Ram Tah got a new makeover?
- Thread starter St0rmFury
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Honestly, this is the sort of thing that really reveals the core issue with Elite atm; nobody in the company has a broad passion for the game.
Sure, you've got plenty of people with their own projects. I believe the guys who designed the Titans really truly cared, for example. But nobody could look at Ram Tah's portrait, look at his ingame appearance, and think this is anything but the most minimal effort.
I compare this with an ideal scenario like ConcernedApe and Stardew Valley and the difference is stark. And notably, Stardew Valley is still selling on the order of 5 million copies per year at full price, so it really does show that this sort of passion does pay off.
Sure, you've got plenty of people with their own projects. I believe the guys who designed the Titans really truly cared, for example. But nobody could look at Ram Tah's portrait, look at his ingame appearance, and think this is anything but the most minimal effort.
I compare this with an ideal scenario like ConcernedApe and Stardew Valley and the difference is stark. And notably, Stardew Valley is still selling on the order of 5 million copies per year at full price, so it really does show that this sort of passion does pay off.
nah, it's simply this
ED mugshots had a ton of variability (it really looks like procgen) - sure most of them are hideous - but they were just 2d images.
For EDO, the mugshots have to be actually 3d renderings since you can actually meet them, go around them and have a really close look if you really want to.
But they're definitely not proggen - they simply seem to be a collection of pre-rendered mugshots, and a rather small collection actually. And the renderer is definitely more limited in options than the wildly variable 2d mugshots from ED Legacy
I mean, they cannot replicate the Legacy planetary surfaced in EDO, and they dont seem to be able to replicate the 2d mugshots in EDO 3d renderer either.
And it's not something that i expect to be fixed.
As with anything, it's just a matter of how much effort you are willing to put in. I can accept not wanting to completely rework an engine to make things look picture perfect, but it seems evident here they didn't even really try. After all, they already have facial tattoos available. They could relatively easily have designed a custom hairstyle for him, as well. They just decided it was too much effort.nah, it's simply this
ED mugshots had a ton of variability (it really looks like procgen) - sure most of them are hideous - but they were just 2d images.
For EDO, the mugshots have to be actually 3d renderings since you can actually meet them, go around them and have a really close look if you really want to.
But they're definitely not proggen - they simply seem to be a collection of pre-rendered mugshots, and a rather small collection actually. And the renderer is definitely more limited in options than the wildly variable 2d mugshots from ED Legacy
I mean, they cannot replicate the Legacy planetary surfaced in EDO, and they dont seem to be able to replicate the 2d mugshots in EDO 3d renderer either.
And it's not something that i expect to be fixed.
This is solid: from now on, I'll consider it canon.Oh c'mon. First screenshot is his Tinder profile pic ("I'm dangerous, baby") and the chubby guy on the second one is his everyday reality (without henna tatto).
I never suspected Elite to include such nuances in visual storytelling. It really brings this character to life.
Reminder here that Odyssey was already running at least six months late when it released and was at the time of release both their most expensive single product and the most expensive Elite Dangerous expansion in terms of development cost. That's the sort of situation which would make anyone decide that anything not critical to release is "too much effort".
(Sure, in an ideal world the people responsible for setting the original scope for Odyssey in 2018ish would have set one that was actually realistic to achieve in two years, budgeted for more realistic sales expectations, and it probably would have included neither space legs nor atmospheric planets but also not been quite the release disaster that Odyssey eventually was. But by the time it got to late 2020 that wasn't an option any more)
Other way round, really. Elite Dangerous costs them vastly more to run than their other projects, and brings in far less return than many of them. According to their accounts pretty much everything ED has brought in since 2018 or so has gone back into running or developing it. There's absolutely nothing "easy" about it for them.
Developing more park management sims is very much the easy-money option for Frontier. At least, it was, and hopefully still is...
