Farming and Elite Dangerous
- Thread starter kiario
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So why am I having so much fun with it? According to you I should bored brainless, but I am not.
In the course of a few hours play this evening I took on a high paying mission. Then two others came up which I could fit in (a bit time sensitive they were) so I took them. Then I get held up by a star blocking the jump route, plus a couple of interdictions (one nice bounty and one lucky escape) and I managed to fullfil all three. Tense? Yes. Exciting? Yes. Challenging? Most definitely. And very profitable
I suppose I must be a fanman (at my age I can't possibly be a fanboy!).
But I have to think, if it's this good now then the future of E : D will be brilliant.
Pure hyperbole on the part of the people claiming its empty obviously. You could easily boil it all down to flying a spaceship if you really wanted too just like you can boil pretty much every game ever down to its core mechanic if you really wanted to, and maybe the content they were hoping for isnt there, but its a far cry from empty.
Much more to do?
Go kill x number of xxxx and return.
Go collect x number xxxx and return.
Go talk to xxxxx and return.
Go take and hold objectives till the timer runs out to gain pvp points.
It may say there is a point but it still all boils down to one of those 4 things. Saying that those activities are somehow connected to some story doesn't make it any less of a grind.
I've been playing WoW for the past 10 years(closed beta onward)...not for the uber gear but for the community. Same for SWtoR, STO, Jumpgate, LOTR....etc
So why am I having so much fun with it? According to you I should bored brainless, but I am not.
In the course of a few hours play this evening I took on a high paying mission. Then two others came up which I could fit in (a bit time sensitive they were) so I took them. Then I get held up by a star blocking the jump route, plus a couple of interdictions (one nice bounty and one lucky escape) and I managed to fullfil all three. Tense? Yes. Exciting? Yes. Challenging? Most definitely. And very profitable
I suppose I must be a fanman (at my age I can't possibly be a fanboy!).
But I have to think, if it's this good now then the future of E : D will be brilliant.
And there are people that play farmville religiously. Not everyone's the same.
I've played hundreds of games. What you might call a high paying delivery mission, I call a fetch mission. What you consider lucrative trading, I consider flying around in circles for money. These aren't unique game mechanics and I've seen them all before. A fetch mission is a fetch mission, regardless of whether I'm in a spaceship or riding a horse. Sure, it has some novelty the first few times, but Elite seems to work on the presumption that tedious game mechanics are made fun with the addition of spaceships. What other game can get away with giving you a generic mission that sends you across it's world to deliver a commonplace item? The gameplay of Elite is good, but not so good that it can carry the whole game on it's shoulders. We need good, unique content to compliment the gameplay.
To me, shooting an asteroid and collecting rocks that fly off from it is no different than mining in world of warcraft. It's only an action or two more involving, and I've done it before. I've also done space combat before. Elite has some great combat, but it currently has nothing to supplement it. It's substantially more fun than in any other space-sim I've played, but there's nothing to give it purpose. You can be a pirate, but it's really no different than being a bounty hunter. At worst you make an enemy out of one of the factions. You won't feel at all like a pirate. You'll just feel like some dude in a spaceship who's shooting Haulers in anarchy space instead of interdicting cobras in Federation space. All this leaves us with is good combat.
Elite will be a great game when it's finished. As it stands right now, Elite objectively lacks content when compared to other games. That isn't to say that it doesn't have enough content for people to enjoy it, and that there's anything wrong with enjoying it.
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All terrible examples of games that work around repetition and grinding. Are you trying to imply that Elite is the World of Warcraft of space sims?
Most modern games will tell you to go kill X and will then give purpose to your mission with unique dialogue and encounters. The games you listed will tell you to go kill x and are accompanied with a generic text dialogue that no-one cares about. Even in SWTOR I skipped through the dialogue.
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So as I expected when push comes to shove you recognize that the game is far from empty, and contains exactly the content most everyone would expect out of a space sim. Maybe its not the content you were looking for, but its far from empty.
Are you even sure you know what you want? The crux of this seems to be a "you problem". It seems like maybe you've just spent a bit too much time playing video games and are bored with what they have to offer. I would argue that this game does have unique mechanics, as Ive never played any game where you could dynamically influence factions into a civil war that can potentially result in a regime change in individual systems. This seems very unique and offers some very exciting possibilities to me, but I don't spend nearly as much time gaming as you seem to, so maybe Im wrong and thats not unique?
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Excuse me? What push and shove?
I could boot up X3:R right now and find that it has a few months more content than ED. I can boot up ED right now and find menu's that I would expect to be present in every single space-sim missing.
