Poor play, really. There's no end game, it's a sandbox, so no need to grind. There's no "I won" scenario.
Whereas with Starfield, streamers had completed the story in a week.
Do you want ED 2 or an Expansion?
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Whereas with Starfield, streamers had completed the story in a week.
Exactly. Elite as a sandbox is fine, being able to shortcut or even (arguably) having grind in the first place is poor design.
Yes, you can arbitrarily choose not to do that but thr game still offers it as an option.
Fundamentally, both currencies (credits and eng. mats) aren't increased by becoming more effective and efficient at an activity but by it's repetition. So not skill based but time based. To me that's poor design. YMMV.
1 - For my taste there is only 1 "good part" here - infinite travel between the stars. So do you suggest to remove everything else then ? Personally me thinks fights has no sense as resources are infinite so there is no reasons for conflicts.
2 - Other space games does not have infinite big & long travel between the stars, not an option.
3 - Well, problem is infinite travel in space requires more GPU then graphics itself to compute this infinity. So I'm ok to have less graphics and more detailed infinity around.
P.S. I would love to be able to travel to other galaxies too, at least that 3 we see around. Imagine only, Andromeda is about twice bigger then ours
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I definitely got more productive at on-foot upgrading when I got better at infiltrating sites, doing missions etc.
Much quicker for each of my successive CMDR accounts.
But I don't view doing things as a "graind", the game is all about upgrading gradually to get better suits, modules etc to get better at doing things... that is the game.
I'm not sure what you would do once everything is top-tier upgraded... what are you doing it for if not to be able to do the game loops faster / more efficiently?
I enjoy flying about taking pictures as an "end game" activity, but I wouldn't grind to do it slightly faster.
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The irony being you don't need to grind, at all, to take pictures - you can do that with a sidey and master how to press the buttons in the correct order in less than a minute. I'll grant the artistic side in terms of composition may take longer but still.
Thought experiment time. Imagine missions for a set reward exist where the objective is taking pictures of certain objects in the same way each time. You master this quite easily ofc as described earlier. That is it however. To get this reward you need to do more of the same each time. This is where ED, across many gameloops is now
What if, instead for reward times X, you have to take a picture with additional challenge? It could be within a set time limit. It could be from a specific angle. You master this cos you're a good pilot with a steady hand and a good eye. Ok now the challenge is all the things in the previous version, but now you have to fly a specific ship and not get scanned once, or you have to stealth in or similar. The reward for this though is X to the power of Y.
I'm sure I don't need to tell you how those game designs are different, and that is what I mean when any new version of ED needs to have the latter design philosophy in it rather than the former. What do you think?
Thought experiment time. Imagine missions for a set reward exist where the objective is taking pictures of certain objects in the same way each time. You master this quite easily ofc as described earlier. That is it however. To get this reward you need to do more of the same each time. This is where ED, across many gameloops is now
What if, instead for reward times X, you have to take a picture with additional challenge? It could be within a set time limit. It could be from a specific angle. You master this cos you're a good pilot with a steady hand and a good eye. Ok now the challenge is all the things in the previous version, but now you have to fly a specific ship and not get scanned once, or you have to stealth in or similar. The reward for this though is X to the power of Y.
I'm sure I don't need to tell you how those game designs are different, and that is what I mean when any new version of ED needs to have the latter design philosophy in it rather than the former. What do you think?
Of course, go too far away and it's less clear that it's actually a sequel. Though games changing their entire genre for the sequel has happened before...
That said, I'm not sure I agree with you on this. Looking at the main elements of ED:
- trading: yep, this is basically the 1984 Elite version with some enhancements.
- combat: massively different from the previous games where you had fixed laser weapons and a few torpedo-equivalent missiles.
- exploration: barely existed in the previous games beyond "you can go to places you haven't been yet"
- missions: somewhat similar to FE2 in very broad outline
- outfitting: completely different to any predecessor
- mining: took a few goes round, but actually works in ED when it was irrelevant in the previous games
There are definitely issues with a lot of it - but they're not issues because they stuck to the way FE2 did it too strongly (not even trading, really: the biggest issues with that come outside the "trading" part of the game itself)
I think that's a good question and essentially where the problem lies. Upgrading just gives you the opportunity to do the same thing faster and with less challenge. It doesn't, by and large, unlock new challenges that were impossible or impractical with lesser equipment.
So your way to get your ship from G4 to G5 is exactly the same as your way to get your ship from stock to G1 ... except you have to do ~1200x as much of it for the same incremental performance gain, and the activity was already possible with a stock ship anyway. If each tier of upgrades meaningfully unlocked some new activities (or tougher higher-paying variants of the old activities) then it might feel rather different. Rather than doing 1200x as much RES hunting, for the G4 to G5 step, you do 10x of something really difficult that you need the G4 ship for.
(HGEs being an easier - if incredibly boring - source of G5 material than most activities that will get you a handful of G2s and G3s is a particular abomination here)
There's also a lot of encouragement from things like the unlock process of this big curse of engineering culture - depth-first engineering. As I regularly point out, an entire fleet at G1 or an entire ship at G3 costs about the same as a single G5 module. If the starter 5 engineers offered all modules between them ... but only at G2 or so ... that might have encouraged a somewhat healthier approach.
(Odyssey upgrades are better for this - annoying as it is to have absolutely everything require Manufacturing Instructions, it does strongly encourage keeping your suits and weapons in sync rather than letting one of them run way ahead)
Which players?
Active players, how long active?
Forum Players.
