This is a slightly edited version of a post I made to r/Elitedangerous on reddit. Covers suggestions I have for improving gameplay, from the perspective of open world gameplay in FRPs.
I will only be talking about gameplay elements which I have experience with. I have logged about 300 hours, almost all of it dedicated to exploration and combat. I am finishing off engineering my Vulture and an Asp Explorer. I have no experience with mining, very little with trading, none with piracy, and my only experience with the big 3 is in multi-crew.
Right, with that out of the way let me begin by talking about D&D.
What I actually play is mostly FUDGE, and have been GMing for a number of years in worlds and quests that I would call very much Open World Style. I don’t like to lock my players into specific storylines etc (railroading) but like to give them a rich world to experience and enjoy. I have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Now obviously players differ and the things which I talk about don’t apply to everyone, but overall they apply pretty generally to the players I know. There are a few principles that I find really important for players having fun and staying engaged.
1. The FEELING AWESOME principle
Players like to feel like the main character. An FRP player playing as a Ranger wants to feel like Aragorn when they play. For the areas where they excel – archery, bushcraft etc – they want to feel successful. They want to be known in the world (more on this later). If a player is playing as an explorer – they want to feel like Lara Croft, or like Neil Armstrong, where they are braving fearsome odds to uncover mysteries - they don’t want to feel like Dora the Explorer.
This principle sometimes works really well in Elite, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. The combat dynamics in Elite are superb enough, that when I go bounty hunting I FEEL AWESOME. Seriously. It feels incredible to dogfight in the rings of a gas giant. When I go exploring however, this often isn’t the case. In particular I feel like my stakes aren’t as high when I’m exploring. At this point I’d like to bring up another major principle in D&D.
2. The RISK principle.
In short, I need to carefully manage the risk level. If my players are dying all the time, then they are going to become swiftly disillusioned. But what is actually worse, is if the risk level is too low and my players never feel like they are in serious danger. Players don’t FEEL AWESOME when they are nearly invincible – they feel bored. Often the most fun aspect of my D&D games are really early on, when skill levels are really low and even a simple encounter with a thief has really high stakes. If there aren’t reasonable stakes at play, then gameplay is no longer challenging and successes feel meaningless. Gameplay becomes repetitive and grindy. Creativity from players drops, and any investment in what they are trying to accomplish soon disappears.
You can see movies working hard to make sure that the stakes remain high in various movies faced with the problem of ‘power creep’. By the third movie in a series you often see things like the superpowers being stripped from the hero, or the heroes crash landed on an alien planet without their powerful spaceship.
Elite often feels like its substituting RISK with time. Engineering your ship is grindy because it is an investment of time, not an investment of stakes and risk. I can’t speak for the big ships in Elite having not owned one myself, but I imagine this is an issue too – the level of challenge decreases and its hard to stay invested in your character’s story.
Exploration
There isn’t any doubt that there are stakes present in exploration. Being thousands of light years away from anyone with lots of exploration data is exhilarating. But most of the time, the worst that can happen is I misjudge my jumps and get stranded without fuel. This doesn’t even feel like an especially high stake situation.
The introduction of Neutron Stars/White Dwarfs was an excellent change. Gives decent bonus to your FSD, but actually puts you in a situation that feels like it genuinely has high stakes. Changes like this are excellent, and Elite should look for more opportunities to do this.
Running out of fuel should potentially work similarly. Give emergency options of refuelling your ship that subjects you to risk.
Overall, I feel like exploration needs a much higher risk factor – I don’t FEEL AWESOME and like I’m overcoming adversity. Too often, the biggest adversity that I’m overcoming is the mind-numbing boredom of refuelling and engaging my FSD hundreds of times. Suggest ideas in comments??
One thing that might be able to balance increased risk in exploration is an ability to beam your exploration data back to the bubble. This should be gameplay orientated – perhaps its only possible from certain systems and requires material synthesis etc etc but it stops the loss of exploration data at death.
