Dont say that. OP might actually enjoy it!
A masterclass of fake game design = Void opals by FDEV
- Thread starter EvilWinkle
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I can code. I've even written fin software but, woe betide anyone that tries to get economic advise from me.
Sorry, yes, it is what I meant...
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Kiddo, you are arguing here with people who are earning their livelihood with designing software, writing specifications and coding guidelines, producing code and doing quality asessments.
Seriously - stop digging.
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No, they haven't done quality assessements in a while, i assure you.
Is there something you don't understand about the word "personal idea"?
Do i have to say nothing, and let people ruin it, because i cannot code the graphic engine by myself, in example?
What does this have to do with the main argument?
Most of the things i'm arguing about don't cost a lot of manpower to fix, they're just minor coding mistakes, but combined with lousy game design, they give, at least to me and more than 10 other people (for the moment) a very negative impression.
I know enough about coding to know what is impressive (a graphic engine) and not impressive (a database), that is all, and i stand by my words.
Stop trying to drag me into your stupid personal fights, and quit trying to provoke me with the "kiddos".
The way you're incapable of systematizing in a debate tells who reasons like a kid here, and with absolute certainty.
The only thing i'm sad about is not sticking to my words = i want answers in-game, and only in-game.
And i'm going to fix that right now.
I've written a subsim on 2KB programmable calculator. No flightstick support. Outrageous.
It's not digging. I'd suggest at this point to stop feeding trolls.
I'll be following my own advice.
I'm just waiting to see where the fruit and veg idea goes
ED has lots of bugs, bad UI design, and half-baked game mechanics. This is undeniable fact. Now whether or not ED is still a good game overall despite this is subjective. It's "good enough" to have kept me around all these years, but I totally understand those who quit in frustration, because I've done that more than once as well.
My post wasn't that supercruise exists and shouldn't. It's that supercruise exists and is boring. Nothing happens to engage the player or make use of the sometimes dozens of minutes required of the player to complete this portion of the game in all travel.
Again, the point is not that loading the next system happens when you travel to it. It's that there is no gameplay engaging the player while doing it. There is nothing breaking up and adding engaging / fun gameplay to a player traveling multiple systems away. The current method, much like supercruise is totally devoid of any reason the player would not want to just skip entirely. It can easily be a majority of time a player spends in a given task and fdev utilizes it 0% to add some kind of gameplay to that task.
No, players didn't want npcs that cheated by being able to do things that human players can't which is what happened. Better, more intelligent ai routines weren't implemented, they were wanted to be implemented but that developer was re-assigned before it could be done. What we got was npcs that simply had stats human equiv ships did not and ignored damage and energy reqs and ammo that human ships could not ignore.
Being a re-imagining of something old doesn't give it a pass on being lazy and unimaginative and just plain bad. Plenty of other games do the same thing but manage to improve upon what existed before due to the reduced resources available back during the original release. There's nothing prohibiting fdev from retaining an ad-hoc trading board type system as well as missions and say, making all commodities equally important to trade for different reasons without making only a couple worth anyone's time to ever care about. Or tie that system to the actual production of ships seen in the game or even the availability of player purchaseables. Or to make the entire interface more immersive with less boxes with text and static images of avatars and maybe meeting talking avatars that remember your past interactions. There are lots of ways the system can stay nostalgic without retaining the past limitations.
Nearly every system should be some use to the player or there is no point in having them in the game other than to waste the player's time. Having some be wasteful is fine, so long as most are not. It's not about being settled. It's about having relevance to gameplay and what role does a given thing in game have to gameplay. Currently, all of the systems serve negative gameplay. They are time sinks with no redeeming use to players. Whether it's populated or not, these systems should serve more of a function to players than to just look at. Epecially when there is so much potential to add things that players could utilize them for. Whether it's ways players could initiiate npc involvement in a system and create bgs interactions that otherwise wouldn't happen or leverage them in other more personal ways. But a lot of what you can do to make these better gameplay assets is with the last thing i mentioned .
Not sure what the response here you gave means. Are we supposed to be think that getting a little warm when getting close to a star (regardless of how hot the star actually is) is somehow good use of environmental hazards in space ? That adding some jets around pulsars and white dwarfs that spin you around a bit in supercruise is good use of environmental hazards? No.
There's plenty of opportunity to make the different kinds of stars you can scoop from for instance have a whole different mechanic that takes into consideration the particular procedural attributes of the star and implements magnetic, plasma outburts and changing radiation types depending on your location over say, sunspots to make refueling an engaging game mechanic. There is plenty of opportunity to make mining in rings around gas giants be far more hazardous due to strong radiation belts interacting with the roids in the ring and strong magnetic fields playing havoc with ship systems making players have to strategize how to use the roids to avoid exposure - etc. For roid mining to cause dangerous unexpected explosions ejecting rocks at your ship. or some places to have lots of debris that is moving at extreme velocities thru the ring due to recent collisions or activity by miners that can hit your ship. For exploration to have to deal with similar dangers by active star systems you jump into, where supercruise is not reliable.
