ship interiors - will they happen
- Thread starter Woakes
- Start date
It's not that I see anything particularly wrong with that, my reservations have more to do with the fact that we are talking about adding something like 40 new interior spaces for the sake of a relatively Limited style of gameplay. Combat can be a tertiary thing, a complimentary thing, but I don't think it is enough on its own to justify the rather large development cost.
That's why, at least to start with, it needs a dedicated focus on something else, and I think exobiology is the perfect way to go with that.
The interiors in SF serve 4 purposes;
1) Boarding actions, don't think this needs expanding on here.
2) Research, whilst you have research projects to carry out. Once they're done the lab is redundant.
3) Sleep.
4) Somewhere to talk to characters, same as corridors in Star Trek.
How you gonna fight the Trumble infestation otherwise?
That'd be a funny intro. Someone finds a previously unknown bio on a planet it scans as...something. Then next thing you know it's on their ship and multiplying. They unwisely dock somewhere to cash in their first discovery. Before long everyone's got a problem.
Well, that would happen in a better game where the devs aren't obsessed with corpo faction pvp and guilds with no guild things to do. 
That'd be a funny intro. Someone finds a previously unknown bio on a planet it scans as...something. Then next thing you know it's on their ship and multiplying. They unwisely dock somewhere to cash in their first discovery. Before long everyone's got a problem.
Well, that would happen in a better game where the devs aren't obsessed with corpo faction pvp and guilds with no guild things to do. I mean, traditionally, the inside of a vessel basically plays the role of a mobile base. The problem with Elite in particular being, we've never needed a base, so adding those features tends to be more of a negative than a positive. Sleeping, for example, isn't particularly relevant here. And we don't have characters to talk to, either. And as we've previously discussed, any boarding action is going to be highly limited and opt in.
That's what leads me to exobiology and gardening. In games like subnautica, that's one of the main purposes for having the Interior Space, but first we need a reason to garden, hence the stimpacks suggestion. That said, you wouldn't need to actually go out and explore to get some, you could easily have a gardening section in the exobiology section of stations, where you can buy some plants to Garden on your own ship to keep your own Supply well stocked.
Didn't DBOBE 'promise' hostile ship boarding, EVA repairs and a multitude of other stuff to do with interiors in those videos that keep getting referred to from many, many, years ago?
I don't recall gardening being suggested.... Leave that in Subnautica, please!
Sure. Well, no, 'promised' is probably too strong a word. He indicated a strong DESIRE to do those things - but as always, you've gotta develop the game you've got, not the one you wish you had, and I just can't see them adding everything he talked about at this stage.
Bear in mind, he also talked about landable earthlikes, explorable cities, big game hunting, etc. at the same time. It was pretty clearly a list of longshot hopes and dreams. Exobiology, by contrast, wasn't anywhere on the list. But now we DO have exobiology, it's a bit under-developed, so we might as well use it.
And honestly gardening is probably one of the most realistic and multi-purpose things you could add right now. It achieves multiple objectives at once; it interfaces with combat, it serves as a sort of trophy case for your exploration journeys, it can provide a trickle source of raw mats(which many people like collecting the least), and it even offers a way to decorate your ship as you please. It even already has models that can be used.
The objective should be to find something REALISTIC to suggest. We can keep referring back to Braben's pie-in-the sky list as long as we like, but most of it's just way too complex and expensive to have any hope of getting. That's why I prefer to focus on a more streamlined and developmentally realistic goal; one that can potentially be expanded at a later date if player interest pans out, and that can be used to iron out the bugs and problems that are inevitably going to surface.
Not according to some on the forum, his words were cast in stone, weren't they?
I am afraid that I can only disagree, strongly, with that sentiment.
It is a space simulator (according to some) not an online version of "Gardener's World"...
... but then, the suggestions section has plenty of other odd ideas as to what the poster would consider added value to the game, who knows, "Aggressive Combat Gardening" could take over PvP as a preferred activity!
