Doing the same mistakes for 25 years?

Coming from the discussion from Yamiks' video "we" came to the point where it was speculated where this partly weird game design came from. Today I came across an article from the German PC magazine Gamestar, which has a monthly article series on bad, old PC games and the circumstances at the time, called: "Legendary bad". In January it featured "Frontier - Elite 2" (online article here (subscription only!). It shows, even back then journalists and players strongly disagreed on a verdict on this game. While some liked the complexity and diversity, some criticized flight model, controls and lack of story. Mostly the technical achievement of the galaxy simulation was acclaimed, while the game mechanics are said to be lacking. On that, even Ian Bell was agreeing: "It is one thing to write a simulator, but games are about fun, not realism".
Further the article states it was possible to land on planets and see cities, but with nothing to do besides "generic and boring missions". "First encounter", the successor of "Frontier - Elite 2", is being described as having a lot of bugs and having fundamental problems.

tl;dr: While FDev has solved the performance problems of earlier titles, it seems they are doing the same mistakes, they did 25 years ago:
- generic, boring missions
- lacking story
- overly complex gui and handling
- in general "user-hostile"
- a whole galaxy empty of content

Edit: As some readers misunderstood, the statements above are from the author Heinrich Lenhardt (and partially from other game reviews). This thread is not about my opinion on the game.

I haven't played the old titles, but it really shocked me to see the same flaws in Elite: Dangerous 25 years later.
 
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Enter the hot boiling bowl of interactive missions stew (A progressive and procedurally generated series of unfortunate events...). An ever changing background radiation of stories that fluently sweeps the mission boards, interconnected over the entire universe but still looks like it was "just another plain mission". It is all connected in the background, giving a thread of logic and progress to any mission you accept, which leads you on... and on... and on... towards Raxxla.


"Hey.... I know this mission giver!!"

"Wth... I have seen this before..... it is a map!!!?"

"Aha, now I understand why they needed all these poop transfers at Sothis... omg this is so cool!"

"... omg... I know who the Thargoids really are !!!!!.... wth ... OMG."

and so on... it is all interconnected... or at least... it should be.

It is like long-hair mechanics for stories. Strands that are all connected somehow.
 
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So basically there's a bunch of players who don't like Elite and should play something else.
But wait... they DO like Elite, they just wish it was something else. And THEN they don't like that there's some people who like it because they're playing wrong and their opinions don't matter and they shouldn't have a single game that suits them beyond maybe a railroad/bus/trucking/flight-sim so real gamers have something to laugh at.
 
I sometimes feel they didn't bring Elite 30 years into the future, but players 30 years into the past.
And to be fair, perhaps without that the KS wouldn't have been funded.
I'm just curious what sort of space game they would have made, had they started from scratch and with no ties to Elite...we'll never know of course.
 
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Ian Phillips

Volunteer Moderator
Back when the kickstarter had just finished one of the moderators at the time found an old article of letters to a gaming magazine, where someone was complaining about the original Elite.

The complaints were exactly the same as the complaints about Elite Dangerous. It just goes to show that gamers have not moved on in over 30 years and don't appear to have the imagination to think up new things to moan about! :D
 
David Braben once said that he makes game that he wants to play :)
Yeah, he always wants to play it ... and then never actually gets to play it well due to RL commitments.

So you have it - the game that made to be "tried out", mish-mash of great bits-and-pieces which are each fun for maybe an hour. Just don't make a mistake to play it seriously ;)
 
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I haven't played the old titles, but it really shocked me to see the same flaws in Elite: Dangerous 25 years later.

Flight model and controls bad in ED? Anyway, if you want a strong story-focussed game with hand-crafted missions, why on earth play games in a series that decidedly is the opposite of that? "I bought the latest CoD. I was shocked to see an old review of one of the earliest CODs where they said the storyline was cliche and mediocre, the campaign was very short and the gameplay is very arcadey!" Why havent they fixed this!?"

Anyway: Gamestar. [haha]
 
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verminstar

Banned
Back when the kickstarter had just finished one of the moderators at the time found an old article of letters to a gaming magazine, where someone was complaining about the original Elite.

The complaints were exactly the same as the complaints about Elite Dangerous. It just goes to show that gamers have not moved on in over 30 years and don't appear to have the imagination to think up new things to moan about! :D

If they were complaining about the exact same thing then perhaps the company could try a different approach maybe?

If the complaints are the same as before then that’s the very definition of making the same mistakes over and over. That’s not really the players fault, that’s the fault of those making the same mistakes ^
 
If they were complaining about the exact same thing then perhaps the company could try a different approach maybe?

If the complaints are the same as before then that’s the very definition of making the same mistakes over and over. That’s not really the players fault, that’s the fault of those making the same mistakes ^

Except they get good reviews and sell tons of games. People forget that FD isn't their personal dev studio that solely exists to cater to their very whims. They are a company, and they make games to earn money to pay salaries to make more games. Alternatively, maybe the people who keep complaining should just accept that Elite series simply isnt what they are looking for?

I can guarantee you that many people would likewise complain if ED would be a small-universe with handcrafted-mission...
 
I sometimes feel they didn't bring Elite 30 years into the future, but players 30 years into the past.
And to be fair, perhaps without that the KS wouldn't have been funded.
I'm just curious what sort of space game they would have made, had they started from scratch and with no ties to Elite...we'll never know of course.

If the kickstarter had talked about RNG spam rather than the Grand Vision they would've been out of business.
 
Back when the kickstarter had just finished one of the moderators at the time found an old article of letters to a gaming magazine, where someone was complaining about the original Elite.

The complaints were exactly the same as the complaints about Elite Dangerous. It just goes to show that gamers have not moved on in over 30 years and don't appear to have the imagination to think up new things to moan about! :D


Well, the common thing here is the game developer and not the gamers. You're a stout supporter of everything FDev so it's not surprising you'd want to blame the customers and not the ones making the product! But this thread, and the history recited, is making a fairly clear point about the design of the two games being very similar, and both failing to make many customers happy.
 
Oh no they're not

Quite a few people believe other people exist solely to make their live fun: "I am not going to make a game, but others should do so, and they should do what I want, and they should do it now. Otherwise they are stupid. Unlike me, because I am smart."
 
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