From how long ago?
ship interiors - will they happen
- Thread starter Woakes
- Start date
It's true that Starfield players like Starfield interiors doesn't necessarily mean the same thing happens with Elite. But did you realize that the community of players that has asked for this feature the most in the world of video games for years, in forums, YouTube, reddit, etc. is precisely Elite?
If there is a video game community that would approve this feature, more than any other, in the world of video games, it is precisely Elite.
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I find it curious that 'suggestions' can get poo-poo'd when made by others...
Lacking in your opinion, naturally?
I would prefer that FD decide what they consider worthwhile to include in the game, hopefully it won't include gardening, but may include pathways to living as lawless, outside of the PF.
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Gotta get it wrong
If there were ship interiors then crew (multi-crew) members would be able to walk around the ship :
1. During normal flight ?
2. During SC flight ?
3. During SC + SCO flight ?
(What's that commander over there in the corner? He went to the bathroom and I switched the flight mode to SCO.)
4. During hyperjump ? (well this option is already visible on FC)
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For me, the fact that you can roam around and do some interesting things with your crew, when the ship is parked on land, space or station, is enough and more than enough for me.Gotta get it wrong
If there were ship interiors then crew (multi-crew) members would be able to walk around the ship :
1. During normal flight ?
2. During SC flight ?
3. During SC + RMS flight ?
4. During hyperjump ? (well this option is already visible on FC)
Yeah, I know what you mean.
It's very interesting to watch other people (multi-crew, private group or just open play) when people are messing around in your FC.
It's very cool
How long can you sit across from each other in a bar?
You’re confusing a lack of resources with a lack of enthusiasm. On-foot gameplay mechanics had to be added to the game before ship interiors could even be considered as a potential environment for said gameplay. And quite frankly, planetside settlements are the low-hanging fruit of such environments, compared to ship or even station interiors… and the latter is so minimally viable as a product that it could be replaced with a menu system.
Your proposal is new, but it’s a survival game mechanic in a game that’s missing survival gameplay. Without said gameplay, it’s a useless distraction from exploration gameplay, a diversion away from on-foot combat gameplay, and utterly useless for all other types of gameplay.
Ship Interiors are an environment in which gameplay takes place. For gameplay to take place, there needs to be fane mechanics in them. As Starfield has shown, most players will choose to skip traversing an environment that is devoid of gameplay. That’s why fast travel is so popular in so many games.
On the other hand, ship interiors make a marvelous environment for all sorts of gameplay, such as clearing out an alien infestation, spying on a in-flight meeting, or rescuing injured passengers from a ship in distress. All activities, I might add, I’ve done in other games that focused on ship interior gameplay at the expense of a good flight model.
I wasn’t recommending it, in fact I agree with you about the characters.
It was beautifully shot and I am glad my friends showed it to me but I thought the ending was quite cruel to the characters involved.
Not sorry I watched it but probably a once is enough situation.
I'd say that survival mechanics exist in at at least a prototypical form; the Synthesis menu on the right-hand panel. One can gather materials and use them to make useful things like heat-sinks, ship weapon ammunition, chaff etc. It's even in the SRV, where I've personally made fairly extensive use of fuel synthesis and hull repair as an explorer when crossing very rough terrain while looking for biological samples. Limpet synthesis has also helped me out a lot in order to effect repairs in Titan space, when I've run out or forgot to bring them.
I think there is potential to build on that. The current Synthesis UI is rather clunky, being a massive list that one has to scroll through to find what one wants, so streamlining that should be a part of any expansion.
During combat? Including high-G force manoeuvres?Gotta get it wrong
If there were ship interiors then crew (multi-crew) members would be able to walk around the ship :
1. During normal flight ?
2. During SC flight ?
3. During SC + SCO flight ?
(What's that commander over there in the corner? He went to the bathroom and I switched the flight mode to SCO.)
4. During hyperjump ? (well this option is already visible on FC)
Yes, and the same was true of "space legs like in NMS" back in 2018-2019, followed by Odyssey...
There can potentially be quite a big gap between
- vague specification of a feature which only exists in the imagination
- things people (including the vast majority of players who aren't part of "the community") will actually pay for
Well, sure, because most other games [1] either already have ship interiors or (more usually) clearly have no possible context in which they'd make sense to add. Neither ED nor Tetris players continually ask for falling block puzzles to be added.
If only "the Elite community" could agree on what ship interiors should actually do. Just from this thread...
- some people just want them as cosmetic/immersion places with no functionality (or at least would be satisfied with that), other people think that's pointless and only want them with functionality
- some people want to board other player's ships and steal them, other people definitely do not want that happening to them (or the consequential changes to other aspects of the game needed to make it possible)
- some people want to spend hours loading cargo barrels onto their ships, other people want to be able to press "buy 500 tonnes" and take off on the market screen
- some people want to repair their ships, other people don't want their ships to get damaged regularly in the first place
- some people primarily want to explore NPC/derelict ships, other people think that's basically just more of Odyssey but in a different setting
- some people want extra features to be tied to interiors, other people want those extra features to be accessible from the ship menus if they don't specifically require interiors.
- some people have ship interiors as their #1 priority, other people wouldn't mind it but prefer base building / dense atmospheres / Powerplay 2 / etc.
- some people want ship interiors for the ships we have, other people want more ships (and therefore ship interiors pushed further away)
- some people want EVA content, other people feel that's more of a ship exteriors thing
That doesn't seem like a feature which is going to make the transition from "dreams" to "actually pick one and implement it" in a way that "the community" will be happy with.
