Do it, and I'll post a "why aren't the why threads all stickied together" thread? And maybe even a "Why not make a "Why?" subforum?"
Why Space Legs?
- Thread starter Layne Vakarian
- Start date
We could also discuss why people always feel the need to ask 'why?'. Is it what makes us human, is it in our genes? We should do a podcast, probably call it the "Why Chromosome".
But...
As for the Space Legs, I am getting further from the belief point and nearer to the "I very much doubt this will come about" point.
The reason for this change of mind is that the more FDev put in the game that can be done from the seat the less likely we are to have a reason to leave the seat, and with only a (comparatively) few thousand players (many of which are happy to remain seated) the effort required from FDev simply isn't worth it.
FDev have chosen their path on the backs of new casual players for sales and fripperies, it seems that 'guns' are the chosen favoured part of a ship for many (not all) players, I see a lot of 'hero chat' in the forums about shooting this or that and the various 'combat' loadouts, and it leads me to believe that shooting stuff is the top thing to do, that leaves walking around doing 'other' stuff and staring in wonder at the shear scale of things pretty low on the list, "OHNO! it's gonna waste time"
There are Explorers out there that don't want combat, yes, quite a few, but many of those just wish to sit and database their collections of rares and oddballs, or make the biggest jump ever, or travel further that anyone else, there just doesn't seem to be as many players wanting a space adventure as there used to be, so really Space Legs might just not be worth it any more, the game seems to have moved further away from the dream that many (not all) of us had of 'First Encounters ++' kinda like FDev said "we decided we're not so much gonna push the boat out here, but you can have pedalo's in lots of different colours and crash into each other for fun, oh yeah we might introduce grassy banks and a 'small' wave machine too"
As for the Space Legs, I am getting further from the belief point and nearer to the "I very much doubt this will come about" point.
The reason for this change of mind is that the more FDev put in the game that can be done from the seat the less likely we are to have a reason to leave the seat, and with only a (comparatively) few thousand players (many of which are happy to remain seated) the effort required from FDev simply isn't worth it.
FDev have chosen their path on the backs of new casual players for sales and fripperies, it seems that 'guns' are the chosen favoured part of a ship for many (not all) players, I see a lot of 'hero chat' in the forums about shooting this or that and the various 'combat' loadouts, and it leads me to believe that shooting stuff is the top thing to do, that leaves walking around doing 'other' stuff and staring in wonder at the shear scale of things pretty low on the list, "OHNO! it's gonna waste time"
There are Explorers out there that don't want combat, yes, quite a few, but many of those just wish to sit and database their collections of rares and oddballs, or make the biggest jump ever, or travel further that anyone else, there just doesn't seem to be as many players wanting a space adventure as there used to be, so really Space Legs might just not be worth it any more, the game seems to have moved further away from the dream that many (not all) of us had of 'First Encounters ++' kinda like FDev said "we decided we're not so much gonna push the boat out here, but you can have pedalo's in lots of different colours and crash into each other for fun, oh yeah we might introduce grassy banks and a 'small' wave machine too"
It's common practice to have assets made with significantly higher detail than what is at the final offer, be it geometry or higher resolution textures, the question here is, is all that stuff still saved? Because more often than not that kinda thing just gets lost.
Even if they have those models with much higher triangle counts and textures at a much higher resolution, they still were never made to be used up close and would lack the granular detail.
I doubt anyone ever at FDev sat down to 3D model a desk with a bunch of props that would sit inside a control tower, or a rug for the floor, or keypads, etc, etc before getting these assets retopolised for the final game, and that is what I mean here, more than likely no stuff was ever made to be used in a first person game, so even if they still have the high triangle counts, they still wouldn't look good from a perspective that they were (apparently) not intended to be used at.
So we are talking about significant work in either case to make something that would work from a first person perspective on the ground, and again, all this would mean not just time and money but also higher system specs to run it.
The problem with all the spectacular suggestions posted here is time and money to develop them, you have to convince the money people.
It's not what you wanna have, is what you can have.
