Also, share prices aren't part of the company profit or loss. More a problem for speculators than the company.
Is Elite Dangerous a dead game? I compared it to some others ...
- Thread starter Alien
- Start date
I can't speak for others, and I never try to, but Elite is definitively approaching the end of its life for me because of the overall development direction that has been taken. This is not a criticism of those who enjoy Odyssey, because I know and respect that there are players out there whose sense of immersion and general experience have been improved by its introduction. It's just that I have absolutely no interest in running around with either a gun or a scanner in my hand, and I never did. That's not why I play Elite, so here I am burning whatever is left of my metaphorical fuel in Horizons.
Elite is, bar none, the best extraterrestrial dogfighting, mining and exploration game ever made. Its ships are iconic. They have personalities. The things we can do with them can be, and are, stellar. We have an entire galaxy to cruise through, to put our names on, to blast rivals out of the stars and the skies in, and so on. When we undock tons of futuristic machine and take off into the black, we're driving dreams that have come true, and I can't for the life of me understand how any of it is improved by spawning outside of those magnificent machines and running around taking weightless shots at braindead npc bullet sponges with a peashooter or scanning things on low resolution surfaces. I don't understand Star Citizen's design for the same reason. I mean, I fly massive spaceships that take ages to get into and out of... so why am I huddled in the corner of a dank little cave mining pocket rocks by hand that I have to sell at a station terminal that I needed to sit on a train after docking just to get to?
I understand why both a developer and a certain segment of a large game's population would want their game to be everything for everyone, but the best games I have ever played simply don't bother doing that. They take their essence - the core of what makes them successful - and they expand on that. Here in Elite, we could have had an expanded focus on enriching open and private groups, the option to build our own planetary outposts with extractors and manufacturing systems, improved PvP with more accessible and enjoyable engineering, broadened AX and rescue and planetary flight and deep space exploration stuff, and much more. So much can be done with spaceships in this spaceship game, but that path was inarguably passed over in favor of something else.
EVE Online is one part social engineering experiment, one part market spreadsheet, and one part space-based conflict simulator. Its developer, CCP, abandoned the notion of "walking in stations" long ago, which is something they poured no small amount of their people's time into... because they realized that walking around in space stations isn't why people play EVE Online. I applaud them for that; for not chasing a pipe dream that diverts players from the essence of their game. Dust 514 taught them an important lesson, which is that none of their players wanted to run around in the dust shooting lasers at one another, and that nobody coming in from the outside wanted to be playing a first-person shooter that didn't stack up against far better first-person shooters.
I honestly hope that Elite never dies. I hope that people are playing this game long after I myself have died. It's wonderful. I'm still playing it. But I'm playing an old iteration of it, because the new one just doesn't contain anything I'm interested in. I don't care about my space legs. I care about my jump range, the effectiveness of my frag cannons and my missiles, and pushing the spaceships in Elite to their limits against other players, npc criminals, strange aliens, and the stresses of the vast unknown.
The game isn't dying. At all. It's just dying for me, because what I love about it is clearly no longer of any interest to those who run the show.
Elite is, bar none, the best extraterrestrial dogfighting, mining and exploration game ever made. Its ships are iconic. They have personalities. The things we can do with them can be, and are, stellar. We have an entire galaxy to cruise through, to put our names on, to blast rivals out of the stars and the skies in, and so on. When we undock tons of futuristic machine and take off into the black, we're driving dreams that have come true, and I can't for the life of me understand how any of it is improved by spawning outside of those magnificent machines and running around taking weightless shots at braindead npc bullet sponges with a peashooter or scanning things on low resolution surfaces. I don't understand Star Citizen's design for the same reason. I mean, I fly massive spaceships that take ages to get into and out of... so why am I huddled in the corner of a dank little cave mining pocket rocks by hand that I have to sell at a station terminal that I needed to sit on a train after docking just to get to?
I understand why both a developer and a certain segment of a large game's population would want their game to be everything for everyone, but the best games I have ever played simply don't bother doing that. They take their essence - the core of what makes them successful - and they expand on that. Here in Elite, we could have had an expanded focus on enriching open and private groups, the option to build our own planetary outposts with extractors and manufacturing systems, improved PvP with more accessible and enjoyable engineering, broadened AX and rescue and planetary flight and deep space exploration stuff, and much more. So much can be done with spaceships in this spaceship game, but that path was inarguably passed over in favor of something else.
EVE Online is one part social engineering experiment, one part market spreadsheet, and one part space-based conflict simulator. Its developer, CCP, abandoned the notion of "walking in stations" long ago, which is something they poured no small amount of their people's time into... because they realized that walking around in space stations isn't why people play EVE Online. I applaud them for that; for not chasing a pipe dream that diverts players from the essence of their game. Dust 514 taught them an important lesson, which is that none of their players wanted to run around in the dust shooting lasers at one another, and that nobody coming in from the outside wanted to be playing a first-person shooter that didn't stack up against far better first-person shooters.
