Will this game ever outgrow its "space trucking sim" stigma from the early years?

Will this game ever outgrow its "space trucking sim" stigma from the early years?
It's been 10 years, there's a lot to do in this game.

What else can you do?

fly from star to star

kill person/deliver item

return

I don't know, you tell me what else you can do in it?

But I love space trucking..

i wanted to be a space bounty hunter but it was shit so i stopped playing.

Turn the game on and off to farm engineering materials.

So long as the game only offers space trucking with shitty repetitive combat it'll still be seen as such

they just announced base building and system colonization today

For those who say that there's nothing to do in Elite... what would you count as something to do? It's a procedural sandbox MMO. What kind of activities do you think that the game should generate for you to engage with?
I have some answers to that but I'd like to know someone else's first

install game

put on vr

fly towards the sun

"wow thats cool"

close game

never play again

that FPS gameplay

how embarrassing...

exobiology is getting nerfed soon

Yeah GCZs are a shitshow, the onfoot fps gameplay is more akin to a stealth shooter like MGS or Thief.

good thing i abused spires pre nerf

anyone that thinks they will release the Mandalay without nerfing the shit out of xeno nodes is completely and utterly enthralled by Braben and his lies

The average Anon Babble anon was in highschool when the game first came out.

I think you're missing two things. One, they've been developing system colonizations, aka. the new massive credit sink to deal with the excess funds that everyone has. So there's no reason to nerf profitable systems. Two, FD is too lazy to fix even basic bugs so there's no way they'd care about rebalancing a years old system that nobody has complained about that they've heard.

So there's no reason to nerf profitable systems

painite and low t. diamonds have been gutted like theres no tomorrow tho
what makes you think exo and exploiting hunting missions in anarchy systems wont get fucked in the ass?

The game is nothing but grind.
If only there was a campaign and sidequests like other MMO's other than the constant grind. It doesn't even have daily or weekly missions.

I like ED, it is cool to be in 1:1 of the Milkyway and to be able to visit all the star systems and see all the nebula. But apart from that there isn't much to do.

yeah, it needs a campaign that runs parallel to the mp sandbox.

what makes you think exo and exploiting hunting missions in anarchy systems wont get fucked in the ass?

Because you listed everything that has been nerfed in ten years by listing two things. Everything else has either stayed the same or been buffed. Such as goid hunting. When killing orthruses was nerfed, all other goid kill rewards were buffed.
How would campaigns and other authored content even function in a procedural sandbox MMO? I actually don't know because I've never played any other sandbox MMOs. Do they just repeat the same campaigns and quests when you've done them? What about the linear progression of time? Elite Dangerous started in the year 3300 and it's now 3310. How would those specific events happen multiple times in nearly identical ways across the years? Moreover, what would be the point? Not for the player, but for the galactic situation? What is accomplished and what does it change when the campaign story concludes? Everything is connected to everything and all things that all players do change the background sim.

How would campaigns and other authored content even function in a procedural sandbox MMO?

They could do something like The Division 2. It's an open world sandbox Mmo but it also has a story campaign.

They have the foundations there, they have had community events where people have to destroy titan alien mother's hips, they have Odyssey which is the boots on the ground fps mode.

They could easily build a campaign with various story missions around the Thargoids which are the alien race in ED.

No nigga, no.
Division 2 is nothing like Elite.
First and foremost it's not randomly generated, and the game is nowhere near a sandbox.

Technically ED is not "randomly" generated, but it is generated. It has a set seed that creates the ingame universe, and background sim that maintains its current state in ways the player can influence.
Still, it would be very tricky to try and graft some kind of authored campaign content into it. It basically can't be consequential. If it is, it can affect almost nothing, and if it's like that then that big grand story mission has the same impact as doing random tiny quests

Not all of ED is procedural, only the planet surfaces. They can still build missions and disable the procedural generation and build the campaigns on isolated sections of a plane. They can design bases and other stuff specifically for a campaign. They can add in story mission dogfights, boss fights against alien ships, story mission trucking missions, they could do a lot to make a campaign.

And The Division 2 is an open world sandbox anon, have you played it?

Motherfuckers tryna argue semantics with fucking me.
You fucking cunts, do you not understand what random procedural generation means?
A planet having a seed means jackshit, it's still randomly generated THROUGH that seed.
Division 2 is entirely hand crafted, you fucking demented retards.
The fact that it's sandbox, aka it has a vast degree of freedom, doesn't mean it's anywhere near close Elite Dangerous.
Holy shit I actually have to spell this, you absolute fucking retards.

