When you add atmospheric landings, don’t make all planets landable at once.

[AtotheCtotheG]

There’s no conceivable way you (or any other developer) would be able to create the sheer amount of diversity necessary to make each/most/many worlds feel unique and special. Worlds which feature non-Earth life are the biggest problem here; it would take an enormous amount of man-hours to create thousands/millions of alien biomes which didn’t all look similar. No Man’s Sky is an example of how not to do it.

Anyway, when the time comes to finally add atmospheric landings, don’t do every planet at once. Don’t even do every planet of a single TYPE at once, if that type has a lot of room for variety. Start small, take the time to do it right. When you add landing on Earth-like worlds, add a couple of specific ones first. Earth itself might be a good first pick. But try to avoid doing what No Man’s Sky did, because they took a vast galaxy (or galaxies) and made it seem tiny, repetitive, and meaningless.

 

[Azreh Helas]

No matter what they do its going to be hard to include truly unique wildlife if atmospheric landing on earth-like, outdoor and water worlds is going to be a thing. It may be a good step to start with one planet including cities or do barren worlds like metallic and ice world with atmospheres land able. Or one variant that i feel many would like - the outer most layer of gas giants before the pressure crumples your ship like a aluminum can.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I would assume life would be procedurally generated with many variations depending on the composition of the atmosphere and gravity of the planet.

Most atmospheric planets won't have complex life on them anyway.

 

[Kzak]

In earlier posts, years ago, they said they'd gradually introduce atmospheric worlds, probably so they could get the technology right. Earth-like worlds would be the final element to click into place as they would have to do a huge amount of work on them.

 

[AdmiralXanos]

Considering terraformed worlds, isn't it possible those would be seeded with earth's fauna & flora? Meaning a good bit of the earth-likes inside the bubble would be copy pastes of earth and still be believable... I think no mans sky procedural animal generation is outside the scope of what we can expect from this game ever. Also what about if the Guardians/Thargoids had seeded the earth-likes outside the bubble, meaning a total of 3 evolutionary paths regularly encountered when visiting ELWs.

 

[AtotheCtotheG]

No matter what they do its going to be hard to include truly unique wildlife if atmospheric landing on earth-like, outdoor and water worlds is going to be a thing. It may be a good step to start with one planet including cities or do barren worlds like metallic and ice world with atmospheres land able. Or one variant that i feel many would like - the outer most layer of gas giants before the pressure crumples your ship like a aluminum can.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Now that I think about it, I don’t know how they could even do the biome of just Earth. It’d still be a massive undertaking, and that’s just lifeforms we already KNOW about. Frontier’s best bet might be to make some in-universe reason to limit or eliminate player interaction with at least fauna. Plants are more doable, but animals simply have too many moving parts and behaviors.

Maybe most of the fauna of any given planet could be cordoned off within massive nature preserves; these could be entirely closed to interstellar pilots, so as to limit the impact of ship engines or SRV exhaust (if any) on the ecosystems—and to limit the amount of jerks who might be tempted to strafe innocent animals with lasers and cannons and such.

Alternatively, they could also just employ a minimum altitude limit over these reserves, so that pilots could get close enough to see some beautiful stuff, but not close enough to see the finer details.

Outside of the reserves, I’d expect things to be heavily industrialized, but the devs could include some foliage, and maybe even a couple of the more common animal types, like pets or squirrels or some such.

Although for populated planets, just modeling and programming (and voicing) the humans will be a colossal task by itself. I’m glad that Frontier has given us some features from Horizons, while still taking all the time they need to make sure the remaining features get done right. I only hope that the ambitious goals they’ve mentioned in the past are within the realms of possibility and practicality (and profitability) at all.

 

[Leadfoot]

I had always suspected that atmospheric landings would be gradual DLC's, possibly starting with gas giants (simply because you don't need to create any landmass, just clouds and wind). Each type of solid planet with atmosphere could be added as a separate DLC as the process improves. I can see they're already experimenting with it through the use of Lagrange clouds (watching the 'mist' roll by your canopy as you fly through them at higher speeds).

 

[Azreh Helas]

Yeah, that’s a good point. Now that I think about it, I don’t know how they could even do the biome of just Earth. It’d still be a massive undertaking, and that’s just lifeforms we already KNOW about. Frontier’s best bet might be to make some in-universe reason to limit or eliminate player interaction with at least fauna. Plants are more doable, but animals simply have too many moving parts and behaviors.

Maybe most of the fauna of any given planet could be cordoned off within massive nature preserves; these could be entirely closed to interstellar pilots, so as to limit the impact of ship engines or SRV exhaust (if any) on the ecosystems—and to limit the amount of jerks who might be tempted to strafe innocent animals with lasers and cannons and such.

Alternatively, they could also just employ a minimum altitude limit over these reserves, so that pilots could get close enough to see some beautiful stuff, but not close enough to see the finer details.

Outside of the reserves, I’d expect things to be heavily industrialized, but the devs could include some foliage, and maybe even a couple of the more common animal types, like pets or squirrels or some such.

Although for populated planets, just modeling and programming (and voicing) the humans will be a colossal task by itself. I’m glad that Frontier has given us some features from Horizons, while still taking all the time they need to make sure the remaining features get done right. I only hope that the ambitious goals they’ve mentioned in the past are within the realms of possibility and practicality (and profitability) at all.

Indeed and as someone else mentioned a lot of the ELWs and WWs would probably be copy pasted, which i wouldn't mind to be honest as long as there is some variation. With atmospheric flight i'm really looking forward to the flight model and the sights. Another thing Fdev can do is to limit it to cities. You'd get permission to one region of that planet if its inhabited while uninhabited planets would have no such thing. And should we get space legs there may also be entry points through shuttles or something.

I had always suspected that atmospheric landings would be gradual DLC's, possibly starting with gas giants (simply because you don't need to create any landmass, just clouds and wind). Each type of solid planet with atmosphere could be added as a separate DLC as the process improves. I can see they're already experimenting with it through the use of Lagrange clouds (watching the 'mist' roll by your canopy as you fly through them at higher speeds).

That is possible, i don't think it will be a full implementations either...if it comes that is. Outer layers of Gas giants with gas mining facilities and such would still be pretty cool.