Im really not to sure what to classify this post as. Small part rant, small part nostalgia...
I apologise in advance for this essay.
Due to popular demand heres the tl:dr
RP/Imagination/playergroups - Either give us story and RP at the player-level (as opposed to galaxy wide story arcs) or give us the full sandbox and multiplayer tools to RP the stuff ourselves and have our own narrative.
Power Creep and Engineers - Engineers have destroyed balance in PvP and late game ships have become very easy to obtain.
AI and combat feel - PvE engagements should be more meaningful with each kill being a task in itself, rather than shooting supposedly elite NPCs down left right and centre, balance rewards to reflect this.
PvP and community - We've needed C&P for ages, my personal preference is implementing some kind of EVE like system where in chunks of space if you attack someone you get proptly owned by system security.
Dev game focus - Would wish that the devs would try and fix the current features and sort out placeholders like signal sources that have been around for ages.
I havent played E
for months, and every now and then I think about coming back to it, but without significant changes to the core game that interest me I always get bored and leave again. First and foremost let me start by saying that E
is not a bad game, it is a good game. I've played many hours and it was worth the money to be an alpha backer. This game (and I guess SC?) reignited the space sim genre at a time when finding games like this were so rare. E
is the best VR experience i've had by far.
But I think that FD have made some design decisions that have just made a bit of a mess of things. Im positive that they had a rationale for these, but we've seen it before and personally i've never liked where it led.
RP/Imagination/Player Groups
The biggest mistake (and I say this as a predominantly solo player) is the lack of ingame tools for corporations/clans whatever. Now as an original Elite and FE player I fully understand the idea of the elite experience being "you all alone in a galaxy which tries to kill you" so I get why initially the decision was made to try and keep that single pilot vs universe feeling, and I guess they reasoned that corps/clans would massively change that aspect of the game. (Which is true, it would). However, whilst elite has lots of potential for emergant game play, there are no cues to help a person RP, aside from their imagination. ED never bothered making any bespoke missions (they existed in the first alpha of the game for the mastopholese mining corp, and I think that if they had kept that style that alone would be enough to keep me playing), granted its a lot more writing work, but good games are not built on coding alone. So without the RP hook of bespoke missions, this is something that player groups can fill in. If you belong to a player group there is always an idea, some goal, some thing that you're trying to do (if you have the tools for player group bases, wars what-have-you).
Having neither of the two creates some weird disonance, basically the BGS is working so your actions have an effect on the macros scale of the universe (a small effect but an effect nontheless), powerplay is another layer on the macro scale which allows for galaxy wide story telling, we have the thargoids and the arc showing their arrival, again macro level. We have the CG's and again individual pilots can see their efforts doing something (sometimes) on a macro level again. However there is nothing on a personal level, and this is where the "imagination" stuff comes in. Some people have great imagination and can quite happily link their actions to that larger outcome, for these E
is one of the best games ever. Some others don't have any imagination so if they dont have their hands held through it all, then they get bored within a week. And of course you have all the inbetweens (which I classify myself as) and there's only so much that I can "imagine" until the drive and interest to keep playing leaves and I take a long break. (VR was a big help for me with this btw otherwise I probably wouldnt come back to E
at all)
Power Creep and Engineers
This here is a classic, and it happens everywhere. It even happens in films, and series. Good examples are Marvel films. The heroes are powerful, the supervillains are really powerful that you need some kind of special power to beat them, so in the sequal, well the supervillain needs to be even more powerful than the one before, so the heroes need to band together and get some even greater special powers to beat them, and so on and so forth. Other good examples are DBZ, the enemies and the heroes just get more and more powerful each story arc.
The same thing happens in a lot of games, we gain resources, we use the resources, we get more powerful ships, now we all run around in Anacondas and we've hit the ceiling, so along comes engineers, this raises the ceiling again (in a horrible grindy RNG way, but whatever) so off everyone goes again, and their ships become even more powerful, so we need more powerful enemies, so now the enemy ships have engineered modules, but the community doesnt like that, so we just increase the number of enemy ships that we destroy. So the NPCs arent a challenge for a proper engineered PvE ship, so along come the thargoids, we'll probably need some new even more powerful weapons to defeat them.
In the mean time, that part of the game is getting further and further away from the new players who are coming in, and so the only solution is to allow them to reach that content faster, so we make missions pay out greater amounts of money etc. Strange how even though the E
currency has not really experienced any inflation in goods prices, suddenly everyone and his dog (mission givers) have more money to pay for menial stuff.
This type of (admittedly classic) solution to end game or game ceiling problems is what has caused all this issue. E
should have given people an even playing field, but just more options. Balancing becomes more of an important part of the game, but you dont get this crazy power creep. Anacondas and Cutters should be rare! Almost every CMDR I run across in private or open (when I do go there) is in one of these massive end game ships. Getting to these bigger ships is fairly easy (Conda and Python, as cutter has another grind to wall it off). They are also (for the most part) categorically better than the smaller ships, they have more firepower, can survive far longer, have much more cargo space, can jump greater distances, mass lock little ships but cannot be masslocked themselves etc etc. Good pilots may prefer the speed, agility, nostalgia, utilitarianism of a Cobra, however this is more of an RP/personal decision, or a PvP one. Instead of balancing, E
has simply add bigger ships and engineers, and then made it a little easier to get them. Personally I think engineers was a mistake, having special boosts to existing weapons and modules locked behind a time sink is a quick easy solution. Better to add a greater variety of weapons readily available rather than just basically have the quad damage permanent buff (could have been RPed beautifully too with new corps coming up selling new weapons, adverts in galnet etc etc). This has also led to crazy time to kill issues in PvP which have ruined that too.
