"gear curve"? Are you talking my mention of engineering? Well I first faced the learning curve, then the gear curve which took considerably longer to overcome. After getting over both, the game indeed was easy as I had the knowledge and gear to protect myself and do whatever I wanted.
Is Elite: Dangerous too difficult?
- Thread starter Clarion-Z
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"gear curve"? Are you talking my mention of engineering? Well I first faced the learning curve, then the gear curve which took considerably longer to overcome. After getting over both, the game indeed was easy as I had the knowledge and gear to protect myself and do whatever I wanted.
THIS is what I disagree with. I've done precious little grinding in this game. People who grind are impatient people who want to jump to the end of the book rather than enjoy all the chapters that come before.
If you can't enjoy the game in a Cobra (or even the starter Sidewinder), then I propose that you are playing the game wrong or playing the wrong game. My best memories are from the early game in those early ships. Now that I have all these "end game" ships, there's not much left to do with them. I finished the book, and the ending was a bit meh, but the most of the chapters leading up to the ending were enjoyable!
Wrong, I can't enjoy the game with its bulletsponges. It was fun enough before my vanilla gear turned into peashooters.
That seems like a strange and self contradictory take. If the best time you had was in a cobra why not just fly a Cobra? There isn't a lot you can't do in a sidewinder fundamentally so by way of content you could have "finished the book" in the Cobra. There is no underlying force to upgrade.
Also, I can and did enjoy the game in a Cobra. I didn't start in a vette. If the things I used to get to that vette weren't fun in their own right I would have quit. It just so happens that I like Vettes, Condas, Mambas, Kraits and Chieftains more. But I guess that's playing wrong because I still see some things as grindy and don't look back on my cobra days as being the peak.
Okay, on this topic I agree-ish. I absolutely hate what Frontier has done to NPCs to make them "hard". CZ NPCs are not hard, they are boring. Heck, I'll even give you the word you want - CZ NPCs are a GRIND. This bothers me more based on my sense of immersion / realism than it does with the time it takes to destroy an NPC. If it takes me awhile to destroy a battleship Anaconda, well okay, I can see that, but when Vipers and Vultures are bulletsponging MY battleship Anaconda with engineered weapons, that's just nutcakes.
Unfortunately most players use the term "grind" to describe their impatience in going from a Sidewinder to that battleship Anaconda. If they can't do it in a couple of days, then "Woe is us, the game is a grind, I'm not having any fun!" It took me six months to earn my Anaconda as a new player, and I loved every minute of it. These grind-whine snowflakes get their Conda in a day and then quit a week later because they are bored (or they were griefed because they are rubbish pilots), so I have no sympathy for them at all.
But I do have sympathy, empathy even, for your point made above.
Thanks for telling me I'm impatient - after all these years I didn't know that about myself. I just needed you to come along and tell me. Oh, and thanks also for telling me I'm playing the wrong game. Clearly it's not a decision I can make for myself.
In the wee small hours, are you ever haunted by the suspicion that the problem might be your own lack of understanding?
Over and out.
You're the one claiming a game that thousands of people enjoy is more grind than it is fun. Over 38,000 reviews on Steam alone, averaging out to a "Mostly Positive" score. Yet you say it's mostly negative. Apparently statistics side with me on this one.
Now had you said, "I personally find the game to be more grindy than fun" we might be having a different conversation, though I would still come to the conclusion that you are playing the game wrong or playing the wrong game. Or, had you said, "XYZ in ED is a grind!" I might have actually agreed with you, like I did above regarding NPC bullet sponges.
Regardless, I'll be sleeping quite soundly tonight.
All? That's a pretty big blanket and demonstrably wrong. I can think of a number of games that didn't force the player to do something they didn't want to do. Ex. Sword of the Samurai, Sid Meirer's Pirates, Ultima Online to name a few. Something a little more contemporary - Eve. There's more but those are the ones that stand out in my mind. I will qualify this by saying that none of those may qualify in some others minds but I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut that they'd have their own list too.
