I'm sure he has input and advises, but is David Braben even on the dev team anymore?... He's no longer lead designer of his legacy looking at FDev roles. Maybe that's why we're seeing such a divergence from his initial vision to what we're currently getting?
FD making the game they want - quite literally
- Thread starter Jay8ch
- Start date
Correct.
As as others have summarized, this current attitude of features before fixes (instead of fixes before features) is going to catch up with them, and badly. The amount of downtime, emergency patches, outages, and embarrassment on the deployment of 1.3.x only serves to reinforce their complete lack of QA.
Power play wasn't required. Bug fixes and planetary landings is what was required, and that wouldn't even have taken them up to Elite:Frontier levels of quality. So sad.
Everyone has their gripes, FD fix somethings & some players are happy - for a while. The rest gripe cos they didn't get what they wanted. Next patch some more players are placated cos they got their fixes, a bunch of others aren't happy cos they have new bugs they want fixing. Some are even grumpier because they feel their issue has been overlooked entirely. And so it goes on, round & round. I know this cos I've been happy, content, grumpy & annoyed at different times. Right now I'm ok, til something else I don't like pops up then I'll be grumpy again. I think it's probly best the Devs make the game they want, as long as it works properly 
Agreed that it might hold some appeal to social players, but after Wings in 1.2, and after the promise of a revised mission system & `the biggest update yet`, I was hoping this update was going to offer something for solo players. In that respect it's been very disappointing for me personally. A few of the long standing bugs in missions have been fixed (mostly), which let's be honest, was well overdue, and that is pretty much it. The long standing belief that the mission system was a placeholder mechanic is starting to look somewhat shaky. Extra ships is welcome of course.
`Not taking part` seems to be the only bonus really, although I'll give it another week or two (pledged to the fella in the `Your Country Needs You` type pose), but it just seems that PP is not for me, and I'm guessing a fair few other too. Thinking back to the numerous `What will be in 1.3` speculation threads, I don't recall anybody hoping for a board game mechanic.
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I think most devs don't play their own game, which is why you get such obvious/frustrating bugs that persist forever.
For example, does anyone on staff mine? I doubt it, I doubt it very much. The same thing comes up with piracy, they make changes that would completely remove piracy like they have no idea what impact it will have lol.
Making your own games great, as long as its a good game your making and I don't entirely trust FD - the basis of the game was amazing, but since then they've just coasted along really.
Let's not forget that ELITE: DANGEROUS is a product which was developed from crowd-sourcing; the pitch / incentive being that it would be developed the way the players wanted. This isn't a game that was developed for the love of developing. It's always been a commercial product. I don't get a say in the creative direction that they game goes, as I was not a backer, but - I would be very upset if I had pledged with the understanding that things would turn out a certain way, only to find them moving in the complete opposite direction of my expectations.
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A solid thoery, and one I am completely OK with.
While not participating in PP myself, I like it because, as someone already said, it has condenced the player population and so aids in making the galaxy feel more full and alive.
Also, I am totally OK with FD experimenting with how to get players to do what they intend to happen. This will make them better able to make big events more believable and meaningfull, rather than a flop that noone knows about and only has a dozen participants. Get the experimenting and not so great decision making out of the way now, before big discoveries and wars start happening.
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Hmmm. I wondered why I don't pledge on Kickstarter projects...
Bought the Merc Edition, got what I paid for. Skipped all the drama beforehand.
If you haven't paid attention, Ian Bell seems to have gone a bit psychadelic over the years. I suspect if he had been in charge of development that we would have ended up with a game that somehow resembled the Beatles film Yellow Submarine.
If FD arent careful, there may not be many people left to buy the DLC/expansions - a couple of months ago i would have pre-ordered ... now i would wait to see what comes out, as my faith in the game design is waning right now ... there's nothing to excite, imo
FD have struck gold with Powerplay.
As I've said previously, I have no problem with the idea of power play. I just think that it could have been implemented better than taking canisters of stuff to different systems. At the moment I find it dull.
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Really?
Another space sim just came into early access a few days ago (not Star Citizen or Limit Theory). Head over to their forums and have a look. You're going to see a few familiar names and the odd post about Powerplay.
Someone struck gold with it, but it wasn't FDev.
Who cares what other peoples views are on Powerplay on another forum, what counts is player activity. FD have already said many are flocking to Powerplay and ae playing it. So i expect when they used those words, they were based on their stats.
Yes some people will not like it, some will express their individual minority views on other forums about powerplay, it doesn't mean those words are fact and definitely they are not the words of the majority.
By ruining a profession in the process of it? I think not.
They aren't other people on another forum. They're people here on this forum who've gone there. Elite: Dangerous players who have spent money on another space sim since powerplay came out, in spite of the fact that FDev released a new bunch of skin packs. There isn't a positive spin you can put on that if you're going to be objective about it.
Really? I've not seen any mention of people "flocking to it".
If you trawl through these forums you can see, very obviously, that Powerplay isn't the hit they hoped it'd be. In fact it's been contentious and contraversial, to put it mildly. There are few posts talking about which is the best power, what the powers should do, but there are a plethora of posts saying that powerplay needs urgent attention, that it is broken, unimmersive, lacks lore, or (most worryingly of all for Frontier) is a major departure from Elite as we know it.
Powerplay has, as Yahtzee put it once, the stink of the auteur. This is something made for the designers, not for the players, and it really shows. As the Op said, the game now is starting to feel like it is for them not for us. That's absolutely fine. But they will inevitably lose a lot of us if they go down that road.
As someone who thought "meh!" when the details about Powerplay were made public, who was adamantly sure he wouldn't participate because it sounded boring and who ended up pledging to Felicia (Ms. Winters for the rest of you 30mn after entering the game for the first time when PP was released, I must admit that I really like it.
Delivering pamphlets in a T6 to some backwater system has an actual impact on the game, interdictions by foreign powers and interdicting foreign ships who shouldn't be in Winter's bubble happen regularly and make actual sense in terms of gameplay (And again have an actual impact on the way the game progresses).
Additionally, seeing players while in SC is *much* tenser : before Powerplay most playerships I saw were clean, so apart from some rare friendly exchange over chat, the player to player interaction staid minimal. Now even law abiding players can be a source of danger (or be prey, depending on the ship I'm flying) as long as they pledged to the (wrong power. And there are attempts at coordinating player efforts, meaning more friendly interactions too (there is a r/EliteWinters subreddit, and I'm sure there are some for each power).
So yeah, from my PoV, ED feels a lot more alive with PP than it was before. As for the OP's point, I actually imagine they gave the heads of each departments a power to manage, and they probably have a board somewhere in the Frontier's office to keep track of the standings. Whoever has the highest standing at the end of the year gets a special xmas gift (plush Powerplay leader?.
30mn after entering the game for the first time when PP was released, I must admit that I really like it.Delivering pamphlets in a T6 to some backwater system has an actual impact on the game, interdictions by foreign powers and interdicting foreign ships who shouldn't be in Winter's bubble happen regularly and make actual sense in terms of gameplay (And again have an actual impact on the way the game progresses).
Additionally, seeing players while in SC is *much* tenser : before Powerplay most playerships I saw were clean, so apart from some rare friendly exchange over chat, the player to player interaction staid minimal. Now even law abiding players can be a source of danger (or be prey, depending on the ship I'm flying) as long as they pledged to the (wrong
power. And there are attempts at coordinating player efforts, meaning more friendly interactions too (there is a r/EliteWinters subreddit, and I'm sure there are some for each power).So yeah, from my PoV, ED feels a lot more alive with PP than it was before. As for the OP's point, I actually imagine they gave the heads of each departments a power to manage, and they probably have a board somewhere in the Frontier's office to keep track of the standings. Whoever has the highest standing at the end of the year gets a special xmas gift (plush Powerplay leader?
.