Timesinks: a critique of ED design philosophy
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1. Einstein never said that. It originates from AA literature.
2. Like constantly harping on about the same things in a game that will never change the way you want it to?
Firstly, I love this game.
Secondly, TLDR: I agree with OP.
Potted History: I'm middle-aged. In terms of the Elite franchise I'm old school - Elite on the BBC Micro and Amiga & Frontier:E2 on the Amiga, although never played FFE because I didn't have a PC at the time and by all accounts it was an unfinished & terribly bugged game.
When Elite Dangerous turned up I was really excited but by then my gaming was solely on console and my PC was reserved for work so I watched, intrigued and slightly jealous, as it developed until the day they announced the PS4 version, when I realised I would eventually play it. So I've only been playing Elite Dangerous since last spring, and I probably haven't had the time to get as salty as some of the original KS backers and other PC players.
...BUT! ...One of the things that does bug me is the amount of time some actions in the game take. Unnecessary amounts of time IMHO. There are examples of this throughout the game.
I do get that there's a 'sim' aspect to ED, and I love the mixture of real science, pseudo-science and sci-fi science that's used to achieve that. I love that the Milky Way is huge and largely accurate to current knowledge. I love the way that the FSD works is based on the theoretical physics of the Alcubierre drive. However I've been doing a lot of exploring and charting systems lately and just in that one aspect of the game there are two good examples of unnecessary time wasting that I feel get in the way of my enjoyment in that they 'interrupt' my focus and immersion in the game.
The first is the time the scanners take. Yes, I get that it's nice and sci-fi feeling to have things (like the FSD) charge up, or spin up, or take at least a little time to work - but the surface scanner (for example) takes between 15 & 35 seconds to complete a scan depending how far you are from a body. As far as I can tell those are arbitrary values made up by FDev, nothing to do with the time it takes the game to retrieve the information. When you're scanning a system of possibly 20-30 bodies or more that time adds up, and it's pretty much time spent doing nothing but staring at the screen waiting for the scan to finish. That's without factoring in the time travelling between bodies, which is the second thing...
Yes - mentioned before in the OP but - one of the biggest, most intrusive, and inexplicable time wastes is the amount of time spent in SC travelling anything over a few thousand light seconds. Sure there's an emphasis on achieving a certain sense of realism in Elite Dangerous, but come on it's still a game. I can't fathom the thinking of any game designer who thinks it's acceptable to leave the player sitting staring at the game screen for 15, 20, 30 minutes or more with no interaction apart from watching some space dust streaking towards them and keeping a check on a rolling digit counter. I mean... think about that for a moment. Seriously. That's not an exaggeration, you can quite literally sit in front of your computer monitor or TV for 20 minutes doing nothing. My girlfriend thinks I'm mad I'm sure. She'll ask, "So what are you actually doing in this game?" ... I try to explain and I'm sure it just makes her question my sanity even more.
It wouldn't take a huge change to reduce SC travel times either, all they'd need to do is change the acceleration and deceleration values of the FSD so that the ship reaches higher speeds in the middle of the journey, that would help a bit at least. Otherwise they could maybe introduce a mini-jump mechanic for travel between stars in the same system or something like that, I dunno.
Either way, there's a lot of time spent in ED not actually 'playing' the game, and when many players have a full and busy RL and limited time to play, that's a crime IMO.
Secondly, TLDR: I agree with OP.
Potted History: I'm middle-aged. In terms of the Elite franchise I'm old school - Elite on the BBC Micro and Amiga & Frontier:E2 on the Amiga, although never played FFE because I didn't have a PC at the time and by all accounts it was an unfinished & terribly bugged game.
When Elite Dangerous turned up I was really excited but by then my gaming was solely on console and my PC was reserved for work so I watched, intrigued and slightly jealous, as it developed until the day they announced the PS4 version, when I realised I would eventually play it. So I've only been playing Elite Dangerous since last spring, and I probably haven't had the time to get as salty as some of the original KS backers and other PC players.
...BUT! ...One of the things that does bug me is the amount of time some actions in the game take. Unnecessary amounts of time IMHO. There are examples of this throughout the game.
I do get that there's a 'sim' aspect to ED, and I love the mixture of real science, pseudo-science and sci-fi science that's used to achieve that. I love that the Milky Way is huge and largely accurate to current knowledge. I love the way that the FSD works is based on the theoretical physics of the Alcubierre drive. However I've been doing a lot of exploring and charting systems lately and just in that one aspect of the game there are two good examples of unnecessary time wasting that I feel get in the way of my enjoyment in that they 'interrupt' my focus and immersion in the game.
