My issue with this is that we have nothing really to do with the SRV that is worth doing. Despite this many players simply enjoy driving around. If we used the same argument that people are using for space legs and applied it to the SRV then that feature shouldn't exist either, yet players not only use the SRV they also enjoy it despite the lack of any meaningful content to go with it.
My issue with this is that we have nothing really to do with the SRV that is worth doing. Despite this many players simply enjoy driving around. If we used the same argument that people are using for space legs and applied it to the SRV then that feature shouldn't exist either, yet players not only use the SRV they also enjoy it despite the lack of any meaningful content to go with it.
Honestly I think FDev have "space legs" right now in some form but have no game play for it. We all at other features that are "pointless" like CQC or multi-player so why would they release "space legs" until they actually have a good game loop for it. Braben has stated that certain features are easy to do but they just have no game play to go with them. Rather they focus on what they have first and tighten it up than focus on basic ideas for the future of this game.
I like to think of a first person adventure/roleplaying game with shooting elements and equipment based "skill" system. FPS mega battles is the least fitting to Elite, imho, especially when I look at CQC and the fate of Dust 514.
Uh, quoting Derek's opinion on this is like asking a vegan to rate a steakhouse. In his opinion both Elite and Star Citizen should have failed.
In a game this large and complex I'm willing to bet this one of the biggest hills to climb.
CIG is going the client server route, which is harder but more reliable. FDev seem to be ok with the downsides of peer to peer, which is much easier. So I don't expect to see the kinds of problems in Elite spacelegs that CIG are seeing, we'll just have combat logging and the same issues we already have.
There's more to it than just walking around for the novelty of it. People would tire of it after the first few times.
You have to give them things to do while on foot or else it'll get boring fast and it'll be essentially a waste of time and money and this is space legs is something that will require a lot of both if you want it done right.
On top of that, there is a lot more Frontier is doing in space itself and with our ships that I rather them focus on getting that done right now instead of something like space legs.
Last edited:
EVA would be much easier to do from a technical viewpoint than 'walking around'. What does it need. Flight model - in the game. Collision detection between objects and stations, ships, weapons (because you know someone's going to try taking potshots at you with a class 4 plasma accelerator whilst you're sat on the roof of your Asp trying to fix the aerial) - in the game. Accurately scaled models - in the game. I think people who say the ships and stations don't 'feel' big would probably have a different opinion if they were 3m away from them in an EVA suit.
As you say though, that's not a game. Having things to do that don't just involve spending five minutes flying around your Asp taking selfies or flying out of your cockpit with three units of polonium and shoving them by hand into your engine to supercharge your jump range would be a game and developing those gameplay scenarios is what takes time. You know that if they released a basic form of 'space legs' (God I hate that phrase) you'd have about 10%of the playerbase bouncing around the holds of their Asps and Pythons and sobbing with joy whilst everybody else decried it as a placeholder, or multipew v2.
I don't think it will ever become a feature in the game unless it can be released with significant meaningful gameplay content at day one because FDev's comments in the past have suggested that's their own threshold point for it. Personally I think that's a good thing.
Having the Space Legs actually be a worthwhile add-on for the people playing the game would necessitate making a vast amount of content, which would take quite some time. Otherwise we'd get Space Legs a la X: Rebirth, which was pretty mediocre (but the rest of the game was okay when patched up).
At the moment the biggest issue for SC development is probably their core flight model since they still can't decide on a proper speed/acceleration balance and still don't have properly functioning turret gameplay. The network code is the next biggest issue however as players can't get good enough performance out of the game to do very useful alpha testing. There are a number of significant features which should dramatically improve the network issues (bind culling being the main one) but they are still several months away from being implemented.
I was very skeptical of SC development for many years but even I found many of his claims to be rather excessive. He seems to be deeply invested in seeing the game fail for some reason and everything he writes on the topic is focused on this goal. At this point I don't think that SC can really fail in terms of not being released at some point so in that sense he's trying to argue against the game existing at all which is really a rather pointless argument. I don't suspect that SC will fully live up to all the hype it's generated (no game really could) but the idea that it's going to suddenly fail is basically not possible at this point with the amount of funding it's brought in so far.
Everything in Elite Dangerous is instanced and pretty much RNG'd, everything! land on an instanced planet, get out of the SRV and the surrounds generate around your avatar, just like they do in the SRV. Planet bases and space stations are going to be one corridor (think Star Trek) with RNG potted plants, locked doors and lifts going to specific area's where you are allowed access.
