Feel free to skip the intro paragraph and start by the numbers for each idea--There's a lot of them.
Odyssey was a great starting point for Elite's claim to the best space/simulator game of all time, and it only needs a few things--on top of a rebranding--to really jut out and grow the community. Some people vehemently disagree, however, saying it didn't do enough to integrate itself into the core game. Others complained saying they never wanted space legs or an FPS component at all--It could affect whatever gameplay loop they refined/exploited. Maybe they just don't want to change their HOTAS setup to accommodate getting out of their seat for a function only available somewhere else in their ship. Whatever the reason, the bickering has left the community somewhat divided. I'm not surprised FDev ultimately decided to keep the two separated. I sure am glad the developers we yell our opinions at 24/7 still manage show up to work and improve the game instead of just pull the plug to stop the screaming. Obviously, I know very little the direction the team is trying to take the game. It could be that leadership does not see the game as profitable enough to greenlight the grandiose projects and ideas the devs or fans want. If that's the case, I want to try and address that possibility... while I go ahead and demand you all read my grandiose ideas. These suggestions are in no particular order.
1. Friendly Planetary Firefights. Some of the most fun I have in this game is when my friend and I pick a pretty planet on which to land, step out and shoot each other. We only fight until one of us loses shields because dying can be frustrating. At best you die on foot, you and your ship get punted into orbit and you have to re-approach. On top of that, as beautiful as the landscape can be, the engagement is usually one-note with very few obstacles and elements to change things up. If only there was some way both of those problems could be solved...
2. Building. Serious, in depth, fully fleshed out. In space and on land and sea. Build almost whatever you can imagine out of anything you can think of... with a caveat: It won't be permanent without some kind of a beacon. Without a beacon to guide you back, when the instance is left, it's all deleted. This would allow players to setup fun structures, homes etc. and fool around while at the same time not allow for any messes to go uncleaned.
A. The beacon could be named then deployed to the surface of a planet or established in a custom orbital around a body. Your ship would have to establish a supercruise orbit at the correct speed before deploying it. (It could even be that near the body you drop out in normal space while doing a fun minigame to get orbital right. Create a separate size-1 computer suite module that can do this.) The beacon would work like any other signal source. They cannot be dropped or stolen while in your cargo bay, and you could buy your first one for say 5,000,000. but the price increases drastically every time you want to buy another one from anywhere. The next one is 50,000,000 then 500,000,000 and so on. This would be to keep well-off players from flooding systems with locations. Perhaps cap the buying price at 5 billion. Deploying could grant the owner and wing/team building "permissions" within an area (keeping in mind you can still build anywhere but what stays is what's within the boundaries). The area should be square-shaped and pretty generous in size, or even upgradable to allow for building racetracks which may require large areas. (20km by 20km should be a good max size) Once placed, you must wait 1 week before removing a beacon.
B. Building on planets would be an on-foot matter with ship-based support. There's plenty of different ways this could be done, but one way I envision it is: ships could equip a module that handles building and allows for your ship to hover over you. It would take your cargo and put it into what I can best describe as a reverse refinery (bins that break down the cargo into percentages). Let's say you want to build a chest-high wall out of titanium and give it a cobalt finish. It would extract 50% of a single ton of titanium and 10% of a cobalt ton. You point a tool that holographically previews your placement. Once you fire, a limpet deploys from your ship to build it. When you're done you can empty the excess bins like in a regular refinery. For smaller, non-structure items, maybe a builder can be constructed on the surface by a limpet to handle those things. This all needs to include lots of basic and functional modular structures in various finishes that will make all different commodities relevant in the process. A bonus feature would be to allow for the painting of large decals across surfaces. Interior building would probably not be too different. with the smaller builder. Just require things like fabrics and electrical/computer components. Make some things SUPER hard to build, requiring combinations of rare materials, commodities and metals etc. Include landing pads, air locks, power supplies, storage rooms, and SPAWN POINTS like beds. For the sake of fighting, Specialized spawn points can be placed and claimed by users. Once they respawn, there's a cooldown before you can claim it again, which allows for enemies to actually send you out of the instance in the case of base raids. This would still give the owner of the property a defensive edge and allow for custom battlefields to be built and played with in fun and creative ways. Beds would be a different kind of spawn point players can choose to redeploy at in the case of losing their ship or losing consciousness.
