Taken from my new blog which you can check out here (it only has this post as of yet though, so it's quite limited
(Oh and as always i apologize for any bad grammar!
Elite is still one of my favorite games of all time. The gigantic galaxy, the living galaxy, it is amazing. Yet i seem to dream back to the earlier days of elite, back in beta, and where the galaxy felt much more alive, and happily void of all the problems which plague the game today. But why is this? What steps have frontier taken, or rather not taken, in the development of the game?
1. My story on how i got into the game
Before elite, i had never really been big into space sims or space games for that matter. Not because they didn't interest me, they certainly did very much, but because i had no knowledge of their existence and their capabilities. My first real taste of space games were Galaxy On Fire 2, an iOS game of all things. I found it while searching the app store for games to download before a long boring flight. Of course it had the usual iOS limitations, the physic engine was, and still is, utterly boring, and the gameplay is quite limited, but it had one thing, which really made me search for another one like it; Charachter. The game was full of interesting stations, setting creating backdrops, interesting charachters and more. The whole feel of it was amazingly well done.
So time went on and i eventually forgot about it, or that would be, until i saw Scott Manley, a guy i casually watched KSP videos of, upload a star citizen video. I looked it up, and i immidiently got sucked into what they were trying to do. A immersive galaxy, filled with life, it was all like a dream. But of course, after learning more about the game, it turned out to be, at least for the next few years. So i started searching for more games, and i eventually stumbled accross Elite : Dangerous. What i liked about Elite which really drawed me in, was the dirty look of it. A galaxy with issues, but with history. With people trying to make a living, doing dangerous stuff even piracy. This was so incredibly well done in the beta, that i didn't even care to check if it would run on my system, i immidiently bought the 60€ beta pass. It was truly amazing, i learned after getting myself a computer that could handle it, and it still stands as one of the best moments i've had in all of playing video games. It was astonishing. After that i got truly addicted, i played for hours on end. Sometimes not even eating, this was the game for me, i knew it!
2. But then it changed
After meeting the known youtuber SkyForger (Kornelius Briedis) in game, becoming friends, and learning me how to trade, i was suddenly in an anaconda, the largest and biggest symbol of wealth you could get. This was also quite a fun time, as such a big ship, such early in the games lifespan, was really a status symbol, and people paid quite a bit of respect to it, unlike they do today as it's quite common theese days. Of course although the anaconda is a large ship, it's not without it's limits, especially regarding combat, so i decided to take a different path; Exploration.
Exploration, in the start was amazing. All theese things to see, planetary nebulae, new undiscovered corners of the galaxy, weird planets, there was just so much to discover! I had fun trekking to the galactic rim, feeling all alone, and in uncharted territory, it was yet another of the best video game moments i've ever had.
I went to Sagitarrius A*, the far galactic rim, and many other places, but every time i returned i noticed a disturbing trend.
Frontier were ruining the immersion! Community Goals was one of the first updates to annoy me, the way it was presented, and the way galnet "Thanks every commander who participated" felt so immersion breaking, i was horrified, maybe a bit too much at the time. Eventually we got into the age of combateering, which brought on so much immersion breaking. People started arguing over solo/open/group play, shield cells became controversy #1, everything started to become about maximizing your ship to the max. I started seeing people around me, who previously had promoted immersion into the game, treat it like it was a league of some sorts, and i just couldn't take it. And of course then it went from bad to horrible as one disastorous update rolled out;
Powerplay - I really can't express my hate for powerplay enough. Even though it has a clear bias towards the imperials and federals, promotes unnecessary killing of civilians, it is not that which annoys me the most, it is just how god damn immersion breaking it is! From the unrealistic "galnet" "polling" on the best powers, to the incredible weird merit system, out of roleplay rules etc, it's absoloutley horrible! And this even strenghtened the age of combateering even more! It was incredibly stupid, and i think my golden age of elite ended with it.
Now, this would all be bad, but negotiable if i could just have fun exploring... but even that changed.
3. The problems with exploration in the current game.
Exploration has always been a profession which frontier has put little effort into. Frontier counter-arguments this by saying there have been loads of updates to exploration, but updates, as proven by powerplay, aren't always good. Take the first discovered by system, although it gives nice rewards, and the ability to brag over being there first, it also has negative effects. I remember before the system was implemented, going to the far reaches of the galaxy and seeing amazing sights, which i most likely was the first to ever see. Now i could still do that, and i often would be the first one, but jumping just two systems away from it and seeing a "First discovered by Allintil" is more than enough to ruin that feeling. Another update, yet not an upgrade, was the ability to target planets from the system map. Although this certainly was a help to combateers, traders and smugglers, this was a rather downgrade to the exploration gameplay. There was always a challenge, a rather fun one, to look at the system map, trying to find the correct planet via an assortments of tricks, and either feeling like you've accomplished something getting it right the first place, or discover something you weren't planning on if you failed. It had a value for explorers, as it was one of the few times which skill was required, but frontier didn't listen, and exploration became even less skill-based than it already was.
