Chris Roberts update
- Thread starter Sir.Tj
- Start date
CRSI was the first game I've ever pledged to, mainly because of this guys vision of what a space simulation should be. A similar vision to the present Frontier Elite Dangerous game in many ways, but obviously different in certain aspects. Both of which I like btw.! 
He strikes me as being pretty honest and straight forward too. I also like the detailed description of some of the ships he's having designed for his game as well.
Jack.
He strikes me as being pretty honest and straight forward too. I also like the detailed description of some of the ships he's having designed for his game as well.
Jack.
I was reading the whole thread the other day and it really is amazing that Elite is as unknown as it seems in the usa, going on many of the comments. It seems as if most Americans first experience of a 3D space game was wing commander, which of course was inspired by Elite (as is the genre).
I know Elite got ported to nearly all systems under the sun, but i do wonder if maybe it just had no real wide take up in the usa for some reason? Maybe in 1991 when Elite Plus (as let's face it the original PC's had terrible colours!) came out on PC it just looked too old fashioned to get much interest?
On the wider issue of crowdfunding, i think the big publishers must be a little concerned, as much as they will be over the general 'Indie' revival in general these last few years. A huge famous AAA title is always going to make loads more money, but around those few (and growing fewer) big hits they are seeing their control on gaming slip. Sites like Steam, GoG, Desura etc give small dev teams a direct point of sale for many gamers, retail is in decline. Now you add crowdfunding (kickstarter etc) to that mix and things are not looking rosy if your a bloated AAA with massive production costs and huge annual budgets to manage within smaller overall returns. Gamers are voting with their feet and moving a good portion of their spending outside of the traditional bricks and mortar shops that are the traditional preserve of the big AAA publishers.
I completely share Chris Roberts (and others, Notch etc) enthusiasm for what this change can mean to gaming, and PC gaming in particular. It is a brave new world where we can get back to what making games and gaming was about in it's early golden era of creativity and passion. I hope these early bunch of high profile Kickstarter projects really do end up offering that creative freedom and control that developers have had 'contracted' away from them for the last few decades by the big publishers, and that it leads to a further democratization of gaming in general.
I know Elite got ported to nearly all systems under the sun, but i do wonder if maybe it just had no real wide take up in the usa for some reason? Maybe in 1991 when Elite Plus (as let's face it the original PC's had terrible colours!) came out on PC it just looked too old fashioned to get much interest?
On the wider issue of crowdfunding, i think the big publishers must be a little concerned, as much as they will be over the general 'Indie' revival in general these last few years. A huge famous AAA title is always going to make loads more money, but around those few (and growing fewer) big hits they are seeing their control on gaming slip. Sites like Steam, GoG, Desura etc give small dev teams a direct point of sale for many gamers, retail is in decline. Now you add crowdfunding (kickstarter etc) to that mix and things are not looking rosy if your a bloated AAA with massive production costs and huge annual budgets to manage within smaller overall returns. Gamers are voting with their feet and moving a good portion of their spending outside of the traditional bricks and mortar shops that are the traditional preserve of the big AAA publishers.
I completely share Chris Roberts (and others, Notch etc) enthusiasm for what this change can mean to gaming, and PC gaming in particular. It is a brave new world where we can get back to what making games and gaming was about in it's early golden era of creativity and passion. I hope these early bunch of high profile Kickstarter projects really do end up offering that creative freedom and control that developers have had 'contracted' away from them for the last few decades by the big publishers, and that it leads to a further democratization of gaming in general.
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I think you raise a good point here. I notice that the Kickstarter regularly gains money throughout the day, but after about midnight / 1am GMT it slows to a crawl overnight. Looks like Elite: Dangerous will be backed almost entirely by folks from the UK. In the long run FD might want to look at tactics for attracting the attention of players in 'merica.
Star Raider is regarded as general founder of the whole genre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders
Elite was not the first space trading game made but it nailed the concept so hard that everything that has followed has been inference by it.
Probably a number of different reason why the games are not so well know in the USA, even though Elite was ported to 15 different systems, see Steve pic on Frontier Astro
http://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Misc/Elite/Collection.jpg
But most of the 8 bit system were unknown in the USA.
