Hmm well the fact that ED is putting a out a content like that is interesting, but abount the competition and the "pressure" on CIG I'm not that sure...
I've played a bit of ED since its giveaway on the Epic store, honestly not impressed... not even a bit.
Yeah the idea of having the whole galaxy to explore is great, but it is worth it? I've travelled to a far distant system (like 20 jump awayform the system cluster you start into) hoping to have some mission along the way to make some cash and get preactice with the game mechanics but there was baiscally nothing... no mission, no station to interact with, hell some system ware only two stars and nothing else while the other just a bit more... So exploring what exactly?
Personally I thing SC, even right now, with lack of mission content and a single system to explore, have far more content and entertainment of the whole 20 system I've travel in ED... adding the ability to walk around and ship interior doesn't seams a way to improve that but just an addition of emptyness that I don't feel is necessary.
On ED side I'll focus on creating content, mission and bring the graphics up to date instead of having several cheap texture all over... create differents ship cockpit to give you a felling of an actual cockpit instead of being just an overcomplex FPS interface, adding the ability to navigate and interact menu with the mouse also since right now if feel like a cheap console porting...
After all of that then you could add some FPS gameplay and start to apply pressure on CIG side, untill then, it feel more like is the other way around with ED that is running more and more behind SC the more CIG release contents.
Yep, my thoughts exactly, apart from the controls.
Content wise, ED has been empty since launch, and even though I tried playing it a couple of times per year, it always feels hollow and empty. There is too little life, too little to do, and everything looks the same. I travelled much farther out, and there is literally nothing to explore. It's just some scientifically correctly colored balls of light (Stars) with some muddy textured smaller balls around em (planets). Nothing more. SC has waaaay more stuff to do already.
As for controls, I think ED is pretty damn good IF you set it up correctly. You can literally do everything from a 4 button joystick with a hatswitch. Access all the HUD panels, set all your ship items, use the comms, and so on. It was very convenient for travel/space truckin. It is simple but effective.
I think the current millions of button bindings in SC are a bit too much when we don't have a good default setup to start out with. It's great to customize it later on, but it took me, an experienced player, about an hour to set up SC controls for my new joystick. And that was just to make it playable. ED controls just work out of the box, it's much less to customize though.
SC should keep it's control customization depth, but maybe add a separate tab for Basic Controls so you can (re)bind them fast to get into the game more easily, without having to scroll and hunt through the thousands of lines of control bindings.
Edit: and to address the point about the expansion being postponed: who cares at this point??
Seriously, is there a player base that really wants this? Cos the hardcore few who remain loyal are already there, everyone else just left ages ago.
You can already drive around desolate wastlands, fly from supposedly highly populated system to system for hours without bumping into anyone ever. What's the point of adding walking? (Apart from it being promised in the original goals)
I haven't seen anything about there being proper Ai PVE FPS missions to provide content for this new feature. Also, just like with landing and driving, I've not seen any mention of there being dozens of different armor and weapon types. The promo only showed like 2 guns and 1 type of recolored armor. So again, no content, just like with having a single type of buggy to drive with a modification list of like 4 items.
So what will you do when you can walk around? VR maybe fun for an hour, but then again, no content!
