Elite - Would it be better as a single player?

Dbrn47

Dbrn47
Yes, I have no doubt that the game would be much better without multiplayer. As much as people love it, it also tends to water down experiences because of the extra resources spent on it. Think about how much they have spent just trying to get us to show up in the same instances over the years, the multicrew flop, the cqc flop,then wings and now wing missions. It's all cool and the work is appreciated but I don't feel the game is better for it when all that effort could have gone into other content. We can't put the genie back in the bottle though.
 

znôrt

znôrt
HAL- 9000 said:
Would Elite Dangerous have been been better as an offline, single player game?
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if the developers had any experience with mmos, mmo all the way. the current limited multiplayer functionality bolted on the single player online game that ed is at its core is a nice addition, but doesn't really cut it as a multiplayer mmo.

would it have been better as offline single player? well, frontier stated a while ago that making it offline was "not possible" due to the sheer size of the galaxy, and the way they wanted to unfold the "narrative", so there you go.

if you omit the 'offline' bit ... no doubt the game could have benefited a great deal if the time and energy invested in dealing with multiplayer complexity in a way that doesn't really work had been invested in other areas. then again, players do exist that enjoy the limited multiplayer functionality there is, and quite a few massive community initiatives have taken place that probably wouldn't have existed without it.
 

Seizewell Warrior

Seizewell Warrior
Not read most of the preceding pages but yes, definitely would prefer a proper single player game.

It would have been a Day 1 purchase for me rather than 4 (?) years in at bargain bucket price.

Much of the game would be as it is now, but genuine SP could avoid the rebuy scenario, allow multiple saves and could have thrown in some progressive campaigns. Even if that meant it turned out more like Terran Conflict or Rebirth but set in the "real" universe. Could also have offered a choice of difficulty level so those of us getting hammered in combat could turn the AI skill down a bit.
 

the source 0179

T
Mad Mike said:
sadly i am old enough to have played the original on launch (ish) platforms :(

to your answer, talking selfishly, personally i would have MUCH preferred ED to have been a primarily single player game, but where we could take our cmdr into other players game universe for a session (and stayed there permanently if we wanted) kind of like games like payday2 or torchlight 2 or borderlands 1/2.

it could have supported private servers etc, although STILL connected to the galaxy sim to download any data needed from the servers, but once downloaded that data was on our machines and we could interact with it from then on..

WHY?

well imo it would have meant we could truly have had proper persistance, actual npcs to build relations with and help build bases etc etc and still have been able to play with friends = or even randoms if they had an open private server = it could even have had configurable rules for the game server.

So long as the game is as it is, i cannot see how we will ever have destructible environments or persistent characters unique to our own journey because how can FD store that kind of data for every player?, and also because 1 group of players could ruin so many peoples game.

but that is my purely selfish view.

its an interesting question imo.
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Agreed.
 

the source 0179

T
Yes. I play in solo 95% of the time. I have no need to see other cmdrs etc. I play mostly single player games. And on rare occasions hop on shared world games with friends. I'm from the era of if you want to play with friends you meet up at each other's houses either lan or split screen drinking and eating and playing games together. Only reason i got elite is cause it had a solo mode. If it was straight open/multiplayer i probably wouldnt of got it. There could be middle ground though something like driveatars in forza. And i did like the shared world of destiny were by you do your our thing and run across random people fight with them for awhile without having to speak. just play. But what makes that work is not being able to kill other players. Lol
 

the source 0179

T
popuptoaster said:
Rubbish there are lots of single player games that make money and then continue to make money by adding paid DLC and whats to stop companies selling ietms in single player games? They could sell whatever they wanted and it wouldn't cause "pay to win" arguments, there is also the possibility of a heavy modding scene, Freelancer was kept going for years by mods
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I have to agree also.
 

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead
Basically, yes.

Single player, with mod support.

Perfect. Lol

I can begin fixing all the odd issues I have with this game.
(Well someone else can fix them, and I'll just install the mods. Lol)

Ideally with some kind of Multiplayer support, hop in hop out co-op?

The idea of a Multiplayer universe sounds awesome, especially 30 years ago. But people are kind of annoying, and I'm not a fan of always Online games anyway.
 

zombieapocalypse

zombieapocalypse
I played the original games first time around and sunk a good portion of my teenager years into Frontier: Elite II on my Amiga. Even back then, and subsequently every time there was talk of a sequel, I thought wouldn't Elite be amazing as a shared universe.

The multiplayer aspect of ED does at times leave a lot to desire, but I think I would have stopped playing a long time ago if wasn't for the online features and community. Hopefully, FD will learn from their mistakes and build on their experience to improve the multiplayer features. That said, I'd love to see what the modding community could do with ED.

