. How could these be solved? By adding optional active scanning which would also eventually attract attention to you. That way, travelling through the galaxy wouldn't be more dangerous than it currently is, but poking at things with a stick might lead you to disturb a hornet's nest.
Now that I've made my point, let me elaborate on these.
Frontier have steadily been adding exploration content to the game, although the rate at which they've done so isn't terribly big. However, the rate at which said new content is discovered(!) is much less than that. Why? Because they are rare, and we don't have good enough tools to find them. Most of the time, one needs to almost literally stumble into something to find it without hints. And Frontier's problem with hints is that due to the community method of solving stuff, once they give out hints to locations they are solved and/or found within a day, if not hours. If they aren't, then either the hints are vague enough to be nigh useless (*cough* Formidine Rift *cough*) or the thing to be found is rare enough to require far too much luck (*cough* Unknown Probe convoys *cough*).
This does sound bad, but it could be solved by explorers having better tools to find rare things. The solution would be scanners which provide information about whether special stuff can be found somewhere, and scanners that require more than just pointing your ship somewhere and finding out everything about it based on one scan. Something that's more like the excellent SRV wave scanner than the lazy Detailed Surface Scanner. Personally, I'd most like to have an orbital scanner that sends out a ping towards what's in front of you, and you get a pong back if there's an anomaly down there somewhere. If you want to narrow down its location, you'd have to fly closer and ping again. That way, you'd have to be more active, fly your ship and send out pings to narrow down the location of the anomaly, instead of getting the precise location of whatever might be down there.
And these pings could lead to something else too: more danger. I'd say that if exploration will be more dangerous (and FDev have warned that it will be!), then active scans should lead to increased danger, and not just passively travelling through the galaxy. (There would be plenty of loud complaints if the current methods of exploration were suddenly much more dangerous, and frankly, those complaints would have a valid point.)
About the current state of danger and exploration. Basically, exploration is one of, if not The, least dangerous things you can do in Elite. Yes, we've had the devs saying that explorers should be armed in the future because things might turn dangerous, but these warnings were done so long ago that they sound like the boy crying wolf. But right now, outside of the immediate vicinity of populated systems, you can travel through the galaxy peacefully, with the only real danger coming from your own mistakes, and some very rare bugs. You could say that exploration is Mostly Harmless. However, universally increasing the danger level everywhere would be a lazy and bad decision. Rather, it should be a risk-reward thing: higher risks are tied with higher rewards.
And if you just want to travel undisturbed, you should continue to be able to do so. A good designer should not raise risks for existing activities without raising rewards too.
Now, I talked about active scanning earlier. The principle should be relatively simple: the more active scans you do, the more likely you are to attract attention. The form of said attention, and the time it would take for them to arrive, should depend on your distance to various special regions: pirates from human space, aliens from other regions (perhaps the permit-locked ones?). So once you fire off your D-Scanner, orbital scanner or anything that involves active scanning, then an invisible timer should start until some NPC(s) come looking for you. With a single DS ping, this should take fairly long. But with repeated orbital pings, it should keep decreasing.
This could also add a good use for Basic and Intermediate D-Scanners: the less energy emitted by them would attract much less attention than the Advanced's system-encompassing honk.
For example, an ADS ping could start an invisible timer at, say, 15 minutes. (This should vary depending on distances to regions.) Each orbital ping could reduce the remaining time by one minute, for example. This way, you'd have a good reason for avoiding constant pings (which could cheapen the planetary search) and for being more conservative with them - and you'd also have a good method of attracting attention if you want it to come!
And this way, if you just wanted to look at some planets, find Earth-likes and so on, you could do so with one ADS ping and move on before anyone came.
Of course, if ADS pings lead to increased danger too, then so should the reward for scanning things be increased. Alternatively, the D-Scanners could be kept the way they are, and only orbital scanners should draw attention.
Introducing such a new gameplay mechanic would also be useful for other stuff. For example, you might find automated probes, which you could scan to receive useful data but then you'd have to evade pursuers that the owners of the probe would send after you. Although I think that the current NPC pursuit would have to be improved before this were really feasible.
In closing, let me just mention that the current exploration mechanics pretty much failed when it came to discovering aliens. The current encounter was said by FD to have been present since release, but nobody ever found the original location of the aliens, so the developers eventually had to add them to the Pleiades and thus pretty much force them to be discovered. The whole thing would have been even more interesting if it didn't first happen in the most obvious location.
The other alien discovery, that of the first ruins, was quite interesting: Frontier unintentionally gave out a difficult hint, and the site was discovered within days. Meanwhile, the red plants(?) shown in the same trailer are still yet to be found.
However, on the whole how the content is distributed is pretty good. Personally, I like that there are many barren worlds, and ones without any special features: it's realistic, and makes the rare finds more special. It's certainly better than if every planet housed something, because if there's "special" stuff everywhere, then no such stuff is actually special.
I would make volcanic sites more frequent though.
More content would be good, but for people to have more fun looking for more content, I think better exploration methods are needed. Having the option of better rewards at the price of increased tension and increased danger would also be good.
Thanks for reading all this! Feedback and comments would be quite welcome.
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