Quite happily playing ED now but there is one thing I really would like and that is totally seamless planet and super cruise intermissions.
Do away with the SC and countdown and just have a nice quick effect when entering SC.
Do away with the silly orbital cruise and glide game mechanics and let my fly seamlessly to and from planet surface.
Happy Saturday evening to ye all and dont forgett that this weekend you will loose an hour of ED
This would mean making ED like the previous games, and allowing players full control of their ships, able to decelerate or accelerate however they liked, and would ultimately lead to commanders 'blazing their own trails', which of course is the very antithesis of ED's design ethos.
If you've ever watched a rocket launch video, you'll notice that the journey up to orbit involves being able to freely change speed relative to the ground. Likewise, if you've ever played Elite 2 or 3, or Pioneer, then piloting a ship from say Earth to the Moon necessitates literally "flying", through space, by using thrust to change speed relative to the two bodies you're travelling between...
Which might
seem kind of obvious, until you realise that ED is intrinsically incapable, from the ground up, of doing any of this. It would mean that different ED ships would have different thrusts - so some would be able to change speed faster or slower than others - instead of having top speeds. You would basically have full freedom of motion, without friction to keep you safely at your top speed relative to the viscous aether of space itself.
Imagine doing canyon dives from high orbit, tearing into an atmosphere at Mach 20 as your hull immediately starts boiling away and you're pummeled with 10 G of deceleration forces whilst a pack of 20 police vipers come screeching in behind you and another squadron of 20 mercs are launching up at you from the base you're about to nuke and they're
all firing at you in a maelstrom of laser beams and smoking missile trails and The Ground! The Ground's coming up at you as your altimeter kicks in at 70,000 meters, then forty thousand, ten thousand, oh God, the ground! And swinging into reverse, giving it full thrust whilst switching to rear lasers to peck at the closer ones whilst the police ships start streaking down past you all tumbling into each other and the ground's
still coming at 10km/min only 5,000 meters to go and now some of the police are crashing into it and the missiles are still coming and you're spamming the ECM and desperately firing on three thrusters simultaneously and then
just skimming the ground by a few meters before lurching upwards again in a smoking overheated wreck back into the fray to try shake off or kill enough baddies before you can line up the nuke on the target..
How boring would that be?
And there's the rub - disenfranchised ED players like to fantasise about how cool it would be to actually be able to control their own so-called spaceship, without realising how utterly boring and stupid that would be. I don't know about you but when i hear "spaceflight", i
think 'crippled bathtubs in custard'. The slower, the better. Because everyone knows "spaceflight" basically means "slow motion", right? Just like in the movies. Basically the slower and more restrictive it is, the 'spacier' and more fun it is.
Personally i think they've got the viscosity of the custard just right, really dense and thick, and all nice and lumpy, with transitions,
for the transitions!
About the only thing it still lacks is transitions for the transitions
for transitions (obviously with a 10 second countdown and full system lockup on every one), but it's mostly there already so i'm willing to wait another four years for them to fulfill their vision.
