Well now; I wasn't even thinking about insults, I might make a blind statement; but really would like to know what you consider 'emergent'. That term is so loosely thrown around...
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What exactly was wrong with the DDA?
- Thread starter Cmdr Kurnek
- Start date
Well now; I wasn't even thinking about insults, I might make a blind statement; but really would like to know what you consider 'emergent'. That term is so loosely thrown around...
emergent, meaning content that emerges from gameplay. the only real element of this right now is USS/SSS/WSS. To be fair to FD I do see them making improvements on this front, it's simply the fact that PP was their 'big release' and the focus was placed on highly grindy mechanics. Hell I wouldn't mind if they were more interesting mechanics. instead of delivering corruption reports we could be tasked with following/stalking corrupt system security until they drop out of SC to catch them in the act of making deals with criminals etc. the possibilities are endless...
So you consider 'emergent' to be (lack of grind and content that emerges from gameplay);....finally figuring this out.
Yeah I also want more devotion to the DDF. I don't necessarily need emergent game play yet,...but when were' on planets I would like it deeply mixed through the whole game.
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Bingo. Welcome to game development. It is best not to know how the sausage was made.
You might not (or might) know, but Mat Zemlya means Mother Earth in Russian.
And you might find you will be embroiled in the fallout from powerplay if your system gets taken over by a power.
Yeah it will be hard to ignore Powerplay, because in one way or another it will effect our game decisions.
For me, the best thing to do is learn it, and play around it, (assuming we'll continue to be able to do that).
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Way to belittle those passionate about the game and its heritage.
Im not a vet from the previous games, and i havent had anything to do with the DDF other then following its discussions and reading through the threads, but there is ALOT of good suggestions and discussions going on there which should have been prioritized higher then to be "maybe added later".
But what gets to me is how much they, FD themselves, made a big deal out of it only to have it rendered little more then a food for thought.
Bits and pieces of it are making its way into ED, and this is good. And equally good is it that ED DOES adapt some of the modern trends as well.
But the overall opinion I get from the DDF is that it was more or less without meaning.
In fact, I would say that it WAS the holy grail because im sure it got PLENTY of people to crowdfund ED with the belief that they would in fact have a say in the development.
I did read on...trust me...I've read these documents waaaay to many times!
And yes, I am about to tell you "that
Note that they used the word "example" in what you quoted in the spoiler tags while the text I quoted was the definition of what they are. They also DO provide mission to the player even if these most certainly needs to be improved into something more interesting than what we have now and tie them more into the main game, something I'm quite sure FD are aware of.Do note that I am not saying that Powerplay as such was planned in detail back when that document was written. Obviously it wasn't. The main idea still fits though. Persistent major NPC characters that are known to all players that you can work for, but not meet directly. Characters that can "rise" (manually) from the BG simulation with a lot of work from players. Considering how many times David have made references to Game of Thrones when describing the game they also make perfect sense in that context.
When we get more direct interactions with tier 2 NPCs they could easily be working for one of the main powers (or another minor faction for that matter), but to have the kind of direct interaction you describe we need NPC comms first (see my previous post above) and hopefully this will come sometime later this year. This is IMO what they should focus on next. Nothing in the current implementation is stopping your scenario from being implemented on top of the current framework.
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Most of them (thousands) haven't even posted one time at the forums. As a backer myself I don't want anyone to have a say in the development except FD employees. Customers can make suggestions and I would be really happy if some of them are good enough to help FD to make a better game. Bu that's it. Backing isn't buying rights to have a say in something.
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Comments like this really makes me want to go through all of the design proposals step by step and prove you wrong...but I don't need another full time job so I'm not going to.
Most (but not all) of the stuff in the DDF have actually been implemented already. The biggest omission (IMO) at the moment has to do with NPC interactions of different sorts. Things like passengers (which also means more detailed slave mechanics), NPC wingmen, tier 2 NPCs, NPC crew and most importantly NPC two way communications. This is IMO the bottleneck right now for a lot of these features. When NPC comms gets implemented a lot of the other things will follow naturally and more complex missions will also be possible where you meet and interact with NPCs this way.
