Would you prefer FDEV commitment to Atmospheric Planets or Ship Interiors

[DemiserofD]

It's no problem to ask the question. My problem with people is when they ignore the many answers that have been provided and go on saying there's no gameplay

This works both ways, you know. The problem is that people have suggested the same exact things countless times, those things have had holes punched all over them, and then the next week someone else suggests the same bloody things.

Look, just for you, I'll go through ALL your suggestions.

Immersion has gameplay value; this is why supercruise takes time, even though the engine could handle much faster movement, so that space feels bigger and it's more immersive. That's adding 5 minutes to an hour to basically every activity in the game, doing very very little, just for the sake of immersion. I think there should be a little more gameplay or a little less time in that loop personally, but it's clear Elite is willing to have immersive mechanics for the sake of immersion. So that is, I think, a good framing for this topic as a whole.

It's true that immersion has gameplay value, which is why I do agree that, for example, moving the boarding circle from the ground to the door would be a good idea. But it doesn't justify the massive expansion that would be comprehensive ship interiors.

Customising your ship is one gameplay mechanic. My Anaconda and my Imperial Courier are my ships; I love them dearly, and I'd love to customise them and make them mine, add furnishings to my quarters, repaint the interior, walk around and enjoy what I've created, maybe adopt a cat that has to wear a little safety harness. Elite's fantasy up until very recently was of being a cross between a fighter pilot and a ship's captain in space, and part of that fantasy is your ship as your home, a place you live in that can come to reflect you. I think that has value.

This is another realistic aspect of content; essentially the sims inside your ship. But would such a thing be worth designing massive ship interiors, plus reworking the entire physics model of ships to allow interior walking areas? Questionable, at best.

Another one is having a lab, so the on-foot exploration/scientist gameplay loop could consist of going out and collecting samples of new flora (and one day fauna), bringing it back to your ship and analysing it in a lab using verisimilitudinous minigames to get some fluff information about it (maybe one day procgen information, a grown-ups version of No Man's Sky scanning information), and possibly make a discovery that it's related to another sample you previously analysed. Every step of analysing could increase the payout from selling that data, until it's quite lucrative. This would also be a fantastic way to advance on-foot Guardian and Thargoid storylines, through strange readings, unusual sound frequencies, and discoveries that could affect gameplay (like the corrosion resistant cargo racks or the Guardian modules), all from analysing small objects you were able to find.

Why does this reqire ship interiors? If you're going to add content like this, it would be just as easy to do it in a menu or on foot while collecting it. It certainly doesn't require or benefit from ship interiors, other than the aforementioned immersion factor.

With that scientific information, as well as standard recipes and guides, plus all that ore you mine and refine, all those materials; maybe you can make some things with it yourself at a gun stripping station or engineer's bay. Replacement parts for your ship, small upgrades that aren't as large as engineering but can go on top of it, modifications to handheld weapons and suits. This could be something that's mechanically difficult but cheaper than buying it yourself, provides some advantage that can't be bought, or it could be a more normal "lite" crafting system to add another layer of "This is my ship, these are my tools" customisation into the game.

Same response.

If NPC combat AI was improved in specific scenarios, there could even be gameplay during combat. Have very, very good NPC AI take over for "defensive maneuvers", maybe give them a couple extra cheat pips as long as they aren't going to destroy anyone, while you go and repair the powerplant while it's still operational, or manually control the FSD charge so it can charge significantly faster, difficult maneuvers that are otherwise impossible to achieve. Imagine seeing a railgun shot go through the ship in front of you while you're sprinting to overcharge the FSD and get the hell out of there. Sounds exhilarating to me! Introduce hull breaches, fires, broken things, and the ability to fix them all. Maybe this better NPC AI couldn't protect your ship against good PvP players, but it could help against the more average PvPers and NPCs.

Unfortunately, it's quite likely impossible to make an AI that can handle your ship competitively in a fair way. Either it will be like the npc pilots and be largely ineffective, or it would be overpowered enough to be gamebreaking. Either way, there's no way you can meaningfully repair your ship in the timeframe of a fight. By the time you run down to your power plant, a football field away, it would have already exploded. The only time repairs would be feasible would be out of combat, but the only result of that is that players will feel forced to manually repair their modules, so as to save the space otherwise spent on an AFMU. That's not a good result from either end.