Can't argue with that but I have to ask; if FD had chosen not to follow that rule when designing ED how many more players would it have now than it does, how much revenue would they be generating and and how much more time and resources would now be allocated to ED instead of their lame copies of the Tycoon games they're - seemingly - spending most of their time and resources on the silly theme park games (NOTE: interesting concepts poorly executed though I freely admit that I am in a very, very small minority of gamers who think that).
Doesn't have to be and it's almost always a bad choice on a dev's part.
No not good. And it makes me think about all the politicians in this world that think they know better than the people do about what is best for the people. They don't, and NEITHER DOES FD.
Aside and tongue in cheek: Geeezzz - you'd make a great socialist and/or dimocrat, Darth - cool game name, by the way.
Games are all about FUN! Work can force you to do things you don't want to do (even if you own the business) - gotta make a living. The goobermint can force you to do things you don't want to do, your wife/partner can force you to do things you don't want to do; the list goes on and on and on. AND - none of it is fun, none of it. I don't know about the rest of you but to do any of those things I have to get paid (OKAY - okay - get yur minds outt'a the gutter
)But a GAME? No way! Games are meant to be fun (well - maybe not for the professionals). If one is forced to do something they don't wish to it stops being fun and when games stop being fun then the reason for playing them essentially ceases to be at which point anyone but a masochist would just plain move on.
NO. I'm not leaving the game - I just like cats.
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Games are all about FUN! Work can force you to do things you don't want to do (even if you own the business) - gotta make a living. The goobermint can force you to do things you don't want to do, your wife/partner can force you to do things you don't want to do; the list goes on and on and on. AND - none of it is fun, none of it. I don't know about the rest of you but to do any of those things I have to get paid (OKAY - okay - get yur minds outt'a the gutter
But a GAME? No way! Games are meant to be fun (well - maybe not for the professionals). If one is forced to do something they don't wish to it stops being fun and when games stop being fun then the reason for playing them essentially ceases to be at which point anyone but a masochist would just plain move on.
Most games are about escapism, especially this kind. Your journey in that game can vary and everyone enjoys different things so no game is going to give people only things they enjoy. Playing parts you dont like is going to happen. It's expected and has nothing to do with work or real life.
There is huge value in a story in making the protagonist struggle, in making their journey hard at times and thus the game mechanic something a player will struggle with and maybe wish didn't exist at the time. But if it's done for a good reason, then the payoff for that will happen to make it worth it and the overall view will be positive.
Your version of what a game is sounds utterly boring or mindless casual crap. Even mario games have things that some players may not like or appreciate (like auto-scrolling levels or particular mini games in mario party) ... They're objectively great games though for their entire content, not just the things a particular player make like.
Whether you enjoy something or whether it's a struggle or unwanted doesn't determine good game design. Purpose plays a much more effective part in that and the problem with the "bad things" in elite is that they are bad because there's no purpose for them being tedious or hard. You would like to equate good design to having to be fun, it doesn't. Fun is subjective for one, but two, good design is a holistic thing that can contain tons of parts - not all will be equally appreciated but all build something that is.
This isn't candy crush.
You made some pretty good points, well spoken, I don't agree with most of 'em but still - a good effort and worth the read.
That said:
ED in it's current state is exactly like candy crush in a critical way (I've watched my wife playing it on occassion). They're both focused on a limited number/type of mind numbingly repetitive tasks. At least ED has some goals - unfortunately after the 1st 10 or 20 times of doing each of them they also become mind numbingly repetitive and lose their shine and the goals become pointless. I haven't found anything new to do in ED for the past 2 years or so - and yet I keep coming back (about once a week for an hour or two compared to the 20 to 30 hours a week for the 1st two years that slowly has gone down and down and down - because it stopped being fun because I was forced to do mining - you know - mats in order to stay competitive - I hate MINING! - forced to do it because for some reason - I've heard all the apologist, white knight B.S. before so don't bother repeating it - FD couldn't just make a market place where a player that hates mining could go buy the mats they need - or trade for 'em with other players -what's up with that?)
I'll keep coming back once or so a week hoping that FD will eventually add some new content (and I find that NPC farming in a HAZ REZ is good exercise for my old and shot reflexes). I'm not holding my breath waiting for new content though.
