Fiction Official books and lore accuracy

Phosfurious · Jun 14, 2015

I have made my way through "And Here the Wheel", "Out of the Darkness", "Reclamation", and "Legacy" so far. I thought they were all exciting reads, and I am working my way through the rest!! Having some things connected to or searchable in the game has been a big plus to me as well! Some details, though, are clearly different.

What we have in E: D right now and the descriptions of things in the books I've read so far keeps making me recheck to make sure I actually understand how things work in-game. Artistic license and imperfect information might have pushed a few things off the path here and there. Even with that said, the differences never take away from how much I enjoy each story and often makes things more exciting since i can't guess what will happen as easily!

I think the fact itself that things are different has been covered a couple places, but can we get a clue as to how close each "official" lore book gets to the mark? I don't want to list up exactly what was different since it may or may not spoil things in the books and it isn't strictly necessary. Instead let's use 5 broad-ish categories that often seem different between the books and the game: [Ships], [Celestial Bodies/Locations], [Structures], [Technology], and [Environmental Mechanics/Physics]. I want to rate the books on how accurate they are in the descriptions of things that are in-game currently (or, optionally, at some point along the dev cycle)?

For example, I'll use my opinion of the accuracy of "Legacy" comparing its similarity to Elite: Dangerous 1.3 (and a couple naughty peeks at game files

):

[Ships] 95%
[Cel. Bodies/Locations] 95%
[Structures] 80%
[Technology] 75%
[Env. Mechanics/Physics] 75%.

How do you think each of the books stack up like this?

Poseidal · Jun 15, 2015

I'd like to hear your opinion on Reclamation.

One thing to note is they were all (I think) written before everything was set in stone, and what to go on were concepts given to them by FD and past games only.

For example, in Reclamation, there's a physical description of the Vulture which is pretty accurate (all the way down to the players), while there were statements about its movement that are not, but the author would only have been given a brief description or picture and FD may have changed their mind afterwards (and also it was spoken by a character in-universe, so it's possible the character did not know it that well, though I thought he would be quite savvy, so I think it's more of a direction change for the concept of the ship).

Phosfurious · Jun 15, 2015

Give me a little time to check a couple things here and there, and I guess I can try adding that in. I agree that it seems that concepts probably shifted during and after the book releases. I picked Legacy because it was by Michael and seemed to be more recently finished than the others. If anyone had inside info to keep the book close to the game, it would have been him.

Flowswithdrek · Jun 17, 2015

You have to remember that the authors started writing the books/stories before even FD had fleshed out much of the detail or before that detail was set in concrete. In fact I think its fair to say we bombarded FD with all manner of questions related to technology. e.g. hyperdrives, weapons, how communications worked, magnetic boots, human life expectancy etc. etc. to be as true to the game as possible. Also not every story is set in the current time line, so that needs to be taken into account. FD did allow some artistic licence, but they also made us change aspects of the fiction if it didn't fit with their vision of the game. Michael's book also came along later and benefited from an author who actually made many of the decisions on how technology would work in game.

Phosfurious · Jun 18, 2015

@poseidal I'm still looking over the books I read again, so I'll get to the rating eventually but not just yet.

@flowswithdrek Thanks for confirming that about changes to things after writing. I only got into elite last year, so there's a bunch that I don't know about. I haven't read Tales from the Frontier yet, but it is definitely coming around soon for me. I figured it was something along those line for the info available to the writers such as yourself. I just wanted to get a sense of how close things were in game to try guessing what might still be in the pipeline. For example, jumps that take days show up in some of the books, but in the game that was apparently reworked. I wouldnt expect that to change. Though the misjump mechanics described in a few books might still be plausible even though they aren't in-game yet.

I feel like the books can teach us a lot about which ways the game might go, so I wanna get every drop of detail out of them I can. How close do you think what you wrote is currently to the game, or even better, is there anything you think can be ruled out/still coming? Oh and which books aren't in the timeline?

