This is probably due to the fact Frontier probably can't commit yet on the big August patch as its not quite ready. The next release we know is lore and story related if its not polished enough to launch it would break the narrative. Quite common in online games! I have to say I think its a minor issue and not really worth moaning about. Given the Odyssey stuff I'm sure Frontier's QC for patching has gone up.
Anyone else getting a bit frustrated with the prolonged narrative?
- Thread starter Peter Mannion
- Start date
I'm a bit odd, I guess, if something doesn't interest me much (like the Azimuth saga) I pay no attention to it - after all, we are not being forced to be involved in it - so don't come here to complain that it is slothful and tedious, because I'm having my own fun elsewhere.
You do realise it is optional to take part? Of course you do!
You do realise it is optional to take part? Of course you do!
I've always found the story to be a self driven solo aspect of the game anyway. The goid fighting is one of the few times I've been involved and done lore content with friends too. It's better than it was but still a bit lacking. For those that hardcore explore and take an interest in galnet is probably works. Elite overall is a very self driven experience. The training missions and tutorials did address a lot of the early game problems for newbies. Might be nice to have something optional in game that force players to learn a bit about the story and super powers. Most games have a voice or animated narration to drive you ED has only just gotten avatars and on foot characters so I fully expect story to be improved upon over time. I just want more content that actually drives players together either in PvE or PvP aspects. I know space is big and open but there should be bustling starports where we can talk, trade and speak to other commanders or missions that force us to compete with other commanders not just gankathons in space around engineer bases. I think I like reading about stuff more than doing it at the moment.
That isn't a bad wish at all!
I play with a small group and we all have fun doing various activities, just because we can, in EDO. Finding that playing together has kept a continuing interest in the game.
I can understand why we'd want to move things on though. Obviously the focus has been on bug fixing and it does feel like we need something to spice thing up a bit.
Or if you'd prefer: BRING US THE FACE EATING MONSTERS THAT WE MAY DIE GLORIOUSLY WHILE TRYING BEAT THEM TO DEATH WITH OUR RIFLE BUTTS!
Or if you'd prefer: BRING US THE FACE EATING MONSTERS THAT WE MAY DIE GLORIOUSLY WHILE TRYING BEAT THEM TO DEATH WITH OUR RIFLE BUTTS!
That was so predictable LOL!
I have a big interest in lore and narrative, hence why I am complaining about it ... What's your point?
Edit: Also I don't like how it now become the norm for people to suggest just ignoring issues with the game. I see it all the time on the forums. Narrative is poor, don't interact with it. FPS combat is poor, don't interact with it. Performance is bad, don't look at FPS. The literal act of sweeping it under the rug.
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Point?
Oh, do I have to have one? I thought I'd made mine quite clear, never mind.. Carry on!
So the devs respond to player activity with Operation Witch hunt delaying Salvation's plan and folks are mad the plan got delayed? Attack the witch hunt folks.
I think the pacing has been solid. Enough time to solve puzzles or to get the spoilers and go see some really cool stuff. Paced well enough that folks like me can take a week or month off and not miss too much.
Besides lots of slow fun is better than an explosion and then nothing. It's also better than nonstop frantic fun.
I think the pacing has been solid. Enough time to solve puzzles or to get the spoilers and go see some really cool stuff. Paced well enough that folks like me can take a week or month off and not miss too much.
Besides lots of slow fun is better than an explosion and then nothing. It's also better than nonstop frantic fun.
Elite dangerous is a game that was made for many different people with different preferences. Most of them will like and dislike different things. Nothing in ED is mandatory except flying a ship (discounting Apex for the moment) or walking around, otherwise one is not really playing...
Suggesting someone ignore some aspect of the game if it doesn't suit them isn't any better or worse than making any other suggestion that any other player may like or not...
its not telling someone to ignore some aspect of the game because it doesnt suit them. Lore and narrative suits me down to the bone. Its telling someone to ignore some aspect of the game because it has issues. Imagine me telling you to ignore an aspect of the game you love because you complain about an issue it has.
Its just lazy papering over the cracks and an attempt by many on this forum of trying to silence criticism. I see it all the time. Just cringe.
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I wonder if there was a misinterpretation here where they said:
and the "I" was implied between "so" and "don't"...
No, just missing.... (bad edit as the original sounded derisive, which wasn't the intent)
I've been taking zero notice of it all year. No relevance to exploration or Colonia. Just seemed an excuse for some CGs and some often-faulty module prizes.
Which I assumed..anyway...back to things being long and drawn out...
I very much doubt that they are responding to that. This part of the campaign is lasting exactly as long as they had been planning it to last. The only response the witch hunt got was a galnet article.
It could be worse, by the way...
I predict this is going to be a bit of a ramble, and late in getting to the point, so I think I'll just cloak it in a spoiler tag right away, so that it can be easily ignored...
I predict this is going to be a bit of a ramble, and late in getting to the point, so I think I'll just cloak it in a spoiler tag right away, so that it can be easily ignored...
So, I'm very fond of the Myst series of games, which gained fame and success, through the original being a storage-hungry game that launched just as CD-ROMs hit the market and were being heavily marketed as a must-have add-on for every computer... I'll run through the history, for context.
After the second game - "Riven", the makers, "Cyan Worlds", were quite flush with money, and decided they wanted to expand their horizons with a realtime 3D (as opposed to the prerendered (or earlier yet - hand drawn) still screens of their previous games), multiplayer, online spinoff from the series, which ended up with the name URU.
Like its predecessors, it was a puzzle game, that took place in relatively small maps, but there was a hub world, with sub locations, where you'd commune with your fellow players, and some puzzles were designed to require the assistance of one or more friends, in order to solve them. There were also larger story beats, which would take the cumulative efforts of all players over time to progress, very much like ED's community goals.
Cyan bought a company that had a 3D graphics game engine, and signed Ubisoft as publishers, then set to work, sinking all their own accumulated wealth into the project.
(Meanwhile Ubisoft had the rights to produce two more regular Myst games, which they commissioned out to other studios, with mixed results (...it did give us Brad Dourif playing what I refuse to call a "villain" :7 ).
Not far from launch, management at Ubisoft made a sudden decision to give up on anything "online", whether it was in any way in competition with the market dominator: World of Warcraft, to whom they ceded, or not, and cancelled, in a single stroke, everything they had in development, that had the slightest whiff of MMO, including URU.
What work was done, and in progress, was rejiggered into a standalone single player game (still retaining the marketing for the now defunct online element, in the installer), and a pair of expansion packs. Some remaining scraps were later yet finished, and collated into a standalone fifth "Myst" game, which was really more haphazardly wrapping up some stuff from URU, than a Myst game proper, even if it did bring things together toward the end.
At this point, all the money was spent, and even with the bits of income from all of the above, Cyanworlds was pretty much skint, and had had to lay off most of their work force. Hanging on by a thread, with a skeleton crew, they managed to survive as a game testing contractor, more than as a creative studio.
Then, when the lid looked firmly shut over URU, came a short stint were an online gaming service called "Game Tap" (now long gone) decided to finance a run of the online version of the game, whose originally intended launch had never come to be.
Cyan managed to regain the rights to their by then already ancient production, from Ubisoft, and decided to pick back up, under Gametap, where they left off after Myst 5, since it had irrevocably disrupted and spoiled (even if it had taken a different turn) the flow of the story, as it had originally been intended.
Not only was this a difficult place to continue from, but the studio was underfunded, and severly undermanned at this point, having had to let go of too much of their talent in preceeding years -- there was no way they were going to be able to create new compelling content fast enough to satisfy the player base.
Long term goals tended to be a terrible grind -- there was for example a large lake, in the underground cavern which made up the hub world, which had a counter for how much luminescent algae it contained; Bringing this up to levels it had been in the fictional past, when a thriving civilisation had occupied the cavern, would take the place out of its eternal dusk. This counter would go up through a player travelling to a certain world, and running to its end location, past all its puzzles, where they would manufacture one pellet of algae, which they could bring back to the lake, adding an infinitessimal sliver of progress -- I'm not sure I noticed any difference, for all of that run of the game...
...and I guess finally I get to some sort of point with all this...
Running story progress involved interaction with NPCs, but with the exception of the one which appeared only in prerecorded holographic messages tied to the game's prebaked narrative content parts, these were not AI- or predone-animation-driven automatons, but actual custom player characters, played by members of the studio -- dungeon-mastering in real time.
They could not afford to do this all the time, and it would of course be impossible to conjure up new content on the fly, to support where mastering player input could take them - even if they had had the resources they once did, so contrary to the preauthored content, this was almost all: "tell, don't show".
In order to make it possible to predict when there would be an opportunity to catch these characters, they ended up scheduling appearences and events -- an hour or two every month - that was it.... If you were asleep at the time, or at work, or in any other way occupied, wherever in the world you lived: Tough luck - just read about what you missed on the forum, afterwards.
