The 2.X season of ED has just been a mixed experience for me. I cannot tell you how wonderful Planetary Landing has...

The 2.X season of ED has just been a mixed experience for me.  I cannot tell you how wonderful Planetary Landing has been for me and I think it has made a massive contribution to my enjoyment of the game.   I am not excited by any of the promised features as part of 2.x (including Engineer), and I am currently hoping that 3.0 brings something similar to Landings.  I don't expect to land on Atmospheric planets yet, but I hope they model water worlds and possibly gas giants which would lead to some more exciting gameplay options.

Currently what bugs me about the current status of the game is the balance of realism versus the intrusion of gameplay limitations.  The attention to detail with regard to physics and scale is awesome, but we have little gameplay "features" that aren't grounded in anything realistic.  I understand certain things like external camera views are not considered realistic, but how about explaining that with programmable drone cams.   Or have cameras set on your Collector drones as an option.  Of course the drones have detection capability, why not add vision?  It keeps to the "rules" of the Universe unlike a random external cam view which isn't anchored to anything.  With pinning blueprints, its more efficient to write them down or check on Inara than pinning them.  What's the point, other than some vague gameplay element.  It just breaks the realism for me and is so disappointing.

The 2T limit on SRV's at the moment is annoying.  You should be able to overcome it somehow.  I'm guessing there will be other vehicle types introduced later, but 2T?  What about on lower gravity worlds?  Why the same ?  It's the same thing when you talk about 1T of gold vs 1t of fabric, but that's another story.

The wavescanner is an interesting mechanic, but really, in the year 3000+, I expect to be able to survey an area from orbit and get more and more detail as I descend.  The SRV should land with most nearby objects pre-identified.  I understand that it is easy enough to wander around following wavescanner signals, but this style of gameplay would be exactly the same for a harmless pilot to an elite one.  Zero progression.

I never mined the game pre-drones for this reason.  I was unable to accept the initially flawed implementation of mining when I| knew that they would improve gameplay for ships / players with a larger ship / capacity / budget.

The engineers does address this with regard to powering up weapons and FSD, etc, which is good, but the implementation of forcing gameplay types on me has seriously gotten on my nerves.

Forcing me to wake-scan ships is so arbitrary and inane, I'm baffled that it exists for this purpose.  The reasoning of people researching this seems so weak and is entirely up to you to decide if you are willing to believe the devs.

I'm just making the same point over an over and not saying anything new, but its late and I'm not focussed enough to be more coherent.

All of the above is Opinion and I'm pretty sure many of you will disagree and possibly like some/all of the above.

I guess its that this damn near perfect game feels flawed and I just want it to be even better.  Its still the best game I have EVER PLAYED and I can't stop.

I have bought a bigger monitor for it and I will one day buy VR just for this bloody game.

I will be getting the season 3 beta when it's offered and I am committed to one day making triple Elite, so I am prepared to put up with the various annoyances.

Feel free to disagree / enlighten me if I'm playing it wrong ;)

Comments

outsidefactor said…
I think that 2.x for Elite is a case of 'fumbling towards ecstasy'. It's not perfect, but in the case of the majority of elements it's a move in the right direction, even if they haven't hit the mark yet. I also think it's hard to judge Horizons until we have the full suite of things we'll get by the time that season 3 begins. It's a layer cake, and right now we're looking at only the first two layers of Horizons.

With the cameras... FDev are very leery of anything that could potentially give a tactical advantage, and while I don't buy that excuse on it's own, when you mix the rendering challenges of doing multiple camera views, and there are significant challenges, I can understand why FDev have taken the stance they have. Huh, who would have thought I'd be defending Fdev?

Next we have the SRV comments. I think you've missed a point: the Scarab is the only SRV we have now. I very much doubt it's the end of the conversation. I hope we're going to get access to the Skimmer, or perhaps even the Goliath. This is in the same way that the Condor and Imperial fighter are in the game but not human playable yet, but I fully expect them to come with the Multi-crew expansion, as ship launched fighters.