Susimetsa · Jun 18, 2015

Phosfurious said:
For example, jumps that take days show up in some of the books, but in the game that was apparently reworked. I wouldnt expect that to change. Though the misjump mechanics described in a few books might still be plausible even though they aren't in-game yet.

The insta-jump hyper-engines are so-called Generation 3 hyperdrives that were historically introduced only in 3290's (if I remember correctly, could have been '97 even), so stories set before that time would use the slower Gen2 drives. Misjumps were a problem with Gen1 drives (cannot recall if they were also in FE2 and FFE timeline (Gen2)).

drew · Jun 18, 2015

Most of the books were in a 'final' state towards the end of the 2013. I, personally, was able to make some modifications to mine based on the ED Alpha build but that was the last opportunity for change due to our time constraints. Thus I have no reference to some established in-games aspects (e.g. the Frame Shift Drive). Michael's books was a little later so is more accurate.

My description of the Vulture was based on the sparse information we had at the time, the ship has evolved since I wrote the book. I deliberately kept my descriptions fairly vague as I thought this was a likely outcome. We had an artist's impression of the ship, not a model.

Since then many things have diverged from the official books. The Power Play characters are perhaps the most obvious example, none of the characters involved in PP were known to any of the writers and none of the writers characters have been introduced as part of PP. The actions of the PP characters will also shortly override the outcomes of many of the books (Patreus about to own the 'Prism' system for example and I believe Michael's system has also changed ownership)

The ending of my book is also 'wrong' in the sense that the Imperial Courier in my story isn't the same type of ship as the one now available in game.

Cheers,

Drew.

Flowswithdrek · Jun 18, 2015

Phosfurious said:
How close do you think what you wrote is currently to the game, or even better, is there anything you think can be ruled out/still coming? Oh and which books aren't in the timeline?

Timeline is a difficult one. My story - A Game of Death was written as of right at the beginning of the current time line, but was originally linked to events in Allen Stroud's Lave Revolution, which is set before current events. The publisher took the links out of the story for 'publisher reasons'. I'm not sure about the other stories. Like Drew, I kept a lot of descriptions vague. One thing I have in my story are Kraits, small ships from earlier versions of Elite. The story was written before I was told there were no plans to introduce them in the current game, but I kept them in anyway..

Susimetsa · Jun 19, 2015

As it comes to my story, I purposefully set it before the Gen3 drives, since the ability to instantly jump from one place to another did not really appeal to me from a storytelling point of view, although I understand the need from gameplay perspective. I also included ships from earlier games to give more colour to the universe (as having only a limited types of ships would make it feel much smaller). Also, the hero in my story flies an old version of Cobra Mk I without a windowed cockpit (using monitors instead). This was a nod to the original Elite and the picture of a cockpit presented in the guidebook that came with it.

Not sure how many of these details survived the publisher's editing. I can only remember the version of the story that I wrote...

My wife's story was set over a 1000 years before the events of the game, so the tech is entirely different in that one.

JeffRyan · Jun 19, 2015

drew said:
Most of the books were in a 'final' state towards the end of the 2013. I, personally, was able to make some modifications to mine based on the ED Alpha build but that was the last opportunity for change due to our time constraints. Thus I have no reference to some established in-games aspects (e.g. the Frame Shift Drive). Michael's books was a little later so is more accurate.

My description of the Vulture was based on the sparse information we had at the time, the ship has evolved since I wrote the book. I deliberately kept my descriptions fairly vague as I thought this was a likely outcome. We had an artist's impression of the ship, not a model.

Since then many things have diverged from the official books. The Power Play characters are perhaps the most obvious example, none of the characters involved in PP were known to any of the writers and none of the writers characters have been introduced as part of PP. The actions of the PP characters will also shortly override the outcomes of many of the books (Patreus about to own the 'Prism' system for example and I believe Michael's system has also changed ownership)

The ending of my book is also 'wrong' in the sense that the Imperial Courier in my story isn't the same type of ship as the one now available in game.

Cheers,

Drew.

I thought your links to the cartography of the region were particularly noteworthy Drew. You must have done a lot of research.