Probably unpopular opinion: Some people are nervous about FPS because they just aren't good at FPS.
Open: Meet other players, most of whom don’t shoot you, whilst others do, for no reason, but they did at least expect you to shoot back
Solo: where everyone shoots pretend people in the back with impunity, whilst they declare their higher values Openly.
I dare say my version is no more reliable than yours Paul. Life is just perspective.
Solo: where everyone shoots pretend people in the back with impunity, whilst they declare their higher values Openly.
I dare say my version is no more reliable than yours Paul. Life is just perspective.
Did better than me, my source of entertainment was reading game guides. I didnt get a PS2 til 2013. I felt so hip and modern. XD
sighes Im gonna miss those days.
Kind of. I like having money now.
Elite may be marketed as a space flight sim, but to me (and I am sure to many others) it is essentially a Milky Way simulator (still in its infant stages), and I welcome all and any additions to its complexity. By 2085 I expect Elite to be a highly detailed galaxy with life, planet-cities and balanced methane clathrate prices.
Perhaps some. I freely admit I'm not as good at FPS as I am flight, but there are a few reasons for it. Primarily, I don't much care for FPS games and never have, so I've never bothered to get good at them.
Additionally, as far as [partially] transferrable skills go - I've done quite a bit more flying in real life than I have running around shooting at people, so there's that aspect too.
I'm not sure I'd call it nervous. Apprehensive, perhaps. But again, not because of the FPS itself or my skill with such games. My concerns stem from the following:
1. Something in FDev's process is broken. Nearly everything they've released over the last ~18 months or so has been incompletely implemented and broken in some way, often seriously impacting things that should be unrelated, and even the 'intended targets' are frequently impacted in significant, unintended ways.
Yes, "mistakes happen", but this is well beyond that point. Things being seriously broken are the most reliable part of any new patch. We all know it, we all sort of joke about it. But it shouldn't happen with the frequency that it does if there are proper processes in place. This alone has caused considerable apprehension with respect to their ability to properly execute a project of this scale.
2. Related to the above, there's a feeling that the "core" of Elite (spaceships) has been fairly neglected for some time, and that the dev time and attention required to keep it running well has been in short supply. This has been especially evident with features that have been implemented short of their potential and then effectively abandoned in favor of the next "shiny thing", only to repeat the cycle. My concern is that "legs" will cause further neglect of the "core" game, because now there's effectively an entire second product to focus on.
It might be suggested that perhaps the last couple of years have been the result of most devs working on Odyssey instead of the core game - but that only seems to prove the point. Especially as I would expect there will be fewer total devs working on Elite as a whole once Odyssey releases, as they are reassigned to other projects under development.
Finally, and as originally stated - I'm just not really into FPS games. I'll make the occasional exception for story (e.g. Mass Effect), but by and large, as a genre it just doesn't interest me. As a result, I've yet to see anything "for me" in Odyssey. FDev stated in (IIRC the last) dev diary that if someone wants to 'continue with their ship' they can, but so far they haven't shown any indication of throwing the barest of bones in that direction. Frankly, the more they concretely say about Odyssey (which so far hasn't even been all that much), the less excited I become about it.
And that's disappointing. Because I want to like it, I want to be excited about it. I want it to be good.
I recognize that the above may be (and probably is), "Just me", and that's fine. But when I express reservations about Odyssey and the focus on the FPS aspect, it's not because I'm nervous about my relative lack of FPS skill - it's for much deeper reasons and concern for the core of the game that drew me in and has provided so many wonderful experiences and friendships over the last few years.
And working smuggling
And working tissue sampling
And working megaship looting
And working PWAs
Whacking an FPS on top of that doesn't do anything.
I do get the idea of peeling back the layers to make things a bit more impressive, but the fundamental outer layers are damaged, and if you try to peel back that you'll just find more rot.
At least the forum will look like that. But that's only 2.8% of the players anyway, and the remaining 97% will happy play a mixed game and have feelings about either aspect somewhere between the extremes.
Been happily playing Mixed since 2001, with Operation Flashpoint's release. That for me was the first mix of Flight and foot gamplay, it also had ground vehicles. Before that I had Flight games, FPS game or Vehicle games. I suppose The Tribes series was close too, but I was playing Savage League Quake 2 CTF around that time (1997-2000).
The Arma series of games with its Choppers full of infantry and The Massive CTI mode won me over in 2001 and I played those games in leagues and not, on and off for a long long time.
In fact I moved from Arma3 to Elite in 2015.
If Fdev can have FPS combat akin to the Arma series combat they will have a winner in my eyes. Though I only really played on the MilSim servers and avoided the 3rd person arcade style server modes and mods. With Elite that wont be possible as there is only one Mode split between Open, PG and Solo. Pleasing both the Milsim and the Arcade groups will be hard for Fdev. If not impossible. Luckily either side can just decide the combat part is not to there liking and just do the other stuff in PG or SOLO.
Of course a Hardcore mode would solve all that, there could be a Milsim version and an Arcade version. Though some have been asking since 2015 for that, cant see them doing it now
Here is some Arma2 footage from 2012, you can see the expert MilSim guys in action
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Is it really random genres? Elite started out awkwardly as a trading game with a 3D arcade shooter overlay. The Frontier series then took it to planetary surfaces, added Newtonian physics to it and gave us a mission system as well as a ship "progression".
ED dialed things back a bit at first, but soon we were able to land on planets again. They extended the 30-year trajectory with movement outside our ships using SRVs, and pedestrian gameplay (pun, as usual, intended) seem to be the next logical step.
