In these forums ironically called "Suggestions" you will meet a lot of "old timers". People who have been playing this game for ages, and will disagree with any suggestion to modify the game in any way that will make it easier for new players to advance. Mostly because they have already done the grind that you want to avoid, and they feel that you have to do the same amount of grind to be worthy of playing the game and advance to the same level they are at. Don't assume that FDEV will share their thoughts on the matter. FDEV is dependent on attracting new players for the game to be profitable, so new ideas must be considered. Not being willing to change the game to suit more players will in time end with nobody playing the game, and it will be abandoned by the developers. Refusing to embrace change has had some rather unpleasant consequences in the past. Remember Kodak or Nokia? For now Elite is by far the most immersive VR game I know of, but it wont always be. If it wasn't for the VR experience, I'd just play something else. In fact I bought the game in 2017 and played it on flat screen for a short while, then ignored it until late 2020 when I got the Rift S and a X52 pro HOTAS. Now I'm getting a bit tired of exactly the stuff you mention here, so I would want some changes, but as pointed out by the others here: It's entirely optional to play Elite.
Please: more playing, less waiting and grinding
- Thread starter cmdrdale
- Start date
Okay, now that we have cleared this out.
Let us disect the arguement to the bone : Let say that we have mission A and mission B. A and B are the same mission, but B requires a travel of 200 Kls whilst A does not.
B has a larger payout in credit, such that Delta = P(B)-P(A).
So. The act of traveling the 200K ls will net Delta credits. Since the act of traveling the 200 K ls is equal to watching a ~20min timer go down to 0:06 before pressing a key, we have a credit/h baseline for doing nothing in game. Should we pay that amount of credit for time spend in the hyperspace tunnel ? Why not ? Searching nebulas in the galmap ? Why not ? (note that the latter requires more skill than SC travel).
Combat sure requires more skill than waiting 20min to press a single button. Are you seriously considering the two tasks as commensurable in difficulty ?
One may argue that it as to do with the distance. Well, there are systems in the core that are closer from each other than Hutton is from the exit point.
We can jump between those systems, but not the longer hutton system distance ? Why not ? Both cases are identical : go from star A to star B.
It's a trade off .. one longer flight, docking once . or two short flights, docking twice .. for balance of reward.
Might as well ask if you consider docking to be a deeper gameplay mechanic than supercruise is because evidently you want to dock more quickly and more often by shrinking distances.
Docking sure requires more skill and is more interesting. Flying in the planet populated are of the system means that there might be interesting SS or interdictions which are actual gameplay. And yes, I fine docking much more interesting than watching a countdown. I guess there are some people that are very much into waiting in queues and thrilled at the idea being stuck waiting in a traffic jam, but they must be few.
Note that the interesting/somewhat skillful part of SC (aka in the planets populated area) is the same for long SC and short SC.
So it really is wait Xmin, press throttle to 75%, get Y credits. Long SC requires zero skill, and does nothing beyond displaying :
1) A timer
2) A distance
3) Space Dust
It's not even logically consistant within the game as there are systems that are 0.1 lyr appart that one can be accessed via hyperspace,
but the two Hutton stars that are 0.13lyr appart can't.
It's almost like FDev felt that long distance SC should be paid more to compensate for their inconvenience and inexistant gameplay...
Yep. This is the basic problem with supercruise - it works really well in the inner systems where you've got planets to route around, various strategies to optimise your acceleration and deceleration, risks of interdictions, and so on ... it works incredibly badly for the journeys between widely-separated binaries where there is literally nothing you can do to speed up the journey, basically no risk of interdiction because of how the acceleration/deceleration curves work, and you're just looking at a slightly fancier version of the Windows 3.1 Starfield screensaver for 15 minutes.
Veteran players have developed various workarounds to deal with this:
1) You can not go to those systems or stations - after all, playing the game is optional. Some missions tell you in advance ... other mission types don't and must be partially or entirely avoided. If this doesn't seem satisfactory and you can't see how a twenty-minute hands-free journey adds to the experience of doing a surface scan mission when the previous surface scan mission didn't require it ... that's entirely valid and I can't either.
2) You can (eventually) buy a Fleet Carrier, which allows you to directly jump to any planetary body (with some downsides, though, and expensively)
3) You can move to Colonia, Pleiades, Witch Head, or some other region where all the stations were individually hand-placed by Frontier after the start of the game [1], and where long supercruises are rare or non-existent. This was my workaround for it
4) There is a possibility that Apex Travel - available in the Odyssey expansion coming up soon - may shorten the times required for some of these journeys. There's not enough information to be certain on this.
