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THE FORMIDINE RIFT MYSTERY (Part 4)
- Thread starter Cmdr Zach
- Start date
You left out the bit about the drip feed of adrenaline required to keep your attention from wandering, and the months of rehabilitation therapy afterwards.
I have a theory as to why things are the way they are. The politest way I can put it is that this game is...ahh...well there's a lot of 1980s thinking in it, isn't there?
you mean a trade mechanic that is copy and pasted from 1985 doesn't measure up to your standards for 2018 pc gaming?
could spend an hour (at work) ranting about that nonsense.
#3 requires that someone else did #'s 1 & 2. None of these are any fun if you want to do it yourself. Throw in the fact that you can't dismiss your Anaconda if you were to want to use an SLF for searching, because FD only ever thought you'd want to fight in it...
Z...
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![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
I've been thinking some more about this...
I believe FDev had the right idea with the Jacques disappearance. There were clues scattered about local Galnet which would have led to the discovery of where he ended up. Unfortunately it didn't work out properly for two reasons - firstly somebody found it by filtering the Galmap on population and secondly hardly anyone reads local Galnet. I actually found 3 of the systems which contained clues whilst looking for Rift clues and that was something like 6 months afterwards.
Good technique, but poor implementation.
Changing the delivery mechanism and (I hope) making discovery relevant to the players' actions could make for something approaching a personal narrative. I think it needs some kind of 'seed' (like Reclamation seeded the Rift) to send players off in a particular direction.
I dunno, it doesn't sound easy to get right.
I believe FDev had the right idea with the Jacques disappearance. There were clues scattered about local Galnet which would have led to the discovery of where he ended up. Unfortunately it didn't work out properly for two reasons - firstly somebody found it by filtering the Galmap on population and secondly hardly anyone reads local Galnet. I actually found 3 of the systems which contained clues whilst looking for Rift clues and that was something like 6 months afterwards.
Good technique, but poor implementation.
Changing the delivery mechanism and (I hope) making discovery relevant to the players' actions could make for something approaching a personal narrative. I think it needs some kind of 'seed' (like Reclamation seeded the Rift) to send players off in a particular direction.
I dunno, it doesn't sound easy to get right.
It would be nice if we could get the Galnet from any station at any time. Especially when searching out in the Rift like we were. Having to travel to hundreds of random stations in hopes of finding a clue ism't so great. Not being able to read Galnet on the HUD, also, was annoying. I'd have liked to be able to ready galnet whilst flying between planet scans, but having to go to a different screen, now completely clueless as to what your ship is doing...
Z...
I did float the notion of allowing players to "subscribe" to local Galnet feeds and thus be able to access them from anywhere in the Galaxy. Ian Dingwall (who was handing the player submitted news articles at the time) said that Frontier would love to implement something like that but that it simply wasn't a development priority. Well... those weren't his exact words but they are pretty close. I'd have a hard time tracking down the actual post.
That sort of thing, exactly. I'd get thrown out if I listed it all. It makes me want to gaffer tape certain people to chairs and force them to play modern MMOs while I wave a pointer at a whiteboard and lecture officiously about the tactical significance of HUD waypoints and recon sensors and a bazillion other things.
HAVE PITY...at least give me a 2x optical zoom, I'm getting old.
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Unfortunately their priorities seem to revolve around things people don't want, like powerplay, CQC, RNGineers and avatar generators.
Instead of things that add value to actual, you know, game play.
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I must say that I was a little disappointed of the nothing the Tilalia(?) system had to offer in any kind of information. I thought they might have something buried there, being permitted but not even a local GalNet blurb about Wreaken or anything really. Actually all the permitted systems (maybe Sirius) offer nothing much, in my opinion. Why bother having these rank progression rewards that add nothing to the narrative, or gameplay? Very odd.
... I wanted avatar generators. [wink]
Seriously though ... remember back when the game was in Beta? How people would gush about the possibilities? I truly hoped that there would be abandoned alien structures dotted across the galaxy. Even expected we'd find some abandoned Dodecahedron stations out in places where they shouldn't have been. I never once thought that they'd leave the entire galaxy so ... empty.
Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of Exploration in Elite: Dangerous. The execution though? You discover one Earth-like world you may as well have discovered them all. Until and unless there is some actual random, procedurally generated SOMETHING out there to find that makes the universe seem alive and vivid, exploration is extremely repetitive. I'd really love to join the Distant Worlds 2 expedition but I'm having a hard time committing myself to that much repetition all over again when there is zero chance of anyone finding something unique. Think about it: with all the threads on these forums cataloging various expeditions Frontier has really never even once hand-placed something unexpected and unique for these explorers to find along the way. It would have been so simple (and so gratifying) if they'd just planted something (anything) along the well-published route that any single one of these expeditions were planning to take. Opportunity missed. Instead ... every single expedition has pretty much been carbon copies of every single other expedition. We fly. Honk. Scan. Land on a planet and play dune buggies with our friends. Repeat when you reach the next waypoint. Oh wait: Don't forget to see how many ships we can get to make a hyperspace jump at the same time! THAT would make a unique screenshot ...
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All of this.
It's why I was so disappointed with the way the Rift story played out. There were so many ways that FDev could have made it something epic, something challenging, something unique, something we could interact with, but all we got was a CG, some brute force searching and a POI.
I’ve thought, and said the same. Perhaps there’s something in them that we’re missing. But it would be nice to get a hint that was true cos I’m getting fed up with fruitless searches.
Perhaps participant ships could be stacked nose to tail on a low g planet for a good screenshot.........
runs and hides.
