Why is ship interiors something that is not planned to be included if at least half the player base wants it?

It's funny how listening to it now, David himself describes the gameplay that interiors would provide, how the ships were designed like that from the very outset and now people are saying they see no use in them.
It's called being in the fdev forums, outside of the forums on the reddit and discord you'll find people that don't worship FDEV and want them to actually provide meaningful content regularly, rather than half broken game play loops generously given to us every few years with almost nothing inbetween.
 
Well I stand corrected then!

Let me get my pitchfork......
No no no... lemme be clear I'm not about pitchforkery... I just want people to realise what the plan from the very beginning is/was! I'm more hopeful and just want it to come eventually, i don't hate on the devs, just hope for them to be given more resources to get what they do done more quickly.
 
Actually that's a good point - I wonder how many bods actually work on EDH/EDO? We go through these huge content droughts which makes me think not many.

Anyway, I don't have a particular horse in this race - ship interiors would be nice if done properly and not half-baked - it's in my "nice to have" column. I would much rather they focus on fixing EDO and the outstanding bugs and some much needed QoL features in the base game - that for me, is where I would like their efforts to go.
 
Walking around is enough for me. I play Elite for one thing: immersion. I will love walking around my ship for the same reason I love looking from it from outside admiring its size and for the same reason I love walking on it.
Until it gets boring...
Back in 2011 EVE-Online introduced 'walking on stations', basically space legs for EVE-Online pilots. Don't get me wrong, it was very cool walking around the captains quaters - for like the first 10 times but then it got boring and I moved my butt back to my cockpit where I could do the same stuff but faster.
Ship interiors sounds good on paper but wouldn't add much value at least for me, especially if there is a risk that the performance breaks like in ED:O stations.
Apart from that, maybe it's not the best time to ask for more features while FDev is desperately trying to fix the ED:O issues.
 
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Until it gets boring...
Back in 2011 EVE-Online introduced 'walking on stations', basically space legs for EVE-Online pilots. Don't get me wrong, it was very cool walking around the captains quaters - for like the first 10 times but then it got boring and I moved my back to my cockpit where I could do the same stuff but faster.
Ship interiors sounds good on paper but wouldn't add much value at least for me, especially if there is a risk that the performance breaks like in ED:O stations.
Apart from that, maybe it's not the best time to ask for more features while FDev is desperately trying to fix the ED:O issues.
To be honest it makes business sense for them to do stuff like this though, in MMORPG's we have emotes that serve almost no purpose and the majority of the playerbase will not use them. But the people that do use them will love it and will generally will pay money to unlock more and more. The Role Play community in SWTOR for example will not be as a big as the main playerbase, but they probably spend more on the game unlocking this kinda stuff.
 
Today, the Arthur dude on the live stream just said that it is not being considered at all. Why? I don't get it. On every video, every trailer, in every forum, people are asking for it and they are saying no. The only explanation was the stupid reason that it is too much trouble going to the pilot seat and through the entire ship, which makes absolutely no sense because right now, the larger the ship, the more distance has to be traveled through the hangar and to get to the blue light in general. It makes no sense.

Are they simply trying to dodge saying that they are lazy?

Also is someone from FDevs overseeing these posts? Is no one from their team supposed to respond to these questions in the forum?

i think Star Citizen already proved ship size is no reason not to do ship interiors
 
To be honest it makes business sense for them to do stuff like this though, in MMORPG's we have emotes that serve almost no purpose and the majority of the playerbase will not use them. But the people that do use them will love it and will generally will pay money to unlock more and more. The Role Play community in SWTOR for example will not be as a big as the main playerbase, but they probably spend more on the game unlocking this kinda stuff.

Maybe if FDev should consider to sell it as a seperate DLC to make money out of it (assuming the expense didn't justify the implementation of such feature).
And still a risky venture.
 
I want to take the optimistic approach that Arthur has to say something like "there's no plans for that" just to shut down further "yeah, but ..." from the community. I'd like to think Frontier are open to ship interiors, may even be developing it (we don't know and anyone who does know has signed an NDA) but are not ready to reveal it yet.
 
I want to take the optimistic approach that Arthur has to say something like "there's no plans for that" just to shut down further "yeah, but ..." from the community. I'd like to think Frontier are open to ship interiors, may even be developing it (we don't know and anyone who does know has signed an NDA) but are not ready to reveal it yet.

They have probably done some work on it in the past, however it's a relatively small team that's just added a massive additional bunch of immature functionality on top of a complex online game that already had lots of areas that need more iteration - so announcing a massive future upgrade as a knee jerk response seems inappropriate marketing. They probably know they can monitize ship interiorors but I'd imagine that from the company management position, without the Odyssey sales to back that up - it's not the right time to focus on something else.

I'd like to imagine that they could see past the Odyssey sales figures, ED is still very popular - if they are able to figure out how to go forward with an adjustment to business strategy. It might be a good time to bolster the dev team and run a specific sub team for community voted features with a constant commentry on how that team are doing.