Note that these are all workarounds, not a claim that flying hands-free for 30 minutes is actually fun or compelling or adds to the game.
Compare it also with inter-system travel - the galaxy is big, it takes many hours to get across it, but there are strategies to speed that up significantly, it requires frequent hands-on (if a bit repetitive) gameplay, falling asleep for ten minutes will damage your ship, and you won't get a surprise 20,000 LY trip put on you by a mission (you can take missions that long, but they're all signposted as being that long on the offer screen). Also, 99% of the gameplay is available in or very near the bubble without any long-range travel at all.
[1] It's pretty clear from Frontier not hand-placing things in places where they require a long supercruise, over the last several years, that Frontier acknowledges and understands this is a problem. The tricky thing is finding a suitable gameplay alternatives - allowing arbitrary jumps (without the limitations of a Fleet Carrier) would break a lot of the working gameplay associated with the shorter supercruise distances around a single star and its planets. But they definitely know it's an issue and have certainly done things to mitigate it a bit.
Personally I think 2 changes could alleviate a lot of the issues:
1) If you plot a route in the sysmap to a planet on a secondary star then you jump in at that secondary star. And if you're in a system and target a different star then you can initiate a hyperspace jump to that star. You'll still have some long-ish SC, but not the really huge and pointless ones. They'd need to reduce some of the mission payouts, but otherwise this should be fine.
2) Make the FSS work when moving. So now when you are SCing to a planet you can check for HGE or other interesting USS. This would mean you have something you can be doing while in SC. Ideally they would also change the spawns of USS so they're closer to the planets (again reducing SC somewhat - though once you're out of the star's gravity well SC isn't so slow anyway). This actually makes slightly larger systems more attractive than the super-compact ones - a 2000 ls SC gives you more time to look for interesting stuff than a 15 ls one. Ideally you would also add extra interesting USS that might be worth finding - HGE already do this, but you could also add more Trading USS (which are currently pretty rare) - though they need a payout buff.
Neither of these seem amazingly difficult to put in the game, but hey, I don't code the game
1) If you plot a route in the sysmap to a planet on a secondary star then you jump in at that secondary star. And if you're in a system and target a different star then you can initiate a hyperspace jump to that star. You'll still have some long-ish SC, but not the really huge and pointless ones. They'd need to reduce some of the mission payouts, but otherwise this should be fine.
2) Make the FSS work when moving. So now when you are SCing to a planet you can check for HGE or other interesting USS. This would mean you have something you can be doing while in SC. Ideally they would also change the spawns of USS so they're closer to the planets (again reducing SC somewhat - though once you're out of the star's gravity well SC isn't so slow anyway). This actually makes slightly larger systems more attractive than the super-compact ones - a 2000 ls SC gives you more time to look for interesting stuff than a 15 ls one. Ideally you would also add extra interesting USS that might be worth finding - HGE already do this, but you could also add more Trading USS (which are currently pretty rare) - though they need a payout buff.
Neither of these seem amazingly difficult to put in the game, but hey, I don't code the game
I actually agree with you. People will tell you "space is big", but I find that supercruise actually makes space feel very small. Let's compare and contrast this to Space Engineers, where you have a single solar system with small planets. In SE you have two modes of travel, normal space and hyperspace. A hyperspace jump drive is very costly, so usually you start out with normal space travel. It takes about 90 minutes to travel in normal space between earth and the moon, and people say it takes six to eight hours to make the trip from earth to Mars (like I said, it's a scaled down solar system).
Once you do get a jump drive, then you can jump anywhere in the solar system using "blind" jumps. This is pointing your ship in the direction of a planet and guessing how far it is and seeing where you pop out. Like ED, there is a countdown, but the actual jump itself only takes about a second. It can take multiple jumps to get where you want to be, but then you can create a jump point for future reference that will allow you to lock in on those coordinates and not guess. I can go from earth to Mars in a single jump, but it fully depletes my drive capacitor, so it takes time to recharge before I can jump again. Other planets take multiple jumps because they are so far away.
The reason it makes space feel BIGGER is that planets never go racing by like you're just driving past Epcot Center like they do in Super Cruise. You also cannot jump in or out of a gravity well, so no supercruise orbit like ED. I've been exploring just one single planet for MONTHS now, and I've just scratched the surface. It will take me many months to explore all the planets, each which has lots of stuff to see and do in multiplayer since the most exciting assets are player built. Compare this to ED, where I can "explore" hundreds of solar systems in a game session, and tell me which feels like the bigger universe.
