What would you pay for ship interiors?

[Ian Doncaster]

Odyssey crashed because it was so poorly implemented.

That certainly didn't help at release time, sure. It's been fixed now: performance is "good enough" on most hardware PC players are likely to be using [1], it's got no more bugs than the existing Horizons content has, and a bunch of the most obvious feature gaps have been filled in. Plus it's now regularly on sale so you can easily pay less than a quarter of the initial release price.

Good reasons not to buy it in May 2021, sure. If someone's playing Horizons but still not picking it up on sale in February 2023, it's not because it's still poorly implemented, it's because it's still not the features they're looking for, even for cheap.

Anyway, given the average release day state of the larger Elite Dangerous expansions, any projection for whether ship interiors are worth developing is going to have to include "release-day disappointment, might be good in a year or two" as the expected quality level, right? If the "I'll only play if ship interiors are added" demands are actually "I'll only play if ship interiors are added and also actually good" then that makes it more rather than less risky to cater to them.


[1] The number of PC players on Legacy for any reason - be that performance, planets, lighting, anti-aliasing, etc. - is probably somewhere under 1% of the numbers on Live, judging by things like EDDN returns and Squadron leaderboards. Horizons 4.0 is doing fine ... Odyssey, rather less so.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

But you fly a Corvette, so you do? I've been playing with a Type 9 for the first time and I quite like that it has the magical blue boarding circle at the back!

Got to admit that personally that's the only selling point of a T-9, but yeah, if I know I'm going to be walking around stations doing Odyssey stuff, I'll generally get in a Clipper, FdL or a small ship.

 

[Frankymole]

But you fly a Corvette, so you do? I've been playing with a Type 9 for the first time and I quite like that it has the magical blue boarding circle at the back!

It's listed as my main ship but I'm never in it. I mainly use a DBX (with the exit hatch at the back), for exobiology because that's where the money is and as an explorer I like to land. But I do use taxis and the hatch is at the back of Apexes and I don't want to hang about in those, the smell of vomit is overpowering.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I don’t need to walk up to the bartender in the game to imagine my character would spend time in that bar, watching traffic, as she waits for her cargo to load. She’d actually spend that time in a bar in one of the rings, if they exist, star gazing. I do need there to be a meaningful difference between missions, especially if fulfilling those missions may have detrimental effects on a faction, to make an in-character decision between them.

I don’t need to meet a contact in a bar in the game to imagine my character doing so. I do need credits to be sufficiently rare, and to have more than one type of bar to meet in, to make a decision between meeting a contact at an expensive bar that provides privacy for its customers and guarantee a mission remains covert, and meeting that contact in a seedy dive which all but guarantees every faction knows what’s going on.

Sure, thats very reasonable to work with what we have. You could also consider frontier not existing in isolation though, and text based imagination hasn't been required for a long time.. you could almost assume that video games generally provide the context for the fantasy? It would be even broken to not expect a game to provide the experience from the last 20 years?

Well in terms of gameplay mechanics, i don't think frontier are rolling back.

Imagine if they released hogwarts legacy without hogwarts and just people broomsticks and wands.

EDIT: or even better, imagine what would have happened if the elite kickstarter instead declared that the view of the development team was there is no gameplay in ship interiors and consequently they will not be implemented...

 

[Marvin the Martian]

I don't have a f...ing carrier. I have almost every ship, just not a carrier. And I bet many people don't. So, if you enjoy your carrier's interior, then no need to contribute to this thread, go back to your carrier.

There are more fleet carriers in every system in the Bubble than there are bases, so a great many people have them.

And if you'd read what I actually said about the fleet carrier interiors, you would apologize for that over the top, completely off base comment.

On my fleet carrier, I can go to the command center, up to the command chair, to the concourse bar, out to the hangar that houses my ship, etc...

It was cool for about a week or two. That's about as long as it lasted.

I've said this before: it would be like all the concourse bars: novel at first, but quickly seen as non-productive and forgotten about and wind up being unused 99.5% of the time.

 

[ferus]

That is totally out of the question as long as ED is a live service game. You can not have mods to the game itself, while it's live service, period. Players connecting with altered code base would potentially harm the stability of the game big time. So we won't see anything beyond what already exists, like EDHM for example. But none of the existing mods alter any gamefiles at all. Should ED become offline single player at the end of it's lifetime, then yes, mods are on the table, but not as long as it's an online game.

