Been a few years now, and Elite still feels like an empty shell.

[Crank Larson]

That's nice, dear.

 

[Ian Skippy]

But he put more thought, and more words into his points than your emergency defense post it seems

No, he just typed more. "Cut open from solo and make everything persistent so better servers!" isnt a deep thought.

Its okay to just say "I like x", but the whole drama around it is weird. Especially when what yoy want has been explicitly said never to happen way before beta even began.

 

[Ian Skippy]

The OP has taken the time to write a well thought out review of ED. There is no where in it he says he can't stand the game he just points out that with a few changes here and there it could be a much better more immersive game and in my opinion he is right. I really like ED and play every day for an hour or three but I would be lying if I didn't admit that aspects of the game can be boring and repetitive.

Exceptvthey cant. Some of his core argument are based on stuff that neither will nor can happen. May seem harsh, but please let us keep the baseless expectations from daydreaming to that other space game.

 

[Achilles7]

Elite: Dangerous has a way of feeling realistic without feeling real.

Huh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xiWw5dwngc

 

[Blackcompany]

I agree with a lot of your points, OP but I have come to the conclusion that I doubt it will change much and I just have to accept that it’s not particularly exciting. Having accepted this I think i have more enjoyment.

I load up ED and enjoy it for a while and when the inevitable happens, and the sterility of it all hits me, I play something else for a while instead. But I always end up loading ED again at some point.

Same here.

And the OP has extremely valid points.

The game is devoid of both content and meaningful interaction to a pathetic degree. Even combat, which is the one thing FDEV did right beyond - and lets face it, mostly because of - the basic flight model (which they NAILED; credit where its due) has become a slog. Ships have too many effective hit points, spam healing potions and the AI can cheat. Blatantly.

More depressing still, combat is pointless. RES and CZ remain pointless horde mode instances. No consequences. No purpose.

And everything else is literally a spreadsheet sim. Not even TRYING to hide that its all just numbers going up and down. I mean, really...its just shallow progress bars, gated behind blatant time sink grind that isnt trying to hide a design so lazy, its like it came from some free mobile game.

And this is very likely all its ever going to be. Because in three years, Frontier havent even TRIED to change it. Its been one time sink or useless "feature" after another, with zero effort put into meaningful interaction or depth.

 

[Blackcompany]

Agreed, I have stopped playing. It's a nice galaxy, shame they couldn't put a decent game in it.

This made me laugh, because it is quite literally the picture perfect, one sentence summary of everything Elite is, and that is wrong with the game. In one single, concise sentence.

 

[Ian Skippy]

This made me laugh, because it is quite literally the picture perfect, one sentence summary of everything Elite is, and that is wrong with the game. In one single, concise sentence.

Haha, yeah, I always laugh too when other people dont like stuff that I dont like. [haha] Ah well, have to go to r/beanies to tell them that beanies are stupid. Great fabric, shame they couldn't make a decent piece of headgear with it. Who is with me!? [haha]

And dont tell me I should just wear other stuff. I love headgear, so beanies are stupid because why else would I think it is stupid? The sad thing is designers are so arrogant they cant admit their mistakes and make the hats I want them to make. Its because they dont wear their own beanies, otherwise they knew how dumb they are. Trust me, I am sure sales charts of beanies will plummet in the next few months, beanies are dead! Anyway, brace yourself, I can hear those lame beanie-white knights stampeding over the horizon, lol.

 

[Vasea Azure]

Lots of things I agree but you did not discovered anything new really. All has been discussed already I`m afraid. But thanks for a nice read OP, have some rep.

 

[GG7]

Lots of words, might as well have written 'i want to play another game'

Pretty much.

How many years does it take for some of these people to finally admit that ED is never going to be a game they like or appreciate?

I've never spent more than 30 days with a game I disliked as much as most of these people dislike ED.

Whatever... TLDR.

 

[NMS]

Agreed, I have stopped playing. It's a nice galaxy, shame they couldn't put a decent game in it.

