A Game At Odds with Itself and Why

[Infidel Deity]

Mate, I know whether I'm playing the game or not.

Are you "droves"?

 

[Pluvialis]

Ah the Internet. One of the 7 wonders of the modern world that has given all the people a voice... which they use to moan about movies and videogames..

In fairness, this is one part of the Internet. The Internet also provides unparalleled opportunities for research, trade, diplomacy. Revolutions and social justice movements have been enabled by the Internet.

If the Internet is humanity's hive mind, shouldn't it be capable of encompassing all the things that humanity does? Popular culture included?

 

[Infidel Deity]

I feel the same, to be honest. I love flying the ships. Landing and docking. The combat. They nailed the sim. Absolutely nailed it.



I see green stations all over. Made quite a few friends out there.

It's altered my gaming experience not one iota.



1. Longer jump ranges for all ships.Max an Asp Explorer at 50LY and let it set the bar. My shortest jump range: 20LY. Because fewer loading screens is better than more if them. People have lives; 20 jumps just to get to the CG, and 200 more to participate, simply isn't fun.

2. Dynamic economy with ship and outfitting finders. Was s would increase the cost of ships and arms in systems. Booms would drive costs down. Stuff would cost less nearer the source of supply. Give us reasons to travel.

3. More tools for the Sandbox: Repair Limpets (and by extension, Repair Rats). Economic exploration (gather and sell info about deals, discounts etc in the dynamic economy).

4. Scannable planets. Use DSS to reveal POI from space and lock in bases and wrecks as Persistent. Decide whether we want to land. Procedurally generated lost Alien ruins, wrecked explorers, major meteoric impact sites with unique samples, strange elements for recovery and resale, forgotten expedition bases, smuggler caches, pirate and scientific bases - all Persistent as they are discovered and reported.

5. Meaningful impact: I should not be able to rank with both navies. Smugglers whose stuff I Lise should remember that, and refuse me jobs or even look for revenge. I want to make friends, enemies and deals. I want to see the change as opposed to imagining it.

I do like this list, however.

 

[Patrick_68000]

Frontier makes the game that they want to play. It is the founding declaration

 

[NeilF]

Let's invent a hypothetical game. For the sake of argument, let's call it 'toe-sphere'. In this game, you can:


Hit the sphere with your toes, or another part of your foot.
Hit the sphere with your head.
Hit another player with your foot, or your head - the game mechanics however impose a penalty for this.
Fall on the ground, pretending that another player has hit you with his foot or head - unfortunately the game mechanics aren't very good at detecting this 'griefing' tactic.
Your 'score' depends only on guiding the sphere through a slot - you 'win' by grinding the sphere through the slot more often than the opposing team.


Boring obviously. Nobody would want to play, and the idea that people would pay to watch it is even more ludicrous...

Toe-sphere does sound very dulll...

Personally I can only see this hypothetical game working if:-

• Toe-sphere actually allows sides to be organised such they could actually work/play togethor in different roles as part of the task required.
• There's plenty of toe-sphere available. Can you imagine being interested in trying it with other people, and simply not being able to find it to play?
• Toe-sphere allows splenty of different approaches and variety to achieving the task required. It would be very dull for example if it just involved one person at a time running up the ground and taking it in turns to shoot. Before then one of the opponents did the same... Over... and over...
• Where possible try to ensure toe-sphere results are fairly totalled up. There have been instances I believe where some groups have played on different pitches simply scoring goal after goal after goal into the opponents "slot" (who were of course not even there). The other team were obviously quite annoyed to find out the score later on, and that they'd lost, long after the match had finished.
• The results actually have bigger effects - Imagine if your group could progress somehow as a reward! Maybe even having some sort of obvious effect on the toe-sphere grounds if successful enough?
• And if there were also lots of other "sphere" related games which meant if you didn't want to progress your group through "toe-sphere," you could maybe instead organise some of your group to use for example "hand-sphere" instead.

