This week I flew out to help with Jaques' Station in Type-9. I thought I'd be helpful to have something that big out there for a more large mining assist. In doing this a lot of little things occurred to me about the game which I believe just about anyone can overlook. I thought I'd kind of go through them as they occurred to me at the time.
For starters taking a Type-9 anywhere is a chore. They turn slow, jump to a very limited range, and generally get on with nothing quickly. This may all seem bad, but in truth the thing is one of the best exploration vehicles out there. I had the best canopy in the game with a massive view. It refuels very quickly. It can do any job you ask of it. Last of all, it isn't lacking in module space, just power.
In traveling in such a large ship, especially laden, the jump range goes down to just 13.6 Ly. At best it can only get up to 16.3. In short, you have a lot of time to think.
The first thing I began to realize was "Wow, there are a lot of refuel-able stars out here." In an Asp Explorer or Diamondback Explorer you can really miss on this fact. Further, once you're out there the whole 'this thing turns like an old lady riding a turtle' falls off your interest. "Getting to the object to scan," becomes more clearly in focus at the "time consuming element" of exploration. It really zero'd in for me why people want an auto pilot so much. Personally I'd like to see a continuous flight mode where we could see the galaxy cruising at the pace of a snail: something slower than jump and much faster than supercruise to take us between systems. These two things would make the game awhole lot less the experience of a fish hopping between jars. It would "complete" the experience of the game in a big way from something I didn't understand more than an emotional angst before. Sometimes you just want to enjoy what you're looking at, am I right?
It wasn't until I was nearly there that other things started to snap into focus. I'd had this horrible suspicion on the way out there that the flight would all be for nothing. At about 64 jumps per 900 Ly the entire trip took 8 days. 8 RL days. For the first two I listened to about half of H.P. Lovecraft's collection of stories. Then I listened to some Yale lectures on the fall of Rome. For about day I listened to some weird indie music. And then the anxiety of the station just not being there by the time I arrived started to set in again.
It was at this point I realized my anxiety made no sense. If you look at the dates of things the SEPP CG kicked off just as the Distant World's explorers got back. I'd be willing to put money on the idea that nothing much more is going to happen with Jaques' until the Crab Nebula expedition is back. In short... Frontier is pacing their development with what we're doing. I think most of us would miss this because we're hopping between content. For example... I wasn't going to do the Type-9 flight to Jaques' until I got pulled into doing some supply runs for people in the SEPP CG. Before that I was trying to wrap my head around the Engineers (which I still hate, though somewhat less so: I'll get into that). This means I was hopping between community information like Youtube, various forums (especially these), and Discord to get information about the best ways to do this or that. That's just one activity (learning). Another activity involved experimenting. "Should I take one SRV? Two? More? How about AFMU? ...Let's break something and find out? ...Or the game could do that for me... curd. Okay, bringing some then..." etc. All of this is different kinds of 'stuff' people do in the game. note that I've only really talked about two up to this point, but within that is Open and Solo Play (so four now)... Then there was the question of "Do I have to shoot things?" If no then I'll play. if yes, goodbye. And... I'm going to need a 7A Fuel Scoop... so... Trade for days on end wanting to die... or ...goodbye my Asp Explorer. You're worth 60,000,000... sorry.
The point anyway... is that the game "experience" for the majority of us is a scattered broken up thing that looks more like the morphology of Lovecraftian Creatures meets Fallout radiation bathed monstrosity. Our perspective on the state of the game variously comes out about the same. Something frothing at the mouth not because it's angry, but because happy got mixed with the anger ball somewhere in the GLADOS software suite that is our experience of playing.
Frontier seems to be developing this game much at pace with what we are actually doing in the game. So Jaques' events are going to take place when the majority of its player types are bunched up into the bubble or galactic core. Similarly, whatever is going on with UAs and UPs is a longterm story element that happens at the end of all other schedule sets of content release schedules. Given the pace of things this might put the big reveal date for those somewhere out near October or November. Which means we'll probably see a new type of ship somewhere between August and September... maybe even the end of this month.