Unfortunately it's true. I do not play anymore either. I tried the beta of "Beyond" and by the way the shell will remain empty.

+ Rep

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

I agree with most of what the OP has said. Sadly I believe that FD's solution is the Engineers. However, on a positive note, with each release they polish the game up and I am usually pleased with these improvements.

I dip in out of the game and am waiting for the Q4 core game improvements before I pass final judgement. If I don't like it, I will simply go out exploring again, enjoying the Galaxy everytime I get the itch.

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

Pretty much.

How many years does it take for some of these people to finally admit that ED is never going to be a game they like or appreciate?

I've never spent more than 30 days with a game I disliked as much as most of these people dislike ED.

Whatever... TLDR.

Lol. How can you pass judgment without reading it. You may as well just write "Whatever... TLDR".

 

[Sylveria]

Lol. How can you pass judgment without reading it. You may as well just write "Whatever... TLDR".

I dunno, I read the entire OP (regrettably, as my eyestrain can prove) and have to agree it's pretty TL;DR-worthy.

The thread title enough would have been sufficient to convey the sentiment. Verbosity doesn't always equal clarity, after all.

 

[Skipnik]

That fact is that we all thought, in the beginning, that Elite Dangerous was going to be the be all and end all of space games. Surprise!! We were wrong. But it's still a really nice iterative step until something better comes.
Devs fell in to the trap of quantity over quality and that's probably because we wanted too much!! They made decisions that ended up horrible time sinks in dev time like engineers. A futile attempt at adding gameplay that was always going to be unbalancing as Fek if they applied it to weapons.. But what do they do? Add more depth to galaxy or add meaningful game? Or try to do both in a not very excellent way.
The real problem they need to fix is how they view co-operative game!! and to use the fact that people want to interact to solve some of the problems in the galaxy. Markers on galaxy map for high Cmdr activity, Flagged ships, ability to add player bounties, ability to pay other Cmdrs for job, ability for paid npc to fly your other ships as part of convoy, creation of trade routes from new distant mining areas ect ect.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Lol. How can you pass judgment without reading it. You may as well just write "Whatever... TLDR".

Lets take this quote:

And the universe should be persistent and smaller so the servers can handle everything, even if logged out, your ship remain in space vulnerable. Also the universe is too big for you to actually care about things which forces the game engine to have temporary things, and nothing persistent.

It means the OP has no understanding of what an engine even is, doesnt get what needs to be done with the networking and why that is impossible, but feels like it should happen anyway. When you are this clueless and ignorant, being verbose isnt a plus. The only way people can agree with this is if they dont understand much of it either, or when they are people like blackcompany or NMS who will agree with every complaint by default.

That fact is that we all thought, in the beginning, that Elite Dangerous was going to be the be all and end all of space games. Surprise!! We were wrong.

Unfortunately, the same happened with NMS. And now SC. And will happen with whatever comes next. Maybe the lesson is that there will be no 'be all end all' of space games, that the expectations are completely unrealistic and will never be met. I think that is a more sensible approach than the constant hype->disappointment->frustration->new game->hype cycle some push themselves through year after year after year. These are games. You pay a bit of money, you have a bit of fun, live goes on.

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

Lets take this quote:



It means the OP has no understanding of what an engine even is, doesnt get what needs to be done with the networking and why that is impossible, but feels like it should happen anyway. When you are this clueless and ignorant, being verbose isnt a plus. The only way people can agree with this is if they dont understand much of it either, or when they are people like blackcompany or NMS who will agree with every complaint by default.

Yep you're right there and you did read it. Doesn't mean everything else is wrong.

I guess ED invokes so much passion is because many of us played and loved the original. We all dreamed of a modern update and all had our own ideas about how it should be.

 

[Sylveria]

Yep you're right there and you did read it. Doesn't mean everything else is wrong.

I guess ED invokes so much passion is because many of us played and loved the original. We all dreamed of a modern update and all had our own ideas about how it should be.

And the "disconnect" occurs when there are literally hundreds of thousands to millions of people with their "own ideas about how it should be", too.

