Engineers The Engineers is turning into a deja vu for me

I hope that at some point FD will stop with the board game nonsense like Powerplay and Engineers and start concentrating on making ED a better CMDR Simulation. I would like more things to do in ships and SRVs, rather than 'rewards' for doing the same things more. Missions are good, flying the ships and driving the SRV is fun, combat is good, the galaxy is awesome. I even enjoy mining from time to time ;). FD - please concentrate on making these interactions more complex and rewarding.
 
FD - please concentrate on making these interactions more complex and rewarding.
+ 1 :) I think most of us that have been with this game bought it to simulate being a pilot flying in space. All these shiny additions don't really add much to that unless they tap into rewarding core mechanics.
 
+ 1 :) I think most of us that have been with this game bought it to simulate being a pilot flying in space. All these shiny additions don't really add much to that unless they tap into rewarding core mechanics.

I do have some hope that passenger missions, ship launched fighters and even multi crew will good additions to the game, though I do think that not being able to hire AI crew could be a mistake.
 

Jex =TE=

Banned
E: D is far too complex a beast to approach with half-baked ideas. And I do think that both Powerplay and Engineers were horribly half-baked ideas. Lots of comments out there in the forums detailing extensively how and why. The design rationale that seems to have gone into both patches goes completely against good design practices. Honestly, I sort of wish I would have chosen this situation as my final paper's research subject.

I hear this a lot and each time I think, is it really that complex? When you break it down you load into big skyboxes and you take very simple missions or trading runs.

Eve is complex, not that I play it but it's more complex than ED. Flight Sims are more complex by far. I think the problem is that it lacks complexity or if it's there, the devs have accidentally hidden it. There are already models of the universe, probably public data and this has been done before in FE2 and FFE so what work are we talking about they haven't done 3 times before already?
 
I hear this a lot and each time I think, is it really that complex?

The underlying model is quite complex. The political and financial systems, the BGS, Powerplay... There is a lot under the hood.

But that is not what I meant by it. What I meant was more to do with the expectations they set and how complex they are. What the playerbase wants and how to go about making the large majority happy.

For instance, if you make a platformer game the complexity when it comes to that is relatively low. You know your market really well, and what people want from your game. You can tailor to those expectations to deliver a good experience.

Ask ten people what they want from ED and you get ten different responses. It is a game that portrays the potential to experience life as a starship pilot in the future with all the freedom it entails.

When they throw ideas like Powerplay and Engineers into the mix, they have to consider how they affect all these groups of players (as well as the technical complexities underneath). Everyone wants to take part since they all paid for it, everyone wants it to be meaningful, etc. When they implement it in a half-baked fashion even the people that were primarily targeted by those updates are disgruntled, those that weren't primarily targeted are excluded, those that weren't primary targeted but figured to give it a try anyway are dismayed by how bad the features are.
 
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Jex =TE=

Banned
The underlying model is quite complex. The political and financial systems, the BGS, Powerplay... There is a lot under the hood.

But that is not what I meant by it. What I meant was more to do with the expectations they set and how complex they are. What the playerbase wants and how to go about making the large majority happy.

For instance, if you make a platformer game the complexity when it comes to that is relatively low. You know your market really well, and what people want from your game. You can tailor to those expectations to deliver a good experience.

Ask ten people what they want from ED and you get ten different responses. It is a game that portrays the potential to experience life as a starship pilot in the future with all the freedom it entails.

When they throw ideas like Powerplay and Engineers into the mix, they have to consider how they affect all these groups of players (as well as the technical complexities underneath). Everyone wants to take part since they all paid for it, everyone wants it to be meaningful, etc. When they implement it in a half-baked fashion even the people that were primarily targeted by those updates are disgruntled, those that weren't primarily targeted are excluded, those that weren't primary targeted but figured to give it a try anyway are dismayed by how bad the features are.

I understand it's more complex that a platformer but I don't know what the BGS does, nobody does except FD and how complex can it be. Player X does Y and affects Z. The game relies on RNG so much it makes it even easier.

