Tag: Cryptic

Are Elite:Dangerous ship interiors worth doing?

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.

Bridge (starship) | Wookieepedia | Fandom

See Also

Orion’s Champion Proposal: Transparency Turbine-Style

The STO community lavishes praise on Cryptic for their transparency, but I think Turbine deserves at least as much credit–and perhaps more for not over-sharing. A case in point is Orion’s latest dev diary post about the upcoming changes to the Champion.

Orion’s Page – Blog Archive – Champion Proposal: Final Stages

Elf ChampionMy first LOTRO character was a champion based on a character from a LOTR-based NWN persistent world. Gameplay with that champion (rolled two years ago this month) felt a little lethargic and uninteresting compared to my eventual love, the runekeeper. I’ve dabbled with champions since then and liked what I’ve seen in changes to the class and overall combat engine.

From Orion’s latest post, this update to the champion class will be significant.  I’m not a big enough champion nerd to appreciate subtle changes in how skills and stances relate, but a few things stand out:  no more shields, no fervor penalty for two-handing, and far fewer on-defeat skills. That last one is big for me as a solo; I don’t get to use on-defeat skills as much wandering around alone.

My sense is this champion tune-up is on par with or bigger than what the runekeeper got a few months ago. Some of those runekeeper changes didn’t stand out in the dev diaries but ended up being fantastic; i.e., Master of Writs. Pairing solid posts like Orion’s with Turbine’s usually-well-delivered updates has me eager to roll a new champion and see how it feels when the time comes.

I’m not so eager for STO Season 4 and the Duty Roster System: Cryptic’s having problems in the discussion and delivery departments lately, and they’d do well to take a few pages from Turbine’s book. Turbine’s communications with the LOTRO community are more measured and better timed. It may help that the LOTRO community seems better behaved but no less passionate: their forums suffer less from heat/noise–except for those trash-talking PvMP forums, of course.

It also helps that forums.lotro.com supports RSS feeds to get around the heat, noise, and overload that trying to stay on top of STO’s forums inflicts on me.  Hint, hint.