Elite is designed so that the minute you first drop into the game, all gameplay paths are open to you. You can choose to be a pirate, a trader, a bounty hunter, explorer, or a miner, and you can get a reasonable sample of all of these types of gameplay very quickly without ever having to buy a new ship. So what happens to the average player once they've done everything the game lets them do? See, at this point, I'd shredded Elite anacondas with my Viper's multicannons, explored a vast swathe of empty space and brought back scan data, run a few hours of trading in my Type 6, and run enough missions that I had seen every possible permutation and twist that could occur - There weren't very many, and the missions were horribly generic - Go here, find an instanced USS, locate X commodity, kill Y number of Z type of NPC, etc.
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And here's the meat of it. We were promised a galaxy with which we could interact, blaze trails and pave the way for development, a galaxy focused on emergent gameplay, but what we got instead was a series of progress bars, spreadsheet statistics that determined the limited and utterly boring missions available to us, and an often-broken background simulation that governed the economic prosperity and expansion of systems. There was no place we could call home, no place we could BUILD a refuge of our own. We could, over many weeks and through long labour, topple a power on behalf of another power, make its influence grow, and let it spread to other systems, and gain absolutely no recognition or reward for it, save the payouts for the generic missions we had to grind. The NPCs who we were 'allied' with, the factions whose fortunes we had made through our work, would shoot us unblinkingly if we forgot to ask for docking permissions before entering one of their stations, or if a stray laser blast struck one of their ships when defending them from an attacker. The galaxy seemed as far from living and relatable as it could get. There was nothing a player could become personally invested in, nothing to care for, and no rewards to be reaped from loyalty to a faction or a cause.
The game's been out for over seven months now. When will it become fun?
I think the problem lies somewhere deep in Frontier's philosophy, because the core of Elite is so good that it can hardly manage
not to be fun, yet, with a combination of long running, but vaguely annoying bugs, failure to write a proper manual (or to explain new features in something approaching readable English), and particularly in—as you rightly identify—failing to provide a way of making players feel at home, the game very often seems worthy rather than entertaining. At times, Elite seems more like work than a game and when I watch Frontier's thought police descend on the guys at EDMC for providing a tool which does something that Elite should have had at its core all along, I kind of wonder if they aren't going to manage to foul up a potential classic despite themselves. It is almost as if Frontier used up all their very considerable reserves of imagination in the first round and have put the accountants in charge of development!
I totally agree about the fines/bounties for stray lasers etc., that kind of thing is intensely annoying for the very reason that when that kind of thing happens, you end up having to abandon your 'home' and go elsewhere. Sure, it is only a game, but having spent a major part of my life tinkering around with people's minds, a key piece of advice for Frontier is that even games need a place of safety. Hell, even I get annoyed when one stray cannon round hitting the wrong ship means spending a week elsewhere, and of all people, I should definitely be able to rationalise that one away. If non-lethal strikes were reduced to non-bounty fines and if the polis did
not automatically drop what they were doing and chase the offenders back home, that would be an excellent thing and it would possibly also stop the current side-show where the polis spend half their time shooting at each other!
Some quite small tweaks would fix this 'home' thing, I think, and bring back the fun. First of all, it would be great if the starports had more individuality—everywhere in the universe looks the same, which diminishes the sense of time and space. Introducing some ratty old, poorly maintained, asteroid battered textures in less wealthy systems would do a great deal to personalise Elite's world. Frontier has done a great job making the outposts reasonably individual, with creative mix and match of a clutch of core components and textures, but I would put in a big vote for extending that a great deal in order to introduce a feeling of having arrived somewhere different. The worst moment in the game from this point of view is when you drop into the hangar, only to find that is is (more or less) the same hangar that you just left. What about some wear and tear, and some graffiti? These are supposed to be working ports, for Pete's sake, and we all know what they look like.
I totally agree about the missions, it would hardly take any effort to introduce more variety as the forums are full of good ideas that Frontier could raid. A missions update would be a great crowd pleaser if it was done well. As it is, when you drop into the same hangar that you just left, you get to read the same set of missions on the bulletin board as the ones on the bulletin board you read before departure.
If the populated universe slowly expanded, with a few new stations appearing every week, then the more adventurous players could trade and fight on the frontier, where, needless to say, Elite would be much more dangerous. With a war on between the outlaws and the inlaws (apologies), commodity prices could skyrocket, and making your fortune trading or fighting would be possible, but only if you survived. I would dump the CZs and increase interdictions system-wide on the frontier, to encourage fights between armed traders and NPCs, not to mention PvP. The mechanism for this already exists and the idea of fighting my way in to deliver a fortune's worth of goods in a heavily armed ship really does appeal as relaxation at the end of a hard day's work. And yeah, I might get killed instead, but that is what Elite was always supposed to be, a great game, and dangerous.
Make it so, Frontier.