I meant that players would create mods (since FDev don't have time or don't care enough), they would then submit them through some official portal and FDev would then choose to incorporate them as official content.
So everyone would end up with the same code.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Good reasons not to buy it in May 2021, sure. If someone's playing Horizons but still not picking it up on sale in February 2023, it's not because it's still poorly implemented, it's because it's still not the features they're looking for, even for cheap.

... Ship interiors (for player housing)? Some sort of eva for another tier of mining and power plant repairs would complete the set.

In the lead up to odd, even before the marketing and white knights came back, i don't remember anyone here in the slightest discussing what types of lasers we would be given, or how the bullets and gunplay should feel. It was just a shrugged given. Even as it was becoming clear, everyone wrote it off to frontier marketing trying to attract a new audience, not changing to suddenly own bullet excitement... I don't think we even had the slightest clue what to expect.. the only lead we had was "spheres of combat" or something?

Anyway, given the average release day state of the larger Elite Dangerous expansions, any projection for whether ship interiors are worth developing is going to have to include "release-day disappointment, might be good in a year or two" as the expected quality level, right? If the "I'll only play if ship interiors are added" demands are actually "I'll only play if ship interiors are added and also actually good" then that makes it more rather than less risky to cater to them.

I think many people would understand an incremental approach. I think they should even further squeeze their mvp and start by extending carrier interiors (which form a great basis in many aspects for what could be delivered for ships). Only after positive feedback and commerical success should they consider doing ship interiors proper?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

i don't remember anyone here in the slightest discussing what types of lasers we would be given, or how the bullets and gunplay should feel. It was just a shrugged given. Even as it was becoming clear, everyone wrote it off to frontier marketing trying to attract a new audience, not changing to suddenly own bullet excitement... I don't think we even had the slightest clue what to expect.. the only lead we had was "spheres of combat" or something?

Yeah, it's interesting. There was a huge amount of chatter on the forums before that first Odyssey trailer came out - basically all the time from towards the end of Horizons onwards - at about the same level of density as the current "ship interiors" threads, asking for the ability to get out of your ship and walk around:
"NMS has it", "Star Citizen has it", "X4 is getting it", "what sort of space sim nowadays confines you to your ship?" etc.

Requests to be able to do specific things having left the ship? Rather rarer. So the lack of interest as to what the weapons in that trailer might do and whether one of them was actually a weapon or a giant self-powered crocodile clip for jump-starting SRVs? I guess it shouldn't have been a big surprise.

I think many people would understand an incremental approach. I think they should even further squeeze their mvp and start by extending carrier interiors (which form a great basis in many aspects for what could be delivered for ships). Only after positive feedback and commerical success should they consider doing ship interiors proper?

I'd agree that extended carrier interiors are probably going to be far easier to implement - though, of course, the intersection of "people who care about walking around interior spaces" and "people who have enough spare money to own carriers" is probably too small for commercial success to be an option.

 

[Old Duck]

I actually don't care about boarding ships but I think that while out exploring, having a lab on board a ship where I refine the results of collecting DNA in some kind of minigame might be fun. Vista could pay me more if some of the analysis work is done up-front.

In SE, one of the activities available is finding satellites floating around in space (they spawn in randomly like crashed satellites in Elite) and disassembling them for parts and loot. Usually I would just go out on EVA to do this, but it's a bit of a pain because when you bump these things, they start drifting away from you (good 'ol Newtonian physic). So I designed a ship with a cargo bay and a magnetic grappler that lets me fly my ship up to a satellite, grab it, and pull it into the bay where I could work on it in a secured, warm environment with air and even gravity thanks to an AG generator.

While I absolutely loved this particular gameplay use of ship interiors, I suspect the instant gratification crowd would hate it. So.. many... steps!! Pull up to a satellite, align the ship perfectly using external cameras (not as easy as it sounds), depressurize cargo bay, open bay doors (though I was able to automate those steps into a single keypress), manually lower the magnetic grappler, grab satellite, retrieve satellite, close bay and pressurize, get out of the pilot's chair, walk down a short hallway, walk down a flight of stairs, walk through the medical bay (which also serves a purpose), open air-tight bulkhead door, use hand tool to disassemble satellite, put parts into storage bin, and finally walk back through "familiar" ship to cockpit.