Log into bulletin board = RNG mission generator.
Fly into REZ/CZ - RNG NPC generator.
PP - RNG mission generator though player affects a "side score" to add to the overall effort? (I dunno, never played it)
ENG - ok so insert them into a system, make the UI then rely on RNG for the effects.
Trading - X commodity to Y station sell/buy

If it's complex, don't you need to ask the question....

Why make it so complex for such simple gameplay elements? Have FD made this hugely complex BGS at the expense of everything else and it hasn't worked the way they thought it would? Everyone says "ED is a complex game" however you'd be hard pressed to see it and if it's so subtle that you can't see it or feel it, then what was the point of making it?

When they added Eng and PP - did anyone think before the game was in beta that this was going to be the end result? If the game is about your ship and the wide open galaxy, they should have concentrated on the ship more by making it more personal to you and making a decent mission generator. We still can't name our ships and how hard would that have been?

Here, choose up to 2 names from the list below (or 3 names, who cares)

Blue,falcon,pirate,beard,cutlass,corporation,etc,etc,etc.

Next you record those names so when you add in the voices, and you chose Blue Cutlass as your ship name, you hear, "Blue Cutlass cleared for landing on pad zero nine"

I'm just rambling now.

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It's so sad that the prevailing gaming wisdom is going to ruin this game. (for me.)

I might be in the minority, but the only reason I play this game is for the emerging game play and the fact that there's no arrow telling me what to do.

I've tried to get into 1000's of dollars worth of games since E : D came out, and they don't last long. I'm always pulled back. I don't want to, in any way, be told what to do.

I've played for nearly 1000 hours and I have 200 million credits and an a-specced python. That's it. The best thing I have is a never ending urge to log in to Elite.

It sucks people try to 'win' this game.

Try 7 days to Die :)
 
at same time, the core of Elite Dangerous is based on a random number generator. Procedural is just a RNG much more sophisticated !
 

Jex =TE=

Banned
Yepp, the player should improve his knowledge about game mechanics and rely on that knowledge, forums, informations, instead of the well of fortune. And then game become interesting.

Driving 3 hours straight to get 6 pollonium is dull, but using accquired knowledge - (you need K star, metal planet and near crater then you will find pollonium in 10-20 minutes) could be interesting.

Add in an NPC that "knows" the system that you need to track down and talk to to find out where the best areas are.
 

Jex =TE=

Banned
I've seen it mentioned a while back that the material distribution is related terrain, but in my personal experience I don't think this is true, or at least not to the extent it could be.

For example, only this week I spent hours exploring craters for Polonium and found two in 6 hours. The following day, on the same world. I find 5 in fifteen minutes of driving across a featureless plain. To me its completely random and has no bearing on skill, challenge, or a need to build up any geological foreknowledge of what is where in game.

Have a look at this video linked below. Its of a crater that is nearly 100 kms deep, it has mountains 40 kms high, and ravines just as deep. Not only is it an awesome place to visit, but its probably one of the most challenging places to explore in an SRV.

Now if places like that had an abundance of the rarest elements, and players were rewarded for venturing into them to locate and retrieve those elements, that right there throws adventure, risk, reward, skill, and challenge into what is currently a mind numbingly boring grind fest for rare mats. Have such materials only spawn in those kind of locations, but reward players for their efforts to retrieve them and we start to move away from the uninspiring random and shallow gameplay that we currently have.

I don't expect it to be easy - I expect it to be challenging and interesting... and above all... a rewarding experience both in terms of the adventure undertaken, and the ultimate goal of coming back with a few of the items I went looking for. Gametime well spent.

Waiting for a lucky random spawn to pop up nearby offers none of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekLvhPpOyUs

The planet in the video looks awful.
 

Jex =TE=

Banned
I'm in two minds over the DDF. On one hand it was a great sounding board for the devs and on the other listening to the customers isn't always such a good idea. I know that's counter intuitive but I've seen customer requests ruin games time and time again, sometimes the devs need to stick to their vision. It needs to be done with care.
What I think is frustrating is the way that the devs keep so many of their plans hidden, I assume for marketing reasons. While this can work out well from time to time, I think it's also dangerous. It means a lot of work goes into features that suddenly get sprung on us and turns out to have missed the mark. A bit of early discussion with the community could have possibly steered the specifics of said features into a better solution. Earlier and longer structured beta's requesting testing/feedback on specific features would be a great way to make sure what hits live was of the quality we all want our game to be. The beta's have always been a few weeks too short and every big patch is plagued with bugs that annoy and frustrate the users giving the game a bad rep. These pre-set deadlines are only hurting the game.

