News Announcement: Elite: Dangerous coming to Xbox One

Marc Alexander

Marc Alexander
Pibbles said:
It's not contradictory at all, one merely needs to apply some logical thinking. Many games that are designed purely for consoles are not restricted in any form. I could go downstairs and and play Forza 5 right now and have a great time. Will it be the same as Assetto Corsa in my friends racing chair with NVidia surround? No. Will it be the same as taking my own sports car out on the track? No. Is it therefore somewhat restricted? No, because Forza 5 played with the standard peripherals all racing fans own (wheel, surround sound and quality HDTV), will actually be as unrestricted on console as a good PC sim with the equivalent peripherals. It's as good as I can expect a current racing game to be and I think it's very well done indeed.

Now, is Need for Speed (originally of course a PC franchise) restricted in some way? Yes, in many ways. Car handling, car differentiation, racing lines. It's an arcade game by all measures. It's fun actually, but as I do actually race cars as a hobby it will never hold me because I can of course simply go downstairs to the garage and go and do it for real. Is it restricted because it is now mainly a console franchise? No, the Forza franchise shows us that very few - if any - restrictions need to be placed on racing games due to console architecture. Why is NFS restricted? Because the vision was to make an arcade style game, that was the desired niche and in fact it has served EA very well. Many people do not desire to get into the minutiae of driving cars, in the same way a space game that dug into the minutiae of flying a spaceship would be dull to many people. Already a lot of people find ED dull for that reason and ED is nowhere near being a sim. One must remember a game is being developed, not a documentary, and the balance is a fine one.

So, I say again. ED is most likely not restricted due to a desire to port to console, it is restricted due to vision. Does that mean that the dev team would flagrantly ignore consoles throughout the last few years all the while David is saying, "we won't rule consoles out"? Obviously that would be incredibly weak development because he had already made a strategic statement on the point.

The entire console vs PC argument is silly, I own them all and I enjoy them all for their own reasons. ED have chosen to make an arcade-style space shooter for reasons of vision most likely, this means it can easily be ported and, given that is the case, they would be rather foolish to not deliver that. My over-riding mantra on this is that given the rather precarious state of the company until recently, people should be pleased by this decision.
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That's rather a lot of words without addressing my point. Okay:

"my personal view is that it was designed with *consoles in mind*, I don't mean they deliberately hamstrung the game because of them. When I say in mind, I mean that each time a design decision was made it was no doubt considered in the light of consoles."

In other words, from the start, deliberate decisions were made in view of porting to consoles.

"I personally think the released game is hamstrung primarily because Frontier were not able to do a deeper gaming experience, either due to lack of vision from the top, lack of game coder skills or lack of resource."

In other words, the game is limited due to some inability (of vision, skills or resources)

"But when FD realised they had delivered something rather basic they would be fools not to realise how simple it would be to port it."

In other words, the inference is that the game was not designed with consoles in mind - there was a 'realisation' of how easy it would be to port it.


Now, those 'illogical' suppositions I have gleaned from your post strike me as contradictory.

Maybe its just me?
 
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Pibbles

P
Marc Alexander said:
That's rather a lot of words without addressing my point. Okay:

"my personal view is that it was designed with *consoles in mind*, I don't mean they deliberately hamstrung the game because of them. When I say in mind, I mean that each time a design decision was made it was no doubt considered in the light of consoles."

In other words, from the start, deliberate decisions were made in view of porting to consoles.

Maybe its just me?
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Yes, it is just you. You are trying to put words into my mouth; 'in other words', and then writing a load of stuff I actually did not say.

If it pleases you to think I said some things I did not, then be my guest. But I stand by what I actually said; the game is limited and 'arcadey' most likely due to vision. Yes decisions would have been considered against console architecture due to Braben's strategic statements at the time, but that does not mean consoles drove decisions. I am buying a new car at the moment, a factor that possible models are considered against is in car hi-fi quality as I am a music buff. But more than anything I am a driver, so I won't buy a gutless car just because it has a stonking hi-fi. I'll buy the powerful car with the weak hi-fi if that choice needs to be made, the ICE is not driving the decision, the performance is. But on the journey to that decision, development factors are all ratified against my varying standards. I cannot make this any simpler for you I am afraid, I am not the best at analogies.

I suspect the vision was to make a fairly arcade style game due to mass accessibility. I've been an Elite fan since day 1 and I really did hope for an Elite for 2015, taking full advantage of multiplayer and other gaming standards of our time, so I was personally disappointed to get something more akin to a remake\reskin of Elite 1984. But I can also see the over-arching value in developing something that doesn't tend to pander to old farts like me, but considers a whole new set of gamers and the vastly increased market that FD could tap. They even say that's what they wanted to do in their IPO docs.

I don't agree with all the decisions made by FD but to port to consoles is a total no-brainer.
 
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Marc Alexander

Marc Alexander
Pibbles said:
Yes, it is just you. You are trying to put words into my mouth; 'in other words', and then writing a load of stuff I actually did not say.

If it pleases you to think I said some things I did not, then be my guest. But I stand by what I actually said; the game is limited and 'arcadey' most likely due to vision. Yes decisions would have been considered against console architecture due to Braben's strategic statements at the time, but that does not mean consoles drove decisions. I am buying a new car at the moment, a factor that possible models are considered against is in car hi-fi quality as I am a music buff. But more than anything I am a driver, so I won't buy a gutless car just because it has a stonking hi-fi. I'll buy the powerful car with the weak hi-fi if that choice needs to be made, the ICE is not driving the decision, the performance is. But on the journey to that decision, development factors are all ratified against my varying standards. I cannot make this any simpler for you I am afraid.