THAT is the reality here. Not everyone is going to agree with everyone else as to what the game should be or should have been​ and some will like it, and some won't.

 

[Adhock]

*sigh*

Another notch on the wall for yet another topic about the same damn thing.

Another disenfranchised individual who couldn't find a narrative to be entertained with and has no capacity for creating their own.

I wonder how many more of these we're going to get. Obviously everyone is jumping on the "Galaxy Wide and Inch Deep" train right now when every time people tell me something is missing and start talking about how X is better, the only difference I can find is that X has an overarching narrative which for some reason is the missing component that everyone is looking for.

 

[Cosmo]

I will quickly go through your criticism.

I always get this constant feeling that Elite is mostly a simulation demo and everything is pretend. It seems that those people that do get together and create their own thing, is a pretend of some sort. Let’s pretend that this is something we can do.

People can feel a lot of things. I think otherwise.

THE UNIVERSE:
There should be 2 separate universes, OPEN PLAY and SOLO/PRIVATE, the game needs to move everything to SOLO/PRIVATE what we have today, and a new OPEN were everyone starts fresh, but only when the game has been fixed and stabilized. And the universe should be persistent and smaller so the servers can handle everything, even if logged out, your ship remain in space vulnerable. Also the universe is too big for you to actually care about things which forces the game engine to have temporary things, and nothing persistent. I loved the way it was in the early stages of beta where there was a limited amount of systems, your learned the systems and they grew on you, I still can feel the sense that I am home when I see Eranin or passing through.

There should not be separate universes, because that divides the player base even further among the multiple game modes. The milky Way should stay the actual real size like real-life. Because, that's one of the pillars of ED, that you're in a recreation of the Milky Way, not some downsized drivel.

Keeping ships persistent in space makes them vulnerable and open to abuse. If ships are persistent (don't disappear when logging out) then players have to dock at a station or outpost or land somewhere safe. It would be another costly time-sink though.

THARGOIDS:
At first, sounded so great and I really looked forward to this, but ended up you just go to an USS, and there they are, on your terms and they just standing there like just waiting to die from you. At first when we saw the first hyper dictions, it was really scary!!! And Frontier really nailed this so good, best possible way I can think of. But then...they executed the next step of this very badly. The Thargoid could be a great PvE aspect of the game but ended up failing horribly.

Yes it should have more PVE interaction. More stuff should come in the coming months. As for PVP, the galaxy map needs a method to push back Thargoid invasions by killing X amount of Thagoids in a system. Combat should be around the stations and above the planet surface.

POWER PLAY:
What we though Power play would be, was a great faction system, where people choose their factions and then these faction battle against each other over things around in the bubble, like taking over stations and raging war against one another, and that you were allowed to engage people without getting wanted if they wasn't in your faction. Players who are not in your faction are automatic hostile and red, unless you end up in a populated area, such as stations, then they will be neutral yellow colour until you fire upon them or they fire upon you, then they will get red and if this happens near a station, station will intervene. And other players of your faction are green and you can use healing lasers on them without need to be in their wing and so on. Power play could open up a PvP aspect to the game and a very interesting thing too, not just people "duelling" outside stations. People are bored these days, they need something interesting and motivation like a sense of purpose and that things matters.

Powerplay needs some major improvements. I think the powers and factions should be Player managed with players as leaders and make the factions player guilds.

ENGINEER:
The damage this have been doing to the game is horrible, allowing big slow ships to turn fast and boosting at such incredible speeds and agile as a small ship, and there is also a lot of other things that have ruined the delicate balance of the game, thanks to Engineers. Engineers have allowed some ships to be the number one choice, where the rest of the ships don’t matter.

That should get fixed with the Beyond Chapter One update.

SHIPS:
The ships in the game should never been like a levelling system, each ship should have their strength, each ship should have their special thing, and a nice mix of it all, making it a hard choice to choose a ship, not just taking the most expensive ship and that’s the best one. Sidewinder should always be the worst ship, it's your starter ship too so, only take a Sidewinder if all your ships are destroyed and are on cooldown.

