Frontier grows too fast ? Not enough coordination in the services ?
Management problem ?
Unfortunately I think internally they are very happy with the game and slightly bemused as to why we are not, and that does not bode well.
From the top. Braben has his ED galaxy delivered and it is good. I think the whole thing was pretty much handed over to the secondary game devs after the core deployment for 2.0. And the rest is...
My problem with Braben is that he does not seem to have moved on with the times, the technology and the player base. He seems to be fixated with delivering a game via text like a 1980s graphical adventure. I honestly believe that Braben's vision for the game is pretty much delivered as it is. The basic look and feel of the game is spot on, perfect. You can interact with the galaxy pretty much like Frontier First Encounters. After that was accomplished Braben then has no vision for the 'game' and what players are going to do. I don't think he has any concept of what gaming has become, particularly MMOs, and how players can interact with a game world and each other. So we get a fantastic looking game that is driven by basic menus and walls of text.
To flesh out the Elite Dangerous world, he fell back on what he knew, lore delivered by background text. That worked really well in FFE in the early 90s. We got a handful of booklets in that game with wall to wall text, background and lore of the galaxy, gazetteer of planets, an in depth manual on how to fly, fight, trade, do missions, work for the military, etc. Like a lot of games in the 80s and 90s the game would be interspersed with TEXT - speech bubbles, text driven menus, story and plot. This was due to the technical limitations of interacting with a fully animated avatar or a video talking head.
But for a game like Elite made today, delivering the game lore by text is extremely weak. Take Professor Palin. Who here has interacted with Prof Palin? Oh you have? You mean via a basic TEXT menu? And how did that interaction go, did you feel that he was responding to what you were doing saying? Or did it feel like you were interacting with a 1980s gaming menu?
Have you seen the game Black & White? Have you seen the methods of interacting with the game world and the menus? To access the game menus you have to enter the temple in the game, and the game menus are in there, as part of the game, and you interact with them the same way you do in the game. The game lore is delivered by characters you can interact with, and the story emerges from what happens in the game, there's very little menus and very little text at all, in fact the game has the facility for you to use gestures and develop shorthand for those gestures, and it uses colour to denote mood. Elite Dangerous could have had all of these things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjMBJ8_-sss
Why aren't we flying down and entering a base and INTERACTING in some meaningful with a character? No. We get GALNET walls of TEXT about Professor Palin, meaningless copy'n'paste CGs, and a basic text menu. 1980s game play implemented with 2010s technology.
The Thargoids. I watched those Thargoid streams where FD delivered their most EXCITING(tm) game content yet ENTIRELY BY TEXT. We watched Ed Lewis 'find' a mysterious beacon. We were then given a CG to do, fetching DATA/FISH, the outcome of which we knew was already predetermined. The next day part two of the stream, Ed open by addressing the children present "Well done community, thanks to you Porfessor Palin now has enough data to be able to decipher the message". He then preceded to read a wall of text that the game generated which ANNOUNCED THE ARRIVAL OF THE THARGOIDS. Ed then turned to the camera with an EXCITED(tm) look on his face to officially declare the arrival of the Thargoids in the game. There you go folks, you will now be encountering Thargoids, THEY ARE HERE. It was the weakest thing I'd ever watched. The depressing thing is that FD are happy with that content delivery and their own game lore.
There was zero agency from the players. We could go and get the message ourselves from this beacon, but whats the point, we had to watch the stream to know what to do, but then we were given all the answers in that stream, there was nothing different for a player to do, except go and experience for themselves exactly what they had seen Ed do on the stream.
It's 2018, and FD are delivering their content entirely by text. It was at this moment that I realised they were clueless from the top down.
They have absolutely no imagination when it comes to delivering their content. Why did they not drip the Thargoids in like so many have suggested? We start seeing NPCs with odd damage, and the airwaves are filled with panicky radio chatter about some new mysterious, and exciting, threat. A station or two get attacked, maybe destroyed. Some players start to get ambushed doing salvage missions in a certain area of the galaxy. Is it Thargoids? FD are silent. Some player groups head out to investigate...
I will continue to pop in and out of the game. The ED online community is the best there is, not just gaming wise. And still, on a basic level, Elite Dangerous is the BEST GAME THERE IS. I have friends online that would be a loss if I dropped the game. I enjoy rares trading immensely, especially in groups, we have so much fun playing together! I basically ignore Engineers and enjoy flying around in the ships, being immersed in the ED galaxy, interacting with the players. I will continue to enjoy Elite Dangerous DESPITE Frontier Developments.
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