Polygon and Twinfinite interviews - more Odyssey details, unknowns, and Walking-In-Ships not at launch

Stinja

S
Drelthar said:
Did anyone notice the alt tabbing in the live stream with the senior designer, there was a powerpoint document seemingly titled "Community contingency.."
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Probably pre-planning if The Community does|n't like the stream / info releases:
  • have backup messages already written ("we're waiting to announce that", "still invesstigating that", "that's not at launch, but may come later" etc)
  • additional pics (diferent angles)
  • meeting notes on "managing expectations"
  • CVs of the next wave of community managers to join when the current ones leave
  • EDIT: console peasants (so negelected i forgot about us myself :/ )

and so on.
 

Mrrshal

Mrrshal
askavir said:
Yeah that's what I think too. With only tenuous atmospheres and basically no weather phenomena of any kind I don't expect any changes to the current flying, aside from some effects when entering the atmosphere.

I would love to see mists, rain, storms, wind, snow, and "otherworldly" extreme weathers and how they would impact flight, but I know these kinds of planets are for a later time (assuming we'll ever get there).
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The planet they showed has 4x the atmo of Mars and Mars has dust devils, clouds etc..
 

Ruskodisco

Ruskodisco
Honestly, I havent been back on these forums since forever. I cant believe they are so out of touch to actually do this. I have spent about $200 on this game in support, since kickstarter and they havent actually done anything that I feel is worth getting this game for. If this doesnt come to odyssey, I sure aint getting it and Im glad the frontier forums have woken up from their delirious state of affairs they have been plagued with for years.
 

Sysmon

Sysmon
-VR- Max Factor said:
I take it you've played the expansion, so you know exactly what it's like. There seem to be an awful lot of commander Thrusts from Bradford around at the moment.
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CMDR Thrust from Bradford is usually very positive though. A reliable source reports him as having shown his approval of the fishing in low-altitude crater seas. The snowscooter variant SRV also is a fun a drive, according to similarly reliable third-hand sources.

:D S
 

[VR] DDastardly

[VR] DDastardly
"Our design philosophy was to identify what our player base loves about Elite and distill that down and make sure that those game loops and things that people love engaging with are represented on foot as gameplay loops that they recognize but are obviously presented in a way that is appropriate for foot gameplay."

I really, really hope they didn't conflate what players spend a lot of time doing in ED with "what the player base loves" e.g.

Fdev1: We've run the numbers and it turns out what the players love doing is shooting stationary defenceless rocks or shards in an environment with zero danger, and relogging at HGEs and Dav's Hope.

Fdev2: Great, then how about we "expand the gameplay" by adding a science gun that players can use on foot to shoot stationary defenceless plants (we'll call it "collecting DNA"), and... er we could add respawning temporary POIs to relog at for all the people who enjoy relogging at HGEs.
 

Jace Harriman

Jace Harriman
I know the (possible) lack of ship interiors (at launch) feels like a kick in the balls, but it's also one of those things that may seem simple, but is a whole rabbit hole of headaches and work for a fairly limited reward.

We already have cockpits, so at the very least we should be able to get out of our chairs and walk around those, right? Well, okay. When? If we can stand up at all times, what happens if the ship is in flight? Does the ship keep going? Can we only stand up when the engines are powered down? What about multicrew or NPCs - can we walk around our ship if someone else is flying it?

Maybe that's too complex, and the safe option is when we're landed on a planet; the same trigger for being able to access the SRV, that code's already there. Maybe we walk to the door at the back, and that's the interface for switching to outside. But how long before the novelty wears off, the walk gets tedious, the cockpit isn't enough?

So okay, give us the whole ship to walk around, then. It can't be that hard. But what about passengers, where's my VIP cabin of NPCs? What's the point of walking around inside a ship if some doors are off limits? Or should the game populate your passenger cabins with NPCs as appropriate, based on the missions in your journal?

And okay, if I can walk around inside my ship, and I can meet other Commanders on foot, why can't I invite them onto my ship? In person multicrew not holo-presence, surely that should be part of it else it breaks immersion. And so on, and so on.

We all know how video games work. The player base will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, but trying to do ship interiors "properly" has so many challenges and so much work before it becomes anything aside from just novelty value. Should they dedicate resources to that, and have a big chunk of the work on their paid DLC go towards novelty fluff... or do they save that for later, deliver it as a free addition post-Odyssey, building on space legs at a time / in a way that isn't directly paid for by us?
 

Alien

Alien
Drelthar said:
Did anyone notice the alt tabbing in the live stream with the senior designer, there was a powerpoint document seemingly titled "Community contingency.."

