Elite Dangerous is the Largest Empty Sandbox Ever Made

[ALGOMATIC]

Some decent points, but I think you're also too critical. The game doesn't need a complete overhaul. CQC, Powerplay, Multicrew don't require overhauls. The foundation is decent, they just need to integrate it better into the main game and give it more variety and depth in terms of gameplay.

CQC needs bots to fill matches and option to wait for a match while in the main game. Powerplay needs to be more player driven and player controlled. The player factions in Powerplay should be player managed guilds imo, that would add so much depth. Now player actions in Powerplay are superficial, because we're tiny gears with little agency. Multicrew needs more PVE gameplay and should be more like Star Trek: Bridge Crew and add NPC crew.

About PP, guilds wont help when people will grind in SOLO or press the block button when they see a hollow squere. No point in changing features when the fundamental design is broken which cant allow the content to exist to begin with.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

About PP, guilds wont help when people will grind in SOLO or press the block button when they see a hollow squere. No point in changing features when the fundamental design is broken which cant allow the content to exist to begin with.

Oh look, another incorrect ‘Open is the only...’ post.

 

[Cosmo]

About PP, guilds wont help when people will grind in SOLO or press the block button when they see a hollow squere. No point in changing features when the fundamental design is broken which cant allow the content to exist to begin with.

The solo or private game modes aren't going away. People who want to play solo or in a guild is a personal choice. By making Powerplay more player driven so players can become significant entities then it'll be more interesting and engaging.

The EVE devs called it a fake sandbox at the last fanfest. That just goes to show.

• No player driven economy.

Well the player impact on the economy is just very small afaik. The different system states, aren't noticeable (anarchy, democracy, theocracy etc) feels the same when the player arrives in such a system.

• No tools to build clans, corps and alliances..etc

This hopefully gets addressed with the Squadrons update.

• No ways to manufacture stuff and sell them.

True, this is essential for a deep sandbox game.

• No ways to influence the universe in a meaningful manner.

Individual impact of players is small, it makes little difference. A group of players such as a squadron (Guild) should be able to significantly influence a system, especially the area around their Fleet Carrier imo.

• No industry focused gameplay.
• No player owned contracts.
• No player owned outposts.
• No player owned stations.
• No player owned space.

Player owned outposts would be cool. It doesn't need a lot of functionality just the idea of letting a Squadron have their name on an outpost and maybe get some benefit from that would be nice.

A lot of people are against player owned systems, but to me it's just another game mode and I honestly think people wouldn't be bothered if it's far away like near Colonia. Frontier could designate a remote region specifically for player owned systems. Those who want no part of it could still travel through the system as long as they don't harm the Squadron who owns the system.

• No real player career progression with reputation and consequences to your actions.
• No player driven narrative stories based around meaningful interactions.

Well players have influenced the narrative of the Thargoids, Salome etc. We do have career progression in the Federal and Imperial Navy. They could add cool story-driven missions to make career progression meaningful.

It's a cheap theme park with the illusion of a sandbox. The poor implementation of gameplay mechanics is what is holding Elite Dangerous to become a "Good" game.

I'd say it's a shallow sandbox with a lot of potential. Players have much freedom to do things, but few tools to mold and create their own things.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

CQC, Powerplay, Multicrew don't require overhauls.

Now for once, i'm going to be more negative than you

CQC and Multicrew - yeah, i can see them getting better with some relatively simple changes.

Powerplay on the other hand, i think needs putting in a shredder and completely changing to be actually any good.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

About PP, guilds wont help when people will grind in SOLO or press the block button when they see a hollow squere. No point in changing features when the fundamental design is broken which cant allow the content to exist to begin with.

Well, they could fix that issue by making PP a PvE only activity

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

The EVE devs called it a fake sandbox at the last fanfest. That just goes to show.

I don't give a rats bottom what EVE devs say. I think their game is awful.

No player driven economy.
No tools to build clans, corps and alliances..etc
No ways to manufacture stuff and sell them.
No ways to influence the universe in a meaningful manner.
No industry focused gameplay.
No player owned contracts.
No player owned outposts.
No player owned stations.
No player owned space.
No real player career progression with reputation and consequences to your actions.
No player driven narrative stories based around meaningful interactions.

So what. Just because it doesn't have those, doesn't mean it isn't a sandbox game. I think you need to look up the definition of sandbox game first. A player driven economy is just not possible in a game world the size of ED. If you reduced the player area to 200-300 systems, then yes it's possible, but we don't have that. There a few things you said I agree with regarding consequences. We need more of them, but the asset owning stuff, no thanks, not needed and not wanted by me. I don't see why that stuff makes it a sandbox and not having it makes it not.

Even the BGS is adjusted by the devs when there's enough cry babies crying on the opposite side of the spectrum.

The only adjustments are when there have been bugs or exploits being used. I see no issue there.

It's a cheap theme park with the illusion of a sandbox. The poor implementation of gameplay mechanics is what is holding Elite Dangerous to become a "Good" game.

While there are some theme park element just like EVE has them, they are purely optional.

 

[babelfisch]

You love it, or you hate it. Or you love it for a while then fall out of love. Or you fall in love and never fall out. That's life. About all things.

I'm not sure another thread about helps. We have had a lot of them

It’s the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day.

 

[CMDR Carbo]

Still mostly a hollow experience three years into full release... Let us review:

Starting with the Good:

• Flight model is excellent, rewards skill that takes a long time to master
• Decent visuals (mostly)
• Audio is fantastic and atmospheric
• Ship designs are nice IMO
• Great variation in possible ship builds and weapon variations
• Good variation in available customisations and cosmetics
• Character creator is decent
• Scale of the galaxy is impressive
• Community goals are good for creating player bottlenecks
• Wings are useful
• Thargoid ships look and sound very cool
• Strong background lore and the game is faithful to previous titles in the series

The not so good:

• Still have done nothing with PvP bounty hunting - no tracking tools, no central most-wanted lists, max bounty capped at a level which makes it totally pointless to try
• Still have done nothing with criminal careers - they just seem to want to focus on the punishment side. Punishment without reward will just push players away.. (will piracy ever get any focus??)
• Exploration is still basic and repetitive (honk if you're bored)
• Trading is repetitive and most of the commodity types are valueless and only useful for new players. No player to player trading of any sort (open goal missed)
• Rare commodities have never been utilised properly, they could be the cornerstone of the open play trader-pirate-bounty hunter ecosystem... but allocations are too small (and drip-fed) to be attractive to traders
• Landable planets started off looking ok with some nice variations and colours.. but this was clearly too interesting so Fdev made them all grey and beige
• PvP is still a useless sideshow because Fdev seem to be scared to give it a purpose - 'meaningful' DB said in the kickstarter days, it's anything but
• Mining is eclipsed by all other activities in terms of profit when it should be the best earner (mineral, metal and high tech commodities are all way too low in value - this hurts piracy too)
• Naval rank is still a horrific, nonsensical grind, with most ranks serving no purpose whatsoever - has little to do with conflict zones either which is odd
• Capital ships look nice but are actually pretty underwhelming
• Galnet is a wall of text that is full of uninteresting waffle and is hidden away where you forget about it
• Community goals are over-used, and are pretty much the only interactive way to carry the narrative forward
• Powerplay was too grind-driven to ever be successful with it's 'free to play' style treadmill super-grind.. Restricting it to open might have made it work on some level but that would require them to come of of their comfort zone regarding mode parity (open goal missed)
• CQC was fun for a couple of hours but the lack of depth made it a novelty that about 99.99% of the playerbase got bored of pretty much immediately. Concept was based on assumptions about what console players and PvPers wanted... both were incorrect assumptions
• Engineering effectively gated PvP to all but the most determined players. It's also a mixture of horrific grind and online casino (draggable sliders were such an obvious avenue, why the multi-tiered RNG which everyone was bound to hate?)
• Multicrew, pretty much the same as CQC, nice idea but it lacks depth so nobody bothers - requires a turret or fighter to actually serve a purpose (turrets suck and fighters are limited to a few ships)
• Thargoids, while well designed (visual & audio), are pretty much a ride you can choose to go on... this removes any sense of mystery/fear from them
• Lack of new ships in the Horizons season made things a bit stale
• Still only one ground vehicle two years into Horizons
• No new planet types to land on since 2.0 - many assumed volcanic planets were on the agenda for season two - but Fdev were probably in retrospect referring to those small volcanic features found on some rocky worlds - disappointing
• Its taken Fdev 3 years to realise that player factions/squadrons need proper mechanics, will be four years by the time they arrive - they listened too long to the 'go play EVE' crowd
• Fdev have let combat logging run rampant throughout the game for three years.. Alluded to a solution but always seem to kick the can down the road. Where's this karma system then, beyond beyond?
• They have provided too many ways to circumvent player opposition, rendering proper faction conflict an impossible pipedream
• Giving players the ability to block other players from instances is a ridiculous concept - it's too open to abuse. Should be comms only (also adds to the game's instancing woes)

Very good summary. While I disagree with some open only points, most of it is spot on.

Saying requested features are 'too difficult' to implement has been a reoccurring response - why is this?

It likely means it's too much work to do for the handful of people that still work on ED.
I mean, just look at the bugs section, there are bugs that have been in game for 10 month or more. Bugs that were acknowledged with we are looking into it.
I suspect if FDEV would want to address all the points you have listed they would have to majorly expand the dev team.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

It likely means it's too much work to do for the handful of people that still work on ED.

You have 100 finger hands? :O

 

[babelfisch]

As much as it pains me to say it, it *technically* is a sandbox.
It certainly doesn't feel like one, let alone a good one, but it's a sandbox nevertheless.

It's the same as when people call it an mmo. Is Elite a mmo? No, not by a long shot, but *on paper* can be called like that anyway, because it technically has enough features to be considered and being sold as one, even if those features are underdeveloped or whatever.

To me it feels much, much more like a rng procedural generated theme park rather than a sandbox, but still.



