No Single Player Offline Mode then? [Part 2]

Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Yeah, but do you spend more than a week at a time at work? I spend several weeks, sometimes months at a time at work. I'm not trying to "derail" Frontier Developments in their vision or endeavors. I would like them to either reconsider their decision and keep to their word about offering an offline mode.

That would be awesome. if that should happen, I close my ticket then and there and ask Mr Braben what else he has I can throw money at. Seriously.
 
I apologize if this has been gone over before, but I didn't really find the answers I was looking for elsewhere, so I respectfully ask that the community or Frontier forum reps please clear this up for me.

This kind of confused me:
Can I still play in single player mode?
Yes. Some people have thought that dropping 100% offline play means there wouldn’t be a single-player mode - to be clear, the single-player game is already there, but it requires a low bandwidth online connection for the reasons we explained.

What does the online connection provide? What does 'single player online mode' mean -- will I still need to interact with other players? Will the markets be affected by them? What impact will other players have on my playing experience in single-player mode?

Thank you for any information!
 
I apologize if this has been gone over before, but I didn't really find the answers I was looking for elsewhere, so I respectfully ask that the community or Frontier forum reps please clear this up for me.

This kind of confused me:


What does the online connection provide? What does 'single player online mode' mean -- will I still need to interact with other players? Will the markets be affected by them? What impact will other players have on my playing experience in single-player mode?

Thank you for any information!

It's all in the first thread about this, mostly confined to the last 30 pages of that thread.
 
Many of us are wondering why you won't provide a 100% offline mode for those of us that want it - if it's a smaller universe (which can be handled by the average PC) then fair enough. The original Elite's world was big enough for me and I'm sure this was also the case for many others.

As I said in an earlier post, as far as I'm concerned it's a case of No 100% offline mode = No Sale.

It's your loss.

I saw a post addressing this quote of yours, directing you to other games like oolite etc. Have a look at this, it should be out some time next year. At least the guy making this game is SPECIFICALLY making it offline single player.

[video=youtube;MumoTz8CKtE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MumoTz8CKtE[/video]
 
I apologize if this has been gone over before, but I didn't really find the answers I was looking for elsewhere, so I respectfully ask that the community or Frontier forum reps please clear this up for me.

This kind of confused me:

What does the online connection provide? What does 'single player online mode' mean -- will I still need to interact with other players? Will the markets be affected by them? What impact will other players have on my playing experience in single-player mode?

Thank you for any information!

While you do not see any other players they do interact your space, trade routes, prices and affect events around you.
 
Looking at some of these posts makes me wonder why they backed Elite: Dangerous at all! Given the "cut my nose off to spite my face." attitudes. Backing for 'just' offline mode, really. Hard to prove that one, since to me it looks more like "Ah, I've found the mistake we're looking for, let's bleed it dry and make a scene." Since Michael has taken time out to answer many questions and this still persists without closure by the moderators.

Shok.

Right. Sure. That makes sense. Puhlease, get real. I'm sure all the people here just woke up one day and all simultaneously decided to work together just so they could pull one over on FD. Riiiight. Am I on candid camera?
 
Last edited:
Right. Sure. That makes sense. Puhlease, get real. I'm sure all the people here just woke up one day and all simultaneously decided to work together just so they could pull one over on FD. Riiiight. Am I on candid camera?

i'm surprised the mods have not banned him.
All he does is put fuel on the fire tbh.

ppl want offline for there own reason they don't need to explain why to anyone on this forum tbh.
They bought into offline mode they should get offline mode.
 
Last edited:
Hi All,

I want to keep you all updated.

We initially declined some people's request for refund as our records showed they have already played Elite: Dangerous online. After listening to many of the comments I received after my AMA here, we have since re-opened these requests and informed those people that we will be contacting them so that we can fully understand their individual situation before making a more informed decision.

We will be contacting them each in the next few working days.

Thanks,

David

That is appreciated - what should remain are the fans who want this game to succeed and like myself probably cant wait for the 16th.

cant rep you again so soon - need to spread it around, so good show sir.
 

hypergreatthing

H
I requested a refund.
It's not so much that i even care to play in an offline mode.
It's the fact i was lied to and duped. When someone pulls a bait and switch tactic they deserve what's coming to them. It wasn't even in a sense where the feature that was promised would be worked on later, they just simply slipped it into a newsletter.
Plain and simply, FD does not deserve a dime for changing the product a month before release.
You might be happy with the crap excuses and lies but i won't be.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
i'm surprised the mods have not banned him.
All he does is put fuel on the fire tbh.

ppl want offline for there own reason they don;t need to explain to anyone on this forum tbh.
They bought into offline mode they should get offline mode.

Well I have a sneaking suspicion that they are going to let a lot of stuff slide as long as it isn't too bad, because they are in effect, placing all their "bad" eggs in one basket here in this thread.
 
So you're not doing anything that you haven't already done or told us about then?