Sure, you can certainly make a list of thing that isn't in the game yet, but the list of things that ARE in the game will be a lot longer.
There are also certain things that probably got dropped in early testing. The design documents around docking is a good example. Reading them you can see a very involved process of how that was planned to work. Getting put into a queue, flying to a holding area, approaching the dock, wait for the airlock to open and so on...we even know that the stations have functional airlocks that can close due to a bug during development which triggered them at times. So originally they probably had a lot of this in place but soon realized that this simply took to long for a process you will be doing over and over again quite often in the game so instead they simply kept the doors open, added a force field and skipped the queue system so you could just fly straight in there a lot faster. Similar decisions have probably been made in regards to other design plans too that might have looked great on paper but in reality just got boring in the long run...
Yes, theres probably more truth to that then not, I believe you to know this better then I so ill just accept that.
I guess it comes down alot to priorities, I might feel some things should be prioritized higher they what you think.
Transporting/ferrying ships between stations and NPC interaction are two things I feel should have been there at release, no excuses. I would gladly have waited instead for the halfhearted implementation of mining or the anonymous community goals.
I agree with what you say, but I do want to point out that many of the things mentioned in the logbook proposal is also in the game even if people seem to assume it isn't and the reason for that is that much of this information is spread out across the ship.
Just some examples:
- "Provide a place players can view and sort through their in-game achievements." - Right sidepanel / Stats
- "Faction data – any significant changes in reputation or events within a faction should link to new feeds for that event." - Right sidepanel and the local newsfeeds in the stations.
- "Mission links/data – any event that links to a current mission." - Left sidepanel
- "Changes in ratings/rank/reputations." - Right sidepanel
- "Criminal activity (e.g. witnessed crimes, police responses)" - Left sidepanel (bounties, fines...)
And I never said it was.
But dont ask for feedback, ignore said feedback, and expect everyone to be happy with it.
Now, i am exaggerating but you get the point.
Some people feel that FD didnt hold up on what they claimed to offer and are voicing their opinions.
Yes, passengers and NPC interactions should have been there (especially since we already have passenger ships but no passengers)...heck, personally I would have liked planetary landings, first person gameplay and everything to have been there from day one...but reality is kind of a downer sometimes!
They seem to be in a pretty good place financially though (I've kept track of the numbers) so we just have to be patient until they get there...
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Yeah, you said that some ppl have that belief. All I am saying is, that their belief is wrong.
Sure, and I voice my opinion in response.
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Even if that were the case, and I believe it isn't, it would have been arguably more 'honest' to stick to a vision closer to the DDA, and possibly accept a niche market and lower sales.
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However, we've had a few very good, 'old school', single-player, crowed-funded games that have been successfully embraced by larger audiences - look at Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity for example. If the DDA was 'out of touch' with modern games, that doesn't mean to say the end product would not a) been excellent, and b) would not have found a wider audience.
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I vaguely remember one of the devs (Michael Brookes?) stating that online, ironman mode was how the game was envisaged to be played. Ditto the transponders thing - originally IIRC Sandro stated that he felt there should be no distinction between NPC and player icons. Those suggestions didn't come from players being 'out-of-touch'.
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Modern multiplayer =/= good game to everyone.
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This should be a player career/mission type. Only the most trustable would get the job but there would always be a human risk involved ('I hope that guy doesn't make off with my ship'). It could also be fun in that you could fly different kinds of ships all day, so experience the ship variety of ED without needing to be super rich.
Not quite.
Some context: I was a proponent of Elite's way of doing things - the 400 Billion star systems. In comparison, I've not been as impressed with Start Citizens hype machine demos.
However, recently, people I've spoken to that play, or have played, extensively other space genre games, have shown me there are pros to the other way of doing things. One person I speak with often, an old EVE player, is looking forward to Star Citizen and mentioned this difference when we discussed the pros and cons of procedural generation versus individually crafted content.
