Has somebody mentioned the biggest advantage of offline mode? It is free. There is no offline game not persisting in torrent trackers and all community mods are free by default. I’m sorry guys, but last time I’ve checked, FD was PLC. If it was changed to charity NCO, let me know.
Elite - Would it be better as a single player?
- Thread starter ITZC0ATL
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Deleted member 115407
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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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Deleted member 115407
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And that is a target that I think a lot of the "Offline Solo" people miss - one of the things that makes the game feel so alive, even for those who stick to Solo, is known that there are thousands of other CMDRs out there.
This game would be dead in Offline mode.
The only reason i would like an offline mode is to be able to play when i'm far away from home for work, damn i miss the game 
. Other than that i do believe that the game is so much better with fellow commanders, either in open or PG.
. Other than that i do believe that the game is so much better with fellow commanders, either in open or PG.
I remember being excited when I first found out about this game's development way back. Elite online!
So no. I don't agree. But I get the reasons why a lot of people would have been happier if it was just a single player game. Only a blind idiot wouldn't, particularly after suffering through the mega threads of doom following the announcement that offline mode wasn't going to happen.
So no. I don't agree. But I get the reasons why a lot of people would have been happier if it was just a single player game. Only a blind idiot wouldn't, particularly after suffering through the mega threads of doom following the announcement that offline mode wasn't going to happen.
Better? Depends entirely on the player. Its a very subjective question.
For some it would be better, for some it would be worse, for some better in some ways, worse in others. That is the only answer there can be to this question.
For me, both better and worse. All i wanted from ED was coop Frontier. I've more or less got that, so i can be happy. But single player might provide some benefits depending on how they approached it. Moddability might be one thing we could have. Also FD wouldn't have needed to bother with networking, meaning more time for other things.
For some it would be better, for some it would be worse, for some better in some ways, worse in others. That is the only answer there can be to this question.
For me, both better and worse. All i wanted from ED was coop Frontier. I've more or less got that, so i can be happy. But single player might provide some benefits depending on how they approached it. Moddability might be one thing we could have. Also FD wouldn't have needed to bother with networking, meaning more time for other things.
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unless i am misunderstanding then i think people are either not getting it or are being willfully obtuse.
I do not think OP is asking if this EXACT game would be better as a solo offline game.....
but more that whether he is asking if we would prefer Elite WITHOUT all the compromises and cut features which are pretty much bread and butter of single player games which have been cut, or severely compromised in the interests of making it an mmo.
plus if all the time spent on trying to fix the bugs and instancing issues are worth it to us, or if we would rather it spent on single player content.
Agree / disagree with the question but as usual some of the people responding like to be snarky at the posters (not aimed at the post i am quoting).
but.... personally i do not think separate BGS for solo and for multiplayer is the answer..... for plenty of reasons, one obvious one being FD having to maintain 2 stories.... and the other one being, just doing that would NOT magically bring back all the features which have been cut from the game... all we would end up with is all the negatives that we have with elite as it is now, but without many of the *positives* as well
** positives in my subjective view, some are free to differ
I am NOT demanding FD change the game from an MMO. this would be like shouting at the tide to turn. We have what we have and i DO enjoy it... and i hope some of the missing features FD find a way to bring in.... but, as a hypothetical discussion i thought it was interesting... which personally i feel is different to whining and demanding changes.
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Basically? Because in a multiplayer universe you cannot have time dilatation or compression. Everybody's game has to tick to the same clock.
The joy of multiplayer is the sense that the universe you play in is actually alive. In EvE Online I have floated outside a station in Oursulaert, seeing literally hundreds of ships coming and going about their business, realising that every one of them is another player somewhere in the world. For someone who once flew the empty void alone, back in '84 in ELITE, it was quite a soulful moment.
I think the multiplayer element makes the bubble feel more alive, and consequently the vast deep space feel more desolate. Wouldn't change that, if I were fdev.
On the flip im heading towards 1500 hours played, and would say 90% of that is in solo which is near enough a single player game, I looked at the time ive spent in my X games and they go well beyond 1500, think one or two I dont have on steam, I know they are differnt games but I never brought ED with the intetion of ever playing it with others.
If you took into account the amount of time I spent playing the orignal games...oh dear where did my early 20,s go, think it was work/clubbing/Elite....
As a solo player, I don't miss seeing other commanders at all with one exception: exploration. When I go exploring, I sometimes play in open because the chance of bumping into a like-minded commander is quite exciting.