By far the most fun I have had in the game, in an exploration related activity was when I flew over to the first mystery ruins site and spent a few days buzzing around filling out a Cannon Research form. This was one of the few times that I really really felt like an explorer. Which leads me to:
3. Curiosity Principle
This is sooooo important in an open world game. One of the most rewarding aspects for any D&D game which I play, is the excitement that players experience as they uncover the mysteries of the world.
Exploration in Elite needs more of this, because when it works it works soooooo well. Give exploration more randomly generated types of events that explorers can discover.
Missions should be much more widely available outside of the Mission Board.
Explorers should be able to enter a system, hear a distress call, investigate and immediately start a mission. There are heaps and heaps of exciting things in the game that its really easy to not ever find or know about – generation ships, geysers, alien artifacts etc Most of these I have only experienced because of forums, and the occasional passenger mission. Highlight interesting things in a system for explorers to go and investigate!!
A lot of the coming updates, and changes to existing features have a lot to offer if they are done with an emphasis on gameplay.
Multicrew:
Obviously there are technical restrictions but they need to be fixed because multicrew has so much to offer exploration. Give SRVs multicrew capability. Make exploration multicrew vessels effectively independent Wing ships so they aren’t tied to the instance of the mothership. Introduce a new SLF – the Low Orbit Shuttle. These changes would allow a crew exploring a system to drop off SRVs and Shuttles to explore planets whilst the mothership explores system-wide.
Introduce an engineer role!!! This role would have a lot to offer in both exploration and in combat. If exploration ships that are in deep space for long times experience wear and tear or system failure, then an engineer can repair or boost certain modules using discovered materials.
Engineers:
I really like the idea that even in a thousand years’ time, there would be lots of mysteries in the universe. I like the idea that there would be compounds and materials on other planets that have not yet been discovered, or that black holes remain a mystery. Introduce a new class of unknown materials and data. Make unknown materials exceedingly rare and only found in systems thousands of years outside the bubble. As well as receiving a discovery bonus, don’t make them part of recipes – but when added to certain existing recipes, allow them to have a random but potent effect. Gather unknown data by launching a probe into a black hole – and make black holes abide by the RISK principle seriously! Gather unknown data by scanning other randomly generated galactic anomalies. The fact that Elite is so accurate to current science is fantastic, but there’s so much we don’t know, and I honestly think Elite can take some artistic licence - which really helps the CURIOSITY principle.
Feedback on Reddit suggested this would have issues regarding power creep. Potentially effects from unknown material could be unrelated to combat? Don't want to unbalance PVP.
Thargoids:
Ok this is an obvious one – this has so much to offer. Massive boost in CURIOSITY, massive boost in RISK and massive boost in FEELING AWESOME for explorers. Hopefully they are integrated in a way that allows for all this.
Spacelegs:
Space legs primarily offers increased immersion, which I think is great for exploration. It also has lots to offer for an Engineer role, and for dealing with the occasional damage to the vessel etc Also has the potential for increased exploration gameplay on planet surfaces. Give players the ability to establish scientific bases which gather and send back data periodically.
Gas Giants:
The addition of more planets has heaps to offer for exploration where CURIOSITY is such a big driver to explore beautiful places. Gas Giants also offer more gameplay. Fuel-scooping from Gas Giants gives an alternative to being stranded in a system with non-scoopable stars, and it does it in a way that offers RISK, because flying in the atmosphere of a Gas Giant should be incredibly dangerous even if it is lucrative!
Atmospheric Landings: Pretty obvious really. The ability to discover new fauna and flora really brings exploration into the realm of Star Trek etc. This has a lot to offer for gameplay in all areas, SO LONG AS: atmospheric planets feel different – they shouldn’t all be forest and ocean – they should have procedural flora and fauna so there is always an element of CURIOSITY, and landing on an atmospheric planet should have RISK (cough NMS). There should be dangers of local wildlife, and dangers of atmospheric re-entry. If that happens and there is enough other gameplay content, then you can guarantee that explorers on Earth-likes will FEEL AWESOME.
