Seems Elite Dangerous will be continued!
- Thread starter The Lawful
- Start date
And it's not that I finally agree with you.
For me, what was mentioned about ED without details doesn't lead to anything. Let's hope there's no more of the same.
That sounds like what Monster Hunter does. It's actually a selling point for that franchise, my son loves the Monster Hunter series.
Rubbish take and even worse troll attempt.There are those who claim the Amiga isn't dead for various reasons, and in a sense they're right. However, the court of common opinion has the Amiga as dead as the Dodo, and in a sense they are also right.
I see ED as a bit Amigarish at present
That's not true to say, I count the defence of Lovaroju from the Thargoids as one of the best moments in the game for me personally, and I think the effort put forth by those who've really engaged with it hasn't been a waste. The spire sites are a substantial addition too. War is a game of statistics, numbers and logistics. Looking at the Thargoid war like you're playing Civilization is like playing poker and approaching it like Blackjack. The best way to view the Thargoid war is to put yourself in the shoes of a soldier or a low-mid tier officer.
Unfortunately, my time for games has been quite limited recently, but I'm keeping up with the war for the most part and I don't just see it as a numbers here, numbers there situation. Maybe it's because I've mostly flown around the bubble in my years of playing and some of these systems have, within the realms of the game, become familiar and friendly. I guess it's a RP thing and if you're not fussed about that (and no problem with that btw), then I guess it may seem just like numbers, but at the end of the day, all games are like that, even the good ones, you push your buttons you get your responses, whether it's jumping, shooting, building, driving, flying, cookie clicking... what have you. Underneath it all, it's just numbers.
Yeah and there are even many good RTS games that don't have or need unit stats, the difference being that those games have different scales and rely less on individual 1v1 unit engagements. C&C games would be a good example of a RTS where it's not needed. The combat triangle stuff with damage types seems like it could reduce the reliance on stats but it's kinda messy if it relies on icons instead of how the units look because it's all a bunch of melee dudes and pure rock paper scrissors combat isn't deep.
This is an issue I had with the war from the beginning - it doesn't have anything for players to latch on to because it's so abstract and large scale that individual or small group contributions hardly matter and even if they do you don't get any sense of how much you did. Most of the actual fighting is same from system to system, week to week and only changes the distance you have to travel.
There's multiple ways to fix it without much effort like top contributor lists, breakdowns of what activities people did to contribute and rewards or system effects like "more basilisks/scouts in encounters" but with how broken the launch was and how frontier almost never patches in small gameplay enhancements instead of major overhauls I don't expect it to get better beyond getting a maelstrom boss fight down the line.
When the war is over and you want to sum it up to tell a cool story about the great second thargoid war it's going to be hard because it all just blends into a haze of forgettable repetitive battles with ambigious targets where it's unclear how much effort players put into it. Which really sucks because I'm sure people did put an amount of effort that would amaze anyone who reads about it later.
There was enough player engagement here for an epic gaming story like stuff from eve/wow/that logistics war game/ultima online if things were done just a little differently in a way that would let players take more ownership of things and maybe even break the intended script a bit more - like maybe Palin was able to figure out the spire poison faster because we cleared a few spire systems before they became officially active instead of the systems just getting flipped back magically.
I think I agree with the point made that it is a tough balance to try to have both the strategical and the operative aspects combined the way the war is structured in the game. I think not having hit points in Monster Hunter makes it feel less gamey so it makes it seem more realistic - even though you're just this guy going up against monsters that would squish you in a nano second in real life, but I digress... within the defined boundaries and mechanics of the game, I think it works, or at least it seems to me to. Anyway, back to Elite, I think what Frontier have done with the war, and the scale from sabotaging spires onfoot to battles in the skies and outer space, to the tactics on how to reclaim entire systems is quite the feat. And while it's not perfect, I'd say it's definitely working far more than not.