I honestly hope that Elite never dies. I hope that people are playing this game long after I myself have died. It's wonderful. I'm still playing it. But I'm playing an old iteration of it, because the new one just doesn't contain anything I'm interested in. I don't care about my space legs. I care about my jump range, the effectiveness of my frag cannons and my missiles, and pushing the spaceships in Elite to their limits against other players, npc criminals, strange aliens, and the stresses of the vast unknown.
The game isn't dying. At all. It's just dying for me, because what I love about it is clearly no longer of any interest to those who run the show.
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I'm a traveller, through the galaxy. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a resource site manager or base commandant, or a cog in a corporation (even if it's called a clan). That's not what Elite has ever been about, and that's not what the RPG it was based on ("Traveller") was about.
That's awesome, and obviously that playstyle is something that should also be supported with more interesting and exciting planets and locations and location features. My point was that I was hoping for innovation in Elite to be based around things that can be done in and with spaceships specifically. For those who did want some kind of planetary interaction beyond more planet types, terrains and sites to experience, building something on those planets... with and for spaceships... might be fun. It's the whole getting out of the spaceship thing that never made much sense to me, you know what I mean?
To each their own.
Being permanently riveted to my pilot's chair never made much sense to me, I'm a CMDR of a ship, not just a ship.
Let me just say that, as I mentioned right away, I never speak for others. I only mentioned why Elite is dying for me personally, and it's because the actual spaceship part of the spaceship game is no longer the focus of FDev and hasn't been for a long time. I could list so many examples of why; from the lack of any new ships and new things to do in those ships, to the lingering of broken and abandoned features like Powerplay and CQC and the engineering grind, to the fact that they never even bothered to model damage beyond the Anaconda. Focus went into Odyssey. That's fine. That's the direction they went in. And some people like it, because as you said, it makes them feel like the commander of a ship.
That's not the case for me. Scanning low polygon grass by hand in a low texture quality desert does not make me feel like more of a spaceship commander. Neither does shooting npcs at repetitive copy-pasted outposts and getting paid peanuts for it. Neither does walking around in a copy-pasted space station that I can't even sit down and get a drink in looking for an npc to interact with. None of these things make me feel like more of a commander. At all. And again, I genuinely respect that some players feel more immersed in the galaxy by doing these things. I just don't. I'm not here for any of that. I'm here to fly spaceships and, at the lowest end in terms of experience, maybe drive around in an SRV. But even that feels like a major downgrade from staring into the black heart of the galaxy or defeating a dangerous criminal or a Thargoid in battle.
Mining void opals by the ton after cracking a massive asteroid? Great. Traveling to the edge of a galaxy? Sounds good. Going up against an alien in a strange and deadly ship? Brilliant. All of that makes me feel like a commander. Nothing in Odyssey does. So again, the game is dying for me, because nothing I enjoy about it is being improved. It's different for you. Odyssey's features make you feel like more of a commander. That's awesome. It just isn't my cup of space tea.
You just had to say it, you just had to say it!
RubberNuke will not be happy!
The best (space/sci-fi) game I played, apart from Elite, also had the dullest in-game grind ever - Mass Effect trilogy was great, but walking round and round and up and down floors in your huge spaceship to find crew members and trying to get them to create 'power-ups' DOH!!!!!!
Only three more weeks of meaningless numericals and fleeting servitude, and glorious space waifu will finally grant me temporary access to her magnificent, gigantic, giggly shields. Oh Aisling-chan. You are so kawaii.
Ugh. Such fond memories. Of walking.
For me, I’ve always viewed my character in this game as a bit of an Imperial Agent, independently supporting brave Freedom Fighters resisting the might of the Evil Galactic Federation. I’ve frequently imagined her meeting contacts in seedy bars, secret back rooms, or out of the way places, both before or after a mission. I’d much rather actually do what I imagined, with the caveat that such meetings come with potential wrinkles, such as sting operations, betrayals, or internecine fighting. These carefully curated missions we get currently could use some spice of that variety, especially if you have to make develop those contacts in the first place.
Back before Frontier “fixed” BGS play by removing the more nuanced trading of reputation and influence for changes to faction states, replacing it with a straight influence grind off, many of the missions I took I treated as proxies for stealthy missions of sabotage and theft. These days, I can actually do stealthy missions of sabotage and theft, because Frontier actually added a fairly good stealth game mechanic. My chief complaint remains that the always online nature of the game leaves me little opportunity to indulge in this kind of gameplay. If this had been a single player game, I could’ve easily quintupled overall time playing this game.