With the ability to leave your seat during combat for emergencies and have an NPC (or a less effective shipboard AI) take over, that introduces the possibility of boarding and brings real benefit to having NPC crew, who could then be walking, talking people you get to know and grow more attached to than the avatars we have now, even though they of course won't be Mass Effect level crewmates, just procgen backstories on procgen NPCs. You could hop into specialised "Ship Launched Boarding Vehicles", unarmed vessels that are highly agile and fast, with the possibility of being outfitted with more heat sinks for a stealth approach, a shield cell bank to punch through fire, or significantly more chaff than the enemy was expecting. Get close enough, magnetically tether yourself to the enemy ship, and board, getting ready for a gunfight onboard their ship.

Boarding is likewise impossible. For one, you're entering a ship the size of an aircraft carrier while leaving your own ship defenseless. For two, you're essentially rendering your enemy defenseless as well, if they choose to get up to fight you. For three, it makes small ships dramatically overpowered against large ones, as you could ignore all their engineering and such and just murder them in their chair.

The other alternative is if you have to disable their ship first, but there's a simple answer to that: The self destruct button. Otherwise, it's basically just griefing. You've got them dead in the water, and against their will you're forcing them into yet another form of combat. Only if they win, your other wingmates will just blow them up anyway, and if they lose, you probably get to plunder their ship or whatever. It's a lose/lose.

There's absolutely no way ship boarding can ever work.

If your ship gets boarded, be prepared to fight them off. Maybe you'll have upgraded your ship's interior with specialised turrets that won't shoot through your own walls, or combat bots like smaller skimmers, so you have a little more time than you otherwise would have, or the boarder/s can be defeated or driven off completely if they're not good enough to beat them. All of these combat changes would require some amount of rebalancing of ship combat to make it a bit slower paced, similar to the rebalancing that occurred a while ago to end the heat meta. Not impossible, and the gameplay sounds very fun to me.

See above. Fun, but absolutely impractical, if not completely impossible.

You could have a hologram room, where you can walk in a galaxy map, browse entries in the codex with 3D models, browse your catalogue of discovered alien species, watch ongoing CQC matches or canyon racing/hooning, or listen to rarer/more important Galnet news articles with associated imagery. Imagine hearing the story of first E contact with the Thargoids, and being able to watch that happening in front of you in-game. Imagine the same for the first encounter with on-foot Thargoids, if that happens. All of the first discoveries in this game are some of the best moments in this game, they give me the goosebumps to watch, but the only way to see them is on YouTube, out of game. Maybe Frontier will record the first gameplay interactions between new game elements and a CMDR as a matter of course, so they can play it back later for people.

Why do you need a room for this, besides the aforementioned immersion?

You could have new highly lucrative missions, where the goal is to board a ship known to be carrying a particular VIP or prisoner, get them out alive, and return them to the person who hired you. That sounds very fun to me; a lot of work, high risk of failure, high reward. Maybe the person you're rescuing/abducting talks to you and makes you a counter-offer - they're skilled and would like to join your crew, screw the mission. That gives a way of getting high-skilled crew members that don't cost an arm and a leg and still have a shared history and story of how they got where they are.

Why do you need ship interiors for this? That seems like shoving a square peg into a round hole, and ignoring all the existing content to boot. Do this exact thing except on ground bases, and you've achieved the same result with a fraction the dev time.

If you have skilled crew onboard your ship, you could face NPCs targeting them, not you, aiming to board and abduct them. If they succeed you have to go rescue them if you want them back. What an amazing story that would be! Your comrade in arms, abducted right off your ship by one of their old enemies, and you have to go and rescue them.

That sounds absolutely awful. Getting your minerals stolen is bad enough, getting an NPC you've put thousands of hours into stolen? That is the sort of thing that makes people quit games forever.

What about fully immersive bounty hunting? Track down your prey and you find his ship in station or on planet, but he's nowhere to be seen. Break in with some verisimilitudinous minigame to stop them knowing you're there and sabotage his flight computer so it jumps directly to you with a long cooldown, then lie in wait somewhere advantageous. Or just sabotage his FSD so you can hunt him down on the station/planet without having to worry about him leaving. Get notified if your sabotage device is tampered with, race back to their ship before they're able to fix it and escape.

Why bother adding ship interiors for this? Do it with a ground installation or station instead, same result, vastly less dev time.

General bounty hunting/pirate lord missions could be made even more fun with an optional objective to bring them in alive. Fight your way onto their ship while your crewmate (and possibly your wing) defends your ship, once you capture them you send out a threat to their crew that if they don't back off the pirate lord gets it, they high-wake out. But don't get too comfortable, because there's every chance they'll try and ambush you to break them free, or maybe the pirate lord breaks free on their own and tries to escape off your ship; maybe both happen at once, and you have to prioritise. That sounds fun to me.

Same answer as above.