On a side note, I'd also suggest:-

• The "griefing" you mentioned does sound like it might put people of the game! They might end up just playing solo-toe-sphere? So maybe if stronger punishments were used where possible to try and deter the griefing?
• Ensuring the rules of toe-sphere mean if people want to play toe-ball by themselves, they should use basically the same clothing/equipment. Can you imagine how annoying it might be if you were down at the park and had the opportunity to play in a group-toe-sphere game, but unfortunately you had your solo-toe-sphere stuff on?
• Toe-sphere allows very good video access with quick moving camera angles/shots. It could make it very dull to watch using a slow moving unmaneuverable camera don't you think?
• When new toe-sphere grounds are built, ensure they are clean! Can you imagine travelling a long distance to a brand new toe-sphere ground, being the first person throught the gate, only to find loads of random litter all over it as if it's already been used loads? That could be quite annoying couldn't it! Surely no one would overlook that when building a new ground though! Would they?

Are we done with toe-sphere? Personally I'd like to discuss aspects of Elite Dangerous instead of a make-believe games...

 

[Rudolphus]

when immersion in a videogame is Im must pretend in my head gameplay why play a videogame,
then I can do when i was a kid playing that my house is a spacestation and my bicycle is a spaceship, and my light the laser beam.

 

[Querty Out]

The level of agreement with Mr. Braben's statements is inversely proportional to one's number of hours played.

 

[ozrix84]

Are you "droves"?

Are you serious? Buzz off.

 

[el_tel]

Let's invent a hypothetical game. For the sake of argument, let's call it 'toe-sphere'. In this game, you can:


Hit the sphere with your toes, or another part of your foot.
Hit the sphere with your head.
Hit another player with your foot, or your head - the game mechanics however impose a penalty for this.
Fall on the ground, pretending that another player has hit you with his foot or head - unfortunately the game mechanics aren't very good at detecting this 'griefing' tactic.
Your 'score' depends only on guiding the sphere through a slot - you 'win' by grinding the sphere through the slot more often than the opposing team.


Boring obviously. Nobody would want to play, and the idea that people would pay to watch it is even more ludicrous...

It does sound boring. I'd rather play football (AKA 'soccer' to our American cousins).

 

[Zak Gordon]

Sadly so much detailed and useful 'critique' has been given all along from the very first alpha days, that as this point it really is (sadly) probably a waste of time to try to phrase things in a way that might get a response from Frontier that they are thinking about the issues that keep getting rasied over and over.

As Patrick_68000 puts it, Frontier makes the game that they want to play. It is the founding declaration. It is also probably the game that a fair few have been happy playing, and no doubt the focus on the CQC/Arena stuff will bring in more.

That does not prove all these other voices are wrong though, and i do seriously ask myself if in 20 years time people will even be talking about ED anymore let alone playing it (assuming the required server issues etc) as they do with the original three previous games?

Anyway i repped the OP as it shows just how much love for Elite there is, even now and that is kind of heart-warming if also probably a little like tears in the rain.

 

[CMDR_Amanath]

I dont know why we dance around the obvious, eventually the game gets boring. When you have most of the ships, and money, and have completed all of the tasks ad nauseum - yea its boring, and i struggle to play it right now if i am honest. I still like the game but it doesnt draw me in like it used to.

The game lacks an end game really, which most mmos have. End games are infamous for being boring as well, but they serve a purpose. If you dont have a range of interesting things to challenge you, to advance you and to keep you interested then it does get flat. I'm not suggesting it must have an end game, but without one its going to cycle through players endlessly. Frontier need to realise that the base game + the latest expansion ( without significant new content ) wont be enough for a lot of players. By new content i dont mean landing on planets, that is recycled content and some additional seemingly pointless driving around.

Ill keep playing because i love the idea of the game. I do fear for it though, in some respects im not completely sure FD know what they are doing. But i hope they get it right.

 

[Jex =TE=]

Now the OP said there wasn't a lot to do (notwithstanding they didn't like some of the things that could be done) and this is possibly true if you look at the game in the terms it only has 2 activity's fight/trade (exploring is wandering while looking for one of the other 2 ) but someone described Elite as Euro Trucker in space (which having played Elite since it came out on the BBC Micro and every iteration since) I mostly agree with this description. The problem with this analogy is if you have ever played Euro Trucker it only has one thing to do apart from driving aimlessly is collect/deliver things (one less thing than Elite) but it has a lot of devout fans who love it. So the OP, as they have already stated in this thread, would hate that game due my description of it's activities.

