Yes, the amount of dissatisfied people will be bigger if they don't add more content and MMO co-op features for the release-build.
So, if they delayed the game, say a month, to add these features instead of fixing exploration and then released, would the amount of dissatisfied people be lower? I highly doubt it. Exploration would still have issues, and likely the new features would have bugs or lack functionality people would complain about. So, let's say they delay it a year. Maybe by that point the exploration and social features would be implemented and working and they'd be implementing new content. Come release, you'd still have at least a small group of people who are complaining because the chat system isn't like it is in EVE or CoD or WoW or whatever they're used to and they don't want to change (human nature). Every feature in the game has its small army of complainers who want it changed. More content = more complainers. That doesn't mean adding more content is bad. It's just the way of things. If it hurts ratings, you just live with it. It's the price of scope. Elite wouldn't be Elite without a big scope, it's kinda the point. Far more complaints will come in from the newly-implemented features that haven't been fully fleshed out yet - this is a "problem" that will always be present during active development. Instead of complaints about social features and exploration, you'll have complaints about how "this feature seems tacked-on" or "this feature needs more content", and only because it has had less dev-time devoted to it than everything else. Let's imagine they were to release sometime in the future shortly after implementing planet landing. "OMG THIS FEATURE SUCKS I BLEW UP WHEN LANDING", or "need to add more landing pads cuz i cant land without shooting someone". Noob city. Talk about an avalanche. This is going to happen anyway, it's just going to be worse if it's the day-zero build (release build). Complaints will always be worse and more plentiful surrounding the release date. Let's say they delay two years. It'll be the same #$%@-storm over some other new feature, only now you can add people complaining "Two years of delays for THIS?" to the mix of complaints. The only thing that might change based on release date and current build status is the amount of complaints, but good luck predicting that one.
In the end, you're talking about unknown quantities. If you have some way of telling when the perfect day to release a game will be to have the least number of complaints, please make this knowledge publicly available. There are a great many developers who could benefit from such a system. If I seem a bit jaded, well maybe it's just a symptom of age. I just want them to make the game they want to make. It'd be wonderful if people could just let them do that and not get emotional or crazy about it. But that's not the world we live in.
Honestly, I think the whole notion of a "Release Date" for a game like this is archaic and silly. It's already been available for purchase for months. The only thing a Release Date does is tell the critics when they can write their articles. And for people like me, who are long past trusting or caring about what paid reviewers think, it's all a lot of industry posturing and farce. But I will acknowledge that there is a great deal of money invested (wasted?) in that farce, but that is the only thing that makes it relevant, and only serves to highlight how obsolete the whole system has become.
There's plenty of examples like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It's critically acclaimed with very high critic reviews (94% out of 100%) and user reviews (8.4 out of 10)
see Metacritic.
If the release build of Elite Dangerous is the same as Gamma then it won't be critically acclaimed.
Firstly, despite being "critically acclaimed" Skyrim was often described by critics as a stripped-down Morrowind with pretty graphics, and in fact fell short in many areas. It was a decent game, but it doesn't rate highly in my Steam list of most played games, though I can't say that counts for much since I play games as much for research as for enjoyment. It got high scores based on the fact that it offered a great deal of player freedom and it had beautiful graphics. Its value was more akin to an art installation than an actual game. It had great immersion - you could actually feel like you were a part of this fantastic world - but only to a point. Its gameplay was never that developed - it was a fairly generic hack and slash with a very nice coat of paint. In fact, I can point at numerous one-man-developed roguelikes with more intriguing gameplay and combat mechanics than Skyrim. It was criticized for its lack of depth and inherent grind by more discerning reviewers and "enthusiast press". In fact, everyone I know who still plays Skyrim plays with a ton of mods. I've actually had discussion with a few friends about it, and we've come to the conclusion that without mods Skyrim just can't compare to other RPG's once you get over the "oo, pretty" aspect of it. Some of the games we've compared it to are much, much older, as well, and can't rely on a graphics crutch. Baldur's Gate is almost universally agreed to be far superior to Skyrim. There's legions of Final Fantasy fans who can name a multitude of iterations of that series that are far more deserving of being "critically acclaimed" than Skyrim. And there's more. Maybe it's not fair to compare Skyrim to the all-time legends of the RPG genre, but really, isn't that implied by "critically acclaimed"? Then again, I don't see alot of logic in games journalism these days.
Throw in mods though and the game gets new life. But the credit for mods doesn't go entirely to the game they are made for (only insofar as crediting the developers for making it moddable in the first place). The creator of the mod should get most of the credit. The base game already gets extended longevity and publicity from people modding it and playing mods on it, it doesn't need anything more than that. This is also why people don't complain about Skyrim needing new features. People can get whatever features they want by either making them manually or getting them off the internet. The internet will ALWAYS have more dev resources than any dev team, and can even work faster in some cases. Also, the dev team stopped working on it a long time ago, so nobody bothers them about it anymore. Well, I'm sure some people do, but you get those yahoos in every industry.
Also, the fact that anyone takes Metacritic seriously anymore surprises the hell out of me. In fact, I rarely get any useful information out of traditional reviews these days. Most often, they only give misleading information and end up wasting my money. I think the problem here isn't the developer, it's the industry clinging to an obsolete system.
I think there wouldn't be much additional bugs if they increase the amount of variation by expanding existing content. It shouldn't be complicated to add MMO stuff like system-chat.
You might be surprised how the smallest change can tend to create some of the most complicated bugs. I don't really think we can form expectations of how long any given feature might take to implement, without direct access to the source code. That said, I agree that these are needed features and should be prioritized.
what? like a kind of DDF?
There is already a DDF. Do we need a dedicated space for whiners? I don't mean this to be inflammatory - it might actually help if we could separate non-constructive criticism from the constructive.
