The combat focus of the game

[eza]

Combat is a staple of the genre. It's the core game loop: make money from trading and spend it on better weapons/ships, repeat.

There are other space games with no combat and more of a science focus. Two great ones that I play are Kerbal Space Program and Rogue System.
They're both worth checking out if you're looking for something with more realism that Elite doesn't quite offer.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Except- we're not in 1984 anymore, and Elite has grown up to be much more than just combat. Following the same logic, I suppose we could also say since the original game was single player we should just dump the multiplayer aspects completely too, right? Oh wait, that's not quite what you were leading at, was it?

I'd also love to see non-combat activities given more focus in ED.

Pew-pew QQ has had its day- now it's time for FD to bring more depth to the game. Squeaky wheel has gotten plenty of grease over the last 3-4 years with many "balance" changes, items being introduced, etc.

Except that in the KS of ED exploration was nothing but 'go see pretty stuff' and (almost) all trailers are about combat.

I'd love more 'science' stuff, dont get me wrong. But ED is primarily a combat game, always has been, always will be.

Besides, many aspects were improved. In current ED, I can land on planets as an explorer, have them named after me, explore alien bases, find materials and such. Mining has been much improved, we get new trade tools in.3.0 etc etc.

"Its just combat" is not even true.

 

[Dommarraa]

Hmm, Q4 updates. The silver bullet of all PvE issues. Seems to be a lot of hope pinned to this update. While I'm sure there will be plenty of good stuff, I have the feeling it may be too little too late.
Unless the Thargoid plot gets some non combat love before then, not sure I will still be interested enough to still be playing

 

[gooddoc]

Except that in the KS of ED exploration was nothing but 'go see pretty stuff' and (almost) all trailers are about combat.

I'd love more 'science' stuff, dont get me wrong. But ED is primarily a combat game, always has been, always will be.

Besides, many aspects were improved. In current ED, I can land on planets as an explorer, have them named after me, explore alien bases, find materials and such. Mining has been much improved, we get new trade tools in.3.0 etc etc.

"Its just combat" is not even true.

Because FD knew that they had to produce a combat game first, to generate the unit sales, then hope to trickle in the sciencey stuff at a later date.

 

[LaTokk]

I'm Elite in Exploration & Trading but Mostly Harmless in Combat, I'v only gained that rank through shooting rocks on planets!

Shooting rocks? I'll have to be careful of that - don't want to spoil my chances of hitting Harmless; Elite; Elite; Helpless.

Back to the thread subject - I'd like to see a lot more done with the gap between an explorer discovering a system / planet and that system becoming populated. A lot of activity that currently happens in the background needs to move into the foreground. There should be a lot of scientific survey work around choosing worlds to terraform, or siting stations and then a huge construction effort.

 

[Krieger]

That's what the ELITE game has ever been. Back in the classic ELITE days there was only one rank to grind, the combat rank. Everything else you did in the game was only to improve your abilities to gain the combat rank ELITE.

But at the same time many players were captivated by the alien worlds that were depicted (mainly in text) in original Elite and the accompanying novels. Same goes for the sequels FE2 and FFE. So it's somewhat of a mystery to me why -so far at least- ED is so squarely combat oriented.

I like both combat and non-combat roles (hence I'm triple Elite) but with the Engineers combat became too arcadey for my taste. I hope Beyond will shift the balance between science-based game mechanics and arcade game mechanics closer to the science-based side again. OP gives a few good suggestions for that. In addition I think the game needs new mechanics for storytelling that allow for more player agency.

 

[Cosmo Bozo]

That's what the ELITE game has ever been. Back in the classic ELITE days there was only one rank to grind, the combat rank. Everything else you did in the game was only to improve your abilities to gain the combat rank ELITE.

I might be wrong but I think it was the first space game where you could actually do something other than combat... the first that wasn't pure shoot em up.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Í'd definitely agree.

IMHO nothing wrong with bringing out toys for folks that enjoy combat against Thargoids or enjoy combat in general...
But there's quite alot of things that would (finally) deserve far more attention. Especially in the light of all previous combat-focused developments.

For example, we got all those landable Planets and even after the entire Season has ended, there's still essentially almost nothing to do down there on uninhabited worlds.

Engineers still don't even have a single Blueprint for Mining Lasers and even the Scanners/Limpets came very late to the show, often only offering the generic mods quickly slapped onto most non-combat Modules just so we have anything at all there.
But of course 20+ Weapon mods at Day 1.