Where I'm going with this ramble is Viking84 sums up why people love or seem to hate Elite (or a lot of other games if you substitute the games name instead of Elite into the quote)

Then you've never played Euro Trucker or has anyone else that tries to make a comparison between the 2 games. ED is NOT Eurotrucker but in space. What a massive load of nonsense. ET is a driving simulator. If you like driving, then you're going to like ET because it gives you the chance to drive big trucks with big loads all over the world (with Mods). The graphics are top, the weather effects are great and parking in ET is like landing in Falcon 4. It even has internet radio so you can tune into a station lol. Try driving up the alps with an M1A1 on your trailer with only a 400hp diesel to move it.

ED couldn't be further for ET if you tried. They have NOTHING in common.

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I went to boarding school, from 6th to 9th grade. School had a large library with fast internet connection in the early nineties. We had an indoor stadium and an olympic field outside. The school grounds were located near a village, surrounded by farmland and had its own acres of groves.

I had so many adventures in those groves with a few like minded friends, looking for squirrels or lizards. We would try our hand in sports like the long jump and fail miserably while having great fun. I learned most of what I know from the internet of those days in the library, most importantly, how to learn things.

Not the cool kids though. They preferred to play only with spherical objects and complain constantly about how it was a miserable and boring life in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.

Yeah I was one of those kids who played in the dirt and made forts out of twigs or sticks and tree-houses with my friends and I think ED is boring so yeah, nice anecdote about having to use imagination but since I have that in abundance, as do many here that find the game dull, you're still wrong

Stop using that failed argument.

 

[Jex =TE=]

Hyperspace jumps, on the other hand, are watching, not doing. It's spectatorship. And just think of how much time a long haul trader spends just watching their ship jump as opposed to flying it, during any gaming session.

What is needed is warpdrive, not jump drives (or jump drives with range limited only your fuel capacity but obviously take a lot longer). You need things to do whilst your traveling though which is why you need to be able to walk around your ship and do stuff in it. Then you need stuff like anomalies and things happening outside the ship.

Instead what we get is 50 loading screens that are incredibly time wasting and boring. I'd much rather set a course and just have the hyperspace screen for 5 minutes and go and do something like repairs back in the engine room.

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What we have here is a split between players who "play" games, and those who Play them.

Players that Play games neither desire nor require instruction, and are perfectly content figuring things out for themselves and exploring the game world set out before them. For example, they do not feel that they are hemmed into a singular area of space because their reputation in that local region is high, and do not feel that min-maxing reputation and missions appropriately to gain loads of space bucks is a priority.

Players that "play" games desire the answers to be right in front of them, greyed out, with a little lock indicating that not enough time has been wasted yet to gain access. They need reminders, achievements, stacks of useless junk and item colour coding (to tell them how epic they are), they need to *see* their rank rise in the universe so that they have some measure of self worth, some indication that the hours of painful, pointless grinding they have spent in game actually amounts to something. They will never be content, always desiring some new progress bar to fill, some new instruction to execute or tech tree to travel along. They will play the game endlessly until suddenly, one day, they grow frustrated. Instead of questioning why they burned out trying to complete a game with literally no end, they log onto the forums...

...And post threads like these.

You forgot the "gamers", the ones that get bored of looking at the same planets in a universe that repeats itself and don't find simple game mechanics fun and desire more depth and intelligence to their gameplay as well as imagination. Just because you're happy with the simplistic game mechanics and lack of diversity in the galaxy doesn't mean the rest of us are and we want to see changes.

 

[bamber]

This thread is still going round in circles based on the fact that because people don't LIKE content it means it doesn't exist which is obviously wrong

 

[Jason S]

As Patrick_68000 puts it, Frontier makes the game that they want to play. It is the founding declaration.

This is a lot to do with everything about the game of course. They do react to crowd view sometimes but only when they really feel they have to and basically otherwise they are trying to make the game that they want to play. And I think also a big sprinkling of short term maximize revenue is going into priorities of features and pricing.

This can lead to a cool original game but can also lead to a niche game that they want to play and others who think a similar way.

I suppose at least it should be different to the other hordes of space games that will come out in the next couple of decades and that maybe a good thing of itself.

 

[Jex =TE=]

A growing sentiment seems to be "just play for fun, not progress." Or Play, for those wanting their Elitism stroked.

Trouble is, fun is not universal. To me, fun is having an impact on a game world, however small. Knowing my decisions matter, that things can go wrong, that actions have consequences. If Sandbox games lack these things, then to me personally they are themselves lacking. Why have a world of your world is little more than 3D tapestry that never changes and upon whose contents I can have no effect?

