Elite Dangerous plans for 2024

[[VR] Mad Mike]

@BigBANGerZ i dont think being close to 60 is a problem.............. but i would like to think that members of the board of a videogames games company should actually be interested in videogames.......... i dont know if that is the case or not at FD (but the few of the people from FD i have been fortunate enough to meet WERE genuinely gamers)

for me personally it would be a bad thing (because i highly doubt it would be a VR game so i doubt i would bite) but maybe what Elite Dangerous needs is to go the route of a sequel (or prequel).
that way they can start from scratch, not be stuck with old possibly outdated code, they wont be limited by key decisions made in Elite dangerous and can learn from the experience of the 1st game.

and they could target the PS5/XBoxX hardware to have some newer shinies.

Like i said, it wouldnt work for me personally but i am an edge case. in general fans of elite would probably be ok buying a brand new game

 

[BigBANGerZ]

@BigBANGerZ i dont think being close to 60 is a problem.............. but i would like to think that members of the board of a videogames games company should actually be interested in videogames.......... i dont know if that is the case or not at FD (but the few of the people from FD i have been fortunate enough to meet WERE genuinely gamers)

not for one individual no, but when the entire board is of that age group it doesn't help with diverse thinking or understanding their customer base

 

[amigacooke]

There have also been a lot of other attempts to make a competitor, some of which would have really appreciated having even Odyssey's "success". "Not dead on arrival" is a hard enough bar to clear in this field that there's still only three-to-six meaningful competitors after a decade, depending on exactly where you draw the "a bit like Elite" line. Ultimately it comes down to money which is pretty scarce for AAA-ish games in a niche genre.

I can't help feeling that Frontier couldn't handle the release of another paid expansion of ED as badly as they did Odyssey. The pre-marketing was great, anticipation was created and then flushed away by a release that failed on so many levels. Not forgetting all the shilly-shallying over the console release. Bizarrely, Frontier ruled out the then future consoles way before they ruled out what was then the previous generation of consoles. Money spent there with no result, further money spent creating and supporting the legacy version.

As for money not being available for the niche space genre, Star Citizen, for all its faults, blows that out the water.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

....

As for money not being available for the niche space genre, Star Citizen, for all its faults, blows that out the water.

They sure talk a lot for how lttle they have to show for.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I can't help feeling that Frontier couldn't handle the release of another paid expansion of ED as badly as they did Odyssey. The pre-marketing was great, anticipation was created and then flushed away by a release that failed on so many levels. Not forgetting all the shilly-shallying over the console release. Bizarrely, Frontier ruled out the then future consoles way before they ruled out what was then the previous generation of consoles. Money spent there with no result, further money spent creating and supporting the legacy version.

Of course. I'm sure a lot of lessons were learned. But the bar for a return on investment isn't "not as bad as Odyssey". The bar is "at least 2-3 times better than Odyssey". On a lower starting active player base.

Regardless of quality issues - say it has a perfect release from that perspective - what could Frontier possibly add to Elite Dangerous now that literally everyone still playing bought it, and it was a near-automatic purchase for new players too? "Space legs" was the big "why doesn't ED have this yet?" feature for years before Odyssey - as you say, lots of pre-marketing and anticipation when it was announced - and there were still plenty of people who either weren't interested at all or aren't sufficiently interested to pick it up even on sale.

(Or, alternatively, what could they do which would generate at least Odyssey levels of interest but also be possible to do 2-3 times quicker)

As for money not being available for the niche space genre, Star Citizen, for all its faults, blows that out the water.

Not really. It has less than half the base unit sales of ED. If those sales were at anything approaching a conventional unit price it would have run out of money and collapsed years ago. It's entirely being propped up by the relatively small fraction of its player base willing to spend thousands or more on it - and that's a sufficiently unusual market (especially for computer gamers more generally) that it's not really possible to say if that's because it's in the space genre, or for some other reason entirely.

You can't make a business plan - and no other non-SC games company does either - around "what if we found lots of people who were willing to pay £5000/unit for the game?". Sure, Frontier could stick some of the ultra-premium options from the Kickstarter back on sale, why not - £750 to rename a planet, £3000 to rename a star system, £5000 to rename a star system anyone might notice, etc. - but I doubt they'd get enough takers to really make a difference. Even during the Kickstarter the average payment per backer was only around £60.

