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Frontier could add optional story-driven gameplay as DLC, however. Spider-Man on PS4 gives players this lovely "world" to explore and interact in, and there is always crime to fight and good deeds to do and things to see. However, its the narrative-driven missions that really give the player purpose. Of course the game comes with a huge story to complete, but after that you can download additional DLC with new stories that take place in NYC using your customized Spider-Man "build".
Elite could, and should IMO, offer the same thing. Heck, the original Elite had story-driven missions, which were my favorite part of the game! And unlike a typical "game on rails" (Uncharted, Tomb Raider, etc.) Elite is much more like Skyrim where you could totally ignore any narrative and just do your own thing, so giving the players optional narrative won't ruin the "blaze your own trail" side of the game.
My worry is that Frontier is rubbish at narrative... If they do this, they need to hire an experienced team capable of producing good gameplay-driven story telling (and I'm not talking Drew Wagar).
You can do what you want within a very limited choice of activities.
I really wish the ‘game’ hung together as a whole and not just a series of disconnected scenarios.
And yes, i too would like something like proper career or faction narrative missions with outcomes that arent just more credits (what i need them for?) or mats.
I really wish the ‘game’ hung together as a whole and not just a series of disconnected scenarios.
And yes, i too would like something like proper career or faction narrative missions with outcomes that arent just more credits (what i need them for?) or mats.
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The main problem is that for any part of the game to be relevant/good it has to effect the game environment in some way - you know a mission will end up with you blowing up a station or some such.
However it is supposed to be a continuous universe - so that is just not going to work unless you take the whole universe and make i offline so you are the only human player in the environment.
Not that that would be a bad thing but it is not how the game was designed.
However it is supposed to be a continuous universe - so that is just not going to work unless you take the whole universe and make i offline so you are the only human player in the environment.
Not that that would be a bad thing but it is not how the game was designed.
Keep the general sandbox game, but utilize the mission chains, add handwritten mission lines. For example the imperial/federal rank grind should be replaced by stories preferably with multiple ways to do them. This (and not the guardian ruin grind) could really create a personal narrative.
The OP has a point.
If FD had gone down the route of presenting ED as a platform / environment with a toolset for third-parties to develop gameplay then we would potentially have a much richer experience all around.
If FD had gone down the route of presenting ED as a platform / environment with a toolset for third-parties to develop gameplay then we would potentially have a much richer experience all around.
It need not be so grandiose. I don't think OP wants to be Luke Skywalker blowing up the original Death Star. We don't need to save THE princess, but in a galaxy with over 22,000 inhabited solar systems, surely we could each save A "princess", metaphorically-speaking. I often enjoy side-quests as much or more than main quests in Open-world games, as long as the story behind those quests are good.
FWIW, when I first started playing Elite, missions were these "quests", and I enjoyed them because they were fresh and new. However, it didn't take long before I realized there is just a handful of mission types that are reused over and over again, with no actual story or narrative behind them. This is different than a game like Skyrim, where I felt a personal attachment to different NPCs after helping them, and I also felt closer to the game world in general as I progressed through the numerous story lines, adventures, quests, etc.
Oh, and those adventures and quests were almost always fun. The only grinding I did was to level up certain skills, and that was my fault.
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In games like Skyrim, sidequests are things you do that take you to places or make you do activities that you wouldn't normally do. You're then rewarded appropriately for the time and effort you put in.
However, in ED, missions are used primarily to earn large amounts of money for doing the thing that you were already going to do. The rewards are (generally) vastly out of proportion for the effort involved.
You could argue that unlocking Engineers is the ED equivalent of sidequests - they have the same 'gather 50 of these items return to me' mechanic - but the reward is simply that you can now perform a new sidequest to grind another 20 'gather 50 items' loops before you are actually rewarded with the thing you were wanting in the first place. And this is after the improvement that removed the RNG from the reward allocation.
FDev did try to introduce actual sidequests with the 'tip-off mission' concept, but it was horribly implemented and the reward meaningless (hooray, less credits then I could have earned for a single A-B delivery mission). There also used to be goodies hidden away in local Galnet, which would provide puzzles or clues to where interesting things could be found. Unfortunately local Galnet was so flooded with pointless BGS state change messages that hardly anyone even knew they were there. In addition, there wasn't any actual reward for solving the puzzles - unless you count figuring out where Jacques had disappeared to 6 months after somebody had found him by filtering the GalMap on population
It would be great if FDev put some energy back into adding mysteries and puzzles to the game, rather than just new and 'exciting' things to take pictures in front of. Unfortunately, there aren't enough medium ships or weapons in the game yet, so naturally FDev are focused on adding those.
What kind of gameplay are you looking for. Give some examples of some mechanics you want in the game.
For me there is plenty of game, there just needs compelling reasons to do that game. To me that is EDs biggest downfall at the moment.
