Pretty sure he mentioned multi-crew, alongside things like boarding and zero g combat in his presentation, but i expect it's a very long way off. I have to say, personally i'm happy for them to focus their talents on planetary landings / atmospheric flight.
Granted it's not in space but it has a simple mechanic of multi-crew ships with hundreds of players on one huge seamless map. It works freaking awesomely.
The thing is Elite is STILL being overshadowed by a game that is much earlier in development. Frontier should do more to show off Elite to gamers and the media. I guess Gamescom was a suitable platform to do that.
they did on gamescom, i guess david had like 300 appointment these 3 days, i hardly saw him come out of his booth, this guy really works hard for his game!
I am also looking forward to the Swat/Rainbow style FPS experience. I am a big fan of Rainbow Six Raven Shield. Pax Australia will be good. I hope COD or BF players will have a hard time in the fps of SC.
Also new racing maps confirmed. I hope they do a Murray Cup this year maybe in December amd stream it. The winner could get some nice prizes while 2nd or 3rd places can also get some free stuff.
I really likes the Hangar revamps. I thought they were ways off. CIG has really been working on a lot of stuff while patching AC post release.
I wouldn't call it ground breaking, it's standard multi crew gameplay. I've been playing it in Planetside 2 and guns of Icarus.
What's exciting however is how in-depth they could go when it comes to the operation of different ships. Each ship is a mini crysis internal level and could be filled with bits and knobs for the crew to fiddle, fires to fight ect. Anything you can do in a crysis level, you can do inside a ship.
Another thing is how different the experience can be from multi-crewing a Retaliator with its submarine-like vibe, to flying RIO inside a glass paneled Xi'An scout, to doing engine maintenance inside a Starfarer.
The way I see it now, SC is 80% about the ships. They are the stars of the show and not the actual universe. Take that as you will, good or bad. Even if the actual combat gameplay turns out to be as bad as in AC V0.8 (which I'm sure will be improved anyway), it might be worth getting the game at entry-level just for the crew interactions.
Over-all the game gave me a Mass Effect vibe and I loved the first two. It's obvious they've borrowed a lot of inspiration from it. They even said they had the same character creation process where
you have a generic character for the first mission and then you get severely injured and get "surgery", which is an in-lore way to create your face etc.
Having said that, the version we saw looked pretty rough. The animations were downright terrible and reminded me of early 2000s games
Also, some minor gripes like the constellation not having an airlock between crew compartment and cargo space. Want to go back and forth in a damaged ship? Better kiss your atmosphere goodbye every time you open the door.
As always, the problem with those commercial videos is that they always show ships flying in an atmoshperic style -what looks way better than what you can see in AC.
So if it's obviously more interesting to have ships flying the way it's managed in ED, why then not adapt the real gameplay to it?!?
CIG have still a long way to go ...
Edit:
And as predicted the crossing of the 50.000.000 $ stretch goal together with the new SHIP SALES and the new COMMERCIALS got CIG a big money boost:
But building ships and making commercials is very little work compared to creating a real consistent and fun to play game. Therefore those things do not impress me at all.
I think its one small step for CIG-kind that CR admitted something was bad. I'm hoping it will influence many SC fans into moving away from swearing blind everything is awesome and instead taking the giant leap forwards towards discussing what improvements they'd would like to see.
Also giving away a joystick at least proves he hasn't forgotten they exist. All he has to do now is figure out how they meaningfully work in a world with follow the mouse flight and zero order web browser mouse gunnery. It's going to be a challenge.
As always, the problem with those commercial videos is that they always show ships flying in an atmoshperic style -what looks way better than what you can see in AC.
So if it's obviously more interesting to have ships flying the way it's managed in ED, why then not adapt the real gameplay to it?!?
I think their ego and the need to not overly embarrass the 'flight model is so good its perceived as bad' crowd will mean they probably bring it in by stealth down the line.
Edit:
And as predicted the crossing of the 50.000.000 $ stretch goal together with the new SHIP SALES and the new COMMERCIALS got CIG a big money boost:
Not always that simple. A couple of years ago, the consensus was that HTC had the best range or phones of any manufacturer. They started making a loss. The consensus was, it was because they weren't any good at marketing their excellent product. A year later, they released a new phone, backed it up with excellent marketing, and now they've returned to profit.
Sure, word of mouth is important, but marketing isn't something you can ignore in the 21st Century. I saw that latest ship trailer and part of me wanted to reach for my wallet. I'm sensible, so I didn't. A lot of people aren't that sensible.
Not always that simple. A couple of years ago, the consensus was that HTC had the best range or phones of any manufacturer. They started making a loss. The consensus was, it was because they weren't any good at marketing their excellent product. A year later, they released a new phone, backed it up with excellent marketing, and now they've returned to profit.