One thing I've seen people here (and Obsidian Ant mentioned) is the community being "grown up" enough to understand when features need to be dropped. As a developer myself and having worked on many a dev team over the years, I have to say that's a bit of a fallacy and any developers that are put into the public eye could risk being hung out to dry. We've seen a couple of pretty good community managers getting roasted by the community in the past. If they went down the road of developing interiors as an open initiative I very much doubt any developer would want to go on some stream and say "we simply can't get it to work so its being dropped for now" even with the best explanation and in depth narrative. Those developers are trying to pay mortages and feed kids, they worry about their future. Don't expect to make them reality TV.

Sure, people will point at Star Citizen and call that open, I'd argue that what you see there is a very brushed over "here's all the good exciting stuff", they can simply move stuff back into their "Backlog" and their paticular funding model supports that.
 
Peak forum moment, FDEV are apparently allowed to lie about the games they are making during their kickstarter and it's ALL GOOD! You know... if FDEV had tried to get capital funding and had lied to investors, we all know how that would pan out :). But apparently because we are a bunch of suckers we are fine that FDEV lied to us when we invest in them.
Equally, we shouldn't be so insistent as players on "No, you lied to us!" that we insist that Frontier implement every single bad idea they came up with during the Kickstarter/pre-release days, when they had absolutely no idea of what running a MMO environment rather than a single-player game really meant, and the idea that players might form organised groups rather than just interacting in chance meetups didn't seem to have occurred to them.

Take that quote about sneaking on board another ship while it's loading cargo, and that other ship might be owned by a player. It sounds cool. I'm sure when it was said they were just thinking about how cool it would be. While I'm sure there are technical challenges it's something which could appear in the game in a purely technical sense. But let's think now about what adding that gameplay would practically mean for Elite Dangerous.

First up: multi-minute cargo loading delays to give someone in the concourse time to notice that a ship has docked, select the right elevator, and sneak onto the landing pad while the cargo is being loaded. Obviously - unlike now - you'd need to descend into the hangar for cargo transfers, or if docked on a surface pad at an Odyssey settlement the containers would be transported visibly from the storage buildings. Very immersive ... can you imagine the complaint threads those delays would raise?

Secondly: what happens when you're onboard? If you sneak onto the bridge and blast the pilot with your Intimidator ... then what? Can you steal the ship? If so, and the ship owner gets to pay 5% rebuy as normal to respawn themselves ... this is the biggest money-and-engineered-module-copying exploit the game would ever see. If not, what are you doing here? When you gun down the pilot does the ship self-destruct and send you to the rebuy screen too? Or are you just restricted to whichever cargo hold you sneaked into, and it's basically an Apex taxi experience but far less reliable and with the risk of a hatchbreaker limpet coming in half way through to eat you?

Are you only able to sneak on board ships if the other player also has the Interiors expansion? If so, does that encourage people to buy it or not? If you can sneak on board anyone's ship, how do they defend themselves if they don't have the expansion? Can someone force you to respawn off their ship simply by relogging immediately after leaving the station? If so, would that become a normal part of precautionary gameplay? If not, what does happen to you and the ship when they log off?

Obviously most of these issues disappear if you can only sneak aboard NPC ships / only NPCs can sneak aboard your ship - though enforcing loading times would make "NPC Asp docked at an outpost" even more annoying to everyone else, still! - though there's still a question of "can you use a cheap suit+weapon set to steal yourself a couple of T-9s an hour?" to which the answer probably ends up being "yes"... but equally, if you don't want to deal with NPCs sneaking aboard your ship to sabotage it, why not just not play the Interiors DLC? "This expansion mostly adds bad things to happen to you" is going to be a tricky sell.


Cool concept, no way it would ever work within the existing Elite Dangerous game or anything much resembling it, would be in practice really unpopular if they tried once you get into actual implementation rather than concept art.
 
So whatever the reason is - its probably not laziness! (Why is this insult even a thing, in internet forums? Does anybody really believe this?)
No, I was joking, I should add a disclaimer that most of my post are meant ironic and/or sarcastic. But then again... my pathetic comedic attempts are often ruined by the language barrier.
Which of course doesn't stop me from trying anyway
 
No, I was joking, I should add a disclaimer that most of my post are meant ironic and/or sarcastic. But then again... my pathetic comedic attempts are often ruined by the language barrier.
Which of course doesn't stop me from trying anyway
Don’t worry, this wasn’t targeted against you specifically.
I just read this again and again and most of the times it’s meant in no way ironically.

Maybe, if an expression like that is so worn-out and used so often totally non-humorously, it’s not a sensible way to add irony to a topic? Its just too easy to be taken as rude and inconsiderate. Just my opinion, of course.
 
Here's a better question:

What percentage of the player base wanted a sub standard, generic, single mode, First Person Shooter mini game added to their space sim ?
It's less fun, less enemy types, less weapons, less variety of combat arenas, less game modes and a lot lower frame rate than pretty much any FPS game you care to name.
 
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