I think we've grown far beyond that, at this point. Indeed, the very premise of the suggestion of interiors is more or less contradictory to the presumption that this is a purely a space simulator.
I don't mean to be rude, but what's your goal here? It feels like you're being very contradictory in general, and I'm not sure that's helping the conversation.
They hyped us up for it, back in 2019, when they released a Twitter picture of the FSD room of a Mamba. I'm starting to wonder if that was a April fool's joke delivered late. At the time, many were under the impression that it was teasing of what was to come, sooner than later.
x.com
x.com
x.com
Last edited:
Which is why I think they should be mission wrinkles, rather than all the time. If you’re not interested in potential problems of that nature, don’t take higher-paying missions that state that there’s an assassin after them, or a rival faction may sabotage the mission, or there’s a possible hijacking plot.
When it comes to ship interiors, I find the idea of choice of checking passenger IDs personally for a potential assassin if I stack passenger missions and one has such a wrinkle, sacrifice pass agar space for a security station, or dealing with any problems in flight far more appealing than having those same passengers be nothing more than animatronic dummies
Which is why I think they should be mission wrinkles, rather than all the time. If you’re not interested in potential problems of that nature, don’t take higher-paying missions that state that there’s an assassin after them, or a rival faction may sabotage the mission, or there’s a possible hijacking plot.
When it comes to ship interiors, I find the idea of choice of checking passenger IDs personally for a potential assassin if I stack passenger missions and one has such a wrinkle, sacrifice pass agar space for a security station, or dealing with any problems in flight far more appealing than having those same passengers be nothing more than animatronic dummies
Which is ironic, because I’d consider exobiology a tertiary activity to exploration, while I’ve seen dozens of potential gameplay activities of ship interiors, not all combat related, on the last few pages. Imagine searching a sunken Anaconda for critical corporate data on a water world, like what we see in Subnautica. With a good interior module setup, each interior could potentially be unique, while still familiar enough to get proficient at such activities.
Imagine you buy a ship and all you can do is sit in a cockpit chair. If you're a holographic AI imagine you can only be in 1 seat. You'd have no clue what's behind the cockpit / bridge, because the door is always locked. I'd get upset and demand the rest of the ship.
Maybe the ship manufacturer filled the ship's compartments with garbage. We can't open the door to inspect it.
Last edited:
I don't mean to be rude either - but suggestions made get reactions, don't they - and quashing a suggestion in favour of another is commonplace, by some.
Not contradictory in general, but very specific.
There have been several interesting suggestions made, none of which involve gardening in any shape or form.
See the 2017 movie Life for how that could go.How you gonna fight the Trumble infestation otherwise?
That'd be a funny intro. Someone finds a previously unknown bio on a planet it scans as...something. Then next thing you know it's on their ship and multiplying. They unwisely dock somewhere to cash in their first discovery. Before long everyone's got a problem.
Sure. However, most of the ideas mentioned here are the exact same ideas that have been mentioned for the past... probably 10 years? Thus far, there has been very little enthusiasm on behalf of the Developers for those same ideas, so I think we should, for all intents and purposes, consider them to be dead in the water. If they were going to implement those ideas, they would have done so by now.
By contrast, my proposal is relatively new, streamlined, and untarnished by years of failure to implement. It enhances some aspects of the game that are currently lacking, without unduly impacting the areas that are already good.
If you had any critique or ideas for improvement, I'd love to talk about them! But just coming in and saying no, without any reason or way to engage, doesn't really help the conversation progress, you know?
Seen it. For some reason I find it hard to repeat that one. I think it was too much character stupid. Might have to try again.
If you watch videos with the devs about potential features, many are excited about ship interiors which was mentioned multiple times. Fdev tends to take longer than expected to implement new features. For example Odyssey was delayed a few times and some features such as Fleet Carriers and interiors came years later.