I love this sort of commitment to a character that emerges from the lore and is then polished by the player over time. I've always viewed my character as a dyed-in-the-wool brigand; a smuggler (back when that was both doable and genuinely fun in Elite), a spacefaring gun for hire, and a galactic trekker. It's that old Han Solo thing, you know? Beholden to nobody, yet submerged in the causes of many for the sake of profit and the freedom that independent wealth provides.
Is it super obvious yet that I got my start in Freelancer?
Anyway, as you've pointed out, it's great when we get to do the things that we imagined. The problem for me is that Odyssey doesn't contain anything that I imagined myself doing as a commander. Repetitive FPS gunfights and scanning space flowers was simply never the direction that I was hoping Elite would take back in the day, and if it did end up going down the "space legs" route, I was hoping that more of what we would be doing would be directly related to our ships; exploring the interiors and interacting with those interiors in meaningful and ultimately beneficial ways, gathering materials to improve them in new and innovative ways including equipping new weapons and new modules to handle new and expensive materials, and rigging them for an ever-broadening variety of new combat and exploration tasks.
And even then, I was honestly hoping the whole thing would fall through and FDev would refocus on ships. To put in it all in context, I play DCS World because I love to fly. I've spent a lot of money on that's game's DLC planes, because the cockpits and the handling are sublimely realistic. My experience in that game, whether I'm alone or with my wing, was never going to be improved by the ability to get out of my jet, walk into an airport, and buy a Pepsi from a vending machine. It was never going to be made better by the option of carrying, drawing and firing a sidearm at someone. I was never going to be happier with what I was doing because I was given the option of disembarking and shoving dirt into my pockets.
That's where the disconnect happens between players like me and Odyssey. And again, this is not a criticism of those who disagree. It's the reason I simply can't hang in there for much longer. It's also the reason I will never migrate to Star Citizen. My criticisms of Odyssey are amplified by its admittedly beautiful but amazingly tedious "walking simulator" loops. Picking up boxes of medical waste by hand, hoping that the boxes don't clip through the floor wherever I put them down, and spending the next half an hour walking to a delivery terminal isn't my idea of a good space sim. It's just a boring timesink.
These things you list? Aren’t what makes ED the premier Virtual Reality space ship game for me… the non-VR king of space ship games being Kerbal Space Program. What makes ED a great space ship game is the fantastic flight model, one which requires custom scripts for my HOTAS to make the most of the game’s controls. Only the fact that we can’t land on most planets with atmospheres, especially “Earth-Like” worlds, relegates ED to third on my overall space ship game list, behind its predecessors.
What makes me feel less like a Commander in the 34th century of the Elite Universe is how ridiculously out of whack in-game rewards have become. A starving outpost having the credits to buy hundreds of million credits worth of void opals. Being offered more than the overall value of my ship to run a trivial, risk-free mission. Not being a wanted fugitive across Human for the dozens of premeditated murders she’s committed over the years, let alone the kidnappings, sabotages, thefts, and biowarfare, and other acts of infamy committed against the “Evil Galactic Federation.”
The way this game evolved, especially how the Pilots Federation literally lets us get away with murder, I've come to realize something regarding the Pilots Federation in general:
That’s fair enough. It does, however, make me feel more like I’m playing someone exploring the galaxy out in the galaxy. That was also the case with the SRV in Horizons. "Exploring strange new worlds" to me means more than viewing the planet from 30 light seconds out. It means getting out of the ship and getting my hands dirty, and taking biological samples.
What would make me feel even more like an explorer would include taking geological samples, conduct atmospheric tests, and other things like that. Being able to walk through ancient alien ruins that I discovered, and uncover their secrets. Things like that.
I started playing during the Alpha. What you call "peanuts," I call rewards so absurdly high, they break my suspension of disbelief. "You want to pay me how much to clear out some scavengers? Why don't you buy take some flight lessons, buy an Eagle, some unguided missiles, and take of the problem yourself. You'd still be ahead half a million credits afterwards!"
Fair enough. But I've had adventures in the Elite Universe since 1984, and dreamed of what life would be like beyond the boundaries of my ship.
I remember finding my first Odyssey "forest" after the proper release. I noticed that the gas giant the moon was orbiting was about to eclipse its primary, so I decided to switch over to the on-foot VR mode (still wishing we had roomscale VR), lay on my back among the living plants that had managed to thrive where by all rights no living things should exist, and watched as the star slid behind the innermost ring.
It was then and there that Commander Inga Stevenson set aside her bitterness towards the people of the Federation in general, and decided to stop making excuses regarding the human right abuses that keep happening right at home, despite the strong regulations and traditions that is supposed to keep them from happening. Not that she would completely ignore the threat the Federation still posed towards the free people of the galaxy. She would just save her ire towards those who truly deserved it: the Corporate executives and the armed thugs they used to enslave their so-called "employees."
