Watched the recording of the Elite talk during FX17 now. Overall, I'm positive on the changes, but as the Horizon season has shown: The devil's in the detail. Take the strictly progressive improving engineer upgrades. In essence, that sounds like a great way to reduce time wasted on RNG gambling. But it's so vague and leaves so much room for interpretation, that the actual implementation may turn out to be poor. Just like multicrew was about my most anticipated PvE feature of Horizons. And turned out to be a right turd, not only because the mechanic itself was so limited and tacked on, but also because of the pretentious no-fun-allowed payout gimpings.
I've got a a couple of main concerns:
Will they be able to stick to the roadmap this time? While all updates sound great in general, they aren't exactly as groundbreaking as to fill two years. We've had that with Horizons. They seemingly aren't monetizing the updates either (I'm expecting a hole lot of new buyable cosmetics instead).
And while very vague, Sandro's comments on expanding mining sound like the basic activity will receive quite a bit of added depth (if the changes turn out to be competent: very much *YAY!*). In contrast to that, they've mostly mentioned new "anomalies" for exploration as far as I understood? That is, in terms of new content, not much needed fixes like the de-beigfication and planetary surfaces hopefully looking less like a HD-yfied mid 90's voxel based terrain generation game (height maps mountains without cliffs or overhangs, no surface details beyond the completely out-of-place rocks everywhere). While more 3D assets to find are definitely great, unless the basic exploration mechanics are overhauled, it'll all come down to holding a trigger for 15 seconds to scan a thing and having no other meaningful interaction for explorers. Even the much needed ingame encyclopedia isn't going to change much about that unless exploration becomes a less braindead ingame activity than it is now at the level of its basic game mechanics. I'm talking about something like differentiated scanning mechanics, which reward skill and provide more meaningful info that can guide explorers, e.g. to surface POIs or interesting systems.
Wing missions. If they re as tacked on as PvE activity as multicrew is and as poorly integrated into the rest of the game (not even SRV control during multicrew...), for all I personally care, they don't even need to bother. Wings support should be an absolutely basic feature that pervades the whole game. Not something only isolated spawned missions offer you won't see half of the time, because they're RNG-spawned, but you still spend half an hour watching the braindead instance transitions with friends, just so got to the station where there's a chance of these missions even spawning. Horror scenario: We learn that Wing missions are introduced and spawn in systems with state X. We gather friends, spend an hour searching systems in state X, driving there, landing on stations, refreshing all mission boards and hopping through all modes, only to find that the missions didn't spawn any longer, because the system's state was just about to switch again. An evening wasted, no fun had, many loading screens watched, never logged back in.
Edit: Forgot to mention it... With things like guilds, I'm just waiting for the screaming immersionist brigade to shout Frontier into submission. Carrier ships that might maybe, potentially let people spawn somewhere with friends
without watching an hour of braindead instance transitions?
WE WON'T HAVE IT! Make it a bloody zero sum because "mah immershun", "mah balancing" and "that's not in the nature of Elite *whine* *growl*"!
Anyway, my
HOTAS mount is done. Let the updates roll in...
Joystick can be switched for Velcro'd mouse pad, for whenever space legs happen to drop.