So long story short, microjumps do not make space feel smaller, they actually make space feel bigger (despite seeming counter-intuitive), and you avoid the sitting around forever taking a nap waiting for SC to finish. One of the reasons I campaigned for a supercruise autopilot before it was finally added was so I could let my ship fly itself for those 15 boring minutes you talk about, while I do dishes or watch a Youtube video. Of course in VR this is more difficult, which is one of the reasons I don't play ED as much anymore in VR (or at all TBH).
3) Learn to play ukulele.Personally I think 2 changes could alleviate a lot of the issues:
1) If you plot a route in the sysmap to a planet on a secondary star then you jump in at that secondary star. And if you're in a system and target a different star then you can initiate a hyperspace jump to that star. You'll still have some long-ish SC, but not the really huge and pointless ones. They'd need to reduce some of the mission payouts, but otherwise this should be fine.
2) Make the FSS work when moving. So now when you are SCing to a planet you can check for HGE or other interesting USS. This would mean you have something you can be doing while in SC. Ideally they would also change the spawns of USS so they're closer to the planets (again reducing SC somewhat - though once you're out of the star's gravity well SC isn't so slow anyway). This actually makes slightly larger systems more attractive than the super-compact ones - a 2000 ls SC gives you more time to look for interesting stuff than a 15 ls one. Ideally you would also add extra interesting USS that might be worth finding - HGE already do this, but you could also add more Trading USS (which are currently pretty rare) - though they need a payout buff.
Neither of these seem amazingly difficult to put in the game, but hey, I don't code the game
That's just daft - this is a space game .... learn to play the Theremin
Personally, I don't think SC times should be reduced. The issue with it is having no gameplay while it happens, not its duration.
With Odyssey coming soon, we already have confirmation that ship interiors will not be coming with its release. That said, when we do get interiors, it would be the perfect opportunity to adress this by having gameplay within it. It would naturally fix the lack of gameplay portion during SC times, while not reducing them. If the gameplay is interesting enough, we might even purposedly take those long times!
With Odyssey coming soon, we already have confirmation that ship interiors will not be coming with its release. That said, when we do get interiors, it would be the perfect opportunity to adress this by having gameplay within it. It would naturally fix the lack of gameplay portion during SC times, while not reducing them. If the gameplay is interesting enough, we might even purposedly take those long times!
You weren't the first to suggest shortening the travel times (I did the same in a previous thread post) but your suggestion will fall on deaf ears. For some reason, people on here are quite happy to be treated like mugs.
The wasted 30+ seconds of time needed to jump between system suns instead of straight to the station, they say "deal with it"
When FDEV gives a handful of ty paint jobs as a thank you for pre-ordering Horizons, they say "deal with it"
Each system Nav beacon is so ridiculously close to the sun I get heat damage if combat happens, "deal with it"
Crime and Punishment is broken and gankers are a real problem for new players, "Deal with it"
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People complain because they love the game. If they didn't care, they wouldn't be here...
In the case of this "old timer" (actually I'm probably sort of a middle-aged-timer) it's more like figuring out how to enjoy the game while minimizing the grind was incredibly useful, and has helped increase my enjoyment and longevity in the game immensely. I don't have any problem making it easier for noobs, but I can see that certain commonly-suggested changes to make it easier upfront would have ultimately been unhelpful for me.
Which is not to say the game doesn't need improvements. It needs many, and the OP is right about the long supercruise trips. They contribute nothing and should be changed. In the meantime, there are workarounds. Use third party tools to find out how long the trip is. Once on the trip, use Supercruise Assist. Lock in your destination and then go enjoy a relatively more fun activity, like doing your taxes.
SPACE ENGINEERS
Thanks for this reply. As you've said, for the benefit of others I feel like I should acknowledge that I understand "space is big". I get it. I read lots of sci-fi that frequently makes this point. And I love the fact that Elite is 1:1 scale! Finding that out just made this game so much more impressive. I actually put the headset on my girlfriend and took her on a tour of a system or three in VR just to make this point.
I understand that in real life it typically takes a long time to travel between planets. But since we're making up things like supercruise and frame shift in our games, I'm just suggesting we make up technologies like 10x faster/more powerful, so that our games can be more fun than real life.
Exactly this: I quickly fell in love with this game. I honestly haven't enjoyed any other game since then. I have since tried to play a few DCS games, NMS, totally different games like Project Cars 2, but nothing is interesting anymore. I keep thinking about Elite.
I would not have bothered to seek out this forum, register for an account, and write the OP if I didn't care.
When I couldn't find another game to play, I finally busted out my lock picking gear and learned to pick a few locks over the weekend.
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Do you have a poo jar too?
No, I don't think my co-workers would approve.