Are we any closer to understanding what FDEV have in store, or is it still radio silence?
It feels like someone is doing their job wrong
- Thread starter Silvere
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and this very much shows that the game hasn't changed much otherwise people had new stuff to complain about.
Yep, the planetary bases and boring missions are inexcusable. It could have been fun doing attack runs on stations to knockout defending ships, turrets and generators. Then landing and being confronted by enemy SRV's. Endless possibilities.
What we have now is just plain awful.
Just seems pretty clear to me at least, that MC is the foundation of elite feet so I'm not down on the update at all. Am finding the Contacts History really cool around homebase too but for another instance, been looking today at beating the hyperspace jump record (stands at a 280.3Ly at the moment which means a trip to Colonia, with a fair wind, of 26 real world minutes. Beat that!). That's where the game is at for me then, the subtleties, unusual loadouts, SRV demolition derby's etc.
It's a tricky development stage I think Season 2, still early doors and the in your face stuff, missions may not be developing quickly while the game infrastructure is still building. But I noticed the 'rediuced powerplant output when damaged' as an example for me of where the Engineers update REALLY fits in (at game release your module percent health just meant it works/doesn't work). So not about the Engineer bases (the obvious stuff) but that update had repercussions on damage cascades and so on.
I think you can see the same in all updates but again, can be subtle at times. ED is getting pretty sophisticated but if you do decide to engage with it and try something left-field (playing the game as is, current limitations and all) some of the clubs do some fun things. Like if you haven't done a Buckyball Run yet, really you haven't quite lived. And, if you're taking ANYTHING bigger than an Eagle into Haz Res, then basically you're a great big pink girl's skipping rope handle imo.
Well, I handed out a bunch of rep to the peeps that deserved it. OP included, he hit the nails right on the head.
Elite is broken and won't be fixed. Why do I say that? Look at every feature headline brought out. CQC, Multicrew, Wings and RNGineers. All broken and no patches to make them right.
Dragging up from the history of this thread saying that offline single player can't be done is yet another reason of why not to believe in FDev. Elite released in 1984 fit onto a single floppy disk for the BBC micro (I don't know how much storage space as I had a speccy at the time and that was 48k) that used less memory than our pc's use to load in our bios. Elite: Frontier (my favourite and most frustrating) I played it on the Amiga, 1.2mb 3 1/2" floppy disk. Loaded everything. Flying from one system to another (with the use of a time skip function as well) with planetary landings and day/night cycles (actually Frontier was a heck of a lot more of a game than this one is). What I'm saying is that apart from the huge amount of storage that textures take up, its not too far fetched that we couldn't have an offline single player game. But we don't.
FDev have bankrolled our nostalgia and are squeezing the last vestiges of life out of this game with microtransactions. I'm sorry to say that other than the love of just flying around and dogfighting, there's nothing holding me to this game. Even moreso with all the crashes and not even a 'yeah we're working on it'.
Edit: One really good thing about this thread has been stocking my killfile with the white knights.
Elite is broken and won't be fixed. Why do I say that? Look at every feature headline brought out. CQC, Multicrew, Wings and RNGineers. All broken and no patches to make them right.
Dragging up from the history of this thread saying that offline single player can't be done is yet another reason of why not to believe in FDev. Elite released in 1984 fit onto a single floppy disk for the BBC micro (I don't know how much storage space as I had a speccy at the time and that was 48k) that used less memory than our pc's use to load in our bios. Elite: Frontier (my favourite and most frustrating) I played it on the Amiga, 1.2mb 3 1/2" floppy disk. Loaded everything. Flying from one system to another (with the use of a time skip function as well) with planetary landings and day/night cycles (actually Frontier was a heck of a lot more of a game than this one is). What I'm saying is that apart from the huge amount of storage that textures take up, its not too far fetched that we couldn't have an offline single player game. But we don't.
FDev have bankrolled our nostalgia and are squeezing the last vestiges of life out of this game with microtransactions. I'm sorry to say that other than the love of just flying around and dogfighting, there's nothing holding me to this game. Even moreso with all the crashes and not even a 'yeah we're working on it'.
Edit: One really good thing about this thread has been stocking my killfile with the white knights.
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Bye then. All I can say is that my experience is different. In particular crashes. The game is not perfect but it is pretty stable for me. P2P connection is a bit screwy from time to time but more often than not ok enough for me. Not trying to dismiss your experience but mine is........different.
While I've already agreed with the OP, I'm certainly not on board with the more recent posts that are much more negative toward the outlook of ED.