But anyway, other thoughts that came up where just what the game is. When only making 13.6 to 16.3 Ly jumps continuously for days... and days... and days... not even bothering to scan a planet unless it happens to have FSD Injection material potential things get pretty samey.
This sense of "the samey" telescoped for me. I could see myself Mission... Mission... Mission for worth of credits back when I started. Then I could see myself Trading... Trading, Trading... over and over to get to the 230,000,000 needed to get the Type-9 fully outfitted. And the nigh 200,000,000 after that to try... then hate... then sell... and never touch again an Anaconda. canopy. Hate the ship. And the general contempt I still feel reflecting on the state of the limited options for exploration ships: it feels like we got shoved the trash bin - "Have at it!" ... -.- Meh. Then again, we could have got stuck with something like the Fer De Lance and a big bar running down the middle of our field of view. So, there are always worse things...
And back to "the samey"... Press J, Press X, loop star... Press J, Press X, loop start... This might be why I'm currently 10 jumps from my next destination with my Diamondback Explorer... where i have been for the last hour thinking... eh... and can't be bothered to Press J again for all the tea in China. And that returns me to the actual value of some other means of travel than jumping... The whole romance of space is the lack of anything in it. You put yourself very much on a pin-point destination goal and ...glide... for days and days. In Elite it's more like dashing across an exploding Crystal Field in Hyper Light Drifter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJDhN1jcMJI ...Dash, dash, dash ~ f-this...
And this is where Elite lacks the most. Repetition.
Another area really to get to me was that it got me in the first place. I think the human mind is just set up to respond more actively towards negativity than positive reinforcement. Passively its always seeking positive feelings. This rather simple binary system is actually quite a conundrum leading to pointless temper tantrums as our rewards system of the brain doesn't match up with reality. In this case, mindless repetition leads to a sense of futility, pointlessness, and other like minded emotions. Perspective can override this, but perspective is fueled by experience. So it's a bit of a chancy networking whether or not the rewards of a system actually match with the rewards the body/brain reward system prefers; demands really probably.
It occurred to me that in a Type-9 I'd begin playing at about 5 in afternoon and continue flying until 5 in the morning. At that point I'd start going into the "Wow... shiny ball got big... STAR!!! AHH ROLL!", and so would log then. I seriously doubt most people have that kind of time to spend which raises the questions I keep asking of why the heck we can make these big ships jump further... or any of them really. And since Frontier is doggedly going to avoid this... why we can't have a continue cruise for flying between systems that ISN'T Jump as Press X, Press J, loop star... is all there is to exploration when you get right down to it. There's absolutely no opportunity to just get up, walk around, have a thrill at look around... complete manual control loses its romance fast when there's no way out of it because someone fears it detracts from the game. It won't. It doesn't. It can't. And I'll say that to my dying breath. All it can possibly do it make the game a whole lot more romantic.
Surprisingly this situation is made worse in an Asp Explorer or Diamondback Explorer. With the Type-9, due to the slow turn rate, you can actually consistently line up with the arch the star and then just head off. The ship will hold its circling around the star if you just get a good turn going and keep your mouse steady. With the Asp and Diamondback it's more like trying to circle with something that just can't be bothered to refuel. It's also an eager dog wanting to head off on its own adventures... again comes in this idea of how toggle-able feature to just have it "go around the star" would break the monotony quite a bit. Again, with the Type-9 you're definitely piloting the ship. With the Diamondback and Asp you're just encouraging the ship to not kill you.
This may seem like nit-picking, but I'm just talking about the things you are actually doing. That I'm saying it in a more negative tone goes back to what I said above. We're just set up this way. Once something bothers us it bothers us. No use getting all faithful to it (the bothering). It is what it is until you can find something to later that sets it away... Think if it like getting caught in one of those mid March storms in a temperate forest during a multiday or week hike. It's cold, muddy, misting, raining and not quite spring or winter; a mix of both. The scenery is gorgeous, but the experience just makes you grumpy and edgy the whole time.
