5621

No one has found any yet, and I think if you do find one, the appropriate actions to take are to take screenshots and to post them in the main forums. Barnacle hunters may find this post helpful. Not sure if the Canonn player group is offering a reward, but if they are, it will be something like a ship paintjob.

5622

What are these barnacle things, exactly, anyway? A mineral formation? A form of life?

5623

THARGOID EGG

5624

Looks like barnacles were finally found in a sandy crater on MEROPE 5 C.

5625

Yup. https://twitter.com/DavidBraben/status/687676444571512833

5626

So my co-op group finally gave this a try yesterday, and for the most part, it went somewhat poorly. So I wanted to check in here to see if there were some things we just didn’t grasp or did wrong or simply missed.

Is there much point to doing this in co-op? I think we share exploration data, obviously more ships is better than one in a fight, you split bounties, but can you take a mission as a wing and complete it together? If not, that was something we really felt was missing. The Nav Lock stuff didn’t seem to work that smoothly either but maybe that’s just us as new players.

I didn’t care for a lot of the supercruise and jump mechanics. A jump always brings me into the new system dry humping a star. I came out of many jumps taking damage as my heat suddenly spiked. Then I seemed to have to manually point my ship toward the next jump destination and then manually fire up the jump drive again. With supercruise, I appreciate the realism they are trying to go for (but I guess I’m not sure why they go for it here and other parts feel less real), but either I let supercruise auto adjust speed so it takes forever to get somewhere or it turns into a Benny Hill sketch trying to crash down the speed so I don’t take damage while overshooting. I missed EVE Online’s sort of “go here and set a distance you want to pop out into regular speed” - assuming I remember that right. I guess I never understood why it took so much manual effort to pick a point in space on a computer nav system and go to that point and drop back to normal speed 10 km out.

Docking is a hassle. I always appreciated in the X series just how distinct the markings are into the docking bay. Lights extending a decent chunk away from the structure so that it was clear from a distance where you needed to head. I feel like docking computers should come standard, not just in the Horizons expansion (maybe it’s also retroactively added to the original game?). A Ford Escape can parallel park itself, so should a spaceship in the year 3300 or whatever.

We wished there was something more to aspire to than just more expensive ships. I know the nature of these games is to earn more money, but X packaged that into owning fleets and space stations (although there seems to be some interesting stuff in Horizons… bigger ships, multiplayer crewed ships), EVE lets you call yourself a corp. Is there stuff like that in Elite? I see posts above about needing to go grind for a new ship. Is there more to it?

Finally, the factions. At first I thought it was interesting to see all the different factions and maybe there’s not as many as first appears. But I would do a mission that takes me to another system and finish, but I don’t want to fly empty handed, so I take a mission at the new place. Suddenly I feel like I never will make any faction progress unless I just choose one and grind it out, always coming back to make sure the efforts go toward that faction.

I know there’s probably a lot of GO PLAY EVE YOU PILOT NEWB thoughts in reaction to this, but I do feel like EVE presents a solid model for getting around in spaceships with the Elite ability to take control manually a nice addition when you’re bored or in combat. I also feel like I could really like Elite Dangerous, but either it’s too hands on in weird ways for mundane stuff, or it’s too much of a hassle to figure out info… my friend had a mission to find 1 ton of ore in a system. That seems 1) beyond a needle in a haystack and 2) not worth the cost and effort as a mission. I had one where I was to meet someone in a system to pick something up. When I arrived, no contact, no idea what ship to look for, nothing. A typical space mission would have the other party aware that I’m coming, contact me when I hit the system, and set up a rendezvous point. I constantly felt like I wasn’t getting quite the amount of info I would expect from the HUD based on other games like this that I’ve played (mainly a lot of the X series, Privateer, Freelancer).

So are there ship upgrades that address a lot of this? Is Elite just in a different place philosophically than what I want? Would Evochron Legendary address a lot of these issues (the campaign in that seems to be coop)? Like I said, I think I could really enjoy going down the Elite rabbit hole, or the rabbit hole of some space sim. I just wasn’t sure how much of our experience was due to inexperience.

5627

In my opinion, the mission system is absolutely awful and I tend to avoid it. They’re tedious, annoying, and the payouts tend to be terrible at the start. Supposedly, the mission system is getting a total revamp in the 2.1 update that should be out Q1 this year.

A lot of stuff really sucks in Elite, is half-baked or clunky, or just has no depth to it. You’ve already pointed out a lot of those. Other stuff is the YMMV variety. They take the “sim” part of spacesim pretty seriously in this game, and it is very much about the moment-to-moment gameplay of piloting a spaceship. There’s really problem jumping from star to star, just throttle back once you enter hyperspace. With supercruise, it’s a player skill, you tend to get a lot better/faster at it with practice. That being said, it’ll always take a little while to get from A to B, but for me personally I find that important because without it a star system wouldn’t have a sense of “space” (I hate the feeling of just blinking from one space “room” to another).