In a Game world spanning some 80000LY and currently offering some 2.4*10E127 km² of unused real estate on Planet Surfaces, pewpew just only does so much.

 

[Captain N]

I suspect a big part of this may be FD's philosophy of only focusing on features and parts of the game that people actually use. The same reason they stopped developing Powerplay and CQC.

Thing is, people are not necessarily focusing on specific parts of the game because they are only interested in the idea of what those areas represent - they just use the things that are well implemented enough to feel worthwhile, right now.

All I do in ED is combat because that's the only part of the game where the base mechanics are fleshed out enough that it can hold my interest for long. Not because "shooting things" is the only thing I expect from the games I play. It's just that, unless I'm looking for a very specific type of gameplay (6DOF 3D arcade space shooter with VR support) I'm pretty much guaranteed to find some other game that does whatever ED does, but better. Simulating space flight? Orbiter, Children of a Dead Earth, Kerbal Space Program. Economics and trading in space? X series, EVE Online. Big procedurally generated model of the universe where you can fly around and take screenshots? Space Engine. Online multiplayer space combat, but not too fussed about VR? Allegiance. RPG and sense of progression in an open world? Literally hundreds of games out there, that's one of the trendy types of game du jour.

So the end result is, the people who didn't bounce right off the moment they realised the game offered nothing for them, gravitate to shooting things, because that seems the only thing with any depth to it, someone at FD looks at the graph and goes "a-ha, so they really like shooting things! Let's give them more guns! Scrap that big exploration update we were developing, they're not interested in exploring" So the vicious cycle continues.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

That's what the ELITE game has ever been. Back in the classic ELITE days there was only one rank to grind, the combat rank. Everything else you did in the game was only to improve your abilities to gain the combat rank ELITE.

I guess you never played Frontier or First Encounters. But actually, at the moment you seem to be more right than wrong concerning ED at least. It's actually on Fdev to decide if it stays this way beyond Beyond (yeah, pun...) or if the changes in Q4 are only kind of a treat.

I think FE2 and FFE were much the same. In practice, in those games you could do combat, do combat missions, trade (which got you attacked by pirates), do passenger/courier missions (which got you attacked by assassins), mine (which got you attacked by pirates), work for the navy (which got you attacked by the other navy) ... and that was about it. You didn't have to go all out to do combat, but combat was a part of everything you did. (You could explore a bit, but there was no real supporting mechanism, no scanners to look around or discover unexplored systems, and you still occasionally got attacked by pirates. Met some way out in the middle of nowhere at times, though fortunately I was well-armed)

(The occasional FE2/FFE hostile had a plasma accelerator fitted, too, which would make 2.1.0's "plasma multicannon" - or for that matter modern station guns - look like a peashooter. Fortunately any ship big enough to carry one was too big to aim it)

Elite Dangerous has already stepped quite some way from that - exploration has no combat (departure or return aside), certain mission types never attract enemies, and with the advent of the cargo scanner NPC pirates no longer blow you up just because you might have had some cargo. The density of random combat encounters when trading is also much reduced compared with the previous games - certain stacked missions aside, you might meet one pirate per system, two if you're very unlucky, none if you're quick at getting to the port while they're still stuck in a gravity well.

But, nevertheless, it does retain the heritage of its predecessors - it is very clearly in a lot of respects Elite: Dangerous, not Some Other Game: Dangerous - and combat or the possibility of combat is still a fundamental part of almost all professions. So it's not surprising that it gets a lot of the development and feature time, or that pretty much every major feature has some combat use.

On the other hand, almost all those features also have non-combat uses. Just going for the headline ones (since the non-headline ones tend to be QoL features more than combat ones anyway):
- CGs: there are more types that don't directly involve combat than those that do (though the combat ones are generally more popular)
- Wings: essential for group exploration expeditions to get big instances at meetups, other non-combat uses in trade, exploration and mining
- Powerplay: there are quite a few powers who are almost entirely indirect-conflict traders. Additionally, most of the passive power effects are things like BGS effects, trade price effects, LYR's discounts, which are mostly or entirely non-combat
- CQC: okay, yes, this one is combat. (Though as an explorer I found it very useful to be able to hop in for a quick fight and break up the routine of the surveying. I didn't manage a trip over a week long until after they implemented this)
- Horizons: synthesis, SRVs, salvage, racing, canyons, sightseeing ... lots of planetary stuff not (or not just) about combat
- Engineers: sure, a lot of the blueprints are useful in combat (a lot of outfitting is useful in combat!) but almost all of the non-weapon engineers offer things with non-combat uses
- Guardians: passenger missions, ruins to explore, SLF racing
- Multicrew: more useful in my opinion for exploration (sharing the sights) than combat (where it means you can't use the far more combat-effective Wings feature)
- Return: lots of Thargoids to shoot, but also lots of Thargoids to research. Station rescue and repair are non-combat.
- Beyond: trade data improvements, trade wing missions, improvements to other missions, less beige