C. Terraforming is one of my personal favorites but understandably much less likely to be done because it could require yet another rehauling of planet generation (hear me out on that part) It's not nearly as important as building in general. While it would be VERY nice, I think the community can live with not having it. It's a big universe and I'm sure the perfect spots exist out there with no touching-up. That being said, I have received personal testimonies from players who are on the fence about elite and seems there is a large demographic of people who would immediately buy the game if it had terraforming paired with building. The desire to build and create cannot be overlooked when it comes to player experience. This is why Minecraft sold 100,000,000 copies.
D. Spacewalks and space buildings. I've never personally wanted to build my bases in space but I see it as an absolute must if they were to add base building. What I HAVE wanted since Odyssey is the ability to leave my ship while in normal space. Think of the mission potential where you have to repair assemble a nav beacon or maybe you could secretly leave on a spacewalk in the middle of a fire fight and land on an enemy ship with magnet boots. you could fly right through bypass shields and bust their canopy or disable their equipment with an emp grenade. Ofc thats just a random example. With regards to space base building, I think the approach would should be more modular as opposed to planetary building that way it's easier to use the ship aim to place things but ultimately allow for the same things to be built. With spacewalks, there should be the ability to just have human sized entry points so you'd have to park your ship somewhere outside sitting in space or dismiss it out of the instance.
3. Landing on Planets with Full Atmospheres. Almost everyone wants this and FDev is more than aware, I'm sure. The least we can do is try and come together and agree on how we want it done so the devs don't have to lose sleep when they go for it...
A. Volcanic, Terraformable and Water Worlds Should be super easy to do, and everything really depends on how the approach works and how ships interact with dense atmospheres. I think the approaches should require a very narrow angle of approach, and even when that's done it does a certain amount of thermal damage to your shields. Not a significant amount if you keep the right angle--maybe 100 absolute thermal damage and up to 500+ thermal damage if you approach too steep the whole way down. Too shallow and you skip across the atmosphere and drop out of your glide. If you descend into a storm cloud or hurricane, you get thrashed about violently as lightning and thunder surrounds you, your ships functions risk failure and you drop out of the sky with no control until the last few km, just for some fun realism. If you make a water landing, as long as you have shields, your ship shields create a buoyancy and allow you to skid at extremely high speeds along the water doing small amounts of kinetic damage. Without shields, realistically I think a water landing means you're SOL or you have very little time to get out before you get waterlogged. Maybe if your thrusters and shields are good enough, you can submerge your ship entirely, which opens up the possibility of submarine builds. Maybe you could add water-tight hull and module reinforcements as an option. If you still have shields underwater, you'll have to fight the buoyancy from the air pocket it makes but you could see the ocean through the curved surface like a second canopy window. Maybe also include a mini submarine SRV, a hoverbike SRV and an actual jet ski as options for your SRV bay. Terraformable Mars-like worlds would be pretty simple with some weather effects here and there, and let's face it--the volcanic worlds would be easy too: chaotic, riddled with earthquakes and teeming with lava lakes, rivers, waterfalls etc. which means we would get to live out dreams of dueling on Mustafar.
B. Earthlike and Ammonia worlds. I know--we've heard it before... you show the game to your friend and they ask, "why can't you land on earthlike worlds?" And you have to say, "Yeah idk because it would be too much work I guess," and now both of you are big sad. OF COURSE This would be super difficult. Not impossible. I'd say for the time being if ever FDev were to allow us on Earthlikes, I would not be mad if they only allowed us on ones with no previously established human populations. CIty generation would be a lot more work on top of trying to recreate earth with enough unique variations to make visiting different ones worth your time. Honestly I have a lot of fantasy stuff I could go on about when it comes to this but nothing of real value. Adding all the wildlife would really completely blow up the codex, making trying to complete it all but impossible. I don't think we'd be too picky however so if you just go for it: a few extra biomes, plants and animals, cloud and weather volumetrics and we're happy campers.