Sure, word of mouth is important, but marketing isn't something you can ignore in the 21st Century. I saw that latest ship trailer and part of me wanted to reach for my wallet. I'm sensible, so I didn't. A lot of people aren't that sensible.
First of all HTC, apple, Samasung, given they all have very good products, much of a muchness and critically customer rather than fan bases, do not present a good example. Better think of examples from movie land.
Take for example the movie terminator. When it came out it turned a small profit but it was only hardcore genre fans who knew about it and went and saw it. It is forgotten now but the mainstream had absolutely no awareness of this movie, fast forward a few years and the rest is history. By the time T2 came out everyone had seen T1. Meanwhile many other heavily marketed and big releases of the day are utterly forgotten.
EDIT
As you can see it came in position no. 24 in 1984 box office, (below Red Dawn!!!)
Meanwhile if you analyse how much money T1 has since made in video/dvd/blue ray/world wide syndication etc I think you will discover it has made a huge amount of money, many times what it did when it first came out making it an enormously successfully movie.
First of all HTC, apple, Samasung, given they all have very good products, much of a muchness and critically customer rather than fan bases, do not present a good example. Better think of examples from movie land.
Exceptions don't prove rules. Marketing is important. It's not impossible to achieve success without it, but there's a reason why companies - across all industries - spend vast amounts of money on it.
Exceptions don't prove rules. Marketing is important. It's not impossible to achieve success without it, but there's a reason why companies - across all industries - spend vast amounts of money on it.
Excuse me. You're misunderstanding what I'm saying.
1. Comparing a product such as video game that has a fanbase and not a customer base with mobile phones is a poor comparison.
2. In the world of products that have fanbases, the T1 story is not an exception, it happens all the time. It is so common it is in fact a rule and a classic demonstration of the power of word of mouth. Without it you will need to add huge marketing cost but even then you will never achieve long term success. I assure you today no one is watching Waterworld nor will there ever be a sequel or any other form of spin off.
Exceptions don't prove rules. Marketing is important. It's not impossible to achieve success without it, but there's a reason why companies - across all industries - spend vast amounts of money on it.
I think what we can say is that marketing can boost initial profits, but in the long term it's all about quality.
And that's exactly what we can now observe with SC vs ED:
- SC has more marketing therefore more cash flow.
- ED has obviousy more quality but less reputation because of fewer marketing.
But i am optimistic that in the long term ED will be get the reputation it deserves.
This will come out in reviews and product comparisons on gaming sights and not just word of mouth.
The rabid, foamy mouthed ramblings of fans in both camps won't make a huge amount of difference outside of the core groups that hang around in their respective forums. It will be up to external groups, or dare I say it, the official marketing departments, to get traction and penetration elsewhere.
First you compare apples with oranges. Then you reject the terminator example as an exception. And now a demonstration of a simplistic view on what marketing is or is not. Word of Mouth is a form of marketing. And not just a passive one given it can be actively fueled by strategy.
What you are referring to, called above the line marketing because it incurs a cost, of course has a role to play - advertising for example to drive awareness for the initial release. My point is when dealing with fanbases this impact pales into insignificance as compared to good word of mouth which can make or break a project regardless of the marketing spend. And particularly in this connected, online, social media age.
Would you see a heavily advertised film you knew from your like minded friends to be complete garbage? Conversely would you see a movie that you had not even heard about except from like minded friends who are raving about it? Perhaps if I put it that way my point becomes clearer. WOM is so influential above the line marketing is typically deployed to mitigate or amply it's effects. I appreciate it may seem counter intuitive but it is nevertheless true. Go ask any film executive, which is more important, or if it boiled down to one or the other, which would he rather have on his side, he will set you straight very quickly.
P.S. you have not wasted your saturday morning. In spite of being a stubborn student you have just learned something fundamental about mixed marketing to fanbases.
...The rabid, foamy mouthed ramblings of fans in both camps won't make a huge amount of difference outside of the core groups that hang around in their respective forums.
This I refer to as WOF, word of fanboy, it is something new, like Ebola, and definitely not the same as WOM, and I agree it has no credibility or influence on the grand scheme of things, other than if anything to make people reject the proposition. As such as a marketing director the last thing I would want or need is a hoard of militant fanboys evangelising on my behalf. I'm pretty sure in the next few years all marketing text books will be updated accordingly with the appropriate warnings.
SC seems like a ticking time bomb of disappointment. Now they are even doing commercials FOR AN UNFINISHED PRODUCT. They have a insane amount of money, and the development speed is more similar to a ambitious small developer team than what they currently have. They really don't need that much money now, so why are they increasing the income by making commercials?