You could come across a derelict ship at a signal source; explore it to find out what happened to them, and maybe come across something terrifying, maybe something valuable, maybe both.

Same answer as above.

Explore the inside of a crashed ship, maybe fight off scavengers, find a cool new mod for your gun or a new suit.

Same answer as above.

If you're running passenger missions, those could get a whole lot more interesting. Maybe you can negotiate their dumbass demands down to something more reasonable if you talk to them face to face, maybe one of your passengers is holding another (or a member of your crew) hostage and demanding to be D.B. Cooper'd, maybe one of your passengers is a hitman who received a job on you when you landed at the station, and the hitman and their team break out of the passenger cabin and try to finish you off. Higher risk missions, higher rewards, maybe rewards you never expected.

Same answer as above.

Maybe you're running rescue/evacuation missions, and as you're leaving the station there's a critical medical emergency on board. Jump up, treat them with your ship's first aid kit if you have one, watch helplessly as they die if you don't.

Same answer as above. Burning station interiors would be great, however, and would likely only require minor editing of existing assets.

You could get a mission to place an unknown package on another ship docked/landed at X location without being detected, no questions asked. Analyse the package at your ship's lab and discover it's not a Valentine's surprise, but a biological weapons vector set to go off after a certain amount of time; renegotiate for a higher fee, call it off, or hunt down the person who hired you for a bounty instead - more if they're alive. Maybe you don't want a bounty, maybe you want to board their ship, place their package on it, then destroy the FSD, thrusters, and comms before leaving. No reward, just satisfaction.

Same answer as above.

You could have a display case to display trophies and interesting things found on your travels. A strong enemy's pistol, a Thargoid artifact, a Guardian artifact, a plant specimen, a singular example of one of the rare goods, models of the various ships and stations, a Hutton Orbital mug... just a place to look over what you have done, and reminisce.

This goes back to the Sims concept, which is one of the few truly viable aspects of ship interiors. But is it worth the dev time just to be able to hang a few trophies up on a wall?

You can make yourself a coffee or another drink, and bring one over to your crew member. They'll appreciate it, and maybe that has some sort of gameplay impact long term, like a loyalty or trust metric. On that note, you could hit the jukebox and dance maybe, who knows?

Same answer as above.

You could just steal from a ship. Like sneak on, steal things, try and get off. Be a thief! Oh they're taking off? Well @#$&, now you're a stowaway and you need to figure out a way back.

See answer subsection B: Why does this require ship interiors? With the added caveat that being trapped on board a ship, unable to leave, is going to be awful 99% of the time. Not even in a fun way, it's more like dying and needing to get back to your ship from the prison colony 200ly away.

Ship interiors definitely will not include everything here. It probably won't include half. But honestly, it wouldn't take many of these ideas for it to be an enjoyable and worthwhile addition to the game, and it's important to understand that there absolutely is feasibly achievable gameplay for ship interiors. The only serious question of fact is whether FDev is willing to commit the resources to make it so.

Pragmatically, it's just not worth the dev time. Not when 95% of related content can be done without them at all, and the remaining 5% are largely tied to immersion, the value of which does not equal the required dev time to achieve it.

Side note, I wish to god there was some way it could be economically feasible for Elite to do an "integration" expansion, where they just go over all the various systems they've added with DLC/expansions and then forgotten, and integrate them all seamlessly. Make CQC an in-universe eSport where competition can earn you useful rewards in the main game, make multicrew work with wings (now teams), etc etc.

Now this I can get behind 100%. If they integrated many of the gameplay loops and made BGS and Powerplay better, it would exponentially improve this game.

 

[Bobbydylan]

I don;t see the gameplay added from adding different textures to walk around on, and different lighting affects when walking. Even if Fdev added earth-likes with full walkable cities, I don't see the point in adding a new place to do the same gameplay. I view adding earth-like worlds as a lateral expansion, more of the same.

However ship interiors could add complexity to existing game loops. It's a whole new layer to the game. It's depth.

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

I don;t see the gameplay added from adding different textures to walk around on, and different lighting affects when walking. Even if Fdev added earth-likes with full walkable cities, I don't see the point in adding a new place to do the same gameplay. I view adding earth-like worlds as a lateral expansion, more of the same.

However ship interiors could add complexity to existing game loops. It's a whole new layer to the game. It's depth.

I understand what you're saying and agree that ship interiors are higher priority, but it's wrong that atmospherics, earth like world's, and procgen cities are just more of the same. There's a bunch of exciting gameplay possibilities with all of them. Atmospheric world's? Storms and hostile weather systems. Sure, you could do something very similar on existing worlds, but it would be better in the fully immersive environment of an atmospheric world. Rivers and liquid bodies give on-foot opportunities that don't otherwise exist, like jumping off the roof of a base into a river that carries you away to where you parked your ship downstream, a way to escape faster than you otherwise could and tell a great story to boot. Earth like worlds, which I interpret as basically the addition of fauna and thick atmospheres, could give a lot of gameplay. Big game hunting animal attacks, rescues from completely different scenarios than other situations, beautiful vistas. Sure, you could do a lot of this on existing assets (sci-fi vacuum animals, basically) but it would be so much better in the context of an earth-like world. And procedurally generated cities have so much possibility. It's not even a theoretically solved problem yet, a decade away at the earliest, but if the setting can be created you can make engaging content for it. All of these things are so incredibly difficult to do that they're not coming even remotely soon, these aren't engineering or development problems like ship interiors, these are science problems that haven't been solved, let alone commercialised, yet. But that doesn't mean they won't be fantastic if we eventually get them.

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

This works both ways, you know. The problem is that people have suggested the same exact things countless times, those things have had holes punched all over them, and then the next week someone else suggests the same bloody things.

Look, just for you, I'll go through ALL your suggestions.

It's true that immersion has gameplay value, which is why I do agree that, for example, moving the boarding circle from the ground to the door would be a good idea. But it doesn't justify the massive expansion that would be comprehensive ship interiors.

This is another realistic aspect of content; essentially the sims inside your ship. But would such a thing be worth designing massive ship interiors, plus reworking the entire physics model of ships to allow interior walking areas? Questionable, at best.

Why does this reqire ship interiors? If you're going to add content like this, it would be just as easy to do it in a menu or on foot while collecting it. It certainly doesn't require or benefit from ship interiors, other than the aforementioned immersion factor.

Same response.

Unfortunately, it's quite likely impossible to make an AI that can handle your ship competitively in a fair way. Either it will be like the npc pilots and be largely ineffective, or it would be overpowered enough to be gamebreaking. Either way, there's no way you can meaningfully repair your ship in the timeframe of a fight. By the time you run down to your power plant, a football field away, it would have already exploded. The only time repairs would be feasible would be out of combat, but the only result of that is that players will feel forced to manually repair their modules, so as to save the space otherwise spent on an AFMU. That's not a good result from either end.

Boarding is likewise impossible. For one, you're entering a ship the size of an aircraft carrier while leaving your own ship defenseless. For two, you're essentially rendering your enemy defenseless as well, if they choose to get up to fight you. For three, it makes small ships dramatically overpowered against large ones, as you could ignore all their engineering and such and just murder them in their chair.

The other alternative is if you have to disable their ship first, but there's a simple answer to that: The self destruct button. Otherwise, it's basically just griefing. You've got them dead in the water, and against their will you're forcing them into yet another form of combat. Only if they win, your other wingmates will just blow them up anyway, and if they lose, you probably get to plunder their ship or whatever. It's a lose/lose.

There's absolutely no way ship boarding can ever work.

See above. Fun, but absolutely impractical, if not completely impossible.

Why do you need a room for this, besides the aforementioned immersion?

Why do you need ship interiors for this? That seems like shoving a square peg into a round hole, and ignoring all the existing content to boot. Do this exact thing except on ground bases, and you've achieved the same result with a fraction the dev time.

That sounds absolutely awful. Getting your minerals stolen is bad enough, getting an NPC you've put thousands of hours into stolen? That is the sort of thing that makes people quit games forever.

Why bother adding ship interiors for this? Do it with a ground installation or station instead, same result, vastly less dev time.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above. Burning station interiors would be great, however, and would likely only require minor editing of existing assets.

Same answer as above.

This goes back to the Sims concept, which is one of the few truly viable aspects of ship interiors. But is it worth the dev time just to be able to hang a few trophies up on a wall?

Same answer as above.

See answer subsection B: Why does this require ship interiors? With the added caveat that being trapped on board a ship, unable to leave, is going to be awful 99% of the time. Not even in a fun way, it's more like dying and needing to get back to your ship from the prison colony 200ly away.

Pragmatically, it's just not worth the dev time. Not when 95% of related content can be done without them at all, and the remaining 5% are largely tied to immersion, the value of which does not equal the required dev time to achieve it.

Now this I can get behind 100%. If they integrated many of the gameplay loops and made BGS and Powerplay better, it would exponentially improve this game.

