It feels like someone is doing their job wrong

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Symmetrical wing payouts are exactly like the automagical extra-pip in multicrew: Both are clearly breaking the simulation aspect of the game. Wing payouts are also unhealthy for the Background simulation. Things like that are another aspect of "doing job wrong" in my opinion (exactly as the instant ship transfer was, but I am happy that this aspect was instantly killed by the community).
 
Both are clearly breaking the simulation aspect of the game.

Ship hull health bars would like to have a word with you. Elite is not a simulation. It's an arcade space wanabe MMO thingy. Don't be fooled by the terrific HOTAS support. You're still flying around in fantasy Star Wars/WW2/Korea dogfights with a bit of 6dof, taking missions to kill 5 pirates or deliver 12 tons of tea and "discovering" everything there is to discover about a planet by waiting 15 seconds for a non-interactive space-doughnut-of-scanning. Except for interesting spots on the surface, for which there is no scanner.
 
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hehe... or percentage of ship-integrity :)

A synonym to fuel your imagination does not make it anything else but a life bar. It ranges from 0 to X. If it's reduced to 0, you're dead. No matter whether it was just your lowered gear or the space spoiler of your space ship import body kit was hit (unless body kits have no hitbox?).
 
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Ship hull health bars would like to have a word with you. Elite is not a simulation. It's an arcade space wanabe MMO thingy. Don't be fooled by the terrific HOTAS support. You're still flying around in fantasy Star Wars/WW2/Korea dogfights with a bit of 6dof, taking missions to kill 5 pirates or deliver 12 tons of tea and "discovering" everything there is to discover about a planet by waiting 15 seconds for a non-interactive space-doughnut-of-scanning. Except for interesting spots on the surface, for which there is no scanner.

It's two years I've been saying Elite is not a simulator and it's as arcade as a random ace combat for playstation and I've been constantly shot down and denigrated for that.

It just highlights how poorly fdevs marketed their game.

It's an arcade space shooter bolted on a gorgeous tech demo. Everything else we can do in this game is just bland sugar coating blown out of proportion by misleading trailers and Braben's enthusiastic words.
 
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A synonym to fuel your imagination does not make it anything else but a life bar. It ranges from 0 to X. If it's reduced to 0, you're dead. No matter whether it was just your extracted gear or the space spoiler of your space ship import body kit was hit.

Exactly, if it was a simulation the player would be required to hit important points, like the powerplant, or cause catastrophic damage. As it is, every enemy is just a bullet sponge. Half the time even if you do target the powerplant the hull "dies" before the powerplant will...
 
+1 to OP for being polite and constructive. Also love the game but agree with all points made. I have played since alpha but have never done trading because:

8Half of the time when trading I have to check on another website OUTSIDE the game where I can get something.

I cannot fathom how trade data is not stored when you visit a system - the ui was clearly set up from day one to do this. If it's a data overhead at least let us store locally the historical commodity prices. Started trying to write prices down once then realised I'M WRITING LISTS DOWN TO COMPARE PRICES - didn't someone invent something for this? Oh yeah it's called a computer!

Also would like to add: Can we PLEASE FIX SUPERCRUISE PLANET TESSELLATION! It's a bug that's been in since day one and is why the stars and planets have popping textures when viewed off to the side. A lot of the game is zipping round suns so we see it ALL THE TIME.


Anyway - rantmode off :) It is still the game I have played the most in my life so maybe I'm suffering some level of executive burnout. I hope these slightly empty frameworks FD are putting in place are part of a much higher level master plan. I have faith in the team.
 
Exactly, if it was a simulation the player would be required to hit important points, like the powerplant, or cause catastrophic damage. As it is, every enemy is just a bullet sponge. Half the time even if you do target the powerplant the hull "dies" before the powerplant will...

Unless the data we see is simplified into something a human can easily understand at a glance.
In which case it would still be an accurate simulation.
 
Well written response. Some really good points here. +Rep for taking the time.

Especially in point about the kickstarter backers etc. I agreed with those points. People have pledged money to Elite, because it was pitched to them in x way, during the pre-development stages. And so they expect x to happen. If only game development was ever that straight forward. Kickstarter, in itself, has problems and this is one of them, in my opinion.