I recall statements that the Engineer pictures in Horizons were created with what would later become Holo-Me. That would probably imply the mugshots were of originally 3D models; but even if they weren't, there's no technical reason why they couldn't have created 3D models for Odyssey that matched the original mugshots a little better. Something would have had to go very wrong if the EDO renderer is physically incapable of displaying certain skin tones, at the very least. It probably just fell by the wayside in the rush to push Odyssey out, and nobody has complained enough for it to warrant fixing.nah, it's simply this
ED mugshots had a ton of variability (it really looks like procgen) - sure most of them are hideous - but they were just 2d images.
For EDO, the mugshots have to be actually 3d renderings since you can actually meet them, go around them and have a really close look if you really want to.
But they're definitely not proggen - they simply seem to be a collection of pre-rendered mugshots, and a rather small collection actually. And the renderer is definitely more limited in options than the wildly variable 2d mugshots from ED Legacy
I mean, they cannot replicate the Legacy planetary surfaced in EDO, and they dont seem to be able to replicate the 2d mugshots in EDO 3d renderer either.
And it's not something that i expect to be fixed.
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Honestly, given the quality of Odyssey early on, I almost guarantee that it's just that they ran out of time, and these were the placeholders that got pushed into the release.
I really don't get the mindset. They released Odyssey early to make money - but in doing so, they basically sacrificed a HUGE amount of money due to the quality issues. That was the point their stock prices were at like 3000 dollars, too. Is it really possible they didn't have the cash to finish it? Couldn't they have, I dunno, sold some stock in the company to finance a complete game?
Maybe I just don't understand finance well enough, but no part of it made ANY sense to me.
I really don't get the mindset. They released Odyssey early to make money - but in doing so, they basically sacrificed a HUGE amount of money due to the quality issues. That was the point their stock prices were at like 3000 dollars, too. Is it really possible they didn't have the cash to finish it? Couldn't they have, I dunno, sold some stock in the company to finance a complete game?
Maybe I just don't understand finance well enough, but no part of it made ANY sense to me.
I don't think they were ever at risk of going bankrupt, someone in management will have just decided "alright, we're already over budget and time, just launch it and fix it later". Either they underestimated how hard it'd be to fix, or they knew it wouldn't really be possible so they may as well just get some money out of it. Engineer models probably weren't a high priority in any case. Or maybe it just came from the same economic school as "why don't we just raise the prices to make more money".
"Early", again, being "six months late on the original schedule" here. They had the spare cash in hand at the time to carry on longer, easily, but eventually the "sunk cost fallacy" has to be confronted (and it took them another nine months or so to do the same again for the console release).
They wrote off a £7.4 million loss on Odyssey as it was. Merely covering that would have required, at full release price of £35/unit, even in the implausible best case where they sell almost all the copies directly rather than paying Steam's cut, around 200,000 extra sales. Assume a 30% Steam cut and other costs-of-sales and it's closer to 300,000 more copies. I'm not sure it sold 200,000 copies to start with on pre-orders and early release before people released how badly it was going; where do these other sales actually come from?
Further development, based on their published figures, would have cost them something like that again each year. So if they take their time and delay the release to mid-2022 (so by the time it releases, ED has had no major features since Fleet Carriers and no other significant released development for four years), which probably doesn't get it to a state much better than it was by Update 13 ... they need to sell 400-600,000 more copies than it did, which is well past the "optimistic" end of their sales projections, which were already really optimistic and included console sales potential. And this is just to break even on the extra development costs.
Take five years - by which time in the real history we were well into the Thargoid war - and get those extra details polished too, and it needs to sell 600-900,000 more copies than it did, which is the "automatic must buy for everyone and attracts a huge number of new players" dream scenario. It's clearly racking up extra debt faster than any plausible "Odyssey, but a bit better" is ever going to repay it - while slowly bleeding away Horizons players on the other side as month after month goes by with no sign of this "vaporware" expansion and no other new content either.
Maybe that's true - but as it worked out, the release of Odyssey alone resulted in a $640,000,000 reduction in their market capitalization. Isn't that a far more pressing concern?
The problem with the view of it as a single discrete sale is that it is completely contrary to Fdev's stated goal of long-term game maintenance. They don't have to make back the investment purely on the initial purchase, since if it reviews well they can continue selling it at full or close-to-full price for years to come. Using Stardew Valley as an example yet again, if you have a highly-reviewed game that gets periodic content updates, you can continue to sell the full game at full price essentially indefinitely.