How do I split up a quote into multiple little things to snipe one by one? I'm not very familiar with the forum even though my account is old, I don't come here often

 

[DemiserofD]

How do I split up a quote into multiple little things to snipe one by one? I'm not very familiar with the forum even though my account is old, I don't come here often

You basically need to highlight each segment and hit the quote option. Then you go to post and hit insert quotes on the bottom left.

 

[DemiserofD]

How do I split up a quote into multiple little things to snipe one by one? I'm not very familiar with the forum even though my account is old, I don't come here often

But before you do, know that I'm going to sleep atm so won't be able to reply for a bit. o7

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

The point though is that it's not our job, and we aren't required to be able to imagine how to get a gameplay loop working well

I agree... we can only give suggestions, not the way it should be done and how to balance it.

 

[Dartay]

How do I split up a quote into multiple little things to snipe one by one? I'm not very familiar with the forum even though my account is old, I don't come here often

Don't feed the troll. I've seen this forum user to this countless times and they're not doing it in good faith.

The real question should be: what about the inside of space ships makes them decide that engaging gameplay can't happen there?

EDIT: if their demands for gameplay ideas were really sincere, they wouldn't ignore the existence of Mass Effect, Blackwake, Sea of Thieves, Warframe, Guns of Icarus, Cosmonautica, Halo, Subnautica etc.

They also wouldn't ignore the fact that the single gameplay justification for Odyssey is FPS, which can also occur inside space ships.

etc etc

The discussion is turned completely on its head, as they force a start from the assumption that "@DemiserofD 's convoluted gameplay demands" are somehow a standard the industry is trying to meet.

 

[Dragsham]

Given the choice in Ops original post..
Planets.
Even though for me in vr ship interiors would rock..just the base game, requires planets that are landable with nice full on atmospheres and elws perhaps mebbe too much a reach.

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

How do I split up a quote into multiple little things to snipe one by one? I'm not very familiar with the forum even though my account is old, I don't come here often

No please! Don't do it, it's so annoying to read such post. Replying with a short and meaningful sentence is the smartest way to reply to such posts.

 

[Bobbydylan]

I understand what you're saying and agree that ship interiors are higher priority, but it's wrong that atmospherics, earth like world's, and procgen cities are just more of the same. There's a bunch of exciting gameplay possibilities with all of them. Atmospheric world's? Storms and hostile weather systems. Sure, you could do something very similar on existing worlds, but it would be better in the fully immersive environment of an atmospheric world. Rivers and liquid bodies give on-foot opportunities that don't otherwise exist, like jumping off the roof of a base into a river that carries you away to where you parked your ship downstream, a way to escape faster than you otherwise could and tell a great story to boot. Earth like worlds, which I interpret as basically the addition of fauna and thick atmospheres, could give a lot of gameplay. Big game hunting animal attacks, rescues from completely different scenarios than other situations, beautiful vistas. Sure, you could do a lot of this on existing assets (sci-fi vacuum animals, basically) but it would be so much better in the context of an earth-like world. And procedurally generated cities have so much possibility. It's not even a theoretically solved problem yet, a decade away at the earliest, but if the setting can be created you can make engaging content for it. All of these things are so incredibly difficult to do that they're not coming even remotely soon, these aren't engineering or development problems like ship interiors, these are science problems that haven't been solved, let alone commercialised, yet. But that doesn't mean they won't be fantastic if we eventually get them.

Sorry, I just don't see the difference in base jumping off of a tall cliff in an airless world to that of one with air. I also don't see storms or rain adding anything beside something nice to fly though.

The game hunting I think wont happen because FDEV don;t seem capable to creating large surface moving objects controlled by the AI, without making them fall through. There's a reason why settlements use skimmer and not SRV, FDEV can't code collision.

 

[Hamset]

Much prefer atmospheric planets!

 

[amigacooke]

Well we know Frontier have no plans for ship interiors, I suppose someone better ask Arthur whether they have any plans to expand the types of landable planets.

I wonder whether, at the moment, Frontier have any plans beyond rescuing the Windows version of Odyssey and getting it out onto console platforms?

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

I wonder whether, at the moment, Frontier have any plans beyond rescuing the Windows version of Odyssey and getting it out onto console platforms?

I wonder this too.
They said that this "New Era" was also supposed to expand the game more easily in the future, but this was said during the marketing phase so I don't know if we should believe it or not... it sounds like D.B. statements during Kick Starter.

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

This works both ways, you know. The problem is that people have suggested the same exact things countless times, those things have had holes punched all over them, and then the next week someone else suggests the same bloody things.

So there's not "no gameplay", then, it's that you don't like the suggested gameplay or think it's valid. My issues is with people who say things like "I've never seen anyone suggest good gameplay for ship interiors, they can't even think of anything" and keep saying it despite hearing plenty of good ideas. If you're not one of those people I wasn't talking to you.