Seems to be some very narrow thinking at FD.
Don’t forget the CTDs!
to be fair the FRift bases were aptly eerie, though rather strangely placed. And they did put effort into the Zurara, though personally I still think they’d have been better putting the voice logs onto the original derelect annaconda. The megaship raised too many things that were out of context with the story; it broke the immersion. But they could have done some very simple things, e.g. they could have added some abandoned shipping comtainers on a couple of planets or floating in space-something that would have left a few breadcrumbs to follow & increased the target size.
I did find a small crash site and watched a toxic waste container roll down a hill-thought I’d found a failed mycoid delivery mission, but it was just a random poi.
Yeah - any of you guys remember an old game called "Starflight"? Story was that your sun was gonna flare and kill everyone in the system, so you needed to explore the nearby systems and find suitrable planets to colonise - you scanned planetary surfaces and if the gravity, hydrosphere and atmosphere seemed good, you could log it as a potential colony world for cash. You could also land on planet surfaces and mine materials. And every so often you'd encounter alien ruins with messages often pointing you in the direction of some other system, a relic of a lost ancient civilisation. There were also alien races to communicate with, who would sell you information about potential locations of alien ruins and artifacts. It was one of the greatest games I ever played, the only downside was that it was fairly limited in scale. There's SO much opportunity for Elite Dangerous to work similar aspects into the game, but it's all squandered. I hope they fix it and at least offer clues for us to find stuff. I LOVE spending time (hours, days even weeks) trying to decipher clues or investigating leads. I HATE spending even HALF that time searching aimlessly when I don't even know if the thing I'm looking for exists.
EDIT: There was an AMAZING twist in the story in Starflight once you'd gathered enough information about the ancients too...
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*Tiliala has a Tourist Beacon that mentions INRA. This was before any INRA bases started appearing. Granted, it's not a lead into solving a puzzle, I think it's a piece of lore giving a hint of future story development.
I think that FD are using Tourist Beacons, Unregistered Comms Beacons (UCB) and Listening Posts to do some of the work done previously only in local Galnet. None of these are perfect (and the UCB has the downside that they only activate at certain times - a casual player finding one is unlikely even to get the message!). There are scannable data points at some installations that also give similar clues. All these potentially work as 'hooks' to allow a passing player to be drawn into a puzzle or mystery and I suspect that there will be more of this with the development of personal narrative. Without a general source to drive people to search or be curious, though, I think it will struggle - the Rift mystery needed only a brief mention in Reclamation to inspire the search of the Formidine Rift but where is the inspiration for new mysteries and stories? Main Galnet needs to do more, or there needs to be some other in-game media organisation disseminating (possible vague) background story / myths / rumours on a large scale.
That’s all fine, but:
1/ FDev need to supply a process for the breadcrumbs. Hopefully that will be the personal narrative but even so scanning a beacon where the data will be lost from your emails automatically isn’t a good option. They need an in game journal to store the information for future access. Doing a long trip to revisit a tourist beacon doesn’t work. Neither does heading off to YouTube. We need to be able to access our archives in the game.
2/ such things need to be conditional and logically so. As we know people will post the end results. If that is, for example, finding a base that base should be persistent. Once done by a person it needs a reason to walk through again. Simple options like collecting part of an encryption key at various steps and leads that can vary location such as tracking down the right pilot can work, but if they allow it most people will just jump to the end.
3/ it needs to be ongoing. The galaxy is already becoming littered with sight seeing points. It needs an ongoing development rather than just deadending on something pretty.
4/ it needs to be rewarding. That will mean different things to different players. But it needs rewarding gameplay and an end reward. If running to form FDev will just think a credit payout will do, but some of us want more. Opening up contacts and other related content for example. Being able to try and change things, fight the bad guys or even join them.
The Inra stuff for example. Even if just delivering the Jamiesons logs to Lori bumped your rep, opened up other options or quicker/better engineering it would provide something tangible for effort put in and would make sense from an RP perspective for a living galaxy.
My fear is dead end trails giving lore and credits for delivery and assassination missions with RNG enemies. The potential to do better is there though, it’s up to FDev to take it.
All of that sounds like constant hand manipulation and development.
Which is fine if you have the money and drive to follow through with expensive content that can only be used once. Apparently fdev doesn't.
I think they will need to really up their rng game and be able to better procedurally generate missions and persistent poi's based on the bgs.
I also think galnet should revisit community based content on a much wider basis.
Fdev should be the censors of a sandbox game in terms of content, and leverage their own players to generate the content for the game for free if the players are willing ( they are). They need to give up this stupid idea of shoe horning a single player game design in a game that is not. It's not working. They can't keep up with the playerbase. They need to pivot so they don't have to because it makes everything involved look bad and feel forced/out of place. It doesn't follow the fluidity ( as much as there is) of the rest of the game.
Which is fine if you have the money and drive to follow through with expensive content that can only be used once. Apparently fdev doesn't.
I think they will need to really up their rng game and be able to better procedurally generate missions and persistent poi's based on the bgs.
I also think galnet should revisit community based content on a much wider basis.
Fdev should be the censors of a sandbox game in terms of content, and leverage their own players to generate the content for the game for free if the players are willing ( they are). They need to give up this stupid idea of shoe horning a single player game design in a game that is not. It's not working. They can't keep up with the playerbase. They need to pivot so they don't have to because it makes everything involved look bad and feel forced/out of place. It doesn't follow the fluidity ( as much as there is) of the rest of the game.