One of my favorite pandemic activities is answering questions on OK Cupid to feed the algorithm. So today it asked me about my most memorable board game accomplishment. Here’s what I said to the algo and to my potential future husbands:
Winning the one time we played the worst board game ever published in a glossy box. From boardgamegeek.com:
“The ancient Aztec atmosphere is revived in this game, where warriors and priests fight for leading the virgin to the sacrificial altar.”
Each player has 3 priests, 5 foot-soldiers, and a virgin. The object is to be the first to guide your virgin to the sacrificial altar at the top of the pyramid. Likely the only game on this particular topic!
Fleet Carrier Camenecium visiting a precarious three-body barycenter. Is her interior a ship interior or a station interior?
The long-awaited “space legs” feature has been announced for the next major update to Elite:Dangerous: Odyssey. Commanders will get to walk around stations and planets, shoot and be shot by things, and … practice xeno-botany with a hand-held probe-ulator. The community has been up in arms since that announcement also said that ship interiors would not be included in the first release.
Frontier can learn something from Cryptic here. Star Trek Online stopped doing elaborate interiors because they were expensive/resource-intensive to make and added very little gameplay. They only do bridges now if they use them in missions.
With dozens of ships to backfill and assuming they would all have unique interiors beyond existing cockpits, Frontier could better spend their time and money crafting social areas (fleet carriers?) or actual gameplay. Except for VR players, who I’d guess are a minority, who’s going to walk around their ships just to walk around their ships more than a handful of times? No gameplay would be a terrible waste.
Worse would be punitive gameplay like interiors meaning you have to repel boarding parties or it takes longer to get in and out of your ship without any gameplay added. Interiors should not be a tax I pay to play the parts of the game I like.
The best bet for making interiors worthwhile would be including optional beneficial gameplay like mini games inside to provide long-lasting buffs or find/fix damage without an AFMU or repair limpet. Still doesn’t seem worth the cost as a goal at launch.
The one interior I’d love to see at launch is my fleet carrier’s. I want to be on a super-star-destroyer-style bridge when she jumps. It’s really a station in its own right, can have many of the same features like shipyards and stellar cartographics, and could be a mobile social zone.
After a few extra hours of downtime, Elite Dangerous is back up. The big deal with this release is fleet carriers, but there are plenty of small tweaks and fixes that are worth noting. Here are the highlights from the patch notes of changes I expect to improve my gameplay:
Exploration
Locations discovered using the DSS will now be listed in the System Map correctly after returning to a system.
Fixed a problem which could cause Surface Data to generate in the background at such a low priority that it would stop.
Factions
Updated how Faction influence adds up to 100% in a star system to keep more of a Faction’s trending direction.
Mining
NPC mining ships will now have a more appropriate cargo based on contents of the rings in their system, including Low Temperature Diamonds.
Implemented a fix that will stop Core Mining Fragments from penetrating into Asteroids.
Sub-Surface Mining Deposits can now eject multiple resource chunks from one successful hit.
Missions
The ‘Total Units Needed’ will now update in the Commodity Market as Collect Missions progress.
Delivery Mission Cargo is now marked as ‘Mission Specific’ to prevent the Commodity Market showing the commodity as mission required.
Added depot support to Solo mining missions.
Networking
Increased the chance of players meeting previously encountered players when revisiting systems in a session.
Players can now block any player, not just friends or pending friends.
Supercruise
Corrected the ETA numbers when approaching targets in Supercruise.
Previous Changes From Beta
Squadron bookmarks made for a Fleet Carrier location now move with the Carrier when it jumps.
Inbox message notifying the player that their transferred ship has arrived will now arrive at the same time as the ship, rather than being sent instantly.
Missing Manual Changes
Quick Action menu added to repair, refuel, and rearm from docking screen.