I think they are doing something different because my ticket asking about 3 refunds was under investigation (and still is) for days. Overnight I received the form letter how if you played beta you weren't getting a refund, period.

What he said is good because it sounds like they have realized how important this was to peopole and are at least going to re-examine the requests for refunds.
 
Yes. How does one with such an attitude get on kickstarter in the first place? If they do, you'd think they read the fine print too.

How do I stick to KS? Well:

- I expect those using KS to properly present their goals, to clearly state which objectives are subject to being cut if problems arise, to list their priorities. Due to this I thought, and expected, that a clear and unambiguous statement that the game would indeed have an offline mode meant it was a feature set in stone, one that the devs would scale down or cut out features not promised in order to keep. About every project I've backed up to now succeeded in this; unfortunately, ED isn't one of those.

- I expect that the devs, at the first sight that a promised feature might need to be cut, not only clearly communicate that to the backers, but also offer to give refunds to those backers for whom the feature was important. In this ED was a complete and utter failure, unfortunately; according to DB's own words, the devs knew offline play was often clashing with their vision for the game, made choices to back their vision of the game that they knew also undermined the possibility of offline play, and never communicated it, much less offered refunds to the affected players.

- I expect the news that a promised feature needs to be dropped to be communicated clearly, with a sincere apology for it, and a few gestures to make up for the lost feature, gestures that should include at the very least a new window of opportunity to ask for refunds due to the missing feature. ED, instead, had an unapologetic note included in a newsletter, a note that aimed more at trying to paint the change as a good thing than at being clear or informative, and most players that asked for a refund were initially refused.

- I expect that the devs, in what is effectively an extremely early pre-order, won't hide behind legalese to deny refunds to backers that have legitimate reasons for wanting to get out of the project — reasons such as early promises being broken. While this now seems to be changing, at first ED very much failed this hard.


Frontier handled this exceptionally poorly. Be it luck or higher standards, I've never had similar issues with any of the other two dozen KS projects I've backed. Though, for the record, I see date slips as par for the course and give them little mind as long as the final result is satisfactory.


BTW, for everyone at Frontier: like I promised in a post on the previous thread, I will make sure anyone I know that is thinking about purchasing one of your games learns about this offline game mode issue. But I will strive to make it the full story, including whichever result comes out of this. The ball is on your court for whether this will be a positive or a negative story in the end.

(And, depending on how you handle it, I might even not request a refund. After cooling my head a bit, I can preliminarily accept that you weren't aware how important offline is for a number of players, that you failed to anticipate that the refund process you had in place isn't appropriate for when you need to do meaningful changes to your product, and that the miscommunication issue was a huge fluke. If, through your following actions, you can prove me that Frontier is a good company to deal with, I might chose to remain a customer — though getting back to the degree of trust you enjoyed with me before this fracas will take far longer, I fear.)
 
While you do not see any other players they do interact your space, trade routes, prices and affect events around you.

And that's so bad that we have these two threadnaughts?

The galaxy for Elite: Dangerous is a shared universe maintained by a central server. All of the meta data for the galaxy is shared between players. This includes the galaxy itself as well as transient information like economies. The aim here is that a player's actions will influence the development of the galaxy, without necessarily having to play multiplayer. - Kickstarter
 
No it's not. There is a ton of hand tweaking in the galaxy. All that would go haywire.

Do you have any source on this "hand tweaking"? If you're referring to the pregenerated stars (from stellar catalogues and previous games) and things like our solar system, those should be handled as overrides on the procedurally generated galaxy, so the seed shouldn't matter, really, and in any case they could always not release anything Frontier-specific... just give us the stars from the catalogues and keep Lave, Achenar, and whatnot.

If it's any more difficult than that, frankly, it's a pretty bad design, and I find it difficult to believe that the talented programmers at Frontier could perpetrate such a hack.



Because without the changing mechanics you have very little. If there is no evolution, then what are you doing? Sight-seeing in progressively larger ships after grinding your trade route that never changes?

These systems require large numbers of Players to cause a flux and the implications of those changes are what generate the missions and the counter missions, the political change and combat scenarios... literally EVERYTHING hinges off of the evolution aspect.

That is why an offline version would be sooo empty. I am not even sure you would have the elements that Elite or Frontier offered up because the NPC AI is not (as far as my understanding goes) programmed to always appear or randomly generate in the way it was done in those old games. Here the AI evolves as well to the galaxy around it.

Yes it could be changed, but this is the point, too much needs to be done to get it to work.
Hey it could have been worse, they could have delayed the decision, launched with Multiplayer and then said tough luck. Yes the comms were late in the day, but the decision is understandable in my mind.

An evolving, dynamic, procedurally generated galaxy can be made... if you plan to do offline from the start.

However it's become increasingly apparent that this what not the case with Elite Dangerous, and that any talk of an offline mode was just marketspeak intended to entice people to back a game they might not be able to play.



Hi All,

I want to keep you all updated.

