Polygon and Twinfinite interviews - more Odyssey details, unknowns, and Walking-In-Ships not at launch
- Thread starter StuartGT
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"... discover outposts and settlements " Is this new .... actually having to find them? Or is this likely to be the existing game mechanism of hide and seek from the ship, except now it's on foot? How would that work out? It would be easier from a ship or SRV, surely?
One thing I found interesting that hasn't been covered much (was it in one of the magazine interviews, or the livestream?) is the idea of being able to do missions and trade with NPCs at outposts, as well as just attacking them.
ONE GIANT LEAP
See the galaxy like never before. Touch down on breathtaking planets powered by stunning new tech, soak in suns rising over unforgettable vistas, discover outposts and settlements, and explore with unrestricted freedom.
Don't forget the livestream implied we would gain "First Footfall" bragging rights (and presumably credits) . That is about the only helpful information I obtained from the livestream.
I did notice in the Dev Diary, the guy with the hyper-blue eyes says words to the effect of "Elite Dangerous, in its current form, is a massively multiplayer game"...
Yeah, all he means by that, is that there was Elite 1, Frontier Elite 2, and Frontier, First Encounters (elite 3) before Elite Dangerous.
That's the "current iteration" or form or whatever.
They haven't said anything about a PUBG/Fortnite game mode. If fact all they've confirmed so far is more like No Man Sky gameplay. We know there's going to be First Person Combat in but putting in a forced PUBG mode goes against everything Elite Main game (CQC is another thing).
It will be like the Buggy Races. There's no official support for the races (i.e. race tracks on planets or even the ability to fly round installations) but people still organise and run races. So, there might be a group of players that decide they want a FPS Battle Royal, there's nothing you can do to stop them but then your not forced to join in either.
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What have the 100+ people working on this been doing for 3 years? Interior ship walking should of been like the first thing worked on if your going to put in legs you'd think!Still more questions come out of this than answers.
Interior ship walking should have been before Fleet Carriers.
Fleet Carriers should have been AFTER full atmospheric landings, gas giant scooping, a science career, real military progression, and a full rework of the mission system.
The only thing that belongs after Fleet Carriers is a FPS.
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So:
Am I getting this right? Massive b0llock dropped by FDev if so.
1) No space legs within ships at launch. Potentially not even an animated transition to space legs.
2) No native PS5 console support at launch.
3) Big question remains unanswered: will ED be backwards compatible on PS5/XBox X?
Am I getting this right? Massive b0llock dropped by FDev if so.
And with this, I've unsubscribed from the newsletter, and I think my time with Elite is absolutely done.
I've worked in the industry, and on an MMO too, and I recognise corporate wonk-speak when I see it; normally staff are encouraged to never turn down any speculation but to always say "maybe!" to any question with no hard answer, so as to take advantage of the naive hopes of players who mistake how much they want something for how likely it is they are to get it... It's not phrased like that in the training or the handbooks of course, but that's ultimately the reality of why it's done; "We're listening to you!" is at least a corporate image you want to cultivate, even if at the practical level nothing your users ever say or do will influence the actual development, which comes top down from the corporate heads only.
You only say something even as a vaguely negative as "It won't be there at launch" if that feature absolutely isn't in official development. An individual developer may be kicking something similar around in their free time, there might even be a vague R&D department testing new ideas, but if publicly in an official statement it's said to not be coming, that means that from the top down, no in house support is being given to the idea.
People might spontaneously turn into trifles too; every atom in their body could suddenly turn into custardy ones. It's theoritically possible. But if nothing has been done in the lab to even begin to start investigating custardification, all you have is imagination, not a realistic chance of it happening.
And that raises a lot of questions as to why; I have my suspicions; The main one being that the engine possibly can't support the player being in two "places". It's a surprisingly hard thing to manage, look at Star Trek Online which can't manage it either, you're either a starship, or walking around on the interior, but not both. Look at Multicrew in Elite itself; it's just a different camera angle from the same player location ("gunners"), or being moved to being a seperate entity (fighters). I suspect that ED simply can't allow people to walk around a ship when its in motion. No Man's Sky? Internal mechanics to freighters that make Elite look amateurish, but those are fixed instances too. The only game trying to make internals work whilst moving is Star Citizen, which has earned 300m+, but is years behind any sort of schedule and still hopelessly alpha.
Why aren't Frontier at least allowing interiors when stationary? That's even more worrying; the article mentions that despite being months from supposed launch, and even years into development, years I remind you that they supposedly pulled staff of ED itself, put the game on hiatus for 2+ years, and cancelled features like Galnet and Community goals to supposedly support Odyssey... even core features like "how do I step off my ship and use my legs" aren't decided yet. That's shocking for a product with this kind of delay. I suspect again that the reason is they simply can't do much more with the game and they're still struggling to get any wider content in. What has been mentioned just sounds like repackaged SRV driving to nodes again.