While my suggestion is very limited in scope, that doesn't not come from the lack of personal ambition or vision in regards of what something might be, but rather what it could feasibly be achieved.
This goes with what I said when I mentioned the inside of the stations would have all the services.
For these NPCs I say don't even include audio dialog and just stick to text. More versatile and way cheaper to produce.
Since I'm elaborating, having these modular rooms that could be stitched together would mean a controlled angular environment, easier to make sure players wouldn't be caught on geometry.
Because they would be instanced and closed off, they would be easier to render in comparison with the wide open inside of a station for example or just a surface planet base with assets reworked for up close detail.
I mean as is they already look simplistic enough from SRV view, walking around in them would only exacerbate the problem.
And that is not a bad thing, besides saving actual time it saves on having to develop everything "walking around" would entail. My whole point is to propose something that would be low cost to develop and thus get approved by the accountants, yet still deliver some value to the game, and by value I specifically mean more opportunities to interact with other players, which brings us to...
I'm not intimately familiar with how the PEGI rating system works, but if it would increase the age rating that would be a problem. Then again, this would only be for an hypothetical expansion so it wouldn't affect previous purchases.
And isn't that whole gold farming already possible? As is people are already trading Imperial Slaves for other stuff in game, there are groups dedicated to that.
Since I mentioned Guild Wars 2, that is a game that specifically embraced gold selling with their Gems system and it worked out really well, for the 4 years I played that game I never heard anyone complaining about it or referring to it as pay to win.
With FDev introducing Arks, maybe it's about time they open trading following the MMO blue print. I can maybe see veteran players dropping a billion credits on a new user (which isn't necessarily a good thing) but as long as the option is there to reject the offer I don't see a problem. Anyone that wants to skip ahead too quick already can with wing missions.
Do it as a documentary, on youtube, so you too can become an "influenza", you wouldn't need to do any research into it, just make stuff up and hopefully your journalistic flair would win a BULLitzer prize.
If you believe FDev have decided legs "ain't worth it", so new era is not going to be legs, what is it you think they have been working on?
The first sentence, that I've highlighted in orange, echoes my feelings, I often garumph about this game's target market being shifted from the more mature gamer, to twelve year olds. The revamp of conflict zones is a classic example of this, it used to be that conflict zones were intense and hazardous and, required a mature approach to them constantly interpretting scanner and situational awareness to manage the fight to keep yourself out of trouble. You had to deal with "combat attrition", there was even a combat attrition tutorial excercise when I joined the game, hang in there and rack up huge stacks of combat bonds. It was lucrative, but you had to be skilled to do it. Then they put in the progress bars nonsense, and the "wins", and "Special Forces" ("boss" ships). Ten eagles to "win" a CZ, talk about istant gratification and kiddyfying a game? So now to manipulate the BGS players have to "farm" these CZ "wins", ten kills, jump out, jump in, repeat. I mean seriously, now an interstellar battlezone is now like something out of a free to play cookie clicker game?
I accept the game needs new blood to keep up with natural wastage in the playerbase, so there was wisdom in devoting some dev resources to new player hand holding. Not ideal for the vets who were half way through a major content drought, but OK, we knew there was new things in the pipeline for new players. But to have diverted such an ammount of resources into the shiny new web store for microtransactions, and spammed the button for it everywhere? That was a low blow, essentially saying "We cannot deliver content we promised you two years ago in our first amelioration efforts, but oh look, new shinies to buy, and its ever so easily accessed with links in every damned menu page". And they say star citizen is a scam? Oh the temptation I felt at that time to write an actual fountain pen to basildon bond paper letter, not an online open letter, to say they could stick that webstore up their ARX.
However recruiting new players, and accelerating their development in game kind of makes sense. I mean, nowadays it would have been really hard starting from scratch with the same measly payouts we had back in 2.0 days, engaging with multibillionaires and stupidly over
Monetizing new players also has to be athing for FDev, as they say they have 100 staff working on new era, at an average salary of what £50k, thats £5million pounds a year, for two years, on new era alone, never mind the AWS charges for keeping the servers online, and the drip drip patches we also get. And there is a point of paint saturation amongst players, we ahve our favourite ships, and after a few attempts with paints etc we settle on a look for that ship, or maybe a couple of looks we shuffle between. Like my python, most of the time its crypsis white, occasionally tactical graphite, or some of the metallics, I've not bought paint for it for a couple of years now, and I haven't changed its ship kit configuration in even longer.