And I'm sorry, but people who are saying the multiplayer side is only there to disguise DRM are just spouting idiotic conspiracy-theory nonsense.
 
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Blackcompany

Banned
B
Mods and tweaks.

No forced MP.

No always online requirement.

No instancing required and a seamless Galaxy much more likely.

No loading times.

No server downtimes.

Yeah. Single player would be better.
 

Watcher

W
Tough to say, maybe? I wouldn't expect to get the same sort of ongoing development effort though. I've also enjoyed doing some multiplayer things in the game and losing those would be detrimental. I think the multi-mode approach we have now is pretty good to be honest, it has lead to some awkward compromises and there are design decisions I disagree with but it works pretty well over all and I've got confidence FD will improve things over time.
 

Blackcompany

Banned
B
Bounder said:
Proper Elite - without 'space speed limits', and with time-acceleration, and hordes upon hordes of mindless attacking AI, is the way this game's meant to be enjoyed.


It's a shame, as multiplayer Elite would be awesome. I think most lifers would agree with that, provided it didn't compromise the core game.


I'm not the kind of person who easily accepts what's supposedly possible or not. Sure, there can be no paradoxes, but that doesn't mean there can't be workable solutions or just workarounds. When Breadbins said "supercruise is time acceleration" i think all he meant was that it fulfills the same role in gameplay terms, rather than alluding to some obscure relativistic semantic argument, and as a compromise for multiplayer compatibility, it seems a reasonable concession, though not to the exclusion of full piloting freedom of course (ie. there can be no justification for space speed limits!).

It's a clumsy and inelegant workaround though, and also leads into further procrastination regarding the in-game representation of time generally... surely a neater solution to both issues is possible?


I had hoped that Elite 4 would finally expand upon the time component of spaceflight, as previous sequels had build upon the distance and scale aspects - finally getting shot of the single, universal-mean-time fudge.

You can have a UMT, but you also need at least one other clock, to represent local times. Local populaces will have their own unique timezones. A planet with shorter or longer day-lengths than Earth is not going to be using GMT! Different longitudes around a planet surface will have graduated timezones, just as we do on Earth! The one-size-fits-all approach is horribly dumb and kludgey, in this day and age!

Another aspect to this was that in previous Elites, hyperjumps take relativistic time - they're instantaneous for the traveler, but take hours or days of time off your clock. This is a really cool gameplay feature. In FFE, i'm currently playing with wings. I make up a squadron of AI ships who follow my every move, deck them out with weapons then send them off to attack various targets for me. When i hyperspace, they all hyperspace with me. And if they're in the same ships as me, with the same loadouts, we all arrive together at the same time. But if any of them are bigger ships or have smaller drives, us faster ones have to wait for them to arrive on the other side. Same deal when you're chasing a target (or being pursued) through hyperspace. It's a cool touch that adds to the gameplay.

But in a MP game it would mean that different players will inevitably end up in different times, so a multiplayer base becomes dispersed, as viable instancing opportunities dry up. This can be managed however - players can always still agree to meet up at a given place and time, and someone in the future can still message someone in the past, or wait for them at some location, to catch up in time. While travel to the future is fairly trivial, travel to the past could be facilitated by some kind of handwavium, if it was really even necessary at all..


Incorporating realistic time would also provide opportunity for procedural evolution of the galaxy - including aging functions in the rendering of stars and planets, so that they proceed through the main sequence seamlessly, over the kinds of timescales that would realistically be incurred via time-dilation and relativistic factors. Basically, the more and further you hyperspace, the more time you're going to cover, and the greater the divergence of your on-board clock to one in a non-inertial frame. Over the course of a career, an ardent explorer could rack up millions of years of Earth-time. Time enough to see glaciation epochs come and go, and stellar nucleosynthesis cycles to wax and wane.. for galaxies to rotate, and jumble their constellations like spinning laundry ("..we go round every 200 million years.."). It's one thing to have to memorise portions of a galaxy map, but wait till it all starts moving! Would you even know where to look for Sol 5 million years hence?

I actually think realistic timezones and elapsed time could be a massive bonus and incentive to multiplayer and esp. co-op play, if implemented naturalistically and intuitively...


Time acceleration in a multiplayer environment is a much thornier issue - i suspect workarounds are possible, perhaps AI taking over a player's ship in an instance the player departs when engaging time-acceleration, to maintain some kind of continuity for other players. Dunno. Supercruise would be OK for fast travel, if only it were more linear / intuitive to control speed relative to a given target. But it's no substitute for being able to hit 'fast forward' from geo-stationary orbit and watch the celestial ballet unfold before you..


Bottom line is that i wanted (and reasonably expected!) Elite 4 to continue celebrating fun in realism, making the same kinds of progress and improvements FE2 and FFE did over classic Elite, and which it made over every other previous game in the genre. Instead ED has been a massive retrograde step, gambling away the crown jewels, squandering the strengths and whole ethos of the Elite marque. Every star's slammed robotically in your face on every hyperspace, gone is the ability to choose how you enter a system or approach a star, you have space speed limits (speed limits, in space! "Space speed limits"!!!), there's no mystique or magic or thrill, no skill required or developed, just roll, pitch, supercruise, dock, repeat. I still can't believe they muffed it up so comprehensively. Still reeling from it. Like they've literally no idea what they had, and what's been sacrificed in their cack-handed MP cash-in attempt. We could've had something sublime and procedural and emergent and magical, something that takes a day to grasp and a lifetime to master. Instead we have lowest-common-denominator clunk. An ultra-linear hand-holding garden-pathing slideshow of "Elite". Bland, awkward, unimaginative, senseless, illogical, utterly inconsistent, mediocre and joyless.

It's not Elite, plays nothing like Elite, its constraints are the antithesis of Elite's spirit, it's fractured, not-at-all seamless, and for all that, not even a half-decent multiplayer game!

Multiplayer FFE would be 1000x the game ED is..

Why hasn't someone made multiplayer FFE yet? We've had mutiplayer MAME for over a decade. You can play Streetfighter on emulated Sega's with multiplayer... You can play GTA San Andreas and GTAV with community MP mods.. why hasn't anyone done the same for FE2 or FFE? If the community took more of a lead in pushing standards and expectations, companies like Frontier would be forced to play catch-up, and wouldn't be able to get away with third-rate rubbish like this..

I only hope FD stick to their word and release ED's assets once it goes offline - maybe then someone will be able to build a respectable Elite sequel out of it..
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Well said. This game sacrifices so much for online MP that it drags it into utter mediocrity in so many areas...
 

CobraKhan

CobraKhan
vindelanos said:
Dude, maybe some day when the servers go down everyone will get a free offline mode. And then we can all sit in our lonely, lonely spaceships, with milquetoast NPCs who act on script, no online friends, no unexpected hollow squares, no community goals, no faction movement at all, no surging thargoids, no engaging forum content, no discord servers. Just the player and his static bubble, and four hundred billion star systems that all look roughly the same.

Sounds like a hoot.
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I'm looking forward to this point, Elite will be a great game then.
 

Jools

Jools
zombieapocalypse said:
And I'm sorry, but people who are saying the multiplayer side is only there to disguise DRM are just spouting idiotic conspiracy-theory nonsense.
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Nobody has ever said that multiplayer is only there to disguise DRM (if i recall)

What people tend to say is that the real reason for dropping offline was that "allways online" is the only working form of DRM

David Braben has very strong opinions on this (piracy and DRM) and there are numerous publications where he favours heavy DRM even if it would be to the detriment of a game (Ps. I don`t judge him for that, he wants his money and has all the right to protect his work). I recall him saying "I hate locking my house when i go away, but i do that anyway" when asked about how he sees diablo III intrusive allways online DRM (loose quote from memory)

Planet coaster has an aggressive DRM that requires you to periodically be online

Their JP game will have an online requirement for sure too, as all future Frontier games will i suppose

Its not a conspiracy theory, its just quite obvious

People are salty about it to this day because many predicted that this games development will be hindered by its p2p MMO nature(many things are much harder to do in an always online environment, many are impossible) and felt like David has wilfully sacrificed his dream game that he was dreaming up in those interviews over the years for bigger profit.

I (decide to) believe that he has simply underestimated the hindrance it will cause and decided that bigger profits assured by working DRM will in turn provide more resources to allow quick progress despite the hindrances but later on made another business decision to move those resources to a new franchise which will in turn generate more cash for elite to be completed one day, but then a fantastic new opportunity has come with the successful acquisition of the rights to a huge hollywood franchise and a new building, and two more franchises planned... meanwhile imagine how great it would feel... but the 10 year plan... we want those things to come some day... all very very exciting

Busines>ALL i guess (ask Mr IAN Bell for more info)

Can`t blame him for that, that`s the world we live in, if you can`t make such decisions your chances of being rich are slim

but the game suffered from this decision IMO... a bit too much
 
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CobraKhan

CobraKhan
Sylveria said:
IMO Elite is already a great game and so is Elite Dangerous. YMMV
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Sorry, I thought it was clear that I meant Elite Dangerous :D And if it is a great game for you, that is cool of course, it's your opinion. And I have another opinion and think it could be a way better game. But Frontier made it clear very early that they create THEIR game. So I just hop in now and then to see if I can enjoy it more or not. Still hoping ;)
 
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