Elite promised a world. Dynamic, shifting. A dangerous place with consequences.

The developers have so far utterly failed to deliver in that regard. I keep hoping they will do, and I will wat h for it. But for now I think a break us best for me. I have books to read, shows to watch, other games to play, and am hoping No Man's Sky will support tools like HOTAS, as it seems built for explorers.

The main issue with ED right now is that everything is meaningless. There's no connections to NPC's, to missions, to PP, to anything. This is what you get when you over rely on RNG and PG.

It boils down to this - "Computer, generate me a random mission and put it on the BB for me"

"Computer, generate random space station from stock pile of 5 and place in random .jpeg of planets in next system"

"Computer, place infinite spawning AI for me to shoot at."

It's a sterile and dead universe and it feels like one.

 

[xondk]

Mr. Braben needs to remove the Rose tinted glasses of his imagination and tune into his game as it exists. People are losing interest, and worse, beginning to question whether this is even the game they were promised, or ever will be. Some of the reasons for this doubt are listed above, in case Frontier are listening at all.

"This game is dying!" another thread like this, apparently trying to do what? what exactly is it you are trying to do? scare people away from the game, by giving it the same view on it that you do? what exactly is the purpose of this? wanting Frontier to wake up? by making yet another thread that ultimately at least to me say "I don't like this game, and because I don't like it, it has to be dying!" despite clear evidence to the fact that Elite is doing fine?

Add to that, your conclusion that they need to 'wake up' Elite in itself, the concept that is going is not a problem, the problem is one of that David Braben expected people to treat each other with at least a little respect, and yeah, that doesn't work so well when something is online because that attracts those that do not want to do so. And no, I don't mean it to be a 'carebear' or whatever situation, you can show people respect and rob them blind as pirate or slaughter them as your enemies and still respect them and interact with them, and be respectful about it, heck even if you are insulting them left right and center it can be part of who you are in game. Problem is...people don't use in game motivation behind some of their actions, but as the big topic currently will tell you, they gladly work to cause grief...

As for your conclusion in what is being tried to created......at least to me, it seems like you entirely missed it, absolutely entirely, and also missed the fact that its been repeatedly stated that it is an ongoing process meaning the goal or end state of the game is not here yet. They never claimed it wouldn't have issues, they never claimed there wouldn't be trial and error, or things to adapt to, not one bit, in fact quite the opposite in my mind, they are aware it is a bumpy road and are working on it.

Where threads like this seem to go "A roadbump! oh no the sky is falling!" when in fact is just a small bump in something that is doing otherwise fine.
Sorry, but a lot of these posts seem more minded towards trying to scare people away from Elite towards other games, trying to undermine something simply because the posters themselves might not like it...but guess what...no game is for everyone..so please..just....add something productive instead of this.

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The main issue with ED right now is that everything is meaningless. There's no connections to NPC's, to missions, to PP, to anything. This is what you get when you over rely on RNG and PG.

It boils down to this - "Computer, generate me a random mission and put it on the BB for me"

"Computer, generate random space station from stock pile of 5 and place in random .jpeg of planets in next system"

"Computer, place infinite spawning AI for me to shoot at."

It's a sterile and dead universe and it feels like one.

Which...they have even admitted and are working on, 2.1 will hopefully fix a lot of it....but I'm fairly sure people will end up unhappy anyway or find something else to be upset about.

Heck by your words, a lot of other games are of similar nature, heck most all games.
And a lot of people seem to think creating something like this is easy or done in one swoop? seriously...it is amazing to me that people can think that, when a lot of the games used as example are at best a tiny slice compared to the scope that they are trying to create with Elite..and no, it isn't done yet, they've been exceedingly clear on that since the start what the development model is like.

 

[Jex =TE=]

I'm sort of hoping that it might be possible to have it both ways in a way. To find a middle ground. For human occupied space to have it generated once and have it persistant (or at least parts of human occupied space) and for the rest of the galaxy to be proceduraly generated. Having it all proceduraly generated is probably a complete programing or mathematical nightmare when it comes to making it dynamic.

Yep keep the core systems free from player influence aside from things like PP - there's what, 30,000 systems in the core but even if it was only a thousand it would be more than enough.

