Everyone talks about how much this game has potential, and as an avid enthusiast I'd like to share some of my thoughts on the where the game development should have gone (and should go in the future). I realize now it's too little too late for this kind of thing, and I'm just blowing these very obvious ideas into the wind.
But sometimes it feels better to get things down...
At least in terms of how I would have expected/wanted the game's progression order to flow, here's what I thought made sense.
But in the end these are just the ramblings of a fool. While we all wish and hope for ideas like this, these are of course unfounded expectations and will only lead to disappointment if/when we don't get them. I can list a number of games that, if combined together, would provide all of these gameplay options. While No Man's Sky is probably the closest right now, it still doesn't quite hit it on the mark. A lot of other games (such as Space Engineers) have mods that basically allow a lot of this. Heck, even Minecraft has mods that allow for a lot of this. But in the end it's just not the same as the Elite experience.
All these game developers get so close, and almost always miss the mark of at least what I would call the perfect space game.
But sometimes it feels better to get things down...
At least in terms of how I would have expected/wanted the game's progression order to flow, here's what I thought made sense.
- Players can fly around in ships as the pilot (whether that be in space or landing on planets) - Current Horizons.
- Fleet Carriers - Current Horizons
- Should have at least come with a bridge for the owner
- NO Ship upkeep - the backend code for these should be revisited and optimized to address performance concerns.
- Players can now explore the interior of their Ships and Fleet Carriers.
- The ship could be fully explorable on foot, but there would be optional elevators to take the player to different rooms if players wanted quick access to the cockpit for example.
- Interiors could be customized for both looks and functionality.
- Looks:
- Personal Rooms
- Customizable decorations
- NPC Passengers and Crew introduced here, making larger ships feel like what they really are.. small towns
- Functionality:
- Optional Interior modules for things like R&D (Analyze scan results)
- Engineering a module yourself (with learned proficiency and practice)
- Allowing manual ship repair for internal modules (given resources)
- NPC Passengers could be interacted with here in order to meet some sort of demand for a bonus.
- Imagine picking up a VIP Passenger quest, and along the way the VIP Passenger is actually asking you to complete tasks to be done inside the ship. At the end you could get a really big reward, or better reputation, etc
- Events could occur if ship damage is done. You might need to find a place to park to repair the life support of the passenger cabins before time runs out, etc.
- Lots of gameplay loops available just INSIDE the ship itself. The bigger ones are the size of some entire levels in FPS games. Plenty of room to work with here.
- Looks:
- Station Interiors would have been introduced here
- Lots of space stations have residential zones.
- Would have been good to be able to explore around one of the huge cities of a rotating station, or the green residential zones of the stations, etc.
- Players can now leave their ships, fleet carriers, and stations on foot.
- Space Walks
- Repair outer hull damage
- Can maneuver to an asteroid to analyze or tag it for better resource gathering
- On Planet Exploration
- The new scanning tool is introduced here for flora (or even non-hostile fauna).
- Scanned alien life, data found at crash sites, etc could be analyzed inside the ship interior module (if you have it installed) to either take you to another place (solving a mystery with chain quests), or maybe give it a chance to become more valuable to sell.
- FPS Combat vs. humans and hostile aliens - Basically the only thing Odyssey has to offer right now
.
- Space Walks
- Revisit planetary tech and expand to all habitable world types.
- Realistic looking landscapes
- Expand the amounts and variability of fauna, flora, special objects from ruins and anomalies to scan and discover
- ALL habitable planets (including Earth-likes) can be landed on and visited.
- Weather effects (including hostile atmospheres upon entry, high temperatures, etc)
- Base / Factory / Settlement building
- How great would that be if you could have a base of your own, or if you could manage a series of settlements for passive income.
- Satisfactory-like manufacturing, which would allow you to go down to a planet and create a factory to either sell materials at market price, or have it shipped to your Fleet Carrier or some other ship building station, which in turn allows you to finally sell ships on your Fleet Carrier (without having to buy them). Could also be macro-managed similar to EVE's system perhaps.
- The true introduction of player-run settlements in the void.
But in the end these are just the ramblings of a fool. While we all wish and hope for ideas like this, these are of course unfounded expectations and will only lead to disappointment if/when we don't get them. I can list a number of games that, if combined together, would provide all of these gameplay options. While No Man's Sky is probably the closest right now, it still doesn't quite hit it on the mark. A lot of other games (such as Space Engineers) have mods that basically allow a lot of this. Heck, even Minecraft has mods that allow for a lot of this. But in the end it's just not the same as the Elite experience.
All these game developers get so close, and almost always miss the mark of at least what I would call the perfect space game.