Ship and station interiors

[mamastoast]

Alright, I've been playing the game for a good 10ish hours now and so far I have to agree with what seems to be the general opinion. The game is much more in x3's spirit than Xrebirth ever was... but it feels... small and limited. This goes for ship variety, faction variety and the way they actually use certain core experiences, such as walking around and seeing the word on foot, which is what I wanna talk about here. Keep in mind that this comes from a place of love.

I've been following the game for a while now, so I must admit that it didn't come as a total shock, but even so, the lackluster interiors of basically everything in the game really kills what could have been a great immersive boost to the game. This aspect of the game especially pales when a game like star citizen is looming in the horizon (not a fair comparison.. I know I know). I can understand that having large seamless interiors may have been difficult, so I can live with the somewhat clumsy transporter system... But the extremely limited amount of interior spaces to explore makes the game feel unfinished and poorly thought out. The experience of standing in your cockpit/bridge and watching things happen around you as your AI pilot takes you somewhere is great... I just wish it actually felt fully realised instead of the cheapest possible version.

As far as I can tell, every station consists of a either a (admittedly decent looking) hangar, or an exterior landing platform aswell as a the same generic office copy pasted over and over again. To make it worse, I had to talk to 2 people on the same station at one point, and each of em had an identical office, with an identical view. If you have to instance seperate rooms, atleast have varying room designs with randomised views... or dont give them windows at all.

The ships are even "worse". The small ships are fine... it works, I can crawl aboard my fighter and it feels like there is the amount of interior space I'd expect from a ship of this size. As soon as we move onto medium ships however, it just sorta falls apart. Granted the cockpit im standing in is now roughly twice the size of the small fighter... but that's about it. Even though this vessel is pretty damn huge when looked at from the outside.. It feels cheap and restrictive that I can only go to this tiny part of the ship when exploring it from the inside. It's like owning a house and only being allowed in the broomcloset.

I have not yet been aboard a large vessel, but from a bit of googlefu I found videos of capital ship "tours" which, sadly, only amounted to a larger bridge which now also had the option of going to the exterior of the ship to visit the docked smaller ships. Given the limited selection of ships we have in the game right now, I'had hoped to see more effort put into atleast the capital ships. I understand, being a 3d artist myself, that fully modelling a ship interior is huge armounts of work, but atleast give each large ship a few rooms to visit, such as a crew quarter, the cargo bay... stuff like that. This could even help out with another issue, a place to actually put the otherwise spectral co pilot who'll simply get up and disapear into the transporter at the moment.

On a positive note... WHen you're actually standing in a station hangar, watching ships come and go... It's truly a lovely exeperience, but I find myself torn between appreciating that I can actually jump around in real time aboard a moving ship, and the sad reminder of what could have been done with this system.

Enough of me rambling, I appreciate anyone who took the time to go through my opinions on the matter and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.

[BlackRain]

I agree, it would be great if more could be done with it and also add some functionality to the different locations you could go to.

[malkuth1974]

Give me a captains room or ready room in transports and higher and I’ll be set. I spend 95% of my time micromanaging traders trying to get them leveled for I can set them to autotrade anyway.

Gaining stars is still to dreadfully slow.