I was very interested in the comments people posted on the thread :
Too Hard to Start Limits Audience?
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=16371
..as it seems to indicate that people want different experiences from ED, which is great.
It always was a game which offered many pathways, balancing the idea of being a sandbox toy and a goal oriented game, and hopefully this tradition of user directed gameplay will be central in the release version.
I just wanted to ask - if people had to sum up in a nutshell what they were ultimately looking for in ED it might make interesting reading for the dev team and the rest of us going forward, and perhaps DB himself might even have time to read the forums too :smilie:
Of course “having fun” and “rising through the ranks” are part of any compelling game, but once people have reached Elite status, own a maxed out ship, and completed many interesting missions, what is the real long term replayability drawing people to ED? It can’t just be ‘more kills’ and a higher ranking ad infinitum?
Surely endless exploration must be longest of long term goals – if ‘goals’ is the right word for a toy universe, in which case there must be something to find when you get there which no one has ever seen before, including the designers, to make the hunt worthwhile?
Warcraft certainly bumped up against the ‘Level 60’ problem of nowhere to go from the top of the tree, and of course although new missions, ship designs, equipment, story lines, plots and so on can always be added either by modding or from in-house developers (which begs the question of whether games like these are every truly ‘finished’), but after 40 years of computer games, as I suspect many here share, I wanted to put something out there and see if anyone agrees (either internally or externally to the Dev process
).
I’m sure this is well covered in other forums, so feel free to bump me to the right place
For me, one of the greatest achievements of Elite in terms of programming was that it actually *used* the computer. By this I mean that as well as rendering graphics and manipulating spreadsheets under the surface, actual computational power was used to create a star-seeded universe, making docking computers actually dock the ship without cheating mathematically, and the AI of the enemy NPC’s.
Although things have come a long way since then, games today are much more reliant on graphics, voice acting and simple underlying mechanics but don’t really use the horsepower available in my opinion.
I think, in a nutshell, that my ultimate hope for this game is that it will use its internal procedural generation engines to create planets, perhaps even creatures, which, and this is my point, have never be seen by anyone, including the designers and programmers. The analogy I think is with fractal programs (I’m that old) which, after just a few random mouse clicks can show the user a picture which has never been seen by any other person in the history of the world.
My personal long term hope is that using star-seeding and procedural generation, it will be possible to create planet surface details (and although Spore was a disaster in the end), perhaps even plants and animals which have never been seen by anyone.
If there was a gigantic zoo at the centre of the galaxy, and people could bring back samples to show others, with information about where they found them, people could play the game forever and always have a fair chance of seeing something no one else had ever seen. It makes ‘distance’ the long term goal, and a reason to travel ever further.
If the makers of ED could just say “Show us what you found” and be genuinely surprised and delighted as the Minecraft community is with “Look what I’ve made…” then this game would have almost limitless depth and longevity, and be as ground breaking as its ancestor in a new way?
It means that combat, trading, upgrading the ship, levelling up, piracy, politics, missions, and even multiplayer and PVP, all of which are fantastic fun but perhaps finite in the end, would all ultimately fall by the wayside and leave people, even after months and years of playing, with a sense of the undiscovered and uncharted....which still had the capacity to surprise...?
Too Hard to Start Limits Audience?
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=16371
..as it seems to indicate that people want different experiences from ED, which is great.
It always was a game which offered many pathways, balancing the idea of being a sandbox toy and a goal oriented game, and hopefully this tradition of user directed gameplay will be central in the release version.
I just wanted to ask - if people had to sum up in a nutshell what they were ultimately looking for in ED it might make interesting reading for the dev team and the rest of us going forward, and perhaps DB himself might even have time to read the forums too :smilie:
Of course “having fun” and “rising through the ranks” are part of any compelling game, but once people have reached Elite status, own a maxed out ship, and completed many interesting missions, what is the real long term replayability drawing people to ED? It can’t just be ‘more kills’ and a higher ranking ad infinitum?
Surely endless exploration must be longest of long term goals – if ‘goals’ is the right word for a toy universe, in which case there must be something to find when you get there which no one has ever seen before, including the designers, to make the hunt worthwhile?
Warcraft certainly bumped up against the ‘Level 60’ problem of nowhere to go from the top of the tree, and of course although new missions, ship designs, equipment, story lines, plots and so on can always be added either by modding or from in-house developers (which begs the question of whether games like these are every truly ‘finished’), but after 40 years of computer games, as I suspect many here share, I wanted to put something out there and see if anyone agrees (either internally or externally to the Dev process
). I’m sure this is well covered in other forums, so feel free to bump me to the right place
For me, one of the greatest achievements of Elite in terms of programming was that it actually *used* the computer. By this I mean that as well as rendering graphics and manipulating spreadsheets under the surface, actual computational power was used to create a star-seeded universe, making docking computers actually dock the ship without cheating mathematically, and the AI of the enemy NPC’s.
Although things have come a long way since then, games today are much more reliant on graphics, voice acting and simple underlying mechanics but don’t really use the horsepower available in my opinion.
I think, in a nutshell, that my ultimate hope for this game is that it will use its internal procedural generation engines to create planets, perhaps even creatures, which, and this is my point, have never be seen by anyone, including the designers and programmers. The analogy I think is with fractal programs (I’m that old) which, after just a few random mouse clicks can show the user a picture which has never been seen by any other person in the history of the world.
My personal long term hope is that using star-seeding and procedural generation, it will be possible to create planet surface details (and although Spore was a disaster in the end), perhaps even plants and animals which have never been seen by anyone.
If there was a gigantic zoo at the centre of the galaxy, and people could bring back samples to show others, with information about where they found them, people could play the game forever and always have a fair chance of seeing something no one else had ever seen. It makes ‘distance’ the long term goal, and a reason to travel ever further.
If the makers of ED could just say “Show us what you found” and be genuinely surprised and delighted as the Minecraft community is with “Look what I’ve made…” then this game would have almost limitless depth and longevity, and be as ground breaking as its ancestor in a new way?
It means that combat, trading, upgrading the ship, levelling up, piracy, politics, missions, and even multiplayer and PVP, all of which are fantastic fun but perhaps finite in the end, would all ultimately fall by the wayside and leave people, even after months and years of playing, with a sense of the undiscovered and uncharted....which still had the capacity to surprise...?