I've been thinking about immersion and what keeps me in games lately, and the one thing I've found is this:
Games I really love are fun places to "be". I love games like Minecraft, X3: Albion Prelude, Grand Theft Auto, Skyrim, and the old space sim game Evochron Mercenary. These are big, open worlds with lots of freedom given to the player. Some aspects of these games get grindy or repetitive, but it's ok--the world is a pleasant place to be in, and a nice escape from reality.
MC, GTA, and Skyrim are obviously much different than Elite, but the things that keep me involved are the topography and the feeling of exploration--there's a lot to look at, and little hidden things to find, and the general sense that something ELSE is waiting for me beyond the next hill, or in that cave, or down that street.
X3 and Evochron are more relatable to Elite--open space games, but the difference is that the universe is convincing, and interesting. X3 has tons of ships flying around doing jobs, and if you look at the world at a macro perspective, you can see that things are, in some way, all contributing to a greater whole. The Elite "background simulation" completely fails to provide this feeling, especially as the Frontier team still has to manually decide and inject community events and now PowerPlay interactions.
Evochron was another completely open universe, but it's joy is that it's completely seamless, and there are planetary landings, and a more "realistic" inertial flight model.
I want to like Elite, I really want to love this game and use my expensive peripherals (trackIR and Saitek x52 pro) but every time I pop on, I know I have a few basic options of "spaces" to inhabit -- complete emptiness, asteroid belts, stations, or Supercruise. Jumping between systems is just a series of loading screens, and even while exploring (I've done some big exploring trips), it almost feels like a dice roll... every 15 seconds, I get to roll the dice and MAYBE I'll see an unusual configuration of planets and stars.
Flying ships is awesome and the cockpits are gorgeous, but there's nothing to test my actual flying skills around--one can only do so many loops around asteroid belts, and duck into the geometry of a station so many times. I could spend hours simply driving a car around GTA, however, as there's a lot of stuff going on, and I have the freedom to seamlessly jump into the next activity as soon as I'd like.
Anyways, I hope to see this game continue to grow and become something engaging, but as it stands now, it eventually just isn't fun!
Games I really love are fun places to "be". I love games like Minecraft, X3: Albion Prelude, Grand Theft Auto, Skyrim, and the old space sim game Evochron Mercenary. These are big, open worlds with lots of freedom given to the player. Some aspects of these games get grindy or repetitive, but it's ok--the world is a pleasant place to be in, and a nice escape from reality.
MC, GTA, and Skyrim are obviously much different than Elite, but the things that keep me involved are the topography and the feeling of exploration--there's a lot to look at, and little hidden things to find, and the general sense that something ELSE is waiting for me beyond the next hill, or in that cave, or down that street.
X3 and Evochron are more relatable to Elite--open space games, but the difference is that the universe is convincing, and interesting. X3 has tons of ships flying around doing jobs, and if you look at the world at a macro perspective, you can see that things are, in some way, all contributing to a greater whole. The Elite "background simulation" completely fails to provide this feeling, especially as the Frontier team still has to manually decide and inject community events and now PowerPlay interactions.
Evochron was another completely open universe, but it's joy is that it's completely seamless, and there are planetary landings, and a more "realistic" inertial flight model.
I want to like Elite, I really want to love this game and use my expensive peripherals (trackIR and Saitek x52 pro) but every time I pop on, I know I have a few basic options of "spaces" to inhabit -- complete emptiness, asteroid belts, stations, or Supercruise. Jumping between systems is just a series of loading screens, and even while exploring (I've done some big exploring trips), it almost feels like a dice roll... every 15 seconds, I get to roll the dice and MAYBE I'll see an unusual configuration of planets and stars.
Flying ships is awesome and the cockpits are gorgeous, but there's nothing to test my actual flying skills around--one can only do so many loops around asteroid belts, and duck into the geometry of a station so many times. I could spend hours simply driving a car around GTA, however, as there's a lot of stuff going on, and I have the freedom to seamlessly jump into the next activity as soon as I'd like.
Anyways, I hope to see this game continue to grow and become something engaging, but as it stands now, it eventually just isn't fun!