Like I said, Darth you made some well written and good points though at this juncture we're just gonna have to agree to disagree.
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I agree with this to some extent, primarily in regards to the mission system. Golly gee how tired I am of running the same missions regardless of where I am in the galaxy and who I am running the missions for. I might feel a bit different if the missions themselves were more complex, but most of them are indeed very "candy-crush" in their simplicity and repetitiveness. Farming a RES for bounties is another candy-crush mechanic. Mining and exploring, however, feel different to me, but I enjoy these both to begin with (though mining has only recently interested me thanks to all the activity in Borann).
The game is slow. Plodding. A slog.So many threads needing to reduce the costs of something or make credits more easier to obtain.. or (seen couple) that materials/engineering stuff should be more easy.
Is the game really that hard?
And for those who are going to say "no, but it's just too much grinding": Stop that! Don't grind! You can play without grinding.. unless you actually enjoy it and enjoy complaining about it... then go ahead
Sometimes changes come to the game which make it faster, and people call it easier.
Sometimes changes come to the game which make it slower, and people call this harder.
It's not, for the most part, a game where you have to try try again to develop your skills and get better in order to improve and progress. Nothing in the game is off limits to you if you just keep grinding it out.
Choosing to "not grind" is just pretending you're not on a treadmill while still walking on it at the slowest possible pace.
It is a game where you have to keep walking on the treadmill for long enough to accumulate stuff. As long as you keep walking on the treadmill, you keep accumulating points. You have a little bit of leeway to speed up or slow down the treadmill, but the difference between the top and the bottom is one of degree, not kind. Nothing different happens if you play well. The game asks nothing of its players, and provides nothing for them. It is inert.
Hard and Easy have no place in a discussion of the game as a whole. There might be some individual tasks or activities which are respectively harder or easier to accomplish, but not by a lot. The only ingredient in any of these recipes is time.
I challenge anyone to describe the foundational nature of ED better than Kaocraft has done.
I was largely fine with progression up to engineers. Still a way to Anaconda. I rather picked up diverse roster of ships. I had just acquired a Python when 2.1 released. Took my FAS to CZ and missions as usual and all the combat just took longer. Then I checked what I'd get with the stuff I picked up from 2.0 to 2.1 - I did lots of planet side stuff. Engineered 2 shield boosters and 1 or two other things I don't remember. Grade 1 of course. Then materials were gone. At least for the "useful" stuff. And we were supposed to play cargo truckers for engineering cargo on top back then. Noone had a clue where mats would drop. Then smuggling was nerfed. I had found my own remote system with no traffic whatsoever - it wasn't the big popular one but a bit of galaxy map screening did the job just fine. I liked the smuggle runs, there was always a chance to fail, too.
Found out the game like to screw you over when NPC conda spawned right in front of my Cobra (no shields - a silent runner). I found that a bit cheesy, but tough luck. Stuff happens. The whole run down the drain though. Ordinary missions gave a bit more credits so maybe we'd see some light. Trading was also partly becoming useful given the right state. I unlocked two more engineers.
Nothing to engineer though - I had quite a bit of mats but the ingredient table was just too large. And it was when we could only have limited amount - I don't want to think about how many useful stuff I had discarded up to that point.
You see, when I say "waste of time" it's stuff like this. You get two hands tied behind your back and then you pick gate B because you're sure you've eliminated all duds but the game shuffles secretly the items out again. ED became unfair.
I checked my Python and it was good ship. D-rated only though. It'd take quite a while to get the money for the better modules. A multiple of the ship base price. I found that kinda over the top, but OK. I was just doing BGS anyway. No need for meta builds. A shame though I'd need meta builds soon for PvP though. But I guess that activity was off the table now.
So I did my usual stuff. Mostly on my own. I remember getting shanked in my FAS in CZ. I knew AI would lemming rush me, but they had changed module damage and suddenly when I tried to turn tail and jump out I found myself without thrusters. I gave up fiddling through the UI to find where to restart them. Maybe I found it and they were shot out again. It took a painful while, it was hull-hardened to the top. And that was CZ activity for me off the table.