AI and combat feel
This for me is a really big issue (for others perhaps not so much). When I started in alpha each of those little missions you were given a preconfigured loadout and ship and had to take on some enemies. They were tough, the enemy AI was crazy accurate with their guns, they would hit you with pinpoint accuracy at the edge of their range. If you got into a fight with a similar NPC ship, you knew about it afterwards. You needed to be good to come out unscathed. Then the AI was nerfed so that it wasnt so crazy accurate, this coupled with the larger ships that players can have vs the smaller ships that you tend to find in combat meant that the player had a distinct advantage in combat zones. Then when you add engineers to the mix and the nerf of engineered weaponry from the AI and you end up in a position where you enter a CZ and just run around destroying everything until you get bored/run out of ammo/run out of SCBs.
You get given this crazy feeling of "I am a flying god taking out these elite ships like theyre nothing" inside a CZ. Then you leave the CZ go run a mission and the universe has forgotten you again. Elite, and FE were never about these grand old space furballs with hundreds of ships shooting each others to pieces in a war. It was more individual than that. Each NPC should be a threat, and any ship that isnt a trading ship or exploration ship should have a harder time of waking out.
PvP and community
The state as to which PvP was set up and encouraged in E
was a little farcical. We've been waiting since beta for a proper C&P system that actually works. Instead we have an absolute mess. PvP is only discouraged right outside a station, thats it. You can go to Sol system and run around shooting NPCs and CMDRs up in there if you wanted, the same is true for the home systems of any of the big factions. Which is crazy. If you so much as farted the wrong way in Imperial space and you went into one of their big systems they should be demanding fines or they'll blow you up on the spot. Anarchy and Independent systems should be the areas for PvP where the repercussions of doing something illegal is not as heavily policed or not policed at all (anarchy). There are so many ways that FD could have done this, but tbh I think that EVE had it right when it came to this (please note im not an eve fanboy by any means). There were zones which were for all intents and purposes safe, and if you attacked another ship you would be blown out of the sky in short order. There were areas where if you attacked someone there were some repercussions. And areas where you could attack other ships with impunity. The lack of any of these systems has put us in the crazy us vs them situation that we currently are with regards to PvErs vs PvPers. Engineers has also messed up time to kill and balance of fights. Fights are a lot more protracted, and most of the time no one ever gets destroyed.
The problem is you cant fix the latter without fixing the former. Otherwise if TTK gets shorter across the board it makes it harder for player who are PvEing to get away from the PvPer. With no real consequences for performing illegal actions in the game, there is no disincentive to running around murdering people left, right and centre. The only way to give the PvErs a chance is to increase TTK so that they can actually have a chance of high-waking out. In the mean time PvP duels have become ludicrously long and boring. I think this is another area where the vision for the game has affected game decisions in a negative way. E
is supposed to be cut-throat. You aren't safe anywhere. Instead the consequences of how this has been set up is that PvErs have gone to Mobius or solo (where everywhere is effectively safe), and open has turned into a bit of a graveyard, and where you do get people doing CGs you get a bunch of PvPers who are bored senseless and end up wanting to shoot anything that moves. Lose lose scenario. I know this is something that FD are working on. I really hope they get it right and genuinely make effectively safe zones for traders. The more PvErs we get into open the better. Not only that, but it means that there will be more players at least willing to give some PvP a go.
Dev game focus
This last one is tricky as I dont know the first thing about developing computer games. It appears as though FD have been going through a design process where the base systems for gameplay are put in place, and then they move onto another base system. I get this as they had a roadmap in mind, they have lots of crazy things they want to do (atmospheric planets, space legs whatever). Then they flesh out the mechanics and details later on. This has led us to some very seemingly half baked implementation, and some really REALLY sketchy lore (telepresence), all just to justify a feature that FD want to develop. Powerplay as a feature has not been great, but its not too bad. CQC, why have it separate from the main game, just make an ingame simulator which you access when docked at a station for a bit of random PvP fun, it could be like the armax arsenal arena from ME3 in the citadel DLC. Multicrew and SLFs (imo) have been an utter disaster... direct telepresence, really? 3rd person turret view!?!? (yes I know when you die you teleport back to the station and that concessions have already been made for gameplay, but the lore they made up to justify this feature was just ridiculous, there were much better solutions).
Of course all of this has been at the expense of developing the original features which were put in. Features get added, and then left in this weird half-baked situation, it seems as though only the framework is added, but then the polish is left behind. Its little surprise that the description of "mile wide, inch deep" persists.
Elite dangerous is a very good game.
Its a decent sandbox - not near the level of mount and blade or perhaps even something like skyrim which has only fairly basic sandbox features.
It has a very fun flightmodel - Not IL2, but its fun and it has its intricacies.
It has very engaging combat - Best part for me, gives me the tie fighter feel.
It has poor story-telling / RP - Worst part for me, either you have the full, proper fleshed out sandbox tools like m&b or minecraft, or you add story elements at the player level, rather than galaxy wide (or do a mix like most games)
It has okish multiplayer - Well they went P2P and thats always going to be worse than a dedicated server setup, but hey swings and roundabouts. Just a shame that the multiplayer features werent very fleshed out.
It is very visually compelling - I really like the graphics. I love how the stars are done and the views. I love the planetary rings and the details on the ships and the stations. Flying around is a treat in itself and VR takes it to a whole new level.
But it could have been an absolutely incredibly game. Maybe it still could be, but that would require a massive shift on how they are developing the game currently, and I have to say im not very optimistic.