Twice I went to set down on some rocky worlds with low gravity because of their high metal content. I thought I'd farm up some FSD injection or just get out and/or break the monotony. I don't know which really. Both times the actual content of the planet I couldn't get straight information on right from my HUD as that feature is now gone. Instead i had to load system information... check for an atmosphere, check composition, check gravity, then land... It's not really a complain it's just that System and Galactic maps load like a snail completing laps on a race track.
That got me thinking about stations later... as I was coming into Jaques' I had no trouble finding where I was to park because I had a Standard Docking Computer installed. However, I had a lot of trouble SEEING it. Why does the hud not transform into the interior of a star port or even just a properly angled arrow supplying me with the direction of the dock? This is why I named myself Atebits... as in 8 Bits... all the memory our ship's hardware can spare.
We are Micronesia. This was just random thought I had as I passed above the Neutron Fields. Our little Bubble is like the slummiest piece of space we could have rolled the dice for. It's too far away from everywhere to really encounter anyone else and everyone who would encounter would probably realize quite quickly they could exploit us to oblivion with nary a soul to ever know.
The larger your jump range the more it feels like there's not much to Elite: Dangerous. This gets reinforced by some weird probability of not hitting refuel-able stars.
We're really bad at talking about things. I've noticed that different Power Players seem to have different skills. Some groups of people are more inclined towards independent activities with a strong a strong need for a community vibe. However, their poor at communication and so organization takes a hit too. Other groups go out of their way to lay down things like Press U to turn on SRV turrets or Press X to throttle down: the stuff people continuously neglect in tutorial videos! Yet, these same people seem to be hyper focused towards organization. No groups, including Cannon members seem to be much for speculation. You start to pick up on stuff like this when all you're doing is flying and chatting with people. And this in turn made me realize Elite's story and lore area is very shallow. It's powerfully better than every other game available hands down, but the community is entirely not interested in conjecture. No one talks about UAs, UPs, or speculates on their operation in chat. No one speculates on what's coming next to do with that. It comes down to not enough capacity to interact with them when asked. Ya, there was code in some of them discovered. But ultimately it has been discovered... This makes Elite's community very hot to topics like aliens and such. By hot I mean the McLuhanist media definition: passive, secondary, and to 'come about' - a domain wholly of the developers ('them' etc). Disappointing, but perhaps mature.
And so I reach the conclusion Elite: Dangerous is kind of the World of Warcraft of space simulators. World of Warcraft wasn't a very good game. Where it shined was that it simply every so slightly beefed up its models from Warcraft III and say, "Look, an MMO!" And as a consequence it became a game with an intense longevity since increasingly more and more computers could use it. It benefited from copying the elements of former MMOs, though not well nor was it so nearly developed. Similarly, Elite: Dangerous is the experience of using Auto Desk Maya or 3Ds Max from the perspective of a cockpit whose internal environments are restricted from your access. You can see the object manipulation lines, but not turn the objects yourself. What's profound is what the eye can see, but where it lacks is what you can do inside.
This isn't a slight on the game. It's just powerfully obvious from time to time as you suffer through content drought from Jump to Jump or are stuck in the monotony of some other repetition. All games have this, but Elite has very little meat on its bones. And this, really, makes the game kind a mix. Sometimes the freshness of just swapping up from being a solo player to open play helps. Sometimes doing an arbitrary planetary landing reminds you of the potential. Sometimes a glance at No Man's Sky or Star Citizen makes you weep for joy that Elite Dangerous isn't that. But the end of the day the game is really best looked back on. It leaves a good taste in your mouth and you remember it more fondly tomorrow. That's a strange compliment for anyone. Kind of like someone you drink wine with because you share an privately similar situation for which you would otherwise never have grown to associate with. It might be as easy as sharing the same profession or as weird gloomy as having been at the same accident where your same close friend died. I find Elite kind of offputting and for that reason all very charming; sort of like how I'd imagine getting to know Stephen Fry would be like.