These wouldn't be everywhere at the same degree. Places where these issues exist to strong levels would be places fdev could have high value commidities or materials or other tasks for players to acquire or accomplish. The environment should be utilized to create danger for players more so than npcs are. Space itself should be dangerous and that's one of the biggest failures from Fdev for this game and if you want to bring up how FDev developed and sold the game like in your response to trade. Elite was sold on space in this game being dangerous. That the galaxy is dangerous. it's in the taglines since release. And it's never been true. The galaxy is 100% safe. Most of the roles most efficient ways of playing are 100% safe.
So start again, what happened?
I think I can jump in here and say that as an actual, genuine, programmer, I can back up the statements made by the other two people.
My problem with ED - and any other game for that matter - is that as someone who can program, I can see the "man behind the curtain". I also happen to know about the underlying server & data setup (the back-end services - Dav gave a talk about it in an Amazon AWS video which is available to view on Youtube). The "man behind the curtain" is, to me, a lot more obvious in ED than it is in other games I play.
I vouch for the opinions stated by the other two people - they do stand up to scrutiny and are perfectly valid.
Actual helpful people. They're a rarity around here.
I did hesitate with the suggestion, but you never know right? Some people like that sort of thing...!
And as a self-employed astronaut I can vouch for the notion that people can like/dislike a computer game for whatever reason they want without needing someone to vouch for them. And that "seeing the man behind the curtain more than in other games" is a fine but stunningly subjective complaint, regardless of what you do between 9-5.
Not that it matters, Darth is the only one who made some very critical yet constructive comments actually useful to the devs. The rest of us are just a bunch of presumedly adults arguing wether a game is/is not/is so poopypants.
"Boring" as well as "fun" are subjective, though. I find both watching and playing football extremely boring, but for millions of other people it's apparently great fun.
Not as I remember it. Or rather, not on both of the occasions I remember.
Sure - but you were talking about objective complaints. What you are describing here are - to me - the endless and repeated trips of Cmdr Shephard across a couple of more or less identical space stations, in order to talk repeatedly with the same NPCs. It's a different game design, but not necessarily an objectively worse game design.
As an explorer: every system is of some use to me. Admittedly, some of them are just stepping stones and refuelling stations on the way to get somewhere.
As a BGS player: every inhabited system is of some use to me.
It seems that your idea of gameplay is different from mine - that's not a problem, Elite is big enough for a lot of ideas about gameplay. It may be too big to encompass all specific ideas about gameplay, but that doens't make it an objectively bad design.
Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Yes, ED could be better - but then again, that's a subjective assessment. You've been around a year longer than I have - you remember the times when being able to afford a new ship was a big step, and when people regularly (ok, not the same person) lost their new Python because they wanted to make the rebuy back with that first successful cargo delivery.... You should also remember what the forum clamoured for: more money, lower rebuys, no risk. Well, it's a case of getting what you asked for.
I'm not complaining (much) - people have enough trouble with the learning curve as it is. And by design, ED needs to work with that procedural generation with only a very much limited amount of hand-crafted assets - there just isn't the capacity or the money here to fill the Galaxy, or even the Bubble, with them. Which means, the Galaxy has to be pretty much the same everywhere - if one star type is tough to scoop, every instance of this type of star is tough to scoop. If one type of ring is more dangerous to mine in, then that goes for every instance of this type of ring. Yes, you could increase or branch out the types, but that's limited. So what I want to say, I think, is this: you (or me) are used to the level of danger and excitement in the Galaxy, it's all the same to us. You can land on any high g world, supercharge from a Neutron star with ease, killing NPCs is just too easy and PvP mostly boring. But everyone sees the same Galaxy and the same stars. And there are enough players for whom the Galaxy as it is is dangerous enough so that these come into the forums to complain about losing their ship and being thrown back into the freewinder, then throwing their toys out of their pram and ragequitting.
If, on the other hand, FD had seeded the Galaxy with a small number of non-procedurally generated real dangers - how do you know these are not out there? Less than 0.1% or so of the Galaxy have been visited - or at least visited by CMDRs who lived to tell the tale
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You say so only because you don't have an old Microsoft Sidewinder FFB lying around. Guess why they're still so sought after.
Oh yes, back to the topic: rants, stuff, bad game but good but also bad, throwing insults at people 'cause I'm a cool kid, being coder/designer/artist/plumber/lorry driver depending on context, snarky remarks, insightful remarks, random digs at SC, bottom hats, flimleys. I love the smell of Dangerous Discussion in the morning.
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