Define 'depth'?

Bill Clement

Bill Clement
There's yet another 'mile wide, inch deep' threadnaught starting. Ten pages as of 21.00z tonight. I predict much bickering, increasing animosity and ad hominem attacks, followed by a lock. (That's what usually happens. :D)

I don't want to buzzkill on that one, but I am curious. What is 'depth', or what does 'depth' actually mean to you?

For example:

A couple of years back I stated my belief that more busy work is not depth. This was prior to engineering, but engineering is a great example, so I'll use that.

The engineering process involves many different requirements being met- unlocking engineers, gathering materials, trading same, rolling on a RNG generator to apply improvements.

I do not consider any of these activities to add depth to the game.

Engineering and the associated special effects can completely change the character of a ship. Different engineering effects can be combined in a staggering number of different ways. These can compliment or detract from the build's intended use. There's no 'best' build, the min/max of simpler systems doesn't apply.

This I consider to have added considerable depth to the game.

But that's just my opinion, I'm interested to hear yours?


Btw, I'm curious about 'depth', not engineering. I had a great response to an earlier OP on engineering, which I found very educational. I'm grateful to everyone who posted on it, even (heck, especially!) those who disagreed with me. :D
 

Deadlock-3000

D
When a number of simple elements combine with emergent or unpredictable results, requiring skill or strategy to master.

See some crafting/resource management games, some RTSs, some 4X games.

Pew pew grind grind rank rank? Games that need "imagination" to fill in the gaps? Not so much.
 

Windscreen Smudge

W
Depth is any system where you can end up diving down the rabbit hole, so to speak.

To use your engineering example, engineering is pretty shallow, the requirements are straightforward and once you've begun the process there is little to discover. There aren't many layers to the onion, so to speak.

However, if that were just the beginning of engineering, and you could take it to another level such as tweaking the weight distribution of your ship, choosing which thrusters get which mods, adding different firing modes to your weapons in exchange for more penalties, etc... That would be more depth.

If you could take it another level further by say.... adding a safety bypass to your FSD that you have to manually activate in a menu, which gives you a risk of the thing shutting down entirely, as an option during your extended engineering process described above, that would be another level of complexity added to the system.

And that is depth. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?
 

Dutchman141

Dutchman141
Imho I think depth means things you can do with a story or those that feed your imagination.
Tasks that are very much rng dependent and/or repetitive without some tale to back it up are quite the opposite of depth in many cases.
Also re-occurring mechanics for different tasks can decrease depth considerably.

Just my opinion.
 

IndigoWyrd

IndigoWyrd
"Depth" is going to mean different things to different people.

Let's compare against Mass Effect: (any of them, Andromeda too).

Few would say Mass Effect lacks depth, despite the game being largely a straight-forward FPS or 3PS, depending on how you play.

Where does the Depth come from then?

A large part of it comes from loosely and tightly connected story elements as well as player choices.

Take one character or another with you on missions, they'll develop some relationship with you. Do things for them, treat them well, that relationship grows. Get them killed, treat them badly, ignore them, that relationship shrinks.

But this is only one small aspect of the game. The story is rather well thought out, spans the first three games, with prior actions and outcomes having effects on later games in the series.

Add to this your own personal stats as well as those of your team-mates, armor and weapons customizing, and in the end you have a pretty deep shooter. Season this will all the Other Species lore you can uncover in the game, and you wind up with something half a mile wide and equally as deep.

Elite, on the other hand, well, hold on a minute... Elite actually does have a pretty good bit of depth to is as well, however, and this is huge, that depth is mostly hidden away, to be discovered, usually by accident.

It has gotten tremendously better with the addition of the Codex, in particular, the Knowledge Base. These entries help provide some of the history that has long been known either only to those who have been playing since 1984, or invested a great deal of time tracking down bits of obscure data from data points in the game.

John Jameson? Who's that? What did he do? Why did he do it? What happened to him?
You can find out in game, without going to the Codex, but it will require happening to discover an obscure little ruined facility, on some otherwise unassuming planet, after chasing down signals from space-based beacons and solving some very obscure puzzles.

New players are simply dropped into the galaxy, with no direction or inclination of who they are, how they got there, why they're there, what is expected of them, or any knowledge about the galaxy around them, its rather rich history, or any of the things someone born in the era of Elite would have learned simply by growing up there.

Ever heard of a "Thargoid"? If you lived here, you probably would have. The Club? The Sim Archive? The fundamental beliefs of the Alliance? How about holidays? Popular forms of entertainment?

Sometimes some indications of these things turn up in GalNet stories, seen on the game launcher. Sometimes they even turn into GalNet audio entries.

Cereberus Plague? No, it wasn't an outbreak of three-headed dogs. But there was an event about it, back before I started to play. A few people will remember it, some, like me found out about it later, but only out of curiosity.

So the depth is there, if you know to go look for it.
 

Franc Kaos

Franc Kaos
The complexity of choice and consequence create depth (imo) and the game worlds texture (how the different elements mesh into one reality), but there is little to no player agency in Elite, which is why people say it has little depth. Everything is hidden behind instances, be it the Thargoid invasion or engineering or Guardian grind, your only choice, do it or don't bother.

If the Pleides was a proper battlefront with players in the area being interdicted and the various human navies supplying weapons that previous players had unlocked, and the stations on fire had a finite number of survivors to be rescued, whilst other players were teaming up to crack the Guardian mysteries whilst the Distant Worlds 2 players were out there trying to find clues about our alien neighbours and all of this info were being reported in the codex... I'm pretty sure no one would complain that Elite Dangerous was shallow.
 