I tend to play this in a Wing with friends, and the experience as of 2.0 seems to me more clunky than what I remember it when the Wings update came out. Nav-locking and wing beacons were either changed or were unreliable compared to what I remembered them being initially. I never really figured out which, because I haven’t played it much since 2.0.

The game for me is pretty much “Go to Resource Extraction Site, go plink spaceships until one of my friends is unfortunate enough to graze a police ship who flew right in front of him, then log out annoyed while waiting for the stupid 400cr bounty to expire”. Riveting stuff.

With all that being said, I find a lot of the moment-to-moment stuff to be awesome. I love the way the ships handle, I love the feel of landing on a planet and roaming around in my SRV, even though (like most things in the game), it doesn’t feel like there’s any “point” to doing so. The only progression in the game is making money and there are very clear winners on how to go about doing that.

I find the game very fun in small doses. If I push it longer than that, the lack of depth and the repetitive nature of the game starts wearing on me. As a new user, you’re in a rough spot because their new user experience is utter balls, IMO. I think there is fun to be had for you and your friends, but you’re going to have to do some digging and a little work in finding it (which you’ve already started, by making this post). I’m sure someone will be along and give you some pointers on getting up and running with your buddies.

5628

Thanks for the response. I want to like Elite because I felt like it did a lot of things well. The setting felt massive and captured that Space Is Really Big feel nicely. It worked absolutely beautifully with the XBox controller, shockingly well, which made it a breeze to jump into in some ways.

But my concerns involve the tediousness of the skills needed to do the simplest things. Like I mentioned, if I’m bored and want to manual pilot the whole thing, then great. But if not, it completely makes sense to me to have autopilots do a lot of the minutiae. I could see enjoying it in small doses, so I’m glad to have gotten over some of the learning curve, but I fear that every season pass is going to bilk me for another $40 as they build out the game. Maybe I just wait a few years to see where it heads or something.

Anyway, thanks again.

5629

I haven’t been playing Elite Dangerous much lately (too into XCOM 2 currently), but here’s a pro-tip on the “dry humping a star” thing coming off a jump: as soon as the count-down clock starts, set your throttle to zero, that way you won’t get that.

As to your other questions–supercruise takes some getting used to and some people are philosophically opposed to it as a waste of player time. I personally love it because nothing else conveys the incredible scale of real-life interplanetary distances. What you want to do there is basically max out your throttle until your “time remaining at current speed” counter is down to about 6 seconds, then adjust your throttle down to the point where it stays there as you decelerate automatically approaching your destination.

As to docking being a hassle, what control scheme are you using? I personally wouldn’t even attempt to play ED without a joystick and throttle. Just too many thrusters and such to control properly otherwise. I use the inexpensive Thrustmaster HOTAS X unit with one of the buttons set as a shift key, which takes care of about 90 percent of the necessary controls right there. Docking will become second nature eventually, believe me.

It really is true that, in the end, the main gameplay loop of ED is the “work in various ways to get money to improve your current ship and get a better one for whatever you want to do next” though. Certain kinds of missions just aren’t worth it till you get a ship that can handle them-mining for instance (if you’re asked to get palladium/osmium/platinum–those are mining missions–best done in an Asp or better). At the beginning, also don’t take those “go find this X and bring it back” missions unless you know for sure what station to get it from, and that you can reach it.

ED is not everyone’s cup of tea, and only you can figure out whether it’s yours (but it does take some time invested beyond just a few hours). It helps to be a bit of an astronomy geek, and to not be looking for a “space opera” experience. I’d suggest checking out the Elite Dangerous Catch-all thread over on the Gamers with Jobs forum for more advice–there’s a pretty active contingent over there.

5630

I’m using an XBox controller and I found that it worked really well. I can do the docking, but I get tired of hunting for the landing pad on certain structures. I think with time I could get more used to what stations look like and where I am in relation to it. The ones that spin with the large globe at the top are easy to figure out. The ones that look more like a D20 were annoying for a bit until I started to figure that out.

I like supercruise and the jumping in the game, but I find it forces too much piloting minutiae on me to do simple things (EDIT: so this might mean that philosophically I’m not on the same page as Elite and maybe there’s nothing that can be done there). Thematically it doesn’t make any sense to me. In a WW2 flight sim, yes, over a thousand years into the future where a wrong move docking could destroy a station, no.

We ended up putting about 10 hours into it yesterday, working through questions in voice chat.

5631

So, would your preference for supercruise be for it to be a “set destination and sit back and relax till you drop out” experience? Part of the reason it’s not that way is to let you do maneuvers to discourage interdiction (at least by AI pilots)–spiraling in by yawing left while rolling right, for instance.

