Lower your Expectations for ED

[Old Duck]

Although I'm a fan of categorization and definition because they allow for focused conversation, there's some weight to the notion that it is all irrelevant. We are meat staring at a screen. The games that entertain us vary in structure, style and substance, but they all do the same thing for us. Whether I'm playing ED or Kenshi, which are two radically different types of games, I'm essentially doing the exact same thing: being meat interacting with a screen.

Yeah, but I can see why people want to narrow down to a genre. When I'm in the mood to fly a spaceship with 6DoF and engage in trade and space combat, I'm not going to fire up Nier Automata or Soul Cailbre or Dead or Alive 5, as those are entirely different games of a different genre. I used to fire up Elite to scratch the "I want to fly my spaceship and trade and engage in space combat" itch, and now I fire up X4 Foundation instead, so to tell me that X4 can't be offered as a competitor to Elite is patently wrong.

Now interestingly, if I want to shoot at people (other players or NPCs), competitors to Odyssey that come to my mind are Call of Duty, Battlefield, Fortnite, and a variety of other FPS games I've played over the years, none of which fall under the "space game" genre.

 

[Morbad]

But SE doesn’t have on-foot NPCs at all, and EGSs NPCs, while better than NMS IMO, are still simplistic compared to Odyssey’s. As I’ve said previously, you need a fairly sophisticated AI to make for good stealth gameplay, which is what have in Odyssey. There’s better examples out there, but in my experience, they’re either from single-player RPG games, or dedicated single player shooters.

ehhhhh the AI in Oddity is fantastically awful. "stealth" allows for running in blasting with rocket launchers without raising alarms as you just need to kill the NPCs flagged as alert within a time limit, and they can only flag when they have LoS. They have a Doom tier "run towards player" AI when they hear you outside of LoS. And that's about it.

If you compare the AI in Elite to other space games I can't give you many better examples. And if I compare it to other MMOs I can't give you many better examples either. There are better examples when we compare it to single player games though, and that's what he said.

Which is all kinds of depressing and horrifying.

The AI behavior in ED, especially of infantry NPCs, is abysmal...but I can't think of many multi-player games with significantly better bots either.

Of course, I'm judging the AI against myself. This may seem unfair, but it's ultimately the baseline any AI is going to need to hit to feel immersive, rather than cheap--and is why I've heavily preferred multi-player titles whenever practical. Of course, most real people are strategically and tactically incompetent as well, but there is enough of a spread, enough exceptions to the rule, and enough surprises from the otherwise mediocre, that they never really get old. EDO's NPCs got old the second time I played the suit tutorial.

This is why I'm indifferent to the addition of on-foot Thargoids. I don't see it at all likely that they'll be more than dumb-as-brick bullet sponges with a couple of cheap tricks that become irrelevant the moment their pattern is learned.

 

[Shabine]

You know it's true, deep down in the murky waters of your soul.

I have no clue what you're talking about with this "I want to be told what to do" stuff. Where did I say anything even remotely related to linear gameplay? That's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about definitions for types of games and what the presence of certain modes of play do to those definitions; are the definitions ambiguous or clear given the format and the content?

But other ppl play differently.

Again, who said anything about how people play? The ways people choose to play ED have nothing to do with this discussion.

It's only when to force the game to one extreme or another.... then you hit a wall.

I have no clue what this means. What wall? What extremes? Please be more concise.

Also covers trying to beat another game at its own game.

...

Yeah, but I can see why people want to narrow down to a genre. When I'm in the mood to fly a spaceship with 6DoF and engage in trade and space combat, I'm not going to fire up Nier Automata or Soul Cailbre or Dead or Alive 5, as those are entirely different games of a different genre.

True, but is there as much of a significant gap between those titles and, say, ED and Freelancer? Despite the age difference? Or NMS and Space Engineers? I think that, despite being fairly different... they might all scratch similar itches?

I used to fire up Elite to scratch the "I want to fly my spaceship and trade and engage in space combat" itch, and now I fire up X4 Foundation instead, so to tell me that X4 can't be offered as a competitor to Elite is patently wrong.

Absolutely.

Now interestingly, if I want to shoot at people (other players or NPCs), competitors to Odyssey that come to my mind are Call of Duty, Battlefield, Fortnite, and a variety of other FPS games I've played over the years, none of which fall under the "space game" genre.

Odyssey on foot combat reminds me of most bad fps games, except when Stealthboy is silently one-shotting everything in a settlement like this was a scifi Assassin's Creed game.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@shabind
Okay, but you called yourself "meat", because you like to told what to do. Just shows how you consider yourself.
My point was Elite offers a lot more freedom to do what you want to do.
The games you play are more focused, controlled..
Elite is different and doesn't fit into general gaming classes. You can go do your own thing, blaze your own trail.
If you try and force a system that demands player interaction into this game, it won't work.

 

[Shabine]

This exactly is just an illusion which may be natural thinking for players using only solo mode.

Exactly, which is why Solo is effectively a single player mode. The people who use it either often or exclusively don't care about the BGS, because it so seldom affects them in any tangible way. And because they don't share space with anything other than npcs, they are in no way having a multiplayer experience, are they?

(aka that you are not playing this game alone).

I play this game in Open and I still don't care about the BGS. At all. I don't manage anything, nor am I attempting to herd the hoi palloi toward an objective, and I don't want to. If I run into awesome people, great. If I don't run into anyone, well, that isn't unusual given the scale of the galaxy and the peer-to-peer nature of the game's multiplayer. Which is terrible.

Just look at how, after ten years, multicrew continues to be a painful affair.

