The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread

Personally cant wait for the privelage of landing on a planet....just to be able to get out of the cockpit chair and walk around the ship will be amazing.

it takes it to another level of immersion and realism.I want to be able to fly through the planets atmosphere and see stuff burning up then to suddenly see the planet below along with its citys ect.


i love the game as it is,but will be getting the new content that is released for this game.



i imagine walking into a bar and meeting up with other pilots and telling campfire stories over a few jars of ryjar 7`s` famous root beer.
 
Id rather them enhance the features in the existing product that work on purely cosmetic (walking in station) or ridiculously grand (planetary landing)

Instead of station walking, just have a drone mode in the hanger for vanity shots. No need for player skins and animations.

To make planetary landing not be a half-baked after-thought will be a massive ammount of work, akin to making the game over again. For example look at how much of the existing assets are spent solely on stations and landing. Its inconvievbale to think they will devote the time to implementing planetary landing with the fidelity of station landing.
 
no we dont, at least we dont need it as much as we need more space content and more variety in that.

Things like multiplayer functionality and faction conflict shoudl be much higher up the agenda.

i dont play a space game to walk about, I dont really care about planets...I play a space game....
 
They have to use their resources in such a way that content creators aren't sitting idle too, so it may very well be that they are creating planetary landings and station interiors right now, while the more codey people are working on game mechanics, to later start putting together content with the rest of the game.

In fact, planetary landings sound like so grand work that this is the only way I could see it happening anytime this year.

However, I like OP's ideas, it's many of the same thoughts I've had about player interactions.
 
Right now I feel the multiplayer aspects of the game are horrible. I feel FDEV should focus on the current game in place, instead of investing time and energy into planetary landings or hangar walkabouts.
 
Do we need it? No. No, we don't.

Is it a waste of development time? Pretty much, when they could be spending that time on actually making meaningful contributions to the game.
 
Are planetary landings really needed? That depends on the devs ability to pull the idea off. Planetary landings have HUGE potential and would certainly bring the game closer to a Space sim. Imagine the possibilities. The planets are to scale so you can spend a LONG time on one and find new things if you want. imagine being able to hunt or mine. Civil unrest happening on the planet? join up with rebel to help overthrow the government, find a secret spot like a cave and set up a base of operations, maybe you can actually buy a place to call your own, the possibilities are massive. In an interview (if the wiki is right) it was stated that you'll be able to walk around innsdie and outside your ship in space to make emergency repairs, I can say that there was at least one case where i wish that was in place. My thrusters got totaled after killing a pirate leaving me floating in space with self destruction being my only option. The idea can add TONS to the game and frankly it would most likely take years before the full concept of landings are fully realized.

Don't get me wrong, most of your ideas are great and i hope they get added, but landing on planets is certainly worth the time.
 

Snakebite

Banned
Reading through a lot of the forum posts, this feature seems to be among the top of the ED wishlists. However I'm wondering whether this is a lot of development effort for something players will use maybe a couple of times. Yes the first time you walk about looking at your ship or land on a planet may be awe inspiring but after a while will it not just get boring and something you won't bother with?
For instance, say you're wanting to earn enough credits to upgrade your ship or buy a better one (and let's face it, that as the ONLY reason for earning money in this game). Well every time you land on a station are you really going to get out of your ship look around it just because you can? First couple of times yes, but after that is there any point?
it would be like playing a 1st person shooter where all you do is walk around the level looking at scenery. Even if the scenery was sufficiently varied and detailed after a while it would just become boring would it not ?

i think the developers should weigh up the time and effort it would take to implement this against the actual enhancement to gameplay it would actually provide. Maybe concentrate on providing the ability for players to actually interact more that would provide a more varied and rich gameplay.
some suggestions(apologies if these were already suggested but just writing them off the top of my head)

1/ allow players to create missions. For example, I need a certain piece of equiment for my ship but can't be bothered running around star systems looking for it, post a mission that will reward someone for delivering it.

2/ allow players to post a bounty. Someone's randomly killed you for the heck of it-post a big reward to incentivise other players to find and kill them in return (more than just the standard bounty would yield)

3/ allow players with lots of money to be able to lend money to starter players (with intrest) so they can get a quick start. If the money isn't paid back within an agreed time or agreed instalments then 2/ above can be invoked.

4/ allow players to employ others to do trading for them-that way they can make money even when off line as other players are doing their trading. In return the players doing the trading maybe get a percentage of the profit plus a large cash injection to allow them to get more storage space or weapons on their ships to aid in said job without them having to fork out the money for them.

5/ players can offer other players better insurance rates based on player stats. this works like a real insurance company allowing you to give better rates to a 'careful driver' that's less prone to taking risks. This could be a whole other line eg. Trade, fight, explore, mine, INSURE!

6/ players could buy and then hire out ships or equipment to other players say for one off missions or endeavours that need a bigger ship

7/ ability to hire out other players to escort you in a particularly dangerous missions or to do a particularly nasty illegal thing.

8/ ships/equipment should degrade over time forcing you to replace them after a certain time just like in the real world. Also their value should depreciate over time meaning that you need to think carefully when outfitting rather than being able to just get the original value back. Also how abouts being able to auction off second hand equipment/ships to other players?

9/ ultimately maybe ED credits could be exchanged for real-world rewards eg. money-off future expansion packs to incentivise players to keep playing and making more money.