So yeah, I do feel that as a veteran player of Elite Dangerous, my toes are being trodden on as FDev to recruit and monetize new players. There has been at least a subconcious, if not a fully concious and deliberate, shift in FDev's focus from the mature, mostly PC playerbase of 1.X nd 2.X era to pandering to console kiddies, and the game is as suchbeing remoddled to become something more akin to ROBLOX. Why detract from the game to lure in new players, surely it would have been better to augment the game to lure them in. New kids want consequence free pewpew? Add a mode of being a SLF fighter pilot for either feds or imps on one of their cap ships, accept a mission from a bulletin board, telepresence from there to the cap ship to the fighter, and be elbows deep in a CZ, no rebuy, no risk, just combat bonds.
I used to fly explorer escort missions with Iridium Wing, and I've also legitimately made explorer elite, not cheesed it with some exploit, having travelled over half a million light years, but these days I'm mostly a bubble BGS player, so I can see both sides, and the circumference of this coin. Legs won't add as much to exploration as it would do to bubble play, where you could dock and Role Playing Game with NPC's, where you could get missions / quests from them, that had to be carried out on foot. Out in the void, what are you going to do with legs, walk around repair your ship? Spacewalk in front of Sag A? That'd be the new theme on reddit, not asps in front of stuff, but space suits infront of things.Maybe if legs and atmospheres came in close succession to each other, you could have new legs mechanics to take samples of flora and fauna on planets? Or swim down to a lake bed, pry open a colonial oyster and use its pearl to synthesize a new jump boost. However in the bubble, well there are a lot of awesome opportunities for what legs could bring. If it ever comes it will be interesting to see what it does bring.
There seem to be 16k textures etc in the game and usable now:
As well as suggestions in the files of higher LOD models either being prepped for or in place:
I agree with you that any level of prep beyond that seems unlikely. But it is suggestive that the workload for Legs would be reduced.
At minimum your initial claim that ‘everything’ would need a rework is probably excessive:
@DeanCalaway I'm going to reply inline in the quote, instead of slicing the quote as I did with my reply to @Skip Rockbounder
I really can't think of a good way to explain it right now, but it's more than just a matter of triangles and texture resolution.
Think of it this way:
Even if they have those assets made to hold up at 16K in ED, they were still made to be displayed at a certain (significant) distance from the camera.
So a tree in ED even being rendered with 16K assets wouldn't look as good as a tree made to be displayed at 1080p on a console in something like Far Cry 5, since that one was actually designed to be looked at up close.
It's something on the fundamental design of the asset.
Makes sense?
Why? Why Not?The interminable 'why [feature]' threads are missing the true question that may yet be answered by the forthcoming New Era update:
It doesn't matter which question is asked. The reverse is intrinsically implied.
What an exciting new necro!
Say it 3x and I’m sure FDev will never attempt one of the roadmapped Legs expansions.
And earn money by not selling ships instead.
Sounds like a plan.
If I look at the concept of space legs as a whole, across all the games I've personally experienced them in (No Man's Sky, Star Trek Online, Space Engineers, Empyion, EVE Online, X Rebirth, X4: Foundations, Star Citizen, Pulsar), I can't help but envision them being added in here sort of an aesthetic novelty that, at best, will either add an entirely new combat mechanic or will at least act as a gating mechanic to some new feature. Primarily, I see it being there to add immersion to the idea of "I am not a spaceship" for those playing the game in 2D mode (those playing the game in VR mode already have that feeling).
Note: Star Citizen is a unique snowflake in this list. It's got a $300,000,000 budget and has been in Alpha Test since 2013. Not release, not beta... ALPHA. ED is not going to compete with some of its mechanics, nor will any other game.
