The Planetary landing and planetside missions discussion Thread

Building a future

Personally I would love to follow a Hud type Landing proceedure through a planets atmosphere guiding me to a city where even just to open the stations dialog box would be great.

Even the idea of bounty hunting someone on planet or stealing a ship which someone has suggested.

Some of your points would really require in-game contracts ... If not I could see plenty of 'tickets' from disgruntled players for being ripped off or not been paid, but if they find a way... I like what you put.

Either way.... Great games come from great ideas.... From great communities. :)
 
Do we REALLY need planetary landings and ship/hangar walkabouts

Yes, provided it's done properly - i.e. it adds new gameplay/immersion but doesn't force people into using it unless they want to. Biggest mistake EVE Online made with its walking in stations was forcing everybody into it when they docked, by removing the old station UI. The second biggest mistake was not actually adding any content to it other than a single tiny room that nobody else could enter.
 
Yes planetary landing is critical.

Remember, it is already possible, they just don't don't have the graphical textures on the planet yet.
But the planets are already in there as 3d objects that could technically be landed on now ..... it'd just look like you landed in 1995 :)
 
Currently, nope. Maybe after year or two.What we need now is fixin bugs and expanding the existing functionality, design and adding more content in space.
 
I agree. No we don't. We need a deeper gameplay experience. 400 billion stars, 100 billion systems... It's just so massive yet so empty. More events! More conflict zones. More missions and maybe multi-level dungeons where you go from site to site... Wings and co-op events/missions where it requires several people. More modules. More ships.

I'd want all of this over landing on a planet let alone walking around. If landing on a planet is like docking then fine...But anything beyond that is honestly putting development effort into something I feel is wasteful. There's sooooo much more to polish and existing things to expand upon before adding yet more playable area to the game.

This game does NOT need any more playable area. It needs more depth and options for earning credits and playing the game.
 
Not for me. City scape lights on dark side of planets and other signs that planets are indeed populated is more important for immersion imo.


Yes those have high priority for me too, but I suspect FD will only add them when their planets have higher detail as seen from space.
I strongly believe we will see some big enhancements in that area, because we will of course be able to get very close in the future.
 
It's simple: "No Man's Sky"

You know FD has been looking at this competitor and wondering how to hold onto a loyal playerbase when NMS hits the ground. You've seen the videos, right? You've read about the gameplay design, right?

Granted, ED is not trying to _be_ anything and everything, but if they can capture some of the feel and gameplay elements of NMS, they have a chance at staying strong instead of losing a fair number of peeps.

I'm _not_ saying that the devs for NMS will nail it. But if you can mix eyecandy, mixed-mode space/ground action, progression, and a big mystery trip to the center of the Galaxy in a fun-to-play package, what's not to like about that? We all know ED feels right now more like "solid framework" in many ways, not a "finished game".

So I'm all for it. Let's see what FD can cook up!
 
We've all heard scary tales from addled old spacers for as long as anyone can remember. You always dismissed them - typical lies that old men tell the young to scare them. Now, you aren't so sure...

Exploration had always been a dream, but that was all it was to you. For a long time now, you preferred to pay other people to provide the muscle, whilst you provide the hold space and the credits.

You recently traded up to a nice Asp Explorer, fully kitted-out with all the latest scanning modules and some hefty weaponry, but it was all an affectation. Mid-life crisis, your wife says. You even did a bit of combat training a few months back as a birthday gift, and as it turns out you're a bit tasty at it. However, you know that all those years of space trucking have left you a bit soft in the belly and the mind (albeit with a bank balance that make it all worthwhile), and you never really intended to head out into the black on your own and brave the unknown, no matter what you might tell your friends after a long haul.

All that is still true. Unfortunately, the FSD malfunction you just suffered mid-jump has well and truly called your bluff.

The maps show you are many light years from home. In fact they show you as out in the middle of nowhere, way beyond the frontier. Space is beginning to feel a lot bigger and colder than it did a few minutes ago, but you decide that sitting there filling your suit is not going to help anyone, so you turn on your expensive and never-used scanners and hope that they weren't cheap knockoffs. Luckily it seems not, as 5 new astronomical objects are discovered in the system. 2 of them are brown dwarf stars, 1 is a gas giant, 1 is a barren rock...and 1 is habitable! Fresh water, breathable atmosphere, vegetation, the lot! It even seems like there are signs of life...rather advanced life for out here in nowheresville, in fact.

What the frak is going on?

Your scan should have attracted whatever local security forces exist by now, but nothing has shown up. In fact, there's not a signal to be picked up anywhere. This seems rather odd, especially given that there are what look like obvious signs of an advanced civilisation on the planet surface. You have nothing to lose anyway, so you head down to see what's up.