Side note: I was recently educated on the potential for atmospheres to be incredibly dense--several, several times that of 1 atmosphere. So for any planet with a pressure of over 3 atmospheres should have a noticeable buoyancy effect and speed reduction for all objects, ships, etc.
B. Gas giants. If anything, for the sake of realism and as a joke, they should let you go inside gas giants only to see literally nothing but solid colors and increasing tempuratures. Maybe some giant leviathan monster sounds to spook us.
4. The next DLC should just be free if you already own the game. Consolidate ALL the expansions into a single game. From now on, Elite is Elite is Elite. The full game $40 USD-- some price point that is optimal to drive up sales. That means no more people clinging to Horizons (sorry guys). They get Odyssey and [New update's name] etc. with no choice to go back. I'm sure that's not a popular take but it'd be better for FDev to focus completely on a single version of the game. If they can fix the problems Horizon fans have with Odyssey then there should be no reason to keep them separate any longer. It would be a lot less work. Also, the version confusion can alienate and frustrate new players. Everyone is already divided by open, solo and group play too. It makes the player base seem way too small. I really don't think adding as many different things would make the game worse. There's plenty of open space out there with room for everyone. I'll call it here. Thanks to anyone who read this whole thing, and let me know what you think about the ideas.
o7
Jacob
Odyssey was a great starting point for Elite's claim to the best space/simulator game of all time, and it only needs a few things--on top of a rebranding--to really jut out and grow the community. Some people vehemently disagree, however, saying it didn't do enough to integrate itself into the core game. Others complained saying they never wanted space legs or an FPS component at all--It could affect whatever gameplay loop they refined/exploited. Maybe they just don't want to change their HOTAS setup to accommodate getting out of their seat for a function only available somewhere else in their ship. Whatever the reason, the bickering has left the community somewhat divided. I'm not surprised FDev ultimately decided to keep the two separated. I sure am glad the developers we yell our opinions at 24/7 still manage show up to work and improve the game instead of just pull the plug to stop the screaming. Obviously, I know very little the direction the team is trying to take the game. It could be that leadership does not see the game as profitable enough to greenlight the grandiose projects and ideas the devs or fans want. If that's the case, I want to try and address that possibility... while I go ahead and demand you all read my grandiose ideas. These suggestions are in no particular order.
1. Friendly Planetary Firefights. Some of the most fun I have in this game is when my friend and I pick a pretty planet on which to land, step out and shoot each other. We only fight until one of us loses shields because dying can be frustrating. At best you die on foot, you and your ship get punted into orbit and you have to re-approach. On top of that, as beautiful as the landscape can be, the engagement is usually one-note with very few obstacles and elements to change things up. If only there was some way both of those problems could be solved...
2. Building. Serious, in depth, fully fleshed out. In space and on land and sea. Build almost whatever you can imagine out of anything you can think of... with a caveat: It won't be permanent without some kind of a beacon. Without a beacon to guide you back, when the instance is left, it's all deleted. This would allow players to setup fun structures, homes etc. and fool around while at the same time not allow for any messes to go uncleaned.
A. The beacon could be named then deployed to the surface of a planet or established in a custom orbital around a body. Your ship would have to establish a supercruise orbit at the correct speed before deploying it. (It could even be that near the body you drop out in normal space while doing a fun minigame to get orbital right. Create a separate size-1 computer suite module that can do this.) The beacon would work like any other signal source. They cannot be dropped or stolen while in your cargo bay, and you could buy your first one for say 5,000,000. but the price increases drastically every time you want to buy another one from anywhere. The next one is 50,000,000 then 500,000,000 and so on. This would be to keep well-off players from flooding systems with locations. Perhaps cap the buying price at 5 billion. Deploying could grant the owner and wing/team building "permissions" within an area (keeping in mind you can still build anywhere but what stays is what's within the boundaries). The area should be square-shaped and pretty generous in size, or even upgradable to allow for building racetracks which may require large areas. (20km by 20km should be a good max size) Once placed, you must wait 1 week before removing a beacon.
B. Building on planets would be an on-foot matter with ship-based support. There's plenty of different ways this could be done, but one way I envision it is: ships could equip a module that handles building and allows for your ship to hover over you. It would take your cargo and put it into what I can best describe as a reverse refinery (bins that break down the cargo into percentages). Let's say you want to build a chest-high wall out of titanium and give it a cobalt finish. It would extract 50% of a single ton of titanium and 10% of a cobalt ton. You point a tool that holographically previews your placement. Once you fire, a limpet deploys from your ship to build it. When you're done you can empty the excess bins like in a regular refinery. For smaller, non-structure items, maybe a builder can be constructed on the surface by a limpet to handle those things. This all needs to include lots of basic and functional modular structures in various finishes that will make all different commodities relevant in the process. A bonus feature would be to allow for the painting of large decals across surfaces. Interior building would probably not be too different. with the smaller builder. Just require things like fabrics and electrical/computer components. Make some things SUPER hard to build, requiring combinations of rare materials, commodities and metals etc. Include landing pads, air locks, power supplies, storage rooms, and SPAWN POINTS like beds. For the sake of fighting, Specialized spawn points can be placed and claimed by users. Once they respawn, there's a cooldown before you can claim it again, which allows for enemies to actually send you out of the instance in the case of base raids. This would still give the owner of the property a defensive edge and allow for custom battlefields to be built and played with in fun and creative ways. Beds would be a different kind of spawn point players can choose to redeploy at in the case of losing their ship or losing consciousness.
- Random games: I think there could be some fun impossibly rare display decoration items that can be found (maybe some are even one-of-a-kind) and placed that can be stolen if your base is snuck or broken into. Or it could be a CG: "whoever posesses one of these by the end of the time limit or has had it for the longest time gets a huge reward." People who are space-only could get in on that too. It could be cargo anda good that can't be destroyed. You can only hold it while in open play, while holding it you can't disconnect or else it jettisons, stuff like that. This is obviously a spitball but It's important to give as much purpose to base building as possible.
- Raids. I think base raids should be a thing but other than respawns I don't believe I have any good ideas about how they should work so I'll keep my mouth shut about them. There's a lot of factors there. Help me out in the comments!
- Defensive turrets, mines, traps, tripwires, etc for theft deterrence.
C. Terraforming is one of my personal favorites but understandably much less likely to be done because it could require yet another rehauling of planet generation (hear me out on that part) It's not nearly as important as building in general. While it would be VERY nice, I think the community can live with not having it. It's a big universe and I'm sure the perfect spots exist out there with no touching-up. That being said, I have received personal testimonies from players who are on the fence about elite and seems there is a large demographic of people who would immediately buy the game if it had terraforming paired with building. The desire to build and create cannot be overlooked when it comes to player experience. This is why Minecraft sold 100,000,000 copies.
- A rule could be that you can only terraform inside your beacon's range. This could allow for the devs to be a bit crafty and save some work. From what I understand, noisemaps determine terrain height but, we could take the area the beacon covers, and use those same maps to build a voxel recreation just in that specific area, which could then be dug to a certain depth and terraformed to a certain height. This could allow for crazy artistic builders to go buck-wild and make some good artwork for people to visit/post on social media.
D. Spacewalks and space buildings. I've never personally wanted to build my bases in space but I see it as an absolute must if they were to add base building. What I HAVE wanted since Odyssey is the ability to leave my ship while in normal space. Think of the mission potential where you have to repair assemble a nav beacon or maybe you could secretly leave on a spacewalk in the middle of a fire fight and land on an enemy ship with magnet boots. you could fly right through bypass shields and bust their canopy or disable their equipment with an emp grenade. Ofc thats just a random example. With regards to space base building, I think the approach would should be more modular as opposed to planetary building that way it's easier to use the ship aim to place things but ultimately allow for the same things to be built. With spacewalks, there should be the ability to just have human sized entry points so you'd have to park your ship somewhere outside sitting in space or dismiss it out of the instance.