Maybe Frontier could make ED more attractive to people with "thousands per game" gaming budgets? But probably only by doing things which made it unattractive (or just plain unaffordable) to people who think £5-£50 is a reasonable amount to spend per-game. And there's a lot more of them.

 

[londonx]

Interesting points and the public finances are obviously the ultimate reality check, but some positive hunches

• CMS and their tradition within the company is a nice narrative to spin to nervous Investors who have to look at the recent string of poor financial reports and need a reason to believe in retaining stock, so why bother wasting valuable communication real estate on ED that sits awkwardly outside of this new CMS narrative. I dont think it would serve any purpose as a place to hype ED outside of speaking to current playerbase which is not what these reports are for. However the added value of "emergent properties" is something that is also a big part of their company branding/IP and ED has a lot of scope for that.
• I find it hard to believe that even with a 20% staff reduction it will be an efficient use of everyone to concentrate on just one new title per year and a couple of ports, there is surely enough there to support development for ED and say Planet Zoo (which will likely be end of life in 2024 with one more DLC that wasnt mentioned in the report either), assuming F1 2024 will be more paint by numbers than a ground up rethink.
• ED Codebase 4.0 cost sink has already been written off, I still think you can get some relatively cheap headline content out of it with Paid DLC for existing player base and to attract others to buy the base game bundles. New planet types/Settlement layouts and associated new missions seems obvious as does more exobiolgy and basic animal life for denser atmospheres. Dedicated atmospheric (smaller) aircraft would be a good money spinner, fun for multi-player battles and conveniently gated. Expand the Codebase 4.0 BGS Thargoid Dynamic Campaign AI to human factions and a player driven economy (perhaps isolated to specific commidities linked to new planet types such as animal skins) as freebies to push the Emergent Properties of the game to double-down on their Company IP as something for investors to buy into and to excite the playerbase and wider market.
• There is also risk in not developing ED Codebase 4.0, if it doesn't require further major development re-work then risk is low relative to potential financial gain.
• Conclusion, Emergent Properties/Open World/Multi-Player, this is where their investment money is, Their CMS does well in that regard e.g. model sharing, high-fidelity world building and AI while ED has many areas where it can continue that path and generate product differentiation from its competitors.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

I can't help feeling that Frontier couldn't handle the release of another paid expansion of ED as badly as they did Odyssey. The pre-marketing was great, anticipation was created and then flushed away by a release that failed on so many levels.

The attempts at building hype and marketing the game pre-release were there, but they were advertising what was ultimately a bad product which resulted in confusing Q&A stuff on the forums that didn't really answer anything or manage expectations enough. The few trailers didn't show amazing gameplay or amazing new terrain/enviorments because in hindsight odyssey didn't have any of that really.

You can't make a business plan - and no other non-SC games company does either - around "what if we found lots of people who were willing to pay £5000/unit for the game?".

Isn't that the plan for most gacha games (99% of which fail)

• ED Codebase 4.0 cost sink has already been written off, I still think you can get some relatively cheap headline content out of it with Paid DLC for existing player base and to attract others to buy the base game bundles. New planet types/Settlement layouts and associated new missions seems obvious as does more exobiolgy and basic animal life for denser atmospheres. Dedicated atmospheric (smaller) aircraft would be a good money spinner and conveniently gated. Expand the Codebase 4.0 BGS Thargoid Dynamic Campaign AI to human factions and a player driven economy (perhaps isolated to specific commidities linked to new planet types such as animal skins) as freebies to push the Emergent Properties of the game to double-down on their Company IP as something for investors to buy into and to excite the playerbase and wider market.
• Conclusion, Emergent Properties/Open World/Multi-Player, this is where their investment money is, Their CMS does well in that regard e.g. model sharing, high-fidelity world building and AI while ED has many areas where it can continue that path and generate product differentiation.

Conclusion: lets make more of the stuff it turns out we were bad at making and that wasn't well received.

The challenge for Frontier isn't what to make but how to make anything with a reasonable and fun overall design. They've done it for smaller features in odyssey patches, but on a larger scale they've put so much behind obviously flawed designs without having a way to back out and fix it. If it seems like it's just obvious in hindsight then that's what prototyping and playtesting is for.

 

[Jinx Chrome]

You know what my conclusion is? PLAY the hell out of Elite as long as it is there and hope the best for the game to survive, the staff and the company of FDev.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

The attempts at building hype and marketing the game pre-release were there, but they were advertising what was ultimately a bad product which resulted in confusing Q&A stuff on the forums that didn't really answer anything or manage expectations enough. The few trailers didn't show amazing gameplay or amazing new terrain/enviorments because in hindsight odyssey didn't have any of that really.


