Regarding this recent visit. (Group pic here)
They're all under NDA so can't go into great detail or new content, but there are some broad themes:
Obsidian Ant & DJ Truthsayer in a round table
I've paraphrased here:
Reactions on the Forum Thread:
Alec Turner
Alec Turner
Here's a thing that happened ... so they were about to show us something in mining. They reckoned they knew what the reaction was gonna be so it turned out Will filmed it. Anyway, they did the thing and yeah ... the room went frickin' nuts. After the mining section ... well, you know how most everyone thinks current mining is really boring ... well the buzz around the room was "hell, when this drops I'm heading into the rings and I ain't ever gonna come back out again!"
How's that for hype?
Vingtetun
Frontier dedicated 5 of their team for the entire day to presenting many of the changes and improvements coming to the game in the next release.
It was by no means a polished puff piece for streamers, it was a detailed exposee and q&a on the content, with senior staff on hand asking questions of us, feedback on what was good and what needed work or improvements. There was very little of the 'it is on the roadmap for later' and an awful lot of 'let me just go and ask that part of the team' where we got into detail and provided constructive feedback on the new items we have seen already in live stream but also things they will be revealing over the forthcoming weeks.
They took away extensive notes from a broad range of the audience based on how their communities would react to certain elements, where the areas of improvement were wanted and how the new mechanics would affect people's gaming time.
Our questions weren't dodged, they weren't cagey about their answers and no, wasn't the community team presenting. They were there but the presentation was done by the team doing the doing not the talking about, if you see what I mean.
Whilst some streamers were there, others of us were representing chunks of player groups or event/content creators for in game fun.
Stuff we CAN talk about at the moment: Exploration. Works nicely, looks great, really makes you feel like you are working to discover things and not just honk jump magic wand discovery.
The mining things that were first talked about at Lavecon have come along really nicely. Once again, there is a lot more to do whilst mining. I reckon people will enjoy it.
The lighting changes shown at Lavecon... Was nice to see it in action on a 'live' build and not just screenshots. Once again, think once people get into beta, they will be pleased with it.
Shout out as usual to the sound team. Got a big round of applause at one point. Couple of times we all shushed each other so we could just listen.
The stuff we can't mention yet as it isn't public. A huge amount of work and thought has gone into it all, am looking forward to getting my teeth into it both testing in beta and in final live release. Lots of the regular grumbles have been addressed.
It really is a large body of work. Took 6 hours to fully showcase the lot and there is still more we didn't get see. We over ran by over an hour on their plans as we were asking so many pointy questions and debating their answers. A number of the visitors put some STRONG pressure on frontier on various matters on behalf of wider player audience.
To the question earlier about the 'feel' in the office.... quite a few of the team members dropped their heads in to say hi, some of them were new faces had not met or seen on live streams before. There is a good vibe about the office there, happy looking staff (we quizzed one and the answer was 'even better now that the food isn't as bad as it was at the old office ;-) ). Delicious sandwiches btw.
For the record, yes, the numbers of people working JUST on ED are what they say, their other games were on other floors and no, jobs like HR and finance etc staff weren't part of that number,.It was all people actively working on Elite. Compared to my last visit, they arent kidding when they say the team has never been bigger. The sweeping improvements and changes have satisfied me that they havent been idle in the last year of the free 'Beyond' update.
All in all, and I appreciate there will be lots of 'but why wasn't xxx person invited', and realise I am lucky to have been invited. Am hoping we did you lot proud in terms of shouting loudly about things we are all passionate about, was great to see huge progress and my goodness am I going to have to set aside a whole day just to read the patch notes. Can't wait to get my teeth into it all.
Sir.Tj
Well I don't stream content or have any kind of Internet presence apart from the forum and twitter both of which are to be honest pretty minimal.
Frontier at points were robustly challenged on aspects of the update and productive discussions followed.
This is a pretty big update with a broad range of new features and updates to existing features at the same time. From what I have seen there has been a large amount of work out into this and from my point of view it was all positive.