I also agree that their should be more ways to interact with the current systems. I can't imagine what the game feels like to players without Horizons.

I unfortunately don't agree that the moonscapes are large empty vistas, mainly because I find moons and space fascinating. So I personally have no problems with just setting out in an SRV and finding canyons and mountains, craters, rocks etc. But that's a point of personal taste. I like switching the wave scanner off and roaming in lonely silence. When ever I have the time.

I do agree, though, with how the progression in Elite feels wooly and difficult to quantify. It took me 3 months to finally 'get' Power Play and I dont think it fits purpose at all.

Thanks for the reply!

Edit: I'm not usually a forum person, so I assumed Rep is a good thing. I dont really understand what it's for and I dont really know the metrics of it but have some anyway! [noob]

Thanks for the rep....have some back (it is a good thing)....I do like a well reasoned discussion.

I bow to your greater knowledge on the subject matter, you do it for a living.....I'm just a gamer and don't have inside knowledge of the development process.

When Horizons first launched I spent hours driving around the planet surfaces collecting materials, doing flips and stunts in the SRV, taking selfies all in open mouthed wonder at what an amazing achievement it was. The sense of isolation and vulnerability when you send your ship off into space was quite palpable. Those feelings faded quite fast however and I was left with the sense of what could have been if we'd had a few more tools and mechanics to work with.

It's great that you love the planet surfaces and honestly I get it. We all get something different from this game and love different aspects of it which goes back to your comment on everyone wanting/liking different things.

But to move back to the development of the game I'd like to use another example of the placeholder and 'not quite finished' aspects of the game if you'll indulge me.

The Galaxy Map, this is something we all use pretty much every time we log in and in most cases we use it several times in a session. Now in many ways it's a powerful tool and does the job well. They have improved and built upon it which is also hugely positive and welcome. However there are some glaring omissions from it that I can't quite fathom. Waypoints. The ability to plot a course involving more than one destination in game that is all about travelling vast distances between the stars seems to me to be a fundamental oversight. There may be a very good technical reason why they haven't included it but I can't for the life of me understand what that could be.

They added bookmarks which again was a much needed feature in the Gal Map (I was writing routes and places of interest in a little book). However they omitted the ability to organise those bookmarks into folders. I have a huge list of bookmarks of interesting stuff I discovered which at some point I'm going to have to go through and probably delete much of it. Again, this seems to be a fairly basic tertiary feature that has been missed and for reasons I can't understand, it just seems to be unfinished.

I see these sorts of examples throughout the game to a greater and lesser degree which is why I'd like them to have a look at what they've already created and develop them further.
 
Ship hull health bars would like to have a word with you. Elite is not a simulation. It's an arcade space wanabe MMO thingy. Don't be fooled by the terrific HOTAS support. You're still flying around in fantasy Star Wars/WW2/Korea dogfights with a bit of 6dof, taking missions to kill 5 pirates or deliver 12 tons of tea and "discovering" everything there is to discover about a planet by waiting 15 seconds for a non-interactive space-doughnut-of-scanning. Except for interesting spots on the surface, for which there is no scanner.

I'm enjoying tail hunting my target, hammering it with me guns and see debris fly of my target, oil leaks hits my windscreen and dark black smoke from the damaged engines. Shutting down fuel pumps and adjusting the coolant system while recovering from a flat spin.... Oh wait that is IL-2 (now with VR), sorry I will be right back after I bomb the crap out of the train down there...


:D
 
It's two years I've been saying Elite is not a simulator and it's as arcade as a random ace combat for playstation and I've been constantly shot down and denigrated for that.
It just highlights how poorly fdevs marketed their game.
It's an arcade space shooter bolted on a gorgeous tech demo. Everything else we can do in this game is just bland sugar coating blown out of proportion by misleading trailers and Braben's enthusiastic words.

You know, I don't think I've seen you make a post in a long time that had anything constructive or helpful in it.

Why are you even here on the forums if your view of the game is skewed in such a negative light?

Try saying something, anything, that's not crass, cynical, insulting, or bringing anything/body down.