I have a good number of hours and the grind is only a drag if I let it be. There are plenty of aspects of ED that don't require grinding, and if you focus on them for periods of time, then intersperse the grindy bits along the way, I find much more reason to play the game. Join a faction, work the BGS, grind a fed rank or two, do a 3 week exploration run, unlock a few engineers, work the BGS, travel to Beagle Point, etc.
I have it in my head that I want a Corvette, but I'm not going to sit for weeks on end running data missions in Ceos/Sothis to get there. It would make me quit the game for good, and it's not meant to be played that way. If you choose to go that route, then that's all fine and good, just don't complain about the grind. Yeah, I get there could be a bit more depth in various areas to help avoid the grind, but there's still plenty of things to do now that can avoid it. My gut says, if you don't like doing those things now, nothing ED does in the depth area will help you with that.
I'm itching to get back to the bubble right now, making a fairly straight run for home, but I have 115k lyk on the odometer on this trip, so I've seen plenty. I'l grind a couple more Fed ranks, help on the new Canonn CG when it drops, unlock a couple more engineers, then probably make a B-line to Beagle Point. I've never joined a wing, never MC, never transported a passenger, never flown a fighter, so many things to do, but there's no rush. I'll get to it eventually. Or I won't.
But like I said, I do agree with the OP, and hope for changes in those areas to make ED even better than it is, but it's not all doom and gloom in ED land now. I wish it were, I have been neglecting iRacing for far too long and really need to go back racing.
I have a good number of hours and the grind is only a drag if I let it be. There are plenty of aspects of ED that don't require grinding, and if you focus on them for periods of time, then intersperse the grindy bits along the way, I find much more reason to play the game. Join a faction, work the BGS, grind a fed rank or two, do a 3 week exploration run, unlock a few engineers, work the BGS, travel to Beagle Point, etc.
I have it in my head that I want a Corvette, but I'm not going to sit for weeks on end running data missions in Ceos/Sothis to get there. It would make me quit the game for good, and it's not meant to be played that way. If you choose to go that route, then that's all fine and good, just don't complain about the grind. Yeah, I get there could be a bit more depth in various areas to help avoid the grind, but there's still plenty of things to do now that can avoid it. My gut says, if you don't like doing those things now, nothing ED does in the depth area will help you with that.
I'm itching to get back to the bubble right now, making a fairly straight run for home, but I have 115k lyk on the odometer on this trip, so I've seen plenty. I'l grind a couple more Fed ranks, help on the new Canonn CG when it drops, unlock a couple more engineers, then probably make a B-line to Beagle Point. I've never joined a wing, never MC, never transported a passenger, never flown a fighter, so many things to do, but there's no rush. I'll get to it eventually. Or I won't.
But like I said, I do agree with the OP, and hope for changes in those areas to make ED even better than it is, but it's not all doom and gloom in ED land now. I wish it were, I have been neglecting iRacing for far too long and really need to go back racing.
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The only silly thing is that you came up with head canon that Telepresence goes against and you can't "re-write" your head canon to accommodate that. Months long escapes from the game you can "write" around but any sort of made up head canon around how Telepresence works you can't do.
Honestly I'd be happy with one or the other at this point. This half-baked middle ground is more problematic for both sides than a full commitment to single or multiplayer.
Im a founder, and yet, having played the game since beta, I'm still not Elite an any of the three roles. Why? Well, I simply will not slave myself to a game. I made Elite back in the 80s. So I certainly don't feel any rush to make it now. I play when I want to, and I on only take missions when I want to. Apart from this, I play infrequently, because, hand on heart. I don't really want to play ED, until it reaches near parity with Frontier.
What I mean is, until we can fly down onto atmospheric plants, I always feel the game is incomplete. I know Braben et al, really want to get to that point. But it appears that their resources have meant this development journey is taking longer than we all perhaps wished at the outset.
I dont feel lied to in this regard. Frontier have always said that dev is going to take time, and its going to happen in stages. And it is...
Something Im not so happy about, really, is that features such as Powerplay and Multi-crew have arrived before what I consider to be bigger priorities i.e. more more variety in all environments and atmospheric planets. Powerplay would actually be of value, but I think it was added to early in the dev cycle, meaning the tasks and roles in PP are just a nonses, and it is PURE grind. I wont grind, so I dont take part in PowerPlay.
Multi-Crew is actually a pretty cool tech. But again, I wonder, do we really need it for any purpose? Maybe Frontier have future plans for this.
