First, a few caveats / disclaimers:
1) I actually think NMS is now an amazing game and a brilliant achievement in procgen.
2) I have many complaints about ED, especially when it comes to bugs.
3) I recognize that ED and NMS are very different games in many ways.
So why do I personally prefer ED to NMS, now that I've had time to fully "test drive" the latter? Realism.
The Stellar Forge is Frontier's crowning achievement IMO. My favorite activity is exploration, not just in ED, but any "open world" game. Exploring in NMS was fun at first, because there is a lot to see, but it begins to feel fake and inconsequential over time. I'm always very aware that I'm playing a game with NMS, but I can "lose myself" in the illusion that I'm exploring a real galaxy in ED. I can look up in the night sky and point to my wife and say, "That's where I'm at right now!" Planets, while "boring" compared to NMS, are amazingly realistic, which I prefer. I follow a number of CMDRs on Twitter, but I also follow NASA and other space agencies, and more than once I've looked at a picture before looking who posted it and confused actual photographs from a planetary probe with screenshots from Elite, and vice-versa. That never happens with NMS screenshots, LOL. Of course I can go on about the realistic simulation of gravity, planet rotation and revolution, the incredible star field (which I just noticed is dynamic when zooming), the catalog stars and nebula, and on and on. There is just no other game like this, especially on the consoles. Even the galaxy map is amazing IMO.
Of course there's the ships and realistic space flight and combat. Obviously "realistic" relative, but I can actually picture real spaceships flying like ED ships thanks to sophisticated computer-aided fly-by-wire. Just think of how modern quadcopter drones fly. Compare this to NMS, and there's just no contest. Now I do have issue with how some of the ships in ED are designed, but there are enough ships that I can avoid the ones that feel off in regards to scale or layout.
Missions in ED are seen as a weakness, and rightfully so, but NMS is not that different. When I first started playing ED, every mission felt new and exciting. It's the repetition that gets old, and this also happened to me in NMS. I stopped playing because I grew tired of grinding to unlock blueprints, which is much more "mandatory" in NMS than ED unless playing in creative mode. One thing NMS does have (along with just about every other game with quests) is a few good story-based missions. I really wish Frontier would add some amazing "quests" with voice acting. I'm not talking about "you are THE hero" quests (I know I'm not Dragonborn in ED), but I would like to be somebody's "hero". But that's a topic for another thread.
One thing I really like in NMS that I miss in ED is "space legs", itself a topic all its own, but worthy of quick mention here. In real life, I often pull over the car and get out and walk around when on a road trip. It lets you experience the world in a way that's more tangible than from the 'cockpit'. As an explorer, I would love to walk around some of the "scenic pullovers" where I park my ship or SRV, stand under a water geyser or warm my hands by a small volcanic spout, take a selfie, gather with other CMDRs and kick a football around in low G, etc. If you look at the screenshots from NMS, this is the kind of things the majority of players are loving about space legs. I personally don't need to walk around the stations, which would take a lot of work, but it should be relatively easy to get my existing holome out of the chair and onto the surface of a planet. It would also make things like exploring Guardian ruins much more enjoyable IMO.
Finally, base-building. This is a huge part of NMS, and I definitely see the appeal in it. I also understand the technical difficulties of bringing this to a game like Elite Dangerous, and why many players wouldn't even be interested in this. Someone once said that our spaceship is our home, and this is the "base-building" I'd like to see added to the game someday. Outfitting and customizing my ship is one of my favorite activities in ED, and I would greatly enjoy to be able to take that a step further and "build" the interior of my ship. Assuming we had the aforementioned space legs, it would great if we could have customizable "captains quarters", crew lounge, heck, maybe even a basketball court "module" on the bigger ships. As an explorer, I would love to create different "homes" out of a big ships like the Anaconda and Orca. I would also enjoy making a proper "battleship" out of my combat Conda, with NPC crew manning their stations. I know this all sounds like pie-in-the-sky, but it actually is a lot less complicated than NMS's base-building system (which also comes with NPCs).
The point I'm trying to make in those last two paragraphs (I drifted off topic, sorry) is that even where NMS has things I really would like in ED, I feel those things are easily within reach of Frontier, if they choose to add those things. Even without space legs and ship building, I found myself drawn back to ED after taking a couple of months off from the game, and this is with some horrendous bugs! I thought it would be good to let the developers know that they do indeed have something special, and I hope this new "era" focuses on what makes ED unique and great, because this game is indeed a diamond, albeit in the ruff.
1) I actually think NMS is now an amazing game and a brilliant achievement in procgen.
2) I have many complaints about ED, especially when it comes to bugs.
3) I recognize that ED and NMS are very different games in many ways.
So why do I personally prefer ED to NMS, now that I've had time to fully "test drive" the latter? Realism.
The Stellar Forge is Frontier's crowning achievement IMO. My favorite activity is exploration, not just in ED, but any "open world" game. Exploring in NMS was fun at first, because there is a lot to see, but it begins to feel fake and inconsequential over time. I'm always very aware that I'm playing a game with NMS, but I can "lose myself" in the illusion that I'm exploring a real galaxy in ED. I can look up in the night sky and point to my wife and say, "That's where I'm at right now!" Planets, while "boring" compared to NMS, are amazingly realistic, which I prefer. I follow a number of CMDRs on Twitter, but I also follow NASA and other space agencies, and more than once I've looked at a picture before looking who posted it and confused actual photographs from a planetary probe with screenshots from Elite, and vice-versa. That never happens with NMS screenshots, LOL. Of course I can go on about the realistic simulation of gravity, planet rotation and revolution, the incredible star field (which I just noticed is dynamic when zooming), the catalog stars and nebula, and on and on. There is just no other game like this, especially on the consoles. Even the galaxy map is amazing IMO.
Of course there's the ships and realistic space flight and combat. Obviously "realistic" relative, but I can actually picture real spaceships flying like ED ships thanks to sophisticated computer-aided fly-by-wire. Just think of how modern quadcopter drones fly. Compare this to NMS, and there's just no contest. Now I do have issue with how some of the ships in ED are designed, but there are enough ships that I can avoid the ones that feel off in regards to scale or layout.
Missions in ED are seen as a weakness, and rightfully so, but NMS is not that different. When I first started playing ED, every mission felt new and exciting. It's the repetition that gets old, and this also happened to me in NMS. I stopped playing because I grew tired of grinding to unlock blueprints, which is much more "mandatory" in NMS than ED unless playing in creative mode. One thing NMS does have (along with just about every other game with quests) is a few good story-based missions. I really wish Frontier would add some amazing "quests" with voice acting. I'm not talking about "you are THE hero" quests (I know I'm not Dragonborn in ED), but I would like to be somebody's "hero". But that's a topic for another thread.
One thing I really like in NMS that I miss in ED is "space legs", itself a topic all its own, but worthy of quick mention here. In real life, I often pull over the car and get out and walk around when on a road trip. It lets you experience the world in a way that's more tangible than from the 'cockpit'. As an explorer, I would love to walk around some of the "scenic pullovers" where I park my ship or SRV, stand under a water geyser or warm my hands by a small volcanic spout, take a selfie, gather with other CMDRs and kick a football around in low G, etc. If you look at the screenshots from NMS, this is the kind of things the majority of players are loving about space legs. I personally don't need to walk around the stations, which would take a lot of work, but it should be relatively easy to get my existing holome out of the chair and onto the surface of a planet. It would also make things like exploring Guardian ruins much more enjoyable IMO.
Finally, base-building. This is a huge part of NMS, and I definitely see the appeal in it. I also understand the technical difficulties of bringing this to a game like Elite Dangerous, and why many players wouldn't even be interested in this. Someone once said that our spaceship is our home, and this is the "base-building" I'd like to see added to the game someday. Outfitting and customizing my ship is one of my favorite activities in ED, and I would greatly enjoy to be able to take that a step further and "build" the interior of my ship. Assuming we had the aforementioned space legs, it would great if we could have customizable "captains quarters", crew lounge, heck, maybe even a basketball court "module" on the bigger ships. As an explorer, I would love to create different "homes" out of a big ships like the Anaconda and Orca. I would also enjoy making a proper "battleship" out of my combat Conda, with NPC crew manning their stations. I know this all sounds like pie-in-the-sky, but it actually is a lot less complicated than NMS's base-building system (which also comes with NPCs).
The point I'm trying to make in those last two paragraphs (I drifted off topic, sorry) is that even where NMS has things I really would like in ED, I feel those things are easily within reach of Frontier, if they choose to add those things. Even without space legs and ship building, I found myself drawn back to ED after taking a couple of months off from the game, and this is with some horrendous bugs! I thought it would be good to let the developers know that they do indeed have something special, and I hope this new "era" focuses on what makes ED unique and great, because this game is indeed a diamond, albeit in the ruff.
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