Damn dude! They're getting better at making this game more fun and interesting. Why can't we just give props and be supportive of that?
Sandro and everyone working on Elite Dangerous, Good job!
The things you showed in the Exploration reveal stream not only visually look and sound amazing, they also look to be the first changes of a great new direction towards making the game more engaging beyond just grinding for money and mats!
You guys could just phone it in and keep collecting paint pack money, but these game play changes show that you all really care about the direction of this game and ways to make it better!
Before 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc, I was able to predict imminent failure of design with each pass because discussion and feedback showed a consistent dominance of gameplay inhibiting features. Such things like power creep and various adjustments that made activities pointless. Even the mat trader, which was ideally supposed to help us avoid being forced into the game's most boring activities in order to progress, ended up nullifying everything but those boring activities instead due to a conceptual error. Who made these decisions, I don't know, but it does seem true that those type of decisions do not yet exist.
It doesn't really appear at first glance that anything currently on the way contains logic that would do such a thing. It mostly looks like genuine improvements this time. We could and should pat them on the back if this turns out to be a successful advancement. However, I would have liked to see some of the game's greatest longstanding issues addressed. I would like to know if they plan on addressing these things, because even if they move on with successful content, successful content won't mend a broken framework.
Missions got damaged more often than they got fixed and are still grossly out of balance, not only within each subtype, but also across varying degrees of skill and risk. Perhaps they have been neglecting attention here in prep of the server split.
Instancing still hasn't been addressed and continues to make PvP rather difficult and frustrating to seek out, especially when a large group of players enters a system while some players have some other players blocked due to poor sportsmanship. Rather than isolating those few, they allow them to pose problems and disrupt all players in the system, forcing split instances, Braben tunnels, and CTDs. Oddly enough, I'm blocked more by the new-player-killers than anyone else. Seeing that they've hired some network people and have been moving to split servers between game and missions, I have hopes that they plan to reinforce the P2P system with more rigorous monitoring to make the game more stable, more engaging and fair for the PvPers, and feel more server/client like (which can be emulated with an additional regional pseudo-peer).
Powercreep and module, mod, and ship balance are still quite a ways out of whack. This could have been easy to address with continuous numerical adjustments, even if small, and wouldn't have impacted mainstream development. I'd like to know why they aren't addressing these imbalances when the effort and analysis required is so small.
3.4 doesn't cover these issues. It brings flair to two activities, neither of which dominantly involve combat players, brings more new ships and modules, and some graphical, UI, and social improvements. For a combat player, it's fluff around the edges, but doesn't actually address the core game itself, so how is a combat player supposed to gauge this update and the decision making process when important decisions are still being left out?
