I am an explorer, and so is my wife!
What has FD ever done for us
- Thread starter DD_Crash
- Start date
In describing the current state of exploration you’ve ironically answered your own question!!!!!
Many explorers don’t take part in the Formidine Rift or Alien Ruins stuff simply because the only way to take part is to scour entire worlds with your eyeballs. That’s a special type of insanity that very few are willing to do, and for good reasons. I’ve done it, it sucks. Majorly. It’s not fun, nor engaging, it’s mind numbingly dull and terrible.
Exploration needs more engaging and interactive tools to actually facilitate doing real exploration. Coupled with said tools, exploration also needs content out there to find with those tools. And yes when dealing with a procedural galaxy of this size that content needs to be procedural as well. The mechanics are all in place already and they work great in the bubble with all of the various POI’s you can search for and find, Frontier only needs to create some deep space natural POI’s to generate throughout the galaxy, add an incentive to find them, add in some more interactive tools and viola, exploration is improved 100%.
I can assure you good sir that the benefits to the game would be enormous. There are tons of players who would love to go out exploring if only there was some honest to God gameplay involved in exploration. Just because you personally don’t see any reason to develop exploration further does not mean the cause doesn’t have merit, with value added results for the franchise. It does.
Generated a galaxy big enough for us the firm of mind and repetitionists to confront space madness in.
Many explorers would agree on the former, and as a combat pilot so do I. No, it's not really exploration.
But if your outlook is "you can't fix something because it's currently broken", then I really don't know what to say. People conveniently forget ED was sold as a work in progress but yes, "exploration" needs serious developing. 2.1 has been largely combat based and as a combat pilot I would gratefully see an entire season focusing primarily on revamping exploration if done correctly.
What now? How is this a relevant point? That's for FD to handle. If you can't think of a resolution, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist. There's a reason you're, well, a chap and FD is an experienced development team - they may seek our feedback and input, but we're not armchair devs here. They ultimately have the idea candy and come up with the goods.
If you have an excellent idea, put it forward. If not, that's cool. It's not doomed, it just means you can't instantly propose a development solution to a massive hole in a popular game. Which many people don't comprehend and still put forward stupid ideas as though gospel...
Regarding your first point - about lack of activity in the exploration subforum regarding the current mysteries:
I acknowledge that it might be easy to miss, but the Galactic Mapping Project just did a major update featuring the aliens ruins, formidine mystery as well as the many other mystery sites out there. I have submitted it to FD for inclusion in todays newsletter. Lets see if it makes the pages...
Also, discussions tend to gravitate to where the interest already is. Why start a new data collecting thread here, when there is already a great one being maintained by the Canonn?
Regarding your second point - about much more player interest in the dev-added mysteries (UA, UP, Ruins, Sites, Abandoned Settlement...) than in other types of exploration gameplay:
Why do you think this is so? Could it not be that players go to where the content and mechanics are - rather than where they are not? Players notice that FD devote time and ressources to the alien and Formidine mysteries, so obviously that is where many choose to go. Players also notice the lack of FD development on other exploration gameplay and content and obviously they go elsewhere (passenger missions being an exception here - thank you FD for those
).Don´t get me wrong - I am having a great time blazing my own trail in this great sandbox galaxy. I am also a fan of the latest additions of mystery sites and passenger missions. But truth be told I have spent many more hours on the meta-game of ED: setting up expeditions and social events, making maps, etc - than I have on actually playing the exploration game. The galaxy is beautiful, but when there is a lack of mechanics and content, you have to make up your own content... And the exploration community has excelled at that! Development of tools, ressources, maps, expeditions, social events... Clearly there is a very strong player community devoted to exploration IN SPITE of the lack of mechanics and content.
...but all that was a sidetrack...
To return to the OPs question - what has FD ever done for us. Most important for me would be this:
- they made a beautiful galaxy filled with wonderful sights in space as well as on the ground.
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Well the biggest thing they did was actually write "Eliteangerous".
It was a long wait from "First Encounters"... (although the X games did fill a vacuum for a bit .)
angerous". It was a long wait from "First Encounters"... (although the X games did fill a vacuum for a bit .)
Judean People's Front... off, we're the People's Front of Judea.
You know, I often see it said that planetary landings didn't add much for explorers. To that, let me add my counterpoint: imagine Distand Worlds and most other expeditions without planetary landings. I don't think nearly as many people would have taken part as they did.
As for Mrfailfactory's question about why should FD even develop exploration and have it as a higher priority: because it's there. On a more serious note: right now, the game has two core strengths. One is flying your ship and combat, both of which are the most important mechanics. I would add supercruise here too, even though it's far more simple than "normal" flight, because exploration and the game would be considerably more boring if you just jumped between locations. The other core strength is the Stellar Forge: to date, no other game has nearly as complex procedural generation of a galaxy, and our galaxy, as Elite has. It would stand to reason that Frontier would improve and enhance this, as they already have. See Horizons, and the landable planet generation. You might only see beige rocks when flying above a planet surface, but if you learn a bit more about geology, you'll notice that it's actually simulated quite well in the game. Of course, you don't see much difference on what's on the surface yet because so far, we can only land on barren airless worlds, but this is a foundation that'll become important later.