So, yeah, the Scarab is tiny, so it's not surprising how little cargo they can store. Next time you're on a surface at a wreck site use the debug camera to compare the Scarab to the cargo canisters. And, yes, the 1t cargo canister is imperfect, but it's been a core element of Elite for over 30 years: I am not expecting them to change it now.

Engineers should not be seen as new content, but more an enhanced reward system for existing game-play. It's an effort to incentivise players to get out of their ruts and try the full scope of what Elite has to offer. They are trying to show that the greatest rewards come through diversity or play, that you will get the most by learning different skills and taking risks.

You can keep playing Elite the way you always have, and the game will let you and you'll get everything you used to out of it, but if you are willing to get out of that rut and get out and see all that Elite has to offer the game now rewards you for it. That's why it was a point release, a sub-feature. I think the player base set their own expectations for Engineers too high, and then blamed FDev for it not being the magic bullet of content they wanted. Wow, two times defending FDev in one post: I should keep a look out for flying pigs.

There are many, many, many, reasons to criticise FDev over 2.1, usually revolving around FDev's rushed development style and lousy QA process. You can point at the terrible combat balance, the bugs and the lack of communication and documentation.

I like the wavescanner. I think too much information spoon-fed to us would take away a lot of the joy of burning around on the surface. I am sure we're going to see revised surface details, soon. You can expect significant changes to the System Map and planetary details, I think, probably with 2.2, but maybe before then. And I am sure we'll see other surface craft other than the Scarab.

And your timing of future features is a little wrong, too. By the end of Horizons' release cycle I expect to see atmospheric landings, and possibly even the two types of vulcanism, though I am expecting FDev to shed some of the 2.x features due to development constraints. We'll have to wait and see what winds up on the chopping block, but just because it's cut from 2.x doesn't mean we won't see it in 3.x.
Dennis Wronka said…
Instead of 1 ton it could have been 1 canister or 1 unit. The ton thing is kinda stupid, but it's something I don't really notice much.

And yeah, having to scan wakes to get data for engineers is kinda dumb too. I've hardly ever felt the need to scan the wake of the NPC, and often enough they don't get to jump out in the first place. Most times I did wake scans were PvP encounters, when it was about figuring out where the other guy ran to. But with NPCs it always felt pointless, especially as until recently they had no permanence whatsoever.

But overall I like 2.1. I am quite happy with the NPC update and with the engineers I think I'll be able to make the Cobra 4 the ship it should have been in the first place.
Ronan Young said…
Guys the thing is that this game offer's incredible diversity along with a vast playable space. Yes you are correct in all of the above but let's not forget the incredible achievement this game is.
The fact that so many of us have played for quite a while and continue to play is testament to this.
Fdev are far from perfect as is the game but I think we will all agree we will hang around to see the final outcome and while I'm sure there will be things we don't particularly like I'm sure there's plenty that will amaze us as always.
Ian Jefferies said…
On the external cam view there is a trade off between having "perfect knowledge" of what an opponent is doing and lower fidelity information from the ship scanner.

I like the "not knowing" part of combat and, in a game where there is little cover and perfect line of sight most of the time, having to think/out think an opponent.