For starters taking a Type-9 anywhere is a chore. They turn slow, jump to a very limited range, and generally get on with nothing quickly. This may all seem bad, but in truth the thing is one of the best exploration vehicles out there. I had the best canopy in the game with a massive view. It refuels very quickly. It can do any job you ask of it. Last of all, it isn't lacking in module space, just power.
In traveling in such a large ship, especially laden, the jump range goes down to just 13.6 Ly. At best it can only get up to 16.3. In short, you have a lot of time to think.
The first thing I began to realize was "Wow, there are a lot of refuel-able stars out here." In an Asp Explorer or Diamondback Explorer you can really miss on this fact. Further, once you're out there the whole 'this thing turns like an old lady riding a turtle' falls off your interest. "Getting to the object to scan," becomes more clearly in focus at the "time consuming element" of exploration. It really zero'd in for me why people want an auto pilot so much. Personally I'd like to see a continuous flight mode where we could see the galaxy cruising at the pace of a snail: something slower than jump and much faster than supercruise to take us between systems. These two things would make the game awhole lot less the experience of a fish hopping between jars. It would "complete" the experience of the game in a big way from something I didn't understand more than an emotional angst before. Sometimes you just want to enjoy what you're looking at, am I right?
It wasn't until I was nearly there that other things started to snap into focus. I'd had this horrible suspicion on the way out there that the flight would all be for nothing. At about 64 jumps per 900 Ly the entire trip took 8 days. 8 RL days. For the first two I listened to about half of H.P. Lovecraft's collection of stories. Then I listened to some Yale lectures on the fall of Rome. For about day I listened to some weird indie music. And then the anxiety of the station just not being there by the time I arrived started to set in again.
It was at this point I realized my anxiety made no sense. If you look at the dates of things the SEPP CG kicked off just as the Distant World's explorers got back. I'd be willing to put money on the idea that nothing much more is going to happen with Jaques' until the Crab Nebula expedition is back. In short... Frontier is pacing their development with what we're doing. I think most of us would miss this because we're hopping between content. For example... I wasn't going to do the Type-9 flight to Jaques' until I got pulled into doing some supply runs for people in the SEPP CG. Before that I was trying to wrap my head around the Engineers (which I still hate, though somewhat less so: I'll get into that). This means I was hopping between community information like Youtube, various forums (especially these), and Discord to get information about the best ways to do this or that. That's just one activity (learning). Another activity involved experimenting. "Should I take one SRV? Two? More? How about AFMU? ...Let's break something and find out? ...Or the game could do that for me... curd. Okay, bringing some then..." etc. All of this is different kinds of 'stuff' people do in the game. note that I've only really talked about two up to this point, but within that is Open and Solo Play (so four now)... Then there was the question of "Do I have to shoot things?" If no then I'll play. if yes, goodbye. And... I'm going to need a 7A Fuel Scoop... so... Trade for days on end wanting to die... or ...goodbye my Asp Explorer. You're worth 60,000,000... sorry.
The point anyway... is that the game "experience" for the majority of us is a scattered broken up thing that looks more like the morphology of Lovecraftian Creatures meets Fallout radiation bathed monstrosity. Our perspective on the state of the game variously comes out about the same. Something frothing at the mouth not because it's angry, but because happy got mixed with the anger ball somewhere in the GLADOS software suite that is our experience of playing.
Frontier seems to be developing this game much at pace with what we are actually doing in the game. So Jaques' events are going to take place when the majority of its player types are bunched up into the bubble or galactic core. Similarly, whatever is going on with UAs and UPs is a longterm story element that happens at the end of all other schedule sets of content release schedules. Given the pace of things this might put the big reveal date for those somewhere out near October or November. Which means we'll probably see a new type of ship somewhere between August and September... maybe even the end of this month.