I can explain why having internals would be a wonderful thing to me, and so many others; as someone who has designed content for a living I could certainly knock you up some simple design documents for what gameplay there could be... heck I can even answer the above question about entrance/egress in a few seconds; the option to board or unload cargo is already in game, so a potential "board to cockpit seat/board to hold" gump upon touching the airlock is staring us in the face every time we exited the SRV. Yet it's soooo bizarre watching people here deliberately hobble their own perspective because they want to somehow reframe not providing ship internals as a good thing. "No no, see, ship internals would have to be bad as it would make me walk through my ship every time, so it's good we aren't getting them!" Oh dear...
That "Neil Armstrong" moment? Let's say we can't let the player into the ship; No reason why you can't at least create a ladder at the landing point to let the player walk up and down on at their own pace... player chosen pause before deciding to take that momentous "First Step". eh...? Except the real reason I suspect even that moment is still up in the air is playtesting will have showen how much players then want to take the final step upwards and actually get in their ships... And as I say; we're not getting this. We're simply not, no matter how much people hope. And if it is because the engine is so limited, well everything since Horizon's launch has been badly designed, poorly implemented and quickly abandoned for the next headline feature, thus any hope for future quality gameplay is probably realistically gone.
But we got an in game store for microtransactions, oh yes.
And we got a second round of "Scanned By" to get players to go to the same old nebulas and scan them again. We'll get a "First Stepped Foot On" label next. All that SRV driving you did in your favourite discovery system? Sorry, retconned away now. Have to have used your Space Legs as well. Gotta stretch out what content we have, even if it means taking away other player's sense of achievement by slapping more players names on it as if they were the first too...
I've already done this enough times already though, even before it started being watered down and turned into even bigger grind just because the devs cannot or will not give us anything new. And we aren't even getting an interior to our own ships now, the most obvious and probably most desired reason for having space legs? Well I hope those of you new to the game can continue having fun with it; and the stockholm syndrome forum dads will love it no matter what the game does; but for me, and for many, many like me I suspect, this interview sealed the impression Elite just doesn't have a clue how to make the game have a wider soul; it's what's inside that counts, remember? But we're not getting any of that.
I've worked in the industry, and on an MMO too, and I recognise corporate wonk-speak when I see it; normally staff are encouraged to never turn down any speculation but to always say "maybe!" to any question with no hard answer, so as to take advantage of the naive hopes of players who mistake how much they want something for how likely it is they are to get it... It's not phrased like that in the training or the handbooks of course, but that's ultimately the reality of why it's done; "We're listening to you!" is at least a corporate image you want to cultivate, even if at the practical level nothing your users ever say or do will influence the actual development, which comes top down from the corporate heads only.
You only say something even as a vaguely negative as "It won't be there at launch" if that feature absolutely isn't in official development. An individual developer may be kicking something similar around in their free time, there might even be a vague R&D department testing new ideas, but if publicly in an official statement it's said to not be coming, that means that from the top down, no in house support is being given to the idea.
People might spontaneously turn into trifles too; every atom in their body could suddenly turn into custardy ones. It's theoritically possible. But if nothing has been done in the lab to even begin to start investigating custardification, all you have is imagination, not a realistic chance of it happening.
And that raises a lot of questions as to why; I have my suspicions; The main one being that the engine possibly can't support the player being in two "places". It's a surprisingly hard thing to manage, look at Star Trek Online which can't manage it either, you're either a starship, or walking around on the interior, but not both. Look at Multicrew in Elite itself; it's just a different camera angle from the same player location ("gunners"), or being moved to being a seperate entity (fighters). I suspect that ED simply can't allow people to walk around a ship when its in motion. No Man's Sky? Internal mechanics to freighters that make Elite look amateurish, but those are fixed instances too. The only game trying to make internals work whilst moving is Star Citizen, which has earned 300m+, but is years behind any sort of schedule and still hopelessly alpha.
Why aren't Frontier at least allowing interiors when stationary? That's even more worrying; the article mentions that despite being months from supposed launch, and even years into development, years I remind you that they supposedly pulled staff of ED itself, put the game on hiatus for 2+ years, and cancelled features like Galnet and Community goals to supposedly support Odyssey... even core features like "how do I step off my ship and use my legs" aren't decided yet. That's shocking for a product with this kind of delay. I suspect again that the reason is they simply can't do much more with the game and they're still struggling to get any wider content in. What has been mentioned just sounds like repackaged SRV driving to nodes again.
I can explain why having internals would be a wonderful thing to me, and so many others; as someone who has designed content for a living I could certainly knock you up some simple design documents for what gameplay there could be... heck I can even answer the above question about entrance/egress in a few seconds; the option to board or unload cargo is already in game, so a potential "board to cockpit seat/board to hold" gump upon touching the airlock is staring us in the face every time we exited the SRV. Yet it's soooo bizarre watching people here deliberately hobble their own perspective because they want to somehow reframe not providing ship internals as a good thing. "No no, see, ship internals would have to be bad as it would make me walk through my ship every time, so it's good we aren't getting them!" Oh dear...