I once worked on a video game, back in the day. When I joined the team, it had already been in dev for 3 years. By the time it was released it was 4.5 years in dev.
So, considering that game was a lot simpler than ED (much smaller team as well mind you). Its not that surprising that ED is where it is today.
We have to be patient.
If your not patient, here is a suggestion. Go to the store, buy some extras for ED. Im sure that money will help hire more artists and coders, pushing ED along.
If you dont think this is the case, look how much dev and art has been done at CIG, with Start Citizen. I dont like their (IMHO) pay to win funding model, but its certainly brought in the $$$.
Frontier I think are much more conservative than CIG, So they are not sprouting new studios over the world to accelerate ED dev. But I am assuming they are getting more office space,
coders and artists, producers etc, and these I think will really start to pay off in the near future.
Just to be clear here. With modern tech, producing planetary atmos landings is a VERY big undertaking. It will require so much coding, and art assets. The mind boggles.
So for now, I play infrequently, I buy extras from time to time (stoke the fire) and await atmos landings and generally more assets.
What I mean is, until we can fly down onto atmospheric plants, I always feel the game is incomplete. I know Braben et al, really want to get to that point. But it appears that their resources have meant this development journey is taking longer than we all perhaps wished at the outset.
I dont feel lied to in this regard. Frontier have always said that dev is going to take time, and its going to happen in stages. And it is...
Something Im not so happy about, really, is that features such as Powerplay and Multi-crew have arrived before what I consider to be bigger priorities i.e. more more variety in all environments and atmospheric planets. Powerplay would actually be of value, but I think it was added to early in the dev cycle, meaning the tasks and roles in PP are just a nonses, and it is PURE grind. I wont grind, so I dont take part in PowerPlay.
Multi-Crew is actually a pretty cool tech. But again, I wonder, do we really need it for any purpose? Maybe Frontier have future plans for this.
I once worked on a video game, back in the day. When I joined the team, it had already been in dev for 3 years. By the time it was released it was 4.5 years in dev.
So, considering that game was a lot simpler than ED (much smaller team as well mind you). Its not that surprising that ED is where it is today.
We have to be patient.
If your not patient, here is a suggestion. Go to the store, buy some extras for ED. Im sure that money will help hire more artists and coders, pushing ED along.
If you dont think this is the case, look how much dev and art has been done at CIG, with Start Citizen. I dont like their (IMHO) pay to win funding model, but its certainly brought in the $$$.
Frontier I think are much more conservative than CIG, So they are not sprouting new studios over the world to accelerate ED dev. But I am assuming they are getting more office space,
coders and artists, producers etc, and these I think will really start to pay off in the near future.
Just to be clear here. With modern tech, producing planetary atmos landings is a VERY big undertaking. It will require so much coding, and art assets. The mind boggles.
So for now, I play infrequently, I buy extras from time to time (stoke the fire) and await atmos landings and generally more assets.
The problem with Telepresence is that it's such an unbelievably useful technology, that I don't believe that it wouldn't make manned space flight (beyond transport) obsolete. Why would anyone put themselves at risk to fly a ship in a combat zone, when they can just keep themselves safe 10000LY away.
Teletubance turned space combat from this:
Into this:
Ill play devils advocate here.
Lets say we wanted to allow players to get together, in one ship so they could play at being in Star Trek. How do you make this happen. By having a strict rule, meaning for multi play you must.
* Fly to a single point in space, say a start port.
* Opt to leave your ship and enter another, that has an invite.
* Fly out into space and do stuff.
* If that ship is destroyed, you have to meet up again to get on board
* If you are killed (in a fighter say) you have to meet up to get on board.
Be honest. That would suck so so badly. The logistics involved and frustration would mean only 0.1% of players would ever even try to use this feature.
So telepresence was added. This may seem immersion breaking. But consider these points
* Ships have a maximum top speed. Just a few kms max. We already have ships that fly at 25,000mph +, so this is VERY odd.
* Ships can travel faster than the speed of light. Considered to be impossible in current physics, but we accept this.
* When your ship is blown to slag, you ALWAYS survive (really good luck eh?).
* When your ship is blown to slag, you appear, instantly at a near by station, kind of telepresence like...
* When you change load-out on your ship, or buy / sell cargo, its loaded instantly (Those cargo bots are amazing....).
* When your ship loses a fighter, its re-built, within minutes (amazing future tech).
* Engineer research can take a few seconds to develop new tech.
