I agree with Rearden, by the way. Posted this on Reddit after reading the interview:
TRIGGER WARNING: I mention EVE in a few places. Mostly because DB himself mentioned it! If you haven't played it, could you refrain from telling me how terrible it is and how stupid I am? Played Elite on the ZX Spectrum as well as all the sequels, and am a KS backer, by the way.
TRIGGER WARNING: Too much text. TLDR? Sorry.
Good interview. The most interesting quotes I found to be the following:
On player motivation:
Design is about engaging with the player. With any game, I want the player to care about what they're doing. Whether it is because they are making something beautiful or shooting down enemies, a little bit of thought gives you an edge in the game.
I played Defender a lot and I really enjoyed it. What really interested me was that there was a little bit of story that involved rescuing the people. It was one of the first arcade games that I saw that had some variation in the way you played it. You could choose to play the game and focus on rescuing the people, or you could even shoot the people yourself and bring on some changes and cause the landscape to go away and all the landers mutate all at once.
Interesting, because one of the biggest criticisms right now of ED is specifically that everything is a meaningless grind that players don't care about and that they have no influence on the world – how do you make something beautiful in ED? There are no tools for player creation of anything. How do you “mutate” a situation in Elite to experience a different challenge? Where is the story happening and providing me with goals outside some badly written text posts on GalNet?
On whether ED should take some hints from EVE:
I don't feel like that. The way I see it, the important difference between Eve Online and us is that Eve is an executive control game and Elite: Dangerous isn't. That's a big differentiator. What I see us doing is moving more into the richness of the experience and expanding the depth of space gameplay.
Executive control – well, that's a bit vague. Executive control of what? Player corporations and real market and resource simulations they can engage with? Or controlling capital ships? Funny, because one of the 4 expansions mentioned by FD is precisely controlling executive ships. And in EVE you can directly control your ship using WASD (albeit in 3rd person) and not join any corporations if you don't want to.
Is DB saying for example, that even though I can own multiple ships in different locations, in the future I will not be able to hire NPC pilots to fly these ships as my wingmen?
I sort of get the feeling that DBOBE hasn't actually played EVE. Shouldn't be surprising - he hadn't heard of Space Engine at all until some time during beta (see Scott Manley interview).
So, will expect more richness of experience and expanded depth of gameplay. Well richness can be more station and ship variety, more lore and missions, expansions. Looking forward to them.
But expanded gameplay depth without players being able to form meaningful groups that can compete for resources or influence - how?
If you think about the way people work together in squad-type games like Battlefield 4 or even in Warcraft raids, the fun of it is in playing together and actually planning a little bit ahead. I've seen it a little bit in slightly more arcadey games as well, like Battlestations Midway, where a group of four players go against another group of four players and the difference in tactics makes a big difference. It's not symmetric. Someone might go in with a big Anaconda and essentially draw the fire, but then there will be other players in more nimble ships.
Three points to make here.
1) So the increased gameplay depth means "Wings“ coop gameplay fighting PvE mobs or other PvP groups in a way where different ships play different roles, encouraging strategy and rewarding different skillsets.
Which does sound a bit like EVEs combat, which already has this for many years – getting the biggest and most expensive ship won't win you a battle, there are many counters and different roles for different ship classes and modules, and what would be great in fleet combat might be terrible for bounty hunting or mining.
The real KEY difference between Elite and EVE IMO is that in EVE, the whole “aiming, managing systems and fancy manoeuvring” is moderated through your characters skill points (RPG style), while in Elite the player is the pilot directly managing these things (“twitch” based).
So I'm not sure how it's a
differentiator with EVE to have more depth in space combat gameplay. Yes, it is good and necessary. But EVE is already much more advanced than ED on this score, albeit with a different "RPG" and fleet emphasis. Just like Space Engine is a much better universe simulator than Elites “Stellar Forge”. Helps to have a networking engine capable of hosting thousands of players in one instance and a 15 year head start, of course.
2) I'm wondering though how exactly these asymmetric encounters between groups of ships are going to happen if formation flying and automated dropout in SC won't be possible.
3) This also avoids the elephant in the room, which is why players will want to team up in the first place. Instead of "kill pirate Anaconda in your Cobra by cheesing weak AI", it will be "kill pirate mob of 1 Anaconda and 2 Pythons using group tactics and stealth“?
That's better than what is there now, sure, but if it's just better RNG missions with harder enemies that need wingmen to take down, that doesn't address why players will want to care enough long term to do this. Grind to better ship? Influence factions in some manner?
The currently non-existent military missions and broken rankings could offer some chained missions of this type once they are totally overhauled and all players reset to Cadet rank (I guess around 1.3/1.4). But I'm expect this would be less coop PvE and more like the EVE faction missions for the single player, except you might start as a lone pilot doing FE2 style surveillance missions, to being a wingman in a naval assault group and graduate to more challenging missions where you can order wingmen around in bigger battles. (I.e. the TIE Fighter progression model). This would be good fun, but requires a robust mission system.
(For the uninitiated: In EVE, you as a starter player join one of four broad NPC power bloc factions, each with their own aesthetic and lore. You can then do a series of linked missions with your character in order to learn the game, build up your character and get credits (these are optional). You then graduate to more PvE or freelance for NPC faction missions in controlled space, and then you can join or found player corporations that fight over real resources and production chains in the economy in nullsec, etc. You can also continue playing as a „lone wolf“ as a miner/pirate/bounty hunter/trader/explorer/etc. - it's up to you to, er, blaze your own trail, but new players are catered for and can avoid most PVP ganking if they want to.)
I'm also sceptical about large PVP encounters past 1.2. How will they work if they keep splitting into different instances? How large can one player fleet be? What about combat logging? How will they make the stealth and heat mechanics actually meaningful? How will different ships have more defined roles - e.g. stealth or EW ships when the outfitting is so modular that most ships are in reality multipurpose?
Future plans:
In the short term we've announced more community challenges, we've got wings coming later on in 1.2, and much further down the line we've talked about having other people in your spaceship and being able to land on planet surfaces. The game is not standing still. We've already released updates and we will continue to do so.
Good that he is publicly committed to doing this. The road from 1.2 to expansions is very foggy though. Would be good to have a “roadmap”.
I think it is clear the team suffers from having no MMO experience and have been caught out with the challenge of providing a compelling core game beyond moment to moment dogfighting. So it's interesting that beyond “coop gameplay will be better”, “no executive control” and “we will continue to work on the game” I don't see a coherent plan. Maybe they're still working out a coherent time line and development of the various features, which is ok. Looking forward to future newsletters.