The biggest job would be creating derelict and crashed ships and bases and creating environments you can actually interact with and (for the love of gods), some NPCs to bring life to these environments.
The real problem is, how many people are going to pay for such a basic DLC (I would), unless it's stuff packed with new gameplay? Decent piracy update, hidden black market gameplay, first person shooter, decent Multiplayer connection for online bars where CMDRs can meet 'n greet, stealing ships and shooting dino's.
This is where you're talking about a whole game DLC that could plug into ED but also be a stand alone IP they could sell as 'Adventures in the Elite Dangerous Worlds' with a 20 hour storyline and RNG questlines to bulk the gameplay out (ala Bethesda).
Respectfully, not ALL of us want to be in FPS battles, raids, or similar scenarios. There are plenty of FPS games out there; I own dozens, which are made by companies that understand FPSes. I got bored and haven't finished most of them. There are so many things I'd like to see FD invest in, but space-legs isn't one of them.
Exactly this. Not only is Elite heavily instanced, once you notice the limits of this you can't "unsee" it. This is particularly noticeable when you find the trigger points that separate the instances and see the loss of information from the prior instance. A good example is when you drop out of SC into a USS and all the other RNG-generated USS signals you saw earlier are gone once you jump back to SC. You have to wait for new USSs to spawn again because they only ever existed in the prior SC instance which is completely separate from the USS you just dropped into. The USS in turn is completely separate from the SC instance you jumped back into. It's the same when searching for mats on a planet, the SRV triggers certain rocks to spawn but they are only persistent as long as you remain in the area. Even simply recalling your ship can affect the pattern of those spawns. After a while when you notice it all the time it continually breaks immersion but there's really no way around the issue given that Elite is based on a P2P architecture instead of a proper client/server model.
This would certainly take some development time and effort but it would a lot less labor intensive than some people have suggested. Since none of these areas are persistent they simply need to create new "personal" instances where you and your crew can interact with other individual characters (NPCs or other CMDRs). It would be very similar to dropping into a USS or deploying an SRV on a planet except that you would "deploy" yourself as an individual CMDR into an area. It doesn't need to have any direct connection to your ship or planet outside of that instanced area. It's a very easy solution to implement and wouldn't be difficult to design at all because Elite already does this for other gameplay features such as USSs and SRV gameplay. The "personal" instance would only exist using the P2P connection created by your local Elite client and any other CMDRs who happen to be in the same instance with you.
The issue here is that FD would likely need to "justify" any development efforts into space legs by packaging it as paid DLC. This puts FD in a bit of a bind because they can't offer that type of content for "free" and yet there isn't really a sufficient market for players to pay for another Elite expansion considering how disappointing Horizons and Beyond have been. If Beyond had truly offered meaningful improvements in core Elite gameplay then they MIGHT have gotten away with offering space legs as paid DLC for Season 4 but with what we've seen so far from Season 3 there is no way that's going to work. Elite is basically going to be stuck in a minimum viable product category and that quite simply does not include any room for space legs. Ironically if they did offer even a minimum viable product version of space legs for "free" they would still make an absolute fortune on cosmetic items and it would more than pay for itself in a short period of time, but I doubt that either Braben or FD has enough interest in the game at this point to consider that possibility.
Last edited:
Not really, concerning DSmart's opinion on Elite: Dangerous. He came around soon after ED's release and has acknowledged ED's success on both forums and interviews.
In his blog he wrote yesterday:
"Not until Elite Dangerous (which, at less than $20M to make, has now set the bar so high, that it has pulled ahead of the competition by decades) which went into crowd-funding in 2012, and released in 2014 as promised, was anything close ever attempted.. ..because those guys, including David Braben, who designed and developed it, know the limitations of technology, expertise, and the tolerance limits of gamers."
http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/6418/
Last edited:
Because there's more important stuff to do first probably.
Ask an EVE player just how well legs worked out for them... 
Legs is a separate, second game. They would do better separating open from solo.
Legs is a separate, second game. They would do better separating open from solo.
DeathStroke
Banned
It's not space legs it's self that's difficult, it's adding meaningful content that takes full advantage of space legs that's difficult. Just look at EVE, they had space legs, but nothing to do with it, so it was a massive fail, and everyone turned it off.