Oh, and regarding the mysteries and stuff. You might have come up with an alternative definition where the point is that only players who look into those are true explorers (drinking game time!), but that's just one facet. Most people here on the exploration subforum discuss topics which aren't tied to community-heavy exploration, which the aliens, ruins, Formidine Rift are. Same as the different expeditions. These tend to use their own forums, for reasons which should be quite obvious. As far as I know, the Canonn does too, it's just that they have one thread elsewhere on the forums. You might not have been here during the Distant Worlds era, but at the time, this subforum was for quite some time spammed with [Distant Worlds] threads, to the point that most other stuff was drowned out. Thankfully, that's no longer the case, and in my opinion, it'd be better not to have a repeat of that with any other expedition, be they about finding out more about the unknown stuff, the Guardians, the Formidine Rift, Raxxla or anything else.
As for why some people don't participate in your expeditions, well, that's up for them to decide. No need to insult or shame them if they don't. (There were a few other examples of such in the past too, such as a few people claiming that all explorers are on the DWE and those who aren't, aren't.)
As for Mrfailfactory's question about why should FD even develop exploration and have it as a higher priority: because it's there. On a more serious note: right now, the game has two core strengths. One is flying your ship and combat, both of which are the most important mechanics. I would add supercruise here too, even though it's far more simple than "normal" flight, because exploration and the game would be considerably more boring if you just jumped between locations. The other core strength is the Stellar Forge: to date, no other game has nearly as complex procedural generation of a galaxy, and our galaxy, as Elite has. It would stand to reason that Frontier would improve and enhance this, as they already have. See Horizons, and the landable planet generation. You might only see beige rocks when flying above a planet surface, but if you learn a bit more about geology, you'll notice that it's actually simulated quite well in the game. Of course, you don't see much difference on what's on the surface yet because so far, we can only land on barren airless worlds, but this is a foundation that'll become important later.
Oh, and regarding the mysteries and stuff. You might have come up with an alternative definition where the point is that only players who look into those are true explorers (drinking game time!), but that's just one facet. Most people here on the exploration subforum discuss topics which aren't tied to community-heavy exploration, which the aliens, ruins, Formidine Rift are. Same as the different expeditions. These tend to use their own forums, for reasons which should be quite obvious. As far as I know, the Canonn does too, it's just that they have one thread elsewhere on the forums. You might not have been here during the Distant Worlds era, but at the time, this subforum was for quite some time spammed with [Distant Worlds] threads, to the point that most other stuff was drowned out. Thankfully, that's no longer the case, and in my opinion, it'd be better not to have a repeat of that with any other expedition, be they about finding out more about the unknown stuff, the Guardians, the Formidine Rift, Raxxla or anything else.
As for why some people don't participate in your expeditions, well, that's up for them to decide. No need to insult or shame them if they don't. (There were a few other examples of such in the past too, such as a few people claiming that all explorers are on the DWE and those who aren't, aren't.)
Agreed.
I agree completely, BUT Frontier did not make planetary landings for the explorers. They didn’t add any content at all for deep space explorers, nothing. Frontier needed the planet surfaces for all of the bubble content that 2.0 (and later updates) added, they’ve continually added things to surfaces in the bubble, the engineers update required planet surfaces. Explorers got surfaces as a result of bubble content, it was never added for us, nor has it been developed in any way whatsoever FOR us. They’ve thrown geysers and fumeroles out there but done precisely zero development work to give us any mechanics or tools at all to implement gameplay to find them. In fact honestly we’ve LOST more content than we’ve gotten, what with the beige homogenization out in the galaxy, planets now are far less interesting than they were pre 2.2.
Explorers make use of planet surfaces because it allows us to sightsee and take great pictures, but that’s us making our own content. We’ve made up our own content due to Frontier’s lack of it. Frontier has yet to help us out with that.
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@Mengy... You should use "me" instead of "us" cause your opinion on this topic is too b/w to be mine
True, they didn't make planetary landings for explorers. Nor for combat pilots, traders, pirates, miners et cetera. They made them because they promised this feature at the start of the crowdfunding campaign. Reasons can go beyond catering to any player activities.
Well, of course planetside content didn't add any content to deep space, hehe. However, some of my best journeys involved doing FSD boosts (not the NS kind). Of course, that's just me, I don't claim to speak for others.
It needn't have required them, mind. Engineer stations could have easily been a thing, but if you're going with handcrafted bases, planets offer much better backdrops than space does. Not to mention that planetary landings were promised long before Engineers were even an idea, so it's not like they did surface landings so they could introduce Engineers.
You're forgetting those of us who prospected planets (which was made easier) to get FSD boost materials to go beyond the edge. As for more planetside content, let me just mention that all the mystery storylines are tied to it so far, plus the various hidden installations near the bubble.
I mean, check all the stuff listed on the latest alien stuff thread here. You might say that it's not enough, of course (more content is always good), but it's not nothing.