That "Neil Armstrong" moment? Let's say we can't let the player into the ship; No reason why you can't at least create a ladder at the landing point to let the player walk up and down on at their own pace... player chosen pause before deciding to take that momentous "First Step". eh...? Except the real reason I suspect even that moment is still up in the air is playtesting will have showen how much players then want to take the final step upwards and actually get in their ships... And as I say; we're not getting this. We're simply not, no matter how much people hope. And if it is because the engine is so limited, well everything since Horizon's launch has been badly designed, poorly implemented and quickly abandoned for the next headline feature, thus any hope for future quality gameplay is probably realistically gone.
But we got an in game store for microtransactions, oh yes.
And we got a second round of "Scanned By" to get players to go to the same old nebulas and scan them again. We'll get a "First Stepped Foot On" label next. All that SRV driving you did in your favourite discovery system? Sorry, retconned away now. Have to have used your Space Legs as well. Gotta stretch out what content we have, even if it means taking away other player's sense of achievement by slapping more players names on it as if they were the first too...
I've already done this enough times already though, even before it started being watered down and turned into even bigger grind just because the devs cannot or will not give us anything new. And we aren't even getting an interior to our own ships now, the most obvious and probably most desired reason for having space legs? Well I hope those of you new to the game can continue having fun with it; and the stockholm syndrome forum dads will love it no matter what the game does; but for me, and for many, many like me I suspect, this interview sealed the impression Elite just doesn't have a clue how to make the game have a wider soul; it's what's inside that counts, remember? But we're not getting any of that.
I did notice in the Dev Diary, the guy with the hyper-blue eyes says words to the effect of "Elite Dangerous, in its current form, is a massively multiplayer game"...
In his lair I think Robert smiled a little reading that.
Wow, that's some post ... and I mean that most sincerely.
I don't want to accept ship interiors are not coming, I want to wait for Frontier's confirmation of it not coming .... but yes, inside myself, I have come to accept it's not happening, I'm just waiting for Frontier to make it not coming, official.
I seen nothing that resembles PUGB or fortnight in the announcements.
Perhaps we could have a half way house with being able to get up and walking around the cockpit but nothing outside of that?
That would be pretty limited but I guess would give some amount of walking around in your ship gameplay possibilities - presumably all those panels ought to do something.
Click on the door(s) at the back to go outside...
Nope, you're not getting it right. Apart from the no native PS5 XBX support.
I have a video going live shortly. For those of you who don't watch them, current position from Frontier is "no comment". Basically they haven't said anything official about all of this yet.
The vibe I'm getting is: what was stated in the interview is mostly true -- not at launch -- but Frontier aren't too chuffed about the beans being spilled on a third party article when they planned to gently break it to us on a future dev diary.
Kinda like redundancies being announced on the news before the staff affected are told directly (well, about 1000x times more trivial than that, not that you'd know it from folks' reactions around here sometimes).
But who knows.
That sounds pretty much like the morning weather report in Iraq... "Today will be sunny and hot".
Lets see, lets be generous and give them until the end of Q1 (31st March 2021). So what have they haven't nailed down?
From the articles I've seen, there two things.
What really makes my eyes roll
are the amount of people who think that they should have done more in two and a half / almost three years. They've only shown us the First Dev Diary. There is more they're wanting to talk about. I should have said that in last nights Lave Radio with Souverine and Shan. Yes, I'm hoping that these social hubs involve places on space stations and outposts, as well as the hinted at planetary settlements. It's Like Horizons all over again when people complained that they'd paid a lot for just planetary landings, but then they got Engineers, Fighters and all the planetary side thargoid and guardian stuff too.
Say three months worth of development time left and three months for testing (You don't really count December because of the holidays) to put those things in? Yeah, think they'll do it.
From the articles I've seen, there two things.
- They haven't decided how to get that 'Neil Armstrong' moment of walking out onto a planet right yet. This ties into whether the ship interiors are there or not. If not, it's going to be a case of rising from your seat, fade to black. If so, then you'll walk through you ship. Either way, you still appear at the airlock and be ready to walk down the ramp, stairs or ladder. They're trying to capture a certain feeling when you walk out of your ship, one that will capture the majesty of finally stepping out on a new world. That it going to take a while to get right and they've still got time to do it.
- They haven't implemented atmospheric flight properly yet. I don't think this is as big an issue as people are making it out to be. For the moment, it will be exactly like the airless worlds and they could just explain that away with some game-hand-wavium that the flight computer is compensating or there's something in the atmospheric shields which allows the ship to handle in exactly the same way. However, we're not going to need to go into the same level of depth as say MS Flight Simulator. I don't think it's as big a job as some people are making out. With thin atmospheres, your not going to need to worry too much about weather.
What really makes my eyes roll
are the amount of people who think that they should have done more in two and a half / almost three years. They've only shown us the First Dev Diary. There is more they're wanting to talk about. I should have said that in last nights Lave Radio with Souverine and Shan. Yes, I'm hoping that these social hubs involve places on space stations and outposts, as well as the hinted at planetary settlements. It's Like Horizons all over again when people complained that they'd paid a lot for just planetary landings, but then they got Engineers, Fighters and all the planetary side thargoid and guardian stuff too. Say three months worth of development time left and three months for testing (You don't really count December because of the holidays) to put those things in? Yeah, think they'll do it.
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).