Then I found out how hull-hardening worked for the AI - fair is fair, no? Some clipper or FDL. I finally gave up and rammed it to death, it was pretty much the only somewhat efficient way to destroy it. That was mission running off the table. Then I took a break from the game.
The next time I logged in was me in Asp I believe and some small craft spawned on me. I tried to destroy it but it just flew reverse. I couldn't believe it would go faster backwards than me boosting after it. I mean, what good are the fat thrusters on the backs of ships when some manouever retros are just as powerful? Alt-F4ed that nonsense away.
And that was pretty much it. The nonsense just kept piling on. And I was getting nowhere.
Reason I don't go to CZ's. HazRes at least deals fairly.
This is the "ish" in my agree-ish, because CZs are optional. I no longer do CZs either, as there's no point to them outside of BGS ops, and they just are not fun after the first couple of playthroughs. If I'm looking for fun combat, I much rather jump in my Eagle and fight lower-ranking, non-bullet sponging, non-turn-on-a-dime-in-a-Conda pirates.
As for RES, I have found these to be too much like "Space Invaders" where you get wave after wave of ships to shoot with no logic or deep gameplay behind it. Which one might see as a grind. I do, however, sometimes go to a RES to provide escort for NPC miners. This means not only protecting them from attack, but also repairing them when they get damaged. It feels more like purposeful gameplay compared to the never-ending Pirate Invaders minigame a RES normally is.
One final note - ED lets you set your own difficulty level by the ships you fly. If you fly a G5 FDL, you are purposefully picking "easy mode". Combat in a G3 Eagle, on the other hand, still offers a challenge to this three year veteran
One final note - ED lets you set your own difficulty level by the ships you fly. If you fly a G5 FDL, you are purposefully picking "easy mode". Combat in a G3 Eagle, on the other hand, still offers a challenge to this three year veteran
Both of these comments do the same misleading thing, excusing fdev. These comments pretend like elite has a mechanic that it doesn't and replaces it with imagination and anti-self choices.
Elite doesn't have escorting. Period. What you are doing is not escorting, you're just harassing npcs that haven't been coded to respond. Escorting involves being asked to lead ships from point A to point B...being compensated in some way for doing it, and being penalized in some way for failing. This would involve either missions in stations or ad-hoc missions out and about. Either way, there's a contract that you've agreed to protect a ship or group of ships and usually you're not alone but part of a group of escorts. See basically any space combat game ever made that's not elite if you need an idea of what escorting actually is.
And yes, it can be harder to play with the worst and weakest option given ...there are playthrus in pretty much every game where the self imposed challenge is to not use anything available to players that would improve their avatar. However, this isn't something games rely on purpose, it's done as a "i've beaten the game at it's highest difficulty and now i'm gonna see if i can win in a way the developers didn't plan for". A good game design would offer players a way to not have to resort to self defeating choices to create difficulty in the game (at least those who aren't just trying to see if it's possible - rather than a viable way to enjoy the game). Elite has no such difficulty gradient. The highest rewards go to the safest activities and the hardest enemies are opt-in groups of either the same fish-in-a-barrel npcs or cheat ships seem to be playing without various restrictions that you never need to interact with. The game doesn't get harder the further along you are, it gets easier. That's not how it should be.
these aren't things the game should get a pass on. Your imagination is not responsible for basic game design ...that's what the developers are for.
A wise teacher says that forgiveness is as much for the person doing the forgiving as it is for the one being forgiven. If you choose to hold onto your righteous anger, that's your choice, but ultimately you are the one who will suffer the most. I choose to play the game in a way that is fun for me, even if it requires thinking "outside the box" to achieve what I am looking for. This brings me happiness. That's my choice.
I do admit that the "bubble of happiness" in this game has been shrinking for me over time. When that bubble collapses completely, I'll move on to something else that brings me joy. And since I know somebody will ask, "But Duck, if you are happy, why do you post grumpy stuff?" The answer is simple - grumping makes me happy, LOL