However, there are other factors to take into consideration why offline was appealing to some. Offline mode wasn't purely about not wanting to play with others. It also included unreliable internet connections, lag, latency (etc.) that would impair the game's performance. Not everyone has the good fortune to be able to afford and/or receive super-fast broadband. And even if we all did, I would still play offline/solo ... unless exploring from time-to-time.
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You'd get some weird - and exploitable - divergences between the two over time. Go to Open where an Industrial station isn't in Outbreak. Buy up its extensive supply of medicines. Switch to Solo where it is in Outbreak. Sell the medicines for a substantial profit. Repeat.
All sorts of weirdness with CGs, first discoveries, system ownership, etc. too
It's basically asking Frontier to run two separate copies of Elite Dangerous.
I'm not sure we'd see eye-to-eye on the multiplayer thing: where you obviously see scope for a multiplayer workaround to incorporate time distortion effects such as those we saw in FE2/FFE, I still think it would mean a lot of compromises to get ships with different grades of witchdrive to stay in sync, or identical ships if they jumped to different systems or had different payloads. I don't think it could work.
That said, I'm absolutely, 100% with you in disappointment that we lost the potential for an even richer, more complex flight model than we'd had in the previous games. One of the things I do love about ED is that the ships feel kind of heavy. Not the ridiculous artificial restrictions on turn rates that we're lumbered with because the game's trying to be a Spitfire simulator but in space (presumably the same reason we've no sensible instrumentation on board) -- I mean the fact that they just feel like big, heavy vehicles, and I imagine how this could have contributed to a 'proper' Elite 4. I imagine the physics of Martin Schweiger's Orbiter, but with 32nd century engines, frame shift capabilities, a star-spanning human civilisation, and a vast galaxy to explore (including the ability to land on planets with atmospheres!). And, like you, I think the concept of a speed limit in space, determined by engine power, is just... I don't even know what the best word is to describe it. "Retro", I think is probably kindest. Really, seriously, full-burn retro. As determinedly backward-looking as could be. "Arcadey" would be another way. "Maximum boost speed", for flip's sake...!
I've said it before -- I think even in this thread -- but I love this game. I play ED whenever I have chance. I certainly don't feel the anger towards it that you clearly do. For me, behind the enjoyment I still get from playing ED, there's just a general low-grade disappointment that they went for remaking Elite rather than advancing on FFE. But, my gods, what a beautiful thing a proper, modern, future-set space flight simulator could have been.
i believe the main reason for the speed limits in space was for the multiplayer component..... the faster you fly the bigger the problem of the extra latancy that multiplayer forces on us becomes.... so i think the magic speed limit is something else you can blame on multiplayer
I remember playing First Encounters, once. I can't forget, try as I might. I loaded First Encounters up the once, and within five minutes I was sitting in front of the screen, bereft of purpose, and consumed with an existential despair I've never managed to shake off. I just... the universe... so big; so empty; so cold and meaningless. I clicked listlessly at a few icons but I'd realised the truth by then. The veil had fallen away, and I knew: nothing mattered. Nothing could matter. We are, in the end, just brief sparks of purposeless life: guttering candle flames in an endless, foreboding darkness.
And to think I could have avoided all that if I'd only had the knowledge that other people I couldn't see were playing the same game I was.
There's the Pioneer open source space game, which is reasonably similar to FFE in terms of game mechanics. (It started out as an open source clone of FE2, but has since diverged somewhat)
They have no intention of making it multiplayer - believing multiplayer to be fundamentally incompatible [1] with FFE-style gameplay - but if you learned programming, game design and networking you could fork it and make your own multiplayer version to prove them (and Frontier...) wrong.
You have a vision for how it clearly should be - get started on it, show it has potential, and people will join in once they see that it could work. Waiting around hoping someone else will get started on your vision never gets anywhere. You're part of the community - make the game, push the standards and expectations.
[1] I think they're basically right on this one. I can see how both a multicrew-style cooperative multiplayer and an arena-style competitive one could be added to an FFE-like game, but I can't see a practical way to do freeform persistent multiplayer that would actually result in anyone ever meeting another player.
With an offline solo mode absolutely, not as an offline solo mode only.
ED is clearly built at least attempting to be a multiplayer game - if it were going to be a sole solo release it would have to be restructured enough to be a new game anyway. But with a moddable offline solo mode so that the single player folk can do their thing in the corner while the multiplayer game gets the multiplayer attention it deserves, I think there'd be a few more smiles.
ED is clearly built at least attempting to be a multiplayer game - if it were going to be a sole solo release it would have to be restructured enough to be a new game anyway. But with a moddable offline solo mode so that the single player folk can do their thing in the corner while the multiplayer game gets the multiplayer attention it deserves, I think there'd be a few more smiles.
Honestly I think it would be