News ANNOUNCING ELITE DANGEROUS: HORIZONS

[david6768]

I sit here and read about those of you complaining that a LIFETIME cost of 175 is too much?? Are you freaking serious? What kind of entitlement mentality do you people have?

You pay the 175 and that means for the REST OF YOUR LIFE or the life of the game, you never have to buy anything else. And you expect the devs to give you all the expected content over all those years for free to boot?

I think 175 is cheap for a lifetime of DLC's and major upgrades because I don't see how they can make enough money to continue development at a certain point because there is no constant money stream being generated when everyone buys a lifetime package..

So many of you don't know what it takes to design, produce, code and maintain (code AND hardware) a game system online and you expect them to just give you what you want for next to nothing.

Hope they do make enough money to continue to develop the game. Finally, stop complaining about the cost because right now you have the option to once again buy a lifetime package.. and if you don't go for it, you are a fool and have no reason what so ever to complain about future release prices.

Yes games cost many millions to make, Hmm so do movies and I can go to a theatre and watch a movie for $15. The key is they try to make their money on volume not all on 1 customer!

here is what I see so far
Frontier decided to use procedural generation:
Not because it provides better content to the customer but because it is cheaper
This is not such a big deal and can be good if it is done right but really 2 space station models and 2 outpost models is pretty thin!
Frontier used peer to peer networking:
Not because it provides more available features or better game play for the customer but yep you guessed it because it was cheaper
peer to peer networking is the single biggest mistake I see in this game as it:
severely limits the multiplayer aspect of the game
limits the possibility of fan made mods to the game
opens up the game to exploits as typically client run games are the most exploited where server side games are harder to hack/exploit!
Want proof here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DX4VwlF2pY
Frontier released a base game that is dry, repetitive and lifeless at a AAA price tag
Frontier is cutting corners on what could be a great game all the while charging maximum prices for the least amount of what could be passed off as a game.
When the option to buy an expansion early comes from a developer it usually comes at a significantly discounted price compared to the release price. This gives the consumer a chance to buy in early saving some money and the developer a chance to get some upfront money. The little tidbit of "loyality" discount for Horizons should be on top of a buy early discount IMO! To top it all off new Horizons buyers are getting in cheaper overall than the existing "loyal" customers.

I expect nothing less than Frontier to continue same the minimum content for maximum profit model for Horizons as they have for ED
( The base game ED is included with Horizons so I am still talking about Horizons when I talk about ED FYI)

 

[CaptainKremmen]

<snip>

Oh ya while we are on the subject of things that Irk me, stop making those cool game trailers - there misleading - nothing like what you see in them takes place in the game. most notably this one..

<snip>

You say to FD's marketing people, "stop making... cool game trailers".

I say, NO to that! Let them make those cool trailers!




You say, "People buy this game because of trailers like this".

I say, People notice games and look into them because of trailers like this.



If a promotional trailer is highly stylised, look for a message like NOT ACTUAL GAME FOOTAGE on it.

Which there was, from the first frame of the first scene. You mentioned that yourself, in your edit.




Under no circumstances should FD listen to this sort of killjoy, fun-police complaining!

Honestly, going to the "Horizons" thread and complaining about a TV spot commercial from December 2014?




Now, in the interests of glorious launch trailer watching, here are a bunch of other "Launch" videos Frontier released....

Premium Beta 1 Launch

Spoiler

[video=youtube;Ewo-6WVZaIU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewo-6WVZaIU[/video]

Premium Beta 2 Launch

Spoiler

[video=youtube;ex2nGIvbiVI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex2nGIvbiVI[/video]

Standard Beta 1 Launch

Spoiler

[video=youtube;jUMJs3Bwkh0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUMJs3Bwkh0[/video]

GDC Promo

Spoiler

[video=youtube;fAwmbvRJkzM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAwmbvRJkzM[/video]

XBox One Launch

Spoiler

[video=youtube;jG5J5hCAC4c]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG5J5hCAC4c[/video]

Version 1.1 Launch

Spoiler

[video=youtube;4uozVtIe-5w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uozVtIe-5w[/video]

Version 1.2 Launch

Spoiler

[video=youtube;23GEX4pYL9w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23GEX4pYL9w[/video]

Version 1.3 Launch

Spoiler

[video=youtube;CWPhk5Gclbo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWPhk5Gclbo[/video]

Eventually, when Horizons is launched, it will get its own trailer.

I, for one, want it to be "cool".

 

[Yaffle]

Hello all

Let's stick to the topic of ED:Horizons please.

 

[Patrick_68000]

I, for one, want it to be "cool".

I like many the trailers of Frontier. A real collection to be placed on the hard disk

 

[Pete Clements]

Hello all

Let's stick to the topic of ED:Horizons please.