One final note on exploration gameplay. One of the biggest and most exciting things in exploration is taking beautiful screenshots. Make this a gameplay mechanic. Reward players for the beautiful photos they take.
Before I talk about combat, I’ll bring up one final principle to keep in mind.
4. Players like to know that they are HAVING AN IMPACT.
This is obviously easier to do in D&D, where the world can easily adapt to player’s actions. Elite can make more of this however.
Missions and NPC interaction
Give players much stronger hooks for going on missions. Incite their CURIOSITY. And when players fail or succeed let them know that they failed or succeeded. This makes it clear that their actions HAVE AN IMPACT. I saw a post somewhere about the nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor, and this is a great example of this.
When NPCs interact with players and give missions etc – relate it back to past actions of the player.
“So Commander, I hear you’re the one who made the Colonia Run in 12 parsecs. Can you get me to Sag A?”
This really helps with the FEELING AWESOME principle as well.
Track player statistics in detail to achieve this
And I cannot emphasise this enough – put more missions OUTSIDE of the mission board. In D&D I have never found the ‘tavern mission’ trope to be as effective as giving the characters an in-world interaction which incites CURIOSITY, and appeals to their play style. Got a paladin in my group? Easy – walk him into a starving village under attack by bandits and give the villagers a secret that they are keeping and the player will leap right into the mission without being asked.
Imagine cruising towards a haz resource site, when suddenly an interdiction starts – and the message isn’t “Prepare Yourself!” but “I’ve found you, you wannabe cop scum. You killed one of my men!” prompting the beginning of a chained mission to take down a criminal network if you accept it. Suddenly, your actions feel like they HAVE AN IMPACT on the universe.
Systems in boom, civil war etc should show much more obvious signs to the player that they are occurring. This means when players accomplish missions which help cause these things, its really obvious they are HAVING AN IMPACT. Distribution sites in Famine are a great example of this but give us more!
If a system is in boom, I want there to be massive crowds and convoys of ships around stations. If a system is in civil war, it would be awesome to see armed attacks occurring on traffic coming into station. Don’t just tell us a system is in Civil War. Show us!!!! It makes it feel like we are HAVING AN IMPACT.
This brings me to my other main set of feedback which is on the current set of military/mercenary gameplay.
Combat Zones
Combat Zones don’t feel real. I rarely feel awesome, and I never feel like I am HAVING AN IMPACT. Endless spawns of ships in a combat zone is boring. If there isn’t a capital ship, I don’t feel like I have any kind of real objective. I think there should be a major re-work of this entire system.
-Choose faction at stations not in CZs – this allows for interdictions etc
-Give us USS type instances for combat. Make them common, easy to find depending on the state of the system, and have lots of diversity between them. Most importantly don’t make them endless – each type should have an objective or a limited number of ships. One USS might be an ambush of a capitol ship etc In addition to combat bonds for ships destroyed, give bonuses for achieving the objective in these USSs.
-Create military-type assets which will have combat occur at them depending on the state of the system. Instead of a combat zone above a planet – put a space elevator like in CQC there, which can always be visited, but in states of civil war is going to be the subject of assaults to gain control of the planet in question. The zone immediately has an objective, and players HAVE AN IMPACT.
-Major military assets, like military bases or stations (???) can be triggered as combat zones only once the faction which is attempting to take over the system has reached a certain stage. If you have selected that faction as yours, then you might have a mission notification that there will be an assault on x station at y time. This encourages community involvement in these mini events, and lets players feel like they are HAVING AN IMPACT.
Future Updates and their impact on mercenary combat
Biggest concern here is with the way Horizons has been integrated with existing gameplay.
Planetary surfaces are hugely underutilised.
Stop the separation between Planetary gameplay and Space gameplay. Planetary base type missions are heeeeaps of fun. Give us them in space too! Put Resource sites on the planetary surface, put more USSs on planets, put the new military type assets and missions on planets. This is absolutely the first step before adding more environments.