Sorry for not going through every game in my 300 game library on a periodic basis to check if it's been improved since I last played it
Retard

sorry for not playing videogames

Not that anon and I haven't played the Division games, but from what I understand, there's a big difference between the "open world sandbox" that the Division is and a procedural sandbox MMO. Almost every piece of content in the former is authored, and almost nothing connects. In a procedural sandbox MMO, almost everything is generated and everything connects to a background simulation that governs the game's global current state, with progression that advances in real time with our world. I think you're comparing apples to oranges here. Or more like comparing oil paintings of apples to chemical formulae of oranges.

Only the surfaces are procedural Gordon you fucking halfwit. Doesn't mean they can't create specific instances for story mission campaigns.

Finally someone that fucking gets it.
Being able to move in every direction you want in pic related is NOT the same as exploring a procedurally generated 1:1 simulation of the Milky Way galaxy.

procedurally generated

Anon, only the fucking planet surfaces are generated.

Yeah dude, Frontier totally handplaced 400 BILLION star systems with their fucking planets all over the galaxy
Real retard hours.

only the fucking planet surfaces are generated

NTA but you can't possibly be this naive lol

They use the data from NASA anon.

That's like 200,000 stars. That's 0,005% of the stars in the galaxy. And it's ONLY the stars. The actual planets around them also need to be generated.

My main gripe is there's nothing interesting to find anywhere. What's the point of your one bazillion star systems if they're all basically the same.

There is also nothing stopping them from adding in solo instances of a planets specifically for story missions.

Yeah I wish there were a little bit more variety. There's like an exact range outside the bubble where you will find pirates like they just like hanging around 2000LY away from Earth. There's a different range where you will find tons of crashed ships and escape pods. And after that, nothing, ever. Not even thargoid artifacts. The rules for what you can find are too uniform.

system colonization

uuuuh that sounds problematic

That already exists. Odyssey has a tutorial with a voice acted training mission set on a solo instance on a planet.

So they can do it, they could do it for more planets and make a campaign.

It would have to be some sort of clandestine black ops campaign that you can't lose and the victory condition changes nothing because everything in the galaxy is connected. You can't lose because if you can it would need to have impact, and without that it wouldn't have any stakes. And victory would mean that you take the secret to your grave and nothing changes.
And even if you could somehow write a quest like that, what in-universe explanation justifies it being repeatable content? Why does that same plot happen over and over, for many commanders to engage with?

Read the thread and no one said what else could i do aside from grinding. I have the game but not Odyssey which was broken at launch.
All i ever did in this game was see vistas, mine and run from fights because i couldn't win a single one. Bought a more expensive ship, felt useless since the universe feels static and uninstalled.
So, what would i do except grinding for ships if i were to install again? Do i need Odyssey to unlock more interesting options? I have no interest in playing a shooter.

So, what would i do except grinding for ships if i were to install again? Do i need Odyssey to unlock more interesting options? I have no interest in playing a shooter.

You could always play together with someone. There are plenty of streamers who like teaming up with chatters. And because the galaxy is so big in relation to the number of players, they are aggressively helpful for players who want to get back in.
The thing about a sandbox MMO is that there is no real answer to your first question. You literally can't do anything other than make your own fun. That is beyond the capabilities of a huge amount of vidya consumers, and so "theme park MMOs" are for those players. Games where an intended array of content is made for players to consume. Elite is all about familiarizing yourself with complex systems so you can manipulate them the way you wish.
When it comes to the grind, they actually fixed that recently. All mission rewards and material pickups were buffed, and upgrade and unlock requirements were lowered. RNG was also removed from upgrades so everyone always knows how much they need for what. Powerplay mechanics are being replaced today with a new system, and it also has material rewards.
And no, Odyssey doesn't unlock anything for players who are not interested in the on-foot content.

Not having to interact with people is the reason i play videogames my man. I know the game is about doing what you want but it felt pretty limiting in options. I enjoyed mining a lot, but no other system felt interesting to interact with. Elite feels like it asks too much and gives too little in return. Think i put 30-40h in this game but i did not accomplish very much in all this time.