On the broader point, I could choose to poke holes in literally anything people wanted FDev to do, including atmospheric planets. I don't, because I can see where they're coming from and I think that would be sick, even if I have a little bit better understanding of where the science currently is on procedurally generated life and cities so I understand it's not a good candidate for their next DLC. Speaking of which, can you clarify whether you're on topic for this thread? The thread asked whether ship interiors or atmospheric planets should come first. I may have missed your earlier comments, but I've only seen you talk about how you don't want ship interiors. Are you saying you want atmospheric worlds instead, or are you just saying ship interiors are bad?

It's true that immersion has gameplay value, which is why I do agree that, for example, moving the boarding circle from the ground to the door would be a good idea. But it doesn't justify the massive expansion that would be comprehensive ship interiors.

It's a lot of modelling work, that could re-use a lot of existing assets, and gameplay design. That's really it, it's not new science or anything like photorealistic procgen life or a galaxy full of accurate atmospheric systems. When I say "re-use assets" I'm referring to the up-close assets they've added for Odyssey, particularly building interiors, which are made of the same silver spray painted pallets as almost all ship interiors in fiction and which the in-universe ships definitely draw from, based on their cockpits (cockpit assets couldn't be reused, they're too low quality - or at least they were last I checked, I haven't looked at them in Odyssey yet). Let's assume they modelled the entirety of every ship 1:1 to the same detail as, say, the Normandy from Mass Effect. It's important to remember that the Normandy had some heavy TARDIS going on, and the interior was significantly bigger than the exterior, at least according to the official measurements (which are the measurements by which the Normandy is comparable in size to the Annie, Corvette, Cutter etc). So not every Normandy-sized ship in-game need be as big as the Normandy map was in Mass Effect - it would be significantly smaller. So for assumptions, the big one: I just counted the number of ships of each landing pad size, and multiplied it by the area of that landing pad, then added it all together across all landing pads. Obviously, it is not the case that every Small ship is exactly as big as a Small pad, every Medium ship a Medium pad, every Large ship a Large pad, and it is also not the case that literally every part of the ship will be modelled with nothing off limits and a paper thin hull. Realistically, the internal model is going to be significantly smaller than not only the pad, but the ship itself. But the calculations are a lot simpler as long as you keep in mind this will be a significant overestimate of how much "ship space" there is to model. Eyeballing it, it should be around half or a quarter of the true amount, but let's stick with the estimate for now. All of that area equals 0.499km^2, with no duplicates removed (e.g. the type 9 and type 10 would presumably have identical interiors, the Challenger line probably have nearly identical interiors, etc). So for "ship interiors", with a heavy overestimate on how much modelling would be required, you're looking at 0.5km^2. This would presumably cost US$40 (that's what more than 10,000 people voted for in ObsidianAnt's poll, at least). For comparison to some other expansions and games, AC Valhalla cost US$60 and its map is 103.6km^2, the Wrath of the Druids expansion cost US$25 and was 18.33km^2. AC Odyssey was significantly larger for the same price but had more water, Skyrim is comparable and so is its expansion Dragonborn (Solstheim). Cyberpunk 2077, which is mostly dense city with some desert areas, cost US$60 and was 110km^2. MMOs like ESO and WoW have significantly larger area/money, but I don't think that's a fair comparison despite E being an MMO: obviously it's a much more detailed one. 0.5km^2 (overestimate, remember) of ship interiors is going to be significantly more dense than a cityscape or wilderness, but probably not 200 times as dense. It would be a long project (although not as long as atmospheric worlds with rivers and plants and such, which is what this comparison is asking, remember), which is why it's important we let them know we want it now. But it is by no means a larger amount of work than is the norm for game companies charging that amount of money, it's very comparable. It's not some gargantuan development effort. It's just an expansion sized piece of content, one that is significantly more achievable than every other suggestion I've seen in the near term (e.g. atmospheric worlds with plants and rivers, etc).

This is another realistic aspect of content; essentially the sims inside your ship. But would such a thing be worth designing massive ship interiors, plus reworking the entire physics model of ships to allow interior walking areas? Questionable, at best.

Be worth it to me and the other people asking for it? Yeah, obviously. Be worth it to you? I'm guessing not. Be worth it to Frontier? Absolutely, no question. It's a pretty normal amount of work for an expansion that costs this much, and most of it is building spaces that they can remonetise multiple times through their cosmetics store. Want a cool bedsheet instead of the one that came with the ship? Arx. Want to hang posters? Arx. Cool paintjobs? Arx. Paintings? Arx. Better chair? Arx. Fancier looking gizmo? Arx. Cool decal on your curtains? Arx. It's a monetisation wet dream. I hate microtransactions, I support ship interiors for the reasons I stated, but it's certainly in Frontier's interest to pursue a course of action like that. Probably not in their interests to say so right now, though.

