There just isn't enough meat on the bones in ED to justify a meaningful solo experience. It's the interactions with other players, good & bad, that breathe life into what is otherwise a very pretty, very empty shell. If all there was to ED was the solo experience I would have played it just like all the other solo games in my library; 20-100 hours on average for a "good" game to see all that it had to offer, then move on to the next game.
Elite - Would it be better as a single player?
- Thread starter ITZC0ATL
- Start date
That sure doesn't paint Elite Dangerous in a very favorable light if it is so empty as to not even be worth playing without another human player in your session.
Glad I am able to see far more value in it than that.
Some may place more value on human interaction than you appear to do. I wouldn't look down on that, if I were you. Or assume they are 'youngsters'. Or console players. Or pew-pewers.
You misunderstand Jason. If ED was single player only, all your dreams would come true!
Apparantly...
It was a single player game in it's original form back in the 80s, and I did play on my Amstrad CPC 64. Games evolve, and the internet was invented, and Elite should evolve with it. I agree it should have a solo mode, but open play, and private groups, are also important, as this way it involves all type of players. Each to their own style and mode of play. \i tend to play in mobius and occasionally open (when I want to taunt player killers)
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I played the worlds best single player space superiority simulator (tie fighter) and no, i disagree.
- I wouldn't call this an mmo. Do not distort reality. Go play an mmo. Go play elite. Its not the same.
- The multiplayer aspects that you do encounter are more of a treat and the game would be poorer without them.
- The evolving galnet / galaxy narrative is probably essential even if its in the back of your mind. Put the magnificent areas from uncharted, witcher, even x rebirth and it just doesn't feel the same, there's a hollow element you can't avoid if you know that this is it.
A real single player mode would be awesome, especially if what we have now is the 'engine' for it. Would be just amazing.. but someones got to go build it first.
Did anyone ever find out why the hcs voicepacks demo was quietly removed?
- I wouldn't call this an mmo. Do not distort reality. Go play an mmo. Go play elite. Its not the same.
- The multiplayer aspects that you do encounter are more of a treat and the game would be poorer without them.
- The evolving galnet / galaxy narrative is probably essential even if its in the back of your mind. Put the magnificent areas from uncharted, witcher, even x rebirth and it just doesn't feel the same, there's a hollow element you can't avoid if you know that this is it.
A real single player mode would be awesome, especially if what we have now is the 'engine' for it. Would be just amazing.. but someones got to go build it first.
Did anyone ever find out why the hcs voicepacks demo was quietly removed?
Absolutely not.
Expectations change with time. I'm an FFE and onwards player. The only draw back of the shared MMO universe is the abandonment of proper space flight. I loved the stardreamer time compression and the fact that once you knew what you were doing you could get places faster and with less fuel use by flipping over to use your main engines to decelerate.
Space felt proper big back then.
Fuel use meant something
Docking fees were a PITA
Buying a big ship meant waiting for crew to be available before you could fly it.
Since we can fly every ship by ourselves, of course multi-crew was going to be a waste of time.
Did anyone everyone ever tell you that in the earlier games, unless you kept your speed up, you couldn't escape a star or gas giants gravity when fuel scooping and then "game over" as you sunk slowly down to be crushed in the gravity well.
The MMO/shared galaxy aspect has lost to us the save game where you could try stuff with no loss and therefore everything seems to have been made safer as a result.
All that said, I play ED in VR and it is awesome, it's a different beast but I understand why.
If this makes no sense, blame the red wine
Meso
Space felt proper big back then.
Fuel use meant something
Docking fees were a PITA
Buying a big ship meant waiting for crew to be available before you could fly it.
Since we can fly every ship by ourselves, of course multi-crew was going to be a waste of time.
Did anyone everyone ever tell you that in the earlier games, unless you kept your speed up, you couldn't escape a star or gas giants gravity when fuel scooping and then "game over" as you sunk slowly down to be crushed in the gravity well.
The MMO/shared galaxy aspect has lost to us the save game where you could try stuff with no loss and therefore everything seems to have been made safer as a result.
All that said, I play ED in VR and it is awesome, it's a different beast but I understand why.
If this makes no sense, blame the red wine
Meso
If you're too young to have played Elite in the 80s, then you are far too young to remember Hal 9000
Sole Hunter
Banned
No,
in-game social interactions are what make this game unique for it's genre. The best example are narative based events like "Salome" and the community goals. Elite was sold on the premise that you can blaze your own trail in a large, rich and simulated galaxy while being able to play with other players. An offline single player game would limit the potential of these interactions and ultimately turn this game into a linear progression. This would make itt boring real quick after a few hours if there's no long term replayability.
in-game social interactions are what make this game unique for it's genre. The best example are narative based events like "Salome" and the community goals. Elite was sold on the premise that you can blaze your own trail in a large, rich and simulated galaxy while being able to play with other players. An offline single player game would limit the potential of these interactions and ultimately turn this game into a linear progression. This would make itt boring real quick after a few hours if there's no long term replayability.
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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..
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..
Deleted member 110222
D
I suggest you check out the "modes of elite" sub-forum, so that you can see how Solo is not only directly tied to an Open player's game, but also bear witness to the amount of salt as someone sees "their" BGS affected by players they can't interact with in a physical manner.
I would happily play an offline game just to shut up those sods, because they wouldn't have any cause to request on a daily basis that Frontier destroy the game play for Solo CMDRs, because it "doesn't suit Open players".
Let me be blunt. I want to be cut off from everyone else.
Deleted member 115407
D
ERMAHGERD..... I was a sophomore in high school when you were born. I feel old.
Regarding Elite as a single player game - Yes and no. Yeah, that's a totally non-committal answer. Sue me! It's true, though. I'm more of a single-player kinda gamer, so I gravitate towards those experiences. In that respect I'd love it if Elite were offline/single player.
That said, there are a lot of cool possibilities for social gaming and player interaction that comes from an online experience. I've had a lot of fun meeting people in the game. Playing multi-crew can be a real engaging experience, too. Even though I don't PvP much I can totally see how people can really get into that as well. I hope that future updates like the wing mission stuff will only improve the game and its social aspects.
So yeah - it depends.
Senior. That means I'm older than you and you have to do what I say.
Deleted member 115407
D
Definitely. This game would be dead without a multiplayer experience.
As a single player game Elite would be just a mediocre screen shot simulator--in fact, Space Engine would be a lot better.
Even if you play in solo now the player base still effects things such as economy, governments and such.
Even if you play in solo now the player base still effects things such as economy, governments and such.
Deleted member 115407
D
Why not just have a separate BGS for Solo and PG, Un1? Then folks on both sides of the table win.
Deleted member 110222
D
I'd be fine with that. Again, it would shut everyone up. Myself included.