If the player character is supposed to be the thing we get to manipulate and play with, then the depth of that sandbox is ‘bounties, ranks, permits and credit balance’. If it’s the ships then the depth is ‘weapons, modules and ship skins/bobble-heads’. If it’s the politics or the economy then it’s as I said above, lots of people are making differences to the sand but no one gets to have the fun of making something happen themselves. All the other interaction with the game is just observation or doing things that have no effect on anything (other than the effect on the player character stuff I mentioned).
So what is the solution? How could the game be made more compelling? How can you let players as individuals make things happen in the game that mean something in the wider galaxy?
NPCs! Let us talk with them, hire them, get missions from them, influence them and have them be persistent! Have them be in the news, but also let us contact them directly. Have them be the connection between the players and the world they are supposed to immerse themselves in.
Pretty sure this is planned, with the 1.5 update and the mission system upgrade some of is already being introduced, like NPC encounters in open space with associated missions and multi-part missions too that will have specific NPCs in specific places.
I know they will do it eventually, but will it be a way to actually manipulate the sand? I’ve been advocating proper NPCs since before launch, and until that happens I only ‘play’ the game to look at stuff.
Absolutely! I still think they can pull off a great game, it just feels like forever already since launch and the world still feels as flat as the start. Despite some great additions they are still missing the thing that will make it a world I could actually get immersed in and look forward to interacting with.
I thought Powerplay would be it, but it is still so impersonal, everything I do is just a statistic. I would love it if the contacts I get missions from and report to were actual NPCs with a reputation, a personality, with an opinion of my character etc.
Who am I in the Elite universe? Without some feedback from in-game characters, I really don’t know.
Why should I care about this station/planet/system? With an NPC contact that I know stationed there, I’ll have a reason to care.
@WalrusFist Well, to be honest, you can already kind of interact with NPCs. Those who tell you “I have to talk to you / I’m about to shut down from FSD, will you follow?”, most of them give you small missions. Ridiculous, but still quest-ish
The more I play E:D, the more I realize that this game is not a sandbox and that people barely interact with each other. Maybe it changes over “bigger” levels when I’ll get out of my Cobra Mk 3… But still. The only time I interacted with another player, not from my squadron, was to crush a poor guy that intercepted me because of my bounty when I was disrupting some faction’s holding.
It’s not for quests, it’s for empathy and other human emotions important for ‘caring’ about what I do in game. Also knowing that when I interact with that character, they will still exist and know me when I leave the ‘instance’, giving me another reason to ‘care’. NPCs so far are all throw away nobodies who only exist while I interact (briefly) with them.
Yeah… from my experience, Elite went out of its way to make sure I knew that nothing I was doing mattered or changed anything when dealing with single player content. Didn’t help that the multiplayer stuff wasn’t juicy enough to sink my teeth into.
Hey…not been on here for a couple of days…to busy playing Horizons!!!
They mentioned it here at 47:59
And before you say…“but he only said that they might do it long term”. Of course he did…since every time FD says anything quite a few people takes these things as a rock solid “promises”. I do find it encouraging that he corrected himself mid sentence though right after that. He was about to say that it certainly wouldn’t come in season (2)…then he stopped and said in version 2.0 instead. So potentially it might be something that might come later in the Horizons season.
I have seen this in the meantime, because someone on another forum (where i was obnoxiously complaining) posted this. Gives me hope that the surfaces will improve in the future.
One problem I actually never thought about until one of the devs posted in the official forums, is that
the surfaces around the player have to be uniform, because the game is networked. They can’t have players with slower PCs play on different geometry than those with higher end machines when they all play in the same instance. That’s certainly a “blocker” for increasing the surface geometry detail to Outerra levels, when the average Elite player does not play on a PC that could run something like that reasonably well.
Admittedly, due to the hair raising supercruise framerate drops with AMD cards and Win 10, most of my time playing is spend on a Laptop at low settings, but with nearly 60fps, so I’m not exactly raising the general hardware bar here.
I think I posted ‘my’ answer to this question much earlier in the thread, but since you asked…
Property!! We now have all of this beautiful open land (not to mention space), and clearly the tech is good enough to allow for arbitrary (procedural) placement of settlements on the terrain (i.e. outposts aren’t hand placed by devs)… So let us build settlements!
I always feel like a nomad when playing E:D. Wouldn’t it be great to stake a claim, and build out from there? The gameplay just oozes out of this one mechanic… Faction bases, permanent resource extraction facilities, base resource/energy management, real motivation to attack/defend bases, specialized crafting only available at high level bases, dynamic NPC traderoutes based upon player base extraction/production facilities, ‘cities’ with many player settlements connected via roads… This is just off the top of my head.
My own opinion on this is that ‘settling down’ is not what Elite has or should ever be about. The game is all about the journey. However, it could add some extra fun gameplay as a limited feature. Allow us to have a ‘home’ base with storage and have extra influence within that system. Players could have access to more detailed info about that system and be able to do missions that directly benefit particular stations/star-ports/settlements being able to more directly interact with the organizations in the system. What a player does in a home system could also be used to help build the lore of that system. When a player does something that reveals to a player an event that has happened in the system, or the player is part of an event, that event should become official cannon and added to a wiki-like article accessible by other players who visit the system.
But then what use would it be? Players with higher settings would see additional detail, but it would have to be so insignificant and small, that it never obstructs their view where players on lower settings could see otherwise. Otherwise you’d have a War THunder situation, where the graphic settings for low end machines afford a visibility advantage, therefore forcing anyone who doesn’t like to play with a handicap to that setting. Aside from that, adding all kinds of small scale detail which players clip through - as is unfortunately already the case with most of the small boulders lying around - wouldn’t adress the issues in the terrain generation. Which is that it lacks a lot of detail and possible features one would expect on planets. From ship sized boulders to “vertical” cliffs with actual geometrical detail and overhangs.
Sadly, I don’t expect that to change until maybe two years from now, provided they still care then and the average hardware configuration is more capable then. Considering the commetn from their “how to create a planet” stream, I still haven’t given up hope entirely for convincing planet surfaces.
I guess the reddit’s post just nailed the current problems E:D is facing.
I don’t think they’re gonna be adressed anywhere soon… but I’ll still play E:D for as long as I find some fun and obtain my Anaconda objective, to see how it looks like.
I just read that and if that were the game Elite was I’d be happy to start playing again and buy all the expansions even though I detest the business practice. There’s just nothing for me to do in the game now.
Elite frustrates me In general I want to want to fly around and land on the planet but why would I pay an extra 60$ right now to do it? It doesn’t add much depth to the game and I know I’d be over it after the second landing.
I’ll wait for it to go on sale for 10$ when the next expansion gets released in a year.