I wasn't even talking about the quantity of content in the part of my post you quoted. I was talking about why one person might enjoy the current level of content, while another (me) might not.
1) I'm very sure that I know what I want. I'm still playing video games, and I'm still loving them. 2012 was a terrible movie. Someone who's never seen a movie before might think it was the greatest thing ever, but that doesn't mean the critic who's watched thousands of movies thinks it's bad simply because he's watched too many movies. He thinks it's bad because he has the experience to know better.
2) First of all, you make that sound a lot cooler than it actually is. The truth is, the current system is lot like owning ant farm. You can play god with your ants, crushing tunnels and creating gaping holes for them to crawl through, but at the end of the day your ant farm is not going to have any real impact on your life (except for when you're playing with it).
You can do missions and watch the AI become more prosperous, wage war on itself, and impact the systems around it, but none of it will have any substantial impact on you. It might drop the prices in that system, and make it a little less dangerous, but it's really irrelevant as you can find cheap wares all over. There is currently too little content for the living world to be relevant to us players. Now, as for games that have done this before I can give you 3 off the top of my head: X3, Mount & Blade, EVE.
3) Yes, it's not very unique
. There are tons of games out there that are aiming for this whole dynamic world experience. Elite will undoubtedly be one of the cooler ones, once the system is finished. Regardless, it takes more than one unique mechanic (see: gimmick) to make a game good. Elite has tons of stuff you can do, but most of it is just a variation of shooting at stuff, or moving goods around. As I said earlier in this post, you can be a pirate of a bounty hunter but there is very little distinction between the two and you'll hardly notice any difference. Thus, you're not really being a bounty hunter or a pirate, you're just being a dude in a space ship who's shooting at cargo haulers instead of cobra's.
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No I'm not implying that ED is just WoW in space. What I am saying is that is is pointless to imply that the grind in ED is any different that the grind in any other game calling itself an MMO.
For someone to say that grinding in ED is boring and mindless and doing endless rep grinds via quests and dungeon runs or any other grind is preferable...well...figure the rest out for yourselves.
I get just as much enjoyment out of running those rares 150ly+ as I do queuing up for the same raid, dungeon, flashpoint over and over again. It's a game world either way and will become repetitive.
Setting goals and achieving them is what makes any grind tolerable be it in ED or SWToR or WoW.....
Enjoy the place called The Milky Way and if you can't then maybe you should just move on to some other pastime that will, over time, become boring and commonplace.
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Anyone who says the game is literally empty is, of course, completely wrong. There is certainly content there, but not much. It's exactly the kind of content everyone expects, which is great; it is not the amount of content or the number of mechanics everyone expects. It's like walking into an ice cream shop the size of a warehouse: you fully expect them to be selling ice cream. ED does that. You also reasonably expect that they have a multitude of flavors and toppings, but they don't. You're not being particular about the kinds of flavors or toppings, just that they're there, but ED doesn't offer anything except five flavors...so far. As others have mentioned, games like X3 and Evochron Mercenary, while being rudimentary, old, a bit buggy and nowhere near as polished as ED, have far more content. Besides, the statement that "the game feels like it's empty after 20 hours" is a comment I see very frequently from new players, and I'm not even talking about this forum.
It's neither extreme, here. The game's foundation is finished; the game itself needs more pieces. However, saying it's completely missing anything to do is also false, it's simply a limited offering with limited ways of going about them.
It's not, as many games incorporate the basic idea of making player choice matter in the grander scheme of the game's story and its events. Even if it was unique, this point is moot, because 1) it doesn't even work right now and hasn't for over a week, for some reason; I wish it would... and 2) this doesn't at all change anything about the points we're making. Claiming "this is a unique mechanic" makes no difference, since all it boils down to is performing the same limited tasks you would be doing otherwise to make slight number changes in a system.
Maybe not but Ive seen you say on multiple occasions that ED is empty, which of course implies there is no content at all, which of course is ridiculous. I am in no way arguing that ED is complete or perfect, I just take exception with people saying its empty, as thats clearly nonsense.
X3:R and X3:TC are some of my favorites games of all time, so you'll get no argument from me that they are superior games to ED currently, although unless you picked those up way after release you should probably remember that both of them were absolute train wrecks at the time of, and even months after, their initial releases.
If you want to be reductive you can make any activity sound mundane. In Amnesia you just wander around dark cellars and occasionally hide in wardrobes. Making a great coffee is just throwing some hot water and grounds together. It's not a meaningful line of argument. It isn't wrong to say Elite is a bunch of typical game objectives, but in a game what makes an objective satisfying in the first place is the systems you interact with in the course of fulfilling it.
