So for you is the same Elite Dangerous to DCS World. Pushing buttons are very VERY different in these games. Elite Dangerous equals instant reward and in the other you need to operate different systems to achieve something.
Games are not the same.
Polygon and Twinfinite interviews - more Odyssey details, unknowns, and Walking-In-Ships not at launch
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So for you is the same Elite Dangerous to DCS World. Pushing buttons are very VERY different in these games. Elite Dangerous equals instant reward and in the other you need to operate different systems to achieve something.
Games are not the same.
Never said they were. It was you that did that. Press button, press button etc etc.
And to be honest I really don't care about DCS World, there's a reason why I don't play it.
speak for yourself.
I expected this and even less, since didn't expect atmo planets.
if you are so disappointed by ED development why don't you simply go play another game, maybe you will be happier and I will spare a lot of pointless moaning.
care to note I said "I will" 'cause I don't know the others thoughts
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Player or NPC activity? I vote for the latter, as we are supposed to be small cogs in a big machine, not heroes of the universe or the driving force behind the BGS. In fact, player-driven economic impact should be simplest to achieve in sparsely populated regions and outside populated space. So let the game world grow, but also let it die when conditions are set for it.
Yes, there would be a real "danger" that the simulation would just slowly expand outwards more or less uncontrolled, and players would be about as lost as players often were in, say, Daggerfall (that had a game board the size of Turkey, I dimly recall). However, such expansion is how economy works: Ever expanding cancerous growth until some sort of limitation is reached (and the galaxy is huge).
What is needed is a way to let system assets collapse and be abandoned. Assets would then be left behind as instances to visit and perhaps loot, or be repopulated if BGS conditions allowed them to be. The resilience of systems should increase exponentially with population size and modified for economy type.
This would of course increase the size and complexity of the game world and give FD a real cost in keeping up with supporting server structure. However, they wanted to give us a living breathing galaxy... Maybe first step is to embrace a colonial organism analog to humanity's expansion and treat each new outpost or colony as a new cell that will succeed or perish depending on the environment it faces and how long it can grow in favourable conditions.
SI don't want Elite to be DCS it was just to put an example of how Elite is just an illusion of operating a space ship simplifying too much the tasks at the point were you just almost don't do stuff. The game almost plays by itself.
No it doesn't play itself unless you choose to let it. Sure it's not as complex as DCS, that's because its not a simulator.
Now there is a space ship simulator game out there, and if people want that, they can go and play that. Personally, I'm not interested in a simulator.
Sure there could be a little more complexity, but I don't want to see too much more as it will just make the game more niche then what it is already. It will put people off.
All I want is fun. I don't find complexity for the sake of it fun. In fact it just gets tedious, boring and time consuming, especially if you have to do it every time you fly your ship, which is pretty often in ED.
In Open only. The hate and envy would drive even the most passive people into a rage.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Glad that you asked! Although this starts to veer dangerously off topic.
I think the main issue that often arises in these discussions is the obvious differences in what players consider as "Exploration". From what I can read, and imo, your view and definition seems to be extremely narrow, to the point of reducing it all to the absurd of a “button press”. System jumps and discovery scanner etc are just tools and means to be used within the large realm of the exploration gameplay in Elite.
Let’s take a look at a more balanced and independent view of what Exploration gameplay is.
There is a great Youtube channel called “Extra Credits” where game devs and designers chip in from time to time and you can see game design principles of all kinds discussed in detail. I think it is quite interesting and I'd recommend it to those looking for more info on some of those game design topics. The video I link here below in particular describes 4 main fundamental ways to design Exploration gameplay in video games. Feel free to watch it at your leisure, in the mean time here is a tldr summary of those 4 exploration gameplay variants:
Geographic discovery: This is the one that tends to happen in open worlds such as Elite’s, No Man’s Sky or WoW, and it is fundamentally based in the appeal of “what is over the next hill?” This type of exploration, be it designed manually or with procedural generation, tends to be the more expensive one, the one that requires more technical and financial resources to be achieved successfully.