Space Legs and Atmospheric Landings
Don’t just make it another environment to walk around in – it has to come with ship boarding, station combat etc.
I will only be talking about gameplay elements which I have experience with. I have logged about 300 hours, almost all of it dedicated to exploration and combat. I am finishing off engineering my Vulture and an Asp Explorer. I have no experience with mining, very little with trading, none with piracy, and my only experience with the big 3 is in multi-crew.
Right, with that out of the way let me begin by talking about D&D.
What I actually play is mostly FUDGE, and have been GMing for a number of years in worlds and quests that I would call very much Open World Style. I don’t like to lock my players into specific storylines etc (railroading) but like to give them a rich world to experience and enjoy. I have learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Now obviously players differ and the things which I talk about don’t apply to everyone, but overall they apply pretty generally to the players I know. There are a few principles that I find really important for players having fun and staying engaged.
1. The FEELING AWESOME principle
Players like to feel like the main character. An FRP player playing as a Ranger wants to feel like Aragorn when they play. For the areas where they excel – archery, bushcraft etc – they want to feel successful. They want to be known in the world (more on this later). If a player is playing as an explorer – they want to feel like Lara Croft, or like Neil Armstrong, where they are braving fearsome odds to uncover mysteries - they don’t want to feel like Dora the Explorer.
This principle sometimes works really well in Elite, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. The combat dynamics in Elite are superb enough, that when I go bounty hunting I FEEL AWESOME. Seriously. It feels incredible to dogfight in the rings of a gas giant. When I go exploring however, this often isn’t the case. In particular I feel like my stakes aren’t as high when I’m exploring. At this point I’d like to bring up another major principle in D&D.
2. The RISK principle.
In short, I need to carefully manage the risk level. If my players are dying all the time, then they are going to become swiftly disillusioned. But what is actually worse, is if the risk level is too low and my players never feel like they are in serious danger. Players don’t FEEL AWESOME when they are nearly invincible – they feel bored. Often the most fun aspect of my D&D games are really early on, when skill levels are really low and even a simple encounter with a thief has really high stakes. If there aren’t reasonable stakes at play, then gameplay is no longer challenging and successes feel meaningless. Gameplay becomes repetitive and grindy. Creativity from players drops, and any investment in what they are trying to accomplish soon disappears.
You can see movies working hard to make sure that the stakes remain high in various movies faced with the problem of ‘power creep’. By the third movie in a series you often see things like the superpowers being stripped from the hero, or the heroes crash landed on an alien planet without their powerful spaceship.
Elite often feels like its substituting RISK with time. Engineering your ship is grindy because it is an investment of time, not an investment of stakes and risk. I can’t speak for the big ships in Elite having not owned one myself, but I imagine this is an issue too – the level of challenge decreases and its hard to stay invested in your character’s story.
Exploration
There isn’t any doubt that there are stakes present in exploration. Being thousands of light years away from anyone with lots of exploration data is exhilarating. But most of the time, the worst that can happen is I misjudge my jumps and get stranded without fuel. This doesn’t even feel like an especially high stake situation.
The introduction of Neutron Stars/White Dwarfs was an excellent change. Gives decent bonus to your FSD, but actually puts you in a situation that feels like it genuinely has high stakes. Changes like this are excellent, and Elite should look for more opportunities to do this.
Running out of fuel should potentially work similarly. Give emergency options of refuelling your ship that subjects you to risk.
Overall, I feel like exploration needs a much higher risk factor – I don’t FEEL AWESOME and like I’m overcoming adversity. Too often, the biggest adversity that I’m overcoming is the mind-numbing boredom of refuelling and engaging my FSD hundreds of times. Suggest ideas in comments??
One thing that might be able to balance increased risk in exploration is an ability to beam your exploration data back to the bubble. This should be gameplay orientated – perhaps its only possible from certain systems and requires material synthesis etc etc but it stops the loss of exploration data at death.
By far the most fun I have had in the game, in an exploration related activity was when I flew over to the first mystery ruins site and spent a few days buzzing around filling out a Cannon Research form. This was one of the few times that I really really felt like an explorer. Which leads me to:
3. Curiosity Principle
This is sooooo important in an open world game. One of the most rewarding aspects for any D&D game which I play, is the excitement that players experience as they uncover the mysteries of the world.
Exploration in Elite needs more of this, because when it works it works soooooo well. Give exploration more randomly generated types of events that explorers can discover.
Missions should be much more widely available outside of the Mission Board.
Explorers should be able to enter a system, hear a distress call, investigate and immediately start a mission. There are heaps and heaps of exciting things in the game that its really easy to not ever find or know about – generation ships, geysers, alien artifacts etc Most of these I have only experienced because of forums, and the occasional passenger mission. Highlight interesting things in a system for explorers to go and investigate!!
A lot of the coming updates, and changes to existing features have a lot to offer if they are done with an emphasis on gameplay.
Multicrew:
Obviously there are technical restrictions but they need to be fixed because multicrew has so much to offer exploration. Give SRVs multicrew capability. Make exploration multicrew vessels effectively independent Wing ships so they aren’t tied to the instance of the mothership. Introduce a new SLF – the Low Orbit Shuttle. These changes would allow a crew exploring a system to drop off SRVs and Shuttles to explore planets whilst the mothership explores system-wide.
Introduce an engineer role!!! This role would have a lot to offer in both exploration and in combat. If exploration ships that are in deep space for long times experience wear and tear or system failure, then an engineer can repair or boost certain modules using discovered materials.
Engineers:
I really like the idea that even in a thousand years’ time, there would be lots of mysteries in the universe. I like the idea that there would be compounds and materials on other planets that have not yet been discovered, or that black holes remain a mystery. Introduce a new class of unknown materials and data. Make unknown materials exceedingly rare and only found in systems thousands of years outside the bubble. As well as receiving a discovery bonus, don’t make them part of recipes – but when added to certain existing recipes, allow them to have a random but potent effect. Gather unknown data by launching a probe into a black hole – and make black holes abide by the RISK principle seriously! Gather unknown data by scanning other randomly generated galactic anomalies. The fact that Elite is so accurate to current science is fantastic, but there’s so much we don’t know, and I honestly think Elite can take some artistic licence - which really helps the CURIOSITY principle.
Feedback on Reddit suggested this would have issues regarding power creep. Potentially effects from unknown material could be unrelated to combat? Don't want to unbalance PVP.
Thargoids:
Ok this is an obvious one – this has so much to offer. Massive boost in CURIOSITY, massive boost in RISK and massive boost in FEELING AWESOME for explorers. Hopefully they are integrated in a way that allows for all this.
Spacelegs:
Space legs primarily offers increased immersion, which I think is great for exploration. It also has lots to offer for an Engineer role, and for dealing with the occasional damage to the vessel etc Also has the potential for increased exploration gameplay on planet surfaces. Give players the ability to establish scientific bases which gather and send back data periodically.
Gas Giants:
The addition of more planets has heaps to offer for exploration where CURIOSITY is such a big driver to explore beautiful places. Gas Giants also offer more gameplay. Fuel-scooping from Gas Giants gives an alternative to being stranded in a system with non-scoopable stars, and it does it in a way that offers RISK, because flying in the atmosphere of a Gas Giant should be incredibly dangerous even if it is lucrative!
Atmospheric Landings: Pretty obvious really. The ability to discover new fauna and flora really brings exploration into the realm of Star Trek etc. This has a lot to offer for gameplay in all areas, SO LONG AS: atmospheric planets feel different – they shouldn’t all be forest and ocean – they should have procedural flora and fauna so there is always an element of CURIOSITY, and landing on an atmospheric planet should have RISK (cough NMS). There should be dangers of local wildlife, and dangers of atmospheric re-entry. If that happens and there is enough other gameplay content, then you can guarantee that explorers on Earth-likes will FEEL AWESOME.
One final note on exploration gameplay. One of the biggest and most exciting things in exploration is taking beautiful screenshots. Make this a gameplay mechanic. Reward players for the beautiful photos they take.
Before I talk about combat, I’ll bring up one final principle to keep in mind.
4. Players like to know that they are HAVING AN IMPACT.
This is obviously easier to do in D&D, where the world can easily adapt to player’s actions. Elite can make more of this however.
Missions and NPC interaction
Give players much stronger hooks for going on missions. Incite their CURIOSITY. And when players fail or succeed let them know that they failed or succeeded. This makes it clear that their actions HAVE AN IMPACT. I saw a post somewhere about the nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor, and this is a great example of this.
When NPCs interact with players and give missions etc – relate it back to past actions of the player.
“So Commander, I hear you’re the one who made the Colonia Run in 12 parsecs. Can you get me to Sag A?”
This really helps with the FEELING AWESOME principle as well.
Track player statistics in detail to achieve this
And I cannot emphasise this enough – put more missions OUTSIDE of the mission board. In D&D I have never found the ‘tavern mission’ trope to be as effective as giving the characters an in-world interaction which incites CURIOSITY, and appeals to their play style. Got a paladin in my group? Easy – walk him into a starving village under attack by bandits and give the villagers a secret that they are keeping and the player will leap right into the mission without being asked.
Imagine cruising towards a haz resource site, when suddenly an interdiction starts – and the message isn’t “Prepare Yourself!” but “I’ve found you, you wannabe cop scum. You killed one of my men!” prompting the beginning of a chained mission to take down a criminal network if you accept it. Suddenly, your actions feel like they HAVE AN IMPACT on the universe.
Systems in boom, civil war etc should show much more obvious signs to the player that they are occurring. This means when players accomplish missions which help cause these things, its really obvious they are HAVING AN IMPACT. Distribution sites in Famine are a great example of this but give us more!
If a system is in boom, I want there to be massive crowds and convoys of ships around stations. If a system is in civil war, it would be awesome to see armed attacks occurring on traffic coming into station. Don’t just tell us a system is in Civil War. Show us!!!! It makes it feel like we are HAVING AN IMPACT.
This brings me to my other main set of feedback which is on the current set of military/mercenary gameplay.
Combat Zones
Combat Zones don’t feel real. I rarely feel awesome, and I never feel like I am HAVING AN IMPACT. Endless spawns of ships in a combat zone is boring. If there isn’t a capital ship, I don’t feel like I have any kind of real objective. I think there should be a major re-work of this entire system.
-Choose faction at stations not in CZs – this allows for interdictions etc
-Give us USS type instances for combat. Make them common, easy to find depending on the state of the system, and have lots of diversity between them. Most importantly don’t make them endless – each type should have an objective or a limited number of ships. One USS might be an ambush of a capitol ship etc In addition to combat bonds for ships destroyed, give bonuses for achieving the objective in these USSs.
-Create military-type assets which will have combat occur at them depending on the state of the system. Instead of a combat zone above a planet – put a space elevator like in CQC there, which can always be visited, but in states of civil war is going to be the subject of assaults to gain control of the planet in question. The zone immediately has an objective, and players HAVE AN IMPACT.
-Major military assets, like military bases or stations (???) can be triggered as combat zones only once the faction which is attempting to take over the system has reached a certain stage. If you have selected that faction as yours, then you might have a mission notification that there will be an assault on x station at y time. This encourages community involvement in these mini events, and lets players feel like they are HAVING AN IMPACT.
Future Updates and their impact on mercenary combat
Biggest concern here is with the way Horizons has been integrated with existing gameplay.
Planetary surfaces are hugely underutilised.
Stop the separation between Planetary gameplay and Space gameplay. Planetary base type missions are heeeeaps of fun. Give us them in space too! Put Resource sites on the planetary surface, put more USSs on planets, put the new military type assets and missions on planets. This is absolutely the first step before adding more environments.
Space Legs and Atmospheric Landings
Don’t just make it another environment to walk around in – it has to come with ship boarding, station combat etc.
