Abandonware

[mmm]

"The modding scene" would at this point better resort to making games from scratch instead of relying on benevolent or apathetic "suppliers" and then going all teary-eyed when the platform they don't control doesn't cooperate. The expectation that a game studio makes a platform for them to play with is fairly arrogant.

You don't seem to know what "the modding scene" is or better who modders usually are. They are mostly teenagers or students with generally very limited coding skills (or at least they do have very little experience). But what they do have is ideas and creativity. Attributes, which very very many professional developers are lacking*.
It's always easy to say "if you don't like it, go and do it better". But that's very short sighted.


* I'm not judging here. If you code and/or design as a job and constantly get your creative work smashed by some kind of "managers", you lose your creative mind and it becomes a 9-5 job.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

 

[Mengy]

Braben has always said that it will be handed over to the community. I don't think that's realistic as the servers as far as I know are many, and the BGS is TB of data. No one is hosting this anytime soon. When Elite has the servers switched off, that's it.

Yeah, David made that comment about “handing it over to the community” back during the kickstarter days, when an offline mode was still a feature and potential backers were very concerned about the online component of the game. The offline mode was of course scrapped because the game was developed to be online only, despite the claims that it wasn’t. Now, with the way the architecture is today, it’s never going to be “handed over”. Once the servers are shut down the game will be gone.

Sorry NV09, but what you want won’t ever happen with ED.

The potential for a modable, offline single player Elite-like game is huge however. A Space Skyrim so to speak, a game which can freely be modded and built upon and improved by the community. I’d wager that such a game done right would be immensely more popular (and profitable) than Elite Dangerous is today. Honestly the market is desperately craving such a game, it’s what fueled the hype for NMS but unfortunately they dropped the ball by hugely deceiving their players. There are various low budget attempts at this, games like Evochron and even the X games, but no AAA teams with a large budget have tried. The Mass Effect games aren’t open ended enough to scratch the itch, but even so their popularity demonstrates the hunger.

Bethesda’s upcoming game Starfield might be an attempt to actually, finally capitalize on this demand. We won’t know until they reveal more about it, but they have the talent and drive to pull it off. If it is what it’s rumored to be then mark my words, the game will be an immense sales juggernaut. Basically what Elite gave up when they dropped the offline mode and modding plans back in 2014.

David should have stuck to his original plan with Elite Dangerous though, I think we’d have a much better game today if he had.

 

[iFred]

* I'm not judging here. If you code and/or design as a job and constantly get your creative work smashed by some kind of "managers", you lose your creative mind and it becomes a 9-5 job.

Well said. And Elite looks like it is exactly in this state. No creativity, no fantasy, just numbers, parameters, spreadsheets. I know you didn´t mean FD, but I do

 

[krylite]

We won't know until 2035 and after at least two "ten year plans". Because once spacelegs and atmospherics come, ED will be renaissanced on the top of the space gaming genre again, with another (like Enterprise TMP refit) ten year plan, and the remains of Star Citizen will be mummified among the burial churns of Daikatana & ME:Andromeda, and NMS 1.0; But maybe it won't even get there, and more likely it'll end up in the hall of fame of all-time gaming. (to counter the absurdly trollish assumptions of the OP)

 

[Renown]

When this computer was delivered in 1957, no one could believe that in just 60 years time a computer weighting just 9g would be many times more powereful and have many more times the storage capacity.

https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20151129/

Due to technology advancing I think in less than 20 years time the Raspberry Pi will be looked on in the same way as the Eliot 405.


As for hosting the elite servers in around 10 years time (earliest maybe) with TBs of space needed, since you can get 2TB flash drives now I suppose I'll have to order the 15TB iPhone 20 then just to make sure I have enough storage.

 

[Hooplah]

Worse case I have every IBM version of the Elite games on a dedicated ancient PC from decades ago. This was a DOS and not a Windows game. Also have the Commodore, Amiga, even Nintendo and UK versions shipping the legacy computers to play them in the USA. Nice to have a backup just in case. Maybe in the future the best version of this game ends. But in the past all the game mechanics are there. Easy to play with a lot smaller graphic card.

 

[The Lawful]

Elite Dangerous is actually quite a lot more complex than many people might think. This is from AWS:reinvent 2015.

Spoiler

[video=youtube_share;EvJPyjmfdz0]https://youtu.be/EvJPyjmfdz0[/video]

I doubt it will fit on any disk or non-AWS server clusters anytime soon^TM or ever - and hopefully never get Abandonware status anyway

O7,
[noob]

 

[NY09]

What game disk grandpa?

You younglings today..... the one I didn't pay full price for, and can at least be used for something else - mug friction reduction, garden bird scaring. assets laddie, assets.. do I have to keep larnin' ya, or are you gonna go on your fancy webernets and look up 'economics', huh? What did you get? Used HDD space? I dunno..... sigh.

 

[Shanaeri]

If you ditched the BGS and the exploration database it could probably be done

 

[NY09]

Thanks for thoughts all btw (yeah I'd love to see some open modding, maybe fly some Homeworld or UNSC ships!...)

 

[WR3ND]

I imagine Frontier will be leaving the lights on indefinitely unless things get dire there. Consider how much of a thing "retro gaming" seems to be. Some of the older games never stopped being relevant to me, so it's kind of funny seeing the trend in pop culture for younger generations.

But yeah, as others have mentioned, they have stated that they intend to release the servers if it comes to that. That being said, it came across to me as more of a "we would like to," so I wouldn't hold it as something set in stone.

 

[NY09]

Desperate troll is desperate. And sad Someone get the OP some hot chocolate and peanuts (hoping for an allergy here).

I have a serious beer and pizza allergy, if that helps?

 

[Krash]

What game disk grandpa?

 

[WR3ND]

Well, cartoons were a lot better then. So at least there's that. Smurfs was rather low on my lists.

Either way, I got this game on Steam. I could always burn it to a CD/DVD/Blu-ray I suppose, if I really wanted to.

 

[Shadowdancer]

You don't seem to know what "the modding scene" is or better who modders usually are. They are mostly teenagers or students with generally very limited coding skills (or at least they do have very little experience). But what they do have is ideas and creativity.

They also throw away their skill. Yeah, sure, exposure; you know what exposure does? It kills people. If you take the more capable and cooperative specimens and pair them up with people who know their way around something like Unity or UE and someone who isn't completely useless at business, you quickly end up with quite a capable little studio that can do fun projects (of limited scope, but there's something to say for games that have actual focus) without being beholden to someone like Bethesda churning out just barely playable titles in the hopes that Modders Will Fix It.

Mods these days seem to be (with only moderate exaggeration) either "N00d Mod OMG"/"OP weapon 9001", or "look at this amazing full conversion that took five years to make and will be shut down by a horde of attack lawyers because I'm using Blizzard assets on on a cracked Nintendo!" with surprisingly little middle ground.

 

[Stigbob]

As long the weekly DOOM thread is still being posted we know everything's just as chipper as it was in 2014 when this fine tradition was started.

 

[Mengy]

Mods these days seem to be (with only moderate exaggeration) either "N00d Mod OMG"/"OP weapon 9001", or "look at this amazing full conversion that took five years to make and will be shut down by a horde of attack lawyers because I'm using Blizzard assets on on a cracked Nintendo!" with surprisingly little middle ground.

Nah, there are tons of games with awesome modding scenes out there. The SCS truck simulators have an incredible modding scene, in fact SCS often learns and adopts from them! Cities Skylines from Paradox can be completely transformed to a whole new level of city builder with mods from the community, there are literally tens of thousands of mods on Steam for it. The Minecraft mod scene is still huge today (Java client).

A space game like Elite with mod support and a community like ours to back it up could become a fracking sales phenomenon. It's why Bethesda makes it a top priority to always support the modding communities for their games, they know how much value they bring to the product, and the mods are a huge reason why their games sell by the many millions.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Once this game has completed its orbital decay around the drain and makes the inevitable full transition to abandonware, will we be able to play it as a standalone game, or will the game disk just become part of a new game called Coffee Coaster?

Thx.

As there seem to a lot of people playing the game I can't see that happening anytime soon. We may be able to play it as a standalone game as has already been mentioned sometime down the line.

 

[Thorberg Shavestroke]

The sky is falling! What's up with the millennial obsession with gloom and doom?

Elite Dangerous is just getting started, it has a very bright future. Considering that the Elite franchise has been played (in one form or another) since 1984 - that's 34 years - I don't think it's going away anytime soon!