There is no real competition between the games of space. As David said, each game has its own personality, and it's good for the industry of the game, in general
Competition does a lot as standard game
- Thread starter Jason S
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As far as i am aware, ships will not be purchasable in the finished game, only can be bought with in-game credits, but i think credits will be, (but in limited quantities) so i still see your point.
Strange, i have tried Arena Commander and i find ship control too twitchy amd more difficult than ED. (joysticks at least)
My main concern for ED is that everything that is promised or wanted , eg: planetry landings, walking around ships and stations, npc crew, multi-player ships, owning your own hanger, better mining mechanics, wrecks and salvage to be found exploring, guild play (powers with ED), more ships, Planetside socialising, and even FPS combat, boarding and stealing ships, is already planned or in some cases in engine or being constructed in Star Citizen, which is maybe released next year.
I know some say if it happens, i think it will as too much work has gone into it already, how well it is done is still to be seen.
And i hear a lot of "they are totally different games", but i don't think so, SC is a space game with trading, plus everything else included. I think a lot of players might even play both, but also a lot could move over to SC more permanently when the Persistent Universe is released.
Now no mans sky, is a totally different game, all about discovery, unrealistic (sort of cartoonish) graphics, not my cup of tea at all.
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The most glaring issue is FD's rate of releasing content. They're very, very slow, no other way to put it. Calling PP a "major update" shows what they can actually do.
In my books this is a major update.
Hard to compare ED, SC and NMS really.
SC goes for details, and will have roughly a hundred systems and the numbers of planets to be visited will be limited.
NMS is the opposite. but here we are talking pure fantasy, which makes it much easier to generate worlds to walk on, by the looks of it NMS takes the laws of physics rather lightly when it comes to things like distances and planet size, and chanse for a world to be "earth like" seems to be rather high.
ED deals with reality and reality can be rather extreme. Rocky and ice worlds would be rather easy, but what happens for example when you "land" on a water world?
So in short the competion is quite different from ED. And a game like Eve has not planetary landings yet despite being out for so long.
I have no idea how much a planetary landing will cost, but considering that most of us bought a joystick just for this game and maybe upgraded the computer I would say the cost of the game itself isn´t much.
SC goes for details, and will have roughly a hundred systems and the numbers of planets to be visited will be limited.
NMS is the opposite. but here we are talking pure fantasy, which makes it much easier to generate worlds to walk on, by the looks of it NMS takes the laws of physics rather lightly when it comes to things like distances and planet size, and chanse for a world to be "earth like" seems to be rather high.
ED deals with reality and reality can be rather extreme. Rocky and ice worlds would be rather easy, but what happens for example when you "land" on a water world?
So in short the competion is quite different from ED. And a game like Eve has not planetary landings yet despite being out for so long.
I have no idea how much a planetary landing will cost, but considering that most of us bought a joystick just for this game and maybe upgraded the computer I would say the cost of the game itself isn´t much.
I think this is true. ED and SC have probably had a more positive impact on each other than people realise. There is usually room for more than one example of big games in a genre. Space games having been largely limited to independent releases they have fallen into obscurity.
There seems to be room for War Thunder and World of Tanks and they are broadly doing the same thing. There was room for Unreal and Quake. There was room for Wing Commander and about 500 other space games back in the day.
It's actually very unusual for a game to be the only one "in the village" as consumers are not as predictable as people often give them credit for. They make choices based on all kinds of factors.
I think both Star Citizen and NMS have been good for Elite. Elite has markets those games won't get to (Xbox) and those are also potential fans for the other games in the future when they change system. People will own multiple games even if they don't play them at the same time, people will get bored of one and change to something else. A dollar out of Chris Robert's pocket is not a dollar in DB's pocket.
These are good times for space game fans.
The fact that SC will only have 100 or so systems that are hand crafted and each one different with more content is better than 400 billion empty ones, i sometimes wish ED had gone down this road.
I actually upgraded my PC for SC, and pledged to that first, then bought ED after. where the upgrade was still not wasted.
Well if you are a boss of a company - you would control the amount gameplay being shown wouldn't you by what is impressive and presentable wouldnt you?
So Elite is a game that is naked before all to see. You can buy the game and experience it right now with all its imperfections. This means its not shy of showing everything it has.
SC is a game thats all hypothetical nobody has seen any real demo beyond the arena and place holders and why? Likely because they are incomplete, buggy or flawed. If SC was even close to even having all of that they would have shown some real gameplay trailers with trading, traveling and alpha gameplay. Lets consider some other space games here like Starmade which you can download Alpha now and is a playable game. SC is not a playable game beyond a bunch of hypothetical promises.