Cageman

Cageman
Depth to me, regarding Elite: Dangerous, is that it is a sandbox. I can go out mining to earn some money, or go exploring and come back 6 months later to sell my discoveries, I can land on a planet and assult a base... I can BH in a RES, or combat in a CZ. I can do trading between systems and starports... The cool thing is that I can help BGS in doing all these things.

Depth of a game is very subjective. I think ED is a very deep game in terms of how much you have to learn in order to be good at it. Wether the activities are "deep" enough is another matter.... but there are so many activities to engage in, so I think it evens out.

Story... no, not so much... but then again... as a space / sci-fi simulator that tries hard to be as "realistic" as possible, ED is, as a concept, a hobby... not a game.
 
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zombieapocalypse

zombieapocalypse
My beginner's guide to ED has just hit 34,000 words and has dozens and dozens of illustrative images in it. The Elite: Dangerous Wiki now has over 2400 articles on ED. And there are numerous other community resources, webtools, and databases dedicated to supporting the game.

ED also has a steep learning curve and takes many, many hours to master all its different aspects. And these forums are full of people who've literally spent thousands of hours playing this game. We're also taking about a game that now has over 250 different key bindings.

Despites its many problems, saying that ED has no depth is simply absurd.
 
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Deadlock-3000

D
zombieapocalypse said:
My beginner's guide to ED has just hit 34,000 words and has dozens and dozens of illustrative images in it. The Elite: Dangerous Wiki now has over 2400 articles on ED. And there are numerous other community resources, webtools, and databases dedicated to supporting the game.

ED also has a steep learning curve and takes many, many hours to master all its different aspects. And these forums are full of people who've literally spent thousands of hours playing this game. We're also taking about a game that now has over 250 different key bindings.

Despites its many problems, saying that ED has no depth is simply absurd.
Click to expand...

Obscurity, and a grind process which is positively fractal, aren't the same things as depth.

It's always going to be a subjective judgement. Me, I think this game has all the depth of gossamer. You can write as many essays about your experience as you want, it won't change mine.
 

Deadlock-3000

D
Logging and relogging at Dav's Hope or a crashed ship POI for an infinite stream of engineering materials: not depth

Three different layers of government - superpower, power and faction - on top of a broken "background simulator" which might as well be pure RNG for all the difference it makes: not depth

Unlocking an engineer by ferrying back and forth an astonishing quantity of cigars which only magically appear a small amount at a time for absolutely no earthly reason: not depth

Getting 16x the payouts for mass murder, for 1/4 the time investment, just because you winged up with 3 other similarly spec'ed out murderers: not depth

Being able to control a fighter in real time 100,000 light years away but not being able to pull up the trading prices at another station in the same system because that would be too easy: not depth
 
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Lightspeed

Lightspeed
zombieapocalypse said:
My beginner's guide to ED has just hit 34,000 words and has dozens and dozens of illustrative images in it. The Elite: Dangerous Wiki now has over 2400 articles on ED. And there are numerous other community resources, webtools, and databases dedicated to supporting the game.

ED also has a steep learning curve and takes many, many hours to master all its different aspects. And these forums are full of people who've literally spent thousands of hours playing this game. We're also taking about a game that now has over 250 different key bindings.

Despites its many problems, saying that ED has no depth is simply absurd.
Click to expand...

That's a really comprehensive guide! Can't work out how I missed it, but it's clear you've put a lot of work into it. +1 rep doesn't seem enough. [up]
 

AlexAndTheDJ

A
OK, I'll bite.

As someone already stated, depth will likely have a different context depending on who you talk to.

For me, just like you can have a depth of flavour in food, you can also have a depth of content in video games. Elite do a good job of cooking a lot of different things with just salt & pepper. Bare bones - you can do this, but you can't do much else within that.

Engineers, for example. You want to increase your jump range? Go find these things. You want to fine tune your power plant? Go find these items. You want more firepower from your distributer? Go find these items. A lot to do but its all the same.

So then we get Guardian tech. Great!! You want a Guardian FSD upgrade? Go find this data. You want a Guardian weapon? Ho find this data. . . oh wait, didn't I just do a bunch of this crap already?

Community Goal #1 - bring tea to System A

Community Goal #2 - kill pirates in System B

Community Goal #3 - Turn in bounties in System C

Community Goal #4 - bring explosives to System D

Community Goal #5 - kill pirates in System E

Community Goal #6 - Turn in exploration data in System F

. . . . you get the point.


If you (any player, not OP) think the game is deep enough, great for you, enjoy the game. But don't be so self-important to think that anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong and unimaginative.
 
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Limoncello Lizard

Limoncello Lizard
The game is shallow because little we do makes any difference to the galaxy, e.g. we can't affect system population.

Also it's obvious that NPCs are created fresh on the spot in each instance. They have no memory of the last 3 times they interdicted you, or even think they just did so when you have in fact dropped in on a station.

It makes no difference that you have single-handedly won several wars for a faction, one small traffic ticket and they don't want to talk to you.

Plenty more examples of the game's shallow gameplay and use of RNG and placeholders instead of actual depth.
 

AlexAndTheDJ

A
Limoncello Lizard said:
The game is shallow because little we do makes any difference to the galaxy, e.g. we can't affect system population.

Also it's obvious that NPCs are created fresh on the spot in each instance. They have no memory of the last 3 times they interdicted you, or even think they just did so when you have in fact dropped in on a station.

It makes no difference that you have single-handedly won several wars for a faction, one small traffic ticket and they don't want to talk to you.

Plenty more examples of the game's shallow gameplay and use of RNG and placeholders instead of actual depth.
Click to expand...

Some good examples. The NPC one I can certainly relate to!
 
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