Its not a good game, its great space flight sim and the graphics/sound are excellent, but its not a good game.
This has been Elite’s biggest problem since 1.0, it’s a great space sim but it’s not a good “game”. There aren’t enough mechanics to make it very interesting to play, the meat of the game loops are too simple. It’s why so many people felt like the mechanics of S1 were placeholders and that future updates would flesh them out and improve them.
Unfortunately that hasn’t really happened. They’ve added bolt on features but have not really fleshed out any of the core mechanics. USS still operate the same way. HRES and CZ’s are still as much fish in the bowl mechanics as they have always been. Exploration core gameplay is unchanged at all. Trading hasn’t changed one bit except for the new tools (which don’t change HOW trading plays). CG’s haven’t improved at all and actually lost exploration so they got worse. Bounty hunting went back a bit with the KWS nerfs but otherwise has not improved. Piracy got cargo breakers but is now more frustrating than ever due to C&P, and otherwise has not been improved. All of the core ways in which people play the game haven’t changed hardly at all, in four years.
This is what many hoped Beyond would be improving, but so far it hasn’t done much to make the “game” better. Engineering got glossed a bit but they are an addon to the core game, not the meat of it. Guardian ruins got added but contain no meaningful gameplay at all, instead opting for the usual immense grind which Frontier prefers to create. Will the rest of Beyond do anything to improve the core of the game? Hopefully it does, but the track record suggests it really won’t.
I don’t think Frontier realizes what the actual problem with their game is. They keep adding new bolt on things while completely ignoring what the actual issue truly is:
the game needs to be improved, not the feature list.
They even miss (or avoid?) obvious opportunities to actually improve the core. Take wing missions for example. They should have been a conversion of the normal missions to “shareable missions”, turning any of these mission types into improved content for both solo and wing players, with shareable yet scalable missions presenting many new options to play the game in various ways. It could have been a great boon to traders, utilizing the cargo depot to allow even traders in small ships to move huge amounts of cargo around. Or allowing bounty hunters who want a good challenge to fly an Elite 4-wing rated assassination mission solo. With fair rewards of course, paying either the full amount to one player of a divided sum to the wing.
However, Frontier missed all of these opportunities, completely. Was it on purpose, or simply by ineptitude? Do they actively avoid improving the core of the game, or is it just a regular mistake?
Which brings us back to the premise of the thread:
is the entire Elite Dangerous project just a social experiment? To see how little gameplay a game can contain while still keeping players interested in playing? A mile wide and an inch deep, but instead of adding depth lets just see if we can stretch it out to two miles? Because that’s what Frontier keeps doing, adding more width instead of depth, bolting on separate and segregated content rather than developing anything connected and shared. I don’t know why they avoid fleshing out the mechanics of the core gameplay. Either they don’t want to, or they don’t realize the core needs it.