Why does this reqire ship interiors? If you're going to add content like this, it would be just as easy to do it in a menu or on foot while collecting it. It certainly doesn't require or benefit from ship interiors, other than the aforementioned immersion factor.

1. Doing things in a menu is significantly less satisfying than doing them "in person"
2. Immersion is the reason people play this game. No one would be willing to stand supercruise or driving under an extremely ponderous SRV elevator if they weren't in it for the immersion. There are games like No Man's Sky and others that are fun, lovely games that I wouldn't call immersive. Elite: Dangerous is a sim, it's immersive.

Same response.

Same response.

Unfortunately, it's quite likely impossible to make an AI that can handle your ship competitively in a fair way. Either it will be like the npc pilots and be largely ineffective, or it would be overpowered enough to be gamebreaking. Either way, there's no way you can meaningfully repair your ship in the timeframe of a fight. By the time you run down to your power plant, a football field away, it would have already exploded. The only time repairs would be feasible would be out of combat, but the only result of that is that players will feel forced to manually repair their modules, so as to save the space otherwise spent on an AFMU. That's not a good result from either end.

I answered these points already. Ship combat gets rebalanced to be a bit slower, and an NPC can drive your ship evasively when you need to get out of your seat, including just doing a good job of running away. It wouldn't be gamebreakingly unbalanced to make an NPC pilot good enough at avoiding fire that it can protect the ship from your average PvPer or any NPC while you go and do something on the ship for a maximum of like 40 seconds, unless they have to deal with a boarding attempt in which case they have to focus on that. It makes combat more interesting than just a fighter pilot battle, with fighter pilot battles still being totally possible because there are fighter pilot sized ships in the game that cannot realistically be boarded.

Boarding is likewise impossible. For one, you're entering a ship the size of an aircraft carrier while leaving your own ship defenseless. For two, you're essentially rendering your enemy defenseless as well, if they choose to get up to fight you. For three, it makes small ships dramatically overpowered against large ones, as you could ignore all their engineering and such and just murder them in their chair.

The other alternative is if you have to disable their ship first, but there's a simple answer to that: The self destruct button. Otherwise, it's basically just griefing. You've got them dead in the water, and against their will you're forcing them into yet another form of combat. Only if they win, your other wingmates will just blow them up anyway, and if they lose, you probably get to plunder their ship or whatever. It's a lose/lose.

There's absolutely no way ship boarding can ever work.

Small ships being able to take on bigger ships through cunning and deception is a feature, not a bug. "Have more expensive ship = win" is not an interesting competitive environment. Someone being boarded also isn't dead in the water, at minimum their ship is being piloted by an onboard AI, and if they have an NPC then they're piloting. They also have less to lose from being boarded than by being destroyed outright, by design. The "wing griefing" issue could be resolved by something like targeting computers refusing hostile lock-on to a ship with a member of their wing in it, so once you're on their ship they can't fire on it except with fixed guns, which the onboard AI/NPC pilot should be able to avoid. These are balancing concerns, not a reason to declare an entire gameplay loop completely impossible because you can't imagine it working. And in the absolute worst case scenario, where it's just completely impossible to balance PvP boarding, they can just remove it. Keep boarding a PvE thing, have the Ship Launched Boarding Vehicles be a Pilot's Federation sold vehicle that refuses to board a Pilot's Federation vehicle unless the owner of the vehicle authorises it. It would still be valuable considering most players play PvE and even the most exclusively PvP players would still benefit from everything that's not boarding.

See above. Fun, but absolutely impractical, if not completely impossible.

See above. Not impractical, not impossible.

Why do you need a room for this, besides the aforementioned immersion?

Immersion is the reason for this game lol. Plus the idea would be terrible if it was, what, accessed from the main menu? That would basically be a Frontier-produced YouTube for in-universe Elite content, and I'm pretty certain they'd never do it. Its value would come from it feeling like your ship has a holodeck you can use to browse the copious in-game media Elite has and could have.

Why do you need ship interiors for this? That seems like shoving a square peg into a round hole, and ignoring all the existing content to boot. Do this exact thing except on ground bases, and you've achieved the same result with a fraction the dev time.

You're not boarding a hostile ship during combat on a ground base. You can have the same mission structure at a ground base (why not?), but it would obviously be more fun, or at minimum a very different kind of fun, if you had to board a hostile ship to get at them.

That sounds absolutely awful. Getting your minerals stolen is bad enough, getting an NPC you've put thousands of hours into stolen? That is the sort of thing that makes people quit games forever.

Notice how nothing I've said indicates the loss would be permanent? I think making them die permanently with you having no way to save them would be bad game design. That's why you can send rescue ships for them from the rebuy screen, and that's why you can (and should!) go get them back if they're abducted. Don't even put a time limit on the mission, I don't want people heartbroken. But it would be fun, and it's a real consequence that can still be mitigated or avoided by gameplay so you don't lose something priceless.

Why bother adding ship interiors for this? Do it with a ground installation or station instead, same result, vastly less dev time.

No, not same result, you're not boarding a ground installation, that's its own gameplay thing and fantasy (and it's great! Once they fix the bugs it will be lovely), it's not the same as boarding an enemy ship.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above. Burning station interiors would be great, however, and would likely only require minor editing of existing assets.

Same answer as above. Adding burning station interiors is great and I'm sure it will happen. Out of curiosity, did you argue this strongly against the existence of station interiors? Or do you specifically have it out for ships?

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

This goes back to the Sims concept, which is one of the few truly viable aspects of ship interiors. But is it worth the dev time just to be able to hang a few trophies up on a wall?

Yes. They'll make their money back and more on cosmetics, while we get an immersive and fun game.

Same answer as above.

Same answer as above.

See answer subsection B: Why does this require ship interiors? With the added caveat that being trapped on board a ship, unable to leave, is going to be awful 99% of the time. Not even in a fun way, it's more like dying and needing to get back to your ship from the prison colony 200ly away.

1. It's risky to steal you know. Consequences.
2. You're not "unable to do anything". You can hide on the ship until they dock at the next station (a couple minutes, max - just jump and supercruise). You can hijack the ship and make them turn around. Don't know why you leapt to "unable to do anything", aside from your general penchant for wanting to say no to everything lol.

Pragmatically, it's just not worth the dev time. Not when 95% of related content can be done without them at all, and the remaining 5% are largely tied to immersion, the value of which does not equal the required dev time to achieve it.

The value of this game is immersion, and saying "We have ship interiors at home" and pointing to ground installations isn't 95% of the same content. Elite is not a competitive dogfighting game, it's a simulator where you're in the year 3307 and you get to feel what all the crazy fun future things feel like, and listen to space engines go vroom.

 

[Frankymole]

Well we know Frontier have no plans for ship interiors, I suppose someone better ask Arthur whether they have any plans to expand the types of landable planets.

I wonder whether, at the moment, Frontier have any plans beyond rescuing the Windows version of Odyssey and getting it out onto console platforms?

Arthur Tolmie said this week on the Lave Radio broadcast that they do indeed have additional features planned, not just fixes for current ones.

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

But before you do, know that I'm going to sleep atm so won't be able to reply for a bit. o7

Well, darn. I'm going to sleep in like 7 hours probably.

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

Don't feed the troll. I've seen this forum user to this countless times and they're not doing it in good faith.

The real question should be: what about the inside of space ships makes them decide that engaging gameplay can't happen there?

EDIT: if their demands for gameplay ideas were really sincere, they wouldn't ignore the existence of Mass Effect, Blackwake, Sea of Thieves, Warframe, Guns of Icarus, Cosmonautica, Halo, Subnautica etc.

They also wouldn't ignore the fact that the single gameplay justification for Odyssey is FPS, which can also occur inside space ships.

etc etc

The discussion is turned completely on its head, as they force a start from the assumption that "@DemiserofD 's convoluted gameplay demands" are somehow a standard the industry is trying to meet.

I mean, I got that sense, but they haven't done it to me yet. They could have earnestly misunderstood some of the things they misinterpreted. I wouldn't leap to bad faith, personally. We'll see how they respond.

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

No please! Don't do it, it's so annoying to read such post. Replying with a short and meaningful sentence is the smartest way to reply to such posts.

Five year old voice: But they did it to me first!

 

[Kellan Fell]

Just curious... After properly fixing Odyssey and making proper VR on legs, would you prefer FDEV commitment to have Ship Interiors or more Atmospheric Planets?
TBH I would prefer Atmospheric Planets, I'm waiting for them since launch...
I would love to land on those strange colored world, risk my life landing on volcanic planets, explore the abyss of a Water World and find an ELW far from the bubble to call "Home".

I'd rather they fix the issues that have been outstanding for years and add some gameplay content that isn't grind...