but the true problem is that you have to pay insurance for the ship in the game to actually keep it, lets take moment to indulge this...you pay, lets say, for a ship that costs 80$ like the aurora i believe, you go fly it around abit and after thinking to yourself "i just spent 80$ on a digital ship" you then come across a NPC with a pirating habit, you get in a firefight with said NPC and then you get your ship destroyed, but oh shucks you forgot and/or didn't pay for life insurance. you know what that means? YOU LOST YOUR DIGITAL 80$ SHIP FOREVER!!!! and insurance for your ship literally means "paying money to keep your money" - really think about that.
I did not know this. The whole SC business model felt wrong to me from the start. This is just another reason why it is fundamentally wrong and does not work.
I do not understand people who would buy such expensive in game assets with real money anyway. It destroys game play. It cannibalizes on game play. In Elite I want to earn my ships in game through game play. That is what the game is about. I do not want anything in game for free.
I would be willing to pay a
reasonable price for a ship pack with extra flyable ships, but only if I have to acquire them in game with in game money through game play. I do not want them put in my hangar for free. That would kill the game for me.
Therefore I deplore for example the road FD decided to take with ship's skins. It cannibalizes on gameplay. I feel after buying a ship skin with real world money it should not have been given to you for free in the game. I would have liked to go to an in game ship dealer and have to buy my skin for in game money. That is one of the reasons I have not bought skins and I think I never will.
Gameplay: now i'm not going to judge atm the alpha of SC. but i will judge what they have told us. they won't i repeat wont have actually planet landings they will have isolated landings on planets and have mass effect like places to vist. meaning only a few rooms. or a small area with a backdrop of a city. this does not constitute as a "GTA" in space.
We will have to wait and see what FD will do. We will have actual planetary landings, that much is clear, but I doubt that means we will have total access to complete cities. I would be surprised if that would be the case.
I think that is not feasible for all kinds of reasons I have mentioned in several threads elsewhere.
I do expect full and free access to uninhabited planets, be it with or without alien flora and fauna and perhaps a base or settlement.
I do not expect full and free access to large and densely inhabited core planets with large cities. I think that is not feasible at all. I strongly believe it would be too ambitious and would certainly break the game's back. I believe FD will be implementing a star port hub model in such areas.
Creating a multitude of
complete,
believable,
living and breathing,
immersive cities is far too ambitious. If it were that easy it would not take Rockstar several years to just create one such
enclosed city environment.
If FD tried this at such a huge open world scale it would destroy them and the game with it.
It is not difficult to create a reasonably diverse city-like agglomeration of buildings with Procedural Generation, but to fill that city with acceptable immersive city life, interesting npc and traffic, with cool stuff to do for a player etc. is something completely different. It is better to have a good, but limited star port hub, than to have a huge city that is boring and feels fake. This would destroy immersion in a heartbeat. Players would loath going into such a city environment and it would become an embarrassment to the developer.