Just something I noticed.

View attachment 184612

Not that I think it means anything or I'm reading anything into it personally. I just thought I'd throw it out there for someone with more tin foil than me to have a pop at.
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To be honest, I don't blame them for having a backup plan, we are a horrible, nasty, undeserving motley crew of unwashed masses ..... and yes, I know sometimes we are awesome and do great things like raising money for charity (heck, even I've done that), but on the whole, all we do is moan and complain about anything .... so yeah, they have a "community contingency plan", and I am ok with that.
 

VR SenseiMatty

VR SenseiMatty
[VR] DDastardly said:
"Our design philosophy was to identify what our player base loves about Elite and distill that down and make sure that those game loops and things that people love engaging with are represented on foot as gameplay loops that they recognize but are obviously presented in a way that is appropriate for foot gameplay."

I really, really hope they didn't conflate what players spend a lot of time doing in ED with "what the player base loves" e.g.

Fdev1: We've run the numbers and it turns out what the players love doing is shooting stationary defenceless rocks or shards in an environment with zero danger, and relogging at HGEs and Dav's Hope.

Fdev2: Great, then how about we "expand the gameplay" by adding a science gun that players can use on foot to shoot stationary defenceless plants (we'll call it "collecting DNA"), and... er we could add respawning temporary POIs to relog at for all the people who enjoy relogging at HGEs.
Click to expand...
LOL!
Nice signature btw ;)
 

Stinja

S
Jace Harriman said:
If we can stand up at all times, what happens if the ship is in flight? Does the ship keep going? Can we only stand up when the engines are powered down? What about multicrew or NPCs - can we walk around our ship if someone else is flying it?
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Let me choose to jump out of the seat with no-one flying it - It's called Elite: Dangerous for a reason - and to be honest my NPC crew is probably a better pilot then me :unsure:

But maybe it's a similar issue to not allowing multicrew to pilot your ship, some fear of gankers or something destroying a CMDR's ship, where really it's denying a feature due a tiny probability of something bad happening.
Letting us use space legs while the ship flies straight (say to Hutton) means we could be feeding our Trumbles*, or analysing samples* collected from the last moon, or carrying out repairs* during what would otherwise be downtime.


* if any of those come with Odessey...
 

zimms

zimms
Drelthar said:
Did anyone notice the alt tabbing in the live stream with the senior designer, there was a powerpoint document seemingly titled "Community contingency.."

Just something I noticed.

View attachment 184612

Not that I think it means anything or I'm reading anything into it personally. I just thought I'd throw it out there for someone with more tin foil than me to have a pop at.
Click to expand...

Much more interesting, the file next to it is called EDU!! Need I say more?

Odyssey will be the last content addition for ED and Frontier will then work on Elite Dangerous Universe! A subscription based MMO, very much like Animal Crossing in space!!

Oops, sorry. Seems I went full "Raxxla thread".
 

CMDR Yates

C
Mrrshal said:
The planet they showed has 4x the atmo of Mars and Mars has dust devils, clouds etc..
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Airless planets are capable of having volcanism, but this was not present in 2.0. Planets that should have had volcanism were accessible, but didn't have it. It was added later. And even then, only minor forms like geysers.
 

Jace Harriman

Jace Harriman
Stinja said:
Let me choose to jump out of the seat with no-one flying it - It's called Elite: Dangerous for a reason - and to be honest my NPC crew is probably a better pilot then me :unsure:
Click to expand...

That's definitely the sort of thing one would want to have possible, but my point was that it potentially presents a lot of problems/challenges. Do you allow the ship to keep flying, or can you only exit the chair when your speed it at zero? Can you stick it on autopilot and pop in the back to make a coffee? Does the game treat it like camera mode? Can it cope with accepting FPS control input while the game is also giving the ship different inputs? Can the engine cope with walking around inside a space that is moving, or would you need to handle movement in ships differently to movement on a planet? Do you need a mechanic to warn the player if a potentially hostile ship enters range, or can you get snuck up on and attacked/destroyed when you're away from the controls? Aside from walking around, is there anything to do, or is it purely a cosmetic gimmick? etc etc

There's potentially a lot of work, and potentially a lot to figure out, despite how simple it seems at face value. And because it's the kind of feature where a lot of unseen effort might have to go into it, to deliver a fairly simple-seeming feature it's not necessarily a good investment of resources (for Odyssey at launch) for a directly paid for DLC. If it's later, and you can hype it up as a whole update (like when they added the holo-me in the first place), and if it's free so players can't complain about having paid for it directly... I could see why that might seem like a better way to implement it.
 
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