I'd really like to see him re-iterate his plans for Elite, if things have changed he should be the one to announce that they have changed not drip-feed disappointment through the CMs
Something happened to the dream.
- Thread starter Origalactic
- Start date
He will.....if Frontier stocks sunk again!
Yes! I totally agree.
FD keeps a very tight control on gameplay. Despite ED ostensibly being a sim, there's very little emergent play. If they had kept up the 'sim' aspect of things rather than trying to introduce balanced gameplay loops then there would be numerous interesting things to do. Some of which would, absolutely 'exploit' the system, but this would be part of the fun. (Landing a ship on them being one of the best ways of taking out on-foot NPCs being an obvious, and hilarous, current 'exploit')
I'm still puzzled at the absolute separation of on-foot and on-ship: why cant I visit my on-ship contact in their offices in the station? Why are on-ship and on-foot mission boards separate? Why cant I do outfitting in a hanger, talking to a mechanic?
As for ship interiors: IMHO they need no additional gameplay other than just being there however, you could deploy a lot of existing cockpit functions to the interior: going to SRV/fighter bay, synthesis, jettisoning cargo etc. Other functions could be: a conference function to holo-call other cmdrs, repairs, some form of remote engineering?
Elite has so many amazing things but makes so little use of them.
I'm still puzzled at the absolute separation of on-foot and on-ship: why cant I visit my on-ship contact in their offices in the station? Why are on-ship and on-foot mission boards separate? Why cant I do outfitting in a hanger, talking to a mechanic?
As for ship interiors: IMHO they need no additional gameplay other than just being there however, you could deploy a lot of existing cockpit functions to the interior: going to SRV/fighter bay, synthesis, jettisoning cargo etc. Other functions could be: a conference function to holo-call other cmdrs, repairs, some form of remote engineering?
Elite has so many amazing things but makes so little use of them.
The thing is, if people accept abstractions (such as turbolift orientations for concourse / landingpads) then its more or a matter of external appearance (that has an associated internal volume) and then buying an internal service to fill that space. Its not granular but its still 'yours'.
Yeap.
However, i prefer ED to the Scam that is SC.
And i do hope ED lives long enough so it gets ship interiors (that if EDO really gets successful and sells lots of copies... else...)
The sad part is ED getting like 100+ millions revenues in 7 years while SC getting 450+ millions by selling jpegs and a perma alpha stuck in a hand crafted single system.
Thanks, I just really appreciate intelligent discussion on topics and subjects I'm curious about, I appreciate everyone's opinion on this topic, again it's not about spaceship interiors but about, the ED dream and the possible corruption and loss of it. A sad fact maybe? though I hope not.
X4 is pretty rad, has some really cool starship designs and being able to walk around inside them is cool, you can also hire npc crew members that will fly your starship for you and do other stuff, oh! and some of the community made mods are wild, it's worth a try at the very least when you need a small break from ED.
"Elite has so many amazing things but makes so little use of them." Well said!
Exactly what are you doing when walking around starships? Just walking, or does it have some interesting game mechanic associated with it?
Only asking as just walking about for the fun of it would get really old, really fast. Landing in a station in my Cutter or Corvette and disembarking is walking the length of the ship with no other purpose than to get to the other end, it isn't exciting after the first couple of strolls.
Edit: Typos
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Probably the same things i managed to do while playing MechWarrior 5 or Mass Effect (1/2/3) or SW: Kotor (1/2).
Aka get bored to death roaming the corridors to get that quest or that talk or etc.
A lobby for a single player game... which ED is not.
WE do have the entire galaxy...
Yes! I prefer ED also, and I'm not ashamed to say I love ED, though I appreciate other space games, regardless, Elite will always be at the top for my list, even if it slowly starts to disappoint me I will not stop loving it, but I may have to set it free.Yeap.
However, i prefer ED to the Scam that is SC.
And i do hope ED lives long enough so it gets ship interiors (that if EDO really gets successful and sells lots of copies... else...)
The sad part is ED getting like 100+ millions revenues in 7 years while SC getting 450+ millions by selling jpegs and a perma alpha stuck in a hand crafted single system.
From watching a lot of other streams where there are ship interiors it greatly adds to not only the immersion but the inter-person gameplay. You get a lot of "Gett to zee choppa" moments but you are right it should be a platform for more gameplay. There are a million suggestion pages on how that could be.
