I think at this point, we *need* to see some of Elite's roadmap. We're already behind schedule with Season 2 and talk of Space Legs sounds like it's at least a year away. We don't even know what to look forward to.
Oh boy I'm triggered now lol here comes my rant:
I genuinely don't even really know what space legs could bring to this game beyond more "immersion" type stuff. I don't want "gearing up" my cmdr to be another grind that I have to do.
Honestly the problem with elite has always been really clear to me. It's two fold, I would say that it isn't that there isn't a lot of mechanical depth, hell outfitting a ship is easily one of the most engaging parts of this game. Part of it is that after a while there is this huge looming sense of "why am I doing this?" Because once you get past your standard progression and things start to slow down the cracks start to show.
Personal progression normally goes:
1. Grind for credits to get into a decent ship
2. Grind for credits to A-rate that ship
3. Grind for credits to get a better ship
4. Grind for credits to A-rate that ship
5. Repeat until you have the best ship for what you wanna do A-rated.
Then you go into the hellish engineer grind which is a mix of grinding for materials, grinding for reputation, grinding for reputation to unlock permits to grind for reputation with another engineer and generally just trying to cope with how insurmountable the task of that getting your ship to G5 is until you final do.
Then you might delve into grinding power play modules, which is just pledging, forgetting you pledged for 3 weeks and right before the 4th week grinding out 750 merits in 3-5hrs of shooting down federal logistics ships.
However most of this progression only really applies to combat, but even in the combat pilot route you gotta ask. What's the end game? Most of the hardest NPC ships can be killed rather easily by good piloting and a non engineered A-rated python. It's not like there are any crazy combat encounters out there, even CZs can be handled by that very ship solo with light G1-3 engineering.in most slots. PvP is the only real thing that could be considered end game, but if you're gonna get into that then you've pretty much gotta be aware that there is no real incentive to do it other than good fights. You're not going to make any money, you're not gonna get anything cool, you're not gonna get cool cosmetics or titles or anything.
Traders and Explorers have no use for credits really, for traders I can only imagine that having a huge credit balance is more of a point of pride than anything else. And explorers are basically done once they can afford an A-rated AspX and grind out a G5 engineered FSD.
Then the second part and what I would argue is the real issue is that despite elite being an online multiplayer game
there is no multiplayer in it. Combat pilots have the most multiplayer, they can shoot things down together or even shoot at each other in wings (highly recommendable). Honestly part of the reason draconis 17 is so popular is not that it's a huge money maker, it's that it gives friends a reason to play together. Being in a wing of 4 during a D17 grind is some of the most fun you can have with your friends in this game.
What the fuck else is there? The most Traders get out of multiplayer is that if you guys are flying in a wing when you're going out to sell your goods the other people can collect like 10% dividends on whatever was just sold, so everyone makes 10% more money I guess? Compelling gameplay.
Explorers flying together is kind of sort of emergent gameplay but it's not gonna happen on its own, it's one of those things where they can help each other if the other runs out of fuel or something but really it's just a sight seeing tour with your friends. Which I guess has some appeal if you're really into that aspect of exploration but man I don't think I could ever get into that.
There is just nothing to do with your friends, you can't even accept missions as a wing. Those pirate lord assassination missions would be perfect if they reworked them to be wing missions. Imagine if they were just like a huge pay out, but when you dropped in to the pirate lord you had to fight like 6 dudes or something so you really needed your wing mates.
I love elite so much, and it's easily one of my favorite games but my god it's frustrating to see what's happening with this game some times. Multicrew feels like such a tacked on way to say "yeah see you can totally play with your buddies!" like why is multicrew more fun for my friends than being in a wing with each of us flying our own ships? We might make less money but we're definitely having more fun. It's so blatantly obvious why they keep focusing on combat, because it's the only actually developed gameplay this game actually has. All the game mechanics reinforce combat gameplay the most and give it the only real gameplay loop.
Sorry for the sort of unfocused wall of text about stuff that has been talked to death but man thinking about the "planned" future of this game is frustrating.
Expecting a more or less bog standard planet with the usual ice cream mountains, but actual handmade meshes put on it, just like engineer bases. Add the haze effect, so you can only make out the silhouette and voila, we have the teaser environment. Looks good though!