Edit as I clicked submit by mistake:
My big concern now is that the same sort of problem will happen with 2.2 & 2.3. We've heard nothing solid about what we're going to do with ship launched fighters, passengers and multicrew just that "it's going to be cool". I'm worried that when we get it the devs will be all excited about this new feature they've spent months working on and the community will say "meh, not interested. There's no point". I really hope they start discussing their plans in detail soon so we understand their vision for the new features.

Passengers in FE2 were just another mission. TBH I was surprised they weren't in this version of Elite to begin with so why something that was just another mission in FE2 is this massive thing is beyond me. What exactly do they think we're going to do, jump for joy? Is anyone jumping for joy over a delivery mission - they're essentially the same thing.
 
Passengers in FE2 were just another mission. TBH I was surprised they weren't in this version of Elite to begin with so why something that was just another mission in FE2 is this massive thing is beyond me. What exactly do they think we're going to do, jump for joy? Is anyone jumping for joy over a delivery mission - they're essentially the same thing.

If they are just a delivery missions, or basically go to A via B... I'll suspect I'll just give up hoping ED will ever progress... ie: If we're getting yet another development just to basically add more of the same, rather than investing that time in moving game play forwards to challenging involved game play...
 
at same time, the core of Elite Dangerous is based on a random number generator. Procedural is just a RNG much more sophisticated !
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True. The difference is the "sophisticated". A lot of work and brainpower has gone into the base game. This shows and makes it fun.
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Unfortunately it's as obvious, that little time was available for the current implementation of Engineers, which results in simply not so much brainpower having been available to put into it. And this also shows. I still wish they would take the time and give us the original concept, which had much more time on the table and thus quite certainly was of much higher quality, but was abandoned shortly before the 2.1 beta. They only gave it up shortly before the beta because they ran out of time, so they quickly cobbled together what we got now.
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Unfortunately I consider it very unlikely that they will still complete the old concept and give us that quality. So the best we can do for Engineers is to suggest improvements, which actually help its quality while requiring limited effort, and hoping that the next expansion will actually be delivered with quality on their mind and not be dropped again and be replaced with a cheap shot, just to keep a milestone. Unfortunately my optimism here is limited by now, considering Frontiers track record of the last year. :(

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If they are just a delivery missions, or basically go to A via B... I'll suspect I'll just give up hoping ED will ever progress... ie: If we're getting yet another development just to basically add more of the same, rather than investing that time in moving game play forwards to challenging involved game play...
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Let's put it like this: if they wanted them to be mere delivery missions, they could have easily implemented that already ages ago. So their idea must be something better and more interesting.
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This being said, I would not be surprised if they once again find out two weeks before 2.2 beta that they ran into some difficulties, and instead of taking the time to fix the problems, they will the switch over to just make it delivery missions and be done for. I mean, it already worked with previous expansions, so why go for quality now?
 
Let's put it like this: if they wanted them to be mere delivery missions, they could have easily implemented that already ages ago. So their idea must be something better and more interesting.

You would think so... And I hope so... But the last 12+ months track record is showing a trend...
 
A few things need fixing...

Rebalance the AI combat to what it was before the Engineers update. There was absolutely no need to change the difficulty.

Add profitable exploration missions (I have never even found a single exploration mission, never mind a profitable one?!)

Fix the bugging out of interdictions - Rapidly flickering escape vectors, then instant interdiction. Disappearing escape vectors, then instant interdiction. Jumping escape vectors etc. AI driving you into planets/stars during interdictions is also problematic.

Make the materials have a higher spawn rate.

Stop trying to force people into combat.

These things would make me happy, especially the AI being reverted back to pre-Engineers. That is a must. Too many times I have been interdicted and blown to pieces in seconds, losing 1 million in rebuy cost every time. That is not fun, it is one step forwards, two steps back...
 
