Might as well add my two cents....
As of right now I don't see myself abandoning the game, not as long as it is still being actively developed - even if that development is now less active and more, er,
coasting until the 2020 mega-update. The game is playable and I find it fun. As I wrote in a different thread, the reason why I love ED (and to a lesser extent, Eve) is because it has the type of sci-fi setting I love most: dark, moody and not populated by goofy aliens (like in so many other games, especially NMS) but by characters out of a film noir. I love that gritty dystopian feel that Frontier has imbued into their game. While the gameplay can get repetitive fast, I find it has that good single player game feeling that keeps me coming back for more because I feel like I am in control of my day-to-day goals and in-game activities.
Now, to be fair, I think a big reason why I don't tire of Elite is because while I consider myself a
dedicated player (i.e., I have 2+ weeks of game time on my current character alone - that's ~300+ hours) I don't consider myself a
hardcore player (i.e., someone who feels the need to play
every day and needs to
quickly master everything the game has to offer). Having a more relaxed attitude towards Elite - or any other game, for that matter - helps keep the magic going. For example, now that the hot days of summer are here, my gametime plummets precipitously for Elite and every other game. I have found that it is due to breaks like this that my favorite games remain popular with me as those breaks keep the games feeling fresh when I do return (especially if new content was released during my break - sadly, it appears that won't be the case with Elite as the next patch is in September).
So, no, I don't see "the end" approaching any time soon when it comes to Elite: Dangerous.
Having said that, I do hope that Frontier closely reads this thread because it is an excellent summation of the many reasons why their hardcore fans are tiring of Frontier's magnum opus. If I
was a hardcore player, I probably would have
also abandoned Elite some time ago. Heck, during those early turbulent years, I
did abandon Elite because I could not stomach the endless bugs and broken mechanics. And while the mechanics have improved, the bugs/glitches I routinely encounter are frankly inexcusable for a game that has been in active development for 4+ years now. Honestly, I have recently returned (yet again
) to dabbling with my Eve Online alpha clone because I am tired of tripping over Elite's bugs that seem to rear their ugly heads even in a quick and routine 30-minute gameplay session. So, yeah, despite Old Duck dismissing the bugs, for me that would be a big reason why I might have reached "the end" if I was a hardcore player. Taking Frontier at their word that Elite: Dangerous is a profitable hit, it is time to move to a monthly patching process like most other MMO-type games as these quarterly patches are not sufficient for a game as complex as Elite. It is also long past due for Frontier to maintain a beta server for constant player feedback before rolling out patches/gameplay additions (yes, I am cribbing CCP's excellent work here).
Of course, others have made many other excellent points for their "the end" conclusions. I particularly agree with the critique about GalNet articles rarely having any gameplay impact. Like much of Elite's unaccountably half-baked content, the Galnet stuff is a real head-scratcher. On one hand, I applaud Frontier for having in-game news as it has always struck me as a huge oversight when complex, player-driven games lack the type of regular news reporting the real world enjoys (Eve can be faulted for this - here, CCP could learn from Frontier!). And I also applaud Frontier for the GalNet news reader they added to our ships - its the next best thing to in-game radio stations! Well done! But I just don't understand why the weekly GalNet stories have almost zero impact on in-game events. It is bizarre! Because few of those stories actually impact the game galaxy, reading GalNet often seems like reading the outline for a forthcoming Elite novel and little else. Why go to the trouble of writing this stuff, and investing the effort to create a news reader!, when the vast majority of articles have no impact on our gameplay?! This is one of those tremendously frustrating aspects of Elite that make me want to walk away from the game, too. It is stuff like that that makes Elite: Dangerous seem like the space sim equivalent of "hell being the impossibility of reason."
Well, as others have said, I am keeping my fingers crossed that the 2020 mega-update is the unofficial relaunch of the game, a reboot that will address many of the long-standing complaints of the playerbase. Elite: Dangerous has the potential to be one of the greatest space games of all time - it is already my favorite space game of all time - but right now it seems stuck in a morass of (perplexingly) half-baked gameplay ideas and buggy code seemingly held together by ducktape. ED deserves better. It hasn't proven enough for me to declare "Fin!" just yet, but I do understand why others are cashing in their chips. As I said before, Elite is my favorite space game of all time...but it is also the
most frustrating game I have ever played because of the development issues myself and others have raised in this thread.
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