Content discovery: This is similar to geographic exploration but it focuses instead on discovering content instead of new “places”. The risk of this type of exploration is that oftentimes, when we are in a hurry, we tend to look for spoilers or use shortcuts to get to that content instead of solving the puzzle or follow the clues, and which makes us, well, spoil the discovery.
Narrative discovery: This type of exploration gameplay happens when not all of the lore or backstory in the game is presented to you as you play normally, and instead you need to go a bit out of the beaten path and actively explore and search for it, possibly to remote locations.
Mechanical discovery: This kind of exploration pushes the player to discover the interrelation between different game mechanics and tools in the game in order to achieve new or even unexpected results with them. In the most extreme cases this type of discovery leads to the popular min-maxing and metas plus all the balance issues that often go with many games. In the case of Elite Exploration for the purposes of this discussion this category actually represents one of the fundamental pillars of emergent gameplay in the game.
Back to your question about where is the Exploration gameplay, and to be precise, in Elite we can find all those 4 variants of exploration gameplay:
- The first and most obvious one for players is the geographical discovery gameplay. It is in this variant of exploration where we find stellar phenomena, lagrange anomalies, singularities, geological sites, actual and real catalogued systems and stars, those unique planetary and celestial body alignments that take our breath away and all those systems that can be more or less interesting in some cases etc etc. The great thing about Elite’s geographical exploration to boot is that this geography is not static at all but it changes with orbits and and celestial motions making some of those discoveries literally unique.
- The next avenue of exploration gameplay in Elite is the one aimed at specific content discovery based on info available in the game, “treasure hunts” or “easter eggs” thanks to puzzles etc. This exploration gameplay in some cases can even have a very deep impact in your non exploration related gameplay. In this category you can find for example all discoveries related to Thargoids, from the original unknown probes and artifacts, passing through barnacle locations all the way to spectrographs, Thargoid bases discoveries in 2017 and anything related to INRA/Eagle Eye. Also in this category you can find all the localization elements and info related to finding Guardian structures (Ram Tah probes info etc… these ones in particular were great fun for me at least), with all their subsequent impact in game for other gameplay avenues, engineering etc (all those appearing during the 2017-2018 period). In all those cases it is not necessary to be the first one discovering it to enjoy the exploration gameplay there, some of the beacons that were needed for triangulation were discovered by chance at start but many of them are now listed in plenty of sites if someone wants to perform the search at his/her own pace.
- The third variant of those 4 in the video is the narrative discovery gameplay. In Elite this corresponds for example to all the gameplay related to abandoned settlements in the Formidine Rift or the puzzles of the Zurara megaship in 2017, the finding (thanks to beacons around the bubble) of lore content at generation ships that started appearing around 2017-2018, or the Golconda in 2019, Jameson and many other things that I probably forget to mention. All these represent exploration gameplay that, through puzzles, leads to pieces of lore in the game that we would have not otherwise had access to. In these cases we do not really need to be the “first ones” either, each explorer can take his/her time, with more or less spoilers, to go through the clues in order to reach those lore treasures
- To round up the summary with the 4th gameplay variant, Elite also has numerous elements of mechanical discovery, in Exploration, if that makes sense. Given that Elite has been designed as an open world and a sandbox it makes total sense to try and incentivize emergent gameplay, and it indeed seems to have been one of the main goals of FDEV here. The way it is achieved in Elite is by implementing a number of relatively basic and simple tools for the players (hyperspace jump, refuel, drones, scanners, wing mechanics, hyper charge in neutron stars etc) but that can be combined in a virtually limitless number of ways in order to produce results more complex and deep than the sum of its parts. We can find numerous examples of use of this exploration gameplay, some of them quite popular such as the fuel rats, but I personally think it is something that has achieved excellent results in many other exploration related areas (Hull Seals, Iridium Wing, all kinds of expeditions, rallies etc). These exploration emergent gameplay options now extend even further with Fleet Carriers of course.
This kind of exploration emergent gameplay does not happen just because players role play it or just because “the best of Elite is its community” (the community is great though
). It happens rather because the game design and its tools (such as “buttons”) allow for it and the community plays it. And all this happens not just in recurrent massively coordinated operations such as expeditions but also in specific and ad hoc occasions when a handful of players decides to achieve a certain particular goal for whatever reason. None of this is “required”, none of this is a designed or integrated game mechanic, and yet they occur every day, players create their own with the tools and buttons given. This video, just a few months ago, is a great example of how the use of a few simple tools can allow for some very deep, complex, epic and daring exploration gameplay, worth of being portrayed in the Exploration book of records Coming back round to my opening point about different players having different “definitions” of what exploration game play is, of the 4 variants of exploration gameplay discussed above, the 2nd and 3rd ones (content and narrative exploration) will always be consumed by players much faster than any dev can produce them (in any game). And still FDEV has been generating them constantly. The first one (geographic exploration gameplay) in Elite is virtually endless (and will be further expanded with Odyssey) but for some players, especially those with lots of hours played, this can become boring at some point. Even with the regular addition of new stellar phenomena etc that we have had so far. Only the last exploration variant, exploration emergent gameplay, can imo support and hold exploration gameplay long term in any game, not just Elite.
Exploration gameplay in Elite, especially its emergent one, is best in class imo.
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Maybe also a set of achievements only achievable by sporting a golden planet decal as well?
SMaybe also a set of achievements only achievable by sporting a golden planet decal as well?
Oooo. Thats Vader level hate generation.
I think Player. There's two ways you can interpret this:
1) As Pilots' Federation members, we are indeed collectively the heroes of the universe, even if as one of a few million our individual contributions are less noticeable - we're a small cog in a big machine, but the machine is important. We are mechanically the driving force behind the BGS already, in out-of-game terms.
2) Player activity, while not economically significant itself, is sufficiently large to be considered a representative statistical sample, so if one player is doing something, there's probably 100 NPCs doing the same thing.
More importantly, scaling the inhabited bubble to the bits players are actually using - and having it shrink and grow with player activity - would be more interesting than taking the already over-large one, doubling its size, halving the player density, and saying "an NPC did it".
Three plausible limitations already exist:
1) The bubble has a significant shortage of many high-tech goods (to the extent that Colonia is a galactically-significant supplier of HE Suits, for example) which strongly limits expansion rates.
2) Expansionism is expensive even with the FSD making the transport aspect more reliable. Mainly it's an activity to be funded by the superpowers - who are having enough domestic issues that funding distant colonies which are likely to rapidly declare independence is a waste of their time.
3) Population is relatively stable and basic resource needs are met.
You really seem to have an issue with buttons!
Seriously though, saying Exploration in Elite is just pressing a button for hours is as narrow as saying that the king of games, chess, is just moving pieces from tile A to tile B for hours. Or that rock climbing is just moving limbs from rock A to rock B for hours. Boring! Narrow!
No, there is indeed tons of gameplay and depth in Elite's Exploration, but if that is your definition then it simply means that you just do not like most of the actual Exploration gameplay (which is fine) or that it just eludes your personal and too narrow definition.
Please stop. That is simply not true. It is about pressing buttons and visiting the same place over and over again. Saying contrary is simply not true.
Only thing good in Elite regarding exploration is its community. Despite FD destroying or mixing their plans all the time(tritium style)
... lol
list the elements that give elite exploration ... depth. ill waitYou really seem to have an issue with buttons!
Seriously though, saying Exploration in Elite is just pressing a button for hours is as narrow as saying that the king of games, chess, is just moving pieces from tile A to tile B for hours. Or that rock climbing is just moving limbs from rock A to rock B for hours. Boring! Narrow!
No, there is indeed tons of gameplay and depth in Elite's Exploration, but if that is your definition then it simply means that you just do not like most of the actual Exploration gameplay (which is fine) or that it just eludes your personal and too narrow definition.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Far too many too mention and I suspect we could probably argue for many pages about what is "depth", but hey for an example have a look at the last few paragraphs and the last video in this post.
no list them
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Far too many too mention and I suspect we could probably argue for many pages about what is "depth", but hey for an example have a look at the last few paragraphs and the last video in this post.
its literally two sentences
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Nah man, if you can not even comment in some examples already given, I suspect you are ready to simply dismiss anything posted. Not very constructive to be honest, so be my guest.