So in summary, the eye-candy of walking round your ship or landing in a planet may require a lot of development for very little usage once you've experienced it once. I think suggestions along the lines of the ones given above would maybe set it apart from star Citizen which is already going for this persistent universe as they call it but which may have little long-lasting appeal. The original Elite was a great game when played as a single player but since ED is a multiplayer game I think that's what should be focused on as its the interaction with others and the unpredictability of human nature which will give it longer lasting appeal.

First of all you should seperate them out into two threads as (IMHO) they are two seperate game mechanics.

Addressing planetary landings first....

If you ever played Frontier, or First Encounders then you would know that the seemless transistion from space to atmosphere and to land on a planet is a fundamentally Elite gameplay mechanic and adds a lot to the game.
Missions like bombing structures, or destroying ships on the launch pads and then having the cops chase you all the way into orbit before you can frameshift really apeal to me.
Dropping of an MB4 mining machine is of course impossible without surface landings.

Oh the fun of trying to land on a low G world or asteroid and bouncing off into space because you hit to hard... such fun... We need grapling tethers or tractor beams if the Gravity is really low.

Transitioning from space based combat to atmospheric flight combat was great fun in frontier, even if the implementation was a bit clunky.

In Frontier I remember trying to fly a Pantha or Imperial explorer under London bridge with a bunch of police vipers on your tail...... lol such fun...

So, the planetary flight is a central part of the game and seemless transition from space to atmosphere is just Sooo cool (no other game has that).

Secondly.... Exiting your ship into first person mode.

Braben first suggested this many years ago... my memory fades as it was many years ago, but from what I can remember he talked about having advanced AI interactions being something that they had developed from ' a dogs life' my initial thought was that this is not needed, and if done badly would be a wast of time... But i actually quite like the idea of getting 'special' missions from people you may meet in seedy south city bars....
If done well, the FP mode could add a lot of depth to the elite universe, but as the op suggests it requires a lot of work and there is so much other stuff to get right first.
 
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Id rather them enhance the features in the existing product that work on purely cosmetic (walking in station) or ridiculously grand (planetary landing)

Instead of station walking, just have a drone mode in the hanger for vanity shots. No need for player skins and animations.

To make planetary landing not be a half-baked after-thought will be a massive ammount of work, akin to making the game over again. For example look at how much of the existing assets are spent solely on stations and landing. Its inconvievbale to think they will devote the time to implementing planetary landing with the fidelity of station landing.

Exactly this.

People (players) have virtually no idea about the complexity of software development. If planetary landings were released on par with what Frontier had on Amiga, it would be deemed 'the ugliest thing ever', even if it was done with today's standards with texturing, tesselation etc.
What people expect to see is something like 'no mans sky'. Which is a titanic effort, in a direction almost directly opposite from a space sim.

What I'd like to see is more of the core game, rather than bells and whistles. Cosmetic content will be consumed very fast, and will grow 'old' within few weeks. What we need are working, reusable and interesting game systems. Not pretty pictures.
 
In a word: yes. How else will I be able to explore alien worlds, locate the Thagoid's home planet, land outside their capitol city, blast my way into the Queen's palace and conquer their entire race?
 
We only have a skeleton core game atm. It needs to be fleshed out a lot before even thinking about walking around anywhere. Better mission system, more indepth faction system, including wars and such, some actual fun naval ranking missions that make sense, etc. etc. A lot of the current core gameplay really is pretty barebones. It has potential for sure, so now we need the devs to bring that potential to life.
 
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Let's be honest, we do need planetary landings, walking around stations and much more. I've been playing since release and already feel like it has a lack of content to be called "a full game". It also needs more social features (a lot more social features). Simply putting it this game needs more content or it will die out fast. That's my honest opinion.
 
Planetary landings? Most definitely needed for the full experience. Getting out and walking about? Eh, not so much. It's a space sim, not an FPS.

It's a similar feeling I had with Star Trek Online, I had a whale of a time flying around and blasting stuff in space in both PvE and PvP. The away mission parts where you got out of the ship were bloody awful, pointless busywork.

Edit: OH! And adding planetary landing would open up a load more places to park your ship, there's already plenty of threads on the go about how people can't dock at busy stations. I know it won't be a 100% fix (sometimes you have to dock at a particular station for a particular trade run) but it should help somewhat.
 
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Yeah. I don't want anything that might distract me from grinding credits. Grind grind grind grind grind grind grind. I'm really worried about this getting in the way of my grinding. Only yesterday, I accidentally had some fun and forgot to grind. It was very annoying.

Giggles. Good effort, 9/10 :D

In answer to the OP, yes we REALLY need the expansion packs that Frontier have talked about. For one thing they open up more gameplay (which, if you follow noodle's excellent joke, is all good), but they also allow ED to become more feature full than the previous two Elite games from like 20 years ago, which is just a good thing.

many of your suggestions are also great, and from my brief look at ED so far (just training missions) i can already see little things that would improve the game, and hopefully over time ALL of this can be worked on and added into the game to make a truly fantastic and genre defining game that will be the new 'gold' standard just as the earlier Elite games were :)
 
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will that add any improvement in terms of gaming content? or will it work just the same as a station, just with landing pads on a surface of the planet with eye candy sights?
 
Definitely want it! There has to be more opportunities for contact and being able to flesh out interaction with NPC's. Right now the bulletin board, faceless NPC, no speech etc is killing the immersion for me. Walking around and planetary landings are on the top of my wish list. That is after all the core mechanics get fleshed out and the bugs minimized. I would also finally like to see the stut stut stuttering gone. This has gone on for WAY too long and should have been gone before release.
 
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