3. Landing on Planets with Full Atmospheres. Almost everyone wants this and FDev is more than aware, I'm sure. The least we can do is try and come together and agree on how we want it done so the devs don't have to lose sleep when they go for it...
A. Volcanic, Terraformable and Water Worlds Should be super easy to do, and everything really depends on how the approach works and how ships interact with dense atmospheres. I think the approaches should require a very narrow angle of approach, and even when that's done it does a certain amount of thermal damage to your shields. Not a significant amount if you keep the right angle--maybe 100 absolute thermal damage and up to 500+ thermal damage if you approach too steep the whole way down. Too shallow and you skip across the atmosphere and drop out of your glide. If you descend into a storm cloud or hurricane, you get thrashed about violently as lightning and thunder surrounds you, your ships functions risk failure and you drop out of the sky with no control until the last few km, just for some fun realism. If you make a water landing, as long as you have shields, your ship shields create a buoyancy and allow you to skid at extremely high speeds along the water doing small amounts of kinetic damage. Without shields, realistically I think a water landing means you're SOL or you have very little time to get out before you get waterlogged. Maybe if your thrusters and shields are good enough, you can submerge your ship entirely, which opens up the possibility of submarine builds. Maybe you could add water-tight hull and module reinforcements as an option. If you still have shields underwater, you'll have to fight the buoyancy from the air pocket it makes but you could see the ocean through the curved surface like a second canopy window. Maybe also include a mini submarine SRV, a hoverbike SRV and an actual jet ski as options for your SRV bay. Terraformable Mars-like worlds would be pretty simple with some weather effects here and there, and let's face it--the volcanic worlds would be easy too: chaotic, riddled with earthquakes and teeming with lava lakes, rivers, waterfalls etc. which means we would get to live out dreams of dueling on Mustafar.
B. Earthlike and Ammonia worlds. I know--we've heard it before... you show the game to your friend and they ask, "why can't you land on earthlike worlds?" And you have to say, "Yeah idk because it would be too much work I guess," and now both of you are big sad. OF COURSE This would be super difficult. Not impossible. I'd say for the time being if ever FDev were to allow us on Earthlikes, I would not be mad if they only allowed us on ones with no previously established human populations. CIty generation would be a lot more work on top of trying to recreate earth with enough unique variations to make visiting different ones worth your time. Honestly I have a lot of fantasy stuff I could go on about when it comes to this but nothing of real value. Adding all the wildlife would really completely blow up the codex, making trying to complete it all but impossible. I don't think we'd be too picky however so if you just go for it: a few extra biomes, plants and animals, cloud and weather volumetrics and we're happy campers.
Side note: I was recently educated on the potential for atmospheres to be incredibly dense--several, several times that of 1 atmosphere. So for any planet with a pressure of over 3 atmospheres should have a noticeable buoyancy effect and speed reduction for all objects, ships, etc.
B. Gas giants. If anything, for the sake of realism and as a joke, they should let you go inside gas giants only to see literally nothing but solid colors and increasing tempuratures. Maybe some giant leviathan monster sounds to spook us.
4. The next DLC should just be free if you already own the game. Consolidate ALL the expansions into a single game. From now on, Elite is Elite is Elite. The full game $40 USD-- some price point that is optimal to drive up sales. That means no more people clinging to Horizons (sorry guys). They get Odyssey and [New update's name] etc. with no choice to go back. I'm sure that's not a popular take but it'd be better for FDev to focus completely on a single version of the game. If they can fix the problems Horizon fans have with Odyssey then there should be no reason to keep them separate any longer. It would be a lot less work. Also, the version confusion can alienate and frustrate new players. Everyone is already divided by open, solo and group play too. It makes the player base seem way too small. I really don't think adding as many different things would make the game worse. There's plenty of open space out there with room for everyone. I'll call it here. Thanks to anyone who read this whole thing, and let me know what you think about the ideas.
o7
Jacob
Last edited:
