ANNOUNCEMENT Odyssey: Update on VR and Ship Interiors

Rainbro

Rainbro
Rat Catcher said:
They haven't actually been dropped from development, just currently nothing bar Odyssey is being discussed from the CMs. Understandably ;)
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So I take it you're now saying that they have been dropped, but only temporarily? Fair enough, Frontier might decide to resume it in the future. Unfortunately I don't believe they've put that out as a PSA.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Rainbro said:
So I take it you're now saying that they have been dropped, but only temporarily? Fair enough, Frontier might decide to resume it in the future. Unfortunately I don't believe they've put that out as a PSA.
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Don't worry your head about whatever I say, just enjoy the fresh air...
 

Riverside

Riverside
Rainbro said:
So I take it you're now saying that they have been dropped, but only temporarily? Fair enough, Frontier might decide to resume it in the future. Unfortunately I don't believe they've put that out as a PSA.
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The community managers aren't game designers. They do represent the company though, and if they are expressing their own opinion they will usually (and should) make sure it is clear that it is not to be interpreted as a company statement.

However there have also been times where part of the community team has actually said 'not something we are planning to do' yet a later dice roll actually added that feature (I'm thinking of the Orrery system map here).

So while I'll take the words of a Frontier employee at face value over the words of any non-employee every time, random chance suggests even when an unambiguous statement is given that's still not cast in stone.

I am not expecting walking about in ship interiors to be added at all, based almost entirely on Arthur's livestream 'you think you want it but you don't' rant.
 

[VR] Orodruin

[VR] Orodruin
Phoenix_Dfire said:
The best they could do is walking around the bridge, down a corridor or taking a turbolift, and then out of the hatch. Those kind of transition are normally the first things that get turned off because they get boring.
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You mean like how we now have to run from a blue circle beneath our ships, through a hangar that is longer than our ships, to an elevator? Without any option of turning it off. Relevant gameplay?
 

RooksBailey

RooksBailey
I am hoping we get a compromise: I would be happy to be able to walk across the command deck of my ship to a captain's quarters where we can maybe sit at a desk to review our recent activities, bunk out when exiting the game, and maybe even decorate it to our liking with Arx purchases. Something like Mechwarrior 5 offers:

fANagbw.png


Contrary to what Fdev says, I never get tired of walking the length of my Leopard, looking at my mechs under repair, and going to my office to review ops. And if I do get tired, Piranha gave us quick buttons to skip the walking. The best of both worlds! Which you can do in a video game, which is why Fdev's statement on ship interiors makes no sense. Be that as it may, if they don't want to put the work into full ship interiors, at least give us captain quarters!
 

Mark Zero

M
RooksBailey said:
I am hoping we get a compromise: I would be happy to be able to walk across the command deck of my ship to a captain's quarters where we can maybe sit at a desk to review our recent activities, bunk out when exiting the game, and maybe even decorate it to our liking with Arx purchases. Something like Mechwarrior 5 offers:

fANagbw.png


Contrary to what Fdev says, I never get tired of walking the length of my Leopard, looking at my mechs under repair, and going to my office to review ops. And if I do get tired, Piranha gave us quick buttons to skip the walking. The best of both worlds! Which you can do in a video game, which is why Fdev's statement on ship interiors makes no sense. Be that as it may, if they don't want to put the work into full ship interiors, at least give us captain quarters!
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After sitting at a desk all day managing paperwork, the absolute last thing I ever want to do in an Elite Dangerous ship ever in any way is sit behind a freaking desk. I play the space game to fly space ships in space, and any "ops" work I need to do is contained in four menus around my cockpit while I'm flying the space ship in space. I do not need a desk. Do not ever, ever, ever give me a desk.
 

DazeDreamer

D
Riverside said:
The community managers aren't game designers. They do represent the company though, and if they are expressing their own opinion they will usually (and should) make sure it is clear that it is not to be interpreted as a company statement.

However there have also been times where part of the community team has actually said 'not something we are planning to do' yet a later dice roll actually added that feature (I'm thinking of the Orrery system map here).

So while I'll take the words of a Frontier employee at face value over the words of any non-employee every time, random chance suggests even when an unambiguous statement is given that's still not cast in stone.

I am not expecting walking about in ship interiors to be added at all, based almost entirely on Arthur's livestream 'you think you want it but you don't' rant.
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Also does go the other way though, the Tuesday before the official announcement that consoles were delayed till the end of time (kidding). Bruce announced they were looking into a Beta for console, and from what I've seen and heard it didn't go that way exactly 😬
 

Belandriel

B
Mark Zero said:
After sitting at a desk all day managing paperwork, the absolute last thing I ever want to do in an Elite Dangerous ship ever in any way is sit behind a freaking desk. I play the space game to fly space ships in space, and any "ops" work I need to do is contained in four menus around my cockpit while I'm flying the space ship in space. I do not need a desk. Do not ever, ever, ever give me a desk.
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I'll probably never understand how people don't want OPTIONAL content... You WON'T have to use it :rolleyes:
 

Mark Zero

M
Belandriel said:
I'll probably never understand how people don't want OPTIONAL content... You WON'T have to use it :rolleyes:
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Consider this; if they put content in the game that is optional enough to not have to be used, then it's not going to be deep or engaging enough for the people who want that content.

If they put content in the game that is going to be deep and engaging enough to satisfy the people who want it, or is at least going to matter in the game, it's probably not going to be optional even for the people who actively hate engaging with it.
 

Belandriel

B
Mark Zero said:
Consider this; if they put content in the game that is optional enough to not have to be used, then it's not going to be deep or engaging enough for the people who want that content.
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You mean like ship interiors? It works fine without, obviously (trolling on purpose here, of course) ;)
 

Mark Zero

M
Belandriel said:
You mean like ship interiors? It works fine without, obviously (trolling on purpose here, of course) ;)
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Ship interiors are a great example of what I mean, actually! Let's dive in, shall we?

Because they are so ravenously demanded by a portion of the players, adding ship interiors to the game is going to be a massively difficult undertaking for Frontier, because there is literally no way they can get it right enough for people to actually like it.

Let's say they add ship interiors "just enough", for that sweet sweet immersion factor that everyone demands. You can walk in your cockpit. You get some hallways, maybe a lift to take you down to the airlock to disembark. You get some pre-fabbed dynamic areas where if you outfit a cargo hold, you can see a cargo hold. None of it is interactive beyond a walk-by, but it's there and you can move through it in all its glory now. Let's say just to make this fun, the blue teleport circle is still there too, so you can choose to disembark with a teleport or walk through the ship manually. The ship interior is implemented, but totally optional! Everyone wins, right?

Wrong, and I guarantee you knew why before you got through that paragraph: People who want ship interiors want more than just the immersion of looking at it, even if they claim they "just want to walkabout in the cockpit". No they don't. The immediate next demands are gonna be "Braben said we'd be able to repair damage inside the ships in the kickstarter", "what about EVAs", "I want to interact with these computer panels and have it mean something", "where's my Captain's Quarters?", "I want an NPC crew I can see and give orders to". If all we got out of an eventual ship interior implementation is "walk around in your ship", people who claim to want that will celebrate for about ten minutes and then demand to play with it in a more engaging way. And for folks who want it to be optional, and who unironically continue to use the teleport disembark? That's going to be decried as trivializing interiors, and that FDev is bad at game design because they allow it to be bypassed.

Now let's flip the scenario. Ship interiors are functional. You plot your course through the stars on a dedicated Universal Cartographics star mapping module. You can repair your modules manually from the inside of the ship, and you can EVA to repair the hull breaches on the outside. You get a fully customizable Commander's Quarters, ranging from a simple bunk in the Viper III to a full blown Stateroom in your Anaconda. You can go down into modules like a Cargo Rack or a Refinery to see what's in there, repair it by hand, maybe even take part in enhancing its function or constructing something like limpets. People can board your ship/sneak aboard just like Braben said in the kickstarter. Amazing, right? Dream come true!

Except it's not, because if you're gonna make that gameplay mean something, it's going to re-balance the entire game in ways that can't be opted out of. Wear and tear on modules might need to be increased to give you a reason to interact with them, which means tedious maintenance gameplay loops. AFMUs now become optional, which means the "ideal build" might not include them, so now why are those in the game any more at all? If there's a mini-game inside a refinery module that slightly increases the yield of an ore payload if you work it manually, now the only correct way to mine is to engage with that tedium for every single chunk of ore you break off. Don't think people will play that way? Look at how people treat Engineering now. If the game allows for sneaking onto or forcibly boarding a ship and stealing it, is that going to be a rebuy or have you lost that ship permanently? Either way, having to fight people inside your ship (NPC or player alike, because there will have to be NPC boarding attempts if the system exists) is now non-optional. Decorations for your Commander's Quarters? If you can earn them in-game, they're a grind. If you can buy them with Arx, it's a greedy corporate cash-grab.

All of this considered? Unironically, as it stands now, the game actually does work pretty great without interiors.
 

Belandriel

B
Mark Zero said:
Ship interiors are a great example of what I mean, actually! Let's dive in, shall we?

Because they are so ravenously demanded by a portion of the players, adding ship interiors to the game is going to be a massively difficult undertaking for Frontier, because there is literally no way they can get it right enough for people to actually like it.

Let's say they add ship interiors "just enough", for that sweet sweet immersion factor that everyone demands. You can walk in your cockpit. You get some hallways, maybe a lift to take you down to the airlock to disembark. You get some pre-fabbed dynamic areas where if you outfit a cargo hold, you can see a cargo hold. None of it is interactive beyond a walk-by, but it's there and you can move through it in all its glory now. Let's say just to make this fun, the blue teleport circle is still there too, so you can choose to disembark with a teleport or walk through the ship manually. The ship interior is implemented, but totally optional! Everyone wins, right?

Wrong, and I guarantee you knew why before you got through that paragraph: People who want ship interiors want more than just the immersion of looking at it, even if they claim they "just want to walkabout in the cockpit". No they don't. The immediate next demands are gonna be "Braben said we'd be able to repair damage inside the ships in the kickstarter", "what about EVAs", "I want to interact with these computer panels and have it mean something", "where's my Captain's Quarters?", "I want an NPC crew I can see and give orders to". If all we got out of an eventual ship interior implementation is "walk around in your ship", people who claim to want that will celebrate for about ten minutes and then demand to play with it in a more engaging way. And for folks who want it to be optional, and who unironically continue to use the teleport disembark? That's going to be decried as trivializing interiors, and that FDev is bad at game design because they allow it to be bypassed.

Now let's flip the scenario. Ship interiors are functional. You plot your course through the stars on a dedicated Universal Cartographics star mapping module. You can repair your modules manually from the inside of the ship, and you can EVA to repair the hull breaches on the outside. You get a fully customizable Commander's Quarters, ranging from a simple bunk in the Viper III to a full blown Stateroom in your Anaconda. You can go down into modules like a Cargo Rack or a Refinery to see what's in there, repair it by hand, maybe even take part in enhancing its function or constructing something like limpets. People can board your ship/sneak aboard just like Braben said in the kickstarter. Amazing, right? Dream come true!

Except it's not, because if you're gonna make that gameplay mean something, it's going to re-balance the entire game in ways that can't be opted out of. Wear and tear on modules might need to be increased to give you a reason to interact with them, which means tedious maintenance gameplay loops. AFMUs now become optional, which means the "ideal build" might not include them, so now why are those in the game any more at all? If there's a mini-game inside a refinery module that slightly increases the yield of an ore payload if you work it manually, now the only correct way to mine is to engage with that tedium for every single chunk of ore you break off. Don't think people will play that way? Look at how people treat Engineering now. If the game allows for sneaking onto or forcibly boarding a ship and stealing it, is that going to be a rebuy or have you lost that ship permanently? Either way, having to fight people inside your ship (NPC or player alike, because there will have to be NPC boarding attempts if the system exists) is now non-optional. Decorations for your Commander's Quarters? If you can earn them in-game, they're a grind. If you can buy them with Arx, it's a greedy corporate cash-grab.

All of this considered? Unironically, as it stands now, the game actually does work pretty great without interiors.
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I'm actually pleased, that I did not just let it go :) So first of all... Thanks for your thoughts!

Maybe one idea to circumvent all the problems: Make that depending on how big your ship actually is... is it multi-crew? Then now you know, wyh you need a crew at all. No more sitting around watching a boring 3rd person view... get to work :D Or else you just fly on your own in a small / medium ship with non-functional stuff.

Although we know, this won't happen ^^ And by the way... you will NEVER please everybody ;)
 
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Mersozz

Mersozz
As far as ship interiors go, I am not opposed to the idea, but there are higher priorities for me personally.

I can already look around my cockpit to a great extent. Being able to climb into my ship rather than using the blue cylinder would be fine, but either way it remains an entrance/exit maneuver.

At the moment, I would pass on new content which will generate a crap ton of bugs, like commanders getting stuck under their cockpit chairs, on toilet bowls, inside refrigerators, etc.

So, if it happens, great, but if it happens at the expense of working on other unfinished features, then not so great.

I would not mind if they introduced a method to jump from the ship directly into the concourse, but that’s just me.
 
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