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"I can remember when this was all shops..."
No new lore in Elite Dangerous Odyssey?
- Thread starter drew
- Start date
Lore hasn't been a priority since Michael Brooks left ED in mid 2017. It's had no direct guidance, vision or passion ever since as far as I can see. It could have been so different.
I think the lore effectively "died" at that point, sadly (Here's the notification - June 21st 2017). All the complex stuff was retconned... the Thargoid civil war (Klaxian/Oresrian conflict), Halsey's story, the ramifications of the Salomé affair, the lore reason behind the permit locks... all the main story threads either stopped or were grossly simplified.
Without Michael, or someone in Fdev like him who has the passion, drive and knowledge to curate the lore we're not going to see stuff like that again. Unfortunately, without the lore, there is also less for players to hang their own events off. That's not to say community events can't take place, as they do, but they're going to struggle to be as significant as those that took place in the 2014-2017 era.
I commented on this in one of my 'history' youtube videos >
Cheers,
Drew.
I miss Michael also for his cool and engaging dialogs here with all of us
I'm sure I saw a message in Communications that read,
"For information on Elite Lore, you must first obtain a Raxxla Permit"
I could be wrong, Vodka is so cheap these days.
I did invite him as a guest speaker on my "Lore Tour" last year, he politely declined.I miss Michael also for his cool and engaging dialogs here with all of us
Cheers,
Drew.
Sad to hear.
Yeah Elite is a project which needs hearts standing behind it, not a big corporation. I mean that was the reason why DB started the whole endeavour as a Kickstarter without a publisher at that time. Then they themselves became the beast they tried to avoid...
This brings up one of my pet peeves in this game. Permit-systems should have been BGS protected and used as lore/story anchors, not to mention handcrafted scenery. The demise of Van Maanen's Star for example is sad to see when the system was made iconic in FE2 with 1) starring in a printed novel and 2) being a major contraband route for Sol's luxury goods.
These are scattered special systems that could have been hotspots of uniqueness and personality, and whose trust you need to earn before you gain access. So they already act as a gameplay reward! It's a pity they don't have more to show for themselves than an occasional rare goods.
In a lot of places, I agree.
In Elite: Dangerous, initially the Thargoids were something in the mist that we did puzzle after puzzle on, trips far flung around the galaxy, and constantly searched for new information.
But after a little while of the Thargoids hitting the galactic stage "in person", they quickly became nothing more than ‘station-attack bots’. Station attacks don’t mean anywhere near as much to me anymore when the lot of us in Operation IDA can get a station back online in a single week with the larger community’s help.
The Guardians had a ton of interesting puzzles, some which felt like mild archaeology which was really fun to be doing in a space game during Horizons release.
Now we just use their bases as blueprint printers for weapons to go shoot down the ‘station-attack bots’.
The variation in these puzzles/ways to interact with the lore made the game feel very alive and much more vast, but nowadays it feels like the lore takes place more in the detached text of Galnet than in the game itself. New players seems to know largely anything that’s going on in the background, and I don’t blame them considering we have a chapter’s worth of info in the Codex and that’s about it unless you go wandering the galaxy and stumble on an old relic of 2015-2017.
There is still a lot of that era in the game to interact with tho, and loads of it is voice-acted - but to expect new players to go out and find it quickly is a massive expectation that most people will have the interest to do so without much tangible along the way.
Maybe some day, if Odyssey really is meant to be a platform going forward for the foreseeable future of Elite, then maybe we'll get more Formidine/Guardian/Thargoid/INRA/The Black Flight/The Club moments like in the golden years.
But if at some point we get Thargoids on the ground to interact with, I can only imagine that at some point they’ll turn into ‘green-creature on the ground you shoot at for mats’ lol - and that thought is a depressing one. The last big wows for me in the game's lore were the Thargoid Superstructures (which had a decent puzzle to them), and the Guardian Beacons (which were only used for a single part in unlocking Guardian Fighters and had no real lore with them :/) . . . and how many years ago has that all been?
This isn't to mention all the stuff player groups did with player-submitted galnets & events in the first year.
In Elite: Dangerous, initially the Thargoids were something in the mist that we did puzzle after puzzle on, trips far flung around the galaxy, and constantly searched for new information.