A few things need fixing...

Rebalance the AI combat to what it was before the Engineers update. There was absolutely no need to change the difficulty.

Add profitable exploration missions (I have never even found a single exploration mission, never mind a profitable one?!)

Fix the bugging out of interdictions - Rapidly flickering escape vectors, then instant interdiction. Disappearing escape vectors, then instant interdiction. Jumping escape vectors etc. AI driving you into planets/stars during interdictions is also problematic.

Make the materials have a higher spawn rate.

Stop trying to force people into combat.

These things would make me happy, especially the AI being reverted back to pre-Engineers. That is a must. Too many times I have been interdicted and blown to pieces in seconds, losing 1 million in rebuy cost every time. That is not fun, it is one step forwards, two steps back...

Are you being destroyed in seconds because the AI is too good, or because their weapons are OP? I feel it's the latter.
 
Are you being destroyed in seconds because the AI is too good, or because their weapons are OP? I feel it's the latter.

A bit of both, I can't seem to out-run anyone when interdicted, they strip my pretty much fully upgraded ASP Explorers shields in seconds, then target my thrusters or other specific systems needed to escape, using fixed weapons, with pin-point accuracy, so chaff is useless. Their weapons also seem to be OP.

I seem to be getting interdicted a LOT more too, and it bugs out so often that I get FSD failure and am a sitting duck for the OP AI. I must have lost 10 million or more by now, which probably doesn't sound like much to some, but is probably 10 hours of taking crappy missions to increase my rep with mission givers, and half of the credits that I had 'saved'.

It's fairly soul destroying and leaves me to conclude that I could most definitely be doing better things with my time. Games should not leave you feeling that way...
 
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A bit of both, I can't seem to out-run anyone when interdicted, they strip my pretty much fully upgraded ASP Explorers shields in seconds, then target my thrusters or other specific systems needed to escape, using fixed weapons, with pin-point accuracy, so chaff is useless. Their weapons also seem to be OP.

I seem to be getting interdicted a LOT more too, and it bugs out so often that I get FSD failure and am a sitting duck for the OP AI. I must have lost 10 million or more by now, which probably doesn't sound like much to some, but is probably 10 hours of taking crappy missions to increase my rep with mission givers, and half of the credits that I had 'saved'.

It's fairly soul destroying and leaves me to conclude that I could most definitely be doing better things with my time. Games should not leave you feeling that way...

I hear ya
 
A bit of both, I can't seem to out-run anyone when interdicted, they strip my pretty much fully upgraded ASP Explorers shields in seconds, then target my thrusters or other specific systems needed to escape, using fixed weapons, with pin-point accuracy, so chaff is useless. Their weapons also seem to be OP.

I seem to be getting interdicted a LOT more too, and it bugs out so often that I get FSD failure and am a sitting duck for the OP AI. I must have lost 10 million or more by now, which probably doesn't sound like much to some, but is probably 10 hours of taking crappy missions to increase my rep with mission givers, and half of the credits that I had 'saved'.

It's fairly soul destroying and leaves me to conclude that I could most definitely be doing better things with my time. Games should not leave you feeling that way...

I run an Asp with deliberately down-graded shields and have no issues outrunning the interdictions.
Maybe you need to adjust your tactics rather than calling for a lowering of the standards?

If you're running cargo, fit a few mine launchers. At the very least it WILL cause them to slow down, alter their course, and give you a few seconds to get out.
 
I went out exploring (again) a few weeks before Engineers went into beta. I'm still out there.

I feel for the devs because they put so much effort in and in some respects the game is moving forward but for me there's so much they're trying to put in that it's becoming over-complicated, at least that's how it seems from 45KLy away ;)
 
If they are just a delivery missions, or basically go to A via B... I'll suspect I'll just give up hoping ED will ever progress... ie: If we're getting yet another development just to basically add more of the same, rather than investing that time in moving game play forwards to challenging involved game play...

What DO you expect passenger missions to be? That's what you do with passengers - bring them from A to B safely. Probably get attacked by slavers all the way. Those billions of slaves on the markets have to come somewhere from.
 
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