Young enough players just make their older parents buy it for them. Young ones ahead.
Next Update = 2020
- Thread starter Cmdr Ultra
- Start date
Young enough players just make their older parents buy it for them. Young ones ahead.
A new player experience which 99% of the players will not use.
Who cares about new player experience 5 years later of release? also there're hundreads of videos on youtube and information on internet already, yes all this should be in the game but it should be since 5 years.
The development of this game really amazes me, its very clear FD is not doing the game they want to play, if they do they are clearly thargoids.
Han: “one moment while I pull up Inara to find a tabana gas mine...”
Leia: “inara? What’s that?”
Han: “yeahhhh... frontier built the navicomputer for the falcon... gotta use third party apps to find anything. Makes smuggling interesting...”
Leia: *Ew-face*
C3PO: “our chances of finding 6A thrusters in-game are approximately 3,971 .... to 1...”
R2D2: *sadddd beeeep*
Leia: “inara? What’s that?”
Han: “yeahhhh... frontier built the navicomputer for the falcon... gotta use third party apps to find anything. Makes smuggling interesting...”
Leia: *Ew-face*
C3PO: “our chances of finding 6A thrusters in-game are approximately 3,971 .... to 1...”
R2D2: *sadddd beeeep*
I agree: 99% of (recently) active players likely won't use a New Player Experience, because they already know how to play the game and/or are active in the community so can find help/advice.
Instead, the NPE will be targeted at those players who haven't played for a long time (for whatever personal reason), and new players obviously - I'd estimate that at least 10% of negative reviews are "far to difficult" or "don't know what to do".
A small fraction of game buyers check official forums, Reddit, YouTube, or Twitch, for help and guides on how to play a difficult/expansive/deep/complicated/no-hand-holding (choose whichever adjective you prefer) game.
With the 2yr+ development cycle of the EliteDangerous2020 update ("our biggest update yet") which began last Summer, FDev are clearly aiming at bringing huge numbers of ex-players back ("the size and scope of the content we wish to bring to the Elite Dangerous galaxy"; "this milestone is our continued and unwavering commitment to making Elite Dangerous the most authentic, ambitious, and expansive evolving space game in the world") and attracting new ones too. My guess is that they're aiming for a dramatic improvement similar to Final Fantasy 14's Realm Reborn (2.5yr dev cycle; new engine, total revamp) and No Man Sky's NEXT (1yr dev cycle; large iteration from 1.1-1.3) updates.
FDev will no doubt push Milestone2020 heavily on the marketing side: mainstream & gaming media reviews & articles, YouTuber Let's Plays, high-viewership Twitch streamers, Reddit posts, and Twitter-spam, to get the word out as much as possible. Maybe even cinema adverts again? Similar widespread marketing to that used with Jurassic World Evolution. Large-scale marketing of a single, massive release/update is much easy to co-ordinate compared to frequent, smaller updates.
Elite Dangerous' basegame has sold 3m copies, and Horizons 1.4m. The immediate conclusion is that there are 1.6m (ex-)players that never tried the gameplay/content of Horizons+Beyond, who can be potentially attracted back with a massive update. Plus the many hundreds of thousands of Horizons-owning former CMDRs who stopped playing at least 6 months ago. Finally, the new players who buy the game everyday - around 750k copies are sold each year.
Those are the players that the New Player Experience is being developed for, and I'm interested to see what emerges.
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New players. Check the recent Steam reviews, at any given time there's usually at least one negative review from a player with less than two hours played.
I certainly dont care about it, and i dont understand why it is even mentioned. Just fix the god damn npe without changing the normal rate of developing stuff for old and loyal customers.
I guess various excuses will be used from now on, to buy time for the other projects.
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It depends how you do the turorial though doesn't it. In lots of games the tutorial is done in game via the first few things in the quest line. There's plenty of people who have been around ages saying they need to be given something to do by FDEV. They could combine the two in a chain of missions that cover the basics or even advanced things.
Kind of harsh but I agree with this sentiment (except the part about consoles), but probably for different reasons.
The way I see it, it's always going to be impossible to give a newbie ALL the information they need about ED, for both intellectual and practical reasons.
If somebody attempted to explain everything about ED, even in the most rudimentary terms it's quite simply not going to sink it.
Even if it was possible, a newbie in a 7Ly Sidey isn't in any position to play along with tutorials involving the vast majority of ED's gameplay.
And then there's the whole ethos of the game.
I might be wrong about this but I was under the impression that a newbie is supposed to be a rookie pilot who's setting out on a journey of discovery in a dangerous galaxy?
You know how to fly a ship, you have that innate capitalist sense of opportunity and you're supposed to go forth and embiggen yourself.
Again, I can only speak for myself but, for me, the main attraction of ED was the thought of this huge, tangled, opaque, convoluted, variety of stuff to discover... once I bought a fuel scoop.
Providing additional assistance for newbies is only going to serve to undermine the mystique of the game IMO.
It'd be like providing tutorials for Subnautica which (spoilers) told you what you need to to to get into a place that's swamped with radiation, what to do if you find a gigantic space-cannon that needs disabling and where to go if you want to find some wacky alien portals.
