Elite Dangerous' Game Design is stuck behind a rock and a hard place

[Sallen]

I'm not sure that praising X-Rebirth and Limit Theory testifies to your superior judgement of space sims.

Yeah, X-Rebirth is a very bad game in general terms. I just wanted to make a point about how shallow trading currently is in Elite.

Do you consider Limit Theory a bad game though? In my opinion it looks like it's shaping up great...

Also, it's not my judgment that's superior, it's the other guy's that is inferior

 

[Ottomic]

The biggest shame about this community is that... it recognizes the problem, but feels the need to defend the flaws anyway - as if it should be part and parcel of the experience.

OP's biggest shame is that the community aknowledges this game is slow paced and doesn't mind it, be it because the pacing pays off, or because they simply like their games slow paced. If that bothers you then you just don't like the game, not that its design is between a rock and a hard place.

You can't complain that Flight Simulator is bad because it doesn't play like HAWX.

 

[Tar Stone]

I didn't really take note in which kind of system this happened (my guess would be Anarchy mostly), but I do get interdicted a lot, which brings tension (but because I'm a passable pilot not too much danger). Also, it's always a good idea to check what kind of ships are flying around while in SC and if possible get an ID lock on them, and depending on your findings ("hmm .. viper, Dangerous, wanted?! oh.. and approaching at a suspect pace!") that also can bring some tension in your routine

Maybe it's just me and I'm a lone voice in the wilderness here, but I don't get any sense of danger from the ships whizzing around in supercruise, rarely get interdicted, and find them too easy to evade.

 

[Mikey2305]

@zaptruder.. Was just wondering, no offence i hope!

 

[Herik]

The biggest shame about this community is that... it recognizes the problem, but feels the need to defend the flaws anyway - as if it should be part and parcel of the experience.

I played about 8 hours yesterday... and I do have a triple monitor setup; and I was indeed using my other monitors to browse the web and watch videos. But the travel in this case is maximally annoying - requiring just enough attention to make it difficult to do other things, but repetitive to the point that it's very boring.

I'm sorry, but that's not how a game should be experienced.

Yes; I'm a fan of the game. No, I do not see waiting around to do things in hyperspace a flaw in the game. In all the Scifi I've watched and (read) 'hyperspace' travel does take some time. I see no problem with 5-10 minute waits reflecting massive distances travelled; and of course multiple jumps.

 

[rumtruffle]

i completely agree TC

i think a large part of the problem is DB's insistence on everything being 'realistic', or what he deems to be realistic at least.
how on earth you can be realistic in a game that is set 1000years in the future is beyond me. aside from the galaxy itself there is no way that anyone can predict what advancements that human race is going to make in space exploration and technology that far in the future.
hes trying to employ modern day principles and thinking to a game that is set 1000yrs from now. which is going to cause all sort of problems
- like, how does hyperdrive exist but in all the years its existed in the game the designers of it cant get it locked to anything less than a sun? if modern day values were applied to something like the 'frame shift drive' then it would have seen the company sued multiple times for accidental deaths and destruction from depositing people too close to the star, and concerted efforts would have been made for many many years to get it locked to an actual destination.

this game is sort of what you get if you gave patrick moore the ability to code a game (when he was alive)

 

[Connatic]

The OP has a point...a lot of the game is super cruise. Which isn't a surprise, what else is a space ship supposed to do but fly through space?

Personally I'm glad they went with this game mechanic and not instant travel via Worm Holes or Jump Gates. It makes hunting other ships a lot more interesting. Having to scan and chase them down is a lot more fun than camping a warp gate. But I do agree some trips can drag on. I haven't played the beta heavily so I don't have a problem with it...but I imagine I will after a while once I become more proficient at this game. Where more of the travel becomes a time sync and not a game. Which is ironic, people were complaining about being interdicted too much, and when they tone it down it's now too boring.

I think just some minor tweaks to Acceleration and Declaration is all we need. That way the scale and scope of traveling through the galaxy is maintained, but the over all process is just a tad bit quicker.

 

[GT3000]

I just want to be able to do other stuff while my ship goes to the destination. I hate the inability to lock the ship onto the destination I'm SCing. Messing with the controls are annoying when I'm just gonna sit there and eat a sandwich anyways.