"Elite has so many amazing things but makes so little use of them." Well said!
The most amazing thing Elite has it's the ability to make your imagination gone wild.
It did it for me with the first Elite, it still does with this one.
Sure, the basic requirement is having imagination, duh
And that's the point.
I'm playing the game together with my wife and all we want is a own system with our own settlement
That would be totally great, but will maybe never come.
And yes, we want to travel through the galaxy and maybe we find abandonded ships, which can be reactivated with some kind of magic... aaaaah the possibilities...
However, ED is a rather big part in our life (no kids yet) and we are playing nearly every day.
It's just disapointing, that the original "Drive" from Braben and his "Dream" somehow disapeared.
So @David Braben , I think an update would be realy realy helpful for the most of us
And regarding ship interior... just make an option "Just beam my lacy a... down to earth". So noone is "forced" to go down the stairs
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I only drop into SC on occasion to check it out, but from what I can tell ship interiors are quite useful in multiplayer. If you have a few friends and you're headed out to some mission that requires EVA, you can all get in the ship, walk around inside it while on the way, man the turrets if there's a space battle, check your loadout, swap gear, arrive at the place together, all jump out of the ship to do whatever the mission requires...that sort of thing.
It can be quite immersive IF you are playing with others.
By yourself there's nothing much to do in the ship except pilot it. You can walk around, even get up while on autopilot, but there's not a lot of reason to do so.
SC is clearly aimed at the multiplayer community. PVP is always enabled. Going it alone is either boring or dangerous or both.
Nothing wrong with that, it's just not what I hoped for when I backed the game (way back at the beginning).
Fair question, In X4 for example you are usually walking around your starship to either get out at a starport/station, getting into your eva suit to make repairs to your starship while in space or eva over to a captured starship, Sounds simple but it really adds to the immersion and realism then simply just fading to black and appearing beside your starship. In x4 you can even get a crew member to pilot your starship to somewhere else in the galaxy, get off the starship before it takes off, buy another starship and team up with your crew member who is piloting your old starship, Anyway a bit off topic but point I'm trying to make is, it's the little things that really make the difference.
I never fell asleep and thus are immune to the dream fantasies. Just buy the game at what it is and judge it for the product description vs delivery. Everything else is unhealthy hype and fanatsies.
I suspect the process of dropping them was rather more gradual - they started (and so did their original backers/fans!) very naive about what "Elite but MMO" actually meant for game mechanics, implementation, etc.
They probably started to figure it out sometime around the initial Powerplay "overheads" disaster but by then were pretty much locked in on Horizons, so the first sign they'd actually figured it out was Beyond.
I think it'll last quite a bit longer - sure, there are other games set in space, but none of them are directly competing with Elite Dangerous, and there are good reasons for a new entrant not to try that either.
Broadly I think the requirements for "Elite but better" are that it has to keep the things which distinguish Elite from other space games.
1) Persistent multiplayer
2) Massively oversized game world - and specifically the ability to explore a vast unknown but not being only or even primarily about exploration
3) Primarily about flying the spaceship in first-person real-time, and related activities
Those are essentially contradictory requirements - dropping any one of the three to focus on the other two would make your task far easier, still let you make a great "space game", and much reduce the chance that you join the ranks of "space game projects with a promising prototype that were never heard from again". The amount of tech you have to get lined up at the engine/stellar forge-equivalent level to even try to compete with Elite Dangerous - long before anything like "what do you do in the game?" and "is it fun?" gets asked - is ridiculous.
...and why would you want to compete with Elite Dangerous anyway? There have been basically three successful space games released in the last decade (ED, X4, NMS) and maybe a similar number started and painfully dragging themselves towards release. With so much room to do something new and interesting, I know I certainly wouldn't be trying for "ED clone" even if I had the budget and team capable of it.
So in practical terms, most companies capable of making "a better Elite Dangerous" are also sensible enough not to try to do it.
It's nice the odd time in between, but the bread and butter gameplay of X4 doesn't need that. The only stuff that feels actually meaningful is the EVA and story plot missions. And for that the limitations really show. It's not an RPG. Stuff like that is for RPG, not space sim / business sim.
Stations already have interiors.
Carriers will get interiors in U11 (if everything goes as planned)
I'd say It's enough in term of hubs for multiplayer activities