[1] That said, that's largely not true of "spaceship flying" games, where many of the big ones don't have ship interiors much more than Elite Dangerous does:
NMS: your ship is too small to have an interior beyond what's already in-game (acts like ED SRV interiors), restricted to capital ships only
Kerbal: you can get a Kerbal-eye view of the inside of a ship (and even fly it that way), but like ED you can't get out of your seat
X4: you can walk around the cockpit/bridge and maybe a couple of other cosmetic areas, the main purpose is to distinguish which of the player or the NPC is controlling the ship, plus a few cutscenes take place on NPC ships rather than on stations. It's a long way from a major feature of the game.
I just remembered when Han Solo went to fix the ship, the ship got hit by a gunshot, it shook, and the toolbox fell on Han's head
There’s a difference between survival mechanics and survival gameplay. Survival gameplay is a synthesis of various mechanics that boils down to you need fulfill needs X, Y, and Z, repeatedly, or you’re dead. Exploration is IMO a good fit for survival gameplay. You need to find stuff to build the stuff you need fulfill your needs, and typically the rarer stuff you need to build the better stuff to more easily fulfill your needs is more dangerous to obtain, which in turn requires more stuff to recover from said dangers.
I really think that Frontier dropped the ball during the Horizons Beta when they decided to remove discovering surface composition from the SRV. Synthesis had the potential to provide some survival-style gameplay to exploration, because there was an Incentive to risk high-G landings in the search for jumponium and other synthesis materials. Once it switched to the detailed surface scanner, you didn’t even need to approach a planet to determine its composition.
What other interiors? We don't even have an on-board computer with a five-year supply of jokes like Ion Silent. (Lem, Star Diaries)
That stuck around in Horizons for a while - it was only 2.2 which added surface materials to the DSS readouts.
It made for some interesting gameplay on expeditions - especially combined with pre-engineering or early-engineering jump ranges - where scouting for jumponium for the slower ships to get over gaps was a big part of it. It's obviously far more convenient to get it on scan - especially once engineering added non-synthesis uses for raw materials, but I did prefer it the old way.
Well, as far as I know, nobody's historically suggested this sort of thing, so my critique(that being 'it has been suggested many times before and hasn't been implemented) doesn't really apply, you know? If you had some other critique, I'd be interested in hearing it!
I guess my question is, why not? What exactly do you have against something like the ability to grow raw materials and combat boosters inside your ship?
To a point, but part of the advantage of my proposal is it's basically as stripped-down as possible, requiring only a single room per ship, so it also addresses the resource challenges. This can be contrasted with some other ideas which often require basically the entire interior being simulated (including in-flight) which would necessarily take a lot more resources and dev time. And, perhaps even more crucially, many other ideas directly impact space combat, which they most definitely have shown no desire to alter.
The main addition would be the creation of stimpacks; however, you could more or less conceptualize those as an on-foot equivalent of Synthesis, boosting your stats temporarily in exchange for a limited resource acquired from elsewhere. You could also collect raw mats in this way.
The objective here is actually to give players LESS time away from combat, by giving them a small trickle of these materials without needing to return to the Black to get them. Right now, players need to regularly head out to the Brain Trees of Crystal Shards to restock; being able to grow raw mats and stimpacks inside your ship would notably delay that return, depending on how fast they use up their raw mats and stimpacks for synthesis.
In general, I feel like reducing the need to go collect raw mats would be taken positively. Given that Fdev have shown zero inclination to reduce the necessity for raw mats or the need to go out into the black to collect them.
It's true, in my case, I'm only satisfied with being able to lift my butt off the seat and not be a ship. And if I'm going to be a ship, make up an excuse, for example being incubated in a bubble inside a ship and controlling it with my thoughts, like in Homeworld or EvE.
The best example that comes to mind at the moment is the system they devised for Starfield. It has everything, you yourself create your ship interior with modules, you can furnish the interior, you can invade the interior of enemy ships, you can furnish it with machines for manufacturing components for your suits and weapons, etc.
Furthermore, it is not that much space, since medium-sized ships have the vehicle and fighter module already incorporated, small ships only need the cabin. The issue is large ships.
The best example that comes to mind at the moment is the system they devised for Starfield. It has everything, you yourself create your ship interior with modules, you can furnish the interior, you can invade the interior of enemy ships, you can furnish it with machines for manufacturing components for your suits and weapons, etc.
Furthermore, it is not that much space, since medium-sized ships have the vehicle and fighter module already incorporated, small ships only need the cabin. The issue is large ships.
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The forum rules won't permit me to answer honestly...
An arboretum was suggested when FCs got interiors.
This was mostly an in-game representation of the plants you'd scanned in the Codex.
Some of the agri-settlement glass enclosures would be a nice addition to the FC.
Given raw mats are elements the plants would tend to require them as a consumables resource rather than a product.
In any case I can gather them from moons around the Bubble more easily than from out in the black. I also have access to mat traders so can stock up on whatever I need.
Generally speaking, the raw materials you get off Biologicals tends to be a product of the plant, rather than harvesting the plant itself. A fruit, if you will. I have to assume that the raw materials we use are not just common elements, otherwise they should be very easy to acquire, and we shouldn't be gathering them off alien plants light years away. My assumption has always been that there is something special about the configuration of these particular raw materials; some sort of special structure or form that can't be easily synthesized or gathered up at home.
So you would just fertilize the soil beneath the plant in question with the desired elements, and then the plants would produce the desired fruiting body. You would need some sort of economic or technical reason why this is not done on a large scale, but that's easy enough to come up with, or it could just be ignored entirely.