Article: "Elite’s Distant Worlds 2 expedition proves the game is wildly unbalanced, and that’s OK"
Polygon:
Elite’s Distant Worlds 2 expedition proves the game is wildly unbalanced, and that’s OK.
Two different groups are working at cross purposes, and both seem to be having a great time.
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Polygon:
Elite’s Distant Worlds 2 expedition proves the game is wildly unbalanced, and that’s OK.
Two different groups are working at cross purposes, and both seem to be having a great time.
Polygon said:The old adage in gaming, attributed to Warren Spector during the development of Deus Ex 2, states that “anytime reality gets in the way of fun, fun wins.” For companies that develop MMOs, however, that’s not always good advice.
Players should be allowed to feel powerful and encouraged to get rich in an MMO, but only within reason. If power and wealth swing way out of balance, then virtual economies crash and the player experience suffers. An MMO must, in theory at least, always be grounded in its own internal sense of reality. Otherwise it just doesn’t feel fair.
It’s a constant tightrope walk, one that Frontier Developments, the team behind Elite: Dangerous, has cleverly managed to sidestep. The result is a game that, in its current iteration, is a bit like the old television show Whose Line Is It Anyway? Nearly five years after its initial launch, Elite is a game where “everything is made up and the points don’t matter.”
It’s just that Frontier’s show is set in a fictional version of the 34th century and within an accurate model of all 400 billion star systems in our Milky Way galaxy.
What’s more interesting is that the majority of the game’s community both acknowledges these imbalances and actively works to ignore them.
Elite: Dangerous is imperfect. And most people seem OK with that.
But not everyone.
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