As you land your Asp in the main thoroughfare, you are aware that a few things are not quite right.

First thing: the scale. You couldn't land an Asp in a city street back home, for a start. And there are structures that resemble some of the older buildings you dimly recall during your misspent landlubber youth - but these all appear to be a few times larger than you remember. The doors are gigantic. There are also some vehicles, similarly massive.

Could this be a side-effect of the FSD blowout? Perhaps you have been shrunk to the size of a bug! Or perhaps the citizens of this planet are giants...Fe Fi Fo Fum. Ancient Earth folklore. Must be something to do with being this small and scared, but you seem to be thinking a lot about your childhood at the moment. Man up!

One more thing that feels wrong: the sound. Or, rather, the lack of it. Apart from the natural sounds of the climate, the place is eerily silent.

Also, apart from the buildings, with their giant antique furnishings, and the stationary vehicles (also giant), there is no sign that anything sentient lives here, or has ever lived here. Even a fleet of cleaning drones doesn't do this good a job.

Again: what the frak is going on here?

Entering a couple of the buildings, you really do feel as small as an insect. They all seem to have interiors straight out of a holodrama, one of those set in the pre-Alliance days. You are now working from the hypothesis that time travel may have also been a side-effect of that damned FSD. Now what to do?

You head back to the ship and board your planetside vehicle. Perhaps you should whizz around a bit, get the lay of the land. Hovering around the inside of one of those hangar-sized buildings, you can now view the top of a table, and you notice a paper-based news publication. The language is a bit olde-worlde, but you manage to discern the date: Dec 16 3193! Time travel just jumped right to the top of the list.

Something about that date seems familiar. You are taken back to a history educube from way back when you were a snot-nosed kid, but the info's not quite jumping to the surface yet.

You are unlikely to be able to leaf through this publication, so you may as well glean as much as you can from the content of the 10x8 metre front page. This brings it all back to you. The headline screams "MAN 1, BUG 0 - Virus Invades the Invaders!" That was it! 3193 was when we used the Mycoid virus to take out the Thargoids. It all comes flooding back. The smell of those educubes, the boredom.

This can't be a coincidence. So what is all this...a museum? A peace offering? A declaration of war?

You decide to head back to your ship and see if your FSD module is repairable, and it seems that all is not lost. At last, some luck! You should probably try and make it back to civilised space, to let humanity know the Thargoids are not out of the picture, and that they may be holding a grudge.

Shooting up through the atmosphere and heading out beyond mass-lock range...something's up. Even though you should be well outside any normal mass lock range, your FSD still won't charge up. Unless there's a black hole here you don't know about, something very strange is going on. Add it to the list.

You suddenly notice that the barren rock you initially dismissed appears to be putting out an unusual amount of energy. More than zero would be unusual, but this appears to be expending enough power to send you from here to Andromeda and back. Could it be some kind of long-range FSD interdiction device? Whatever it is, you will probably have to go there and deal with it in order to have a whelk's chance in a supernova of getting out of here.

But will that alert whoever (or whatever) it was that seems to have built a scale model of human civilisation, minus the humanity? And what is their agenda? You can't leave yet anyway, so you decide it's your job to figure all this out...
 
It's simple: "No Man's Sky"

You know FD has been looking at this competitor and wondering how to hold onto a loyal playerbase when NMS hits the ground. You've seen the videos, right? You've read about the gameplay design, right?

Granted, ED is not trying to _be_ anything and everything, but if they can capture some of the feel and gameplay elements of NMS, they have a chance at staying strong instead of losing a fair number of peeps.

I'm _not_ saying that the devs for NMS will nail it. But if you can mix eyecandy, mixed-mode space/ground action, progression, and a big mystery trip to the center of the Galaxy in a fun-to-play package, what's not to like about that? We all know ED feels right now more like "solid framework" in many ways, not a "finished game".

So I'm all for it. Let's see what FD can cook up!

Funny how E: D had its kick-starter page up before the Playstation 4 was even a commercial product yet, with these ideas and plans on said page.

Oh how I cannot wait for a console game with some 60 fov and a LOD that extends a whopping 10 feet in front of me to pop up in my library.

Try again please? This time after doing some research. Or should I start speculating that since Ice does not feel wet, it cannot be water?
 
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definitely planetary landing stuff should be in the game. it was in Frontier

i couldnt care less about walking around a ship. it will just emphasise even more how empty and lonely it is without npc co-pilots and crew in larger ships.

as for hangers.... pfft. x rebirth tried to do the whole 'walking around a station' thing. it was awful and unless youre going to have mass effect level of npc interaction etc its never going to be interesting.
 