But after a little while of the Thargoids hitting the galactic stage "in person", they quickly became nothing more than ‘station-attack bots’. Station attacks don’t mean anywhere near as much to me anymore when the lot of us in Operation IDA can get a station back online in a single week with the larger community’s help.
The Guardians had a ton of interesting puzzles, some which felt like mild archaeology which was really fun to be doing in a space game during Horizons release.
Now we just use their bases as blueprint printers for weapons to go shoot down the ‘station-attack bots’.
The variation in these puzzles/ways to interact with the lore made the game feel very alive and much more vast, but nowadays it feels like the lore takes place more in the detached text of Galnet than in the game itself. New players seems to know largely anything that’s going on in the background, and I don’t blame them considering we have a chapter’s worth of info in the Codex and that’s about it unless you go wandering the galaxy and stumble on an old relic of 2015-2017.
There is still a lot of that era in the game to interact with tho, and loads of it is voice-acted - but to expect new players to go out and find it quickly is a massive expectation that most people will have the interest to do so without much tangible along the way.
Maybe some day, if Odyssey really is meant to be a platform going forward for the foreseeable future of Elite, then maybe we'll get more Formidine/Guardian/Thargoid/INRA/The Black Flight/The Club moments like in the golden years.
But if at some point we get Thargoids on the ground to interact with, I can only imagine that at some point they’ll turn into ‘green-creature on the ground you shoot at for mats’ lol - and that thought is a depressing one. The last big wows for me in the game's lore were the Thargoid Superstructures (which had a decent puzzle to them), and the Guardian Beacons (which were only used for a single part in unlocking Guardian Fighters and had no real lore with them :/) . . . and how many years ago has that all been?
This isn't to mention all the stuff player groups did with player-submitted galnets & events in the first year.
"I can remember when this was all ships... No fleet carriers or murderers running around on foot..."
That was likely the original intention, but I'm guessing that was dropped when they decided to go all-out on procedural generation for everything, including missions etc. To the detriment of the game IMHO.
The lore of the game is .... thin we got a lot of information from the early days, however as we wander through the years the landscape is becoming very bare, it’s almost like we are close to the desert 🏜
Additions to lore doesn't need to be in the form explained stuff by Codex or NPCs. As mentioned above the galaxy is big and old, so unexplained mysterious ancient stuff that explorers can stumble upon would be really fantastic. The unexplained stuff can be expanded on at a later date, but teasing players with unexplained mysterious stuff would really stimulate the urge to explore.
Ancient ruins, giant skeletons, strange rock formations, unnatural remnants. Especially if there were some strange patterns to some of the stuff found. Patterns on a planet, or realized across entire systems. I'm not suggesting adding new core gameplay, just stuff thrown in to give the galaxy some interesting depth.
Personally I would have a much stronger desire to land on planets if I had thoughts of finding something strange, exciting, unique, and new. Not just scanning stuff that has been scanned thousands of times, or picking up more rocks. Currently my primary reason for landing is for cool pics!
Ancient ruins, giant skeletons, strange rock formations, unnatural remnants. Especially if there were some strange patterns to some of the stuff found. Patterns on a planet, or realized across entire systems. I'm not suggesting adding new core gameplay, just stuff thrown in to give the galaxy some interesting depth.
Personally I would have a much stronger desire to land on planets if I had thoughts of finding something strange, exciting, unique, and new. Not just scanning stuff that has been scanned thousands of times, or picking up more rocks. Currently my primary reason for landing is for cool pics!
FDev's response is typically 'personal narrative', which would be great if it was 1984: I had an amazing adventure exploring the galaxy, fighting Thargoids, becoming 'Archangel', but it doesnt work in 2021 when the game isnt solo play. Elite is an amazingly broad game which you can now run around on foot as well as fly spaceships around; the vibrancy and variety of this community shows what a great base it is to build lore, narratives and events on.
I dont underand why FDev dont support this in-game: I want to get adverts for the latest Buckyball racing series, hear about planned group expeditions, read the history of dredger clans, get news on large scale faction wars. All the kind of stuff which I know is going on outside of the game.