But anyway, other thoughts that came up where just what the game is. When only making 13.6 to 16.3 Ly jumps continuously for days... and days... and days... not even bothering to scan a planet unless it happens to have FSD Injection material potential things get pretty samey.
This sense of "the samey" telescoped for me. I could see myself Mission... Mission... Mission for worth of credits back when I started. Then I could see myself Trading... Trading, Trading... over and over to get to the 230,000,000 needed to get the Type-9 fully outfitted. And the nigh 200,000,000 after that to try... then hate... then sell... and never touch again an Anaconda. canopy. Hate the ship. And the general contempt I still feel reflecting on the state of the limited options for exploration ships: it feels like we got shoved the trash bin - "Have at it!" ... -.- Meh. Then again, we could have got stuck with something like the Fer De Lance and a big bar running down the middle of our field of view. So, there are always worse things...
And back to "the samey"... Press J, Press X, loop star... Press J, Press X, loop start... This might be why I'm currently 10 jumps from my next destination with my Diamondback Explorer... where i have been for the last hour thinking... eh... and can't be bothered to Press J again for all the tea in China. And that returns me to the actual value of some other means of travel than jumping... The whole romance of space is the lack of anything in it. You put yourself very much on a pin-point destination goal and ...glide... for days and days. In Elite it's more like dashing across an exploding Crystal Field in Hyper Light Drifter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJDhN1jcMJI ...Dash, dash, dash ~ f-this...
And this is where Elite lacks the most. Repetition.
Another area really to get to me was that it got me in the first place. I think the human mind is just set up to respond more actively towards negativity than positive reinforcement. Passively its always seeking positive feelings. This rather simple binary system is actually quite a conundrum leading to pointless temper tantrums as our rewards system of the brain doesn't match up with reality. In this case, mindless repetition leads to a sense of futility, pointlessness, and other like minded emotions. Perspective can override this, but perspective is fueled by experience. So it's a bit of a chancy networking whether or not the rewards of a system actually match with the rewards the body/brain reward system prefers; demands really probably.
It occurred to me that in a Type-9 I'd begin playing at about 5 in afternoon and continue flying until 5 in the morning. At that point I'd start going into the "Wow... shiny ball got big... STAR!!! AHH ROLL!", and so would log then. I seriously doubt most people have that kind of time to spend which raises the questions I keep asking of why the heck we can make these big ships jump further... or any of them really. And since Frontier is doggedly going to avoid this... why we can't have a continue cruise for flying between systems that ISN'T Jump as Press X, Press J, loop star... is all there is to exploration when you get right down to it. There's absolutely no opportunity to just get up, walk around, have a thrill at look around... complete manual control loses its romance fast when there's no way out of it because someone fears it detracts from the game. It won't. It doesn't. It can't. And I'll say that to my dying breath. All it can possibly do it make the game a whole lot more romantic.
Surprisingly this situation is made worse in an Asp Explorer or Diamondback Explorer. With the Type-9, due to the slow turn rate, you can actually consistently line up with the arch the star and then just head off. The ship will hold its circling around the star if you just get a good turn going and keep your mouse steady. With the Asp and Diamondback it's more like trying to circle with something that just can't be bothered to refuel. It's also an eager dog wanting to head off on its own adventures... again comes in this idea of how toggle-able feature to just have it "go around the star" would break the monotony quite a bit. Again, with the Type-9 you're definitely piloting the ship. With the Diamondback and Asp you're just encouraging the ship to not kill you.
This may seem like nit-picking, but I'm just talking about the things you are actually doing. That I'm saying it in a more negative tone goes back to what I said above. We're just set up this way. Once something bothers us it bothers us. No use getting all faithful to it (the bothering). It is what it is until you can find something to later that sets it away... Think if it like getting caught in one of those mid March storms in a temperate forest during a multiday or week hike. It's cold, muddy, misting, raining and not quite spring or winter; a mix of both. The scenery is gorgeous, but the experience just makes you grumpy and edgy the whole time.
