Not for me. It would just make it even more boring. While I am enjoying exploration at the moment, I am sure it will be much more fully featured when atmospheric planets become a thing. There really is only so much you can find in deep space and on non-atmospheric planets.
The problem with the exploration features, where's the gameplay?
- Thread starter VR SenseiMatty
- Start date
The good thing about ED is that Earthlikes are rare and will be less likely to get as repetative, unlike NMS where planets with life are bountiful.
I also think ED does a better job at planetary PG. I still can encounter unique vistas I've never seen before, despite playing the game way more than I have NMS. And unlike NMS, these vistas feel real - no islands floating in the air!
Agreed. Some of the places I have found have been stunning and then you consider that they are non-atmospheric, then its pretty impressive.
Living moving things on an airless rock? Having a lore story that allows simple organic structures to produce materials on an airless rock is one thing, but complex life walking around on an airless rock? That would just be silly.
I neither completely agree with nor disagree with the OP. But I do have some very different perspectives.
1. Biological POI’s - These are very limited in variety. They’ve gotten better, but still have some ways to go, even if that variety is just variations in colorations. This is “the easy.”
The “hard” is game-play related. We do need more interaction with biological POI’s beyond just scanning them or shooting off some materials. Things like Collecting Samples, performing biochemical analysis - what if “brain tree sap” contains the cure for Stupid? We’ll not find out. What if space pumpkins are not only edible, but taste exactly like your favorite food?
Or what if Sporaflautulence Xenophilumus rapidly decays in an oxygen atmosphere and causes degeneration of your ship’s Life Support systems while aboard?
Some other possibilities - what if that “Brain Tree” isn’t like the others and emits clouds of highly corrosive vapors that could dissolve a nearby SRV? Or that pinkish Brain Tree with the red bioluminescence actually has psychic abilities and causes you to hallucinate (seeing structures, ships, bizarre alien life forms that aren’t even there?
Those storage pods found adrift in some Lagrange clouds.. what if some kinds were attracted to the energy emissions of our ships and swarmed to us, immobilizing us while depleting our fuel at increased rates, requiring us to reboot and run to escape? Or perhaps some of those crystalline forms might produce Most Exquisite Focus Crystals, but at the risk of giving off a dangerous energy discharge if over-harvested?
Just a few of hundreds of dozens of possibilities missing from biological POI interactions.
Many of these same things hold true of geological POI’s at well.
Of Signal Sources and Men...
Signal Sources out in vast void should also be in the realms of the possible, and needn’t be anything fantastic - simply crossing paths with NPC Explorers on occasion, receiving a message like “Wow, it’s great to see another human being out here after all these months.” would just give life to the void. Perhaps even the occasional Research Megaship, plodding a slow course across the furthest reaches would be nice.
Of course, the fantastic should be there to be found as well - a distant Earth-like world surrounded by cellular communications satellites or sub-light space craft indicating intelligent life with a space program in its infancy.
We also have a great bunch of mixed, nixed, reconned lore from previous Elite games regarding other space-faring species.
Just some of my thoughts on this.
1. Biological POI’s - These are very limited in variety. They’ve gotten better, but still have some ways to go, even if that variety is just variations in colorations. This is “the easy.”
The “hard” is game-play related. We do need more interaction with biological POI’s beyond just scanning them or shooting off some materials. Things like Collecting Samples, performing biochemical analysis - what if “brain tree sap” contains the cure for Stupid? We’ll not find out. What if space pumpkins are not only edible, but taste exactly like your favorite food?
Or what if Sporaflautulence Xenophilumus rapidly decays in an oxygen atmosphere and causes degeneration of your ship’s Life Support systems while aboard?
Some other possibilities - what if that “Brain Tree” isn’t like the others and emits clouds of highly corrosive vapors that could dissolve a nearby SRV? Or that pinkish Brain Tree with the red bioluminescence actually has psychic abilities and causes you to hallucinate (seeing structures, ships, bizarre alien life forms that aren’t even there?
Those storage pods found adrift in some Lagrange clouds.. what if some kinds were attracted to the energy emissions of our ships and swarmed to us, immobilizing us while depleting our fuel at increased rates, requiring us to reboot and run to escape? Or perhaps some of those crystalline forms might produce Most Exquisite Focus Crystals, but at the risk of giving off a dangerous energy discharge if over-harvested?
Just a few of hundreds of dozens of possibilities missing from biological POI interactions.
Many of these same things hold true of geological POI’s at well.
Of Signal Sources and Men...
Signal Sources out in vast void should also be in the realms of the possible, and needn’t be anything fantastic - simply crossing paths with NPC Explorers on occasion, receiving a message like “Wow, it’s great to see another human being out here after all these months.” would just give life to the void. Perhaps even the occasional Research Megaship, plodding a slow course across the furthest reaches would be nice.