Its a game, and these blips in its reality make it playable.
I think its a hard line as a game designer to walk between reality and a playable game. But apparently many here find it really easy.
Take the max speed design for ships. Why did this happen? Well, in Elite, ships had I think a fixed speed. No acceleration. And they flew like fixed wing figther planes. And as such combat was fun and predictable.
Then in Frontier, a Newtonian model was used, where ship could accelerate as long as they wanted, building up speed. So when you encountered another ship in combat, you might be travelling at 100,000mph, and you and the other ship would tend to lunge past each other like to golf balls on elastic bands. And if you were unlucky (no real skill for this) you'd hit each other and both die.
So Mr Braben learnt from his mistakes and reverted to the fixed max speed model, and WWII fighter combat mechanics. And people LOVED the result, and play the game because combat works so well. And they just sucked up the conceit.
So it seems well all accept the blindingly impossible game mechanic when it suits us.
Lets say we wanted to allow players to get together, in one ship so they could play at being in Star Trek. How do you make this happen. By having a strict rule, meaning for multi play you must.
* Fly to a single point in space, say a start port.
* Opt to leave your ship and enter another, that has an invite.
* Fly out into space and do stuff.
* If that ship is destroyed, you have to meet up again to get on board
* If you are killed (in a fighter say) you have to meet up to get on board.
Be honest. That would suck so so badly. The logistics involved and frustration would mean only 0.1% of players would ever even try to use this feature.
So telepresence was added. This may seem immersion breaking. But consider these points
* Ships have a maximum top speed. Just a few kms max. We already have ships that fly at 25,000mph +, so this is VERY odd.
* Ships can travel faster than the speed of light. Considered to be impossible in current physics, but we accept this.
* When your ship is blown to slag, you ALWAYS survive (really good luck eh?).
* When your ship is blown to slag, you appear, instantly at a near by station, kind of telepresence like...
* When you change load-out on your ship, or buy / sell cargo, its loaded instantly (Those cargo bots are amazing....).
* When your ship loses a fighter, its re-built, within minutes (amazing future tech).
* Engineer research can take a few seconds to develop new tech.
Its a game, and these blips in its reality make it playable.
I think its a hard line as a game designer to walk between reality and a playable game. But apparently many here find it really easy.
Take the max speed design for ships. Why did this happen? Well, in Elite, ships had I think a fixed speed. No acceleration. And they flew like fixed wing figther planes. And as such combat was fun and predictable.
Then in Frontier, a Newtonian model was used, where ship could accelerate as long as they wanted, building up speed. So when you encountered another ship in combat, you might be travelling at 100,000mph, and you and the other ship would tend to lunge past each other like to golf balls on elastic bands. And if you were unlucky (no real skill for this) you'd hit each other and both die.
So Mr Braben learnt from his mistakes and reverted to the fixed max speed model, and WWII fighter combat mechanics. And people LOVED the result, and play the game because combat works so well. And they just sucked up the conceit.
So it seems well all accept the blindingly impossible game mechanic when it suits us.
Evcochron Legacy
1 Developer
6 years
https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/evochron-legacy-sixth-game-in-the-evochron-series/78028
Read the comments.
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And Harmless Rank back in the 80's would be today's Elite rank. Orignial Elite was hard, that rank meant something. Today's game is a mockery of that ranking system.
Like this lol
[video=youtube;f0Fgn3FTRTI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Fgn3FTRTI[/video]
Yeah... thats special.... Kudos for effort though..
You know, one of the key paradoxes with Elite, is the technology level vs gameplay.
I mean, cmon, its 2017 and in a few years time we will have self driving cars. That means by 3030 or whatever it is, EVERY thing in our space-ship should be auto. Pilots not required, combat, fully auto, repair, automated, ship loading / unloading automated, etc.
I mean, where is the fun in that.
So, as a result we have ships that need to be manually flown from one star to the next,even though the route is ploted. We still have to fly the ship (Id vote for that to be automated eh?).
But we also have lasers that cant really aim themselves very well.
Dumb fire missiles (because it takes skill to hit with them...)
We have Air-traffic control towers inside station, though they also appear to be always empty :/ (!?!?!?).
And we also HAVE to have pilots for our Figthers, even if today, we have drones that can fly themselves.
There you have it. Tension between Canon, and gameplay
Reality vs fun.
Again, a really hard thing to balance.