Also one of the main facts has to be the fact that the series has been dead for the last 17 years unlike the Wing commander games.
While Iam on this subject..think multiplayer is a new idea, take a look at this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjOvL_QsTzA
And here a vid about about Plato from Matt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_QQV9sj4I
Hi Zak
I think you make a really good point but it is still very early days for crowd funding. Chris has attracted 104,243 gamers (so far) to the cause which is fantastic and he has resurrected the space game on the PC in doing so.
Contrast this with COD Black ops which sold 25 million copies worldwide and you can see why the major publishers are risk averse. Unlike Chris and David they are in it for the money and money talks.
When ED gets funded it can only improve the situation.
Aha. You know what, as i was typing my sentence in the back of my mind i was not 100% sure, and your right. I logged a ton of time on Star Raiders on my Atari 800 back in the day (i was one of those uk kids that didn't have a Spectrum or C64/Vic20 or BBC/Electron or Amstrad or Oric or Dragon back in the 80s). Star Raiders was a pretty damn awesome game.....so yeah i'm surprised THAT game is not more prominent in the debates i've been reading around Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous, american gamers of that era would have played Star Raiders while here in the uk we were mostly playing Elite.
@ Captain Black, things are looking rough for much of the AAA game space, you only have to see the crawl of titles of the last few years (now a trickle pretty much as the current gen of console gets fewer releases), and read the industry news on sites like Gamasutra etc. Income is well down, as are sales in the AAA space.
Yes for sure your newest COD/EA sports title of choice will rack up the numbers required, but those are also in decline. In a way the AAA industry is like one of evolutions 'too specialised' creations, and it has created that issue for itself to a large extent. It's creaking and most of what it produces are not the multi-million selling cash cows(but cost the same), those are few and far between these last few years. Everyone is mostly down-scaling, lay-offs are now common place. The industry is going through a much needed period of readjustment. The crowdsource and Indie games spaces are just a small part of this adjustment, but they could become much more?
It's also worth entwining that Chris Roberts has promised to promote ED again towards the end of the KS. I'm guessing this will be tomorrow, but maybe late today? Will hopefully help the KS surge be bigger than it might otherwise have been.
It's a shame there was never a version of Elite for the A800, read somewhere that Firebird were planning a version but the programmer got cold feet and did a runner.
Frontier missed a huge opportunity on Elite's 25 anniversary a couple of years ago they could have reintroduce the games to a younger generation.
Even just a basic console/mobile version of Elite would have kept the games in the public mind.
Don't remind me.
we were all praying and begging that they were going to announce E4 David has been asked why did he announce Elite Dangerous now, he said that he was waiting for the UK version of Kickstarter to be set up. At the time of the anniversary, it didn't exist then.
Im glad to see that chris is a good sport and is happy to help the Elite cause. I mean at the end of the day it has absolutly nothing to do with competition or "I want to see our game win over yours." Simply because it isn't like you can only chose one game over the other. You can get both games and everyone wins.
There is clearly a market for space sims, and until now its not currently being filled to its full potential. hopefully these two games will fill the gap together, side by side
There is clearly a market for space sims, and until now its not currently being filled to its full potential. hopefully these two games will fill the gap together, side by side
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Think you miss understood me there Geraldine I was referring to the fact that they should have re released an updated version of the old game some thing similar to Oolite or XElite.
Exactly archamedes. For me it was never a SC Vs Elite situation. I bought Wing Commander and Elite 1&2 for my Miggy (still have them in fact) back in the 1990s. It wasn't a competition then and it's not a competition now
I agree with this sentiment. To me there was no competition between these two games. They both win. I have both families of games on my shelf (as far back as I was earning money to buy them, at any rate), but I'll admit I've logged more flying hours behind Cobra MkIII than any other ship.
Ah, I see
That will teach me to read posts more closely, but to be honest I was a bit knackered last night Well, take heart, on Reddit David was asked if the older games (fixed and updated) would make an appearance on some new platforms and he said "that is very likely". The Raspberry Pi being one of the first he had in his sights
When will it happen? I don't know, maybe after the E: D KS is finished and development is well underway.