Few questions before release

[Theev]

Hi guys!


I'm very hyped for this game because I love space sims, but also I'm also bit concerned. I was reading forums/watched few videos but I still dont know few things. I will be comparing this to X3 because I played it a lot. So here we go:


1) I know there will be around 15 (up to 30 later) ships at release. Are civilian/npc ships any different? Or whole galaxy is flying with 15-30 ships? How much npc ships you encounter? In X3 sectors looked pretty much "alive", how it looks in ED?


2) In X3 there were many stations/shipyards/factories etc. If I understand correctly, in ED we only have one station with few grahpic variations? So trading = flying+docking between same space stations?


3) People say a lot about exploring. But is it really fun? Or it looks like we have 400 bilions of stars, but its only 400 bilion of spheres with different texture + few planets orbiting + sometimes same looking stations + sometimes asteroids. I know the real space is even more boring so it's kind of accurate but do you find it fun to explore? I fear that after flying around for few days I will be bored because what's the point to fly to other part of galaxy if only thing I can find is sphere with different name?


4) Can we have more than 1 ship?

Any replies will be most welcome And I really hope you will convince me to buy ED

 

[Tiamat]

1. Everybody is using the same ships for the moment but this will change over time. Some really cool capital ships have been seen in the news letters for example. How alive the place looks depends on where you are really. I am in a real backwater but I see plenty of NPCs but I rarely see another player. If you go to the "core worlds" from the early betas or known places like Sol or the founder's world you will see people.

2. I think there are 6 or so different station types and roughly the same number of outpost types. Have a look at the list here (page 78 onwards):
http://www.scribd.com/doc/236560722/Elite-Dangerous-pilots-guide-manual-tutorial

3. It depends on what you want from the game really. If you want the pure unknown then yes it can be a lot of fun but it can be dangerous. I have seen posts where people have exited a jump between 2 stars and been cooked for example. There are nasty asteroid fields that can be found that will prevent you jumping out and you have to crawl. Sightseeing can be amazing at times.

4. Yes you can but at the moment you have to base them fairly close together as you can't have them delivered to you yet so you have to be in the same station to switch.

 

[Alymon]

I've only played X3 a little bit, so it's hard to compare... but my experience so far is that X3 is more complicated and a bigger hurdle to learn. I frequently encounter NPC ships in E, but usually it's 1-2 as I'm docking at a station. It's alive, but I don't feel like it is bustling with activity. At conflict zones, you'll see fleets of ships and it has more of an alive feel.

Fun is subjective. I am having a blast playing E. However, for me, a lot of it is remembering my time in Frontier: Elite 2 and recognizing points of interests from before. There's a bit of a waiting game at times when traveling and it can be repetitive, but I think the same could be said of many open world space games.

One of the biggest draws for me is that E is set in the real universe (as far as the solar systems go). I like that I can see Earth. I like that when I jump to a system, it is a "real" system. Even if the stations are all fictional, having a real universe that has recognizable names is a big draw for me.

 

[darkcyd]

Hi guys!


I'm very hyped for this game because I love space sims, but also I'm also bit concerned. I was reading forums/watched few videos but I still dont know few things. I will be comparing this to X3 because I played it a lot. So here we go:


1) I know there will be around 15 (up to 30 later) ships at release. Are civilian/npc ships any different? Or whole galaxy is flying with 15-30 ships? How much npc ships you encounter? In X3 sectors looked pretty much "alive", how it looks in ED?


2) In X3 there were many stations/shipyards/factories etc. If I understand correctly, in ED we only have one station with few grahpic variations? So trading = flying+docking between same space stations?


3) People say a lot about exploring. But is it really fun? Or it looks like we have 400 bilions of stars, but its only 400 bilion of spheres with different texture + few planets orbiting + sometimes same looking stations + sometimes asteroids. I know the real space is even more boring so it's kind of accurate but do you find it fun to explore? I fear that after flying around for few days I will be bored because what's the point to fly to other part of galaxy if only thing I can find is sphere with different name?


4) Can we have more than 1 ship?

Any replies will be most welcome And I really hope you will convince me to buy ED

1) Unsure what you mean, civilian/npc. There is no marked civilian. All the original 15 ships will be flying and thats all you will see. You encounter ALOT of NPC's since the game is primarily single player. ED looks very nice graphically.

2) Stations are stations....there are 4 different major variants with couple subvariants....meaning 4 major shapes with some small texture mapping/dress changes to spice them up. Then there are outposts which are much smaller but all look about the same.

3) No there is alot of space to explore. No, I don't find exploring fun. I don't consider the current gameplay fun but that could change upon release or patches if they ever decide to actually have some grouping.

4) As many ships as you can afford

 

[n13L5]

1) I think you'll be missing a few things from X - no cap ships you can park your other ships on. No player HQ, No player factories, no fleets you can command through a fast, effective interface, no wingmen,


2) ED has like 3 or 4 station designs and each of those come with a few color variations, but thats about all you'll see for now. Space is not handled like in X. Its both better and worse... Its better because its much more realistic. Its worse, because any real movement happens exclusively in "super cruise". You can't interact with anything, just move from here to there in a system. Whenever you drop out of super cruise, a small, temporary instance will be created, spawning a bunch of NPCs depending on presets for that location, and the game sets those NPCs to whatever relationship to you gets read from your character profile. Once you (and potentially any other players that were in that instance with you) hit super cruise, the instance ceases to exist. So basically, the game has one plane of movement, and any place you exit, you're in a wow style dungeon instance.

When I started to fly around ED, I went from "how the hell does this work?" to "omg this is awesome" to "ouch, this is getting tedious fast" within 2 days, due to the fact, that space flight insists you pay attention the ENTIRE time. No auto pilot and no real 'going straight for a long while' either, except when some station is an ungodly 30,000 LS from the sun..


3) Not that much fun right now, but only because game mechanics are very thin. A good foundation for future possibilities of better game play certainly is there. The star systems may be procedurally generated, but intelligently so. And adhering to current human knowledge of what types of star systems there should likely be.

Space itself is ED's great advantage. Its very bare bones right now, cause they're not funded like Star Citizen. But there's potential.

I would compare X to ED like this:
- X has a very poor foundation in regards to space, with those little EVE-like villages called star systems, but its filled to the brim with cool stuff and features and ships and things to do and really awesome whimsical races. (IDK about rebirth, didn't get that)

- ED has a really great foundation of space, but the price for it was instancing everything, and it simply lacks 90% of the stuff you can do in X.

Trading is the most worked out of the game mechanics, Mining and Exploration are rudimentary at best. Mining also includes a "catch the ore" mini-game which is the epidemy of game developer's incessant war on "sandwich fights", where you could set your character to do something or other and go to the kitchen to get / make a sandwich. Game developers somehow didn't understand that this is not universally a bad thing, but only sometimes. Braben apparently drank a lot of that anti-sandwich Koolaid and made every single part of the game require your full attention (which doesn't actually make it more interesting or fun in too many cases). In the case of mining, this results in such slow progress, even if you have become really good at catching the ore with your ship - manually, the only time mining can compete with other professions like trading is when you're still in your side winder, i.e. the first few days.

And there's Multiplayer - co-operative and pvp. Something that never was part of X, but will certainly appeal to those who like it. I'm not into PVP, but playing co-op with a friend is certainly a great option I wish X had offered. The multiplayer communication system isn't quite done yet either though. I'm pretty sure that's their next priority.

I can't complain at all about someone who is very ambitious for the level of funding they have. I respect shooting for the stars *literally*, defying budget constraints, figuring they'll get there somehow. That's more risk taking than Egosoft was willing to do, and so ED wins some, and loses some, and the final word isn't going to be said on this for a while.



4) You will be able to own as many ships as you want, but every ship you're not flying yourself will simply be rotting in storage.



As for convincing you to buy ED - lets just say that having bought the game already, I'd like them to sell many boxes, so they'll have funding to flesh out this game and bring it up to its potential.

I think I'll play it for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then take a break and wait till they get around to adding a lot more of the promised features...



I do worry a little bit about the overly harsh reactions from MMO players... like with SWtoR, which was brimming with features and story and things way above and beyond the going MMO standard (like companions, fully voiced and well written quests that told a cohesive story, different for every class) But all people could apparently think of doing was to speed through the levels and then complain about the endgame and especially some errors / bugs in the PVP endgame and then dumping the game for the next release of whatever. I thought the only regrettable omission was better space flight in that game and it recovered since anyway. I still like to play that one.

 

[darkcyd]

A good review....this game is bristling with potential but don't expect alot of fun for a while.

 

[Theev]

Thank you very much for your replies (especially n13L5). Now I think I know everything And I guess I will try and buy it. Even if I will eventually get bored, I hope that future changes will make me return. Thx again!