The first is the time the scanners take. Yes, I get that it's nice and sci-fi feeling to have things (like the FSD) charge up, or spin up, or take at least a little time to work - but the surface scanner (for example) takes between 15 & 35 seconds to complete a scan depending how far you are from a body. As far as I can tell those are arbitrary values made up by FDev, nothing to do with the time it takes the game to retrieve the information. When you're scanning a system of possibly 20-30 bodies or more that time adds up, and it's pretty much time spent doing nothing but staring at the screen waiting for the scan to finish. That's without factoring in the time travelling between bodies, which is the second thing...
Yes - mentioned before in the OP but - one of the biggest, most intrusive, and inexplicable time wastes is the amount of time spent in SC travelling anything over a few thousand light seconds. Sure there's an emphasis on achieving a certain sense of realism in Elite Dangerous, but come on it's still a game. I can't fathom the thinking of any game designer who thinks it's acceptable to leave the player sitting staring at the game screen for 15, 20, 30 minutes or more with no interaction apart from watching some space dust streaking towards them and keeping a check on a rolling digit counter. I mean... think about that for a moment. Seriously. That's not an exaggeration, you can quite literally sit in front of your computer monitor or TV for 20 minutes doing nothing. My girlfriend thinks I'm mad I'm sure. She'll ask, "So what are you actually doing in this game?" ... I try to explain and I'm sure it just makes her question my sanity even more.
It wouldn't take a huge change to reduce SC travel times either, all they'd need to do is change the acceleration and deceleration values of the FSD so that the ship reaches higher speeds in the middle of the journey, that would help a bit at least. Otherwise they could maybe introduce a mini-jump mechanic for travel between stars in the same system or something like that, I dunno.
Either way, there's a lot of time spent in ED not actually 'playing' the game, and when many players have a full and busy RL and limited time to play, that's a crime IMO.
As nothing in the game forces you to go to these far out stations/planets I fail to see what the issue is.
And to those saying it is a jumping SIM, getting rid of supercruise will surely make the game even worse. With more jumping instead of flying your ship.
And to those saying it is a jumping SIM, getting rid of supercruise will surely make the game even worse. With more jumping instead of flying your ship.
1 thing that could be added as an option to cut down travel time would be to enable frame shift travel near a station rather than a star which usually means quite a distance to travel to said station, 5-15 minutes in some circumstances, This would dramatically cut down on travel times if for instance you are just doing mining and/or passenger missions.
Just an idea.
Just an idea.
Exactly, there's nothing more engaging and immersive than cleaning house, checking work mails or taking out the trash while playing a game, I agree.
They should put this feature in the back cover of the game: "Traveling in Elite™ is so unengaging and devoid of interaction you can do all sort of stuff in the meantime", same stuff you can read on the robot vacuum cleaners box.
Nothing forces me, but exploring is one of the valid (and advertised) play styles, and I enjoy it - except for the long gaps when nothing happens because you have to travel 100,000Ls to get to the next thing you want to do.
To clarify, I'm not advocating removing SC, it's generally a very clever and well thought out mechanic that works on real (theoretical) scientific principals. I actually like it, it's cool, I just think it needs some serious tweaking to the way it deals with larger distances because at present it's effectively like sitting watching a progress bar - in those cases it may as well be a loading screen.
Having said that I have no problem with the jumping in ED either. It's a space-game, there are huge distances to cover with nothing much happening in-between. There's a reason sci-fi authors came up with the idea of jump-travel. There are generally more interesting things to be doing in sci-fi space than travelling from A to B.
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I made a quite decent proposition about this a while ago : https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/315128-Hazardous-in-system-FSD-jumps
The point would be to exchange travel time for travel difficulty, with greater distances requiring greater skill so as to avoid quick and lethal overheating.
Traveling should never be instantaneous and free, but we can certainly get to a compromise that's interesting to everyone.
The point would be to exchange travel time for travel difficulty, with greater distances requiring greater skill so as to avoid quick and lethal overheating.
Traveling should never be instantaneous and free, but we can certainly get to a compromise that's interesting to everyone.
1. Perfect knowledge of the future is unobtainable. If you never try then you'll never know.
2. Can I interest you in a pedant's revolt?
Autopilot would be good. After all the Apollo missions were not hands on piloted, why do we think in the future we would still hands on pilot at all. We wont even be driving our own cars in 10 years. Probably illegal to drive a car manually in 20 years.
I agree with this 100%, we should have the option to jump directly to the last scoopable star on the route and skip over the systems in between. there's really no need for 4-10 loading screens, fuel scoops etc when you just want to get from A to B and don't care for the systems in between.
Even if the loading screen takes 15 seconds per system because it's multiple star jumps that's fine, it's better than what we have now.
Auto pilot isn't a great idea, it's likely to get you killed and no one wants that.