Soooooooo, when is the horizons beta announcement going to be then? ;-)

 

[Bannon_Orcus]

never get tired of that planetary landings gif! LOL

 

[Paranoid Android]

Frontier decided to use procedural generation:
Not because it provides better content to the customer but because it is cheaper

Nothing to do with cheapness. It would be humanly impossible to manually create all the worlds in the galaxy. There are hundreds of billions of stars... and there are many planets per star and many more asteroids.

Not only would hand producing all this take more people than are currently alive (or many people so long the game would never be finished) storing all that hand crafted data would take up so much room there is not enough storage available to keep it.

Cheap has nothing to do with the decision to go with procedural generation.

Frontier used peer to peer networking:
Not because it provides more available features or better game play for the customer but yep you guessed it because it was cheaper
peer to peer networking is the single biggest mistake I see in this game as it:
severely limits the multiplayer aspect of the game

Again - the peer to peer choice is nothing to do with cheapness. All current MMOs use turn based mechanics. (Correct me if I am wrong - but unless there's a very top secret or unsuccessful MMO out there - I am pretty sure I am not) Eliteangerous isn't turn based - it's a twitch game - your reaction time is important. If your game client had to check with a central server for every hit/collision/direction change that would double the latency of the game - and low latency for twitch games is bad.

You're welcome to your opinion (you may think it's dry and repetitive) but you're also making some assumptions that are not taking in all the available data.

 

[3941]

Again - the peer to peer choice is nothing to do with cheapness. All current MMOs use turn based mechanics. (Correct me if I am wrong - but unless there's a very top secret or unsuccessful MMO out there - I am pretty sure I am not) Eliteangerous isn't turn based - it's a twitch game - your reaction time is important. If your game client had to check with a central server for every hit/collision/direction change that would double the latency of the game - and low latency for twitch games is bad.

Nah... P2P does nothing but ADD latency actually. And we're not only syncing the data from our ship, but all the NPC ships that are controlled by our PCs, too. And we have to sync them with every single player around us, not just one server.
That plus all the weirdness it creates, like my wingman seeing a player AND his NPCs and me seeing nothing of that.

The way Elite works, with these small instances, a client-server model would provide a much smoother multiplayer experience. But it would be exponentially more expensive to run, because it would need a ton more server capacity.

I mean, come on... that's why competitive first person shooters like Counter-strike are using client-server models, and why a game like Call Of Duty is dead as a competitive shooter on pc, because it's now relying on P2P for quite some time and never delivered the dedicated servers the PC community was asking for.

P2P for twitchy games is crap. Period.

But let's not start this here now... Isn't the first time I'm discussing this. Ironically with a person who wasn't even multiplaying that much, but defending P2P anyway...

 

[KellyR]

Nothing to do with cheapness. It would be humanly impossible to manually create all the worlds in the galaxy. There are hundreds of billions of stars... and there are many planets per star and many more asteroids.

Not only would hand producing all this take more people than are currently alive (or many people so long the game would never be finished) storing all that hand crafted data would take up so much room there is not enough storage available to keep it.

Cheap has nothing to do with the decision to go with procedural generation.



Again - the peer to peer choice is nothing to do with cheapness. All current MMOs use turn based mechanics. (Correct me if I am wrong - but unless there's a very top secret or unsuccessful MMO out there - I am pretty sure I am not) Eliteangerous isn't turn based - it's a twitch game - your reaction time is important. If your game client had to check with a central server for every hit/collision/direction change that would double the latency of the game - and low latency for twitch games is bad.

You're welcome to your opinion (you may think it's dry and repetitive) but you're also making some assumptions that are not taking in all the available data.

+1 for this. Have some rep. I've played Freelancer Multiplayer and the lag there was BAD. It seemed my opponent was teleporting. 1st he's here. Now over to my right. Now he's to the left and below me. Then he's behind me. Enough to drive you to drink hard liquor. But the reason was that the each client received information on the location of other clients from the hosting server. And what you said about procedural generation also hits the nail on the head.

So have some rep. Your post was right on target.

 

[KellyR]

Nah... P2P does nothing but ADD latency actually. And we're not only syncing the data from our ship, but all the NPC ships that are controlled by our PCs, too. And we have to sync them with every single player around us, not just one server.
That plus all the weirdness it creates, like my wingman seeing a player AND his NPCs and me seeing nothing of that.

The way Elite works, with these small instances, a client-server model would provide a much smoother multiplayer experience. But it would be exponentially more expensive to run, because it would need a ton more server capacity.

I mean, come on... that's why competitive first person shooters like Counter-strike are using client-server models, and why a game like Call Of Duty is dead as a competitive shooter on pc, because it's now relying on P2P for quite some time and never delivered the dedicated servers the PC community was asking for.

P2P for twitchy games is crap. Period.

But let's not start this here now... Isn't the first time I'm discussing this. Ironically with a person who wasn't even multiplaying that much, but defending P2P anyway...