It's a whole lot more work than just shooting a satellite with ship weapons (which in SE would destroy said satellite, not salvage it) and let collector limpet do all the work, never having to leave the seat. Me personally, I love the immersion and verisimilitude of going through the motions of fully operating my ship and going through all the steps of salvaging a satellite for parts, which happens in the setting of my ship's interior. Whether or not this fits Elite's MO, however, I'm not so sure.

 

[Oh Seven Commander]

In SE, one of the activities available is finding satellites floating around in space (they spawn in randomly like crashed satellites in Elite) and disassembling them for parts and loot. Usually I would just go out on EVA to do this, but it's a bit of a pain because when you bump these things, they start drifting away from you (good 'ol Newtonian physic). So I designed a ship with a cargo bay and a magnetic grappler that lets me fly my ship up to a satellite, grab it, and pull it into the bay where I could work on it in a secured, warm environment with air and even gravity thanks to an AG generator.

While I absolutely loved this particular gameplay use of ship interiors, I suspect the instant gratification crowd would hate it. So.. many... steps!! Pull up to a satellite, align the ship perfectly using external cameras (not as easy as it sounds), depressurize cargo bay, open bay doors (though I was able to automate those steps into a single keypress), manually lower the magnetic grappler, grab satellite, retrieve satellite, close bay and pressurize, get out of the pilot's chair, walk down a short hallway, walk down a flight of stairs, walk through the medical bay (which also serves a purpose), open air-tight bulkhead door, use hand tool to disassemble satellite, put parts into storage bin, and finally walk back through "familiar" ship to cockpit.

It's a whole lot more work than just shooting a satellite with ship weapons (which in SE would destroy said satellite, not salvage it) and let collector limpet do all the work, never having to leave the seat. Me personally, I love the immersion and verisimilitude of going through the motions of fully operating my ship and going through all the steps of salvaging a satellite for parts, which happens in the setting of my ship's interior. Whether or not this fits Elite's MO, however, I'm not so sure.

This sounds super cool, what is SE? Space Engineers? That level of intricacy is what makes good salvage gameplay, and is one of several reasons that Elite doesn't have good salvage gameplay.

 

[Greasetrap42]

The best development bang-for-buck is for FD to expand on Station and Fleet Carrier interiors. It reaches out to more players with greater potential for added gameplay. Also low risk for bugs etc. effecting current gameplay.

 

[Riverside]

The best development bang-for-buck is for FD to expand on Station and Fleet Carrier interiors. It reaches out to more players with greater potential for added gameplay. Also low risk for bugs etc. effecting current gameplay.

I think it would be easier to create new ground base types & insert them, plenty of empty ground to put them.

I would like to see more places to explore in large stations & carriers though, particularly as a 3D environment (ie multiple levels where ground bases would largely be on be level).

Again though, once it's been explored unless there is gameplay there it's appeal would be limited. It is something that could be added to later though (a statement that could describe many aspects of the game).

 

[Old Duck]

This sounds super cool, what is SE? Space Engineers?

It is! I have an entire thread dedicated to it, where I think I have some screenshots of satellite salvage.

That level of intricacy is what makes good salvage gameplay, and is one of several reasons that Elite doesn't have good salvage gameplay.

I don't expect SE levels of salvage in ED, because the two are very different games in that regard. I can picture a similar gameplay loop in Odyssey based on existing gameplay, however. You could scoop up a small satellite (if not in a regular cargo bay, perhaps a special "salvage" bay that fits in an SLF slot), get out of your chair, walk back to the cargo bay to your automatically grappled satellite, and remove panels via Odyssey's cutting tool to get special materials.

I just don't know if the average Elite player wants this. Everyone has gotten spoiled with "shoot ship, ship drops quality components prepackaged in Amazon boxes, collect boxes, presto - pockets full of quality materials!" gameplay. There would have to be some reward incentive (G5 mats?) to go through the extra steps of salvage as I described.

 

[Oh Seven Commander]

It is! I have an entire thread dedicated to it, where I think I have some screenshots of satellite salvage.


I don't expect SE levels of salvage in ED, because the two are very different games in that regard. I can picture a similar gameplay loop in Odyssey based on existing gameplay, however. You could scoop up a small satellite (if not in a regular cargo bay, perhaps a special "salvage" bay that fits in an SLF slot), get out of your chair, walk back to the cargo bay to your automatically grappled satellite, and remove panels via Odyssey's cutting tool to get special materials.

I just don't know if the average Elite player wants this. Everyone has gotten spoiled with "shoot ship, ship drops quality components prepackaged in Amazon boxes, collect boxes, presto - pockets full of quality materials!" gameplay. There would have to be some reward incentive (G5 mats?) to go through the extra steps of salvage as I described.

