New Odyssey Article - more on planet generation

[askavir]

The fact there will be more varied surfaces across the same planet sounds great, looking forward to see the results.

 

[Scubadog]

I can not source it but somehow I have the impression I red/heard somewhere the experience will be of you seating as a crew member and the AI piloting in real time. So, basically a ride and at least you can enjoy the views. Just like a longer landing autopilot. I may be wrong tho.

A ride would seem to be a good compromise between the unbalancing / non immersive instantaneous teleport and a straight timer.

My personal opinion is that if we still have to wait 61 HOURS for a ship to be transferred from the bubble to Colonia, then Odyssey players should experience the same wait-time requirements if they hitch a ride.

 

[Scubadog]

I'm predicting that you'll be very disappointed with Odyssey if you're disinterested in walking and hope missions will be even slightly different to what we have now.

The best I think we can hope for is there's more flexibility and control over mission options on foot. I'm really not convinced the mission system itself has been developed much beyond its current structure.

But we still have one more dev diary which may shed light on this, then alpha. So we'll see soon enough either way.

the current game's mission board is super weak sauce so it'll be interesting to see how it's improved. It's currently a lazy table that is identical regardless of which ship you have (no unique look and feel to empire vs fed vs various independent ships). There's no cinematic/audio portion of the experience that improves upon this game mechanic from that which was put in games in the mid 90's.

I'd be happy if they finally implement escort missions. military branching missions that become the only way to rank in a military and force mutual exclusion to ranking in other militaries. Missions that remember your past actions (even those actions that are external missions) and missions that involven persistent procedural npcs.

The missions should be a way to basically create your own narrative story and fdev should focus on making that experience 1st class. Even cross-mentioning the reputations of other cmdr's in the missions ...perhaps adding in a contractor/employer/union aspect that pulls the player in closer to the success/failure of the factions they're interacting with as well as tying their activities to those of other players they may not see or never see in person.

I really do not care at all about the walking around crap in odyssey - i'm not playing a space combat/trader game to walk around. But improvements to the parts of the game that were basically phoned in and left for the past 5 years do interest me. Maybe give me some reason to even care about doing missions again (assuming i was within 20k ly of a station)

Oh, I do NOT want to see cinematic garbage added to this game. It's not Wing Commander or Privateer. I hate cinematic pieces in games to begin with. And I'm not sure what your point is about missions being the same regardless of the ship you have. I see the mission boards as nothing more than they really should be--a standardized system by which someone can login, search for missions they are willing and capable of handling. I see no point in some sort of "look or feel" based on your ship. That makes zero sense to me. Does the Sonic menu change just because you drove up in a Camaro vs an SUV?

I do like your idea of adding escort missions. I don't see, however, how you could write into the game some way for every player to have an "arc", which is essentially what you're asking for. Heck, they can't even get the Codex to do what it's really supposed to do. I don't think it's realistic to find a way to interweave other players' actions/Codex with yours...and it would have extremely niche application.

 

[Viajero]

My personal opinion is that if we still have to wait 61 HOURS for a ship to be transferred from the bubble to Colonia, then Odyssey players should experience the same wait-time requirements if they hitch a ride.

Harsh but fair. Somehow I doubt there will be an Apex service to take you from Sol to Colonia

 

[thistle]

In one of the dev diaries the expression "within jump range" was used, I took this to mean the jump range of the small ships (viper & adder) that appeared in the concept art. So if you were to use Apex in a station, you could jump to, say, another port or planet in that system, and perhaps one or two systems away based on a set max jump range shown when using the Apex UI. But each jump would be a single jump, not a journey from Sol to Colonia.

 

[Darth Ender]

Oh, I do NOT want to see cinematic garbage added to this game. It's not Wing Commander or Privateer. I hate cinematic pieces in games to begin with. And I'm not sure what your point is about missions being the same regardless of the ship you have. I see the mission boards as nothing more than they really should be--a standardized system by which someone can login, search for missions they are willing and capable of handling. I see no point in some sort of "look or feel" based on your ship. That makes zero sense to me. Does the Sonic menu change just because you drove up in a Camaro vs an SUV?

The menus you see are inside your ship in the game. You never leave your ship (except when in an srv). So yes, the sonic menu very likely will look different in a camaro or suv when that menu is essentially a built in interface designed by the particular manufacturer of the car you're driving.

edit: and you are aware that cinematic sequences refers to just animated interactions rather than reading spreadsheets or flat text everywhere. Modern games dont pre-record video and play that like the games you mentioned from 20 years ago. They render within the game engine the scenes. There would be absolutely nothing wrong with adjusting how you are told about missions to be via interacting with the avatars you are provided a still picture of in the current setup. An interaction based way of being told about missions rather than a passive dump of a list.

It would be slower, but it would be so much better of an experience.

I do like your idea of adding escort missions. I don't see, however, how you could write into the game some way for every player to have an "arc", which is essentially what you're asking for. Heck, they can't even get the Codex to do what it's really supposed to do. I don't think it's realistic to find a way to interweave other players' actions/Codex with yours...and it would have extremely niche application.

Incompetence not withstanding, it is certainly possible to have npcs respond and behave differently to players based on a more complete snapshot of that player's history and actions such that "arcs" form organically. The purpose of which would be to effectively be the game. You're writing your characters story and how they fit in the elite universe thru your actions over time. And unlike doing something like that in your own imagination, it all matters to the gameplay you experience and is something other people can look at and read. . with a story that is updated by notable events and bgs responses to those events over time.

 

[Scubadog]

I disagree...I don't think it is possible. Particularly given how this is peer-based. And, again, I don't see the value of this given even the theoretical overhead required to maintain it.