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Off topic, but do you guys remember Jane's Combat Simulations!?! I LOVED Longbow Gold... But yeah, the era of book length manuals on how the game worked.

LOL yeah and was still playing it about 2 years ago - you can still get it to run and it's surprisingly good even today. Enemy Engaged has been reworked by the modding community so you should check that out too and of course, Falcon 4 BMS 4.3

 

[Pluvialis]

Sorry, but a lot of these posts seem more minded towards trying to scare people away from Elite towards other games, trying to undermine something simply because the posters themselves might not like it...but guess what...no game is for everyone..so please..just....add something productive instead of this.

But that raises the question of what constitutes a 'productive' post, and who arbitrates that.

If I weren't Assuming Good Faith (© Wikipedia), I might be inclined to suppose that you see this thread as unproductive because you disagree with it, and demand 'productive' threads in the sense of 'threads that you do agree with'.

You're clearly a fan of the game - and why not? If you see nothing wrong with it as it is - if ED scratches your itch, as it were - then good on you. There's nothing wrong with that, and your view is no more or less valid than anyone else's.

But the fact remains that others don't see it that way.

Remember, ED is supposed to appeal to everyone, by presenting us with a huge, detailed and immersive (that bloody word again) galaxy and allowing us to Play Our Own Way (that bloody phrase again). So if it's appealing to you, but it's not appealing to me, or the OP, then it's failing to be what it set out to be; and - arguably - what DBOBE continues to describe it as being.

Nobody's trying to scare anyone away; nobody's saying the game is dying. The OP is raising the point that what's being described isn't what we've got. And, honestly, I can't say that the OP is wrong.

What it comes down to is whether FD want to continue trying to make a game for everyone (common sense says they can't, but they may wish to try). If so, then they have to pay attention to what's driving some people - not all - away from the game. Whether it's uniformity of the game world; whether it's griefing-slash-roleplaying-a-psychopath; whether it's a sense of detachment and distance from the setting - whatever the problem is that some people are perceiving, that's preventing the game appealing to everyone.

In the end FD have to decide what they want to do with their franchise. For me, as I said above, the development from Elite -> Frontier -> First Encounters was a solid advancing arrow; while ED has reversed a lot of that progress and taken the franchise back to an arcade space shooter. To keep me interested - if they wanted to - they'd have to somehow turn ED into First Encounters 2. That's not going to happen, so my interest will likely continue to die off until I stop playing. I haven't played in a couple of months as it is.

That's not necessarily a loss to FD, although there will be others like me - but for each of us there will be another who loves the space shooter.

ED isn't going to die off because some game-players aren't interested in it. It's simply going to lose a section of its potential player base. That means that to maximise the section it's got left, it needs to appeal more to that section. That means making ED, for example, a pure PVP shooter, or whatever it is that the enthusiastic players are interested in. And that, in turn, means abandoning the idea of ED being all things to all people.

 

[Jex =TE=]

I would imagine that you would get back the cost you originally paid for the heap-o-junk minus the insurance fee (5% or whatever it is). Then you could be presented with another screen of local junk sold at the station to purchase or if nothing took your fancy, for a fee, transported anywhere you have visited in the past. All this aside, I suspect FD chose the path they did as I think it would have been simpler and easier to code / release for the Xmas deadline they picked.

Maybe one of the season pass upgrades could introduce such a concept of junk ships (along with many other things people have suggested over the months) - maybe all ships you own are immediately sold for full value (so in effect reset the universe); prices on new ships reviewed (10x - 100x) and junk options introduced; now go knock yourself out ... imagine the uproar though

The thought of having a junk ship that you could then do up would be epic. You'd have to make money to buy the parts and fit them so you would then have a reason to make credits and your ship would be a lot more personal to you too. It would be like buying an old car and restoring it though there would need to be a mechanic to fit the parts and tinker with the engines etc lol

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And the bounty hunting, combat zones, base assaults, minor factions, power play and every silly game the community has come up with...

All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?


Or does the OP mean its still a bit of a work in progress perhaps?

No. Unlike what the Romans did which was complex and epic, ED falls short and combat zones and bounty hunting are the same so that's 2 into 1 right there. Minor factions and PP are the same so that's another 2 into 1 and also, pointless and boring unless you would like to give a reason for doing them? That leaves base assaults...as I don't own Horizons someone else will have to answer how much fun those are after the 10th time.