Should Frontier be more open about its development plans

Ghural

Ghural
Should Frontier be more open about its development plans?

Personally I like knowing where a game is going, it gives me something to look forward to and a direction for ingame activities (saving up for an upcoming ship for example). It's been a while since Frontier have mentioned their roadmap and I'm wondering if its something they should be more open about.

EVE online is both a terrible and good example on how to talk about your future roadmap

Terrible because a few years ago developers would get up on stage and say pretty much whatever they wanted. This was at it's worst when it came to the walking in stations (Incarna) expansion. Developers were talking dreamily about players owning their own establishments, a revolutionary animation system where avatars would automatically flinch when walking near a steam duct or turn to glance at other players who have achieved a level of notoriety. It was going to be amazing and ahead of its time.

And then they completely mess it up. To say they under-delivered on their vision would be an enormous understatement.

Now they are much more careful about what they announce. They do have a road map which is discussed on occasion but they are very careful not to mention any particular feature until it's implementation is certain. Their current roadmap only includes the big steps they want to reach and is pretty simple link

Frontier is certainly much more careful than CCP. They don't announce anything until its almost ready to be in the game. However at times I think they are almost too quiet about what is coming and that causes frustration and unhelpful speculation, especially for those of us who do love the game and are excited to hear where it is going and what progress is being made to get us there.

So what do you think? Should we be asking Lord Braben or the other senior designers to give us an update on the original road map? How much detail do you think they should give?
 
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valbarr

V
Currently they feed us scraps. games like this are a long term investment, how can we have any sort of say in what is to come, when we have zero clue. i bought star citizen the other day, because there is a road map a long one, hehe.
 

Marc_Hicks

Marc_Hicks
I'm kind of on the fence. Though it would be nice to know what they have "in the pipeline", I do understand how they might fear backlash if something doesn't go to plan. Aside from getting the release dates wrong, 2016 was definitely an improvement on 2015.....in that we got a clear indication of what the headline features of each update would be. If we get something similar for 2017-18, minus the over-optimistic time-frames.....then I'd be OK with that.
 

Bryan K

Bryan K
We should be getting a lot more info from them. What they're fixing, what they've fixed, when they fixed it, what they're adding next, what's in the game right now, what's a long way off, etc. They're way too cryptic about everything. As they're probably learning with this latest ruins hunt, it's not always wise to just expect us to find stuff they've hidden. We may never see it.
 

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
If you want to see what promising truly open game development looks like - there is always Star Citizen.

If you look very closely - you can just about see it go "whee!!!" :D
 

Mengy

Mengy
Yes, a thousand times YES. Some semblance of a roadmap and future content is important to keep community morale high, especially with an online multiplayer game like Elite. Frontier's current standard of keeping things super secret is not helping the game's future, nor giving players any hope for the future of the franchise. It's frustrating, and it's very anti-hype inducing, in fact it has the opposite effect and reduces hype for the game.

It amazes me that today we don't know much at all about 2.3 other than it has some kind of multicrew feature, of which we still don't truly know anything about, and we have absolutely NO idea what 2.4 will contain, nor any clue at all what they have planned for Season 3. It's one reason why I hold my wallet in check and restrain myself from buying paints and DLC, why invest money into a game when I have no idea at all about where it is going in the near future?

Gamers want to know what they are investing in, and we have next to no idea at all what that is with Elite. That's very bad IMHO.

The roadmap and community involvement with it is the one thing that Star Citizen absolutely does better than Elite, much better.
 
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dynamicbob

Banned
D
Constant meaningful communication is the key, if the whole dev team is busy on 2.3. Have someone running around the office letting out tidbits before the 2.3 PR season begins
 

JuicerPrime

JuicerPrime
Asp Explorer said:
If you want to see what promising truly open game development looks like - there is always Star Citizen.
Click to expand...

Subnautica is a good example of open dev communication. I'm sure Frontier have their reasons for the silent approach, but sometimes it does make you wonder what's going on in there...sinister supervillany-type things no doubt :eek:

MrPapaGiorgiio said:
Yes. Yes.
Click to expand...

[video=youtube;P3ALwKeSEYs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3ALwKeSEYs[/video]
 
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Cobra1984

C
Mengy said:
Yes, a thousand times YES. Some semblance of a roadmap and future content is important to keep community morale high, especially with an online multiplayer game like Elite. Frontier's current standard of keeping things super secret is not helping the game's future, nor giving players any hope for the future of the franchise. It's frustrating, and it's very anti-hype inducing, in fact it has the opposite effect and reduces hype for the game.

It amazes me that today we don't know much at all about 2.3 other than it has some kind of multicrew feature, of which we still don't truly know anything about, and we have absolutely NO idea what 2.4 will contain, nor any clue at all what they have planned for Season 3. It's one reason why I hold my wallet in check and restrain myself from buying paints and DLC, why invest money into a game when I have no idea at all about where it is going in the near future?

