The case for player surface base-building

VR yes, HOTAS / HOSAS not to my knowledge. But the VR controllers are integrated into both flight and foot play.
Ah, gotcha. Never played it (which is why I ask) mainly because of the artistic style being a turn-off (highly stylized graphics, colors, etc.) and the whole "survival game" focus is a bit overdone these days.

VR is a bonus, but not being able to use my HOTAS/HOSAS is pretty much a nonstarter, if it's to be compared or contrasted with what ED has to offer.
 
Fleet carriers are a totally different path of gameplay, they are for players to move their assets about quickly and open up private economies. Bases would be about passive yield, squadron/faction/power influence and tactical combat gameplay. Nearly every other comparable game offers it or is a planned feature.
bases would not in and of themselves open up private economies. That feature boils down to creating player-driven demand for commodities and deciding how much automation is acceptable in the game loop. Unfortunately Fdev appears to be hostile to both those paths.

As far as PowerPlay, I think this would create more game-play than bases would:

FWIW, I think the problem basically comes down to concerns about real money transactions and pay-to-win/pay to avoid grind. If it were up to me I’d say the risks are worth expanding player agency, but queue the “glad it’s not up to you,” crowd.
 
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Ah, gotcha. Never played it (which is why I ask) mainly because of the artistic style being a turn-off (highly stylized graphics, colors, etc.) and the whole "survival game" focus is a bit overdone these days.

VR is a bonus, but not being able to use my HOTAS/HOSAS is pretty much a nonstarter, if it's to be compared or contrasted with what ED has to offer.
The space flight is a shadow of that in ED, being blunt. It is just a means of getting from A to B. Combat is pretty tedious too. (you'd have to try it to understand, sorry)
PC VR was initially good, but stuttered, dreadfully, and was 'fixed' by dropping graphics and textures to PSVR levels. I think it has improved, just not bothered finding out how much.

Graphics looked less 'cartoony' with the latest update, but I admit to only lasting around 10 minutes before any other game felt more attractive to play.
 
While base building could be fun, I'd like more space content in my spaceship game and it's probably been long enough to say the same about the spacelegs game - when was the last time frontier added a new gun or suit to spice up the foot gameplay?

If we did get base building I wouldn't expect a full NMS/Rust/Subnautica style thing where you can actually creatively place things and have in-depth mechanics related to that, but rather something minimal like fleet carrier management/interiors where you allocate resources in a menu and maybe that shows up in-game in your base, which looks like every other base.

Maybe base building or more procgen base layouts were in the initial plans, which then got squished down to the ~20 different layouts that we see now and it's clear the tech has quite a few problems dealing with just those.
 
Yeah, no thanks. Just more skinned avatars and no actual flight model doesn't really fascinate me much.

That also somewhat explains why people keep wanting Elite Dangerous to be every other game out there, too.
This isn't a NMS thread, so I try to keep it short. The mechanics are solid, so is performance (although that's a given, I have a 3080Ti for VR). The art style is very particular, the story was a bit too esoteric for my taste, and overall it made a very... "kids toy" impression to me. Maybe I'm too old for these kind of games (one thing that particularly annoyed me were the obvious "meme" gestures alot of the NPCs did when talking with them), but there are people my age that very much enjoy stuff like NMS. I still kind of enjoyed it once I let myself get involved into the game (I spent around 60 hours on the main quest), but I don't see myself playing on for much longer. Its sandbox will not hold my interest for much longer. For comparision, in ED I'm just short of 2000 hours.
 
The space flight is a shadow of that in ED, being blunt. It is just a means of getting from A to B. Combat is pretty tedious too. (you'd have to try it to understand, sorry)
PC VR was initially good, but stuttered, dreadfully, and was 'fixed' by dropping graphics and textures to PSVR levels. I think it has improved, just not bothered finding out how much.
I last tried it when I still had a 2080S, it was playable on my G2, but I had to drop the visuals alot. That was about a year ago.

Graphics looked less 'cartoony' with the latest update, but I admit to only lasting around 10 minutes before any other game felt more attractive to play.
It is still very bubblegummy. It is supposed to be unrealistic and more 60s SciFi serial style. Still a bit over the top and too much pink. It's a solid game if you like Minecraft in space on alien planets. People just need to stop wishing Elite was like it.

By the way, there is a very obvious reason why NMS performs so much better; it's the "simulate body physics" part of ED. In NMS around sundown (the days are only a few minutes long by the way) I noticed not only shadows glitching similarely to ED sometimes, but also that NMS works on a much coarser timescale. Remember the jumping shadows from Fallout 4? It's that. The timescale is short, the time resolution is low. It's not a sim, it's an arcade game. And that is okay.

Just don't do it to ED.
 