In game there is nothing to support this kind of personal narrative: nothing except some new pew-pews. It says a lot about the support for narrative that in the latest, greatest expansions you cannot even talk to another commander in the goddamn bar.
I dont underand why FDev dont support this in-game: I want to get adverts for the latest Buckyball racing series, hear about planned group expeditions, read the history of dredger clans, get news on large scale faction wars. All the kind of stuff which I know is going on outside of the game.
In game there is nothing to support this kind of personal narrative: nothing except some new pew-pews. It says a lot about the support for narrative that in the latest, greatest expansions you cannot even talk to another commander in the goddamn bar.
I've been looking high and low for a replacement for ED, and I'm just not finding anything that measures up. I thought the X serious might, but I'm just not getting hooked by X3 (which I've owned for awhile but haven't played until recently) because it feels so sterile. NMS is not a "space game" IMO. The closest thing I've found is Space Engineers, which does does give me a good feel of immersive "I'm flying an actual spaceship in space!" along with a sense of personal narrative. On the other hand, it's got zero lore or story of any kind, except what the players make for themselves on a shared server. This is SE's greatest weakness IMO. Ironically my favorite space game ATM is the very humble Rebel Galaxy, and a large part of that is a sense of narrative and "lore".
So while ED may be falling a bit behind in the lore department based on its own history, I've not found any other space game that comes close to giving me a sense of immersive story like ED does. And for me, part of that "lore" is my own personal narrative, often joined with community narrative (Enigma Expedition, Borann 2 LTD rush, your lore tours, etc). It's one of the few games that feels like a virtual "second life", and I think that is the hook that keeps me tied to it, even when it suffers from bugs and repetitive game loops and lack of story-driven content like my favorite Elder Scrolls games provide.
And to this point, I don't know how much nostalgia clogs my vision of what ED is today. I haven't played Horizons for a few weeks now (except to log in to check on things). Part of me has Odyssey FOMO, but another part of me feels like ED is in a weird limbo while Odyssey is being fixed, so I doubt any big story-driven events will be happening until Odyssey is playable. In fact, the biggest "event" right now seems to be trouble-shooting Odyssey, LOL.
So like you, "I don't know." All that I do know is that for all ED's flaws, I've yet to find something better that scratches all the itches that ED does. Any suggestions?
It certainly isn't a space game per se that you can fly ships in and explore the entire galaxy, or in any sense multiplayer, but I've been getting my fix to some extent with the two Subnautica games, at least from a sci-fi/planetary exploration/aliens/lore perspective. And there are a couple of space ships (spoilers). Definitely not for the pew-pew crowd though.
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Well considering you had to pay 4500 pounds up front to write lore for the game, it's likely this is what they are waiting for, a writer to pay them for the privilege of producing lore instead of the old way of, you know, paying a writer. Besides, perhaps the "writing team" is having the majority of their time still taken up by fleet carriers (yes this was a real FDEV quote when galnet went down).
Paying customers are already expected to be FDev’s QA department and now they should start providing the lore of the game? All that’s left is to get paying customers to take over developing the game and Braben can just sit back and cash checks... genius business strategy.
Pay people to do work? Nah!
Get people to work for free? Nah!
Get people to pay you and they work for free? Bingo!
And that's the difference in a MMO like this - we are perfectly aware, that we are part of the lore, our actions should contribute to it.
It's not about doing work for free, it's about shaping the environment you play in into something unique where you feel at home and can loose yourself.
This sums it up for me. While I've tried not to be hyperbolic in comments, it would be safe to say that at many points, Frontier have taken a road different than I would have taken, even given the same technology to work with.
... And yet, I haven't found anything else that makes flying spaceships feel so good.
I haven't had any major technical issues with Odyssey, so I'm giving it a try. But as Drew said, the major stumbling blocks are simply the way the world pulls me out of my own personal narrative.
My latest issue: I'm old (and wise?) Opt-in violence, even in games, just doesn't feel good to me anymore. But human nature being what it is, hang a story on it, where there's at least a chance I'm fighting for the right side, and it becomes fun again (in a game). I'm having trouble finding missions or scenarios where it feels that I might have a chance of being on the right side of the conflict.