V’larr, I can’t tell if you are being contrarian for the fun of it or if you honestly don’t know what “depth” means when everyone keeps asking for it with regards to Elite, so allow me to educate you on it’s meaning. Maybe then you won’t be so confused and can join the conversation with something meaningful to add.
The term “depth” in the video game industry refers to a combination of gameplay elements and mechanics which players must take into consideration while playing. More choices enable more player decisions, resulting in an engaging yet varied gameplay experience. Most developers strive to design mechanics with enough complexity so that new players can take advantage of the more obvious mechanics while experienced players can consider many mechanics, thereby allowing many choices and paths to “victory” conditions as you master the game. This complexity allows players to develop plans and strategies several steps ahead on how they want to play and what they want to do, hopefully producing unexpected and surprising outcomes thereby keeping the game feeling fresh and varied. This level of design is called “depth”.
For example, chess has depth, while tic tac toe does not.
With regards to Elite, when people ask for more depth to the game, they usually mean more connected mechanics that not only allow more choices during gameplay but can result in a larger variety of meaningful results and outcomes. Exploration is jump, honk, and scan, over and over. It is terribly basic in it’s game mechanics. Trading is buy low, sell high, but there are no tools to utilize, no mechanics to add unpredictability or complexity to the profession. Combat by it’s very nature has some complexity and variety simply due to the random nature of the opponents, but the mechanics of combat within the game’s environment are disconnected and predictable. CZ’s are always the same, HRES sites are always the same, except for a little variety in ship opponent types. There isn’t any meaningful bounty hunting mechanic short of “look for a wanted ship and kill it”. It’s this disconnected nature of Elite’s design that greatly reduces it’s “depth”. The game is comprised of a lot of separate modules that don’t really interact in meaningful ways, thereby preventing any feeling of depth. And this can be attributed straight to the game’s core mechanics, the features which make up the foundation of all other features. This core is basic and very lacking, has been since 1.0, thus the lack of depth and the constant complaints from players that the game is “a mile wide but an inch deep.”
Elite needs better core mechanics to allow greater complexity and unpredictability during gameplay, to enable more player choices and responses to stimuli, to permit players to make multi-level plans which might have to be altered along the way due to surprising mechanic interactions. Without deep mechanics a game feels sterile and predictable, boring, and this is where Elite is today for a lot of people. The core mechanics need to develop or this lack of “depth” will kill player interest over time. Some would argue it’s already begun to kill player interest.
So yeah, the often repeated saying “Elite needs more depth” most certainly has meaning V’larr. Do you understand it now?