- Games that already had space flight models/mechanics in their game/series beforehand and added in walking later tended to do a poor job of it, not because the developers did a bad job necessarily but because there are limits to what you can accomplish when your main focus is space flight and walking is a side thing. In these games, the walking's main purpose was simply to show that you are actually a person, and give some aesthetics to look at, but that's it (Examples: Eve Online, X Rebirth, X4).
- A lot of players end up immediately asking "how will I be able bypass walking to accomplish this goal without needing to do so?" (Examples: X Rebirth, X4 Foundations)
- While I think it would be cool to have it add in-flight and in-combat mechanics to work alongside multicrew, like allowing a multicrew player to repair your ship using a welding tool in flight, not every game has been able to pull off the synchronization needed in networked games to walk while flying. To my knowledge, only Star Citizen has. Other games will let you move around in flight but you'll be jittery, bounce all over the place or flat out disappear (Examples: Empyrion, Space Engineers, Pulsar). Other games with networking will only allow you to walk when the ship is sitting perfectly still. (Examples: Star Trek Online, EVE Online, No Man's Sky).
- Some games have added FPS mechanics, but those have taken years to flesh out (Examples: Star Trek Online, Star Citizen). So there's a chance they could go that route, but I'd be shocked if they got it right out of the box in New Era and it didn't take years like Star Trek Online did or years and years and years and years like Star Citizen.
- No Man's Sky is a special snowflake, in that the walking is more fleshed out than the flying. NMS flying is mostly just traveling from point A to point B, with some combat recently added.
- EVE Online started down the path of space legs and essentially gave up, just making it a tiny thing to do on stations and then ultimately removing it entirely.
- The games with the smoothest walking mechanics but lower budget (Example: X4 Foundations) have no networking components to worry about
All together, I think Space Legs will disappoint a lot of folks because what they've built in their imaginations exceed what a company that already has a full workload could add into an existing game, especially a networked existing game. I think ED's walking will either attempt to let you do cool stuff in combat (but stands a high chance of failing due to desync), will make walking only available in stationary ships/objects, or will focus it around specific gameplay only for it that players may either end up ignoring similar to CQC, or asking how to avoid if it gates other mechanics.
All together, I'm not excited for space legs, mostly because there's so much I'd rather they do in the space part of this game first. So many sandbox tools we could use that we just don't yet have, and knowing that a certain allocation of budget and man power would be lost to that for something that historically has not gone over well with space sandbox players makes me a little sad.
But I could absolutely end up eating my words, and it turns out to be fantastic.
This is a very fine post
To make my one snarky note in the margins here, it's arguable that SC won't achieve that massive feature list either. But definitely agree ED can't & won't pitch for anything of comparable scope.
I think the only potential saving grace here, the possible difference, is that there's some suggestion of a degree of fore-planning / prior skunkwork for ED. I'm not sure about the X series, but certainly Eve never accounted for the Incarna addition when they set out on the game initially.
With ED we have talk like:
Those would be some of the key beats anyway.
All of that faces the impediment of a ton of technical debt for sure. It's a 5 year old game etc. And no strategy ever really goes to plan.
But I think it's at least clear that they're pitching for more than just 'stand back and appreciate the main spaceship gameplay loop'. And have been from the start.
Yeah movement around mobile ships is a really interesting aspect. But ultimately I feel like there's still a good game to be made even without 'dream' implementations in place. (IE an Elite with instanced interiors etc, to allow for mobility, but only a faked appreciation of what's happening externally, wouldn't be the end of the world).
I'm sceptical about quite a lot in this area though. Can they really do hull breach gameplay? (And so have at least part of the ship interior instanced with the exterior etc?). Can they do a better job than SC in dealing with the 64bit positioning at human scale. Etc etc.