Isn't that the plan for most gacha games (99% of which fail)


Conclusion: lets make more of the stuff it turns out we were bad at making and that wasn't well received.

The challenge for Frontier isn't what to make but how to make anything with a reasonable and fun overall design. They've done it for smaller features in odyssey patches, but on a larger scale they've put so much behind obviously flawed designs without having a way to back out and fix it. If it seems like it's just obvious in hindsight then that's what prototyping and playtesting is for.

Frontier has lacked a proper design leader for years now. Someone who defines what ED is. How it is played. All ED produced was old tricks in new coats. The little new inventive gameplay takes a backseat in what is supposed to employ most of the players' time: gear engineering. It's rather uninspired.

 

[londonx]

Conclusion: lets make more of the stuff it turns out we were bad at making and that wasn't well received.

I think they could easily double-down more on the multi-player emergent gameplay aspect of ED for relatively cheap cost-sinks, as in avoiding lengthy code re-writes. I think that is where the most fun is in big open world games and is basically the staple of the sim genre once the size of the game world reaches a tipping point.

I feel that is basically where Codebase 4.0 was headed, onfoot viewpoint opens up emergent gameplay possiblities and interaction, "sphere of combat" screams multiplayer fun and chaos even if its appearance in Odyssey was strangely ham-fisted (launch time-crunch?), BGS dynamic campaign, new divergent mission system etc. How do you gate that content though so the world is still seemless between those that have and those that have not paid for it, well planet access has been tried and proven and they basically have an unfulfillled new planet tech engine waiting to create even more emergent properites of glorious landscape generation from a handful of new handcrafted art assets, throw in some animal group behaviour which we know they posess and you can get some emergent gameplay there.

They just need a more robust mechanic to draw volunteering players into more concentrated parts of the galaxy. The Thargoid war has shown that the new Codebase 4.0 feature, the Dynamic Campaign has promise in that regard, why not expand that functionality to other factions combined with a crime & punishment / sphere of combat reboot?

 

[amigacooke]

Of course. I'm sure a lot of lessons were learned. But the bar for a return on investment isn't "not as bad as Odyssey". The bar is "at least 2-3 times better than Odyssey". On a lower starting active player base.

Regardless of quality issues - say it has a perfect release from that perspective - what could Frontier possibly add to Elite Dangerous now that literally everyone still playing bought it, and it was a near-automatic purchase for new players too? "Space legs" was the big "why doesn't ED have this yet?" feature for years before Odyssey - as you say, lots of pre-marketing and anticipation when it was announced - and there were still plenty of people who either weren't interested at all or aren't sufficiently interested to pick it up even on sale.

(Or, alternatively, what could they do which would generate at least Odyssey levels of interest but also be possible to do 2-3 times quicker)

I would have thought the basis for any paid expansion is to attract not only a proportion of the existing player base, but to attract new players with new features. Isn't the production of video games one of those businesses where you have to speculate to accumulate?

Presumably Frontier did all the due diligence calculations for the Foundry, and F1 Manager and Realms of Ruin and got it a little wrong. At least with ED they already have an existing player base rather than having to create a new one with all the risks that involves.

Not really. It has less than half the base unit sales of ED. If those sales were at anything approaching a conventional unit price it would have run out of money and collapsed years ago. It's entirely being propped up by the relatively small fraction of its player base willing to spend thousands or more on it - and that's a sufficiently unusual market (especially for computer gamers more generally) that it's not really possible to say if that's because it's in the space genre, or for some other reason entirely.

You can't make a business plan - and no other non-SC games company does either - around "what if we found lots of people who were willing to pay £5000/unit for the game?". Sure, Frontier could stick some of the ultra-premium options from the Kickstarter back on sale, why not - £750 to rename a planet, £3000 to rename a star system, £5000 to rename a star system anyone might notice, etc. - but I doubt they'd get enough takers to really make a difference. Even during the Kickstarter the average payment per backer was only around £60.

Maybe Frontier could make ED more attractive to people with "thousands per game" gaming budgets? But probably only by doing things which made it unattractive (or just plain unaffordable) to people who think £5-£50 is a reasonable amount to spend per-game. And there's a lot more of them.