 

[Sallen]

i completely agree TC

i think a large part of the problem is DB's insistence on everything being 'realistic', or what he deems to be realistic at least.
how on earth you can be realistic in a game that is set 1000years in the future is beyond me. aside from the galaxy itself there is no way that anyone can predict what advancements that human race is going to make in space exploration and technology that far in the future.
hes trying to employ modern day principles and thinking to a game that is set 1000yrs from now. which is going to cause all sort of problems
- like, how does hyperdrive exist but in all the years its existed in the game the designers of it cant get it locked to anything less than a sun? if modern day values were applied to something like the 'frame shift drive' then it would have seen the company sued multiple times for accidental deaths and destruction from depositing people too close to the star, and concerted efforts would have been made for many many years to get it locked to an actual destination.

this game is sort of what you get if you gave patrick moore the ability to code a game (when he was alive)

Good point. When dealing with science fiction (and that includes other media as well), you have to make a compromise, in the case of games it's a compromise towards gameplay. Books and TV compromise realism for the story, the drama. It doesn't need to be "realistic" in order to be credible (plausible), and I think it's a mistake to sacrifice the fun factor in order to satisfy a misdirected sense of loyalty to realism.

It's not like there are not good examples out there on how to make a sci-fi game that is both immersive and engaging solely as a game. Heck, they started the genre!

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I just want to be able to do other stuff while my ship goes to the destination. I hate the inability to lock the ship onto the destination I'm SCing. Messing with the controls are annoying when I'm just gonna sit there and eat a sandwich anyways.

You can watch Youtube or rant on the forums.

 

[Berien KorGlaens]

I also agree with OP about SC travel.

The problem, from my point of view, is that it requires tons of piloting micromangement and almost no navigational skill. It doesn't take too long, it's just boring.

I've spent hours and hours in games like Age of Pirates doing nothing but walking around on my ship deck just for the sake of travel, looking at surroundings.

This feeling is not here in E: D, except maybe during 15K LS or more trips. On normal ones, we can't really leave the ship's controls, can't imagine being able to have a chat with crew members if we had some : you're stuck in your seat, concentrated on speed, distance and direction.

As far as I'm concerned, all those tiny actions often make me forget the immensity of the surroundings. SC simply makes space too small. Almost a sneeky claustrophobic feeling I'm released from when dropping back into normal space where you can freely move around.

Coming back in normal space should mean "Alert !" or "End of journey, back to work !" instead of this relief.

 

[nexxo]

Yeah, X-Rebirth is a very bad game in general terms. I just wanted to make a point about how shallow trading currently is in Elite.

Do you consider Limit Theory a bad game though? In my opinion it looks like it's shaping up great...

Also, it's not my judgment that's superior, it's the other guy's that is inferior

Limit Theory looks lush and is very promising, but at the moment it's still at tech demo stage. It does not have a fraction of the features of ED.

 

[Phaser]

I've spent the last couple of days at a system where players are currently amassing to try and affect the power of balance there.

What I've noticed is that when you're in a system bustling with player activity, it changes the nature of the game entirely.

Suddenly, supercruise is filled with things to look at and things to do.

Watching other players move around the system, trying to interpret their intentions from their movements. Flicking through their subtarget lists, trying to guess their profession from what components they have installed. Which one of them is working for the Crimson brigade, who is a pirate and who is a bounty hunter. Who is the most likely to have a large non-local bounty and worth interdicting for a stop and scan.

Jockeying for position from where you can interdict another player (or evade being interdicted by them)

Watching, as a third party, a suspected pirate manoeuvre behind an innocent trader, and trying to sneak through the frameshift wake into the interdiction island with them.

Literally racing other bounty hunters around the sun to catch that guy who just jumped in with a 100k+ bounty on his head.

Cursing when that guy you were chasing managed to trick you into getting too close to a planet and being slowed down to a crawl by the gravity well.

There is hardly a single moment of boredom. It's all thanks to multiplayer and the presence of other players involved in complex activities and the spatial game mechanics of supercruise that enable them.

I guess what I'm trying to stress here is that there is a huge difference between playing the game with other players, versus playing it while surrounded by just predictable NPC's with simple AI - and while I agree traveling can get tedious when you're just trucking along uneventfully through empty systems it's a boon for emergent behaviour as a source of interesting gameplay when you're in a player-populated system.

