(crosspost from my Google Plus page, .)
I haven't found the strength to play this game for about three weeks. Here's why.
I was stupid enough to be suckered into premium beta, lured by the shiny promises of blazing my own trail in a living, evolving galaxy that would react to player action.
Man was I dumb; maybe hypnotised by Braben's ever-moving hands, maybe just starving for a good game in the genre.
Frontier nailed it with the very core feeling of the game, that much I give them. Flying a ship seems (lack of boring "realistic" flight model notwithstanding) real, graphically it's nice, and audio is about the best games have had to date. Sadly, the good things and, most importantly, promises end there. What Frontier managed to fail at, and quite exceptionally so, was that whole "trailblazing" part, or to implement pretty much anything written down in their proposed designs exceeding a product that could be sold without getting sued into the ground for deceptive business practices.
Because you see, the game is little more than a dead spreadsheet. There I said it, it's EVE (which I played for about half a year and absolutely loathed for its promotion of grief to core gameplay and bottom-of-the-lake community), just with direct controls and half-hearted opt-out from the multiplayer aspect. Apart from changes in political ownership, the galaxy doesn't change, unless someone at Frontier sits down and manually writes things into existence based on soothsaying player statistics. There's nothing directly engaging a player. In the "core game", you have the choice of combat (go out and shoot the same things over and over again), trading (go out and trade the same things over and over again, if you want to be "good" at it you just get a premade route from the web!), or exploration where you go really far out so you won't encounter other ships, look at varyingly shiny round things over and over again, hope you don't crash into inconveniently double-parked stars, and eventually fly back and click a button to get credits for the privilege. If you want to play with friends, combat is just about the only viable thing, and it takes a very special mind to do exploration for any significant duration. Oh, all the stations you encounter will look about the same too, so inhabited space isn't vastly more exciting than the vastness of procedurally generated nothing.
The "Powerplay" update was supposed to change that by introducing even more faction mechanics; the game already had three major factions and more minor factions than one could shake a stick at, but apparently Frontier realised that those were so utterly boring and fundamentally unfit to serve as game mechanics that they had to build a third, almost orthogonal, set of factions, called "Powers".
What happened was grind. You gain rank with those factions by going to some place, let's call it "A" because there's nothing inherently exciting about it anyway, load up your ship with tonnes of "stuff" (again nothing exciting), ferry it to place "B", and unload it to gain "merits". Not credits, mind you, because credits would be generally useful, and a fun new gameplay element can't have that. The general goal of a player is then to optimise their experience by making sure that "A" and "B" are as close to each other as possible, because you need to do that procedure a lot. Oh, the "stuff" is rate limited, so you can only buy a certain amount per time, e.g., 10 per half-hour, so you have a strong time sink component on top of your grind. Terrific. Anyway, to what end would you do a less profitable and far less interesting version of trade, you ask? To make some numbers go up. If you trawl the menus long enough you may even find exciting barcharts!
"So I only play for a couple hours a week," you say, "surely the game will keep me entertained that long."
You can do that, but you see, the game doesn't like you having other activities to spend time on. Remember those merits from earlier? If you don't manage to meet or exceed the amount you had last week, you will lose rank with the faction you did all that time sinking grind for. Cool, eh? That's first-rate motivation right there! Nice progress you made, would be a shame if anything happened to it! Now get off your behind and ship that "stuff", lazy fatso! The same, though to a lesser degree, goes for reputation with the major factions. So ultimately you aren't as much "blazing a trail" as you are trying to maintain a muddy path that gets washed out by torrential rain every Friday.
Ultimately, it's a game that is built around all the things that define grind, presents a shiny but at the same time bland, dead galaxy, absolutely loathes casual players, and wasted a lot of talent in its making.
I haven't found the strength to play this game for about three weeks. Here's why.
I was stupid enough to be suckered into premium beta, lured by the shiny promises of blazing my own trail in a living, evolving galaxy that would react to player action.
Man was I dumb; maybe hypnotised by Braben's ever-moving hands, maybe just starving for a good game in the genre.
Frontier nailed it with the very core feeling of the game, that much I give them. Flying a ship seems (lack of boring "realistic" flight model notwithstanding) real, graphically it's nice, and audio is about the best games have had to date. Sadly, the good things and, most importantly, promises end there. What Frontier managed to fail at, and quite exceptionally so, was that whole "trailblazing" part, or to implement pretty much anything written down in their proposed designs exceeding a product that could be sold without getting sued into the ground for deceptive business practices.
Because you see, the game is little more than a dead spreadsheet. There I said it, it's EVE (which I played for about half a year and absolutely loathed for its promotion of grief to core gameplay and bottom-of-the-lake community), just with direct controls and half-hearted opt-out from the multiplayer aspect. Apart from changes in political ownership, the galaxy doesn't change, unless someone at Frontier sits down and manually writes things into existence based on soothsaying player statistics. There's nothing directly engaging a player. In the "core game", you have the choice of combat (go out and shoot the same things over and over again), trading (go out and trade the same things over and over again, if you want to be "good" at it you just get a premade route from the web!), or exploration where you go really far out so you won't encounter other ships, look at varyingly shiny round things over and over again, hope you don't crash into inconveniently double-parked stars, and eventually fly back and click a button to get credits for the privilege. If you want to play with friends, combat is just about the only viable thing, and it takes a very special mind to do exploration for any significant duration. Oh, all the stations you encounter will look about the same too, so inhabited space isn't vastly more exciting than the vastness of procedurally generated nothing.
The "Powerplay" update was supposed to change that by introducing even more faction mechanics; the game already had three major factions and more minor factions than one could shake a stick at, but apparently Frontier realised that those were so utterly boring and fundamentally unfit to serve as game mechanics that they had to build a third, almost orthogonal, set of factions, called "Powers".
What happened was grind. You gain rank with those factions by going to some place, let's call it "A" because there's nothing inherently exciting about it anyway, load up your ship with tonnes of "stuff" (again nothing exciting), ferry it to place "B", and unload it to gain "merits". Not credits, mind you, because credits would be generally useful, and a fun new gameplay element can't have that. The general goal of a player is then to optimise their experience by making sure that "A" and "B" are as close to each other as possible, because you need to do that procedure a lot. Oh, the "stuff" is rate limited, so you can only buy a certain amount per time, e.g., 10 per half-hour, so you have a strong time sink component on top of your grind. Terrific. Anyway, to what end would you do a less profitable and far less interesting version of trade, you ask? To make some numbers go up. If you trawl the menus long enough you may even find exciting barcharts!
"So I only play for a couple hours a week," you say, "surely the game will keep me entertained that long."
You can do that, but you see, the game doesn't like you having other activities to spend time on. Remember those merits from earlier? If you don't manage to meet or exceed the amount you had last week, you will lose rank with the faction you did all that time sinking grind for. Cool, eh? That's first-rate motivation right there! Nice progress you made, would be a shame if anything happened to it! Now get off your behind and ship that "stuff", lazy fatso! The same, though to a lesser degree, goes for reputation with the major factions. So ultimately you aren't as much "blazing a trail" as you are trying to maintain a muddy path that gets washed out by torrential rain every Friday.
Ultimately, it's a game that is built around all the things that define grind, presents a shiny but at the same time bland, dead galaxy, absolutely loathes casual players, and wasted a lot of talent in its making.
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