Mind you, I don't think 'use your imagination' is much of a defense either; a person can't force something to be evocative to them, and if the intricacies of these systems aren't interesting to you, the game's credit-grind progression apparatus certainly isn't going to bear the weight. This absolutely feels like a minimum viable product and I'm keen to see things get more elaborate and varied, but I think it's a very robust one. I feel like I've got my money's worth regardless. Which doesn't help you, but there it is.
As for the point about factional conflict: on the one hand I agree, and I'd love to see more tangible systemic consequences to manipulating NPC factions. On the other, a) it's a pretty cool ant farm, and b) the consequence is I'm directly wrapped up in that faction's efforts! That might not change what I'm doing very much, but it completely changes the context. I'm attacking ships I otherwise wouldn't, I'm wanted and shot at by a faction who otherwise wouldn't care. That feels pretty meaningful to me. Certainly I feel much more personally involved than with, say, random bounty hunting.
It reminds me a bit of complaints about certain choice/consequence games not branching the story enough. Like: in my playthrough, so-and-so died, but the ending was basically the same. Well, that's not untrue. But also, that person died. That's a pretty big deal, for a story. Obviously tailored reactions to player choice are exciting, but by the same token I don't think a choice is only meaningful if it comes with a hand-written note of recognition.
Well, no one buys WoW for it's grind. The grind is an outdated game mechanic that developers have been trying to distance themselves from for years. I'd say that doing something tedious should have no place in WoW or ED. While setting goals for yourself can help, a game should never force a player to have to make his own fun. Players should be able to have fun within the confines of the game, and their imaginations should compliment that fun.
Boring quests and repetitive game mechanics have no place in modern gaming. It's very obvious that Frontier gets this, as all the current grindy-ness exists simply due to a lack of content.
I'm sorry, you probably saw a few of my posts out of context. I completely agree that the game is not empty and I know that is has the potential to become one of the greatest games available on the market. What I do believe, is that the game lacks content. That's not necessarily synonymous with it being empty. There's stuff to do, but not very much of it. I'm at ~24 hours played since Gamma launched and I already feel like I've experienced most of what the game has to offer and am currently just playing it because I'm not bored of the gameplay yet. There's very little that I would still consider new.
Don't even remind me about the X3:R launch. I couldn't even get in until they removed (or patched, I forget) that crummy DRM they were using.
Well, I was just trying to make the point that there's not much of a distinction between a pirate and a bounty hunter. We've all played the game so we know that it's a little more than "a dude flying a space ship shooting haulers".
I agree with most of what you said, but I simply can't relate to the part about factional conflicts. While it is true that it leads the player to attack ships they usually wouldn't and to be attacked by ships that typically wouldn't be hostile, it still feels too similar to regular engagements. The encounters are exactly identical to the ones we usually experience. You could change the names on the vessels you're attacking and suddenly you're bounty hunting. Change the names on the vessels that are attacking you and suddenly you're a pirate. While there is a mission directing you, and you are attacking enemies with a purpose, I never really get that feeling of purpose.
If a system is at war, I know that they're at war, but I don't feel that they're at war. If there weren't any conflict zones in a system that's at war I would never be able to tell the difference, and that's the biggest problem I have with the system. Getting interdicted by an Eagle of a warring faction is exactly identical to getting interdicted by anything else in the game, and it makes no difference to me whether it's a pirate or a systems defense vessel.
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Boring quests and repetitive game mechanics have no place in modern gaming. It's very obvious that Frontier gets this, as all the current grindy-ness exists simply due to a lack of content.
And yet everyone knows that to get anywhere in WoW requires significant grinding..it's unavoidable unless you can be happy being mediocre at best and restricted to the least appealing endgame aspects. Being the most successful MMO in history, WoW still has grinds and that is undeniable. Even the latest xpac ends up being a grindfest..but still fun nonetheless.
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Farming? i think your playing the wrong game instead try this http://www.farming-simulator.com/
Yes, but WoW is a 10+ year old game! I felt that it was dated back when I was raiding in BC, let alone now (character model update or not). If you'll look at more modern games, you'll see that grinding is a mechanic that neither developers, nor gamers want to see anymore. I don't know why you want grinding to be in Elite so much to be honest, clearly you aren't a fan of it either! Maybe we're just confused and actually agree
When Neil Armstrong went to the Moon, all he did was go from A to B.
I love the game because I love the world it creates so just going from A to B I find pretty rewarding. I am so glad it was released and I am going to get plenty of hours of play out of my 40 quid. However, obviously there is massive potential for improvement, but I dont want content introduced that leads to more scripted standard RPG gameplay, just want more complex and emergent behaviour in the sandbox.