It didn't really work... I don't blame the studio; They did what they could with what they had, but oh how I wish I could have experienced the game as it had once been intended, even if I infinitely prefer it as a single player game, than any online incarnations.
Cyanworlds still to this day maintain a small server for the last online incarnation of the game, which can be played for free. Sometimes they add a fan-made "age" (...as the maps are called), should one catch their eye.
After the second game - "Riven", the makers, "Cyan Worlds", were quite flush with money, and decided they wanted to expand their horizons with a realtime 3D (as opposed to the prerendered (or earlier yet - hand drawn) still screens of their previous games), multiplayer, online spinoff from the series, which ended up with the name URU.
Like its predecessors, it was a puzzle game, that took place in relatively small maps, but there was a hub world, with sub locations, where you'd commune with your fellow players, and some puzzles were designed to require the assistance of one or more friends, in order to solve them. There were also larger story beats, which would take the cumulative efforts of all players over time to progress, very much like ED's community goals.
Cyan bought a company that had a 3D graphics game engine, and signed Ubisoft as publishers, then set to work, sinking all their own accumulated wealth into the project.
(Meanwhile Ubisoft had the rights to produce two more regular Myst games, which they commissioned out to other studios, with mixed results (...it did give us Brad Dourif playing what I refuse to call a "villain" :7 ).
Not far from launch, management at Ubisoft made a sudden decision to give up on anything "online", whether it was in any way in competition with the market dominator: World of Warcraft, to whom they ceded, or not, and cancelled, in a single stroke, everything they had in development, that had the slightest whiff of MMO, including URU.
What work was done, and in progress, was rejiggered into a standalone single player game (still retaining the marketing for the now defunct online element, in the installer), and a pair of expansion packs. Some remaining scraps were later yet finished, and collated into a standalone fifth "Myst" game, which was really more haphazardly wrapping up some stuff from URU, than a Myst game proper, even if it did bring things together toward the end.
At this point, all the money was spent, and even with the bits of income from all of the above, Cyanworlds was pretty much skint, and had had to lay off most of their work force. Hanging on by a thread, with a skeleton crew, they managed to survive as a game testing contractor, more than as a creative studio.
Then, when the lid looked firmly shut over URU, came a short stint were an online gaming service called "Game Tap" (now long gone) decided to finance a run of the online version of the game, whose originally intended launch had never come to be.
Cyan managed to regain the rights to their by then already ancient production, from Ubisoft, and decided to pick back up, under Gametap, where they left off after Myst 5, since it had irrevocably disrupted and spoiled (even if it had taken a different turn) the flow of the story, as it had originally been intended.
Not only was this a difficult place to continue from, but the studio was underfunded, and severly undermanned at this point, having had to let go of too much of their talent in preceeding years -- there was no way they were going to be able to create new compelling content fast enough to satisfy the player base.
Long term goals tended to be a terrible grind -- there was for example a large lake, in the underground cavern which made up the hub world, which had a counter for how much luminescent algae it contained; Bringing this up to levels it had been in the fictional past, when a thriving civilisation had occupied the cavern, would take the place out of its eternal dusk. This counter would go up through a player travelling to a certain world, and running to its end location, past all its puzzles, where they would manufacture one pellet of algae, which they could bring back to the lake, adding an infinitessimal sliver of progress -- I'm not sure I noticed any difference, for all of that run of the game...
...and I guess finally I get to some sort of point with all this...
Running story progress involved interaction with NPCs, but with the exception of the one which appeared only in prerecorded holographic messages tied to the game's prebaked narrative content parts, these were not AI- or predone-animation-driven automatons, but actual custom player characters, played by members of the studio -- dungeon-mastering in real time.
They could not afford to do this all the time, and it would of course be impossible to conjure up new content on the fly, to support where mastering player input could take them - even if they had had the resources they once did, so contrary to the preauthored content, this was almost all: "tell, don't show".
In order to make it possible to predict when there would be an opportunity to catch these characters, they ended up scheduling appearences and events -- an hour or two every month - that was it.... If you were asleep at the time, or at work, or in any other way occupied, wherever in the world you lived: Tough luck - just read about what you missed on the forum, afterwards.
It didn't really work... I don't blame the studio; They did what they could with what they had, but oh how I wish I could have experienced the game as it had once been intended, even if I infinitely prefer it as a single player game, than any online incarnations.
Cyanworlds still to this day maintain a small server for the last online incarnation of the game, which can be played for free. Sometimes they add a fan-made "age" (...as the maps are called), should one catch their eye.