Things like 1 to 1 planets sound cool in principle but from a gameplay perspective would simply be boring (speaking from my own experience as an ED:Horizons backer), the current scale strikes a balance between being traversable in reasonable time and not being overly small.
The truth is, a lot of these things if attempting to be rooted in reality would be dull. Travelling for hours and hours from point A to B may be realistic but I struggle to see the enjoyment/fun of that and given that the majority of gamers are time constrained (work and life commitments) it would fall flat on its face.
Yep. It was just the fact that the Cobra engine is able to use true scale accordingly because CIG are stating that even 64 bit precision limits what they can do and thus that is why we don't have 1:1 scale as the main reason as it limits travel speeds.
Now I assume ED when you go into warp travel then you are de-spawning. With CIG's implementation of Quantum travel they are truly moving from point a to point b at 0.2 the speed of light.
With that we also know that to get from one side of star system to other in Quantum drive takes up to 45 mins of real time. I see no reason we couldn't of had distance 2-4x greater than they are now set and introduce warp drive. The tech for that would be different. Allowing for only the largest class of Capital ships to be able to enter a warp drive due to it's engine, damping fields and all other tech to do so it could have introduced another dynamic. It could be that they do similar in that you cannot jump and jump again and that depending on the distance you jump via warp depends on the time it requires for the engines to charge again.
With that it could mean with warp because it's meant to be instantaneous travel they could have had the warp form. The ship would enter the warp and de-spawn and then re-spawn the other end as it exits the warp.
It gives meaning to really use the larger capital ships to travel further afield. You could have it so that ships cannot just travel the whole distance of the galaxy but depending on the ship/brand/tech then you could either instantaneously travel the length of 1 to 2 star systems. This system would have been awesome to have fleshed out and add further detail but of course rather late to the party on that now.
In terms of planet size. They suggested in their engine they were not able to do anything larger than the size of earth so scaled it down by a fact of 4-6 depending. With that though to me it would make some things feel odd. Since we are able to fly around etc we are always going to be able to see the curvature of the planet/moon when we wouldn't IRL. Of course that is dependant on terrain etc but yeah. I would assume their biggest issue is actually producing content enough that is varied and interesting to fill in these regions.
I would like to see more day to day life requirements. I was hoping that we would see and have the ability to live in the UEE and own an apartment as such in say a high rise tower. It be ours and ours alone. We then go to our hanger to take smaller vehicles out to get to the landing pad zones (kinda like going to an airport) where you have both private ships and ships you can pay to fly on to get you into out space. You then go from that station to larger ships to actually fly in open space.
Of course that is for populated UEE planets such as earth.
But yeah I guess me wanting to see the tech push and the real gameplay is hard to quantify at this time. If they can get truly procedural explorable cities that are interesting then that will go a long way to help populate such planets. Cities that have various clothes shops with different fashions, coffee shop brands, department stores that sell things for your apartment to give you reasons to earn in the PU etc. They are all parts that could be added to flesh out and also give NPC's diversity.
I think the biggest thing will be making planets generally diverse in terrain etc though. Having a planet that is just a large rocky space is interesting in itself at times but others that sit in the Goldilocks zone and have micro organisms, fauna and flora etc that really is different and diverse from our own but suitably hapital are what are really going to make or break the interest of exploration for me. I would love to see them produce planets that have that dense jungle/foliage exploration. It is what CryEngine was good at.
Their procedural tech can support 16 terrain layers which then can have multiple textures blended but truly dynamic terrain layers allowed them to also have true biomes available with their own weather patterns and similar. If they get that right then they need to be careful that the biomes are actually not feeling cramped which is an odd notion.
Now with that they could have course use the larger planets relative to earth to make some of the goldilocks zoned planets feel epic. That is certainly something I think ED lacks in that respect in that most do appear to be rather limited in what would be interesting gameplay for them. Although I guess that is the limit of not being able to land on planets with atmosphere unless that has changed recently?
Now if they opened that up I would assume that would add huge amounts to the game.
You might have one insanely long wait.
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