Frontier trying to create features for everyone instead of designed for specific player groups. Do you think it is a good idea?

Xender

Xender
Frontier trying to create features for everyone instead of designed for specific player groups. Do you think it is a good idea?

When I think about Elite Dangerous development process I see that Frontier trying all the time to add functionalities and gameplay mechanics that will be accessible for all kind of players, in solo, group or open. This kind of mechanics doesn't require cooperation or teamwork. For example, any kind of mission, Combat Zone activity or Resource Extraction Site can be done on your own, there is no need for team play. Of course you can bring your friends and play together but this is not necessary. Personally I think this approach is not the best for creating deep and immersive gameplay. Frontier should focus on creating functionalities addressed to specified group of players, instead of trying to satisfy all at once. For example, they could create some content doable only in Wing, next they could create some 100% solo, story driven experience. I think in that way the results will much better than now, because generic content for everyone is not the best solution.

What do you think about my observations? Do you agree with me?
 

babelfisch

babelfisch
Not everyone is interested in passenger missions. Many people don't use ship launched fighters. Since there will be no NPC crew, I am not going to play multicrew. Looks like they are already doing what you are suggesting.
 

Lianachan

Lianachan
Xender said:
When I think about Elite Dangerous development process I see that Frontier trying all the time to add functionalities and gameplay mechanics that will be accessible for all kind of players, in solo, group or open.
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Disagree completely with this bit. The amount of consideration of Solo players is somewhere in the range of between Very Little and None. Most development seems intended for multiplayer combat.
 
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Stigbob

Stigbob
Lianachan said:
Or that upon release they did indeed contain the features that you bought them for.
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Based on all the OP's threads his main bugbear seems to be one BGS and optional three playing modes, none of which ever changed.

What dropped feature are you on about ?, if it's offline solo you could always have got a refund when it was relevant a couple of years ago. And "the BGS would melt your PC" was a pretty good reason to drop it.
 

Xender

Xender
It is not bad that Elite have features for everyone, but there is lack of functionalities designed for specific player groups and when something is generic it is shallow. However I will agree that recently they introduced mechanics target for specific play styles:
- Passengers missions for explorers.
- Multicrew - right now, we do not know how it will be implemented, if this will be interesting to play together or it will be dead feature.


To clarify something: Blaming Open/Solo for all bad things in Elite is not purpose of this topic. My intention was to discuss gameplay mechanics like CZ, RES, missions, etc.
 
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babelfisch

babelfisch
Stigbob said:
Have you considered that FD were thinking ahead to multicrew when they introduced hire-able/trainable NPC crew first ?.
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Last news was that there will be no NPC crew in 2.3. They might add it later, just like they could add NPC wings later. I don't get my hopes until I see an official announcement.
 

Enderby

E
FD seem to miss the mark each time they release something new for ED.
It's always something a lot of players have absolutely no interest in (as gleaned from this forum). Dunno who makes these decisions but maybe they should get some help before releasing yet another damp squib.
 

babelfisch

babelfisch
Enderby said:
FD seem to miss the mark each time they release something new for ED.
It's always something a lot of players have absolutely no interest in (as gleaned from this forum). Dunno who makes these decisions but maybe they should get some help before releasing yet another damp squib.
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This is due to the heterogeneity of the community and the fact that disappointed people are more likely to complain than happy people. They could send everyone a gold bar and there would still be people who prefer silver.
 
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CmdrChorusLindarr

CmdrChorusLindarr
As others have said, Frontier already seem to be doing what you claim, as much of their development effort in terms of updates to the game (more recently) have been geared towards players who indulge in more PvP and combat focused activities.

What was the last time an update provided meaningful additional content for traders, or explorers or pirates? It's been a long time, tbh.

On the other hand, I actually strongly disagree with you in principle OP. As dev updates to the game are not frequent enough for the idea you propose. Who decides which player groups to target in terms of development priority? You'd eventually end up with a situation where certain neglected groups are so starved of new content for so long that they leave the game and never come back; leading to Frontier looking at the statistics and determining from them that more players now spend more time doing activities other than those of said neglected group, further reinforcing their decision to prioritize other more popular game activities, leading ultimately to a homogenized and greatly reduced playerbase who only really spend their time doing one or two of the most popular activities... the game thus suffers overall.

ED as a game isn't a finished product. It's a developing work in progress. The devs still cannot say that any of the existing main player activities are fully and sufficiently fleshed out in terms of content. In which case, they need to focus on building on the content for those existing activities and adding new activities to further enrich and deepen the gameplay. By focusing too much in one area will turn the game into something it was never intended to be and end up alienating large swathes of the playerbase... it's a terrible idea.
 

Lemnear

Lemnear
Before being in a group players are alone in general... ofc most of the features have to be for all kind of players.

Players regroups by themself no need help for this imo.

The egg is coming before the chicken if you prefer... so i disagree. ^_~
 

Gunnet

G
I would rather they spend all their development time on content that all players can enjoy. Half the features with twice the polish, not twice the features with half the polish.

But like people are saying, it seems Frontier is chasing business from a specific type of player at the moment anyway.
 
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