 

[Henri]

i think the combat encounters can do with some improving.
i think the thargoid combat is much better than a combat zone.

it's more structured as an encounter and there are no infinite respawns.
combatscenario's would work much better than what's currently there, blockades, combat stuff you know?

 

[Valorin]

Combat is a staple of the genre. It's the core game loop: make money from trading and spend it on better weapons/ships, repeat.

If ED will just get in line with that concept is what we are about to find out I guess. I surely don't hope so, because then I would have less and less to do in the game.

 

[verminstar]

I'm Elite in Exploration & Trading but Mostly Harmless in Combat, I'v only gained that rank through shooting rocks on planets!

Elite in exploration and trade...competant in combat...fair to say I 100% agree with the op.

Its not that combat is too hard, its actually the other way around...I can sit still not moving and just rotate to beat npc if I choose...or fly backwards and get them to stupidly follow me. Only a complete idiot would follow another ship into a controlled slide and the npc sure qualify as idiotic and then some. The combat is predictable and follows the same basic pattern every time...ergo its getting boring fast because its too easy. Ye can literally plough through them with little to zero engineering.

And thats why I spent two years just exploring a supposedly, allegedly combat game...because the combat was just mediocre at best. In two years, almost nothing has changed and its starting to wear me down again. Likely Ill surpass the combat rank to expert but only through grinding the rank and killing skimmers and lots of easy kills that offer large rep increases stacked up 8 or 9 at a time...to save time.

Thats really about as special as combat gets fer me in this game...I know fer a fact that when I do go into the black to explore again, my ship wont be armed...at all. So much fer this being a combat orientated game...if that was true then going anywhere unarmed would be highly inadvisable but here, its the norm...and a whole lot more fun and enjoyable than combat which is just meh at best ^

 

[MajorHavoc]

In an age of discovery the trading companies and their privateers are never far behind the pioneers ! Many space games have done combat well but have any presented a 1:1 scale galaxy with mechanics that allow for the expansion of the human species into its vast frontier, well I am hoping that this one will ! The discovery of any Earth type world near human occupied space would surely create a race to plant a flag, explore to discover the best resources, set up outposts, logistics and surely a military presence. Just need to find a way to put those mechanics into the game !

 

[Jack Schitt]

My 'pathfinder' rank would be higher if I could be more involved in the act of exploration, rather than just pointing my ship at stuffs. I believe FD have every intention of giving that to us. They just need the encouragement to do so.

Personally I thought I'd done that when I backed their Kickstarter and bought LEPs, gave feedback in the DDF, and Repped the Proposal threads here and here. I have an account dedicated to exploration with just over 1,000 hours logged, and associated purchases of kits and paints and outfits in the Store. I'm not sure what more encouragement I'm supposed to be giving to be honest. Pizza?

("It's early days" "Proposals were long-term wishlists not promises" "Kickstarter is irrelevant", "Limited developer time" yadda yadda. Go ahead, regulars. I've heard it all before.)

I suspect a big part of this may be FD's philosophy of only focusing on features and parts of the game that people actually use. The same reason they stopped developing Powerplay and CQC.

I cannot stress how much I hate that philosophy. "Here, kid, here's three Lego bricks. If daddy sees you playing with them every day for the next six months, maybe you can have the whole set."

In theory it seems like a solid idea: only develop the things most people enjoy. In practice it risks becoming an excuse for shoving in bare-bones MVP features to fulfil a design pledge, sticking a tick in a box, then never touching them again because nobody is using them. I leave it as a subjective exercise for each reader to decide whether that is true for ED, and to what degree. I think it's fairly clear where I stand, at least for now.

So the end result is, the people who didn't bounce right off the moment they realised the game offered nothing for them, gravitate to shooting things, because that seems the only thing with any depth to it, someone at FD looks at the graph and goes "a-ha, so they really like shooting things! Let's give them more guns! Scrap that big exploration update we were developing, they're not interested in exploring" So the vicious cycle continues.