I suspect the vision was to make a fairly arcade style game due to mass accessibility. I've been an Elite fan since day 1 and I really did hope for an Elite for 2015, taking full advantage of multiplayer and other gaming standards of our time, so I was personally disappointed to get something more akin to a remake\reskin of Elite 1984. But I can also see the over-arching value in developing something that doesn't tend to pander to old farts like me, but considers a whole new set of gamers and the vastly increased market that FD could tap. They even say that's what they wanted to do in their IPO docs.

I don't agree with all the decisions made by FD but to port to consoles is a total no-brainer.
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I'm merely laying out, in very simple terms, my confusion with your post. Part of that is to offer-up the meaning of the contradictory parts of your post, with a view to you addressing it.

If you think that "designed with *consoles in mind*" is incompatible with making "deliberate" decisions in view of that, then I don't know what to say.

It certainly doesn't clear anything up.
 

Pibbles

P
Marc Alexander said:
It certainly doesn't clear anything up.
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One last try before I go out. Braben always said they would not rule consoles out. Therefore the technical team will have had consoles in mind, if they were doing their job properly. It would not be so great if after that strategic statement was made, Dev A says, "sorry David, you can never port this to consoles because of x,y,z". I think my response (and that of any reasonable leader) at that point would be to refer that dev to my previous comments and hand him his P45, due to him having designed us into a corner.

If you think developing a programme while having console architecture standards in mind is akin to making deliberate design decisions solely driven by console architecture standards, then I don't know what to say. The former is merely not making decisions that break such standards (leaving the door open) the latter is designing firmly for consoles with PC second choice. This latter being what people get annoyed with, rightly so if a PC crowd-funded a thing, but I honestly don't think it happened in this case. The game was made arcade-like because of vision, not standards (vision of course being far higher in the hierarchy of the process). It just so happens that being as the vision was for a more simple\accessible type of game, it was of course very easy to align with console standards when in development, because they are often less exacting (although not in all cases).

A very simple way to view it is that the former is an act of governance with the latter being defacto shaping and dev intent: "don't break console standards when you write this PC game" vs "design this game for consoles and sod the PC, we'll make it fit later".
 
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Marc Alexander

Marc Alexander
Pibbles said:
LOL. It completely clears it up, subject to a) sufficient verbal reasoning skills on the part of the reader, and b) the reader not wishing to cause some spurious argument by being disingenuous.
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That's not very helpful.

Pibbles said:
If you think developing a programme while having console architecture standards in mind is akin to making deliberate design decisions solely driven by console architecture standards, then I don't know what to say.
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Decisions, by their very nature, are deliberate. I was merely making that point. Design decisions, shopping decisions, work decisions, holiday decisions..

You get my point I hope.
 

Pibbles

P
Marc Alexander said:
That's not very helpful.
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No it was not helpful and I actually retracted it of my own volition. I was frustrated at having to say the same thing over and over in different ways. Perhaps I am simply not good at articulating myself here and I apologise if so.

Please re-read the post where I made that statement because I added some more simple statements after considering what I had written.
 

Marc Alexander

Marc Alexander
Pibbles said:
Please re-read the post where I made that statement because I added some more simple statements after considering what I had written.
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Thank you for spelling-things-out-very-deliberately-for-me.

You seem under the impression that I have some level of difficulty understanding your posts. The problem is not that I have some cognitive deficiency, but that any amount of waffle from you still doesn't address my original issues with your original post. Its all a bit of a smokescreen.

Now, obviously it looks like we're not going to deal with your contradictory post, so you can resign yourself to not-being-able-to-get-through-to-a-thicky-like-me, as you like to infer.

And to be honest, I've got more pressing things to do with my time rather than take part in circular arguments.
 
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Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
I think its great.

NES Elite was the best version of the original, plus that had a dpad and all of four buttons to do everything with.

If a UI is designed well it should translate to any platform with little fuss, and ED has done well in this regard.
 

Stealth Gamer92

S
I am only 22 so unfortunately I missed out on the original Elite games, but as a kid I have fond memories of my dad teaching me how to fly a P51 Mustang in Jane's Pacific Theatre. Unfortunately I haven't been able or willing to put the cash into a gaming PC since my dad's went obsolete years ago. I agree with a lot said on this forum, specifically I hope this sim isn't dummed down for CoD or other no thinking just shooting type players. I have one question though. As someone who played allot of WWII flight Sims what kind of learning curve can I expect?

Also I want to say this is the only game that has ever actually made me think "this game was made for me" so I hope the PC gameplay I've seen is the same game I am going to buy on my XB1.
 

OillyRag

OillyRag
Stealth Gamer92 said:
I hope the PC gameplay I've seen is the same game I am going to buy on my XB1.
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I think it will.

The PC and the xbone share the same basic architecture .... they're both pc's really ..... The only thing that frontier will have to do at all differently is the networking as I believe you guys have the XBox live platform.
 

Stealth Gamer92

S
woodstok said:
The only thing that frontier will have to do at all differently is the networking as I believe you guys have the XBox live platform.
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Yeah, I used to complain about it until I got a PS3 and my free online account was hacked 3 times in 3 months while(as far as I know) that hasn't happened to my Xbox account.
 

OriginalBadBoy

O
Rubbernuke said:
I think its great.

NES Elite was the best version of the original, plus that had a dpad and all of four buttons to do everything with.

If a UI is designed well it should translate to any platform with little fuss, and ED has done well in this regard.
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I have the NES version in the cupboard .. should really look it out and see how it play.
 
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