No I don’t think the game is doomed or anything like that. This is just my opinion and I’m sure many will disagree with me.
After traveling more than 250k light years during DW2 and, then heading around the galaxy to the Formidine Rift, in my opinion Fdev has totally wrecked exploration. There is almost nothing to find and the new discovery scanner just makes it a grind. All the planets look the same e.g almost all the ice worlds are solid white with the same hurricane looking clouds, all the HMC worlds are the same shades of brown and orange etc. each jump you have to throttle down and look at a chart that resembles a heart monitor printout. Then if you want to actually look at anything you have to waste time and play zoom simulator to see the same old thing. There is zero skill involved and basically they have managed to turn exploration into a grind.
There is also almost nothing to find. After 250k lys Ive found a single unexpected biological POI. I’ve found zero lagrange clouds or stellar POIs. All the biological POIs look the same and are just copy paste.
The new lighting system has messed up nebulas. Before landing on the dark side of a planet in a nebula was cool. The sky was brightly lit in vivid colors from all the starlight lighting up the nebula. Now, except for bright blue nebula, they just look faded and drab so there is no reason to visit them anymore. Also landing on planets above or below the galaxy used to be awesome, now it’s nothing special.
After DW2 I don’t see any reason to leave the bubble until the next update. Hopefully they will at least bring back the ADS so we are not always forced to use that awful zoom simulator when you just want a quick glance of what’s in the system.
I've got nothing against the FSS but it needs some improvement. For example the long scan waiting time to see geo/biological signals, the missing orbital lines in VR, asteroid clusters messages that block all next information messages and the grind in finding all moons around gas giants (too many zoom levels).
During the beta phase I liked the FSS but I was afraid that apart from planets, it would have been useless if FD didn't add new cool things to find in the galaxy.
Unfortunately my fears became true.
They indeed added some but they're terribly rare and they are quite similar! Unlike you, on the complete DW2 route, forth and back, I discovered ZERO lagarange clouds.
- The odds to find cool things needs to be rebalanced of a 10x factor minimum
- They need to add much more variety to the same feature
- They need to add new phenomena, but a huge number more, not just 10
- We need to see phenomena in Supercruise, the USS box concept is just garbage and the supercruise-normal flight transition kills the immersion.
- Where are supernovae and other stellar features?
- Why star flares are not dangerous?
- Where are the planet catastrophies? Colliding bodies, collapsing planets with unstable core (this is very sci-fi, and ED is sci-fi)
- Where are signs of other civilizations?
- Where are other NPC explorers in need?
- Is it possible that the only gameplay for explorers is only the FSS and wallpapers generator?
- Where are the misteries to be investigated in the various galaxy sector?
- Where are the outpost far in the black that need supplies?
- What about more gameplay on planets rather than just collecting materials?
- Where are the earthquakes?
- Where are the erupting vulcanoes?
- Where is the graphical improvements for the ice worlds?
- Where are the new SRV variants with new dedicated exploration tools?
- Where are the caves? You know, we have thargoid bases which actually ARE caves so no reason not to produce some more variants without aliens inside.
- Where is the planetary mining?
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