Slapping a "2" st the end of a franchise name doesn't make it magically better or easier to develop. They would have to recreate everything from scratch. You really want to wait another 5-10 years of nothing new until we are again where we are now? It's silly. Has always been silly and will never not be silly. I mean, look at Star Citizen and what restarting over and over again did to their development.
Should Frontier continue labouring over Elite Dangerous? Or call it time and work on Elite Dangerous 2?
- Thread starter Alien
- Start date
-
- Tags
- discussion
With Elite Dangerous being the 4th title in the franchise, you are correct, a new Elite game would be Elite V in all but name.
Wouldn't it be Elite 5?
Which is why I said Elite Dangerous 2, as it would be a sequel to Elite Dangerous, the idea being they basically remake Elite Dangerous, not necessarily remake/reboot the entire franchise.
When they aren't breaking it
Sequels are often based heavily on the predecessor code unless they plan to jump to a new engine entirely. It might offer some really great things but the technical debt would be huge. It's not like off the shelf game engines are doing the things in ED as standard fare. On another note, all code is a mess.
Indeed. Many of those lessons are now in the ED codebase. They may or may not be in the heads of the current developers. Starting from scratch often means re-learning all those things.
No idea
Is there enough LEP to actually make a dint?
I still don't get all this crying about EDO... It is a huge addition, it's basically like an elite 2 and a huge step in the right direction on the journey to the complete scfi experience.
Yes not all is working perfectly and there is work to be done, they are on it but all this mimi I don't trust them anymore...is just ridiculous. Sometimes I have the impression there so much tears over minor stuff in the whole picture and really no understanding how complicated stuff is.
Yes not all is working perfectly and there is work to be done, they are on it but all this mimi I don't trust them anymore...is just ridiculous. Sometimes I have the impression there so much tears over minor stuff in the whole picture and really no understanding how complicated stuff is.
It depends when you bought the LEP and how much you paid.
If you bought it during the kickstarter, you might have (with Odyssey) had your money's worth if you value it at that time at £85 which I think was the minimum amount for the LEP
If you bought it afterwards, I think you paid about £140, so you'd want at least one more expansion, maybe two.
Forum goes up, forum goes down. Game goes up, game goes down. NMS was hammered on release and now its done a universal 360.
The game will continue, it clearly needs work but its demise to likely to be greatly over estimated. IMO.
Edit: It's understandable, but I get the impression that having such a rotation of staff on the game hasn't been helpful to the long term continuity of the game. Indeed creating a game and adding to it in such a significant way is a problem all of its own when it comes to keeping staff and knowledge of the game.
The game will continue, it clearly needs work but its demise to likely to be greatly over estimated. IMO.
Edit: It's understandable, but I get the impression that having such a rotation of staff on the game hasn't been helpful to the long term continuity of the game. Indeed creating a game and adding to it in such a significant way is a problem all of its own when it comes to keeping staff and knowledge of the game.
Last edited:
Have they though?
Historically, their development has been sub-par and in no way professional. What has beendelivered time after time, has been ill-thought-out, and bug-ridden. Following that we have periods of 'bug fixing and optimisation' which rarely have delivered. Prior to EDO, EDH was still a buggy mess. EDO was built on top of that mess and so, inherits all the bugs. What development house does something like that?
We seem to be faced with a carousel of rotating developers who just add stuff on without any prior experience of the game or it's audience. And it is all built on a game engine not fit for purpose. We're sold vapourware. A promise on deliverables which are never delivered. MultiCrew is broken, Combat is broken, Crime and Punishment is broken, Missions are broken, and none of these are EDO related, they're all prior work. And to hide the 'mistakes of the past' frontier have a voting mechanism on reported bugs, which means those thatdo not gain enough votes, are automically closed.
In short, No, Frontier have learned nothing, and appear not to want to learn.
No, other developers simply avoid the genre, online open world space games, galaxy simulation, astronomical correctness etc. It's niche and the return isn't historically that great when there are simpler alternatives.
I don't think it has as much to do with the developer as much as new scope and first iteration of complexity always introduce more gameplay paths and bugs.