I came to agree somwhat with his point of view that, while there will be far less systems in the Star Citizen, each will have far more character, variety, diversity and richness of detail than anything in the whole of Elite: Dangerous. As that game evolves and grows, more content can be crafted to add to any system, and create new ones, with curated content delivering interesting and unique quests to players.
In Star Citizen, it really could be possible to have a Hoth, Tatooine, Dagobah, Coruscant, Endor... etc, which looks and feels unique. Now while he was sceptical of the value of procedural generation at all, I argued, using No Man's Sky as and example, that it depends how you use it that can determine how rich and varied your world looks. I also suggested that perhaps a hybrid of the two methods would be the idea: adding hand-made content on top of computer generated worlds.
However, here I wasn't able to relate anything out of Elite: Dangerous to help reference my point, because the way its system is presented, while it has a beautiful visual aesthetic, it is bland and monotonous. Where, No Man's Sky uses it to create everything from the planets, to surfaces, to vegetation, to animals, to ships... in a Borderlands-esque way, Elite has done little to nothing with that potiential, in spite of David Braben's ambitious and fantastical descriptions during development.
After the novelty wears off, Elite looks as boring as it plays. In 1984, with the limits of hardware, that was cutting edge and charming. In 2014, it's unconvincing and rather pathetic.
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I think the AI team is currently busy training their babies to kill us more efficiently, to be working on other forms of interactions. The AI clearly needed a lot of work. Plus they may be waiting until they can give us faces to look at for these NPCs first before giving us more interactions.
At the moment it changing the location of in game objects such as our ships, requires them to reset their servers, at least that how it seems from the communications, even moving a station to a different system currently requires a server reset. To add things like being able to transport player ships from one station to other this would need to be change and I'm sure it will at some point. I'm might be wrong their through.
Plus I'm also hoping the ship transport ships will be in game ships that can be ambush by other players and NPCs, this would create a little bit of a risk, it a dangerous universe after all.
The procedural thing has a lot of promise. Minecraft's world is infinite but the more I roam around the more I feel I discover, some of the landforms are great and there's always the promise you'll hit something really cool, like a particular resource you're after, so you're compelled to keep on trucking because there might be something really cool just over the next hill. Not to mention how malleable that world is.
From videos No Mans Sky appears excellent, full of life and variety, but we won't be really sure how things play out until it's out I guess. The fact that everything looks like a recognisable dinosaur to me suggests that the algorithms for adjusting forms probably won't be all that flexible or powerful. It might be like Spore- swappable horn parts, attachments, patterns and textures. Make things fatter or skinnier. I'm not betting we'll see truly 'unique' kinds of creatures that get thrown up by the power of proceduralism there, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
I really want to see what DB and FD do with it though. DB speaks so passionately about procedural generation that what we have now in ED can't be what he means. The smaller outposts are the best examples of creating variety out of component parts, for the most part those work well. But I'm disappointed that an Orbis station is the same on the inside as a Coriolis station or an Ocellus. If each station type had its own interior, things would feel better, but there needs to be more variation than that still... and I'm sure all the different possibilities have all been covered in depth on the forum as well as over at FD. But we're stuck with what we've got. As you say it makes for a terrible reference.
I think what will help dramatically would be providing the chance to alter things on planet surfaces. Imagine a pristine, untouched Earthlike which becomes progressively colonised. Sending people down there with resources and things to carry out the process. Imagine flying down at the beginning and landing among small settlements, but coming back 6 months later and there are buildings everywhere. In a year you might see a metropolis. That's one way to create diversity from a limited set of assets- variation based on time.
We already know Frontier is hand crafting some content, textures in the Sol system for example. I expect Earth/Mars, Achenar and Alioth will have handcrafted content. An if you take SC for example there Coruscant will be nothing but buildings in the background, you won't be able to fly through the city in your ship.
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No man sky teams claims that their are a lot more alien worlds that they haven't shown off yet. We shall see.