Inara has the contributor lists and info like that if you want to follow what's happening at any given point and in any given system. And while I'd like to see it in the game as part of the local galnet news or something - which I have no idea how much effort that would take, but I assume the ARX hooks could probably be repurposed to make that work - it's currently not in and all likelihood isn't going to be, though again, it would be very welcome. Even so, for me, I find that Inara suffices very well, even possibly moreso being that I can look at that website on the go rather than having to be logged into the game. But Inara is there, and I highly recommend everyone who hasn't yet to sign up and follow the war from there. If you're looking for some personal agency in relation to the Thargoid war and the game as a whole it's a great place to go to.
Inara and dcoh.watch are good tools, but they operate with incomplete information and inara lacks data on sampling and missions. Also for a long time the kill data was very inaccurate due to journal events being bugged and the smaller and lower level you go the less accurate the data gets (small systems with a few contributors have no data and/or just get cleared by one contribution of samples).
In my opinion the data isn't even accurate enough to show the true effect the release of new AX weapons had (because of the journal bug) which is something you could maybe weave a part of a narrative around with more reliable data.
Most importantly you don't see what actually had the greatest effect because that has to be estimated after the fact - the raw numbers don't actually matter and this would be one way for frontier to make them matter more. This is due to thargoids likely having infinite resources and no logistics behind the scenes so progress is still mostly a binary "win/lose" even after it was changed to not erase 100% of the gains every week.
Ultimatley it's up to FDev to make the system more engaging and well presented instead of only giving us a list of systems by most % complete that's quite hidden away due to being a late addition. Having secondary and tetriary reasons to go to a specific system would be helpful in reducing some decision paralysis on where to go if you're undecided even if the way it's currently set up the choice isn't really yours and doesn't really matter much.
Me too.
Actually things are so bad at Frontier, even IGN posted a shocking news article about it:
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20%
Chaos.
Then, in June, Frontier announced the closure of its Frontier Foundry subsidiary and a plan to concentrate on its own universe of curated games, admitting to "disappointing" financial performance across its third-party portfolio ...
...a 20% operating cost reduction from layoffs...
And finally, Chairman David Wilton is out,... Frontier boss David Braben admitted it had been a “turbulent and difficult year” for Frontier...
Realms of Ruin’s poor performance, saying its ... it expects to bring in £80-95 million ....
What? How?
I'm not knocking it for those who enjoy it. I'm just saying how its basically doing the same stuff over and over again for months or even years. Ok, now they added spires, so its just another thing to do over and over and over again for months or even years.
If David Wilton needed to go, then maybe it's a step in the right direction. Time will tell.
It's been a difficult year for the gaming industry as a whole.
The company as a whole, not just Realms of Ruin, I believe.Realms of Ruin’s poor performance, saying its ... it expects to bring in £80-95 million ....
Fair enough, but it's a game like any other in that aspect. What do you suggest they could do to do more?
The thread on this forum is probably the best bet overall, or join the AX discord. I think it's a case of you get what you put in. I get that Inara is limited but I don't know that it has to be 100% accurate to be able to get something out of it. I certainly did, and I guess that's all I can really vouch for.
For me, its the pacing. Many years ago i said FD either needed to pee or get off the pot when it came to the story. Even long before the Thargoid stuff, storyline stuff progressed at an abysmal rate, with months or years between story elements. Basically FD either needed to forget about story and focus on features that add more to the game, but no story behind it or go all in and keep it progressing and engaging, so each element doesn't take months or years (taken to extreme, the hypothetical "what if players did nothing to stop the thargoids" potentially taking 80 years) to resolve.
To give an example, let's take Thargoids.
Without story, they are just another activity, like in the original Elite. A place or places where you can go to kill Thargoids or places to avoid.
With story, then FD need to be on the ball, every month, moving things along, developing the story, bringing in new things, etc.
The latter requires a lot more commitment and engagement from the devs, and therefore more expensive, but it can also be a lot more fun and engaging for players.