Explorers get done great new content to make traversing the galaxy more enjoyable and engaging.
BGS fans again have a lot to look forward too with the codex etc..
Miners again get some great new features and from someone who's never been interested in mining I'll definitely be giving it a go.
Visual improvements are always a good thing and a lot of work has been done on it, Audio is as ever stunning Ed and I agreed that the audio team are vastly underrated on how good they are.
The passion FD still has for the game and the community is very apparent and I can't see that dissipating any time in the future.
I've tweeted a few things about the visit this being one of them https://twitter.com/TjdaMod/status/1045654717722963968?s=19
Yeah not everyone is going to love every aspect of the update but they should be encouraged that FD are still working very hard on the game we all love.
StuartGT - [On the new USS system]
we were very impressed by what we saw.
StuartGT - [On the new Discovery Scanner mechanic]
Wait for the live stream demoes. There's a learning curve and depth, yet with experience it should be quick and easy to identify interesting Star Systems.
Some Bonus Bits on Staffing:
Which mirror Vingtetun's take above etc:
StuartGT
Morale is great internally, they're hyped for the community's response when 3.3 is demoed and goes live. The Elite Dangerous devroom has 100 people (+- 5) for gameplay/content creation; this excludes QA, audio recording, trailer team, website, etc who were in a different area.
ObsidianAnt & DJ: 'Half a floor' of the new building for ED, told they were 'dedicated to ED', and not including QA testers, HR etc
They're all under NDA so can't go into great detail or new content, but there are some broad themes:
Obsidian Ant & DJ Truthsayer in a round table
I've paraphrased here:
- DJ: 'I identified a gas giant by its sound'
- Obsidian: DJ calls explo wonderful, I personally thought it was brilliant as well, but everything's subjective, someone else might see it and hate it.
- Obsidian: It's a big update. Explains why the last two chapters have been so small. Much bigger than Chapter 1 even. It looks like everyone's been working on Chapter 4.
- DJ: The presentation wasn't going stupidly in depth on each thing, and it took 6 hours.
- Obsidian: Obviously they did this for PR reasons, but it wasn't just fluff vids. It was presented by devs and they didn't give evasive answers when questioned. And if stumped went out of the room and got the answers.
- DJ: I am worried about Squadrons.
- DJ: The most exciting stuff about this update hasn't been announced yet. That I can say.
- Obsidian: They paid travel costs, including the guys from America.
Reactions on the Forum Thread:
Alec Turner
If I say what I saw was awesome your expectatations will go through the roof and when Q4 drops you'll say ... but Alec, I thought you said it was going to be awesome. On the other hand I could say meh and deliberately play the game then you'd all be pleasantly surprised at how good it is and think I was a grumpy. I don't know what to say, it's like thermonuclear war! Who fancies a nice game of chess?
Alec Turner
Here's a thing that happened ... so they were about to show us something in mining. They reckoned they knew what the reaction was gonna be so it turned out Will filmed it. Anyway, they did the thing and yeah ... the room went frickin' nuts. After the mining section ... well, you know how most everyone thinks current mining is really boring ... well the buzz around the room was "hell, when this drops I'm heading into the rings and I ain't ever gonna come back out again!"
How's that for hype?
Vingtetun
Frontier dedicated 5 of their team for the entire day to presenting many of the changes and improvements coming to the game in the next release.
It was by no means a polished puff piece for streamers, it was a detailed exposee and q&a on the content, with senior staff on hand asking questions of us, feedback on what was good and what needed work or improvements. There was very little of the 'it is on the roadmap for later' and an awful lot of 'let me just go and ask that part of the team' where we got into detail and provided constructive feedback on the new items we have seen already in live stream but also things they will be revealing over the forthcoming weeks.
They took away extensive notes from a broad range of the audience based on how their communities would react to certain elements, where the areas of improvement were wanted and how the new mechanics would affect people's gaming time.
Our questions weren't dodged, they weren't cagey about their answers and no, wasn't the community team presenting. They were there but the presentation was done by the team doing the doing not the talking about, if you see what I mean.