Of course, the fantastic should be there to be found as well - a distant Earth-like world surrounded by cellular communications satellites or sub-light space craft indicating intelligent life with a space program in its infancy.
We also have a great bunch of mixed, nixed, reconned lore from previous Elite games regarding other space-faring species.
Just some of my thoughts on this.
There are some fine suggestions in this thread. I'd love to see more PG content in the deep black to keep exploration interesting for longer periods of time.
It wouldn’t have to be, within the confines of Elite lore and scientific plausibility. Elite lore makes mention of Sentient AI’s, and moreso the ban on Sentient AI’s. Guardian lore also mentions sentient AI as well, so it wouldn’t be out of sorts to find a complex AI inhabiting an airless world.
Likewise something biologically complex, say, a life form based on silicon rather than carbon, perhaps one that has evolved a symbiotic relationship with a photosynthetic organism for which the silicon-based creature provides mobility in exchange for nutrients produced by the flora it is joined with could wander an airless world, doing its best to stay in the sunlight as much as possible.
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I tried to impart this PoV in the feedback for Beyond exploration, Frontier were/are well aware.
For me, as much as i like the game, there are two main problems:
1: Supercruise pulls you out of the game
As soon as you enter supercruise you are pulled out of the game. EVERYTHING is now optional. Dangerous cloud? Don't have to go there if you don't want to. Space fights? Ignore them? Thargoids, the main fear of humanity? Who cares, go on, nothing to see here. Black holes? Yeah, looks nice, lets go, nothing happening...you get the point.
Supercruise should not give you this option. Those stuff should not be optional. A better way would be you activly have to avoid them instead of activly engage them. This way the game needs your atention while cruising. Right now it does not. Even if i go full speed to a planet it will drop me out and thats it. Not even a chance to crash. Make it the other way around.
2: Not enough randomness and interactivity
Yes, we need more RNG! But not for equipment but for things happening while flying around. Modules malfunctioning, dangerous magnetic storms, Wormholes that could kick you to a place far away...but something we have to deal with. Reparing our modules under stress, blasting out of a storm while trying to avoid debris and lightning bolds, trying to escape a gravitational anomaly. This would give us interactivity while flying and something to talk about.
Staus quo right now:
Player 1: Hey, what did you do today?
Player 2: Did some missions, flying stuff from a to b. Got a little bored, shot some pirates for a mission
Player 1: Yeah, same here.
With those changes:
Player 1: Hey, what did you do today?
Player 2: Man, i was on a mission, delivering some medical supplies to a station. Jumped and suddenly i ended up in a horrible magnetic storm. I boosted and almost hit a destroyed ship there that did not make it. Then a lightning bold struck my ship. I had to repear the engine while tumbling and almost crashing into a planet. I made it out there right before my ship gets wrecked. That was a hell of a ride!
Player 1: Wow, awesome!
Option 2 sound a little better for me ;-)
1: Supercruise pulls you out of the game
As soon as you enter supercruise you are pulled out of the game. EVERYTHING is now optional. Dangerous cloud? Don't have to go there if you don't want to. Space fights? Ignore them? Thargoids, the main fear of humanity? Who cares, go on, nothing to see here. Black holes? Yeah, looks nice, lets go, nothing happening...you get the point.
Supercruise should not give you this option. Those stuff should not be optional. A better way would be you activly have to avoid them instead of activly engage them. This way the game needs your atention while cruising. Right now it does not. Even if i go full speed to a planet it will drop me out and thats it. Not even a chance to crash. Make it the other way around.
2: Not enough randomness and interactivity
Yes, we need more RNG! But not for equipment but for things happening while flying around. Modules malfunctioning, dangerous magnetic storms, Wormholes that could kick you to a place far away...but something we have to deal with. Reparing our modules under stress, blasting out of a storm while trying to avoid debris and lightning bolds, trying to escape a gravitational anomaly. This would give us interactivity while flying and something to talk about.
Staus quo right now:
Player 1: Hey, what did you do today?
Player 2: Did some missions, flying stuff from a to b. Got a little bored, shot some pirates for a mission
Player 1: Yeah, same here.
With those changes:
Player 1: Hey, what did you do today?
Player 2: Man, i was on a mission, delivering some medical supplies to a station. Jumped and suddenly i ended up in a horrible magnetic storm. I boosted and almost hit a destroyed ship there that did not make it. Then a lightning bold struck my ship. I had to repear the engine while tumbling and almost crashing into a planet. I made it out there right before my ship gets wrecked. That was a hell of a ride!
Player 1: Wow, awesome!
Option 2 sound a little better for me ;-)
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Option 3:
Player 1: Hey, what did you do today?