You're not the first to come up with cogent reasons why CIG shouldn't exist, but they do and raise funds for a space 'game' that makes competitors efforts look quite unsuccessful. Can't see how myself, considering as there's still only an alpha to show for it, but they do. You can't really credibly say that large sums can't be raised for the space genre when there is a company (however undeservedly) which is doing it

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Frontier has lacked a proper design leader for years now. Someone who defines what ED is. How it is played. All ED produced was old tricks in new coats. The little new inventive gameplay takes a backseat in what is supposed to employ most of the players' time: gear engineering. It's rather uninspired.

at its core i disagree......... personally i think it is a great game which is why i still play it (admittedly on a break now) and take an interest in its future.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

I think they could easily double-down more on the multi-player emergent gameplay aspect of ED for relatively cheap cost-sinks, as in avoiding lengthy code re-writes. I think that is where the most fun is in big open world games and is basically the staple of the sim genre once the size of the game world reaches a tipping point.

Doubling down on multiplayer when the player numbers are at their lowest level and mostly dropping is not the best idea.

Not to mention the netcode/desync issues, especially for Odyssey activities. In it's current state the game really isn't up to the task since it didn't receive much of an apparent update in odyssey other than tweaking dimensions/size of the instancing areas and maybe some other tweaks.

Also more multiplayer content might increase server costs when their aim might be to reduce them to keep the game running cheaply long term.

The easiest way to do it though would be if the game already had some sort of existing multiplayer-only mode and if they updated that mode slightly.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Doubling down on multiplayer when the player numbers are at their lowest level and mostly dropping is not the best idea.

Not to mention the netcode/desync issues, especially for Odyssey activities. In it's current state the game really isn't up to the task since it didn't receive much of an apparent update in odyssey other than tweaking dimensions/size of the instancing areas and maybe some other tweaks.

Also more multiplayer content might increase server costs when their aim might be to reduce them to keep the game running cheaply long term.

The easiest way to do it though would be if the game already had some sort of existing multiplayer-only mode and if they updated that mode slightly.

Every user logging into the game already runs on a server. It doesn't really matter what mode they pick. Usually group features tend to support player retention, that doesn't necessarily entail cooperative gameplay but coop, too.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Every user logging into the game already runs on a server. It doesn't really matter what mode they pick. Usually group features tend to support player retention, that doesn't necessarily entail cooperative gameplay but coop, too.

There was non-p2p fallback networking option that ran on their servers iirc and there is matchmaking server stuff that runs on their end too but not in solo presumably, but I expect the load from that to be minimal.

It might even overall be a minimal cost, but it's worth considering if frontier is/should be as desperate to make Elite profitable as some people make it out to be.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I think they could easily double-down more on the multi-player emergent gameplay aspect of ED for relatively cheap cost-sinks,

i guess it is good we are all different........ but for me most of the issues I have with elite dangerous boil down to it being primarily aimed at multiplayer.

I would much rather Elite 4 had been a single player game, perhaps with the option for friends to drop in and play coop for a bit of MP fun (a bit like payday or left4dead multiplayer)

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Isn't that the plan for most gacha games (99% of which fail)

Fair. Some of them probably have spaceship themes too.

I would have thought the basis for any paid expansion is to attract not only a proportion of the existing player base, but to attract new players with new features. Isn't the production of video games one of those businesses where you have to speculate to accumulate?

That was indeed the Odyssey business plan as stated in the pre-release financial information. It turned out of course to be extremely optimistic in both the proportion of existing players that would buy it and the number of new players it would attract.

So that just returns to the earlier question: what new features could Frontier possibly include in Elite Dangerous that would substantially increase its appeal to a wider audience - ideally without deterring too many of the existing ones - on a scale at least 2-3 times as efficient as Odyssey was in terms of players/development costs.

Presumably Frontier did all the due diligence calculations for the Foundry, and F1 Manager and Realms of Ruin and got it a little wrong. At least with ED they already have an existing player base rather than having to create a new one with all the risks that involves.