Twice I went to set down on some rocky worlds with low gravity because of their high metal content. I thought I'd farm up some FSD injection or just get out and/or break the monotony. I don't know which really. Both times the actual content of the planet I couldn't get straight information on right from my HUD as that feature is now gone. Instead i had to load system information... check for an atmosphere, check composition, check gravity, then land... It's not really a complain it's just that System and Galactic maps load like a snail completing laps on a race track.
That got me thinking about stations later... as I was coming into Jaques' I had no trouble finding where I was to park because I had a Standard Docking Computer installed. However, I had a lot of trouble SEEING it. Why does the hud not transform into the interior of a star port or even just a properly angled arrow supplying me with the direction of the dock? This is why I named myself Atebits... as in 8 Bits... all the memory our ship's hardware can spare.
We are Micronesia. This was just random thought I had as I passed above the Neutron Fields. Our little Bubble is like the slummiest piece of space we could have rolled the dice for. It's too far away from everywhere to really encounter anyone else and everyone who would encounter would probably realize quite quickly they could exploit us to oblivion with nary a soul to ever know.
The larger your jump range the more it feels like there's not much to Elite: Dangerous. This gets reinforced by some weird probability of not hitting refuel-able stars.
We're really bad at talking about things. I've noticed that different Power Players seem to have different skills. Some groups of people are more inclined towards independent activities with a strong a strong need for a community vibe. However, their poor at communication and so organization takes a hit too. Other groups go out of their way to lay down things like Press U to turn on SRV turrets or Press X to throttle down: the stuff people continuously neglect in tutorial videos! Yet, these same people seem to be hyper focused towards organization. No groups, including Cannon members seem to be much for speculation. You start to pick up on stuff like this when all you're doing is flying and chatting with people. And this in turn made me realize Elite's story and lore area is very shallow. It's powerfully better than every other game available hands down, but the community is entirely not interested in conjecture. No one talks about UAs, UPs, or speculates on their operation in chat. No one speculates on what's coming next to do with that. It comes down to not enough capacity to interact with them when asked. Ya, there was code in some of them discovered. But ultimately it has been discovered... This makes Elite's community very hot to topics like aliens and such. By hot I mean the McLuhanist media definition: passive, secondary, and to 'come about' - a domain wholly of the developers ('them' etc). Disappointing, but perhaps mature.
And so I reach the conclusion Elite: Dangerous is kind of the World of Warcraft of space simulators. World of Warcraft wasn't a very good game. Where it shined was that it simply every so slightly beefed up its models from Warcraft III and say, "Look, an MMO!" And as a consequence it became a game with an intense longevity since increasingly more and more computers could use it. It benefited from copying the elements of former MMOs, though not well nor was it so nearly developed. Similarly, Elite: Dangerous is the experience of using Auto Desk Maya or 3Ds Max from the perspective of a cockpit whose internal environments are restricted from your access. You can see the object manipulation lines, but not turn the objects yourself. What's profound is what the eye can see, but where it lacks is what you can do inside.
This isn't a slight on the game. It's just powerfully obvious from time to time as you suffer through content drought from Jump to Jump or are stuck in the monotony of some other repetition. All games have this, but Elite has very little meat on its bones. And this, really, makes the game kind a mix. Sometimes the freshness of just swapping up from being a solo player to open play helps. Sometimes doing an arbitrary planetary landing reminds you of the potential. Sometimes a glance at No Man's Sky or Star Citizen makes you weep for joy that Elite Dangerous isn't that. But the end of the day the game is really best looked back on. It leaves a good taste in your mouth and you remember it more fondly tomorrow. That's a strange compliment for anyone. Kind of like someone you drink wine with because you share an privately similar situation for which you would otherwise never have grown to associate with. It might be as easy as sharing the same profession or as weird gloomy as having been at the same accident where your same close friend died. I find Elite kind of offputting and for that reason all very charming; sort of like how I'd imagine getting to know Stephen Fry would be like.