Player 2: I was on my way back from a mining trip with a hold full of void opals when I got stuck in a RNG event that destroyed my ship and cargo. Lost 100 million credits and my Elite crewmember. I'm not playing this stupid game any more!
What you describe is more like what we will see when Gas giants and various other types of atmospheric flight eventually enters our virtual world. Frontier pilot simulator (along with past space sims) captures that kind of game play nicely, and frontier is just a basic space trucking sim: Magnetic Storms/Radiation/Alien Typhoons whipping up winds far higher than what we would ever see on Earth.
I have always come from the camp that believes the devs should be allowed more artistic license when it comes to Anomalies in space, expected lagrange clouds to be at least light seconds in diameter, ability to fly through them in SC, playing havoc with certain systems like sensors or shields (Like the old Star Trek Sims) Would seem the devs want to stick to more accurate recreations of known phenomena.
Nebulae is another example, most space sims make them unrealistic, dense fog. Unrealistic, but makes for great game play.
No excuse for Black holes though, 4 years and still no extreme danger, no feeding black holes, no accretion disks.
Thats a question of balancing. And honestly: This can happen right now. A pirate can interdict you, you have a bad day and he kills you. And there could be even more ways to counter that. For example with a cargo insurance. You can buy a cargo insurance and if you lose your ship and cargo than you get some of the value back.
I wrote a suggestion post recently about this. I find exploration nice, and you can find a lot of interesting things, like huge gas giants in interesting orbits or very close orbiting planets, and so on. These things may not be valuable if you sell the system, but they are interesting to look at.
So IMHO exploration has its features.
But I have to agree to the OP: There should be a lot more!
If you are 'out there' the feel of 'wilderness' should be enhanced. Here is my post.
The idea basically is, to add several 'dangers'. Not to kill off explorers, so they should be moderate only, but ancient and degraded alien probes of unknown origin (not Thargoid or Guardian) could sometimes attack explorer ships, and things like that. It should be really moderate, so an explorer ship with a weak shield should easily escape and with weak weapons it should be able to destroy the thing.
Solar flares, and things like that - solar flares are more frequent with M class stars. Also nothing which destroys the ship, but one should be forced to act to avoid it.
All these things should be at best a danger to ludicrously built explorer ships (with no strong thrusters, no PD, no shield and a weak PP), and then not mean sure death. The idea is not to kill off explorers, the idea is to enhance the feeling of 'wilderness'.
So IMHO exploration has its features.
But I have to agree to the OP: There should be a lot more!
If you are 'out there' the feel of 'wilderness' should be enhanced. Here is my post.
The idea basically is, to add several 'dangers'. Not to kill off explorers, so they should be moderate only, but ancient and degraded alien probes of unknown origin (not Thargoid or Guardian) could sometimes attack explorer ships, and things like that. It should be really moderate, so an explorer ship with a weak shield should easily escape and with weak weapons it should be able to destroy the thing.
Solar flares, and things like that - solar flares are more frequent with M class stars. Also nothing which destroys the ship, but one should be forced to act to avoid it.
All these things should be at best a danger to ludicrously built explorer ships (with no strong thrusters, no PD, no shield and a weak PP), and then not mean sure death. The idea is not to kill off explorers, the idea is to enhance the feeling of 'wilderness'.
Imho there is a thin line in having to much or to little stuff to find.
Right now I think there is to little to find and not enough versatility considering the hugeness of our galaxy and flying around exploring can get boring to quickly.
Finding stuff in every other system doesn't make it exclusive anymore though but rather collecting which can become a drag too "oh, another crashed ship, hmm seen those molluscs seven times this week already"
Right now I think there is to little to find and not enough versatility considering the hugeness of our galaxy and flying around exploring can get boring to quickly.
Finding stuff in every other system doesn't make it exclusive anymore though but rather collecting which can become a drag too "oh, another crashed ship, hmm seen those molluscs seven times this week already"
Yes the game needs a more accurate balance. If they leave it as it is instead of trying something this will never get fixed/be engaging
Exploration is now too much "nerfed"
Sadly this sounds more accurate knowing more of the community that posts here.
Not all of those rocks out there are airless, and even ones with thin atmospheres could support the idea of other life forms. A thing dangerous doesn't mean big monsters, they could be small crawling slimy slugs or such, crustacean-like maybe, or complex silicate based lifeforms... which might not need 'atmosphere' as we know it at all. And while we've seen a hint of what Thargoids might look like, we've yet to see what the Thargoid homeworld looks like (if they even have one), or its atmosphere. So why not.
How can it be nerfed when it's never had more exploration content?
I don't get this.
They JUST expanded exploration. And now it's "nerfed"?