One of the maybe more fundamental issues, but which i have literally seen none point out is how traveling in elite works vs in the real life. Okay, imagine sitting in a car. You're not the driver, but you sit in the second front seat, with a quite comfortable seat (amazingly enough) but yet nothing to do other than to look outside the window. Now imagine you're in a foreign, and very new country. A country with loads of things you haven't seen before. Of course most of us wouldn't mind being in that situation, even if that included being in the car for a few hours, you get to see stuff! So what has this to do with elite? Well in elite it's not quite the same. Once you reach a system it's for the most part just like any other, a star, maybe one or two or three nearby, very rarely a close planet, and nothing particularly new. You jump to the next system, and it's practically the same, except this time there's one star more 100k LS away. Of course on the system map this isn't the case, but as many explorers such as i do not always check the system map, and even if i do, go to the planets, it gets repetitive very quickly, and traveling only becomes rewarding after a couple of thousand lightyears as you see the backdrop change, which frankly, for most people, isn't worth the time. I've almost never seen anyone completley depend on the amazing gameplay of grinding yourself to the other end of the galaxy alone. Me myself tend to have whatever YouTube video playing on my phone, while barely paying attention to elite except from the occasional fuel scoop.
It's just not fun.
It doesn't help either that the rewards for exploration are, and have never been, that great. Now i'm not just talking about direct reward via credits, but also the reward in finding something unique. Sure, occasionally you get a ringed earthlike, a binary supergiant etc. but in comparasent to all the completley similar systems you find, and the rarity of the galactic wonders, you have to have a real dedicated and special mindset to make exploration any fun for you, which frankly very few actually have, and it is probably a part of the reason why exploration is such a small, and undeveloped proffession.
4. The Immersion
Look; I get that frontier wants to earn money, that is of course every corporations goal, but i'm not a big fan of the way frontier is doing it right now with the current updates. By attempting to appeal to a more casual playerbase, frontier have done some horrible things in way of immersion, and ultimatley, it may lead to the old elite players, the real hardcore ones (like me) to simply stop playing. I don't think i'm guessing horribly wrong if i guess that many of us came here for the living galaxy, the immersion and the chance to experience a videogame that didn't quite feel like a videogame. And apart from the change from a dirty look back in beta to a more sterile look in gamma, and the final release, there are many reasons why people are loosing their interest in roleplay, and becoming less immersed. Of course as i've said earlier one of those factors is powerplay, but what many don't realize is that many of theese factors are often small and spread out, but that they together lower the immersion of the game. One which a friend of mine, Neon Raven pointed out, was how when you first land your ship, it says "Whatever bound (In his case: JOY-Y axis)) to lift off" instead of "Thrust upwards to lift off". Another one is how Ai's have no proper senses, instead of freighters jumping out and saving their ship & cargo, they will often stick around fighting, even when it's absoloutley hopeless. It's absoloutley immersion breaking seeing a type-6 fight 3 anacondas who interdicted it, instead of just boosting away easily outrunning them. There's tons of theese, and i'm can't even be bothered to find and list them all, but the problem is; Frontier have tried to appeal to another audience, but in doing so, forgot some of the things which made people want Elite : Dangerous to be a reality in the first place.
5. Negligence
Okay i'm going to make this part a bit short, because i've complained about it so many times, and as this is one of the things which i really don't see frontier changing. I'm of course talking about how they treat the different factions with regards to rewards bonuses and story. The obvious bias of frontier is of course to the Empire, which not only recieves tons of rewards, they also constantly have a story going on. What makes me so mad about the frontier bias towards the empire is how this swings so many players to pledge allegiance to them specifically for the rewards. However if you talk to them, many prefer the alliance or even the federation ideologically, but they just don't see what's in there for them of rewards, and of course they're very right. Although the federation has started catching up now with the new federal notdropships, the alliance still gets left in the dark. Of course many attributes this because the alliance is an "underdog" faction, but then again it does controll the largest shipyard in the galaxy, which as of yet has not made an appearence for whatever reason, and also is massively wealthy and influencual in the core systems. It seems silly, to leave an entire faction worth of assets, backstory and charachter behind, not only in a story sense, but also in a financial sense. Why use so many hours of paid work to design a faction you almost won't use at all?
6. Horizons
Horizons for me... well it was a mixed bag. On one hand, it opened up an entire new area with new things to explore, but on the other hand, what gameplay exactly did it add? Sure this is one of the few expansions in the recent time which actually contributed to immersion rather than destroying it, but what else were there? Surface bases weren't that big of a deal, nothing big and complex enough to eager the usual sci-fi fan, nothing dirty or broken enough to eager the usual dystopian-space-futuristic narrative fan, it was just as with stations, little variation, and sterile. The terrain was quite boring, mountains, sloped hills, nothing really alien. Sure they give you the sense of being in the middle of nowhere, and it adds tremendously to the immersion, but it's just not what you'd expect. And even if the terrain was amazing, what is there really to do? The random POIs are fun and exciting for the first 3 hours you do it, but after seeing that same pointless wreckage, only 1km from the last one with the canisters of beer, you realise that this is just as Unidentified Signal Sources, and that they're absoloutley pointless, and boring! Prospecting is also much of the same thing, but with the hold quickly filling up, and you constantly looking for just the few items you really need, it gets annoying and hard to do in a extended period of time without some other entertainment, or just an abundance of time and lack of stress. Of course horizons is still not finished, and there are plenty of updates to come, but as of now it's not terribly exciting after a while.
(And you can't combat on planets, seriously frontier?)
Conclusion.
Elite still stands as one of my favorite games, i know i'm repeating it but it has to be said, frontier has done a good job with it. However, after countless hours (over 2000 in fact) i've started getting bored with the game, partially because i've played it so much, but partially also because the immersion and the sandboxy element of it simply isn't good enough. The last 200-400 hours of elite i've played have really just been because i have such an emotional bond with it, that i'll play it even if i don't feel like it's particularly fun. My worries is that new players, and more experienced players won't have this, and will simply either not buy the game, or stop playing it. I'm unsure if Frontier will be able to have a 10-year plan for the game if something doesn't change, because what i see, and this is from experience, is a game which has approached it's peak, and which will have serious issues avoiding falling down from that peak and having to shut down the servers. But even if this is true, i'm not expecting it to happen too soon, and frontier will probably have something to bring them back by then, if not, then i'll atleast remember this game as one i enjoyed a lot, which i got so into that i wrote a 2647 word article on it.
And as always, fly safe!
(Oh and as always i apologize for any bad grammar!
Elite is still one of my favorite games of all time. The gigantic galaxy, the living galaxy, it is amazing. Yet i seem to dream back to the earlier days of elite, back in beta, and where the galaxy felt much more alive, and happily void of all the problems which plague the game today. But why is this? What steps have frontier taken, or rather not taken, in the development of the game?
1. My story on how i got into the game
Before elite, i had never really been big into space sims or space games for that matter. Not because they didn't interest me, they certainly did very much, but because i had no knowledge of their existence and their capabilities. My first real taste of space games were Galaxy On Fire 2, an iOS game of all things. I found it while searching the app store for games to download before a long boring flight. Of course it had the usual iOS limitations, the physic engine was, and still is, utterly boring, and the gameplay is quite limited, but it had one thing, which really made me search for another one like it; Charachter. The game was full of interesting stations, setting creating backdrops, interesting charachters and more. The whole feel of it was amazingly well done.
So time went on and i eventually forgot about it, or that would be, until i saw Scott Manley, a guy i casually watched KSP videos of, upload a star citizen video. I looked it up, and i immidiently got sucked into what they were trying to do. A immersive galaxy, filled with life, it was all like a dream. But of course, after learning more about the game, it turned out to be, at least for the next few years. So i started searching for more games, and i eventually stumbled accross Elite : Dangerous. What i liked about Elite which really drawed me in, was the dirty look of it. A galaxy with issues, but with history. With people trying to make a living, doing dangerous stuff even piracy. This was so incredibly well done in the beta, that i didn't even care to check if it would run on my system, i immidiently bought the 60€ beta pass. It was truly amazing, i learned after getting myself a computer that could handle it, and it still stands as one of the best moments i've had in all of playing video games. It was astonishing. After that i got truly addicted, i played for hours on end. Sometimes not even eating, this was the game for me, i knew it!
2. But then it changed
After meeting the known youtuber SkyForger (Kornelius Briedis) in game, becoming friends, and learning me how to trade, i was suddenly in an anaconda, the largest and biggest symbol of wealth you could get. This was also quite a fun time, as such a big ship, such early in the games lifespan, was really a status symbol, and people paid quite a bit of respect to it, unlike they do today as it's quite common theese days. Of course although the anaconda is a large ship, it's not without it's limits, especially regarding combat, so i decided to take a different path; Exploration.
Exploration, in the start was amazing. All theese things to see, planetary nebulae, new undiscovered corners of the galaxy, weird planets, there was just so much to discover! I had fun trekking to the galactic rim, feeling all alone, and in uncharted territory, it was yet another of the best video game moments i've ever had.
I went to Sagitarrius A*, the far galactic rim, and many other places, but every time i returned i noticed a disturbing trend.
Frontier were ruining the immersion! Community Goals was one of the first updates to annoy me, the way it was presented, and the way galnet "Thanks every commander who participated" felt so immersion breaking, i was horrified, maybe a bit too much at the time. Eventually we got into the age of combateering, which brought on so much immersion breaking. People started arguing over solo/open/group play, shield cells became controversy #1, everything started to become about maximizing your ship to the max. I started seeing people around me, who previously had promoted immersion into the game, treat it like it was a league of some sorts, and i just couldn't take it. And of course then it went from bad to horrible as one disastorous update rolled out;
Powerplay - I really can't express my hate for powerplay enough. Even though it has a clear bias towards the imperials and federals, promotes unnecessary killing of civilians, it is not that which annoys me the most, it is just how god damn immersion breaking it is! From the unrealistic "galnet" "polling" on the best powers, to the incredible weird merit system, out of roleplay rules etc, it's absoloutley horrible! And this even strenghtened the age of combateering even more! It was incredibly stupid, and i think my golden age of elite ended with it.
Now, this would all be bad, but negotiable if i could just have fun exploring... but even that changed.
3. The problems with exploration in the current game.
Exploration has always been a profession which frontier has put little effort into. Frontier counter-arguments this by saying there have been loads of updates to exploration, but updates, as proven by powerplay, aren't always good. Take the first discovered by system, although it gives nice rewards, and the ability to brag over being there first, it also has negative effects. I remember before the system was implemented, going to the far reaches of the galaxy and seeing amazing sights, which i most likely was the first to ever see. Now i could still do that, and i often would be the first one, but jumping just two systems away from it and seeing a "First discovered by Allintil" is more than enough to ruin that feeling. Another update, yet not an upgrade, was the ability to target planets from the system map. Although this certainly was a help to combateers, traders and smugglers, this was a rather downgrade to the exploration gameplay. There was always a challenge, a rather fun one, to look at the system map, trying to find the correct planet via an assortments of tricks, and either feeling like you've accomplished something getting it right the first place, or discover something you weren't planning on if you failed. It had a value for explorers, as it was one of the few times which skill was required, but frontier didn't listen, and exploration became even less skill-based than it already was.
One of the maybe more fundamental issues, but which i have literally seen none point out is how traveling in elite works vs in the real life. Okay, imagine sitting in a car. You're not the driver, but you sit in the second front seat, with a quite comfortable seat (amazingly enough) but yet nothing to do other than to look outside the window. Now imagine you're in a foreign, and very new country. A country with loads of things you haven't seen before. Of course most of us wouldn't mind being in that situation, even if that included being in the car for a few hours, you get to see stuff! So what has this to do with elite? Well in elite it's not quite the same. Once you reach a system it's for the most part just like any other, a star, maybe one or two or three nearby, very rarely a close planet, and nothing particularly new. You jump to the next system, and it's practically the same, except this time there's one star more 100k LS away. Of course on the system map this isn't the case, but as many explorers such as i do not always check the system map, and even if i do, go to the planets, it gets repetitive very quickly, and traveling only becomes rewarding after a couple of thousand lightyears as you see the backdrop change, which frankly, for most people, isn't worth the time. I've almost never seen anyone completley depend on the amazing gameplay of grinding yourself to the other end of the galaxy alone. Me myself tend to have whatever YouTube video playing on my phone, while barely paying attention to elite except from the occasional fuel scoop.
It's just not fun.
It doesn't help either that the rewards for exploration are, and have never been, that great. Now i'm not just talking about direct reward via credits, but also the reward in finding something unique. Sure, occasionally you get a ringed earthlike, a binary supergiant etc. but in comparasent to all the completley similar systems you find, and the rarity of the galactic wonders, you have to have a real dedicated and special mindset to make exploration any fun for you, which frankly very few actually have, and it is probably a part of the reason why exploration is such a small, and undeveloped proffession.
4. The Immersion
Look; I get that frontier wants to earn money, that is of course every corporations goal, but i'm not a big fan of the way frontier is doing it right now with the current updates. By attempting to appeal to a more casual playerbase, frontier have done some horrible things in way of immersion, and ultimatley, it may lead to the old elite players, the real hardcore ones (like me) to simply stop playing. I don't think i'm guessing horribly wrong if i guess that many of us came here for the living galaxy, the immersion and the chance to experience a videogame that didn't quite feel like a videogame. And apart from the change from a dirty look back in beta to a more sterile look in gamma, and the final release, there are many reasons why people are loosing their interest in roleplay, and becoming less immersed. Of course as i've said earlier one of those factors is powerplay, but what many don't realize is that many of theese factors are often small and spread out, but that they together lower the immersion of the game. One which a friend of mine, Neon Raven pointed out, was how when you first land your ship, it says "Whatever bound (In his case: JOY-Y axis)) to lift off" instead of "Thrust upwards to lift off". Another one is how Ai's have no proper senses, instead of freighters jumping out and saving their ship & cargo, they will often stick around fighting, even when it's absoloutley hopeless. It's absoloutley immersion breaking seeing a type-6 fight 3 anacondas who interdicted it, instead of just boosting away easily outrunning them. There's tons of theese, and i'm can't even be bothered to find and list them all, but the problem is; Frontier have tried to appeal to another audience, but in doing so, forgot some of the things which made people want Elite : Dangerous to be a reality in the first place.
5. Negligence
Okay i'm going to make this part a bit short, because i've complained about it so many times, and as this is one of the things which i really don't see frontier changing. I'm of course talking about how they treat the different factions with regards to rewards bonuses and story. The obvious bias of frontier is of course to the Empire, which not only recieves tons of rewards, they also constantly have a story going on. What makes me so mad about the frontier bias towards the empire is how this swings so many players to pledge allegiance to them specifically for the rewards. However if you talk to them, many prefer the alliance or even the federation ideologically, but they just don't see what's in there for them of rewards, and of course they're very right. Although the federation has started catching up now with the new federal notdropships, the alliance still gets left in the dark. Of course many attributes this because the alliance is an "underdog" faction, but then again it does controll the largest shipyard in the galaxy, which as of yet has not made an appearence for whatever reason, and also is massively wealthy and influencual in the core systems. It seems silly, to leave an entire faction worth of assets, backstory and charachter behind, not only in a story sense, but also in a financial sense. Why use so many hours of paid work to design a faction you almost won't use at all?
6. Horizons
Horizons for me... well it was a mixed bag. On one hand, it opened up an entire new area with new things to explore, but on the other hand, what gameplay exactly did it add? Sure this is one of the few expansions in the recent time which actually contributed to immersion rather than destroying it, but what else were there? Surface bases weren't that big of a deal, nothing big and complex enough to eager the usual sci-fi fan, nothing dirty or broken enough to eager the usual dystopian-space-futuristic narrative fan, it was just as with stations, little variation, and sterile. The terrain was quite boring, mountains, sloped hills, nothing really alien. Sure they give you the sense of being in the middle of nowhere, and it adds tremendously to the immersion, but it's just not what you'd expect. And even if the terrain was amazing, what is there really to do? The random POIs are fun and exciting for the first 3 hours you do it, but after seeing that same pointless wreckage, only 1km from the last one with the canisters of beer, you realise that this is just as Unidentified Signal Sources, and that they're absoloutley pointless, and boring! Prospecting is also much of the same thing, but with the hold quickly filling up, and you constantly looking for just the few items you really need, it gets annoying and hard to do in a extended period of time without some other entertainment, or just an abundance of time and lack of stress. Of course horizons is still not finished, and there are plenty of updates to come, but as of now it's not terribly exciting after a while.
(And you can't combat on planets, seriously frontier?)
Conclusion.
Elite still stands as one of my favorite games, i know i'm repeating it but it has to be said, frontier has done a good job with it. However, after countless hours (over 2000 in fact) i've started getting bored with the game, partially because i've played it so much, but partially also because the immersion and the sandboxy element of it simply isn't good enough. The last 200-400 hours of elite i've played have really just been because i have such an emotional bond with it, that i'll play it even if i don't feel like it's particularly fun. My worries is that new players, and more experienced players won't have this, and will simply either not buy the game, or stop playing it. I'm unsure if Frontier will be able to have a 10-year plan for the game if something doesn't change, because what i see, and this is from experience, is a game which has approached it's peak, and which will have serious issues avoiding falling down from that peak and having to shut down the servers. But even if this is true, i'm not expecting it to happen too soon, and frontier will probably have something to bring them back by then, if not, then i'll atleast remember this game as one i enjoyed a lot, which i got so into that i wrote a 2647 word article on it.
And as always, fly safe!