I don't think they should have delayed it for years, by any means, but even another six months would have had them releasing in a far better state, and without the need to patch a game that's being played by thousands of players.
The problem with the view of it as a single discrete sale is that it is completely contrary to Fdev's stated goal of long-term game maintenance. They don't have to make back the investment purely on the initial purchase, since if it reviews well they can continue selling it at full or close-to-full price for years to come. Using Stardew Valley as an example yet again, if you have a highly-reviewed game that gets periodic content updates, you can continue to sell the full game at full price essentially indefinitely.
I don't think they should have delayed it for years, by any means, but even another six months would have had them releasing in a far better state, and without the need to patch a game that's being played by thousands of players.
If you were one of the suckers who bought FDEV shares at 3000, absolutely.
For Frontier, not really. They have no outstanding loans and aren't likely to want to take out more secured on company value, aren't attempting to raise funds directly by issuing further share capital, have enough ownership in the hands of the board that even with a lower share price a hostile takeover or shareholder revolt is implausible, and aren't intending to cash out by selling the company to Microsoft/EA/Facebook. It's nice to have a high share price but only in the sense that the reducing share price reflected bigger problems with the company's profitability and cashflow.
(Specifically, starting multiple over-ambitious projects which didn't pan out and each caused massive losses, to which the solution is not "spend even more money on all the projects until they eventually work".)
No, but they do need - if they intend to continue development at a particular pace - for it to pay for itself in about the time it took to develop, or ideally quicker.
If every year of development takes two years to pay off, and that's a consistent pattern, then eventually you run out of money.
So as a result Frontier have scaled back development of Elite Dangerous to a level where the money it raises does pay for the development over the long-run.
Stardew Valley, sure, it's a great game, but it's also a game with a sensible scope so that its actual development costs are tiny by ED standards. It's well-deserved for the author that it does still sell millions of copies a year; but an important point is that if it "only" sold tens of thousands of copies a year like Odyssey, it would still be bringing in enough money to pay for its own continued development many times over.
(Essentially the whole "release updates which pay for themselves, indefinitely" model is what Frontier is doing post-Odyssey with Elite Dangerous, especially since 2023. It's just a slower pace than anyone would like because ED is expensive to develop and it's a niche game with limited sales [1], which is not a great combination)
[1] Still, notably, more sales than most other games about flying a spaceship have got. Another commercial advantage of Stardew Valley is that it's not about flying a spaceship.
Putting six months of extra effort in might have meant it released in about the shape it did for Update 12. That's a lot better than it was at release, definitely. But it's in even better shape than that now and even with a much reduced price isn't selling hundreds of thousands of copies and isn't likely to in future either.
- it still has performance issues and therefore, crucially, still can't be sold to the 1/4 of the players on console even as PC performance is getting to the stage of brute-forcing it; that blows a massive hole in any sales projections straight off
- while they've started in the last few months trying to tie a little more to it, it's still not something the majority of players (by number as opposed to activity) are likely to buy, and this is in my opinion far more due to the top-level design and scope rather than how well it's polished (i.e. if you're not interested in walking around, it's very definitely optional). People aren't even buying it that fast at £10.
Sure, but that's not really how it works, is it? After all, we have the perfect counter-example in Star Citizen. They've clearly shown that the more you promise the more you can earn - as long as you don't clearly demonstrate incompetence.
The thing is, we've reached a point where a game can theoretically keep making money forever. We no longer have issues of next-gen graphics so dramatically outpacing the previous generation as to make older games unpalatable, or of next-gen processors making older games feel too small. All that really matters is maintaining a sufficient playerbase to justify continued development.
But that's contingent on maintaining a clearly positive reputation, one that makes players feel confident in the company to treat them well. That requires building a positive long-term relationship with the community.
In that light, focusing on the short-term cost of a project going over-budget is literally the last thing in the world you should be doing. A one-time-cost can be earned back eventually, but respect and trust, once lost, is virtually impossible to fully restore, and priceless to maintain.