I last tried it when I still had a 2080S, it was playable on my G2, but I had to drop the visuals alot. That was about a year ago
Ah, that is since they 'fixed' it. So it may be that they have actually improved their VR over the last few years.
People just need to stop wishing Elite was like it.
I couldn't agree more!
By the way, there is a very obvious reason why NMS performs so much better;
On my 6900XT / 5900X NMS, with equivalent settings to EDO, performs a whole 1 FPS better on average, according to the AMD Adreneline stats.
Just don't do it to ED.
Common for players to want the bits they do like, from a game they don't, to be ported into the game they enjoy, it would seem.
 
Ah, gotcha. Never played it (which is why I ask) mainly because of the artistic style being a turn-off (highly stylized graphics, colors, etc.) and the whole "survival game" focus is a bit overdone these days.

VR is a bonus, but not being able to use my HOTAS/HOSAS is pretty much a nonstarter, if it's to be compared or contrasted with what ED has to offer.
NMS is more about visiting places and maybe findinh one for yourself. Space and flight is only a means between. Traversing the galaxies is still quite a task - they are big but you can teleport to any location you kept in history or imported as bookmark. Survival isnt really a thing, more collecting mats to unlock stuff and build, but unlike ED it's abundant and you can easily tell where to find it.
 
NMS is more about visiting places and maybe findinh one for yourself. Space and flight is only a means between. Traversing the galaxies is still quite a task - they are big but you can teleport to any location you kept in history or imported as bookmark. Survival isnt really a thing, more collecting mats to unlock stuff and build, but unlike ED it's abundant and you can easily tell where to find it.
That pretty much seals it then, because I bought Elite Dangerous for space flight. If I want a survival simulator with base building I'll consider another game instead of narcissistically thinking the game should confirm to my wishes or standards.
 
Carriers seem to be a good compromise of "base" and "mobility"

So, instead of planetary base building, i'd rather see carriers developing
I was going to say that, alot of the points the OP has, I'm like, yeah player run economy, player buildable commodities, ships, modules, etc ALL of that would fit really well in the existing fleet carriers.

As much as I would love the ability to claim an area and build up a base and live there. But me personally I move around too much for that to be a big attractor for me. However to be fair, I COULD see how others might have alot of fun with them. So I'm not saying no, actually I'm saying Yes, BUT I want fleet carriers to get a second pass first.
 
That pretty much seals it then, because I bought Elite Dangerous for space flight. If I want a survival simulator with base building I'll consider another game instead of narcissistically thinking the game should confirm to my wishes or standards.
true, I want to see exploration developed more, especially the on foot exploration
 
Only smaller preconfigured bases like container-homes shipped to locations in a big hauler to be used as hidden cache's would be my preference. Not wholly unrealistic and physics-defying base building like NMS etc. There could be emergent gameplay opportunities to have a secret cache (not too disimilar to the existing POI container locations sometimes guarded by NPCs) where you can land and transfer some stuff and rearm/repair. With them able to be discovered and raided by other players, so ship out your containers somewhere obscure) also a chance of a random NPC attack if you are logged on at the location.

Anything else would be expecting too much and would probably melt the framerates if stupid cathedrals suddenly started being created.
 
Frontier loathes player agency, and passive income, so forget surface bases. They gave us FC's and ground settlements, and that's all we can expect.
 
I wouldn't describe what a carrier does as exactly passive income - yes, you can get money while not logged in, but only if another player does something.

Surface bases and/or carrier-based factory modules wouldn't really be passive either - you bring them the source commodities, they gradually turn them into other commodities. Clearly if the conversion was instant it wouldn't be passive income; if they take two hours to do the conversion during which you can be logged out, that's not passive income either and is "worse" than the instant case.
 
Well, provided you have unlocked all of the recipes for crafting manufactured materials it is, I suppose...

I'm surprised you play it, it is an even bigger grind than you consider ED to be!
I haven't counted the ingredients, they are very numerous indeed. It felt grindy at times to unlock the broken inventory slots. And I guess unlocking the free inventory for visiting starports might be. But the point is that I don't really need this stuff unlocked because there is no bullet sponge or uber enemy spawning on me. Progression is manageable and lacks the time waster aspects ED is littered with. Like going somewhere lengthily to harvest something and then nothing spawns or in ridiculous low amounts considering the time spent doing it. In NMS you just scan places, find the ones that feature what you need, go there and press button until your needs are satisfied. More or less simple.
And it usually goes well with the mission generator. It also harmonises with prospecting and exploration. It is made for playing, not for showing off how big the galaxy is.

There is a lot to do in NMS and you can't do it in a day. However, the stuff you do, the missions, the yields: It's generous compared to the "you deserve NOTHING" Elite Dangerous maxime.

In other words - it just feels worth doing it.
 
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To give an example: My late ED career the bounties weren't even enough to cover repair expenses. That's how crap the rewards were. It's literally showing the player the middle finger.
 
I can't see this happening.
There's no guarantee ppl will even continue to support their base if something else tweaks their fancy. You'll just be left with an awful lot of clutter, and if central to how the bgs works as later posts suggest, catastrophic.
At the end of the day, we're pilots, not property developers.
A mobile base that you had to interact with to make it move always made more sense.
 
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