What FD opted for was something that was story based, but with a pacing that is so slow it might as well be static, without story.
You could have someone who played ED 2 years ago and seeing the thargoids are invading the bubble. 2 years later, the story hasn't really changed. The thargoids are still invading the bubble.
With better BSG and war mechanics, the story would mostly write itself. They'd just need to put their hand on the tiller every once in a while. They wouldn't need to devote whole updates to making each chapter. 
It's funny, DB once said Winter is Coming. At this rate, GRR Martin might finish Fire and Ice before the Thargoids figure out what they're doing here. 
Also funny, system wars finish in 4 days. 4 days! Not a fan of that bull dung; wars are serious business that have lasting consequences (just read the news sometime) but hey, at least some PMF is playing Risk right? One extreme to the other.
It's funny, DB once said Winter is Coming. At this rate, GRR Martin might finish Fire and Ice before the Thargoids figure out what they're doing here. Also funny, system wars finish in 4 days. 4 days! Not a fan of that bull dung; wars are serious business that have lasting consequences (just read the news sometime) but hey, at least some PMF is playing Risk right? One extreme to the other.
I think the Thargoids will be fine, given the pace of GRRM they have at least another 10 yearsAt this rate, GRR Martin might finish Fire and Ice before the Thargoids figure out what they're doing here.
It's the usual "size of bubble" problem.
The effective "frontline" of the war is somewhere between 50 and 75 systems. Much bigger than that, and it becomes incomprehensible - sure, you can still shoot Thargoids for fun, but getting any sort of overview of why you're doing it becomes really difficult. It's rare for a BGS squadron to get that large because keeping track of that space becomes very tricky; most Powerplay groups are a similar size in terms of control spheres; etc.
Make the front line bigger to the point where the Thargoids are a reasonable medium-term threat but keep the overall difficulty the same, and the per-system difficulty has to drop so much that a single commander can save it in an hour or so.
With a bubble of ~1000 systems, the Thargoids at their furthest reach would have taken over almost a fifth of it, including threatening several critical systems (though unlikely to have actually captured any because they'd be the priority for defence, of course). They'd have been able to capture the entire thing given a year or two undisturbed.
The size of the bubble is pretty much what it has to be if your constraints are:
- realistic galaxy map using real-world observational data and distances
- Empire and Alliance capitals in the same systems they were in for FFE
and of course no-one had any idea in 2013 (or 1995!) that those decisions would be making it so difficult now.
One of the big things I liked about the 2020-2021 stories (NMLA and Azimuth being the biggest two), or the 2019 Interstellar Initiatives, is that because they were almost entirely using existing features and capabilities in creative ways, it did feel a lot more as if the pacing was being set by the writers instead of by the game, and they still had some genuinely new things showing up.
Of course now they have all these extra Thargoid-related capabilities, hopefully the next Thargoid-related story will go rather more smoothly in that respect.
With 100% hindsight they should probably have added an effect outside of the directly Thargoid affected systems - something like adding aggressive hyperdictions for X Ly around each Titan, where X proportional to number of control systems. That could have given a reason for most of the bubble to pay attention and want to push back the Thargoids. (Add in economic effects - the hyperdictions could suppress trade, cause negative states to last longer etc).
We kinda had a mini version of this when rescuing passengers would cause Scythes to follow you for up to 70 Ly from the Titans, but fdev quickly rolled that back - presumably because ppl complained. The constant problem with any 'make it meaningful' change.
We kinda had a mini version of this when rescuing passengers would cause Scythes to follow you for up to 70 Ly from the Titans, but fdev quickly rolled that back - presumably because ppl complained. The constant problem with any 'make it meaningful' change.
Players will complain things are too hard, or too easy - there is no middle ground to be found, apparently...
Simplest action would be to remove all traces of the toothless "war" and let players complain about other player's actions, as normal.