Any specific point you're trying to make is going to be lost if you keep obscuring it with vitriol.
 
You know, I don't think I've seen you make a post in a long time that had anything constructive or helpful in it.

Why are you even here on the forums if your view of the game is skewed in such a negative light?

Try saying something, anything, that's not crass, cynical, insulting, or bringing anything/body down.

Any specific point you're trying to make is going to be lost if you keep obscuring it with vitriol.

I did, countless times, for the last two years, both here and especially on reddit.
I think I was the only beta 2.3 customer who actually started a thread a month back praising what multicrew implementation was trying to achieve and how it could be implemented a little better. Did it help?

Besides, what do you want me to say about trailers? To give the marketing team advices on how to advertise their game?
I could say a good starting point is showing how their game really plays, a slow and almost meditative experience full of wonder and nice things to see, rather than showing a bunch of ships shooting each other, explosions, hide and seek through asteroids, infinite possibilities, pilots nodding confidently, fast pace, and SRV chases on planets. Because that is almost NMS level of scam advertisement right there.
 
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I did, countless times, for the last two years, both here and especially on reddit.
I think I was the only beta 2.3 customer who actually started a thread a month back praising what multicrew implementation was trying to achieve and how it could be implemented a little better. Did it help?

Besides, what do you want me to say about trailers? To give the marketing team advices on how to advertise their game?
I could say a good starting point is showing how their game really plays, a slow and almost meditative experience full of wonder and nice things to see, rather than showing a bunch of ships shooting each other, explosions, hide and seek through asteroids, infinite possibilities, pilots nodding confidently, fast pace, and SRV chases on planets. Because that is almost NMS level of scam advertisement right there.

Now I want to see the wings trailer remade, but this time instead of an epic space battle, its 10minutes of trying to get a wing together and then right at the end they drop into an instance and can't see each other, even though it says they're connected.
 
Unless the data we see is simplified into something a human can easily understand at a glance.
In which case it would still be an accurate simulation.

What a great imaginary explanation. Reducing a 100m and 1000t structure's integrity to a single digit. And it's moot, because there is no underlying structural complexity being simulated (modules have their own health bars, but those are separate from the hull). There is only a hull health bar and you'll go *POOF* as soon as it reaches zero. The game does not discriminate whether that happens by your aerodynamic space ship spoiler that does nothing and is entirely expandable being fried with visible combat lasers or your already broken cockpit exposing your squishy, human pilot being hammered with cannon shells, that would instantly reduce them to a pulp of tiny pieces of flesh, entrails and blood floating in space, long before that magic health bar of structural integrity reaches zero.

It's almost... like an arcade shooter. With a health bar. No, wait! It is an arcade shooter with a health bar. You can imagine that health bar to model some complex structure all you want, but that's just imagining Elite to be a sim and doesn't make it a sim. With that explanation, you can argue that any arcade shmup with a health bar is in fact a sim. Which is rubbish.

I'm enjoying tail hunting my target, hammering it with me guns and see debris fly of my target, oil leaks hits my windscreen and dark black smoke from the damaged engines. Shutting down fuel pumps and adjusting the coolant system while recovering from a flat spin.... Oh wait that is IL-2 (now with VR), sorry I will be right back after I bomb the crap out of the train down there...


:D

Cool story! :D I hope you also enjoy the hour clock of wait-for-half-an-hour-until-your-plane-equipment-arrives-and-you-can-bolt-it-to-your-Sturmovik and the hour of wait-to-change-your-plane before you can do a mission. Oh, wait! That was the other arcade game that couldn't get over itself, imposing those mechanics to keep people from playing because of some pretentious wannabe sim horse poo paired with no game design integrity whatsoever. Actual simulations usually have the grace to give you an autopilot, timelapse and whatnot. And usually their devs do realize that putting an hour clock between their players and switching a plane for a different mission isn't the most sensible thing to do. The transfer delays are a pretentious attempt to inject some second life MMO aspirations into the arcade space trucker/shooter/explorer game that Elite has been from day one and still is despite the delays, only serving to make it a more convoluted arcade game.
 
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I'm a bit late to the party, but I agree 100% with the OP. I don't know why the development is so slow and features come out bare bones - I guess the designers and/or managers refuse to look left and right and see what has changed in the past 10 years in game development.