Just in case some still have some doubts...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ystals-exist?p=5503664&viewfull=1#post5503664
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ystals-exist?p=5503664&viewfull=1#post5503664
And what new things they do add is wrapped in so much secrecy they can't even give out hints to get us on the right track....I'm looking at the new organics and volcanism here. All through beta we complained on how it is so hard to find these features on planets, especially anything with a radius bigger than 800KM. What we got was FD, understanding that it's hard and that it's time consuming and that they understood we need tools, telling us those tools won't be coming anytime soon. The problem is that by the time those tools come, the tools that would make these planetary features more accessible to the wider community instead of the niche group we have now looking for this things, we will all have moved on. Or have gotten so frustrated that we just don't care.
That's where I'm at with these organic features. I start to wonder if they aren't all bugged but because FD needs to be so secretive about them we will never know. How long were those "brain" trees in game before we found them, and they weren't even that far away from the bubble. Either they weren't in and we were on a wild goose chase, or they were but were bugged and because nobody can find them FD never knew. Why not make some of this available in betas, tell us where some might be so at least we can test if they are working right.
Let alone there is no clues in any galnet articles or local news that give us any info on these things. You'd think somebody in a station next to a fungal site would have wrote something about them.
I'm with you on your comment of them just adding more half working things instead of adding to the existing whole, and with each half baked implementation being bugged they then have to spend the time to fix that instead of time they could use to add content. And it goes on and on and on.
I am starting to feel myself that FD don't really know what there next plan is. Is it really going to ruin our experience if they set out even a basic roadmap. I understand that means that if things change people get mad but right now people are getting mad anyways. I'd rather be mad because they tried doing something but couldn't then be mad because they are leaving me in the dark. Or like someone said above, once a month just sit down with us and tell us what you've worked on, what you have in the pipeline. Not these ideas of what you want, or things that will come "soon." No, let us know what you are working on now. If it's part of the alien story that you want to keep secret they tell us. We will understand. If it's some fancy new feature that you want to be a big surprise, well, I'm sorry, that route just isn't going to cut it anymore. Especially because each surprise seems to be getting worse and worse and taking the game further and further from what it set out to be.
I love you FD and what you've done but you'e got to realize that after almost 3 years with the same complaints coming up that something needs to change. Something as simple as more transparent communication. I'd rather be told straight out no, then teased with snark no comments or, that's a good idea, or maybe we'll look into that.
Also, this doesn't mean everything is wrong. Like was said, the sound and art is just amazing. My god I love the sounds of this game. And when exploration works man it beats almost everything that is there. But, come on, give us tools man. You have a universe of volcanism that barely anybody can explore because it takes way tooo long to track down sites. If you go over 1,000 radius, chance almost go to zero. I've just started my current geological project and already I want to quite, not going to because I'm determined, but it crosses my time on about the 3 or 4th hour of searching a body that has volcanism and coming up empty handed. We all know what volcanism looks like. So they aren't a secret and I'm sure you can find quick way to make things easier for us without giving us the exact locations. Anyways enough of my rant.
I'm still hopeful, but with some of the things coming out soon, an new infusion needs to happen or people might just find their kicks elsewhere.
I think that if MC was designed as more than just a throw-away pew-pew experience, then all that "effort" of crewing up would worth it. Hell, no one has this problem when Winging up, why does MC need some magic transporter?
If MC was more like Blackwake, or Guns of Icaris, or Pulsar, and actually provided tasks for crew members to perform, then people would be willing to crew up and stay crewed for more than a few minutes.
No. You don;t need to explain the hot-join MP. No explanation is given for the black screen between Pilot's chair and SRV's Players just understand that this part of the game isn't developed yet. To make something up like telepresence, isn't needed and actually harms the gesamtkunstwerk of the game.
All of those are sacrifices to make the game functional. It's not a realistic expectation to expect players to wait for weeks to be rescued from an escape pod. It's not a good idea to make players start from scratch with each ship destruction (although some would like that, I suppose). It's not fun to make a player wait for hours while cargo is loaded and unloaded, or for modules to be swapped out.
It is totally reasonable to expect 2 players who want to play together to actually travel to the place they want to play together in. Especially cos the game already does this with wings.
So to summarise:
1) Hot-join MP is only a requirement because Multi-Pew is a cheap disposable experience, only incentivised by credit and/or power exploits, and not game-play.
2) It's not unreasonable to make players meet up to play together since the game already makes us do this currently (proir 2.3).
3) If we HAVE to have hot-join MP, then explaining it is unnecessary. And the explanation they came up with actually harms more lore than it'd patches up.
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