And after that, something came up in real life, so I had to log out, and I missed the actual eclipse. I really wish this was a single player game, so I could save my game to experience moments like that.
Fair enough. What we got in Odyssey isn't quite what I'd wanted either. It is, however, a necessary step towards what I do want: to have adventures in the Elite universe. Just like ship interiors (if done right) would also be a necessary step towards that eventual goal.
I will say this: for me at least, there's a difference between shooting down a ship to accomplish my goal, and killing some poor soul going about their job, who just happened to be passing by the piece of equipment I've been sent to deal with. I don't care about the money, thanks to Frontier's poor decisions regarding rewards and ship costs, Inga's not a struggling Commander trying to make her way through the galaxy. She's doing it for the thrill of the adventure, and simply slaughtering an entire settlement is so uncivilized.
Legs was in the plan right from the start, if you didn't want it then you bought the wrong game. tbh I don't think I'd have backed a Elite clone, coulda got that free with Oolite. Powerplay was just such a waste of resources, so much potential lost but then you can say that about most of the game.
This is interesting.
- For well over half a decade, this game didn't have Odyssey's features. Was I playing the wrong game that whole time?
- When Odyssey dropped, was it either what you were promised or had reasonable hopes it would be? If not, then that might be the wrong game.
I have no interest in grinding for more materials that allow me to upgrade a gun and a suit that make it easier for me to grind for materials to upgrade my gun and my suit... which FDev promised would not be the core gameplay loop in the expansion. I wish I could leave my ship in space and float around in zero gravity, repairing it by hand in the furthest reaches of the galaxy... like FDev promised I would be able to do. I was hoping that I would be able to walk around inside my giant flying home... like FDev promised was a top priority countless times right up until they decided that the players who were cheering for it would find it boring. It isn't that the foundation upon which Odyssey is built isn't good... it's that the execution is a terrible, hollow, repetitive grind that in no way improved our lives as spaceship commanders.
And that's why the lights are dimming for me. The spaceship-centric features of this game have been abandoned. Unquestionably. So I'm enjoying the features that do exist one last time, because unless Odyssey evolves into something that makes life in a ship more fun, there simply won't be much point beyond the occasional old school thrill. And that's a shame, because when I'm piloting an Elite spaceship, it genuinely is one of the best experiences I've ever had in a game.
Again, please do not presume that I'm looking for a fight here. My issues with Odyssey's execution and the abandonment of Elite's ships may in fact be the reasons why this expansion has terrible reviews (36% on Steam, 3.4/10 on Meta, 46/100 on Open) and did not permanently increase Elite's population, but they may also be fairly personal. I met a ton of people I still talk to and play other games with in this one, but I can't get the rest of them to come back.
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Don’t worry - you wouldn’t have missed much:
https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/48430 - Star shines through planet when an eclipse is occurring
Legs was the plan from the start. The second stated expansion plan. The details of what they delivered was never explicitly stated beyond grand plans. A lot of what they delivered with the ship part of the game was not what I wanted either. After 5 years it was about time they delivered more of what was in the KS. Sometimes I wish they started with the leg game first. Then we could all complain about how it's not a spaceship game.
CQC, Powerplay, broken/barebones Multicrew... that's all stuff I could have done without.View attachment 345065
Legs was the plan from the start. The second stated expansion plan. The details of what they delivered was never explicitly stated beyond grand plans. A lot of what they delivered with the ship part of the game was not what I wanted either. After 5 years it was about time they delivered more of what was in the KS. Sometimes I wish they started with the leg game first. Then we could all complain about how it's not a spaceship game.
With DB changing corp. role, it will be interesting to see what, if any, changes/adjustments/directions the new CEO will bring to Frontier as a company and more specifically to this thread, E.D. as a product.
The potential of E.D.'s bright future remains there afterall.
More new competition is coming in the Space game genre, likely sometime in 2023 with Bethesda's SF for example. Of course, this spells no story of doom for ED imho. However, the market is always open to trying out pastures new and it's more a question of where we, the market, intend to spend our precious time going forward.
2023 will be interesting to watch as I continue to planet hop my way around my current E.D. exploration route which has not end point LOL.
S!
The potential of E.D.'s bright future remains there afterall.
More new competition is coming in the Space game genre, likely sometime in 2023 with Bethesda's SF for example. Of course, this spells no story of doom for ED imho. However, the market is always open to trying out pastures new and it's more a question of where we, the market, intend to spend our precious time going forward.
2023 will be interesting to watch as I continue to planet hop my way around my current E.D. exploration route which has not end point LOL.
S!
Non-existent law and order or consequences, kindergarden bgs, mickey mouse faction war sim, no relationships between factions, no real relationships with factions, overpowered engineering, banana republic economy, deadest NPCs ever in a game, ....