@shabind
Okay, but you called yourself "meat", because you like to told what to do. Just shows how you consider yourself.

That's not the meaning. I think we might have a language barrier. What I mean is that I'm a human playing a video game. When this behavior is examined at the most basic level, the game I'm playing is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Because we're talking about the act of playing games as the foundation of all these discussions.

My point was Elite offers a lot more freedom to do what you want to do.

Of course. It's a very sandboxy game.

The games you play are more focused, controlled.

I play Elite Dangerous and EVE Online.

Elite is different and doesn't fit into general gaming classes. You can go do your own thing, blaze your own trail.

You can do that in a lot of games.

If you try and force a system that demands player interaction into this game, it won't work.

So you don't like the idea of "Open only". I agree. I think that's a bad idea too.

 

[Planewalker]

The AI behavior in ED, especially of infantry NPCs, is abysmal...but I can't think of many multi-player games with significantly better bots either.

My biggest wish is that fdev will let the AI infantry hunker down and turtle while nade-spamming and flanking.
Not run towards a repeater-blasting semi-tank. x|

(and won't someone think of the poor skimmers, barely aware when their nearby kin goes down :/ )

The AI in elite could do with a more wholesome situational awareness for sure.
(i don't mind low-level enemies being easier for new players, it's when that also hurts higher difficulties there will be words =)

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@Shabine
Open pvp has its place, FD just have to find a good place for it.
Can't say i've ever considered calling myself "meat" but if it works for you...
This thread is so far off-topic, i might start an Aisling dating agency...

 

[Shabine]

Open pvp has its place, FD just have to find a good place for it.

Yeah, but they didn't design a game with deep or interesting PvP mechanics, in the last ten years they did nothing to improve them or the terrible crime and punishment system, and their entire focus now is on Odyssey.

Can't say i've ever considered calling myself "meat" but if it works for you...

Ahhhggg! Fresh meat!
Apologies for the Diablo reference.

This thread is so far off-topic

I dunno. I think it's still on topic. Sort of. I mean, the op opened the door to talking about other games, their lifespans, comparisons to ED, genres... pretty much everything related to the lowering of expectations for the future of this particular game. We come face-to-face with ED's probable limitations daily when imagining a much better version of it full of all the stuff we want and, in all likelihood, won't get.

 

[EdzUp]

Whilst wildlife would be nice on certain occasions in a game it would add only about 0.0001% (guestemate) to the game, look at exobiology for example its there but we arent all gushing over plants

 

[Christopher Roberto]

Whilst wildlife would be nice on certain occasions in a game it would add only about 0.0001% (guestemate) to the game, look at exobiology for example its there but we arent all gushing over plants

If you imagine it as Frontier would implement it, yeah. Like, dinosaurs just standing there and you click scan for 10,000 hours to get elite V.

But imagine it done by a better developer. Could have deer hunter tier hunting, find animals you could tame with various abilities you could take with you, find alien cats you can tame and have wandering around your ship that jump onto your screen at bad moments, have to check your ship before leaving for any infestations, smuggle rare animals to rich empire people while evading ecoterrorists, build a base and farm them, cross-breed ones from various planets to get the abilities/resources you want, trade them with other players, duel other players in a pet arena, populate empty worlds you discovered with the creatures you've collected, visit other people's planets and creatures, discover intelligent creatures that seem to be trying to tell you something, etc..

 

[amigacooke]

so to tell me that X4 can't be offered as a competitor to Elite is patently wrong.

Possibly both options can be right, depending on who you are. Just because I fall asleep playing ED doesn’t mean I expect everyone else to do so as well.

But I do fall asleep playing ED

 

[metatheurgist]

Whilst wildlife would be nice on certain occasions in a game it would add only about 0.0001% (guestemate) to the game, look at exobiology for example its there but we arent all gushing over plants

It's also true that the only planets we have access to can barely support plants, which is one of the reasons we can access them.

 

[EdzUp]

Possibly both options can be right, depending on who you are. Just because I fall asleep playing ED doesn’t mean I expect everyone else to do so as well.

But I do fall asleep playing ED

You play Elite on OSX

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@Shabine
Doesn't man they can't make it work in the future.
I have a very positive mindset, mostly

 

[Christopher Roberto]

It's also true that the only planets we have access to can barely support plants, which is one of the reasons we can access them.

It's a silly space meme that space life would need Earth-like conditions. Even Earth life could probably be bred a bit to survive in space, like tardigrades could probably infest planetary rings with a little work.

 

[amigacooke]

You play Elite on OSX

I have this dongle for playing ED

 

[metatheurgist]

It's a silly space meme that space life would need Earth-like conditions. Even Earth life could probably be bred a bit to survive in space, like tardigrades could probably infest planetary rings with a little work.

Maybe, but since we have a sample of space of one, Frontier can do whatever view they like. Will be interesting to see what Juice finds on Jupiter's moons I guess.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

I see pretty much identical complaints against Fallout 76 with far more cause than those levelled against Elite.
Yet Bethesda is boasting of the player numbers.
Elite is larger, more stable, doesn't have pay-to-win, far more robust anti griefing features, far less grind and more stuff to do after you've got the best gear going.

 

[Planewalker]

But imagine it done by a better developer.

You mean instead of fdev that managed the immense feat of implementing a new baseline in an already established spatiality?

But sure, just forget about the staggering amount of things added to the game for the last eight years because it suits your story.

 

[EdzUp]

Technically its an amazing feat getting the galaxy in a game, its just galactic spreadsheets only interest accountants us lay people want exciting engaging content