No Single Player offline Mode then?

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srinidhalaya

srinidhalaya
Wow, how quickly Elite Dangerous went from the top of my most looking forward to list, to the top of my most let down list. ALL of which are because of online only. Seriously, how about when your ISP starts to throttle your access to Elite Dangerous servers, because frontier development wont pay extra for faster pipeline, because there is no subscription model? That is the future of internet by the way, with no Net Neutrality. Frontier Dev's competitors can pay extra to make that happen. Then you will be enjoying tons of stuttering and massive pause's when jumping from bubble to bubble.
 
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Mack

Mack
Monk said:
I think it also goes much deeper than this though. People want to play this game 10 years from now. Can we honestly believe that the servers will be kept up that long?

I do believe, however, that if FD doesn't come up with an offline solution and a continuing online solution, the community will before their servers go dark.
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I fully agree .

You'd be surprised at what the community can achieve, the below are space based games that have been discontinued by their publisher but are still playable :-

  • Jumpgate - backend code acquired and still hosted.
  • Star Wars Galaxies - Complete backend emulation of the MMO server code written from scratch, actually runnable within a Ubuntu VM (as well as a beta server/test server)
  • Freelancer - Online server code was released with game. Community patch made when global catalogue server was shut down.
 
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lbm

lbm
Although this isn't much of an issue for me it would be nice to get some kind of info from the devs how "final" this really is.
Are we talking about "no offline mode as a priority and certainly not for the 2014 release" or "no offline mode ever, even if the servers go down"?
 

stimutacs

S
Styggron said:
I did indeed answer this question because at the best of my knowledge this was what I knew. This news is just as much of a surprise to me as it was to everyone else as I too as many know am a SP offline player.
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Oh no, I'm not suggesting you did anything other than relay what you believed was accurate at the time.

Which was that ... yes there would be an offline mode. There are literally years of continuity of this feature being promised, right up until yesterday. It is not some collective fantasy or something people expecting the feature simply made up.
 

Jedra7609

Jedra7609
It's a shame they merged the Poll thread. I would be genuinely interested to see how many care and don't care about offline mode.

Personally, I never even realised there had planned an offline mode until they announced that they weren't building one.

My reasoning of this, for what it is worth is as follows;

I am always online anyway so that doesn't matter. If the servers go down or my ISP goes dark for a while, I will go and do something else. If they turn the servers off in a couple of years, it probably means the game has run its course (which I hope is not the case) and I will go and play something else. DRM? Well, personally I don't mind the 'on-line authentication' DRM, it's the nasty boot sector stuff and even worse, LENSLOCK (!) that I object to. I am pretty much in favour of companies protecting their investment in a relatively non intrusive way. For the record, I do hate the EULA thing though for many reasons - but, as someone has already pointed out, in the EU it does not supersede you basic consumer rights anyway so if you have the time and energy it can be challenged.

Please don't take this to mean I think that everyone else's views are wrong, that's not how I think, everyone's opinion is valid and correct. I just wanted to add my own thoughts to the discussion.

I do hope that people do not set out to spoil the launch party - that would be a shame. I am not going myself, but I imagine that there will be a lot of people there who are not particularly affected by this decision and it wouldn't be nice to spoil their evening.

Anyway, as I said, a poll would be good and we can see a reasonably accurate representation of the numbers (from forum members anyway).
 

Caiburn

C
ChrisH said:
Ummm, please show me an on-line massively multiplayer game with a functioning pause button. HOWEVER, you can "Quit to menu", and then restart it later, which works pretty well for me (although I occasionally get the forever-spinning-ship-of-death due to network bugs that haven't yet been fixed).
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That is exactly the point. An offline mode could have offered a real PAUSE function. :)
Point taken on the "quit to menu" function.

(Edit: would -> could)
 
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Vagabund

Vagabund
Atinus said:
Here's a question: What if it had been the other way around? That in order to provide for fully offline, they had to sacrifice several aspects that were integral to the "evolving galaxy" vision?
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Then this "evolving galaxy" vision shouldn't be part of the offline version. As I understand it the plan was to exclude offline players from the life galaxy as opposed to "single player online".

This is fine. I think no one expects full feature set in an offline version, when the living and breathing universe is dependent on online players.
 

Gortron

Gortron
PitHH said:
Sorry. I do not understand. Offline is die? Or for "offline" I must to connect to the server sometimes ? To obtain new data.
Sorry for my English.
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You need to been online all the time so you have a connection to the servers to play, even if you are playing solo.

In other words. If you don't have an internet connection you cannot play.
 

Darkmatter

Darkmatter
strangerdanger said:
Some pretty great excuses there, would expect no less from you, now in full damage control.
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Excuses? Damage control? Well, sure. Whatever floats your boat on the sea of bitterness. Thought it was common sense myself, since nothing really works out exactly as planned which is especially true in software engineering. I don't work for Frontier though, for the record. ;)

As mentioned earlier, not quite so outraged myself but I can understand that some are. There is certainly some middle ground to be found regarding refunds for those unable to support a stable internet connection. Demanding every single penny or cent back would be unreasonable, however. Not?
 

AV2012

AV2012
To quote from the newsletter: "A fully offline experience would be unacceptably limited and static compared to the dynamic, ever unfolding experience we are delivering."

To this I would say that a limited and static experience is better than no experience at all. There are times when I would like to be able to play the game offline and I can empathise with anyone that is very upset by this statement. FD should commit to making offline mode available going forwards. They should not be making judgement calls on what people who funded the game will find "acceptable" or not, when this is something they have promised to provide from the outset.
 

Novaflare

N
This really sucks, please reconsider and include some form of offline mode. It doesn't matter if it's delayed or if it's not as fleshed out as the online mode, just keep it on the roadmap and come up with a compromise.
 
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Styggron

S
littleminxundr said:
Yeah, I don't believe that for a second.
I became a member on the board before buying and dropped the hammer when reading the thread you just linked. This post confirmed what I read on the on-site information for Elite. This thread also lured more people into buying, I believe.
Frontier must have known about dropping Offline well before the dates in this thread, but they didn't step in then because it would've upended their update-schedule.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=56686&p=972240&viewfull=1#post972240

You don't make a decision like that and then practically run out to share it with the general public. That's totally in direct conflict with their MO.
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As I mentioned above, this was correct to the best of my knowledge when I answered the users' question. Remember moderators are volunteers, we are not Frontier staff, I get information from the newsletters just like everyone else.
 

philux

philux
xxThe_Dice_manxx said:
Keep going with this nonsense and its going to destroy this game for all of us.
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Revealing such a crucial change of features in the very last minute when they have no other choice (i.e., when the release is imminent) casts a bad light on FDEV. At least, this is not how I want to be treated as a customer, no matter what the name of the company is.
 

Quietman

Q
Michael Brookes said:
As mentioned in the newsletter thread the game has changed a lot since the initial kickstarter. One of the biggest changes is the importance of the the offline component to manage the galaxy and interactions. This isn't something we can translate into an offline experience as we'd effectively have to make a new game world - we couldn't share the same world and that throws out the intent for a shared universe.

Michael
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I love this game, warts and all, but I bought into this game under the promise of a true offline mode.

I have an internet connection for around 3 months out of every 12, (due to work), if you are now telling me that I can only play my favourite game 3 months out of every 12; well my response is, that is unacceptable.

I may be in an extreme minority, but you have just shattered this old timer's chance to relive his childhood memories.
 
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