Rendering issues for multiple cams aside this is the space equivalent of having buildings and cover in Call of Duty. A gameplay choice to retain uncertainty rather than a realism choice.
Ian Stoffberg said…
Regarding the camera my view (!) is that it's a film making thing. Do it via replays or something else like in halo 3 where you can walk through a replay later and create films etc. The 1t cargo thing is an old argument which I am used to dealing with but it makes less sense with gravity but I do think later vehicles will solve that. The upcoming horizons updates are multi crew and the character creator. Not sure if there is another I'm missing. For both of those I'm honestly not excited. Ships inside ships could be interesting. I imagine you could have a class of atmosphere or water class ships added in season 3 so that is potentially massive. Season 4s big feature could be marine life and then surface life could follow one year later. By then we will not want to limited to elite ranks. What would the higher level ranks be named? Also would you have newer docking music when you land on your own mines or surface bases?
I can't wait.
Ian Stoffberg said…
Ian Jefferies keeping combat fair and eliminating opportunities for cheats is paramount. Just want to see cool maneuvers if I survived them.
Ian Stoffberg said…
outsidefactor fdevs are worried. Are you OK? I think you might be wrong about atmospheric landings. Hope you're right though.
Paul Anderson said…
I treat the "ton" canister in the same way that Traveller defined the "ton"" in the High Guard ship design rules. It was 1 ton displacement (I think it was 3.14 cubic metres or something like that), so that everything fit into sizes of 1 ton. This does mean that in reality a ton of gold would be different to a tone of fabric, but the container would still displace 1 "ton", which allows us to perform standard calculations on the cargo space in the ship.
I'm probably way off mark, but in my head that's how I rationalize it, otherwise the 416 ton cargo bay on my Anaconda would have to use Tardis like technology, as 416 tons of gold takes up a lot less space than 416 tons of grain, so I just see it as 416 cargo canisters, and the word "ton" is simply descriptive.

The truth is I was losing interest after Engineers, due to the random nature of the upgrade process (all that grind wasted on the roll of a dice, when you've "scoured" the universe looking for an expert), plus the improvements to the AI and the prevalence of massive upgrades among the NPC pilots was making me back off. (I actually went back to getting my arse kicked by XCom 2).
Then 2 things happened:
1. They fixed the NPC pilots to be more sensible. They now give you a good fight, but a Novice Sidewinder isn't going to kill you Anaconda in 8 seconds any more. Plus I changed tactics and got turrets for my bigger ships.
2. I bought a Rift, and began to see the game as FD intended, and now some nights I just fly for the sheer joy of it.

We've all got gripes about some aspects of the game. I still find the Mission offerings to be bland, and the rewards do not seem to scale sensibly. I'm hoping soon they will introduce mission arcs like eventually popped up in EVE.

Power Play has vanished off the horizon, though it may make a comeback with key automation to collect fortification documents whilst I'm at work, however this defeats the object, as no-one gets into PP to affect the political balance of the bubble, they just want to get 50 million a week for a few weeks.

And they do need to do something about the fact that Bounty Hunter FdL's seem to be able to keep up with an extended range Asp over a series of maximum range jumps to keep on interdicting you for that 3 tons of worthless crap you've got in the hold.

On the whole, I'm feeling the love again, and looking forward to the next major update (though a little more QA would be nice, but that would mean a longer Beta which seems to annoy the non-Beta players).

On the External cameras, I'm not that bothered really. They were simply introduced to enable selfies (no other real reason), and I think there are several more fundamental things that need addressing before we start looking for "better selfies".

Navigation is still a pain in the arse, though bookmarks helped a lot with regular trade routes, it would still be nice to be able to plot return trips, or even add waypoints so you can plot a whole route. We can do that with current Sat-Navs, and you're not going to convince me that ASTRA is more stupid than a Tom-Tom.

A simple rear view camera would be nice. We had it in the original Elite when the Cobra was nimble enough to flip over, but you're not telling me that the bridge crew of an Anaconda is really blind to anything now visible through the cockpit windows...

Some kind of economic information in-game would be good too. As a trader, you can't survive without Thrudd or EDDB outside the game environment to determine routes. The Imports and Exports on the System Map aren't really reliable, so without these external resources trading becomes simply blind luck, and no interstellar economy can work like that. We have a GalNet news Service that spans the stars, and you can buy system information from Universal Cartographic, why can't you get economic information?

Paul Anderson said…
And finally (sorry for the rant), can we sort out the crime and punishment system? You get fined for murder, but summarily executed for loitering in the docking bay.... In what universe does this make sense? In reality no-one would ever take off if getting stuck in traffic meant the station would atomise you. This just makes no sense at all.

One more thing too... I'd pay NPC's (or players) to fly my stored ships to me rather than having to troll around the universe collecting them), something similar to the contract system in EVE, where you could contract another player to deliver a ship to you. Eagles, Sidewinders, even up to Asp Scouts could fit into the cargo bay of a Tradaconda or a Cutter.

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