And certainly P2P suggests any FPS implementation is going to be sketchy in many aspects. (But given they have at least delivered 'twitch' style combat with ships, if in limited numbers, I do wonder if the same could not be true of human scale. IE, we may still be martyrs to geographical disconnects and low-ping pain. But when it works, it should work)
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I dunno. The way I see it, it's happening anyway. Best to cross fingers for an implementation that, while not being the second coming of sci-fi games, may at least be the fruition of some long-held plans for the game. Guess we'll see
(PS I'm only holding that much hope out because this is a sizeable dev run. Horizons did not fill me with huge optimism about well-rounded plans regarding gameplay additions. But the non-seasonal approach gives me a bit more grounds for expecting coherence, and a dab more content. Time will tell )
To make my one snarky note in the margins here, it's arguable that SC won't achieve that massive feature list either
. But definitely agree ED can't & won't pitch for anything of comparable scope.I think the only potential saving grace here, the possible difference, is that there's some suggestion of a degree of fore-planning / prior skunkwork for ED. I'm not sure about the X series, but certainly Eve never accounted for the Incarna addition when they set out on the game initially.
With ED we have talk like:
- Constraints having been placed on the current game to accommodate future Legs:"There was a lot of discussion prior to and during the Kickstarter project as to whether you should be able to walk around in your ship. We looked at that in great detail. Ultimately we decided the arbiter has to be, ‘Does it make the game more fun?’ Because it’s a lot of extra work and it brings in more constraints. It’s something we will do, but it’ll be in a future update because we need so many things on a human scale for that to be additive and enjoyable."
- A fairly consistent focus on gameplay elements being at the fore, not just aesthetics / scale appreciation etc.
- Potential re-use of aspects from prior 'Legs' game The Outsider, which they never got to use.
Those would be some of the key beats anyway.
All of that faces the impediment of a ton of technical debt for sure. It's a 5 year old game etc. And no strategy ever really goes to plan.
But I think it's at least clear that they're pitching for more than just 'stand back and appreciate the main spaceship gameplay loop'
. And have been from the start.Yeah movement around mobile ships is a really interesting aspect. But ultimately I feel like there's still a good game to be made even without 'dream' implementations in place. (IE an Elite with instanced interiors etc, to allow for mobility, but only a faked appreciation of what's happening externally, wouldn't be the end of the world).
I'm sceptical about quite a lot in this area though. Can they really do hull breach gameplay? (And so have at least part of the ship interior instanced with the exterior etc?). Can they do a better job than SC in dealing with the 64bit positioning at human scale. Etc etc.
And certainly P2P suggests any FPS implementation is going to be sketchy in many aspects. (But given they have at least delivered 'twitch' style combat with ships, if in limited numbers, I do wonder if the same could not be true of human scale. IE, we may still be martyrs to geographical disconnects and low-ping pain. But when it works, it should work
)---
I dunno. The way I see it, it's happening anyway
. Best to cross fingers for an implementation that, while not being the second coming of sci-fi games, may at least be the fruition of some long-held plans for the game. Guess we'll see (PS I'm only holding that much hope out because this is a sizeable dev run. Horizons did not fill me with huge optimism about well-rounded plans regarding gameplay additions
. But the non-seasonal approach gives me a bit more grounds for expecting coherence, and a dab more content. Time will tell )
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I didn't even realize that this was a possibility. The fact that they could already have a legs engine at their disposal would make a huge difference in what they could implement. I still don't think that they could successfully pull of moving around on a mobile ship because of the way networking is handled in this game (P2P doesn't lend itself well to that at all, as Space Engineer's and Empyrion's devs can likely attest), but having something already in place does save a TON of resource for other types of gameplay like on ground CQC type matches, walking around ships that are docked or landed on planets, etc etc.
I had been laboring under the impression that they would be starting fresh, or relying on some underlying components of whatever engine they built ED on... if they can pull animations and reuse code from something else, that would change the scope of the project immensely.
He seems nice.
If one plays Egosoft X4 , or the game no longer mentioned, and what I can see from Star Citizen, legs are not value added. Unless the plan is to create a solid FPS, there's no point. Just spend the resources on developing a solid galaxy full of mystery or even create another galaxy and a long involved storyline to get to it.
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There would still be base building. And you know 'open only' threads would still be around and teleporting....