Well giving players options to engineer and customize their ships is good imo. At the top level it evens out for players in some ways.

MULTI-CREW:
Oh my god, where shall I start? First of, people is now holograms, what? Would you like to be hired by a hologram boss to go out fighting on a dangerous mission? I am talking about the NPC Crew who actually dies if you loose your ship. It's not safe for me to actually fly this ship, but it's ok, I hire you to come fight with me, and if you die, I don't care, I just hire another one, for real?, this is crazy, you should at least hold accountable for being responsible for someone’s death. The NPCs, they are not holograms. And where people can teleport to a ship in an instant using a computer generated character. What happened to, keep the game immersive and as realistic as possible, when we all know why Frontier did this, it was because it was too much work for them and so they took a shortcut, so they made this cheap system of a multi-crew. And all the problems with multi-crew, oh my god, all the limitations, you just want them to leave your ship so everything unlocks again, such as outfitting, deploy SRV and so on. Those crazy things when you have a higher combat rank than your crew, ending up that you get all the credits and they get a small portion of it. Multi-crew feels like a fun thing to just try out then leave it to rot, until Frontier actually doing something about it, but they won't, they want it to be so bad so they don't need to work on it, they are happy now where it is.

Multicrew holograms are teh best solution so that players can quickly join other ships that are countless light years away. Otherwise it could take days to meet up with another player and board their ship. The NPC crew should sit in the cockpit if there's no other player and they should survive a ships destruction if the player can afford medical insurance. The instant death of NPC pilots is a bad game mechanic, because people get attached to them. They care about their NPC pilots and don't want to lose them.

[CREDITS:
Oh boy, this is so unbalanced that it's crazy, with no real money sinks in the game, and all the abusive things players can do, have made the credits lose their value a long time ago, now everyone have so much credits so all the work is for nothing, now when they making a new "currency" with materials and data instead. It has come to a point that you really don't care if you loose your ship in a major explosion, you buy it back in an instant and you don't even notice it when having that huge pile of credits. There is no time, before getting a new ship, you magically spawn with it.

More money sinks should be coming with player owned Capital Ships with Executive Control. The Fleet Carrier is hopefully the first player owned Capital Ship. People complain about the grind, but then also complain about having too much money. That's contradictory. More credits means more options for players to experiment such as join battles, explore etc, because they can afford to lose their ship and have it replaced.

REALISM AND TIME:
When docking with your almost completely broken ship and need to repair it, or just dock with a ship that needs refuelling, those things should take time, the fuel refuelling can be automatic, as soon as you land, and you should be able to see if from the window how a robot arm with a giant hose connects to your ship, and then it starts filling up (can be disabled of course so you have to press refuel manually if you don't want to spend money on it) and it will take a little time, not long, in the mean time, you can check mission board or do other things. And repairing a ship, also takes time but takes a lot longer, in fact it can take a pretty long time up to an hour, so it could be a good idea to jump into another ship while that other ship is being repaired and while a ship is being repaired, it's locked, you can't interact with the ship, replacing modules or anything, but you can switch to another ship, depending what type of ship being repaired it takes different time. Repairing an Eagle takes a lot faster than repair of an Anaconda. Losing a ship should not result in instantly getting a new one, which will also take time, much longer time than repairing, maybe up to 8 hours depending on the ship type. This makes owning multiple ships a good idea.

Repairing a ship should not take much time, it would be another time sink. This game has a major TIme Sink, many things in this game take a loooong time. Too long for casual gamers.

PLAYER INTERACTION:
There is no player driven economy and there are so many limitations when it comes to player interaction, which makes this online game feel like a singleplayer game. And the buggy wing system, after all this time, hasn’t been fixed properly. Have not been any cooperative aspects to it for years. I know that they implementing Wing missions now, but it is not enough.

Well the players themselves are a small percentage of the total trade compared to the NPCs. If you can't appreciate improvements like Wing Missions then nothing would make you not be pessimistic about ED. Because Wing Missions are a huge improvement compared to what we had before: nothing.