And so I wouldn't be so quick to blame multiplayer for making the travel mechanics boring. Though I don't disagree that things could perhaps be improved since we're not going to be always surrounded by players to make things interesting.

Good points. I like super-cruise. I bounty hunt while in SC.

Space is more or less the same in every space-sim. It’s a void, and its lifeless. Its very hard to make space, and space travel, feel alive and interesting. Super-cruise achieves this. Without super-cruise, the distances between planets are so vast, that travel between stations, planets, asteroid belts, would make for a lifeless journey. Travel between them would have to be made instantaneous. Everyone would be doing everything there is to do, outside stations, with players jumping to other systems and stations instantaneously, to do the same thing over again. Eve online has auto-pilot. Eve online has star-gates - result – Boring space travel. However Eve online is not boring because there is more to the game than those elements alone. ED does space travel far better. What ED does need, is more content for sure, and it also needs to attract more space sim fans, but its early days yet. I relax when I play ED, and enjoy it best that way...... when I`m not concentrating specifically on making money. Time dilation is a single player game mechanic. X series does that well. Its impossible in a multiplayer setting. The worst thing about automation is that the more you put in, the lazier people get, and the more they want, until they can play the thing automatically while doing the absolute minimum. Surprisingly, some people like this, although to others this would be incredibly boring.

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

i think a large part of the problem is DB's insistence on everything being 'realistic', or what he deems to be realistic at least

Indeed. We have asteroids that are depleted after 8 tons, asteroids that randomize each time, USSs that vanish after you're done with them, NPCs that spawn when you're around, USSs that are unscannable from the outside, missions that require you to go to USSs to find people instead of being able to hang around the nav beacons, cargo floating space that's magically tagged as stolen and can't be carried even to the opposing factions, artificially capped training (besides the breakage) that requires you to fire excel, missions where you kill elite anacondas and they still don't trust you at all and bounty rewards still being screwed up, and don't get me started on standings or the totally screwed up credit balance after the cobra. In general the game feels extremely gamey.

But the worst is the continuous loading involving jumping and SC. You can't even open a side panel to check something and entertain yourself. The continuous instance loading and clunkiness of entering the USS make them a real pain to do.

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

I think right now we have a mash between Elite and Frontier with a great foundation to build upon....

No, what we have is a good flight model with pretty graphics and audio. The rest of the game, of you want to call it anything, sucks.

 

[danjo]

Sorry got bored reading all that

lol - i did too

 

[Sounder Deeps]

That's one reason why, by the way, the ability to look around in supercruise would be helpful, because it would create an engagement activity that the player could do while waiting for another process (supercruise travel) to get to a point that requires intervention.

You can.

 

[Obsidian Spectre]

I also agree with OP about SC travel.

The problem, from my point of view, is that it requires tons of piloting micromangement and almost no navigational skill. It doesn't take too long, it's just boring.

I'll just add my agreement to this. SC is the worst part of the game, and my primary complaint isn't about how long it takes, it's that in most trips the game requires that I pay attention to it while it's being boring. I probably wouldn't be nearly as annoyed with it if I could at least look away and fiddle with other things while it's happening, but the game seeks to punish doing so.

 

[Helvellyn]

Not been playing it long, thought that this might've just been me and I'd not worked out enough yet. Pity, although the working-out-better-with-lots-of-people post sounds promising.

 

[Tar Stone]

Not been playing it long, thought that this might've just been me and I'd not worked out enough yet. Pity, although the working-out-better-with-lots-of-people post sounds promising.

It is better when it's busier, my best night in Elite was during the Eranin war event, the system was heaving with players and it really felt like there was a war on.

I'd forgotten about that...

 

[Zvanya]

Earlier today I spent about 15 minutes in SC traveling to a distant station (240,000 Ls). That was not fun, in fact I almost just exited the game to do something else. So I should find something to divert myself during this time? I should keep a magazine handy perhaps, like you find in doctors office to relieve the boredom? I can't just set a timer and come back - I'll over shoot or worse.

Trips over more normal planetary distances are not too bad, but longer range SC trips need to be faster. Seems like an easy fix to me, just significantly increase SC acceleration - It took something like 5 minutes just to get up to speed.