Whilst some streamers were there, others of us were representing chunks of player groups or event/content creators for in game fun.
Stuff we CAN talk about at the moment: Exploration. Works nicely, looks great, really makes you feel like you are working to discover things and not just honk jump magic wand discovery.
The mining things that were first talked about at Lavecon have come along really nicely. Once again, there is a lot more to do whilst mining. I reckon people will enjoy it.
The lighting changes shown at Lavecon... Was nice to see it in action on a 'live' build and not just screenshots. Once again, think once people get into beta, they will be pleased with it.
Shout out as usual to the sound team. Got a big round of applause at one point. Couple of times we all shushed each other so we could just listen.
The stuff we can't mention yet as it isn't public. A huge amount of work and thought has gone into it all, am looking forward to getting my teeth into it both testing in beta and in final live release. Lots of the regular grumbles have been addressed.
It really is a large body of work. Took 6 hours to fully showcase the lot and there is still more we didn't get see. We over ran by over an hour on their plans as we were asking so many pointy questions and debating their answers. A number of the visitors put some STRONG pressure on frontier on various matters on behalf of wider player audience.
To the question earlier about the 'feel' in the office.... quite a few of the team members dropped their heads in to say hi, some of them were new faces had not met or seen on live streams before. There is a good vibe about the office there, happy looking staff (we quizzed one and the answer was 'even better now that the food isn't as bad as it was at the old office ;-) ). Delicious sandwiches btw.
For the record, yes, the numbers of people working JUST on ED are what they say, their other games were on other floors and no, jobs like HR and finance etc staff weren't part of that number,.It was all people actively working on Elite. Compared to my last visit, they arent kidding when they say the team has never been bigger. The sweeping improvements and changes have satisfied me that they havent been idle in the last year of the free 'Beyond' update.
All in all, and I appreciate there will be lots of 'but why wasn't xxx person invited', and realise I am lucky to have been invited. Am hoping we did you lot proud in terms of shouting loudly about things we are all passionate about, was great to see huge progress and my goodness am I going to have to set aside a whole day just to read the patch notes. Can't wait to get my teeth into it all.
Sir.Tj
Well I don't stream content or have any kind of Internet presence apart from the forum and twitter both of which are to be honest pretty minimal.
Frontier at points were robustly challenged on aspects of the update and productive discussions followed.
This is a pretty big update with a broad range of new features and updates to existing features at the same time. From what I have seen there has been a large amount of work out into this and from my point of view it was all positive.
Explorers get done great new content to make traversing the galaxy more enjoyable and engaging.
BGS fans again have a lot to look forward too with the codex etc..
Miners again get some great new features and from someone who's never been interested in mining I'll definitely be giving it a go.
Visual improvements are always a good thing and a lot of work has been done on it, Audio is as ever stunning Ed and I agreed that the audio team are vastly underrated on how good they are.
The passion FD still has for the game and the community is very apparent and I can't see that dissipating any time in the future.
I've tweeted a few things about the visit this being one of them https://twitter.com/TjdaMod/status/1045654717722963968?s=19
Yeah not everyone is going to love every aspect of the update but they should be encouraged that FD are still working very hard on the game we all love.
StuartGT - [On the new USS system]
we were very impressed by what we saw.
StuartGT - [On the new Discovery Scanner mechanic]
Wait for the live stream demoes. There's a learning curve and depth, yet with experience it should be quick and easy to identify interesting Star Systems.
Some Bonus Bits on Staffing:
Which mirror Vingtetun's take above etc:
StuartGT
Morale is great internally, they're hyped for the community's response when 3.3 is demoed and goes live. The Elite Dangerous devroom has 100 people (+- 5) for gameplay/content creation; this excludes QA, audio recording, trailer team, website, etc who were in a different area.
ObsidianAnt & DJ: 'Half a floor' of the new building for ED, told they were 'dedicated to ED', and not including QA testers, HR etc
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