The missions themselves need a lot more variety though. The grind can be more fun if the mission scenarios are more varied and entertaining.

PLANETARY LANDINGS AND ENVIRONMENTS:
I love the idea of able to land of planets but this gets old fast, with no proper interaction with the planet surface people gets tired of it. Their next step should be able to fly down to a gas giant, through storms of lightning, collecting maybe some kind of expensive gas or what ever they can sell, and water worlds, where you actually dive into the ocean with your ship, docking with underwater bases, and seeing marine life in the water. And when exiting the ocean you see water on the windows of the ship slowly falling off. And Frontier should start introducing weathers and stuff too; they need to start somewhere, like rain of different types, snow, blizzards and heavy winds, and heavy winds makes it hard to fly straight and can be very hard to properly land the ship and so on. And also dangerous environments that damage the ship or preventing the radar from working or other disruptions.

I don't care much about landing on Gas Giants. I want to land on EARTH-LIKE Atmospheric worlds. It's already taking Frontier 3+ years to deliver that.

TRAVEL:
Align, jump, align, jump, align, jump, align, jump, this is what we are use to and it is boring like crazy, and it is very repetitive, why isn't there like a mini game or something when doing multiple jumps, flying thru tunnels in the hyperspace each new tunnel is entering a new system, throttle down in the current tunnel, allows the ship to exit the hyperspace to the next system in queue. You will see your fuel meter go down while flying in that tunnel, and if you notice, omg, I will run out of fuel soon, better press X button, to throttle down, to exit the hyperspace to get some fuel into the tank, either from the sun, or a gas planet if there is no stations. Depending how well you doing in the tunnel minigame, it reduced the time it takes to reach for the destination, but if you want a more passive approach, like watching netlix or need to do something else, you can just let it fly passivly, and it will take longer time. Supercruise is really cool, but need some tweaks I belive. Also the ships engine sounds should be heard in supercruise and not the same for every ship.

I'd rather have a time-limited auto pilot so that NPC crew can pilot a ship. I'm also not fond of manually controlling a ship for countless hours to reach a destination. Airplanes and cars already have auto pilot tech in 2018.

CQC:
Oh no don't make me talk about this mess. NOBODY plays it, maybe for a reason? Is sure would be more interesting if people could actually queue up with their own ships without the fear of paying credits for buying back their ships, and no cooldown (with engineering disabled until they sorted out the balance) on various maps and fun game modes and allowing players to earn rewards for doing this, credits and reputation within their factions, allowing them to get better prices, new equipment and so on, but of course can you get this without the PvP too. Na lets throw them into a boring arena with the most boring ships we made, like the famous suicide winder without any purpose what so ever, yet again, no motivation. Good one Frontier, you really did it this time, put a lot of work into something, and ruining it completely, ending up all the hard work and resources... for... nothing!

Yes it is a shame that Frontier hasn't bothered to add BOTS to CQC so that people can at least start a match.

INTERFACE and HUD:
Needs a complete overhaul. Needs to be faster, more customizable and easier to see things and not cycling through lists. Also, should be able to see shield meter and hull meter attached on the sides on your target and their statuses without need to check down in the corner.

Seconded. It's a shame that Frontier still hasn't added HUD Customization. This has been requested 3+ years. They keep saying oh it's so hard.. Well they had 3 years to implement this.

 

[GG7]

Lol. How can you pass judgment without reading it. You may as well just write "Whatever... TLDR".

Because I have heard it all before. Hundreds of times in the last three years.

I guess I don't understand the mindset of anyone who would waste their time on a game forum for a game they are no longer play and obviously strongly dislike in all its current and previous forms.

Its obvious it is never going to measure up to whatever standard they set for it. The developers are certainly never going to suddenly change their direction because of a multi page novel length diatribe one of these people decides to post on here.

Whatever... You won't find me hanging around on Destiny 2's forums, Battlefront 2, Prey... and all the other games I didn't care for.

Better things to do with my time.