I've seen it happen so many times: a company pivots their product to chase the casuals and in doing so disenfranchise their core demographic. The product doesn't tend to last long after that.
Big Elite Streamers Giving Up On Streaming Elite?
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the opposite can be true as well - ESO - where catering to casuals and making the game more accessible for this group gave the game a great boost. This game is not in any concurrence to Elite, so moderators don't blame me for mentioning it.
I think though that catering to casuals is a business move, when it comes to premium shops in the game - casuals don't have much time to play and are likely to pay for boosters and fluff to enjoy their limited gaming time more. So this makes sense for a game, which has a premium shop or some subscription advantages - both valid for ESO.
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I remember playing Zebedee back in the day at uni (1994). Last time I looked it was still there but I could not remember my log in details.
You hit big bat bone crunchingly hard
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There was a lot more effort put into those games, mainly because they were so limited. You couldn't hide a bad game behind flashy graphics and memory limitations were such that you really had to find groundbreaking solutions to solve them. Braben famously did this, with Hill, in the original game, generating an entire galaxy, positions, attributes and descriptions using a clever use of Fibonacci numbers to simulate 'randomness' - it is probably, to this day, still more advanced a procedural algorithm than you'll find in many more modern titles out there.
Personally I blame the rise of middle management. Design of games is increasingly the remit of talent-less mid-level cogs that produce nothing of worth.
MUDs were actually pretty rich gameplay-wise - there is a lot of stuff which would be quite hard to implement with graphics. I played a german MUD called final frontier for example, one of the races were the Rihannsu. They were shape-shifters for a limited time. As a Rihannsu if I wanted i could be a painting on the wall eavesdropping on people for as long as I could keep up the shape-shift. The room-text got an extention like "There is a picture on the wall." but as long as no one examined that picture, I could remain undetected. I could be anything really - a slight warm summer-breeze - whatever I wrote to be, would be added to the room-text. Try that in a graphical game.
As far as Mr. Braben goes - why did he have to "invent" an RNG generator - linear congruential generators were known since the 1950s and good enough for this purpose.
i personally like multiply-with-carry, but this was invented in the 1990s, iirc, by George Marsaglia - it's cryptographic safe and done in assembler on a normal pc spits out millions of random numbers per second - takes just a couple of dozens of nanoseconds to compute a new number. In theory, unfortunately, as long as those are in the caches that is, but when they have to be flushed out to RAM - takes an eternity
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As someone in a programme management role I resent that
I don't think it is mid-level cogs that are solely the cause of all problems as such. There will be good ones and there will be bad ones; the good ones can be of benefit to dev teams, often acting as a buffer to the wider organisation especially when it comes to expectations management. It is the bad ones that set unrealistic targets, push teams to crunch and mislead stakeholders.
I was admittedly generalizingAs someone in a programme management role I resent that
I don't think it is mid-level cogs that are solely the cause of all problems as such. There will be good ones and there will be bad ones; the good ones can be of benefit to dev teams, often acting as a buffer to the wider organisation especially when it comes to expectations management. It is the bad ones that set unrealistic targets, push teams to crunch and mislead stakeholders.
I've both been in managment (middle up to C-level) and in the trenches and you get all sorts. Problem with managment is when they're good, they're very good and when they're bad they're still very good at covering up their screw ups and not getting fired.
that is strange, the link points to Ian Phillip's request - but it shows one of my former posts.So true. But that is what this fine community (or should I say zeitgeist?) makes of the game.
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I just noticed Ian Phillip's request
I respect this and promise this was my last note here about "other games".Big Elite Streamers Giving Up On Streaming Elite?
Alright, lets go with your example. You P2W you way to the best ships. You no longer need credits. So what do you do in SC next? Explore the gala.... nope can't do it, just one Star System. Fight for a faction to raise their influence in the System? Fight for a local Warlord to take over some...forums.frontier.co.uk
Happens with a lot of products.
I played Horizons for fifteen minutes last night...
Pretty sure they're youtubers.
Pestily even streams himself sleeping so he doesn't lose viewers, LOL. (~2.8K viewers WHILE sleeping ..right now).
Tarkov is still in 'beta' or 'alpha' but should be considered a FPS. Hard to compare a sandbox space sim to one of the most popular FPS, especially from a spectator perspective. I enjoy both games, for very different reasons. Justifying streaming or not streaming is not indicative of the game's future or play and an invalid form of comparison, imo.
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Yea, in my experience free thinking/outside the box thinking and creative productivity solutions are NOT rewarded in the job market. Only drones and sheep seem to make it anywhere. God forbid if you dont think what your boss thinks and any advice or ideas is looked at like I'm trying to tell them how to do their job.
Some one needs to. lmao they sure as heck didn't know how
ED is not a game for 'casuals' and I'm not being elitist here. It has a steep learning curve and takes time, I personally almost never played less than 1 hour sessions because I couldn't get much done in that time.
but that is your personal view that one has to get something done - some just play it to enjoy themselves, regardless of if they get something done or not.
It heavily depends on the definition of casual, more so than most other games. Like, how many games do you know of where it's a coin flip whether someone says it's a game for forumdads or a game for nolifers? It's pretty unique.
I would beg to differ, this is about the most casual game I have ever played, you literally spend most of your in-game time not even playing. Making credits is a joke, as is unlocking Horizon engineers and collecting materials to use them. Not being able to get anything done in less than an hour is more a sign of it taking very long periods of time to do anything for what everyone around here likes to say... Space is big, really, really big. So once you factor in say, finding the right mission, travelling to the mission site, completing the mission you may not have enough time. Or if you are thinking about some light exploring but need to be back in the bubble at the end of your short session... well don't, those are mutually exclusive things.
The same can be said for any game. I really doubt you never have at least some goal in mind when playing ED or any videogame for that matter, then again, a lot of content in ED needs or is greatly aided by better gear.
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