In E3 No Mans Sky showed much of its gameplay, and they didn't show too much of combat and trading because those things are likely to be lacking and incomplete what they showed of combat and space looked pretty lacking, but hey at least they did show something, and whilst we may be unhappy with CQC, Frontier did release 1.3 prior to E3 and did have some stuff to show at E3, what did SC have? Pretty much nothing - a single player campiagn trailer with no content to show whatsoever other than little glimpses of things shown before, what does that tell you about how far SC is along in development and how far ED and NMS is in development.
Lets not forget SC has had ALOT more money than elite has had. It also has active donations in the forms of buying ships to support development. Elite only charges you the first time.
Also no game of the scale of Elite and SC has been release bug free and issue free before, so naturally when and if SC is released they will face the same issues Elite have been facing as well and we are talking at least a year away.
NMS won't have so in-depth ship management, or anything pretty much else. It's single player Minecraft in space. It will look awesome. But it's certainly not comparable 1:1 to ED.
SC won't come out for two years, and will have 1/3 of features promised.
So yeah, competition promises a lot, but they don't deliver.
SC won't come out for two years, and will have 1/3 of features promised.
So yeah, competition promises a lot, but they don't deliver.
dayrth
Volunteer Moderator
Seriously?
ED has only been out 6 months. Getting any sort of additional content in that time is remarkably fast in the software development world, and we have had many. You may not think PP is a 'major update' but from a dev point of view, (yes I am a software developer), it looks pretty major to me.
In roughly 6 months time FD will have released the following major builds:
1.1
1.2
Mac Release
1.3
XboxOne Release (Preview)
CQC (maybe 2 weeks from now)
Let's compare to something...
RSI released the first "pre pre Alpha "of Arena Commander one year ago...and it's still quite buggy in my opinion. In the same timeframe ED went from Alpha 4 to what we have today.
"But...but RSI is working on so many other things behind the scenes..."
Yes, I know, but the same thing applies to FD. There is probably plenty of stuff (including expansions) that they are working on behind the scenes without us knowing (CQC is just one example). This with a third of the budget and 3-4 times less people than RSI.
That's not slow...no other way to put it.
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Unless there is content for there to be some sort of point to landing on a planet, we really don't need ED to bother with that. In fact, I'd go further that until such time as space is so utterly full of content that the only logical place new content could go is on planets, we really don't need to worry about planetary landings.
And we are a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong way from there being enough worthwhile content in the game as it stands.
And we are a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong way from there being enough worthwhile content in the game as it stands.
I'm quite certain you wouldn't be playing Elite now if they had gone down that road. Elite was never going to go down that road, nothing in it's 30 year history suggested it would go down that road, its an entirely different proposition.
Freelancer went down that road and took 6 years to develop. Frontier were on a limited budget and were very much looking at a sequal to previous Elite games which had all offered procedural generated galaxies to explore.
Comparing RPG balance update/design rehash with adding completely new gameplay element at meta level to already existing game? Seriously?
As a Software Project Manager I have to strongly disagree. DX12 is the only major change we have on the horizon as far as software tech is concerned - Not hard at all to add a DX12 layer to a game like this. ED is not exactly hing the boat when it comes to detail - although the stations are very well done they are not pushing anyone's system in terms of poly count.
The major challenge comes with the database as they add features and we explore more. Once you start to add planetary landings you get into a whole heap of data that will need to be stored and retrieved. Now while the data it self will not be huge the sheer number of requests will possibly lead to a new database/server structure being implemented but I would assume this has already been planned for and built into the time line of the games development.
Games will always try to seem bigger, better and more graphicy than the last batch but don't be fooled into thinking that streaming tech is going to change in the next few years. Game developers are already limited as to what can be done by the consoles. Any AAA games that wants to be multiplatfrom has a choice to make, all the same or do some extra work on the PC version.
When done right you end with with, for example GTA 5 on the consoles and PC - It cannot be denied that it looks better and plays smoother on the PC as R* took their time and did a good job (For a change).
SPACE:
"I can't think of anything more boring than just flying around in space..."
Flying around in space isn't really what you DO, it's just how you move around that environment. What you DO is things like trade, exploration, combat, mining, missions and so on...
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DOWN ON PLANETS/STATIONS:
"I can't think of anything more boring than walking around ..."
Walking around on planets/stations isn't really what you DO...
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