I still enjoy ED from time to time, und but every patch has been underwhelming so far. I just come back for a week or two after every major patch. Things get better, but at a very slow rate.
 
Not sure if I understand you correctly, but actually it's the other way around. Usually you implement these features very early, then you have a feature lock / everything that doesn't work gets removed from the game, then you start polishing it. Adding new features at the end of a release cycle is exactly why stuff like PP and multicrew sucks, so that's bad advice IMO.

I develop software for a living and no you do not focus on peripherals and plugins ahead of the primary application. If the features are needed in the first iteration, then they are added at launch/roll out. If the are addons or nice not 100% integral to the application, they are added later if ever. So opinion aside you are wrong. Did blizzard release the first expansion of World of Warcraft before the original game was launched? No, because that is not how you develop any application of any type game or otherwise.
 
You need to ask another question first, does the game really run bad? There are a few hundred vocal people on reddit and this forum who say the game is full of game breaking bugs, meanwhile ~ 240,000 people have played the game during the last two weeks. If it's really that bad I guess more people would complain. Player numbers are very healthy and increasing, which is quite an accomplishment for a two years old game. They just released their financial report and it looks like they are making good money.
So, does that sound like an unsuccessful game? Usually that's all a CEO is interested in. They just care for revenue and everything is fine in that regard. I remember a CEO from EA saying that he hates computer games, but there is good money in it. Luckily David Braben is nothing like that, Elite Dangerous is the game of his dreams, he plays it actively, he reads the forums and he follows development closely. So yes, I am pretty sure that David is aware of the 'current situation', whatever that is.

But yes, as said earlier, OP and the more critical voices on this forum are right. 2.3 shouldn't have launched in this state, and they seriously need to rethink their decisions like releasing multicrew in a barebones state.

240.000.

Could you share your source or where did you get that number?

Just curios cause steamcharts increased from 4000 to 10000.

Having that number could explain how many ppl are playing the game..
 
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I did, countless times, for the last two years, both here and especially on reddit.
I think I was the only beta 2.3 customer who actually started a thread a month back praising what multicrew implementation was trying to achieve and how it could be implemented a little better. Did it help?

Besides, what do you want me to say about trailers? To give the marketing team advices on how to advertise their game?
I could say a good starting point is showing how their game really plays, a slow and almost meditative experience full of wonder and nice things to see, rather than showing a bunch of ships shooting each other, explosions, hide and seek through asteroids, infinite possibilities, pilots nodding confidently, fast pace, and SRV chases on planets. Because that is almost NMS level of scam advertisement right there.

I suppose I can go look up your posts myself, but sometimes, you come across like Lewis Black forgetting to be funny.

Trailers with Elite at least use in-game assets; how many games show trailers that depict things and graphics that the actual game is *nowhere close* to having?

That said, maybe a more relaxed trailer would be a great idea.
 
I develop software for a living and no you do not focus on peripherals and plugins ahead of the primary application. If the features are needed in the first iteration, then they are added at launch/roll out. If the are addons or nice not 100% integral to the application, they are added later if ever. So opinion aside you are wrong. Did blizzard release the first expansion of World of Warcraft before the original game was launched? No, because that is not how you develop any application of any type game or otherwise.
But you are not developing games for a living. Take a look at Warhorse, they just announced that certain features will not make it into the game because they start polishing now. So opinion aside, you are wrong too.

BTW
I couldn't care less if you develop software for a living, for me you are just a random internet dude. So either get some facts to prove your claims or I'll tell you that I am the Queen. Don't have time for this ;)

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240.000.

Could you share your source or where did you get that number?

Just curios cause steamcharts increased from 4000 to 10000.

Having that number could explain how many ppl are playing the game..


You are looking at concurrent players, not active players. The game sold ~ 1 million times on steam and 2.1 million in total (FDEV store + Steam + xbone?). According to steam 123,000 out of 1,000,000 people played the game during the last two weeks. Taking the remaining 1.1 million units into account you can guess that 240,000 people played the game during the last two weeks.

http://steamspy.com/app/359320
 
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