British dev. Old habits die hard

Ehh, we need space games that have genuine dangers from other humans including pirate legions and military, biological horrors, and natural horrors. Like, ACTUAL threats rather than some mobs you sweep up then move on. I want to land on a planet with a billion bugs like Factorio, and the game has the kit for me to deal with that if I work for it. Otherwise that planet would basically be a no-go for novice explorers. You could then build a base on that planet and hire mercenaries or start your own colony and create your own military and scientists, workers who mine asteroids for you, farmers on lush planets which are ripe for pirates to loot from. Until then, sandbox games in general indeed have nothing to do. Devs just don't understand how important well coded NPCs are for the longevity of a massive game like this. Imagine if Daggerfall had no villages with NPCs running around living their lives and doing things, despite the villages not really providing much as the meat of the game was the dungeons. It would not be remembered as fondly.

The problem with lush worlds is that Odyssey has set the standard of detail on the ground. The best you could get with the current level of procedural generation technology is freshly terraformed worlds or freshly settled barren atmospherics. It is completely impossible to generate entire unique biospheres for tens of millions of actually Earth like worlds so that the level of detail meets that of the barren worlds in Odyssey.

If you have to grind that engineering shit for weeks or months in order to be able to do something, then it objectively doesn't count. So yeah, it's just space trucker.

Oh, don't you worry. If you want to do your trucking in Open, you're going to have to get those engineering upgrades for your truck as well. Paper planes get shot down. :)

okay I guess I'll be the one to do it

powerplay had potential, they fucked it up and half assed it

ground combat (both oddyssey and horizon) had potential, they fucked it up and half assed it

exploration had potential, it's basically in the same state it was in at release; you turn your camera to point X and then you press a button until PING and you're done and off to the next one

thargoid drama was cool, but too little too late, and again, too little as in they barely scratched the surface and then let it rot

Elite will never be a good game because it doesn't have a good team behind it, they do not know how to make a game, all they could do was make a pretty but surface level spaceship game, the sound design is great, the graphics are okay, the flying in space is pretty good, everything else goes out the window

All they needed was a good game designer that has hadn't been out of the loop for the last twenty years to come in and tell the retards in charge that their ideas were retarded, and the game would've been successful

Clearly you haven't seen Star Citizen. These things are possible, devs just have no idea what to do with them.

here's a forest, enjoy!

oh wow how pretty.. so uh, what can we do in it?

well, it's a forest. enjoy!

Star Citizen even has Coruscant planets where you can fly over/into the whole city that spans forever. It really wouldn't take that much code or be an FPS hit to make NPCs actually do shit and interact with the player. Literally just click on NPC, add NPC to player NPC inventory, NPC pathfinds to the nearest train station or whatever to simulate him leaving to get to your ship. Make it so this function only works if your ship is parked in designated zones to make it easier for the NPCs to get to, and if you leave the area the NPC will just eventually teleport there. Drop NPC off on your farm. Or the NPCs can just pathfind to their own ships in designated spots and fly to your farm with its own designated parking spot that's impossible for an NPC to fail landing on, whenever they're not loading the game just simulates them doing that/working etc.

as much as I would like to see that it would be impossible with the scale of ED. They need the server connection as no PC can hold all that data associated with 400billion star systems. Now adding X4 factorio building on top of it just complicates thing infinitely.

ED shallowness comes from

literal spaghetti code for its wonky ass engine

overly complicated trying to simulate 1:1 galaxy

shit top management of frontier stuck in their very peculiar ways

I would cum. X4 is fun, but it just doesn't have the same excellent flying and combat feel.

implying I would ever even come across another player

Played this game off and on for years and I can't think of a single time I saw another player. And certainly never been attacked by one.

Clearly you haven't seen Star Citizen. These things are possible, devs just have no idea what to do with them.

No. They are not. Procedural generation tech capable of generating millions of unique worlds with unique biospheres, geology, erosion, tectonics, climates, biomes and oceans does not exist. The best you could ever get is weirdly homogenous spheres with some trees and water on them, and hundreds of thousands of planets with the same damn spruce tree on them like someone went around dropping the same seeds instead of things evolving separately.
...and that's not even the half of it. Imagine if you'd have to generate the worlds that humans actually live on in Elite. Thousands of unique planets with their own histories and individual nation states, politics and corporations, with intricate infrastructures and multimillion population megacities, and trillions of named citizens with daily routines and relationships.
What you said at the end of the post is feasible. Shuttle rides into isolated generated patches where you can view the outside world to a limited degree, terraformed by humans with Earth biology. Implication of wider human infrastructures on a world you can't otherwise explore. That is perfectly doable.