When what is going on is "nothing", is not either additive to the player, constructive to the game's story or testing of the player ...then you can call it boring, you can call it empty.. you can call it whatever you want. It is objectively bad game design and bad gameplay. No matter what you find fun personally. There is no reality in which the current behavior is beneficial to the game.
You remember some forum posts about a developer who had plans on improving the AI. And then you have forgotten that prior to being able to implement those new designs she was transferred to another task and taken off of her work in elite. What we got via a patch into the game was an attempt at making npcs harder by basically making them cheat more. It did not create the need for more strategy or skill, but rather synthetically increased how hard it was to kill an npc without any rhyme or reason to scale that difficulty across player skill nor any change in their general behavior.. They still did stupid things, they just dealt more damage and took less and had less limitations.
The suggestions on how to improve things may be subjective to what I'd like to see, but the idea that they dont absolutely require improvement is not. If we're going to be treated to the same thing due to procedural generation wherever we go, we might as well be treated to some immersive interface to that rather than spreadsheet tables and 4 different variations of canned text.
Absolute bullcrap. I've spent literally years out in the black exploring. I can absolutely attest to the uselessness of nearly every system I've been in and explored, often as the first person to ever do so in the given system. The game doesn't care if I've been to a system. Nobody does. Nothing in the game does. The fact that i get a couple credits or when i turn in at a given system back in the bubble that it tweaks a counter for the bgs a bit is irrelevant. These systems are utilized as nothing more than time sinks between interesting or necessary end points in the game and nothing more. Your best case scenario is eye candy.
There is no consequence to your actions in any of these systems. There is no variation in what you do in them. There is no strategy or skill or test or for lack of a better word, purpose any of these systems have to set them apart from any other. There's no risk involved in going to them and no progression of skill involved in "mastering" exploration of them.
That's objectively bad design. You have nothing going on in the utterly vast majority of your game's environment. It's just a wasteland of useless procedurally generated stuff that could all be eliminated and nobody would miss any of it in terms of gameplay.
No, that's not subjective. How they could do it best is subjective. The fact that the bar is so incredibly low for what they've implemented to where it could be is not. You dont even need to indulge in imagination land to see what happens when developers understand their game and gameplay and look to improve it ...even if you dont agree with the style of gameplay. Look at Hello Games and what they've done in the same time Frontier Development has had with ED. The scope is extremely comparable. Yet the outcomes are like looking at examples of "what to do" and "what not to do". Look, the point is not to describe exactly what Elite dangerous should be ..since that's different for everyone since there are way too many different kinds of incompatible player-types playing this game. But that there are absolutely numerous legitimate real gameplay issues with the game that the developers are well aware of and have done nothing about since launch. Ignoring it or hand-waving it away does nobody any good. Complaining about is not negative.
The forum is a poor cross section of the game's playerbase. Fdev seems to listen to the forum whenever those requests coincide with ideas that hide the issues mentioned above because hiding them is a nice easy quick fix that improves their finances a bit and gets better press than the alternative (not fixing anything...because they sure dont seem to be keen on fixing why people dont want to re-do anything they've already done). Each time there are people yelling for "i win" buttons/features there are players who oppose, but those who oppose are crippled with the fact that there is no benefit to the player in making the game challenging. Why would anyone in their right mind want to keep jump distances 10ly when all that does is multiply how often you see a loading screen and increase the time it takes doing so and nothing else? Why would anyone in their right mind want to lose their ship when it means having to repeat the same meaningless things in the game to accrue wealth to handle rebuying it again? Why would anyone in their right mind want to spend more time lasering one stupid rock after another infinitely available rock vs less? sure, you ruin what little game there is by reducing all of that and increasing wealth rates and such but the alternative is always worse. Because the way you do these things isn't fun. It's not interesting and challenging and testing the player. The cost vs reward is so far tilted to the cost side of that equation that it is hopeless to try and convince people that it's better for them to keep things like wage rates low. To make it take days if not weeks of in-game time to acquire things like the conda and other large ships.
Fdev hasn't made the barriers and balances they use for game rewards good or perceptually worth player effort. They are nothing more than blatant time sinks.
The procedural generation routines can differentiate each instance of a given item that is essentially "the same" well enough to make noticeable differences in how that gameplay interfaces with players. Every B class star doesn't have to behave the same...there are enough variables not just with the given system but with surrounding systems to make extremely unique behaviors. While you are limited in how things can look to a certain degree and be shaped due to textures and models of things, there are plenty of ways to implement variation in what all of that means to gameplay that are effectively limitless in scale and scope. And depending on the algorithm desired, these things can be grouped physically or by some other attribute so that players aren't playing an RNG game. Nor are they playing a game they can just know instantly how it will react.
Using the scale of the number of systems as an excuse for why they all suck is not a valid reason. If you're creating a game and you know something you're doing has no hope of being good ...then you dont do it. If you can't create gameplay that rewards playtime in some way other than some imaginatory self accomplishment of staying awake ...then you rework your idea until you can. Fdev did something to do it ...before having any kind of plan on how they could leverage it properly.
And while yes, some newbies will die in the game when learning how to play, the difficulty scale simply plateaus at "I've learned how to play" and never goes above it. The only time any player who has made it past the week 1 mark in the game dies is if they've fallen asleep, flown drunk, or opted into pvp or alien combat (which is less about their ai being better and more about them just being able to deal more dps and take less). You dont need to be a player who has played for a half a decade to reach that level. It's why literally everyone refers to the game as being a mile wide and an inch deep. It's not the lack of narrative and community content within what everyone expects is an mmo game. It's the lack of any kind of difficulty or skills or mastery needed of anything you do in the game beyond the tutorial level of accomplishment. It's the futile way time sinks are used as a balance mechanic to control income for identical tasks for "different" commodities that only differ in labels as far as gameplay is concerned. It is not subjective to see this as harmful to the game. I mean, you can literally see it with "pirates" attacking (laughably incompetently) your ship regardless of what you have in it so long as it's something other than limpets. They can't even be bothered to make the game pretend like any of it matters.
of when it is difficult and dangerous or not, but rather have full control over if they're going to risk something or not.
If, on the other hand, FD had seeded the Galaxy with a small number of non-procedurally generated real dangers - how do you know these are not out there? Less than 0.1% or so of the Galaxy have been visited - or at least visited by CMDRs who lived to tell the tale.
We've seen many of their hand-built systems. They dont make the systems any better gameplay wise. Because the only difference between a hand-built system and a procedurally generated system is some specific placements and names of the same stuff you get in the procedural ones. There's no enhanced risk or danger ...no additional gameplay mechanics not found in the procedural ones. No environmental features exclusive to them. No, the only thing that they offer is mimicry of lore / reality a bit in some important areas for the narrative / nostalgia. We dont even have any interesting eye candy exclusive to them such as city-planets or other unique and expected things that would differentiate and identify certain systems. No mega shipyards related to the given manufacturers you can visit. No intricate missions that leverage carefully constructed systems.
No these things aren't hidden in the game somewhere and we just haven't found them. They're not in there. You'd have to not only be stupid to hide away the best content (and arguably the only content) in the game, but you'd have to self sabotaging while simultaneously having the best poker face ever for not giving away this secret gem. And if Fdev has proven anything, it's that they can't hide or administer such conspiracies. They'll expose it on a map, blurb about it on some youtube video, leave players friended to them while visiting it and forget that their friends can see their locations, or spoon feed some pet user group on the forum, etc.
