FD should increase size of the team developing ED

[StuartGT]

The game is a dumpster fire that is about to crash and burn. Poor Leadership, feature creep, worsening finances, bad engine, poor network implementation. Tools?! what tools. Any thing substantial in SC has to be done manually. We complain about ED but at least we have a working game. No Man Sky is probably the example you are looking for.

I agree with all you have written except one part: Star Citizen isn't about to crash and burn. Its inevitable disaster will play out for many entertaining years to come, with both Sq42 and SC actually releasing amongst much drama and poor review-scores.

 

[Lightspeed]

There are currently 17 job vacancies at FD .... and two are for QA audio, who says FD doesn't listen?

 

[[VR] wi03016]

I think FD have a lot of developers working on ED but the challenge is to integrate new content. For example to integrate exploration mechanics, this could be very complex due to many dependencies. Lot of code reengineering even some code must be thrown and new developed. My guess it takes time for the whole Q4 update but when it's finished it should be a very good foundation to bring atmosspheric landings with useful gameplay. The next season for example "Atmosphere" must generate income to keep ED profitable. FD should take their time but they should be more transparent in communication.

 

[Ignition]

The only thing that was "strange" was the very slow pace for horizon with late updates and everything.
It feels like they faced some kind of coding snafu requiring a lot of refactoring time, delaying everything.

Think about stupid things like no mix between wings and MC, no SRV in MC etc... it smells coding issues.

But more than that, I think that the game lacks a clear focus in design/creative direction.
It feels like the "heads" don't know what the game is supposed to be and fallback to bolt-on minigames from a lack of vision.
I would add that many times the game feels like the designers have a large perception gap between what they suppose the game plays like
and how the game actually plays out.

The game is certainly not bad. It's certainly not great either as far as open world adventure goes.

More devs on the project only works if the code is well designed and modular enough with a clear vision, otherwise it's just a case of too many cooks.

I bet the gameplay designers of Elite are cellphone game developers. The game is glued with minigames and doesn't have a solid gameplay design.
In 4 years they couldn't overhaul any of the core activities, 3.3 is coming in the next 3 months with improvements in mining and exploration, I hope the next overhauls come in 2019 with smuggling, trading and ground stations since the stations are always empty and we are the only srv and human in whole planet.

 

[ZeroAi]

There have been lot of posts and claims that FD doesn't have 100-ish people team working on ED. While it has always contradicted by regular FD claims of having such big team for game, I think I realize now that discussion is not about how big team works on ED. We have what FD says us, and we have some assertments like FD being publicly traded company so they can't lie about that kind of information on regular basis.

However, I think it is not the point people try to make there, it just shows limits of Internet as discussion platform. Most of people claiming this seems to be saying such things:

* Game is not what I wanted it to be / what I expected it to be / I don't enjoy it - well, this easiest and in same time most hardest thing. If you don't like a game like at all at fundamental level, it really does not matter how much people working on it, is it. And while people associate bigger teams with "AAA game development", which most likely means scripted and fully voice acted and cut scenes galore, ED was never meant such game. No directly involved story line for everybody or any such developments, open world - do whatever you can do, and so on and so forth. Open world games are always this contraversional - people either love them or hate them. And sometimes amount of money spent on it matters, and sometimes it matters little. In the end, if you do not enjoy such games fundamentally, ED isn't gonna cut for you;

* Game updates are too sparse and not frequent enough - this is most subjective and in same time most honest opinion we can all give. I personally feel OK-ish with updates, but I definitely wish there was more "content" and more frequently. Some people say it is totally unacceptable, and some are fine with it. I certainly enjoy the game, so for me it is just wish that might get fulfilled some day. But if someone is waiting for new feature or improvement, I understand his unease about tempo of development;

In conclusion I think none of that even means anything about size of the team. We just discuss actual output. And it is quite obvious that most of us would like to have more ED in a year. So that all being said, I think FD really should increase size of team developing ED - because we want more ED updates to be released more frequently. I hope they do. I hope that recent David side note about happening will really leave some impact on how much they can release a year.

+Rep

I would like to add that I for one would be very willing to buy a $30 DLC each year for the game, or $60 on Elite Dangerous 2.

Don't get me wrong, I like free!

But, if the only way to get big content drops is to pay for them count me in :-D

 

[Koen]

I would like to add that I for one would be very willing to buy a $30 DLC each year for the game, or $60 on Elite Dangerous 2.

Don't get me wrong, I like free!

But, if the only way to get big content drops is to pay for them count me in :-D

Of course there will be more content to pay for.

Some of us (LEP holders -- and I cannot imagine many of those would be happy to buy "Elite: Dangerous 2", "Elite: Deadly" or "ELITE 5" at this point) have already paid for that.

 

[Parmo]

There are currently 17 job vacancies at FD .... and two are for QA audio, who says FD doesn't listen?

Funny. But ....


There are 9 programming vacancies.

There are zero design vacancies.:O
And yet a few - many? - forum posters seem to say there is a lack of design skills as exhibited by what is in Elite Dangerous.

How many games designers does FDev have? Too few or too many?

 

[CMDR Carbo]

It's not the number of staff, it's the sheer inability of FD to not blurt out idiotic comments like "we don't want to waste your time" and then do everything but that. Or lest we forget, "Winter is coming" which it did, a year and a half later, and then with such a painfully underwhelming mess of broken missions and revoked features that it may as well not have come at all. If you're making something, great, just keep quiet about it and for love of all that's sane, make it coherent. The disjointed design decisions are infuriating, if key staff at Producer level can't control this, there's more of a problem than just "not enough people working on it."

Look at the responses to media that's put out by FD. Is it positive? Does it show good faith? We're long past the point of good will here. Put your cards on the table for Q4, FD. I'm not entirely sure you even know yourselves what you want Elite Dangerous to be.

Somebody gave a quite accurate comparison of ED's development to someone trying to build a greenhouse in his garden a week or two ago on this forum, I wish I could remember where it was.

I personally don't really need 4 small updates per year, I would actually prefer one big update per year containing everything that is coherent and properly beta-tested!!
And I don't need everything that this update contains in advance, just tell me the most prominent feature of the update so I can look forward to it.

A bit like Hello Games did with NMS, it took them some time to get the update out, but they delivered.

 

[iFred]

No, they should set up a new Team that builds Elite Deadly or whatever its called. Including 1 year of mandatory "lessons learned" for the whole Team. That goes for Networking, BGS ("dynamic universe", economy), over graphics to Storytelling / galnet.

The current game (design/architecture) seems to be too complex to handle.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

And yet a few - many? - forum posters seem to say there is a lack of design skills as exhibited by what is in Elite Dangerous.

None of those forum posters doesn't sport any good creds as designers though, so I will doubt they it is something beyond subjective dislike of design decisions.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

They *could* hire Marc Miller...

 

[CMDR Dumbfries]

Why would they need to increase the size of the development team?

FD has delivered 95% of stuff it has promised.

According to you, the game is almost finished.

 

[Lightspeed]

Funny. But ....


There are 9 programming vacancies.

There are zero design vacancies.:O
And yet a few - many? - forum posters seem to say there is a lack of design skills as exhibited by what is in Elite Dangerous.

How many games designers does FDev have? Too few or too many?

About a year ago they were advertising for a programmer/designer (I honestly can't remember which) with specific experience in damage modeling.

I thought that was very interesting in the light of what was sketched out in a couple of the concept art pictures that have been associated with the "wearable computer display" mentioned in Galnet.

I was surprised at the time that they were advertising for this skill so late in the game's development, but it kind of makes sense of what is being developed for mining and for what (some suspect) is potentially arriving Soon (TM).

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

According to you, the game is almost finished.

FD promised very little during KS. Everything else has been hinted under disclaimer "one day maybe".

Fact that we want those hints to become reality has little to do how FD tried - and it seems failed for many people - reign on expectations of people.

Having feeling that game isn't finished is completely something different than promises.

 

[Camulus]

That is highly subjective and a bit of a sticky wicket. IME the kind of mentoring required would invariably result in a significant loss in productivity and also put product quality and/or schedule at risk (depends on various factors but such things can not be ignored).

If FD are anything like a decent software house then they will probably have succession plans in place (or at least plans for what happens in the case of work force replacements). The most cost effective way is probably to document the technicalities of the product properly, mentoring/pair-programming can cost the business more and provide less scope for contingencies. Documentation can be backed up, people's minds currently can not.

Rep for the gratuitous use of 'Sticky Wicket'.

 

[dannysquid]

My hope is that large parts of the team are working on things that would take large teams to develop -- atmospheric worlds, space legs etc...

Don't know if this will turn out to be true, but that's my hope!

 

[krylite]

However you want to spin it that equates to cheaper low experienced labour.

By far the biggest reason why Star Citizen is taking so long is they are taking the time to develop the tools, NOW, and get the SOLID FOUNDATIONS built so that everything created with it is easier, and most importantly, that it meshes well with everything else - in other words no spaghetti code. Anyone who knows about building and houses with subsidence will know that fixing the poor foundations of a domestic property will cost more that it cost to build the entire house and decorate and fill it with furniture. Sometimes it's cheaper just to knock it down and redo it.

The game is a dumpster fire that is about to crash and burn. Poor Leadership, feature creep, worsening finances, bad engine, poor network implementation. Tools?! what tools. Any thing substantial in SC has to be done manually. We complain about ED but at least we have a working game. No Man Sky is probably the example you are looking for.

I agree with all you have written except one part: Star Citizen isn't about to crash and burn. Its inevitable disaster will play out for many entertaining years to come, with both Sq42 and SC actually releasing amongst much drama and poor review-scores.

Same here. Star Citizen is a mess of features with no stable foundation as basically modded cryengine levels. They continually have to quietly omit old features and sweep over thousands of ignored bugs in their ever next and latest PTU "updates" just to put a veneer of barely there slideshow framerates to sell to their enabling whales. That's too much of the naysaying bandwagon bent to ludicrously compare or even equate ED development with Star Citizen. Agreed that NMS' remarkable turnaround accomplishment is a far better example of a competitor effort even though it's a far different type of immersive space fantasy game and of course just trying to make up for their initial preorder infamy. Whereas Star Citzen/CIG is steeped in ever growing controversy as to its business practices along with the ongoing Crytek vs. CGI lawsuit. No need to go into it more here as the SC thread in the offtopic category and DSmart's blog can provide far more alarming detail.

Eagleboy, you bring up a good point about wishing more resources and personnel were allocated to ED as we all do probably. You seem to be the most informed of all of us. I'm sure you remember in a recent business article that Frontier was expanding their staff this year adding more to a complement of 200 and beyond as a growing small cap firm. But the article also mentioned there is no way to know how the new staff team organizations are set up. Well I have hope due to some hints in the descriptions of this year's Frontier job listings in which they constantly mention "cross-dev" emphasis where I think it's fair to assume the new staff will be involved in working on the various Frontier products at different stages which includes ED : https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...Expectations?p=6759704&viewfull=1#post6759704

 

[Nagual]

How can you possibly even guess as to the nature of the team? Without knowing how the current team is set up, what their skill sets are, workload, or schedule , it's impossible to say if more people would make a difference. Throwing people at a problem doesn't necessarily make the problem go away, it can make it worse. So, no I don't think adding more people will make a difference. I do think that someone or more than one is the cause of certain elements of both game design and communication that don't perhaps fit in as well as it could, could be doing a more efficient job though.

 

[rp198419]

What they really need to do imo is to change the design team, not just add more people.

 

[DoppelGanger]

There have been lot of posts and claims that FD doesn't have 100-ish people team working on ED....
In conclusion I think none of that even means anything about size of the team. We just discuss actual output. And it is quite obvious that most of us would like to have more ED in a year. So that all being said, I think FD really should increase size of team developing ED - because we want more ED updates to be released more frequently. I hope they do. I hope that recent David side note about happening will really leave some impact on how much they can release a year.

I think FD lacks in management. There is no way that 100 people are working on this game and releasing such shoddy updates. I can take two equal guys to the gym, both spending 2 hours a workout, 3 times a day. They will have completely different results even though they have spent the same amount of time there. One guys is passionate, he enjoys what he is doing or even has a really motivating trainer (CT Fletcher anyone?) and another guy slacks off 50% of the time on the phone, talking to girls etc.

The difference is night and day.

I think the lack of quality in development is a UK thing, I have worked in and for several UK companies and they are abyssmal in management or providing quality work compared to Germany or other efficient and hard working people.