Influencer Players
As a non player of other space games I wouldn’t appreciate being disenfranchised in this way.
Yes, as predominantly a trader I agree that the other activities are different to ED - i was looking through trade coloured glasses as usual.
You hit my other point in the rest though - upgrades do give you the opportunity to do things faster, but essentially they are the same activity with less challenge. This worked in OG Elite because we didn't (and probably couldn't conceive of) layers of challenge in the same way we do now. So an extnded cargo bay was better than the stock 20 tonnes. Military lasers were better than pulse lasers - but the skill in getting a ship in the crosshairs was the same.
This is what I mean by modernising the gameplay elements and reducing grind of low-threshold (as in, can be mastered easily) activities to get a set reward.
This would be a pre-requiste for me to buy ED2 (or an expansion if I weren't a LEPer already)
I want them to make ED2, but it's a single player offline game.
(Before you point out just how ridiculous an idea that is, just read the two options in the first post again. What, it's more ridiculous than those?)
(Before you point out just how ridiculous an idea that is, just read the two options in the first post again. What, it's more ridiculous than those?
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It's OK, I was already disenfranchised by PMFs taking over.
With less pain, and less grind, and better manoeuvrability, and making both ships and ground stuff feel nicer. And improving the feel of the game is something people want (as well as less painful grind). So it's win/win.
What is the "reward" in any computer game that has ranks and "money"? Higher ranks, more money?
As I understand it (which means I could be wrong), Frontier did not come away from the kickstarter with a good and happy outcome. This put them off doing a kickstarter or crowdfunding ever again.
Most pointless and dumb way. Current Elite have everything to match modern tech trend.
They need an update for the engine, not make a whole new game.
And since it's not a single player offline game - they cant just sustained suppor of ED in such case.
We already have expamle of such ambitions - KSP/KSP2. And it's single player game. It's dead end path.
In opposite - we have EVE, which is solid game with 20 years history non-stop (ok, it's on subscrition model, but anyway)
They just upgrade their engine.
It also worked in the original (and to a less well-balanced extent in FE2/FFE) because Corporate and Anarchy systems were extremely distinct. There were quite a few layers of challenge there which were a lot less optional than ED's. Sure, you could do the mid-profit Leesti-Diso run forever if you wanted.
Your basic pulse laser would take on the likely enemies of a Corporate (a rock) just fine.
When you were surrounded by a pack of six pirates in an Anarchy, with more on their way, and needed to fight a running battle all the way to the station, all those upgrades came in really useful.
Furthermore, going to the Anarchy rather than the Corporate you got the bounties from the kills, so you benefited from a faster earning rate ... rather than most of the efficient earners in Elite Dangerous (especially of materials rather than credits) being the zero-risk ones as well.
While I think it's fair to say that they made mistakes during the Kickstarter (which I've also seen a lot of other high-value crowdfunders make) in terms of over-promising rewards or making that infamous video, I think the reason they haven't done one since is simpler: there's been no need to.
Frontier in 2012 was a fairly small company with a few million in the bank, slow revenue, and big ideas. At that point, getting a massive crowdfunding success was exactly what they needed to also get a successful share issue and commercial investments to obtain the ~£7-8 million needed to develop Elite Dangerous 1.0. The Kickstarter £1.4 million was obviously financially pretty important but nowhere near enough on its own. And then ED launched to great success, immediately recovering its development costs and then some.
Frontier nowadays - even with its recent financial troubles - has tens of millions in the bank, and solid income streams from its better-performing games bring in over £100 million in annual revenue. Spending a couple of months effort just to get another £1 million or so by crowdfunding isn't really useful. The Kickstarter raised £1.4 million in two months. Looking at their figures in the latest presentation, Elite Dangerous is still bringing in ~£6 million a year, which - okay, there's been a bit of inflation, it's not directly comparable - is a pretty similar rate. In its best years, Elite Dangerous the released game brought in money faster than the Kickstarter did (and they spent most of it on developing Odyssey)
Frontier - or anyone else trying to produce this scope of space sim [1] - are just operating at a scale where only the most anomalous crowdfunding successes could possibly cover it. Checking Wikipedia it only knows of two software crowdfunders which cover even the full costs of developing ED 1.0 (Star Citizen, obviously, and it counts the sales of the Alpha version of Prison Architect as a second, which isn't crowdfunding in the Kickstarter sense) ... the highest amount raised for a video game in a bounded Kickstarter-style crowdfunder is around $7 million, which wouldn't (allowing for inflation) quite be enough.
[1] And even more so the "Elite 5 which contains everything ED does plus everything David Braben fantasised it could" dreams. No-one can make that.
Hard Yes for an Expansion and a hard No to a totally new edition of Elite ..... Elite Dangerous has a great foundation and it wears 10 years very well. No need to blind follow the call for shiny (graphics). People calling for this up front have little understanding of priority. An appropriate DLC that builds out the platform assets and functionality will be a boost to the community and a new revenue stream for FDev.
What does that DLC include .... see Frontier forums ...LOL
I have my preferences, you have yours and the challenge for FDev, should they choose to take it up, is to work out that balance.
S!
What does that DLC include .... see Frontier forums ...LOL
I have my preferences, you have yours and the challenge for FDev, should they choose to take it up, is to work out that balance.
S!
And here I thought Frontier were developing this game.
On the bright side, I'm sure they'll soon listen to the current blaaaarghing and make everything more expensive.
Wouldn't the resident forum "AAA" devs be able to write the entire new game, in U5 engine, in a couple of weeks?
The way some of them talk about it, I would say they only need a weekend.
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