This thread reminds me why I don't go to the forums too often any more..
Honestly, take it easy and just play the game, will you? Or don't.
Let me give you my lip:
I have been here since beta (I am a LEP holder).
I have some breaks now and then, but I always come back to ED.
I still enjoy this game immensely when I play it.
I am not at all troubled by waiting longer for the next big step.
I am not at all troubled if not a single thing is paid content until then.
I truly wish I could give all the haters my feel; you sure could use it
Honestly, take it easy and just play the game, will you? Or don't.
Let me give you my lip:
I have been here since beta (I am a LEP holder).
I have some breaks now and then, but I always come back to ED.
I still enjoy this game immensely when I play it.
I am not at all troubled by waiting longer for the next big step.
I am not at all troubled if not a single thing is paid content until then.
I truly wish I could give all the haters my feel; you sure could use it
Ah, the good ol' Dilbert situation:
"I can do one of these two things in the time allotted - which one shall I do?"
"Just roll them into one thing and do that."
Yeah, time/resources don't work like that.
There's a slightly distastefully selfish tone to a lot of this: "it won't affect me so why should I care?" or even "it won't affect me so they shouldn't be doing it"
Well, guess what - not everything is about us. In many ways we're the least important people here because they've already got our money - it's not like we're going to cancel our subscriptions.
On one hand I don't mind Frontier bringing in a better experience for new players and I think it's actually good for the game. On the other hand I am so glad I experienced being a new player way back in Premium Beta when it was hard and tough. Those good memories will always stay with me.
We obviously don't know what Frontier are planning for NPE but what would be great is if the NPE is optional so people that like it tough can start off that way.
We obviously don't know what Frontier are planning for NPE but what would be great is if the NPE is optional so people that like it tough can start off that way.
My story too, no LEP but since Beta around. On and off but love to play it as it's currently is. I thank the developers for creating this game.
Updates and packs come when they are done and ready. Until then I just play like I do every time.
Ofc there is a selfish tone there. People are saying that the game is not helping at all new players for now like 5 years and they remembered just now to improve the npe lol. You know what? They can dedicate the entire 2019 and the entire 2020 about it, will it make a huge difference to the rest of us? I don't think so personally. So yes i say go for it.
Its pretty funny to see people excited about improving the "new player experience", when new players gets rekt at the starter systems, with no serious c&p preventing this from happening. But its a cut throat gallaxy i know, i know. Fix some more training tutorials, me says.
And maybe that's what some of the improvements will be about.
And there's a difference between 'getting excited' and 'recognising it needs doing sooner rather than later'.
I m' with you, excited or not. It needs doing. Get that npe the best it can be. Stuff like multi-crew and power play can wait.
Since none of those things affect me in the slightest I couldn't care less, but in the interest of "I'd quite like the game to still exist a few years from now" then I say get the NPE done.
dayrth
Volunteer Moderator
I have a theory. Actually I have no supporting evidence so it's more of a hypothesis.
The horizons season took much longer than people expected. I think it took longer than FD expected. Some features announced (ice planets, carriers), have been dropped/delayed. FD for a long time now are very reluctant to talk about what's coming next.
PC and JWE seem to be working well, but ED is beset with problems. I do not believe this is because FD have abandoned ED in favour of the other games. I think ED has reached the limits of the Cobra engine. This is why things have taken longer than expected, why some features turned out not to be viable and why FD don't want to tell us what's being worked on (because they can't be sure any of it will work) and why some bugs just won't go away.
FD tell us they have been working on the 'next evolution of Elite' for some months, and now they tell us it will take another year and a half. Wouldn't that be about the amount of time it would take for an engine rewrite/major update?
...and if FD are updating Cobra to suit ED specifically then. If I am correct then I see a very bright future, but as I say this is pure speculation.
The horizons season took much longer than people expected. I think it took longer than FD expected. Some features announced (ice planets, carriers), have been dropped/delayed. FD for a long time now are very reluctant to talk about what's coming next.
PC and JWE seem to be working well, but ED is beset with problems. I do not believe this is because FD have abandoned ED in favour of the other games. I think ED has reached the limits of the Cobra engine. This is why things have taken longer than expected, why some features turned out not to be viable and why FD don't want to tell us what's being worked on (because they can't be sure any of it will work) and why some bugs just won't go away.
FD tell us they have been working on the 'next evolution of Elite' for some months, and now they tell us it will take another year and a half. Wouldn't that be about the amount of time it would take for an engine rewrite/major update?
...and if FD are updating Cobra to suit ED specifically then
. If I am correct then I see a very bright future, but as I say this is pure speculation.
Yep... And if we look at the new mining, I'm confused how that got through design meetings and internal testing like it is. There's some clear design and balancing issues with it, which should easily have been addressed in the early design loops, yet here it is in game.
It's yet another in a list of all too often half baked design outcomes/choices IMHO.
It doesn't give a nice warm sense of confidence with the design loops now in action for the next big update.
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If you're referring to the rather high payouts you can get from core-mining: shutup!shutup!shutup!shutup!shutup!shutup!!!