Other companies avoid it by designing around more linear paths. Open world games often tend to lean torwards mass market like car stealing and sexy wizards to justify the budget.
I don't think we will see another developer try to do something quite like this with a realistic galaxy simulation, hence the last three games that did it have all come from the same place.
Last edited:
One thing is for sure Frontier will never win MasterChef they would be KICKed out at the STARTer!
As long as we get to walk inside the animal and maybe even get to look after a Cobra IV
The genre is one of the most common on Unity and other engine sites. Obviously without 'galaxy simulation' but then, what benefit do we get with 'galaxy simulation' ?? After five miutes you're jumnping to systems like CRA-73-H1. DOes that in any way make the game better or worse?
And following that, the procedural engine for the 'galaxy' has been there since 2014 and hasn't changed much if at all. The problem, is that what they added to that to make a game of it, is a mish mash of ideas, badly developed and badly delivered.
Games in the genre continue to be developed. If you used Elite's Graphics in NMS you'd have closer to what most of what Elite's players want and certainly more than what we have now in Elite. And... NMS developer count is a small fraction of Elite's.. How can one team develop and deliver more than multiples oof Elite teams? We're talking 20 vs 100s here.
I'm not sure I agree. The genre is hardly saturated with interest from large studios. When ED released back in 2014 there was only Eve and Evochron Mercenary, it's great that there are more indie developers now like Hello games, but there are still few others pushing much resources into 'Elite' like games (intended as complete products in any case).
I don't think the "NMS is doing more" argument can really go anywhere. How do you quantify more against what metric? NMS isn't doing quite so many things with regard to BGS and realism and perhaps multi-player..it's doing it's own thing really well - but it's a game designed around it's limiations WELL, they keep the graphics stylised and they keep the multiplayer aspects tight...adding more developers onto a mid-sized team does not instantly give you a metric of additional completed work compared to number of developers. Do we really know how those numbers compare anyway? Are Frontier using more artists? More sound staff? More support staff? Does it matter?
I doubt you will get EA or Ubisoft or any other developer chucking 30 developers in a room and saying "Make Elite but with no bugs and make server code all perfect". So I can't see where the argument goes.
If you think NMS is doing more with less developers then you may well be correct. I am still glad that Frontier are continuing to support a game I feel there's room for with a mid-sized development team.
Last edited:
Well, to me, that would look like a way to avoid fulfilling the lifetime pass obligation. Would most LEP owners have expected to get only 2 expansions for their money? I paid full price for ED and Horizons. Add Odyssey to it and I still paid much less than an LEP.
I don't see it. The market for space games like this is only so big. The vast majority of customers for an ED2 would be ED players already.
They could design an ED2 to have more mass-market appeal, to target players of games like Destiny and Warframe, but that's a pretty high-risk strategy these days. For every big live-service game that does well and sticks around, a dozen crash and burn. FDev have a niche of dedicated players, and I think they want to keep them. I could see them making another lice-service game someday, but probably not an ED successor.
They could design an ED2 to have more mass-market appeal, to target players of games like Destiny and Warframe, but that's a pretty high-risk strategy these days. For every big live-service game that does well and sticks around, a dozen crash and burn. FDev have a niche of dedicated players, and I think they want to keep them. I could see them making another lice-service game someday, but probably not an ED successor.
If you only know a hammer, every problem is a nail.
Just put a "2" on the back and all is well Very consumer oriented idea of problem solving. That a piece of software is probably not subject to the restrictions of completeness and not changeability can be imagined. But which complexity FDev represent here strongly determines how error-prone something is and that is a normal development factor.
But to let something out into the world without quality assurance is a completely different matter! So normally now prioritized and fixed, which also happens quite clearly. Looking forward to the further development!
Greetings to all, have fun!
Just put a "2" on the back and all is well
Very consumer oriented idea of problem solving. That a piece of software is probably not subject to the restrictions of completeness and not changeability can be imagined. But which complexity FDev represent here strongly determines how error-prone something is and that is a normal development factor.But to let something out into the world without quality assurance is a completely different matter! So normally now prioritized and fixed, which also happens quite clearly. Looking forward to the further development!
Greetings to all, have fun!
Last edited: