A Game At Odds with Itself and Why

mr_curry_fury

M
I agree with the OP . This is basically what I also wanted to express as what I understand the game to be as I play it. Also to add on the point of why players do not want to move from system to system:

Once we have earned and bought a few ships we are rooted even more firmly to that system as there is the added burden of not being able to move our ships to a new system in a hassle free manner. I know this is Elite: dangerous and not Elite: hassle free. but I also think this is not Elite: Tedious. you want us to move from system to system? well give us the means i have an entire fleet scattered around the human bubble because I was trying to play exactly as you mentioned in your interview. and swapping from ship to ship is such a pain.
 

robbyp

robbyp
Scrum agile is a swear words in my office. in real world where you have to meet deadlines to deliver products to customers planning on the go in not a good idea
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Gidio said:
They have been 'reworking' missions since 1.3 as far as I remember. That doesn't give me much hope that this time, they will work. If they work as intended, I will gladly swallow my words, but the experience of the previous year hasn't given me much faith.
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And each time they mentioned we wouldnt see much of it as it was just a step towards a future thing. It annoyed me back then as well, people pretending FD promised a revolutionary mission update when they repeatedly and explicitly said that wasnt what they are doing. Now they have the stuff in place, so now you get a chance to see it before you complain.
 

Y'Berion

Y'Berion
Braben is the salesman before anything else these days. Whatever he said should be weighted while keeping this in mind.
 

Lobstris

Lobstris
Jex =TE= said:
I think it's about time we dispelled the myth that it's one man, one galaxy and you are meaningless.

Let's take a RL example of one man, one galaxy and look at our own planet earth. Nobody ever heard of Billy the Kid? Spartacus? Han Solo? There are going to be people that get known in the universe for doing things.

I've probably shot down a thousand enemy spaceships. You would think that's quite a feat and that would certainly get me in some history books. In ED, that's nothing. Some people have shot down 10,000 ships in one system and we're saying they're completely unknown? That the name of their ship doesn't strike terror into the hearts of adversaries? To say that a player can't make a dent on the universe is ignoring reality.

So Mr Boooby in his stock sidewinder and novice rank is going to go up against Sporak the Mighty who's Elite rank and has killed 20,000 people? No, what he should be doing is saying over the chat system, "Arrgghh it's Sporak the Mighty....I'm off!!!"
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OK. Your example of the player becoming feared, and NPCs behaving in accordance to that I agree with. To be specific about the 'one man/one ship' thing I'm primarily talking about a) the impact of an individual on the overall economy, b) the fact that (intentionally or unintentionally) I'd imagine 90%+ of the overall gameplay in Elite is by solo individuals (i.e. in solo modes - which don't/shouldn't really have any business affecting the galaxy IMHO) or by non-winged players in open, and c) that not everyone in the galaxy will be 'Billy the kid', 'Han Solo', 'Spartacus' or the latest 'Smiling Dog Crew Terror of the Space Lanes'. The vast majority are 'Joe Schmoe - jobbing space trucker'.
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I'm also not going to dispute that a players actions could have a great deal of local impact (in small population, fringe systems), and that the universe needs persistence for actions to have meaning (i.e. with NPCs to reflect that impact, spaceship numbers that decline to reflect combat losses, or rise to reflect production/reinforcments, and static targets (bases, stations, PoIs, whatever) that can be damaged/repaired by actions to reflect conflicts/trades etc). I'm as big a fan of Falcon 4's missions and campaign engine as the next man - as you know I view it as the greatest PC gaming achievement so far, but ultimately what is driving that campaign engine of the best game ever made is still a form of procedural generation, albeit PG with more heart, rationale and intelligence than I fear E: D seems capable of mustering, based on past evidence and failings. ;)
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(Leaving aside the multiplayer) Falcon 4 is still 'One Man, One Plane, One War' - but the design of the campaign engine and the missions it produces are light years ahead of E: D. Still, let's see what 2.1 brings. :)

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Jezzah said:
...and now planetary landings that really don't add anything to the game only replicating the same tired old bareboned activities.
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This I can't really agree with. I do think that planetary landings add an immense amount to my personal enjoyment of the game. I'm just very concerned that there won't be a game that anyone's still playing by the time atmospheric landings roll round. :(
 
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Kissinger

Banned
K
The game is not working as well as many as hoped - too much cleverness and astrophysics (and I say this as a post-grad astrophysicist)

But nevertheless, my young son, who gave up on this game pretty soon due to the repetitiveness of it, with the account I bought for him as a backer, is now interested again.

Everything depends upon the promised new update to missions.

We need *missions* and *stories* and meaning.

That is all.

Regards
 
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kilvenny

kilvenny
Old Kickstarter guy reporting. I certainly do not post as often as I used to. Back in 2012 we just wanted a new Elite game, almost anything was better than nothing. Most of us had played one or more of the series and understood its roots. The DDF provided a reference of what would be. In those days there was a pretty united front with a collective will to Jonty up and get it done.

Now we have had something in our hands, we can compare it to what we expected or anticipated and our experience of other games. We now know the DDF was a wish list not a specification. Furthermore we have played the game for 2 years and its lost it's mystery. It's clear FD are developing at their own pace, which is slower than most people want. It's also apparent that the direction of development will never suit everyone.

I have a lifetime subscription, I have zipped up my space suit, strapped into my Cobra and decided to enjoy the ride that FD are taking us on wherever that goes. I don't agree with some of the direction or the mechanics involved, I read a lot of posts and comment sometimes when I think its worth it, but most of the time its not.
 

CMDR Saunders

C
For me, this game is a sandbox without all the toys that make a sandbox fun. Just lots of sand.... lots and lots of sand...

It's fun to play in the sand for a bit but it gets old fast. Adding more sand doesn't help anything. (And by adding more sand, I mean the horizons launch. You added planets to land on with very little to do on them. That's just more sand with no toys. Boring fast.)

Throw in the tools to make the sand fun amongst the players -- crime system (murder/piracy), bounty hunting system (actual tracking of big bounties), a more indepth smuggling system (current one isn't bad really, but it needs to be fleshed out more), a trade system with risk/reward a player controlled market (this alone brings a massive amount of tools to the sandbox... imagine having to fight off a guild/corp for a mining colony or a moon with a rare trade commodity), etc.

It's these little touches that bring the game to life. Right now, the game feels pretty lifeless to me.

It was fun... but once you reach for a tool to change up the way you play in the sandbox.... you realize there are no tools and you have to keep playing the same way over and over and over again.

Just my thoughts.
 

tawittle

tawittle
Zak Gordon said:
Sadly so much detailed and useful 'critique' has been given all along from the very first alpha days, that as this point it really is (sadly) probably a waste of time to try to phrase things in a way that might get a response from Frontier that they are thinking about the issues that keep getting rasied over and over.

As Patrick_68000 puts it, Frontier makes the game that they want to play. It is the founding declaration. It is also probably the game that a fair few have been happy playing, and no doubt the focus on the CQC/Arena stuff will bring in more.

That does not prove all these other voices are wrong though, and i do seriously ask myself if in 20 years time people will even be talking about ED anymore let alone playing it (assuming the required server issues etc) as they do with the original three previous games?
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It's true: ED is a dying game and it's only a matter of time before the playerbase migrates elsewhere, just like what happens to the overwhelming majority of multiplayer games.
 

R3D

R
tawittle said:
It's true: ED is a dying game and it's only a matter of time before the playerbase migrates elsewhere, just like what happens to the overwhelming majority of multiplayer games.
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this is a unusually short amount of time for a game to last, the main problem in my opinion is the lack of meaning behind the actions proposed more so then the lack of actions possible in the game. Trading and mining is nothing more then a grinding mechanism to be honest. It brings no value to the game or the player experience compared to a game like eve where you can use the ore you mined to make items that you will later trade to other players for credits. ED has none of these mechanism in place. These would also cause the player base to 'create' trade hubs according to 'our' actions.
 

Ignition

I
Jezzah said:
People have been saying this sort of thing since 2014 and the dev's continue to push in directions that take the game away from the brilliant DDF proposals. Releasing features like powerplay, cqc, etc and now planetary landings that really don't add anything to the game only replicating the same tired old bareboned activities.

I uninstalled this several weeks ago myself I was the last of 15 friends that all pledged to the game during alpha and beta in the heady days of 2013 and early 2014 when there was so to be excited about. Sadly it was all diluted into a universe of sameness, homogenising everything everywhere wrapped in a thin veneer of lots to do. There's nothing in the game that rewards a casual player to put the few hours they have in a week into this whatsoever. I'll hang around and see what direction it goes but it's not going back on my hard drive anytime soon.
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I feel you man, I told my friends to buy the game because the DDA was so awesome, we played the game and realised it was so shallow and simple that we left the game. We play now and then sporadically but 30 minutes later we close the game and play something else.
 

R3D

R
Of course it does. It means we understand how a game is made from scratch and what work in progress means, and some other people don't.[/QUOTE]

a valid point but fixing existing content should take precedence on adding new, equally broken, content !

( think I'm joking, why do my limpet controller keeps exploding after bringing 1 item when I select the items I want them to bring but will bring everything on the field if I just let them do their own thing ?)
 

R3D

R
CMDR Saunders said:
For me, this game is a sandbox without all the toys that make a sandbox fun. Just lots of sand.... lots and lots of sand...

It's fun to play in the sand for a bit but it gets old fast. Adding more sand doesn't help anything. (And by adding more sand, I mean the horizons launch. You added planets to land on with very little to do on them. That's just more sand with no toys. Boring fast.)

Throw in the tools to make the sand fun amongst the players -- crime system (murder/piracy), bounty hunting system (actual tracking of big bounties), a more indepth smuggling system (current one isn't bad really, but it needs to be fleshed out more), a trade system with risk/reward a player controlled market (this alone brings a massive amount of tools to the sandbox... imagine having to fight off a guild/corp for a mining colony or a moon with a rare trade commodity), etc.

It's these little touches that bring the game to life. Right now, the game feels pretty lifeless to me.

It was fun... but once you reach for a tool to change up the way you play in the sandbox.... you realize there are no tools and you have to keep playing the same way over and over and over again.

Just my thoughts.
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if you want to do these things eve online is your closest bet... and that's a sad fact.
 
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R3D

R
Seaside said:
A couple areas I would like to see the Devs concentrate on are

1)Exploration - More unique things to find on planets - lifeforms - Plants/Animals etc. Some dangerous, most not. Some useful. Some can injure crew( Once we have a crew) or make them Ill. These things I hope they are working on. Until we get there, exploration will be somewhat sterile.

2) Events - Things that can happen during your Journey. Perhaps a crew member(Or you) becomes Ill requiring you to divert or risk losing them(If you do not have the required medical equipment). Mechanical problems requiring you to find the necessary parts to repair (If you do not carry them).
Right now NPC's either attack you or ignore you. Perhaps they could ask for assistance - medical or with repairs. Once done they may reward you. Maybe one of their crew will want to join yours or they give you exploration data.
Perhaps missions could be offered from ships you meet in Hyperspace ? How about if a ship who interdicts isn't always looking for a fight ? Maybe they just want to ask for assistance or for information. Naturally you wouldn't want this to happen too often or it could become annoying.


If they concentrate on these areas I think we will find the game much more interesting but it will take time unfortunately.
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I like this post, good ideas in here!
 

Jex =TE=

Banned
J
Seaside said:
A couple areas I would like to see the Devs concentrate on are

1)Exploration - More unique things to find on planets - lifeforms - Plants/Animals etc. Some dangerous, most not. Some useful. Some can injure crew( Once we have a crew) or make them Ill. These things I hope they are working on. Until we get there, exploration will be somewhat sterile.
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Can we make the crew wear red shirts please when we beam down to the surface?


insp_expendability.jpg
 

Jex =TE=

Banned
J
Gidio said:
They have been 'reworking' missions since 1.3 as far as I remember. That doesn't give me much hope that this time, they will work. If they work as intended, I will gladly swallow my words, but the experience of the previous year hasn't given me much faith.
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And why has the conversation turned to the future to prove that the game is fine? WE can all hope that the devs will fix things but then why would we - so far they've produced sub par mechanics that are so bad, it's confusing just how they managed to blunder so big.

Saying "it'll be ok once they fix it" is not an argument for the state the game right now. OK they're working on it like they have been for years - we'll see what they come up with but until them, we'll keep telling them to fix it.
 
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