Why is the Mission system so static?

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

I think there's three big differences, though:

1) A proper economic-management / city-builder / 4X game has an interface designed for doing mass operations and comparisons - things like multiple windows and subwindows, menus, mouse control, overviews, alerts, etc. You can collate and focus on the information important to you. In Elite Dangerous that view space is largely taken up by flying the spaceship, and the interfaces are optimised for joystick/controller (and at the very least have to work with one) while being readable at the lowish resolutions of VR.

2) Most of these games do have tutorials and also campaigns with carefully done difficulty curves, which gradually introduce all the aspects. In Elite Dangerous, sure, they could do a tutorial or two about how the mission system or economy worked ... but then you'd basically be thrown into highly competitive multiplayer.

3) It doesn't matter too much if an edge case or two gets left in a single player game - if you can bring down an economy by building three shoe shops too close together, it would be a bit strange but people would quickly learn not to do that. In Elite Dangerous people would be building shoe shops all over the place. See for example the mess that Planet Zoo's multiplayer economy has ended up in.

If Frontier released an economic/fleet management game set in the Elite universe, I'd probably buy a copy. But I don't think bolting it on to a spaceflight game will work. (It probably depends if you liked the X series or not, and I didn't)

See i was just going to say i love the x rebirth tutorial. As cheezy and bgrade as it is, its really does the job of introducing the game systems and the lore. It disguises so badly that the campaign is the tutorial, they didn't even try. But i really like that model. I enjoyed it and appreciated the introduction into basically all the game systems from playing it.

I think all your points are valid, but definitely in the scope of a more brave or flexible developer if frontier were up to the challenge. You can't say much for not even trying. Then actually bothering to look at the player metrics when they haven't told the mainstream its there and how to use it. There's no way elites development hasn't been bent by this pattern thinking about it.. at the very least in terms of disabiling or trivialising progression instead of even a one liner saying this is what they intended and letting the community do the rest.

Anyway, this was interesting back in 2016, this boat has probably long sailed. Will be curious on how they approach space legs. Guess they're trying with tutorials, so that's probably it. Hope they get the balance right.

 

[TheSisko]

Thanks for the replies, Commanders.

Even with the current mission system, I see no reason why missions don't make more use of the existing features in the game without a major rewrite of the mission board generator.

I mean, why not have Fuel-Rat missions? "Go to System X, find ship Y and fill her up before she runs out of fuel and goes pop!" That right there would make me use fuel transfer limpets for the first time, ever! No need to take system state and BGS for that, surely? Just an server instance with a single, fuel-scoopless ship and a teaspoon of fuel left in the tank.

Or even Ship Repair missions, as above but you're basically a breakdown service, "Commander, your hull is shot to hell, but we can fix that with my party-pack of repair limpets!"

Or even the return of the long range haulage missions. While were at it, how about some 500+ ton missions suited for the T9 and Cutters out there? We already have Outpost 180 ton missions which only ONE ship can do with one trip!

So many possibilities, but the game for whatever reason just doesn't exploit them. Maybe this time next year? But I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[Jmanis]

Even with the current mission system, I see no reason why missions don't make more use of the existing features in the game without a major rewrite of the mission board generator.

I'll come back to that...

I mean, why not have Fuel-Rat missions? "Go to System X, find ship Y and fill her up before she runs out of fuel and goes pop!" That right there would make me use fuel transfer limpets for the first time, ever! No need to take system state and BGS for that, surely? Just an server instance with a single, fuel-scoopless ship and a teaspoon of fuel left in the tank.

Or even Ship Repair missions, as above but you're basically a breakdown service, "Commander, your hull is shot to hell, but we can fix that with my party-pack of repair limpets!"

These basically already exist from FD's perspective as USS Distress Calls built as scenarios.

I agree that having these as mission types would be good

But going back to the very first point, there are simply too many basic mission types, which aren't restricted enough by constraints such as government, state and economy to allow for sane player choices... and it's not helped by the blobby rng. My canonical example is i can still go to a corporate government, extraction economy, boom state only, and get a board full of assassinations and massacres, instead of what you'd reasonably anticipate being a bunch of delivery/source missions.

FD are kinda painted into a corner with mission types because the boards can't serve much more than 100 missions, and that'll be spread across 7 factions. They either need to:

• create new boards separated by broad proficiency, such as combat, trade, rescue and recovery, crime; and/or
• make state/government/economy make more noticeable, hard distinctions between the available types of missions.

Note, FD already said when i mentioned something similar to the 2nd point that "... This already happens"... but I'm 99% sure they consider "Wartime salvage of black box" to be different to "outbreak salvage of personal effects " or "deliver food to famine" and "deliver medicine to outbreak" to be the different... i consider them to be the same since functionally, the missions are identical. This is fundamental to why the boards feel so static; there's no functional difference between most state/gov/econ types.

Point 1 is exactly what they did with passenger missions, because FD (probably) realised how much of a pita it would be to churn through mission boards waiting for passenger missions when you have a specific fit for that; the same problem applies to any missions needing specific equipment, which is why board separation is important.