FD made an MMO without understanding how successful MMOs work

[Crystles]

I've been pretty much saying the same thing, that their system is terribly shallow and woefully underdeveloped since missions were first introduced. I had always believed that they were just a place holder for a much richer, more grand experience.

It wasnt.

 

[Lord_Crazy]

Good observation.
10 points to Gryffindor.

So there is your avatar! It puts a face on the guy who was in my wing, great

 

[SiriusSeven]

This game is closer to Dark Souls than it is to an MMO:

You spend most of the game feeling alone. When you meet another player, it's probably because they want to kill you.

 

[Max Rockatansky]

I think FD's biggest mistake was to manage the user base expectation not good enough.
Hence posts like this keep coming up.
but then again, people always have different, sometimes unrealistic, expectations no matter how detailed everything was upfront.

That being said, there is certainly room for improvement, but hopefully more towards cooperation that has less to do with shooting each other, which seems the main goal for so many MMO players.

 

[dan0h]

I completely agree OP, I played Beta quite a bit (30+ hours I guess), but come release I almost stopped dead. I've played a few times, but its absolutely painful, and tedious. Beautiful to look at, but just a whole bunch of random Go-fetch quests, exploration of different coloured spheres, and nothing really of any consequence occurring outside of some faceless GalNet updates.

Thankfully Star Citizen is progressing nicely, hell, even X-Rebirth in its latest patched iteration is looking pretty good. Maybe I had the wrong expectations for ED, because for me it simply hasn't delivered an interesting gaming experience. Though I do hope that those that are enjoying it, continue to do so

 

[Kerrec Snowmane]

Not my job. It's the job I paid money to FD to do. <snip>

Bend over...how about "buyer beware"?
.
I am a mechanical designer. I "design" stuff for a living. Unless you're making something so stupidly simple, there are ALWAYS issues. Those issues get resolved via compromise, or you go back to square one and fix your requirements to something "doable".
.
To be honest, the problem, from my point of view, is your pre-conceived notion of what a "MMO" is.
.
Massively
Multiplayer
Online
.
Massively: Every single player plays in the same galaxy, affecting the same "background simulator". Check.
Multiplayer: All you need to qualify for this, is 1 vs 1. But the game engine supposedly allows up to 32 players in an instance. Even then, popular FPS games have 8 vs. 8 maps and is easily considered multiplayer. So check.
Online: That's a given, it is even a requirement to be able to play. So check.
.
I don't need to go on. By literal definition, ED is a MMO. The problem is your definition of MMO. FDev simply decided to get rid of the identifier to stop baseless idiotic claims like this OP and move on to actual important stuff.

 

[CorruptedSoul]

The point is whether you call it a MMO or just Multiplayer ED is using the same quest/mission mechanics that MMOs use. So if that's the route they are going take they might as well do it right.

 

[RustiSwordz]

Elite Dangerous is NOT an MMO.

The best analogy is Borderlands which is a Co-op. That is what Elite is a Co-op NOT an MMO.

https://youtu.be/SunQ5T_pbCU?t=17s Hello, anybody home! Its a CO OP... not an MMO! LOL

Borderlands.. 4 players (who can also play solo,) can team up to run missions and explore.
Elite Dangerous.. 4 players (who can also play solo,) can team up to run missions and explore.

Ergo its an Co-op.

 

[Alex Merion-Turner]

<snip perfectly reasonable post>

Hi Scharmers,

You're right. Totally right.

The missions are very lacklustre. And I think that was the crux of your post, not the whole MMO or NOT issue. Perhaps if you want to discuss missions get the title changed it's attracting a lot of distracting of thos is it/isn't it and MMO arguments.

I'm enjoying playing, but missions definitely could be much more!

FD know it though, they've said missions need overhauling and that it's being done.

Please let's not have an attack-the-bad-man-who-said-something-negative-about-our-beloved-game love-in-crap-fest again. We've got plenty of those childish tribalistic defensive threads already.

Cos frankly, we all love the game to one degree or another, but hands up if you don't want FD to improve anything?

I'd like to see some ideas for improvement discussed next. Not whether the OP is right or wrong.

 

[Cmdr Pli55ken]

.. hence it doesn't feel like an MMO to me..

Yes. It's a MMO by definition, but it isn't an MMO like other MMOs. So judging it by those MMOs that are designed to be only playable (or beatable) through the multi user experience is like comparing apples and oranges.
ED is not a typical MMO. It's a single player game where you can meet other players. There's no way to 'beat' or 'end' the game.

 

[Xodz]

Regardless of what we've ended up with, ED had to have been initially planned as a single-player game. FD's realization that ED could only be profitably pulled off as an MMO had to have come later. My evidence? ED stinks as an MMO. Every design facet in the game supporting "MMO-style" play is awful -- and never mind that a P2P connection is about the worst architecture possible for an MMO.

For example, what is the biggest, most awful cliché in MMO mission design, the one cliché that every new (not-WoW) MMO desperately tries to avoid or at least disguise? You guessed it -- the "go forth and collect ten whatevers" quest. And this awful cliché is the CORE of ED's missions. Go out and look for randomly spawning whatchamacallits. Or just about as egregious: instead of spinning the RNG to find a McGuffin, spin the RNG to kill an Anaconda. Why? Why not?

There are no carefully constructed encounters/instances for powerful players, or dynamically-scaling encounters to match the number of active players -- sail a newbie Sidewinder or a fully-loaded Vulture into a High-Intensity Zone, nothing changes; just a capital ship with endlessly-spawning Eagles and Vipers.

ED is a single-player game with multiplayer tacked on, and it's just painful. Sir David needs to collar a decent MMO designer and put him/her to work on ED ASAP -- no more half-baked, placeholder MMO systems. And no, I'm not confident that "oh we just need to wait". I feel that the weak MMO play in ED indicates a fundamental weakness on FD's part.