I posted elsewhere recently that FDev could (and should) utilize CGs and Galnet to spin immersive storylines. They could begin by throwing out some bread crumbs, then give the community time to speculate a bit, then build on the speculation to develop the next steps. These chains of events could be presented via Galnet as continuing stories, so CMDRs can hop in at any point in the narrative and take part even if they missed earlier bits.
These "questlines" could relate to exploration, search and rescue, or combat campaigns, or other themes that could easily accommodate large numbers of CMDRs participating.
It would be like a tabletop RPG with FDev as DM.
These "questlines" could relate to exploration, search and rescue, or combat campaigns, or other themes that could easily accommodate large numbers of CMDRs participating.
It would be like a tabletop RPG with FDev as DM.
Thing is, there's in-game rewards and then there's gameplay rewards. For example, I've been playing Rise Of The Tomb Raider recently. I've already unlocked and improved all the weapons and skills I'm interested in. I don't need any more in-game rewards, but I still get great pleasure exploring and solving tombs, talking to people and learning their stories, finding artifacts and documents and learning those stories - all things that don't "reward" me in any way except the experience itself.
Now I suppose I could go to every abandoned INARA base and generation ship in the game and download the audio files, but for some reason this gameplay is nowhere near as fulfilling for the amount of work (when are we getting a mega ship taxi to the Formidine Rift?) required to visit them. As for puzzles, I much rather solve a Tomb in ROTR than solve a Guardian puzzle (I usually just cheat by looking it up) or worse, doing pen and paper cryptography on unregistered beacons and looking at audio files using Audacity.
Anyway, you get the point...
I like pen and paper cryptography, but the audio file stuff was a step too far out of game for my taste. I'd be overjoyed if FDev created some in-space 'dungeons' that provided an extended gameplay loop, even if the reward was nothing more than a 'completed' tag. Unfortunately we're likely to get nothing more complex than a 'match three' puzzle that drops some grade 5 mats and a couple of billion credits.
I always fast forward through the 'story' part of RPG subquests - I really don't care why you need 5 leather strips, it's not going to change whether or not I deliver them, even if it's so you can use them as part of your 'kidnap' kit. I still enjoy the experience
I always thought that getting pally with factions should open up more options - more advanced missions would be nice and other options or opportunities- say, like, being able to join npc guilds who would, again, have more varied missions or amenities depending on their type of guild.
Maybe like a guild of ship builders and you have to fly one of THEIR ships to a station or to test out for them - so you'd get to use different ships. (They send your own ship there themselves or something). I dunno…
A bit of persistence in respect to things, too.
Anything, really, to give ED more of the feeling of being a game - beyond the rather bland and disconnected feeling that it has now, for me, at least.
Maybe like a guild of ship builders and you have to fly one of THEIR ships to a station or to test out for them - so you'd get to use different ships. (They send your own ship there themselves or something). I dunno…
A bit of persistence in respect to things, too.
Anything, really, to give ED more of the feeling of being a game - beyond the rather bland and disconnected feeling that it has now, for me, at least.
For me, from a gameplay perspective, the issue (having played for a long time) is that there's almost no variety in the activities that I want to do.
If we talk about missions, then once you've done them to gain credits, rank, ship unlocks, after a while the thought of repeating what is essentially the same basic gameplay becomes unappealing. I find it a great shame that over two years since planetary scan missions were introduced, there are still only two scenarios, both of which can be done pretty much with your eyes shut. And it's disappointing that when FD did tweak them, instead of trying to add a different scenario, they simply changed how the pretend hunting of the bases behaved.
Likewise, assassination missions are all identical, as are opposed delivery missions (and hardly any seem to be opposed these days). Why did they think that having to blow up four identical ships would be more fun than having to blow up something different each time? Such a shame that after all this time FD couldn't mix it up a bit, and add some variety in the actual mission activity.
It's like they use the RNG for the wrong things (whether something happens) as opposed to the actual activity (what happens).
If we talk about missions, then once you've done them to gain credits, rank, ship unlocks, after a while the thought of repeating what is essentially the same basic gameplay becomes unappealing. I find it a great shame that over two years since planetary scan missions were introduced, there are still only two scenarios, both of which can be done pretty much with your eyes shut. And it's disappointing that when FD did tweak them, instead of trying to add a different scenario, they simply changed how the pretend hunting of the bases behaved.
Likewise, assassination missions are all identical, as are opposed delivery missions (and hardly any seem to be opposed these days). Why did they think that having to blow up four identical ships would be more fun than having to blow up something different each time? Such a shame that after all this time FD couldn't mix it up a bit, and add some variety in the actual mission activity.
It's like they use the RNG for the wrong things (whether something happens) as opposed to the actual activity (what happens).
If I was so jaded about the game as some posters I'd be happilly leaving it, and the forum, and playing something that did engage me - or lead me by the nose...
Fortunately I'm not jaded enough yet
Fortunately I'm not jaded enough yet