Going by the latest newsletter and even more so by the latest three dev updates, release 2.1 of Elite Dangerous, titled "The Engineers", is going to one of the best updates for Elite Dangerous so far. And that's not even because of its main feature, the new looting & crafting system (about which I personally don't really care a lot), but rather because it will also introduce an expanded missions system (yay!) and the first steps of two of my personal most-wanted features for ED:
I am a little surprised that NPC faces won't be animated at first, but I don't complain, because having static faces at first is so much better than no faces at all. I guess FD is having bigger plans for the animations than just turning the head a little bit, so they need more time for that part. Totally fine with me!
The second feature - persistent NPCs - is something I personally didn't date to hope we'd still see, going by a statement from David Braben during the Horizons launch stream, so I was even more happy when I read Michaels description about how mission givers and engineers will be persistent! And I think he even said this is only the beginning, that other NPCs would get a similar treatment (faces and persistency) in the future, too!
IMHO, these two new features will change the way we play the game so much more than Powerplay or the Looting & Crafting update, because they influence the day to day gameplay! Every time we accept a mission we will see who we deal with, we will see the same faces again, get familiar with them, associate them with minor factions and see how their factions are doing by interacting with them. I firmly believe this is going to be the biggest game changer - apart from planetary landings - for the game so far! It might very well be that thanks to this update the often criticized lifelessness of EDs galaxy might be cured to some extend!
Now, I know some people are a bit wary because they expected a lot from some season 1 updates like "Powerplay" and felt burned by FD when the update didn't live up to their expectations. The difference with NPCs with faces and persistent missions giver NPCs though is that this time we are talking about a much more specific feature - Michael Brookes already went into great detail in his dev updates to explain various facets of how they will work. When Powerplay hit, people had just vague ideas of how they'd interact with this new feature, because the information given in advance was more on a high abstraction level. I still believe that Powerplay is a great concept and it will just need some more work to reach its potential.
In addition to the advent of NPCs with faces and the first persistent NPCs (missions givers and engineers), Newsletter #110 also mentioned passengers finally being release with update 2.2, "Guardians". With passengers being the third of my three most wanted features for ED, I am now more than ever looking forward to what 2016 will bring for ED (I just hope they carefully read my thread "Please take your time with passenger missions and do them right!", otherwise they will end up being just a newly labelled commodity
)! With faces and persistency in place, I really hope these features will be applied to passengers, too!
TL;DR: this season may very well be the time that proves FD is indeed listening to the player base and many of the features we have been asking for will be introduced!
Exciting times!
- NPCs with faces
- persistent NPCs
I am a little surprised that NPC faces won't be animated at first, but I don't complain, because having static faces at first is so much better than no faces at all. I guess FD is having bigger plans for the animations than just turning the head a little bit, so they need more time for that part. Totally fine with me!
The second feature - persistent NPCs - is something I personally didn't date to hope we'd still see, going by a statement from David Braben during the Horizons launch stream, so I was even more happy when I read Michaels description about how mission givers and engineers will be persistent! And I think he even said this is only the beginning, that other NPCs would get a similar treatment (faces and persistency) in the future, too!
IMHO, these two new features will change the way we play the game so much more than Powerplay or the Looting & Crafting update, because they influence the day to day gameplay! Every time we accept a mission we will see who we deal with, we will see the same faces again, get familiar with them, associate them with minor factions and see how their factions are doing by interacting with them. I firmly believe this is going to be the biggest game changer - apart from planetary landings - for the game so far! It might very well be that thanks to this update the often criticized lifelessness of EDs galaxy might be cured to some extend!
Now, I know some people are a bit wary because they expected a lot from some season 1 updates like "Powerplay" and felt burned by FD when the update didn't live up to their expectations. The difference with NPCs with faces and persistent missions giver NPCs though is that this time we are talking about a much more specific feature - Michael Brookes already went into great detail in his dev updates to explain various facets of how they will work. When Powerplay hit, people had just vague ideas of how they'd interact with this new feature, because the information given in advance was more on a high abstraction level. I still believe that Powerplay is a great concept and it will just need some more work to reach its potential.
In addition to the advent of NPCs with faces and the first persistent NPCs (missions givers and engineers), Newsletter #110 also mentioned passengers finally being release with update 2.2, "Guardians". With passengers being the third of my three most wanted features for ED, I am now more than ever looking forward to what 2016 will bring for ED (I just hope they carefully read my thread "Please take your time with passenger missions and do them right!", otherwise they will end up being just a newly labelled commodity
)! With faces and persistency in place, I really hope these features will be applied to passengers, too!TL;DR: this season may very well be the time that proves FD is indeed listening to the player base and many of the features we have been asking for will be introduced!
Exciting times!