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Well, some mission might send you to vast systems, to a planet wayyyy in the back. And if you wanna mine, soemtimes you need to reacha gas giant far away. or maybe there is a planet with a good % of Technetium. Yes, you can find that on planets close to a sun. But then you have to go there Yet Again.
Space travel seems unavoidable in a space travel game. The problem with ED is that it was done by science fanboys as a science project, a 'real' galaxy. The game philosophy came second.
simplest solution:
50% more jump range to all ships without changing fuel on ships.
This would make jumps more enjoyable but still needed scoop for fuel.
50% more jump range to all ships without changing fuel on ships.
This would make jumps more enjoyable but still needed scoop for fuel.
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Maybe some type of star gates would be interesting. Maybe as CG's.
Hooray! Artificial wormholes discovered. Now stargates can be build, that slingshot you instantly 100 ly away. There is going to be one at every capital world so you can deliver your stupid vouchers per ton ! to Mahon's doorstep.
You will still need to fly to the nearest one, pay a fee, maybe proportional to ship type or whatever. Then you may have to fly to your destination and make many jumps still to reach it.
What you will get is that around these stargates there will be islands of usage. And even in the heart of the bubble systems rarely traveled to because they might still be 60 ly away in the middle of nowhere.
At some point one may be built in another spiral arm.
But it is like this with ideas and suggestions, that the more you imagine, the more gameplay emerges out of it. Because if you have stargates as quick jump around the bubble, you can go to a stargate in another spiral arm...and that only makes sense if there is a great colonization effort....and why will that be funded by the Powers? Because the aliens are too powerful, we need to move. And players will trade and bring materials to the colonization sites. A new bubble will form.
At some point we will need to go to the nearest galaxy, what is that, Andromeda.
Hooray! Artificial wormholes discovered. Now stargates can be build, that slingshot you instantly 100 ly away. There is going to be one at every capital world so you can deliver your stupid vouchers per ton ! to Mahon's doorstep.
You will still need to fly to the nearest one, pay a fee, maybe proportional to ship type or whatever. Then you may have to fly to your destination and make many jumps still to reach it.
What you will get is that around these stargates there will be islands of usage. And even in the heart of the bubble systems rarely traveled to because they might still be 60 ly away in the middle of nowhere.
At some point one may be built in another spiral arm.
But it is like this with ideas and suggestions, that the more you imagine, the more gameplay emerges out of it. Because if you have stargates as quick jump around the bubble, you can go to a stargate in another spiral arm...and that only makes sense if there is a great colonization effort....and why will that be funded by the Powers? Because the aliens are too powerful, we need to move. And players will trade and bring materials to the colonization sites. A new bubble will form.
At some point we will need to go to the nearest galaxy, what is that, Andromeda.
Quite the opposite philosophy is in place at many major game studios due to lack of content - Content costs money to produce.
Take one of the biggest selling games of all time GTA V, this game is just a huge time sink in single player mode however the world surrounding you is done so well that you don't realise you've just spent 5 minutes holding the W key to get to a mission followed by 5 more to get to the next one.
One of the games I had worked on has just had it's annual release and I am not surprised to see that the new team have added ridiculous amounts of time sinks and needless button mashing between you and the actual content. However it has been disguised in such away that the player feels they have more freedom... A couple of hours later and you wonder what you are doing walking about for a few minutes between each game for no reason other then to trigger a loading screen. This coming from a major selling yearly franchise shows that time sinks are here and they are only going to get bigger as less content is produced. Sad but true.
And you know the reason I suppose. The longer the player is in-game, the better the statistics will be to show the investors. Look, the average players spends 78 minutes per day. And they get so annoyed by the clickfest and the grinding, 75% within 6 months time of playing will sub-come to paying for shortcuts to make life easier. It is the same with social media. In that case the stats go to advertisers and other such scum.
Does anyone here have any doubt that Master Braben is no fool. He runs a company. He has investors. He may love his job, but he works for them in the end. If he didn't know, he couldn't have coded Planet Coaster.
And you know the reason I suppose. The longer the player is in-game, the better the statistics will be to show the investors. Look, the average players spends 78 minutes per day. And they get so annoyed by the clickfest and the grinding, 75% within 6 months time of playing will sub-come to paying for shortcuts to make life easier. It is the same with social media. In that case the stats go to advertisers and other such scum.
Does anyone here have any doubt that Master Braben is no fool. He runs a company. He has investors. He may love his job, but he works for them in the end. If he didn't know, he couldn't have coded Planet Coaster.
Correct to a point. It can and is also used as a sales point by marketing - "Expanded career mode" is how a certain title is blinding the gamer into making a purchase. ;
)
So.. i take it you dont like exploration?
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