I agree with a lot of this. As pretty as the game looks, often it feels more like a text based game to me, which is just bizarre.

Frankly, unless SC is extremely Pay2Win and overhyped, I don't see this game competing with it, as it is now. Not saying this game can't or won't, but as it is now...

It almost reminds me of a steam game I played before purchasing this, called Entropy. It has most of the same functions, albeit ED is a lot more polished. They both have absolutely terrible missions of Go get X, deliver X, Go kill X, return to X. I think it's a major problem for space sims in general, because as I was explaining this game to a friend he understood immediately what I meant when I was explaining the missions (that's also why he decided not to purchase the game). There is hope though, they will be doing something to missions ....eventually.

 

[Jay8ch]

I think the design philosophy was pretty much "I loved playing Elite, wouldn't it have been cool if you occasionally bumped into real players?".

That's what we've got, and I'm happy with it.

 

[Poseidal]

Ok, I thought of a comparable game: Dark Souls

Here the developers do everything imaginable to make you feel alone. The only evidence of other players is their blood stains, and the occasional invasion from another player, with the one purpose of killing you.

You have been interdicted by the dark spirit of CMDR Lautrec of Carim.

 

[Ydiss]

Now let's count all the MMOs created the "right way" that don't have thousands of threads like this stating the exact same armchair opinion that it's failed as an MMO.

Everyone has an opinion on what they enjoy. And nothing made has ever been something everyone enjoys.

You either enjoy the game or not. I do. I don't really care if it's an MMO.

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

Rome wasn't built in a day ....

 

[Scharmers]

The point is whether you call it a MMO or just Multiplayer ED is using the same quest/mission mechanics that MMOs use. So if that's the route they are going take they might as well do it right.

This, this, this.

And FD hurriedly hauled back the "MMO" moniker with a "harrumph, harrumph, uh, yeah, we called it an MMO, and advertised it as a MMO, but uh, you know, that just, uh, confused the customer base" when it became pretty clear to all and sundry was that they put out a very limited MMO with horribly antiquated MMO features (e.g. stepin fetchit quests as the core of your mission design).

 

[nosleepdemon]

ED does straddle that tricky line between MMOG and single player, with a fair bit of grind thrown in. I will say that while I agree with most of your sentiment OP, after the introduction of the debug camera my opinion of where the game is headed has changed for the better. Go take the camera for a spin around a station, and you will see an incredible amount of detail. Take a look around in your cockpit, and you will see the same. To me, it appears that ED has a lot of potential, a lot more than what we give it credit for. I think the reason we aren't seeing that potential being used right now is that the networking side of the game took a lot of time to get functional. During the beta there was a lot of work on that, lots of patches focussing exclusively on it. The community goals are a step in the right direction, and I believe FD are taking a very procedural approach to game design - get the framework sorted, then iterate on more minor details, once those details are sorted, iterate on even finer details etc. FD have shown a certain level of flare - their community engagement has been nicely handled (e.g. working player anger at high ship prices into game lore), their design decision forum for backers was a good idea, and they release weekly updates without fail. I'd say FD are extremely professional, and generally the "good guys". Even though the game can be a little frustrating, I am more than willing to ride the ED rollercoaster.

 

[AndyC77]

I completely agree OP, I played Beta quite a bit (30+ hours I guess), but come release I almost stopped dead. I've played a few times, but its absolutely painful, and tedious. Beautiful to look at, but just a whole bunch of random Go-fetch quests, exploration of different coloured spheres, and nothing really of any consequence occurring outside of some faceless GalNet updates.

Thankfully Star Citizen is progressing nicely, hell, even X-Rebirth in its latest patched iteration is looking pretty good. Maybe I had the wrong expectations for ED, because for me it simply hasn't delivered an interesting gaming experience. Though I do hope that those that are enjoying it, continue to do so

I took advantage of the recent free weekend on all x games. I installed x rebirth and found it awfull and imediatley uninstalled. Beware, if you do buy it please study it on YouTube first. I hope you enjoy it if you do get it. The cheesey acting was too much for me but you do get to see the rest of your ship not just the cockpit. The hyperspace lanes broke immersion for me though.

 

[Jaybong]

Well, you know, it's nice to know that a lot of folks are happy with non-trading gameplay that essentially consists of spinning an RNG in nearly the exact same way Privateer did in back in 1993. Except that if I took a bounty hunter contract in Privateer, I just had to warp to the right system to find the baddies; I didn't have to then spend 20 minutes driving around that system looking for just the right space bubble to pop in order to find the baddies.

I mean, FD puts out a patch that allows a whopping four players to play together in the same bubble and it's a BIG DEAL. A patch that allows mobs to AGGRO together (!!) against an attacker. WOW!



You will after grinding your 1,000th Anaconda from the mission board, believe me.

I'm on like 893 so I am going to hold you too this. I really want to look down and see hot dog knees and flip flops in me cockpit

 

[cherbert]

Cos frankly, we all love the game to one degree or another, but hands up if you [b[don't[/b] want FD to improve anything?.

Its one thing to love the game but another for OP to be so disrespectful to Frontier for what they have delivered so far and egotistical enough to think he can do better. There are better ways of contributing ideas to these forums to make it better. But the vast majority do not want World of Warcraft in space thank you.

Lets remember that this game is only 3 months from its official release. What state was WOW in on its first release? Think about all the massive design changes, improvements and expansions that have evolved that game in the last 10 years.

I accept that the game has problems - but Frontier are experienced enough to work this out themselves. They are making the game they want to play and it seems to be the game I want to play too. I trust them.