If we ask ourselves why so many players, myself included, get the feeling that
depth is missing in this game, despite its incredibly well executed fundamentals -- I'm talking sound design, ship handling, graphics etc. --, we have to ask ourselves what it is that players are striving for in the game. What reason is there to continue playing after you have had some fun fighting in a RES, if you did a larger exploration run, or made some money trading? What reason is there to this repetitiveness?
Firstly, I want to explore possible reasons to keep playing and enjoying the game and examine where E
s shortcomings might lie.
After that, I will examine the whole problem together and look for a possible, comprehensive solution.
Keep in mind that in this post I will mostly focus on E
's
shortcomings, while not going into detail about the things it does
right. This is not to say that I don't like the game; the reason I become so strongly agitated about this matter is because of the huge perceived potential hidden underneath it's apparent shallowness. There might be
many other reasons for players to keep playing, but I will focus on the three factors where I feel the game could do so much more.
In other games where problems like this arise much less, there are several possible sources of motivations for players:
- Changing and evolving gameplay. The further you progress (e.g. the bigger your ships get, the better your equipment becomes), the harder and more diverse and complex the game becomes as well. Enemies will be harder - but at the same time requiring you to think more strategically about all the game's mechanics to beat them. Games like Dark Souls do implement this very well - while in the early game, you can scrape by without really knowing what you're doing, later on it's required you have a firm grasp on the game's mechanics, and also on how to build your character. In E, designing ships is incredibly limited: There's only a few really viable weapon classes, many engineer upgrades are really undesirable, and quite a few ships do not handle that differently. At the same time, there is no next level or anything. You just stay in the RES and keep shooting the same enemies if you've got your bigger ships, only that now you might be able to fight that anaconda. But is that really enough depth? Why is there no actual levels for players, or dungeons with really rewarding loot and harder fights, or legendary bounties appearing on the message bords that you can hunt down and take down in an epic struggle?
- The drive to shape the world. Many, especially newer games, really capitalize on this incredibly human desire: To leave something lasting, to shape the world we live in, to create a place to return to. E directly contradicts this very motivation, with players being basically forced to live nomadic lives - heck there's even diminishing returns for players staying too long in one sector (less navy rank, changing the state). Games like minecraft or rust work well partly because players can get creative and leave their imprint on the world. You can build something to call your home, and establish a little (or even big) base. There's intrinsic motivation in that, a real sense of accomplishment.
In E we mostly grind to well, get the better ship. Then what? Power play is a joke and inaccesible to many players because of it's incredibly taxing and inconveniencing mechanics. What do we use our money on, and why should we strive to get the better ship?
- The social experience. Many MMOs continue to exist mainly because of this: Most people are inherently drawn to social interaction. There is intrinsic worth in socializing with other people, in cooperation and teamwork, and there is a sense of coming together and forming a loosely or tightly knit group when overcoming obstacles together. In WoW you continue to play the game for many reasons, not the least of which is to just keep playing with your friends. In Eve Online there is this huge system of corporations, alliances and power blocks, where players fight over extractable ressources and territory. So much emergent gameplay arises from this very basic drive of territorial agonism.
In E however, there is very little actual mechanics to build a group or corporation. The best we've got is wings, and even that doesn't really feel rewarding or incentivized. If you're RESing together, you even feel punished because bounty gets split. Mission running often bugs our or is impossible to coordinate. Trading often isnt worth it, piracy might be broken with the trade dividend system currently in place because profits seem to be calculated incorrectly.
Now, with that being said, what can be done?
I believe there is one concise solution that might fix most of the problems adressed in points two and three, and another one that mostly focusses on point one. I want to focus on this last suggestion first, and then finish with my main point.
Evolving combat: This one might be easy to identify. We need dungeons, we need better signatures and bounty hunting, better missions and
better rewards to go with it. There's no elegant solution to this. The game, in this way, just needs more content, it's really that simple. Right now, there a harsh cut-off in terms of combat missions at a pay-off at about 1mil to 2mil credits, and that's just sad considering they take hours and are often broken. Signatures are ridiculously hard for what they offer most of the time. Yesterday I found a single AI relic - and got ambushed by about 8 pirate ships, including at least one anaconda. I don't know about the rest, I didn't have much time to count. At least make the reward for such hard encounters really worth it, or people go back to RES grinding.
Coop Missions would also be something that is really,
really wanted by the community. Let's also not forget that there, in theory, are more weapons than pulse-lasers, multi-cannons and plasma accelerators. And even taking into account those eluse other weapons (like
burst lasers), there should be more, and they should be balanced in a way that there's a niche for every weapon.
Group Building and Self-Actualization: I'm not sure how well known this game is in the E
community, but X3 used to be my go-to space game a few years back. It was in many ways very much like E
. There was an open world, though not randomly generated - but it was still pretty big, consisting of several hundred sectors. It featured a relatively advanced economic simulation model, with stations producing and requiring goods and natural emergence of trade routes because of this. At the same time,
there was no real objective. You could fly around and do combat missions and get bigger ships, you could simply explore and see what's in those unexplored sectors, you could trade -- you get the gist. And yet it did not have that much of a depth problem, or a motivational one. There was
one major difference: You could build your own corporation. You could build your own station complexes, producing their materials which would then get sold by your hired traders, earning you a constant flow of money. You would go looking for the most valuable asteroids to build mines on, and try to maximize your profits while keeping your ships safe and continuing just enjoying the game without constantly grinding.
In the end, you would even build military stations and hire a real fleet of combat ships. You could just waltz into a sector and try to take it out.
This feels like such a natural fit for E
. The world and lore very much supports entrepeneurial endeavours like this: It's a cold one, with many people just on the lookout for themselves and a quick buck. There is so much space (literally and figuratively) in this galaxy, it's unsettling. And yet, we do not get to do anything with it. See that earth-like planet? Well here's some 50k bucks, now go play while the adults talk. Why not let us establish our own colony in a sector? Why not let us put down our own outposts, stations, and even system police forces? Let us hire miners and traders - heck, let us put down our own shipyards. Give us a chance to shape our own destiny in the unexplored reaches of the galaxy. This would also work well as a system for group building: Naturally you would have to work together to really make a difference here, and, just as naturally, incentives to cooperative would arise. Being part of your own corporation feels like such a cool thing, and such a natural thing as well. The power blocks could offer you, as a mercenary force or even loyalists, bigger missions and rewards, or you could try trading and making a profit from the pristine ressource in this new system. There would suddenly be things you could explore in this galaxy that would be hand-crafted, but not by the developers. There woul be so much more room for interaction, and reason's to explore. The game's mechanics would snap in place and work together, instead of existing as occupations competing for your time investment.
E
right now only really works long term for people who treat this either like a dayjob in space, or as role-playing material. And that's fine, people are different, and we all should get to enjoy this game the way we like. But right now, that does not work out well for most of the other players. We need better mechanics in the very core of the game's reward and progression structure. A rebalancing of the weapons would also be very important. But what I would look forward to the most would be a
corporation system in the way I envision it in this post, and I believe I made a strong point in support of it.