Well, I have played multiplayer twitch on a client/server game; Freelancer. And the lag was BAD!!! I'm not real huge on combat in Eliteangerous, but I have been in combat a few times and I've never seen anything like what I experienced in Freelancer. No jumping from place to place. No firing and right as I fire, he/she disappears and appears somewhere else. All the PvP combat I've experienced in this game has been smooth as butter. So, with all due respect, I have to say you don't know what you are talking about. Wish I could give negative rep, but they disabled that. Probably because of abuse.

 

[astrologos]

Well, I have played multiplayer twitch on a client/server game; Freelancer. And the lag was BAD!!! I'm not real huge on combat in Eliteangerous, but I have been in combat a few times and I've never seen anything like what I experienced in Freelancer. No jumping from place to place. No firing and right as I fire, he/she disappears and appears somewhere else. All the PvP combat I've experienced in this game has been smooth as butter. So, with all due respect, I have to say you don't know what you are talking about. Wish I could give negative rep, but they disabled that. Probably because of abuse.

"However, I'm not sure I agree about maintenance on the netcode side... IMO P2P netcode is way harder to get right and keep right. We saw during the betas how there were issues around:
players being unable to see some NPCs despite being in the same instance
players being unable to lock onto some NPCs until they were really close to them (500m or so)
disappearing bounties/fines
cargo canisters disappearing/replicating/otherwise glitching
These sorts of things are made much more common by P2P setups, because there's no central authority - each client owns some parts of the instance, and they all have to agree on what happens. That also means that all the clients have to stay in sync with each other; otherwise you end up with desyncs and some clients seeing one version of events and other clients seeing another. That's pretty hard to get right (as shown during the betas!)
The cargo duplication especially simply wouldn't happen in a server-client scenario because the server has ultimate authority - either the cargo is there, or it's not (i.e. it's been picked up by someone). As it is now, another client can say "wait, I think there's a canister there!" and it's back.
As for people saying that server-client couldn't handle E gameplay... I have to disagree. Assuming the instance limit stays the same, there would be no issues whatsoever - as an example, Battlefield games support up to 64 players on dedicated servers with some pretty complicated simulations compared to E. Not to mention that assuming several clients in an instance it would likely use less bandwidth compared to P2P.
Where a server-client model would cause problems would be where people have poor internet connections (or no internet connection, if offline mode hadn't been canned); it'd cause lag even in solo, which would have been a pretty serious problem. It'd also basically be incompatible with offline mode, which is probably part of why they decided to go with P2P."

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/2um8gr/elite_and_its_p2p_set_up

 

[3941]

Well, I have played multiplayer twitch on a client/server game; Freelancer. And the lag was BAD!!! I'm not real huge on combat in Eliteangerous, but I have been in combat a few times and I've never seen anything like what I experienced in Freelancer. No jumping from place to place. No firing and right as I fire, he/she disappears and appears somewhere else. All the PvP combat I've experienced in this game has been smooth as butter. So, with all due respect, I have to say you don't know what you are talking about. Wish I could give negative rep, but they disabled that. Probably because of abuse.

I'm playing all kinds of multiplayer games for almost 20 years now... So I guess I have a little bit more of experience to add to the table than you, with your one bad experience.
And I've seen quite a bit of lag in Elite by now, with players AND their NPC's teleporting all around me.

The multiplayer part of the game, specifically playing in wings, is so frustrating overall, that I don't even really bother anymore. And I've actually made some friends buy this game. Everybody is still playing, but mostly alone.
I'm not even complaining. I enjoy the game. Multiplayer isn't what makes it interesting for me. Maybe they'll get it better at some point. At least the issues in wings could be mitigated, like highly differing perceptions of our surroundings.

Sorry, but it's you who doesn't know what he's talking about.

 

[KellyR]

I'm playing all kinds of multiplayer games for almost 20 years now... So I guess I have a little bit more of experience to add to the table than you, with your one bad experience.
And I've seen quite a bit of lag in Elite by now, with players AND their NPC's teleporting all around me.

The multiplayer part of the game, specifically playing in wings, is so frustrating overall, that I don't even really bother anymore. And I've actually made some friends buy this game. Everybody is still playing, but mostly alone.
I'm not even complaining. I enjoy the game. Multiplayer isn't what makes it interesting for me. Maybe they'll get it better at some point. At least the issues in wings could be mitigated, like highly differing perceptions of our surroundings.

Sorry, but it's you who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Maybe the others just had bad internet connections. I'll take your word for your experiences here in Elite. Didn't mean to offend you. Just was stating facts as they appeared to me.

 

[Jenner]

As the discussion has veered off track several times already and doesn't appear to really have a chance of getting on and staying on topic, this thread will be closed.

Thank you for your enthusiasm and comments on Horizons! Watch this space for more information on Horizons prior to release.

Thank you.