Gamers want to know what they are investing in, and we have next to no idea at all what that is with Elite. That's very bad IMHO.

The roadmap and community involvement with it is the one thing that Star Citizen absolutely does better than Elite, much better.
Click to expand...


There is a roadmap for Season 2. There was a roadmap for Season 1. There will be a roadmap for Season 3.

On your comment about holding your wallet in check because you have no idea where it is all going - Elite has been out for over 2 years. You can look at where it's been, and get MORE than an idea of where it's going.

Your comment that you have "next to no idea at all" of what you are investing in when the game is there in your hands with 2 years worth of roadmap behind it, and having an actual real life wizard describing to you on YouTube how the background simulation works makes you seem ridiculous.

Predictably you give yourself away with your final little statement there at the end, which goes a long way to telling me what has happened to this forum community since the last time I had a (different) account on here, many, many moons ago.


Elite is an important franchise to me and there are areas where I think Frontier is dropping the ball - but this forum does not right now offer someone like me the kind of environment where any kind of genuine discussion or feedback can take place. That's a real shame, because it used to.
 

Frenotx

Frenotx
I would personally prefer to be far more in-the-know than the current arrangement. It would be amazing to hear about what they're trying out, what they had to axe and why, what they think is going well, etc. A degree of caution is certainly warranted, consider people's tenancy to interpret "it would be cool if" and "we'd like to" as, "We absolutely plan and promise to", but the current level of closed-door is rather unsatisfying.
 

Ghural

Ghural
Yeah. I mean they do have an internal idea on what order to introduce things. Even if they just talked about the broad goals like for example Avatar creator > walking in hanger and ships > FPS mode in CQC > walking in station > player housing .. Or something like that
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
I do think they need to be very cautious about what they say. People so easily misinterpret what they say and it leads to dissapointment when things don't meet peoples' (imagined) expectations.

We can see this with Star Citizen and No Man's Sky. With NMS it all came crashing down. With SC it remains to be seen, but looking at what some people are dreaming about doing based off what they expect SC to be, either CIG really are going to create something well beyond what has ever been done before, or, more realistically, there are going to be some dissapointed people in the future.

What I think FD might be ok with doing is rather than giving a roadmap, perhaps once a month showing off some of the things they are working on. For example, we know they are working on atmosphere planets and we also know from Braben's comments on the christmas stream that its still some way off, but show us something of where it is now. Or for example, the Dolphin is in the works, give us a video of it in its current state.

Of course, there is a downside to doing this beyond mangaing expectations. It takes people time away from their other work. Imagine the first suggestion about showing off some atmosphere planet work. The dev has to prepare a demo, the community manager needs to be checking they are going to say and show stuff they are ready to talk about, it needs announcing, it needs preparing and performing, and of course approval from management.

Even something as simple as a 10 minute skit showing off atmosphere worlds could require hours of work from multiple people.

Is the gain worth the loss? At least you are going to lose a couple of hours of dev time from the very guy we want to be working full steam ahead on a very much wanted feature.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
Why do people keep mentioning SC? They have never successfully delivered on any of their release dates. Never. Is that what people really want? Where's SQ42? That was supposed to be out last year. 3.0? Last December. Anyone remember Star Marine already being in the game then not then yes then not ...

What are you guys smoking?
 

Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
No...........Mans Sky.. :D


In short I feel they could but the question is whether they should. I quite like the surprise, over the years I've found some of the sub-features of the major updates to be gems and it's always fun with the launch livestreams/announcements and jumping into Beta to explore things you had no idea were coming.
On the downside it leads to very much ups and downs on hype graph.

Personally I'd like more open-ness on the major features but keep tight lipped on the extras and save them for the big reveal. I'd really enjoy more community input on development earlier instead of right at the end in beta. Difficult to do that if some of those give the secrets away.

Edit: It's also a careful balance not just between what the promise/tell us but also between them and their shareholders, competitors etc. In a way the less people know the better, they are just presented with the shiny stuff as and when FDev deem it to be finished enough to market. They don't have anyone second-guessing them, they don't have as much "release it nao!" comments and they don't have the whole "I dislike feature X" when they haven't yet fully explained feature X.
The internet (and world) is fickle is the summary of what I want to say. Doesn't take much to cause a poop-storm these days.

My personal thoughts...
 
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Huros

Huros
Poor communications in general. They are good guys and clearly working hard but, they have communicated in fits and starts. The News Letter has become progressively poorer. Dev updates died ages ago. Now it is all about secrecy, or so it seems. Don't get me wrong I love FDEv but their regular comms to the whole community is not good enough. We get plenty of "community engagement" but woefully little communications.

The real problem with all this is Elite has spoiled gaming for me. You, this awesome community, the Canonn, which I have been involved with from the start, and the actual beauty and quality of the game makes most other games I try feel lacklustre. And, it is because of that that I crave news on what is to come next, and why I notice the poor comms.
 
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