It does start to feel that way sometimes, as though exploration in particular has been largely ignored in favour of other mechanics. Horizons with airless landings and the SRV was arguably the last big update that had a significant exploration benefit, and even that was geared in part towards facilitating Engineering with its heavy combat focus. The Great Beigification, effectively a bug, had a massive impact on exploration aesthetics that's only now being resolved. One of the more fun things you can do with an exploration build -- using SLFs as scouts -- is largely an unintended side-effect of yet another combat-focused addition.

We're getting there. Improvements are coming. But when they're slow to implement or come as a unintended benefit of an unrelated mechanic, it's difficult to maintain enthusiasm. There's an awful lot riding on the Q4 update, of which we know next to nothing. I really hope we're not having the same conversations in twelve months.

Here's what I consider the bottom line when it comes to how I feel about ED and its future. It's something I've mentioned in passing elsewhere, but it seems particularly apt whenever the combat/exploration (or even game/simulation) dichotomy is raised:

To me ED still feels very much a Frontier Developments project, in all the good ways. It's unique, it still manages to retain something of an indie feel despite its mainstream success, and the bits that are polished are very polished. It even has a very British feel, if you consider that a bonus which I do. But what it no longer feels like, sadly, is a David Braben project. FE2 and FFE for all their flaws had David Braben's soul in their code. In ED it feels as though that's been diluted. It's Diet Braben. Braben Lite. I'm not sure at this point whether it will ever be anything more, and that's kind of sad.

 

[sb413197]

I agree TS. I think the greatest strength of this game is actually the non combat stuff - there are plenty of other space shooters out there. Looking forward to the exploration buffs!

 

[Captain N]

there are plenty of other space shooters out there.

Most of them are bad compared to ED. Even fewer have VR support.

 

[CMDR Corlas]

I'm a pretty combat-oriented player these days, although I do a bit of everything and I quite like my exploration and mining (Elite in Combat and Exploration, whatver the second-to-last is in Trading). I can understand why combat is heavily focused on, in that in FD's "cutthroat galaxy" it's supposed to be an ever-present threat to all professions; or at least those near the Bubble. Like how in the 15th to 18th centuries, in Europe's boom of sail-based exploration and trade, piracy and violent competition among Europeans (and others, obviously) followed hand-in-hand.

I do agree though that non-combat gameplay needs some work and deserves more focus than what it has gotten, but I think that FD is on the right track. The trade data improvements coming on Tuesday, for example, are going to be quite handy to me. I never cared enough about pure trading to get much into third-party sites. I tried, but I think staying in-game will add a lot for me.

I'm really excited for the changes to mining and exploration, but it does feel a long way off and like more should have happened there a long time ago. I can understand, and feel, a bit of the resentment, but I prefer to be forward looking as well.

Personally, the biggest recent letdown was the Thargoids. Beyond attacking them and forum-based gameplay, there was no meaningful interactions really. As someone who saw no real reason to fight them, that's pretty disappointing, and kept them as essentially non-content for me. Aside from the eye-candy, they could have been only Galnet articles and changed nothing for me.

I would like to see, and am happy to see coming, more non-combat content and fleshing-out. At the same time though, given that ships and combat are the common threads that weave through all of it, I understand why combat has been given the focus it has.

 

[SpaceScania]

OP thanks for this thread! I agree that Elite’s recent content has been largely combat focused and that is somewhat of a missed opportunity. To me focusing too much on space combat is a bit of an easy way out. There are just so many space combat games, it’s a well known and easily repeated formula. I came to Elite Dangerous because there were other interesting things to do besides fighting for the sake of fighting. While I admit it’s fun tangling with the NPC’s that interdict me for my cargo, if the game only had that element I wouldn’t play it for very long.

I’d like to add my voice to the CMDR’s in this thread would love to see more non-combat focused ships (I think the buff to the T-9 was a great gesture in this area thanks FD) and some more non-combat technology, tools, engineering, artifacts and so on. Even more important is putting as much effort into core non-combat components as was put into things like crime and punishment. For example, I really do hope the tech brokers are going to offer other modules besides fancy guns. For myself, my long term investment in this game will largely depend on how Frontier does in offering compelling trade, mining, exploration, and archeological gameplay (Palin and Ram Tah missions), even search and rescue in this beautiful galaxy that they have created.

 

[PS4gamer]

Well said TC!

Quite frankly I'm sick of almost every update and patch being 90% combat focused for the pewpew crowd.

Elite was supposed to be MORE than pewpew.

It's time Mining and Exploring got some serious love.