A lot of people have wrong ideas about why Elite feels shallow & how to fix it:
1. More complex gameplay mechanics (for exploration, trading, mining, etc) will not *necessarily* make Elite have more depth. (It's more difficult than that, although not completely wrong either.)
2. Making existing things more varied (say for missions & station locations) will not make Elite have more depth. On it's own, doubling the amount of shallow variety will only result in it taking you twice as long to find it repetitive. Which won't be very long at all.
3. Depth is not "immersion" or "realism". Immersion is "immersion". Realism is "realism". Please don't use the wrong name for completely different things. It makes it impossible to have a discussion. Gameplay depth can be roughly defined as "deep complexity", or the opposite of simplicity & shallowness, or simply just "depth". Solitaire is shallow, Chess is deep. That's not because Chess is "immersive" or "realistic", it's because Chess has a set of rules which interact in complex ways.
* RNG has nothing to with shallowness. Hand-crafted missions (for example) would be give you increased novelty (for a while), but ultimately they'd still be similar missions with different flavour text (think "collect 10 of X" missions in typical MMOs). This is just another way to ask for "more variety", which I already discounted in point 2.
* Adding new gameplay mechanics (e.g. base building) is not likely to add much depth to Elite. It will just add "more stuff", which some players will like (until the novelty wears off), and some players will find boring. Which I've already basically discounted in point 2.
You are on the right track here! One way to get more depth is to make the gameplay mechanics highly interlinked. So if you do one thing, you can find it's affected the rest of the gaming world in lot of different way. That also allows you to solve the same problem in multiple way. (Apparently Nintendo's popular game "Breath of the Wild" does this very heavily.)
This is also on the right track. If you are given multiple ways to approach a problem (with different pros & cons), then that adds depth. (Ideally you'd also have a bigger range of consequences.)
In summary: At the moment Elite Dangerous is a collection of mostly independent gameplay mechanics, which have little affect on each other (or the wider universe). And that seems to be because each gameplay mechanic was designed separately, without considering how it could be made to work with the rest of the game.
I agree with this. This is why I came up with this:
Bounty Hunting
First off get rid of res sites. Instead we get dockable mining platforms in the rings. These are dockable and you can sell your mined goods there and pick up faction mining contracts.
There are no mining platforms in anarchy systems. At times there will be pirate incursions at the mining platforms (not likely in High-Sec areas, but getting more and more likely the worse the security rating), maybe the pirate need to take out the weapon systems like on a capital ship to make it compromised, this could play into wing missions for pirate factions. These become compromised and a system wide call out asking for help happens (bounty hunting commences). Compromised Mining platforms will have some services shut down, but you will be able to launch your ships, but not dock. Bounty Hunters and Miners with weapons will have to fight off the pirates before the mining platform returns to normal.
Remove bounty hunting missions from the faction missions section and replace them with bounty hunting contracts from the security contact. This will be your staple bounty hunting area to get missions. These will range from low paying to extemely high paying and maybe have some as wing recommended that can be shared with your wing members for a share of the reward.
You can also do the normal bounty hunting looking for wanted ships in supercruise and go to anarchy systems with a KWS.
Trying to tie in pirate factions and res sites and the mission system. Make you feel like you are making a difference in your own small way. Pirate factions get missions that tie into this mechanic (possibly giving good reasons for PvP). Having good reasons for others to do missions.
And another reason why I came up with this:
Idea for more dynamic systems.
I like th BGS but my main problem with it is that after a war/outbreak/famine etc the systems are exactly the same as if nothing has changed.
So my idea was to have mini community goals, these would be completed in the background regardless by NPC simulation, players can speed up the process though.
Example 1
A civil war has broken out at a station. We have the CZ's etc. During the Civil war the station services bit by bit go offline due to infrastructure damage and personel loss.
So after the Civil war some/all station services are offline apart from missions/passengers.
The mission/passengers boards will be dedicated to getting services back online with extra incentives maybe.
Use local Galnet stories as a way to find out what the problems are within system. Would be good to be able to get Galnet when not docked as well.
As said services will get back to normal anyway by the BGS npc's.
This can be expanded to some of the other BGS states.
I want to see the mechanics tie into each other, give good meaningful reasons to do things we can do in-game, without you being the saviour of the world sort of thing.
)
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