We initially declined some people's request for refund as our records showed they have already played Elite: Dangerous online. After listening to many of the comments I received after my AMA here, we have since re-opened these requests and informed those people that we will be contacting them so that we can fully understand their individual situation before making a more informed decision.

We will be contacting them each in the next few working days.

Thanks,

David
Well, let's hope this works out for the affected people, although I'll be sad to see them go.

Personally, I don't intend to ask for a refund, I'll enjoy the game to the extent that it's possible to enjoy an online-only game (not much, even if online solo mitigates the worst issues), and wait for third party private servers to be reverse engineered.



Well that's a pleasant surprise.

Regardless of your feelings for no offline, you gotta hand it to frontier for being responsive and doing some great damage control.

I'd think it's already a bit too late for that...



Did read your thread before actually :)

Why does it make sense? Emergent game play mostly I'd say.

Let me tackle perception first. Is it indistinguishable? that depends highly on the person. If supply of commodity A decreases because a pseudo random process decided it had to decrease thus raising its price will not seem any different then a commodity increasing in price because of players / NPCs buying a lot of that commodity. So why do it at all? Mostly for what it allows. Now I have no idea how far Frontier intend to take this so I am just writing what I think would be possible. News, Missions and Trading can all intertwine together to provide emergent game play for players. Say it all starts with drought expected to hit soon on planet A in System B. Which means soon we're going to have missions to deliver water / trading water at high price. How about people could start exploring close by systems for good source of ICE to mine since this too might become highly requested. What about moving combat ships in the area as those miners will likely be the target of pirates? Thats not all though. Those miners moved from other places and the supply of Ore / ICE / Metals etc.. has fallen in those regions as people try to capitalize on the new ice market. What if some players ignore the whole Ice market and instead focus those previous Mining operations knowing that less miners will probably make what was already profitable more profitable ?

Essentially what I am trying to say it may not be possible to distinguish if a price change happened because of actual market forces or through some process trying to fake those market forces but thats not the point. The point is knowing that price change happened because of market forces rather then due to some random process engages people much much more. By having them trying to anticipate events, by having them trying to move resources to get there first and capitalize on an event. etc.. This is all emergent game play thats not really possible without actually keeping track of all the major variables and understandably with 4b systems its impossible to do that on an end user PC.

Thanks for taking the time to read it! :)

The whole drought->trading->missions->piracy->war->whatever chain could still be done with the kind of model I proposed, though (I used the exploration and expansion example, but this would also work); yes, it would not be caused by players, but from the point of view of each single player there's no way to distinguish between the two models.

But in any case, yes, if your distinction between two identical dynamic galaxies, one of which you know is completely automated and one of which is influenced by players, is that the one that is influenced by players is more engaging because you know it's influenced by players... then, yes, you can't simulate that, obviously (unless if you hide it in a server and tell people it's influenced by players when it really isn't, maybe).

Of course, though, this is all about multiplayer; on single player (real single player) the completely procedurally generated galaxy would be the more engaging one, since without any other players the player influenced one would be entirely static (except if it was built "on top" of the other, as I suggested).

Which brings me again to the point that Frontier just don't seem to have ever taken offline mode into account when designing the game, despite telling us otherwise.



I apologize if this has been gone over before, but I didn't really find the answers I was looking for elsewhere, so I respectfully ask that the community or Frontier forum reps please clear this up for me.

This kind of confused me:
Can I still play in single player mode?
Yes. Some people have thought that dropping 100% offline play means there wouldn’t be a single-player mode - to be clear, the single-player game is already there, but it requires a low bandwidth online connection for the reasons we explained.

What does the online connection provide? What does 'single player online mode' mean -- will I still need to interact with other players? Will the markets be affected by them? What impact will other players have on my playing experience in single-player mode?

Thank you for any information!
The online connection apparently handles transactions, basically, and possibly some location information.

You don't need to interact with other players in solo online mode, but they will in theory affect the markets and possibly other background stuff.
 
Last edited:
And that's so bad that we have these two threadnaughts?

Thats not the thing some of us wanted. And we were promised to have a alternative offline universe.

Not all people prefer drinking beer. And not all people prefer online experience. For whatever reasons.

Now imagine that you want to play online game, as you will play, and suddenly someone is forcing you to accept to play offline only cause they have changed their minds and thought offline gameplay is the best thing for everyone. You can not discuss or negotiate about people's preferences... ;)
 
I think they are doing something different because my ticket asking about 3 refunds was under investigation (and still is) for days. Overnight I received the form letter how if you played beta you weren't getting a refund, period.

What he said is good because it sounds like they have realized how important this was to peopole and are at least going to re-examine the requests for refunds.

It's about controlling the situation. They've let the one lot go, now they're going to let a few more slip through the net while they continue to try and passify the situation & hope that it'll die down.
 
Its never too late mbpoblet ... sometimes it takes a little while to realise things.

What is important is that FD are entering into a dialogue with people.
 
Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom