Now. I'm painfully aware that a thread with such a title is made approximately four or five times a day on the front page of the Dangerous Discussion subforum.
I've opened many of them. They usually express discontent with specific mechanics or development direction. It absolutely sets my teeth on edge when they're the type of doom and gloom players who encountered one bug or had one bad experience through their own carelessness, and thereafter declare loudly for anyone who will listen that the game sucks, and it is terrible.
I cannot claim that I offer any more insight than these other posters. After all, I've struggled since the game launched to put the specific nature of it into words; that is, why I felt Elite: Dangerous was a let-down.
I simply didn't know how to describe it, but now I understand. It finally clicked after watching this video by the (in)famous ObsidianAnt, a video which no doubt many of you have already watched in its entirety.
First, praise where praise is due. Frontier Developments, on David Braben's vision, have created a stunningly beautiful galaxy to explore, managing to more than adequately convey the majesty, loneliness, and sheer, inconceivable scale of space and the cosmos.
The planets have high-resolution textures that are awe-inspiring, even up close, because of how photorealistic, how stunningly real they seem. The stars are rendered beautifully. Planetary rings evoke a sense of wonder.
And to quote the late and great Douglas Adams, "Even the most seasoned star tramp can't help but shiver at the spectacular drama of a sunrise seen from space." Indeed, the sight of a star lighting a blazing crescent through an atmosphere as it emerges from behind the surface of a planet gives me chills every time I see it, even so long after the game's release.
Frontier have carefully based human technology on what is scientifically possible, if not yet plausible, and have added loving detail to every one of the flyable ships and the stations that can be visited.
Playing with an Oculus Rift or a TrackIR is a transcendental experience, for reasons that are not hard to surmise.
It is obvious, very obvious, that they care about the game they've made. This sort of love is entirely absent from the works of most triple A franchises, especially those published by corporations like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft in this day and age, who are more interested in pure profit than building a universe.
And that is why I completely fail to understand why Elite is designed the way it was upon release. The same goes for PowerPlay.
Allow me to explain. The first few days I spent playing Elite: Dangerous were incredible. I'd never experienced anything like it, and while, being a Star Citizen backer, I scoffed initially at the strange arbitrary mechanics that governed Elite's flight model, I grew to love it. I spent my time exploring, bounty hunting, and running missions of many kinds from stations. I upgraded my ship, from my Sidewinder to an Eagle, then an Adder, and finally a Viper. I grew to love that ship, bought skins from the store for it, and even named it. I upgraded it completely, sinking millions of credits into it to make it one of the most formidable ships of its class.
By the end of the next week, the magic was finally gone. Elite is designed so that the minute you first drop into the game, all gameplay paths are open to you. You can choose to be a pirate, a trader, a bounty hunter, explorer, or a miner, and you can get a reasonable sample of all of these types of gameplay very quickly without ever having to buy a new ship. So what happens to the average player once they've done everything the game lets them do? See, at this point, I'd shredded Elite anacondas with my Viper's multicannons, explored a vast swathe of empty space and brought back scan data, run a few hours of trading in my Type 6, and run enough missions that I had seen every possible permutation and twist that could occur - There weren't very many, and the missions were horribly generic - Go here, find an instanced USS, locate X commodity, kill Y number of Z type of NPC, etc.
I was bored. I looked at the most profitable trade run in my area using Thrudd's tool, which had just appeared on the scene, looked at the biggest ship I could buy in the game, the Anaconda, made a half-hearted attempt to make some money, and finally gave up, bored nearly to tears by the repetitive trade grinding.
I'm back now, of course, more out of desperation than anything else, but at the time I resolved never to return. I'm almost certain that many of the people playing Elite for the first time also quit at around this point.
And here's the meat of it. We were promised a galaxy with which we could interact, blaze trails and pave the way for development, a galaxy focused on emergent gameplay, but what we got instead was a series of progress bars, spreadsheet statistics that determined the limited and utterly boring missions available to us, and an often-broken background simulation that governed the economic prosperity and expansion of systems. There was no place we could call home, no place we could BUILD a refuge of our own. We could, over many weeks and through long labour, topple a power on behalf of another power, make its influence grow, and let it spread to other systems, and gain absolutely no recognition or reward for it, save the payouts for the generic missions we had to grind. The NPCs who we were 'allied' with, the factions whose fortunes we had made through our work, would shoot us unblinkingly if we forgot to ask for docking permissions before entering one of their stations, or if a stray laser blast struck one of their ships when defending them from an attacker. The galaxy seemed as far from living and relatable as it could get. There was nothing a player could become personally invested in, nothing to care for, and no rewards to be reaped from loyalty to a faction or a cause.
The only goal for personal progression available to the player is to grind credits for a larger, more powerful ship. And I mean grind, because it takes an incredibly long time, and in order to reach the amount of credits you need to gain said ship, you need to engage in one of several actions repeatedly, literally ad nauseum. Instead of new experiences, or emergent gameplay, the Elite universe became, to me, a place in which I'd seen all there was to see, done all there was to do, and was able to accurately predict the behavior of an NPC, or even tell if they were a pirate or miner, just by watching the direction and pattern in which their ship flew. I could identify a Python, Anaconda, or Imperial Clipper from twenty kilometers away by the trail its thrusters left, and zone in on pirates in RES sites because they flew parallel to the planetary ring, rather than perpendicular to it.
PowerPlay came, and I returned, hoping something had changed. Instead I discovered that rather than creating mechanics to encourage emergent gameplay, Frontier had added reputation decay and merit grinding, a means to try and keep players playing their game without offering them anything truly meaningful in return. This grinding removes the fun from Elite. It makes the game a chore, a second job, and players are forced, if they want to maintain their progress, to put in many hours a week doing the same thing, over and over and over, just to fill a progress bar and keep up with the rate at which their progress is arbitrarily erased.
And players who day in, day out, completely resigned to the grind, play Elite: Dangerous, make up the majority of those on this forum today. That is why, when I made two threads over the last week trying to rally players to use PowerPlay mechanics to protect and establish profitable trade routes, hardly anyone was interested.
Frontier has been silent with regards to features they promised after the 1.0, such as dynamic planetside missions, planetary landings, ship interiors, walking around stations, boarding ships, and more. When I posted a thread a few days ago asking if anyone knew how far along their development was, nobody knew.
Pardon my french, but is this really all we can expect from Elite in the future? More spreadsheet, grind-heavy bull? More time sinks that fail to provide any new rewards? New types of weapons and shields as faction loyalty rewards don't count - They do not change the game's core mechanics one iota.
The game's been out for over seven months now. When will it become fun?
I've opened many of them. They usually express discontent with specific mechanics or development direction. It absolutely sets my teeth on edge when they're the type of doom and gloom players who encountered one bug or had one bad experience through their own carelessness, and thereafter declare loudly for anyone who will listen that the game sucks, and it is terrible.
I cannot claim that I offer any more insight than these other posters. After all, I've struggled since the game launched to put the specific nature of it into words; that is, why I felt Elite: Dangerous was a let-down.
I simply didn't know how to describe it, but now I understand. It finally clicked after watching this video by the (in)famous ObsidianAnt, a video which no doubt many of you have already watched in its entirety.
First, praise where praise is due. Frontier Developments, on David Braben's vision, have created a stunningly beautiful galaxy to explore, managing to more than adequately convey the majesty, loneliness, and sheer, inconceivable scale of space and the cosmos.
The planets have high-resolution textures that are awe-inspiring, even up close, because of how photorealistic, how stunningly real they seem. The stars are rendered beautifully. Planetary rings evoke a sense of wonder.
And to quote the late and great Douglas Adams, "Even the most seasoned star tramp can't help but shiver at the spectacular drama of a sunrise seen from space." Indeed, the sight of a star lighting a blazing crescent through an atmosphere as it emerges from behind the surface of a planet gives me chills every time I see it, even so long after the game's release.
Frontier have carefully based human technology on what is scientifically possible, if not yet plausible, and have added loving detail to every one of the flyable ships and the stations that can be visited.
Playing with an Oculus Rift or a TrackIR is a transcendental experience, for reasons that are not hard to surmise.
It is obvious, very obvious, that they care about the game they've made. This sort of love is entirely absent from the works of most triple A franchises, especially those published by corporations like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft in this day and age, who are more interested in pure profit than building a universe.
And that is why I completely fail to understand why Elite is designed the way it was upon release. The same goes for PowerPlay.
Allow me to explain. The first few days I spent playing Elite: Dangerous were incredible. I'd never experienced anything like it, and while, being a Star Citizen backer, I scoffed initially at the strange arbitrary mechanics that governed Elite's flight model, I grew to love it. I spent my time exploring, bounty hunting, and running missions of many kinds from stations. I upgraded my ship, from my Sidewinder to an Eagle, then an Adder, and finally a Viper. I grew to love that ship, bought skins from the store for it, and even named it. I upgraded it completely, sinking millions of credits into it to make it one of the most formidable ships of its class.
By the end of the next week, the magic was finally gone. Elite is designed so that the minute you first drop into the game, all gameplay paths are open to you. You can choose to be a pirate, a trader, a bounty hunter, explorer, or a miner, and you can get a reasonable sample of all of these types of gameplay very quickly without ever having to buy a new ship. So what happens to the average player once they've done everything the game lets them do? See, at this point, I'd shredded Elite anacondas with my Viper's multicannons, explored a vast swathe of empty space and brought back scan data, run a few hours of trading in my Type 6, and run enough missions that I had seen every possible permutation and twist that could occur - There weren't very many, and the missions were horribly generic - Go here, find an instanced USS, locate X commodity, kill Y number of Z type of NPC, etc.
I was bored. I looked at the most profitable trade run in my area using Thrudd's tool, which had just appeared on the scene, looked at the biggest ship I could buy in the game, the Anaconda, made a half-hearted attempt to make some money, and finally gave up, bored nearly to tears by the repetitive trade grinding.
I'm back now, of course, more out of desperation than anything else, but at the time I resolved never to return. I'm almost certain that many of the people playing Elite for the first time also quit at around this point.
And here's the meat of it. We were promised a galaxy with which we could interact, blaze trails and pave the way for development, a galaxy focused on emergent gameplay, but what we got instead was a series of progress bars, spreadsheet statistics that determined the limited and utterly boring missions available to us, and an often-broken background simulation that governed the economic prosperity and expansion of systems. There was no place we could call home, no place we could BUILD a refuge of our own. We could, over many weeks and through long labour, topple a power on behalf of another power, make its influence grow, and let it spread to other systems, and gain absolutely no recognition or reward for it, save the payouts for the generic missions we had to grind. The NPCs who we were 'allied' with, the factions whose fortunes we had made through our work, would shoot us unblinkingly if we forgot to ask for docking permissions before entering one of their stations, or if a stray laser blast struck one of their ships when defending them from an attacker. The galaxy seemed as far from living and relatable as it could get. There was nothing a player could become personally invested in, nothing to care for, and no rewards to be reaped from loyalty to a faction or a cause.
The only goal for personal progression available to the player is to grind credits for a larger, more powerful ship. And I mean grind, because it takes an incredibly long time, and in order to reach the amount of credits you need to gain said ship, you need to engage in one of several actions repeatedly, literally ad nauseum. Instead of new experiences, or emergent gameplay, the Elite universe became, to me, a place in which I'd seen all there was to see, done all there was to do, and was able to accurately predict the behavior of an NPC, or even tell if they were a pirate or miner, just by watching the direction and pattern in which their ship flew. I could identify a Python, Anaconda, or Imperial Clipper from twenty kilometers away by the trail its thrusters left, and zone in on pirates in RES sites because they flew parallel to the planetary ring, rather than perpendicular to it.
PowerPlay came, and I returned, hoping something had changed. Instead I discovered that rather than creating mechanics to encourage emergent gameplay, Frontier had added reputation decay and merit grinding, a means to try and keep players playing their game without offering them anything truly meaningful in return. This grinding removes the fun from Elite. It makes the game a chore, a second job, and players are forced, if they want to maintain their progress, to put in many hours a week doing the same thing, over and over and over, just to fill a progress bar and keep up with the rate at which their progress is arbitrarily erased.
And players who day in, day out, completely resigned to the grind, play Elite: Dangerous, make up the majority of those on this forum today. That is why, when I made two threads over the last week trying to rally players to use PowerPlay mechanics to protect and establish profitable trade routes, hardly anyone was interested.
Frontier has been silent with regards to features they promised after the 1.0, such as dynamic planetside missions, planetary landings, ship interiors, walking around stations, boarding ships, and more. When I posted a thread a few days ago asking if anyone knew how far along their development was, nobody knew.
Pardon my french, but is this really all we can expect from Elite in the future? More spreadsheet, grind-heavy bull? More time sinks that fail to provide any new rewards? New types of weapons and shields as faction loyalty rewards don't count - They do not change the game's core mechanics one iota.
The game's been out for over seven months now. When will it become fun?
angerous.