Building a "living, breathing galaxy" would make space for base building and management in addition to all the other stuff we got rudimentary versions of over the years. So that could be logical next steps. We shall see. I hope FD spend a bit of time polishing what we have (with Odyssey) before giving us another pile of half-baked additions as they did around the Horizons times.
S
And as there's no difficulty slider here...
Seriously though, I do think some of the complaints about FPS are down to people worrying about falling behind on an element of the game because they just aren't so talented at FPS as they are flight.
Note, I am saying some people. This is absolutely a generalisation so feel free to accuse me of such as that would be, in fact, 100% true.
Not everyone. But there are bound to be some who are nervous. Myself included. I am just not that great at FPS games.
But it is coming. And I have no doubt that PvP in Open will be just as open on the ground as it is in the air, social hubs aside.
Legs was always going to feature FPS. I am really confounded how some people thought it would not feature a lot of combat, especially in a game that describes its setting as cut-throat. Even the official books show that there are guns everywhere. The ED setting is very dystopian. That usually means a fair degree of violence.
I am looking forward to it though. Gives me something to improve on.
Im expecting some kind of Aim Assist within the game given that this update will also be on Consoles using control pads.. it would make sense for Frontier to build within the gameplay some kind of Gimbal feature or weapon modification (like with ships) so that its within the world Lore and helpful to Control Pad users.
Im also expecting, counter measures built into our suits to interfere with the Aim Assist used by some players. Maybe even a drop in DPS from these weapons.
So dont expect the combat within Odyssey to be a shooter in the purist sense. No scoping and Tea bagging. (i expect Tea bagging)
Example..
Nah carpet bombing will be saltyer yarrr
I know the FPS side of Odyssey is what Frontier has been showcasing, but I'm under the impression that there will be other types of gameplay available to us as well. Too bad Frontier hasn't done much to promote that side of the game, but I guess they're trying to draw in the Fortnite and COD crowds at this point in their advertising blitz.
We know that bio cataloging is a thing with legs.
I'd love caves, Mining, prospecting and salvage.
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Also a stealth infiltration avenue for combat missions.
Might want to ask the CEO and founder...
Assuming all of what he says he wants as given fact and that both...
1) combat is 1/3 of Elite's three pillars and
2) we really do need to be able to shoot guns to hunt game
It's a really miniscule logic leap as to why fdev opted to add shooting from a first person perspective in their first iteration of actually getting out of our ships.
This (along with lots of future stuff he mentions but has yet to happen) absolutely has always been FDev's plan. I'm utterly delighted that fdev have ultimately taken so many steps towards that plan. So, the question really ought to be...
Why do you think it's only and can only ever be a space flight simulation?
I hope they just don't get a false sense of security from the grandfathering that happens in the space game. The combination of the participants vs the genre vs zero competition.
Look at cyberpunk.. cdpr are the second coming in terms of angel developer and they're still getting torn to shreds with cyberpunk.
Can you imagine if the mainstream opinions were applied to elite? It would died years ago, the steam reviews would have ended with "scam" and "havent heard from developer in years game is broken". Hang on.. this is a good thing we're too nice, yeah mainstream mainstream. Might even trigger frontier to spend time fixing it.
Feels like random genres to me. Original Elite was genre-defining. This isn't genre-defining to me, rather, it just feels like a bolt-on addition.Is it really random genres? Elite started out awkwardly as a trading game with a 3D arcade shooter overlay. The Frontier series then took it to planetary surfaces and added Newtonian physics to it and gave us a mission system as well as a ship "progression".
ED dialed things back a bit at first, but soon we were able to land on planets again. They extended the 30-year trajectory with SRVs and pedestrian gameplay (pun, as usual, intended) seem to be the next logical step.
Building a "living, breathing galaxy" would make space for base building and management in addition to all the other stuff we got rudimentary versions of over the years. So that could be logical next steps. We shall see. I hope FD spend a bit of time polishing what we have (with Odyssey) before giving us another pile of half-baked additions as they did around the Horizons times.
In short, FPS is not what's missing from this "Living, breathing galaxy" right now. Hell, just a freelancer-style station interface with a bit of a modern lick would do more for Elite right now than an FPS component would.
It's missing from FDev's plans though.
Unless you assume they thought letting us leave our ships would only ever result in entirely peaceful interactions and combat only occurs in space...
#2 is a lot to accept based on three or four words said in a fairly speculative tone nearly 9 years ago. Man, I hope nobody ever promised you a beer that long ago too.
My concern isn't that they're adding shooting... it's that they're leading with it, which makes it central to the entire experience. You might be right on the 1/3rd combat point, but all I've seen is 100% combat and dramatic walking. None of this is inspiring.
Things like this would inspire way more interest from me:
Of course, this is where people will say "Oh, but it's just one trailer, it's not everything coming"... people have been telling me that for 9 years, and those statements have been just as wrong over those 9 years, so there's a high barrier to convince me otherwise.
An FPS is not missing from their plan. Walking around and enriching the game experience through that is.
Again, is it reasonable to assume it will include shooting? Sure. Should it be the core outcome here? Absolutely not, but I see nothing else to suggest otherwise so far.
From what I understand, Odyssey is a modular expansion, meaning it can be played independently of the base game (e.g. no need to fly a ship). I believe that the flaws of the core Elite may find their way into Odyssey (and other future expansions') gameplay loops via the BGS and ship to on-foot player interaction. But otherwise I don't think Odyssey is going to be visibly affected by the bugs of the core Elite. Not by the ones you listed at least.
And if that's the case, it's doubly-concerning that the Odyssey experience is essentially going to be divorced from the rest of the game experience like that.