5632

I feel that supercruise should be that way until I choose to disengage the autopilot because of an interdiction or because I want to fly manually. I thought the game has systems that are safer than others, so I feel like if I’m traveling a path through safer systems, I should be able to choose. That would be more enjoyable for me personally and make way more sense thematically. In my head, it makes no sense that none of these automated systems are there for me to engage or ignore or land somewhere in between. If I want to use autopilot, then I have to accept the risk that comes from the time delay of disengaging that in supercruise when the risk of an interdiction appears. But when you describe this…

What you want to do there is basically max out your throttle until your “time remaining at current speed” counter is down to about 6 seconds, then adjust your throttle down to the point where it stays there as you decelerate automatically approaching your destination.

I react by thinking that seems unnecessarily complicated to efficiently arrive at a point in space 1100 years in the future. That’s why I mentioned a WW2 flight sim. I feel like the spaceships of the future seem to require the micromanagement of an older plane on some levels. It’s sort of a space flight sim in a weird way, but not a convincing space sim or setting in other ways. Thematically, EVE’s set a distance you want to drop out at system makes more sense. I get that maybe Elite wants to convey the idea of momentum in space as the reason for the long slow down (although the speed up is a lot quicker, the sweet spot of speed for maneuverability doesn’t quite make sense in my mind nor does retracting hard points to go fast in a vacuum so I don’t see a need to appeal to realism ever really at the expense of tedium - no idea really either way for me, just my first reaction to the game). Again, that might be the philosophical differences of the design approach that may never gel with me.

EDIT: In the X series, I think, there are tedious things to piloting but you can buy upgrades to the ships to get to where I sort of expect space ships of the distant future to be. I appreciated that things like docking computers were there (and I know that Horizons adds docking computers, but I don’t want to get bilked for the incremental improvements that get attached to big additions).

Like I said, core ideas driving this design might not be what I’m looking for in the end.

5633

It kind of goes back to what I was saying about Elite being very serious about being a space pilot simulation, and that may or may not be up your alley. Lots of “why isn’t this automated?” stuff comes down to “Because the point of the game is to be a pilot, you should be piloting”. This leads to a lot more hands-on type of systems than what you might expect. The only exception to this that I can think of is the docking computer, and I almost get the feeling that’s there because it was available in previous Elites (although it sure is easier for me to dock now that it was in the empty wireframes on my C64, haha).

Elite in a lot of ways is a throwback to an earlier era. In some ways I find that awesome, in others… well, not so much. Overall I have mixed feelings about the game, but I appreciate that they’re following their own tune and they do their own unique thing. It’s been worth the money I’ve spent on it, but it’s not a game I can readily recommend to friends.

5634

BTW awdougherty, I’m sure that the docking computer is available in the base game aka the “first season” unless you’re referring to one that automates landing on planets (which I haven’t heard of). Not sure if it’s available at all stations that offer outfitting, though, since I’ve never bothered with it because I was loath to dedicate an equipment slot to it.

5635

ED is built around a core of old-school grindy space-trading mechanics, which makes sense seeing how that the elder 1984 Elite is the very archetype of the space-trading game. This means lots and lots of WW2-level dogfighting (and modern HUDs/combat system automations have been abolished), at human-manageable velocities. It means lots of hands-on interaction even though absolutely nothing of importance is going on (I’m thinking supercruise, in particular, here). And it means grind. Old-school space-traders assume that their players have a burning desire to spend inordinate amounts of time watching a progress bar go up, and that their players possess a blind thirst to upgrade the buggy they’re flying about in. Above all, old-school space traders demand that their players want to make their own fun. If there’s something beyond grinding for more Quatloos or a better ship, well, then, it’s up to the players to make this up on their own. Worse, ED is a single-player design that was later roughly shoehorned into a MP game, with all of the square-peg/round-hole problems that implies.

In short, if you don’t feel a sense of wonder on your own about orbiting (or driving around on) some unnamed planet circling a neutron star 10k LY from Sol, ED will pretty much do nothing for you.

Not saying this as a criticism – there are times when that old-school zeitgeist appeals mightily to that teenager in me who booted up Elite for the first time on his C=64 – but that’s kind of what there is.

5636

A WW2-era amount of fiddlyness is part of these kinds of games to make them feel interactive. Given we’re almost at self-driving cars, a “realistic” FTL-spaceship pilot sim would probably go something like this:

“Hey ship, lay in a course for Ceti Alpha V.”

“Certainly. I’ll notify you when we’re there.”

“Sure. And if you see any promising minerals when we get there, then mine them. I’m going to take a nap.”

5637

“Captain, unidentified ships detected at range 2 ly, likely hostile.”

“Ship, engage subroutine alpha 2”.

sit back and watch the computer engage in combat at speeds and with calculations no human could ever approach

5638

I always imagine that some event happened between now and 3301 that completely broke trust in any computer thats smarter than a bag of hammers.

5639

Cylons!

5640

There’s going to be an arena combat version of Elite for $7.50 (owners of Elite: Dangerous will get this mode for free.)

Hopefully they’ll optimize this for VR.