I mean elite shines in more than one aspects, sure, but being a successfully interactive sandbox with variety and the possibility of being shaped by players creativity isn't exactly one of them.

So, yeah, on this regard we have to nod and move forward I guess.

That's what I like about Elite. Most other modern games simply copy each other again and again until they are absolutely meaningless and just have different settings. That's true for survival sand box games, mono rail shooters and generic MMOs. Elite doesn't copy these mechanisms, but that means sometimes it sucks...

 

[GreyAreaUK]

It likely means it's too much work to do for the handful of people that still work on ED.

'Handful'? Seriously?

 

[withnail]

Oh look, another incorrect ‘Open is the only...’ post.

You don't do Powerplay, do you?

Nothing worse than a spreadsheet warrior working away in pg whilst you're being attacked by their PvP wings.

 

[S3B4ST13N]

I quite like Techopedia's definition of sand box:

Sandbox games can include structured elements – such as mini-games, tasks, submissions and storylines – that may be ignored by gamers. In fact, the sandbox game's nonlinear nature creates storyline challenges for game designers. For this reason, tasks and side missions usually follow a progression, where tasks are unlocked upon successful task completion.

Sandbox game types vary. Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) generally include a mixture of sandbox and progression gaming and heavily depend on emergent interactive user gameplay for retaining non-progression-focused gamers. Modern "beat 'em ups" and first-person shooters have delved more deeply into the sandbox realm with titles like the "Grand Theft Auto" series, "Red Dead Redemption," "Assassin’s Creed" and others, allowing gamers to run and gun wherever the mood takes them.

In spite of their name, various sandbox games continue to impose restrictions at some stages of the game environment. This can be due the game's design limitations, or can be short-run, in-game limitations, such as some locked areas in games that are unlocked once certain milestones are achieved.

ED fits into this definition.
ED is a sandbox game.
As was stated though.. there's just not very much sand to play with. There is some, definitely.. just not much of it.

 

[babelfisch]

why change the statistic to make his look wrong hes talking about " Right now 2,662 are In-Game via steam" 2662 out of 2.5/3 million sales even for currently playing the game right now is kinda weak ,i would expect at least 20,000 people to be playing "right now" with them numbers

Please start by reading the other posts.

Cosmo said that 80% don't play anymore. Looking at concurrent players doesn't add anything to the claim, you obviously need to look at the active player base instead.
I said that this is true for any game and copied the numbers from steam spy to prove my point. Cosmo than took the numbers of the active player base from other games and compared them to concurrent players in Elite, which is obviously completely wrong.

His number also doesn't include non steam and console users and yet you are comparing them to all sold copies, which is obviously also completely wrong.

 

[S3B4ST13N]

'Handful'? Seriously?

Yes.
Some people don't have an inkling of how long things take to develop so they automatically assume there aren't many working on the product. Or they don't know that development studios can be (usually are) split into multiple teams, allowing them to produce multiple projects at once without sacrificing any of the other projects. So they assume because there's things like PC or Jurassic World, suddenly there's no more devs for ED.

 

[Leo Sagan]

I appreciate that 2.4 wasn't well received (which the reddit thread was talking about.) We said from the very beginning that it was a different way of doing things. Criticism is an opportunity to learn, so this is what we will continue to do. Feedback is gathered regularly so as we move forward we will keep a note of what aspects worked and which parts received the harshest reception to help inform future content releases. We're immensely proud of what we've done but humble enough to learn and do better every time.

A very courageous post, something I don't see often coming from a community manager. Thank you Dale !

 

[S3B4ST13N]

why change the statistic to make his look wrong hes talking about " Right now 2,662 are In-Game via steam" 2662 out of 2.5/3 million sales even for currently playing the game right now is kinda weak ,i would expect at least 20,000 people to be playing "right now" with them numbers

Majority of gamers are over adults (particularly ED in my experience is full of old people.. ). Therefore they have things like jobs.. and stuff.. it's horrible I know, but.. what can you do. Need to make money to buy them paintjobs.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Any PvP content that is being suggested terrifies them because they are so bad at this game and only capable truck A to B and call it trade, scoop honk and call it explorarion.

Incorrect assumption. PvP bores us. Total waste of time.

And as someone else* pointed out, by logging into any mode of this game you have CONSENTED to the BGS being manipulated from other modes.

Sauce, goose.




(It was Rampant: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ox-Ever-Made?p=6169400&viewfull=1#post6169400 )

 

[Valorin]

Don't feed the trolls.

 

[babelfisch]

Since definitions of the term sand box vary it's impossible to establish weather Elite is a sand box or not. And nobody is to blame for that because both definitions are valid. Discussing if the game is a sand box or not is idiotic.

Opinions also vary on what people expect from a sand box. Some people want more Skyrim and some people want more Eve. Simply saying 'add more sand' also doesn't make sense, for you that means let us build and own stations, for me it means give us NPC crew and better BGS mechanics.

Maybe people need to stop using buzz words and start saying what they actually want to say...