We don't REALLY need anything, but it sure would make exploring a lot more interesting...Why WOULDN'T you want these things added? That's a more relevant question.
 
It's simple: "No Man's Sky"

You know FD has been looking at this competitor and wondering how to hold onto a loyal playerbase when NMS hits the ground. You've seen the videos, right? You've read about the gameplay design, right?

Right now, NMS falls in to the category of "oooh, shiny". It looks nice, it has some impressive technology, and vast gaps in what we know about it which people eagerly fill with everything they want it to be. Just like they did with Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen and so many other games before it. Just as some are sceptical about planets in Elite adding good gameplay, NMS has yet to prove that all that procedural generation makes for a good game.

Personally I think it will add a lot, and as a sequel to Frontier and First Encounter, I don't see Elite : Dangerous as finished until that is in. But ED and NMS both will have a lot of work to do to make all those endless worlds interesting and worthwhile to explore in a game, rather than a video clip or universe simulator.
 
It's simple: "No Man's Sky"

You know FD has been looking at this competitor and wondering how to hold onto a loyal playerbase when NMS hits the ground. You've seen the videos, right? You've read about the gameplay design, right?

Granted, ED is not trying to _be_ anything and everything, but if they can capture some of the feel and gameplay elements of NMS, they have a chance at staying strong instead of losing a fair number of peeps.

I'm _not_ saying that the devs for NMS will nail it. But if you can mix eyecandy, mixed-mode space/ground action, progression, and a big mystery trip to the center of the Galaxy in a fun-to-play package, what's not to like about that? We all know ED feels right now more like "solid framework" in many ways, not a "finished game".

So I'm all for it. Let's see what FD can cook up!

Don't get me wrong, because I fully intend to buy and enjoy No Man's Sky...

...but it looks like a big proof of concept to me. It's a very bold, very clever idea, but something tells me it's going to be the next 'obscure punk band' of the gaming world. By that I mean and ingenious idea that inspires a lot of work from other developers, but isn't accessible or entertaining enough for a broader audience.
 
I love playing Elite right now, but I am super keen to see a meaningful PL system added.

Being enveloped in a hostile, alien environment, cyclonic winds buffeting your ship as you land, and not knowing what dangers fight be faced by stepping off your ship as you search for that terraforming colony, sounds like a really cool thing to me.

Or even finding a "utopia" planet and just exploring the beauty of it while taking a few scans to sell when you leave.

As long as it has a reason the be down there, and it feels rewarding (be it missions, planetary development, combat, exploration etc) then bring it on.


My only concern with it is that it's encouraging players to be somewhere other than in their ship in space. Space is already a big enough place as it is (like, really big) and giving players literally millions of new instances to join might spread the player population thinner than it already is.
 
In my opinion, yes, it is needed. I have had to put the game down at this moment due to growing boredom. The only real personal objective in this game at the moment is to earn credits, and buy better ships + upgrades. Why? Not much reason why at the moment, just bragging rights to other CMDR's, for me, at this moment in time, their just isn't any incentive to carry on playing. Pop in, do a few trading runs, switch to my Viper, blow some things up, then done. Save and exit.

Just my view on the game at the moment anyway. Really loved this game during beta, Gamma and the first few days of release. Unfortuantely the novelty has worn off for me.
 
I like the idea of walking around stations, planetary landings as well.
Both of these open up new avenues for income. You could have activities to do inside space stations, if there is a FPS element there could be assassinations in station or fights in general inside the station. You could even have smaller activities inside the station like card games which you could bet credits on.
just a thought
 
This is needed to make the game world feel alive. It's getting boring very fast right now. This is something I posted on Reddit, which contains my thoughts on the issue:

It's 400 billion star systems filled with nothing :-/ Everything is exactly the same no matter where you go. And most importantly, it feels like you can do almost nothing in this game.

I played Privateer back in the day, and you could get out of your ship and visit different parts of the space station. Your missions were handed to you not only by a computer, but also by character NPCs. They gave you (randomly generated) missions, rumors (for pirating), the latest news, trading opportunities, shady deals... The immersion factor of the game was off the roof. You were pretty much doing *exactly* the same things you do in ED. But the presentation made you feel like you were in a living world.

ED's mission system is a text dispenser and you're looking at the cockpit 100% of the time :-/

And that was two decades ago. It's hard to swallow that ED is actually a step back from that rather than forward.

This is getting VERY boring, VERY fast. What little is there, no matter how awesome, is getting old since it's the only thing you're doing and seeing.

It's like your favorite song. It will stop being your favorite song if it's the only song you have and the only one you are able to listen to. It will bore you, and then you will even begin to hate it.
 
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