Sure. And having readjusted their risk appetite way downwards to "what if we tried something we already know works?", a new management sim (3 excellent, 1 good, and the "merely" good one was also the least recent) has a way higher expected return than working on Elite Dangerous (2 good, 1 bad, and the bad one was most recent)

You're not the first to come up with cogent reasons why CIG shouldn't exist, but they do and raise funds for a space 'game' that makes competitors efforts look quite unsuccessful. Can't see how myself, considering as there's still only an alpha to show for it, but they do. You can't really credibly say that large sums can't be raised for the space genre when there is a company (however undeservedly) which is doing it

I think you're arguing against a slightly different point to the one I'm trying to make (for what you're arguing, Starfield is a lot better, I think, since it outdoes SC on both player count and revenue and has a very obvious set of explanations for why).

Even if you ignore the super-outliers, a new "top-10 quality" RPG or FPS will still be a massively profitable hit even if it's closer to 10th than 1st. A new "top 10" space sim will probably get somewhere between "high hundreds of thousands" and "low millions" of sales unless it is the next inexplicable super-outlier.

A new "top 100" RPG or FPS will still have decent sales and comfortably make back its development costs. No-one's entirely sure what the low end of "top 100" spacesim looks like because they didn't buy it either, but unless it was "made by one person in their spare time" it won't have made back its costs.

Everyone hopes, sure, that their game is going to be that super-outlier hit. But you can't build a business case around that possibility. Especially if you've already released the game a decade ago and everyone knows that it is only a genre hit rather than a super-outlier.

 

[angusmadmac1]

at its core i disagree......... personally i think it is a great game which is why i still play it (admittedly on a break now) and take an interest in its future.

Yeah it's a good game but it could have been a great game . How ?
That's the million dollar question .
Me personally I felt it was always great ideas but with a "that will do effort". Not blaming the Devs themselves but higher ups ( but I'm 57 so it's not an age thing ) it was something to sell or make a profit on only and that came down the chain, unfortunately for us .

 

[amigacooke]

Fair. Some of them probably have spaceship themes too.


That was indeed the Odyssey business plan as stated in the pre-release financial information. It turned out of course to be extremely optimistic in both the proportion of existing players that would buy it and the number of new players it would attract.

So that just returns to the earlier question: what new features could Frontier possibly include in Elite Dangerous that would substantially increase its appeal to a wider audience - ideally without deterring too many of the existing ones - on a scale at least 2-3 times as efficient as Odyssey was in terms of players/development costs.


Sure. And having readjusted their risk appetite way downwards to "what if we tried something we already know works?", a new management sim (3 excellent, 1 good, and the "merely" good one was also the least recent) has a way higher expected return than working on Elite Dangerous (2 good, 1 bad, and the bad one was most recent)


I think you're arguing against a slightly different point to the one I'm trying to make (for what you're arguing, Starfield is a lot better, I think, since it outdoes SC on both player count and revenue and has a very obvious set of explanations for why).

Even if you ignore the super-outliers, a new "top-10 quality" RPG or FPS will still be a massively profitable hit even if it's closer to 10th than 1st. A new "top 10" space sim will probably get somewhere between "high hundreds of thousands" and "low millions" of sales unless it is the next inexplicable super-outlier.

A new "top 100" RPG or FPS will still have decent sales and comfortably make back its development costs. No-one's entirely sure what the low end of "top 100" spacesim looks like because they didn't buy it either, but unless it was "made by one person in their spare time" it won't have made back its costs.

Everyone hopes, sure, that their game is going to be that super-outlier hit. But you can't build a business case around that possibility. Especially if you've already released the game a decade ago and everyone knows that it is only a genre hit rather than a super-outlier.

Given that Frontier ended up in a situation where effectively a reasonable section of ED’s existing player base was barred from playing Odyssey, I’m not sure it’s a good example for uptake of a paid expansion. If Odyssey had been released in its present state, how many of those who tried and rejected, or just never tried based on its well earned reputation (David Braben doesn’t normally apologise for releases) would have tried and carried on?

If you put on one side those space genre games that have made large revenue, then it would seem self evident that you have created a space genre that will not make large revenue on the space genre

 

[londonx]

You could also argue in hindsight the bodged release of Odyssey and resulting missed-sales was due to having to juggle too many new titles, which Frontier owned up to in the previous January's report with the new CEO, quantity not quality (was Frontier a different place when "New Era" was planned to where it found itself in the booming share price and heady investment climate of Covid era?. I am pretty sure that the Console release for Odyssey was canned due to needing to move everyone from firefighting Codebase 4.0 issues onto other launch schedules. I don't see anywhere Frontier actually blaming the ED franchise for their financial woes and they aren't shy of culling any tech or market segment that they think is getting in their way.