The thing that gets me about the shoot and scoop we have in Elite, is that it's basically just fetch quests. I wish it hadn't become the norm here, but I appreciate the link to the thread, I will check it out.

 

[Aaron T]

There are many comments about the ability to walk in the hangars and stations being cool a few times and then boring and such. I believe that is only because of the graphics not being very detailed.

I love ED and have played it for years, and I have a love/hate relationship with SC.

In SC I love walking around in stations, in ships, and outside, in shops, and everywhere else and I am bored of it in ED and am returning to Horizons.

The reason is simply because the graphics and detail in SC is very high and amazing, therefore it is very immersive.

SC is in perpetual alpha and may never be released, that is fine, I love it still, and I never get bored walking around anywhere in the verse.

I discover new things every time I walk anywhere in SC, it does not matter where it is, but in Odyssey the graphics and details don't make the ship interiors or exteriors, nor the hangars and stations detailed enough for me to really enjoy.

I love the gameplay and will continue to play it, but I am likely going to delete Odyssey and return to Horizons.

Every game I have ever looked at, whether in alpha or finished has strengths and weaknesses, and ED and SC are no different.

Save the love for __ and the hate for __, it's either one or the other, and such for someone else, I do not care, I love them both, I get bored with them both, I get back into them both.

As much as I love game play, I also love high details and eye candy.

Have a nice day and thank you for reading.

 

[Aaron T]

Is it really only me that still goes down into the bar and looks out at the settlement and the planets from the giant window? That is gobsmacked by the sheer spectacle of the size of a Corvette or a Type 9 every time I run up to board in the hangar? I would not at all mind a travelator to make transitions quicker but the feeling of owning and piloting incredible machines is one of the things I love most about Elite, even if it's just a feeling without any gameplay.

I have stood at the window in the FC and watched the ships land and take off in wonder and and amazement and think "This is all mine and I worked years for it."

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

I meant that players would create mods (since FDev don't have time or don't care enough), they would then submit them through some official portal and FDev would then choose to incorporate them as official content.
So everyone would end up with the same code.

That is a workable idea, but you open a can of worms who then owns the content. For that reason you hardly see a system like that in any game. Also the Devs would have to put additional resources into QA, to test the content for compatibility for every player.

 

[Greasetrap42]

I love ED and have played it for years, and I have a love/hate relationship with SC.

In SC I love walking around in stations, in ships, and outside, in shops, and everywhere else and I am bored of it in ED and am returning to Horizons.

Very peculiar line of reasoning.

You prefer SC's more detailed and expansive interior graphics so you are going to uninstall Odyssey and return to Horizons. Ok.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I've played Star Citizen as well (the free flies, admittantly), as well as built my own ship interiors in other games. Speaking personally, the first couple of times you see a ship's interior, it's all ooh, and ahh! That's how it starts. Then later there's running, and sprinting...

And yet I want interiors... but not for my own ship. I want to be able to board other people's ships. I want to take a a search and rescue mission, and board a crashed ship looking for survivors. I want to be able respond to a ship's distress call, and help them repair their damaged power plant. I want to be able to board a ship to plant a bomb to sabotage a ship, in order to liberate kidnapped Imperial slaves (or just slaves in general). I want to be able to board a ship to capture a Federat CEO to face justice at the hands of the "employees" he so cruelly exploited.

It's the potential gameplay that interiors could bring that makes interiors attractive to me. Interiors devoid of gameplay? They become dead space that simply needs to be sprinted through on the way to something far more interesting, which is the current status of station docking bays in Elite Dangerous. There's so much potential gameplay that could be done in those dead spaces, but they're just space I'd rather skip entirely.

Yes, I want that, too. But would you want it tacked onto something that's already nearly a decade old or would you rather prefer it being developed from the ground up as integral part of a game? I don't think it'd be any good tacked on.

 

[OutofSpace]

For me it's what I see out of the window/visor. I would like more planet features rather than ship interiors and yes, I still get the wow feeling when looking at the planets and satellites. When scanning exobio I just want to press 3, disembark, scan and E to re-enter. Yes, at first, interiors would be "oh that's nice" but for me it would become tedious very quickly, unless good gameplay came along with it. Someone said above that it would be good to analyse exobio samples in interiors, but I think a base building feature to do scientific work would be better in my opinion.