Finding a meaning in this game
- Thread starter Axt0n
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Please can you tell me the book's title Cmdr?
Cheers.
Ps - I've been trying to quote Cmdr kilvenny in post 6. This isn't working on mobile :-(
Cheers.
Ps - I've been trying to quote Cmdr kilvenny in post 6. This isn't working on mobile :-(
This pretty much nails it for me too.I can only tell, what I see in my character and in the game:
My CMDR (and all the other CMDRs) are essentially freelancers, not affiliated with any faction, not even with the Pilots Federation. The way you get your first ship is the PFs doing, but this is all. They have no rules, enforce no rules, require no thank you. So as a freelancer and sort of a mercenary I can do what I want. There was a game called 'Freelancer', and it was actually quite good. It is very old, and single user, but I remember it well. This game is similar, but in the old Freelancer game you had sort of a quest, here you have none.
You can opt to become affiliated with a faction, and you can opt not to and remain neutral. It will help a bit to have 'ally' status with a faction in a system you often use, this is only logical. Therefore your only objective is to survive as a freelancer pilot. You need money for this. Not much more, because the engineers and the guardians/Thargoids are entirely optional. This is true for solo play, it is not true for all open play, be it in a PVE group or completely open. There you are forced to grind like crazy or you just cannot compete. But this I already said elsewhere and it does not belong here.
Now to 1) As I see it, Explorers explore for 'scientific' reasons, or just because they are curious, and are drawn by the huge width of the galaxy, which is open to them. They want to see sights, discover unusual things and know how it looks out there. At least this is my motivation - and the motivation of my CMDR. And yes, there are benefits, you can earn a lot of money with it, and - if you like it - it is just fun to play.
2) BGS: Seems not to work well at the moment, and does not interest me. ED is a typical MMO, and therefore cannot have 'heroes', and hero quests. They could do a lot more, but the games structure does not seem to support it. Or they just do not want to do it. So I do not care. I register possible changes and if i do not like them I will move on.
3) Thargoids: Here I do not understand FDev. This is so clumsy. I understand that they want it to be optional, which is actually a good idea. But there are stations attacked, on not one of the super powers cares? Really? And the billions of people living on planets - they do not care or fear too? Hard to believe, yet you see no navies fighting, only we freelancers are 'allowed' to fight them. As an added nonsense you have to grind for weeks on end to buy a ship which even can fight them. This is ludicrous. Yes, in practically all games where you need equipment you have to buy it somehow in the game, this is normal. But taking on the nasty grind, buying a ship and equipping it and then risk it for nearly no reward is a bit much. I understand, that this is for players who asked for harder and cooler enemies. Good for them! They will do the grind just to get the 'privilege' to fight them. But there is a massive rift between the game worlds internal logic and the meta game knowledge. A Game Master should not allow this. In the games logic all super powers should be mightily concerned, they should fight too, and support CMDRs who help. Not let them do the grind for a privilege. And helping in other ways - which I actually thought about - is not possible as long as you are fined for loitering in a burning station, where you risk your ship and your life to save people - and cannot do it because of a ludicrous 200 Cr fine for loitering after being shifted by an explosion. This is just too much, it is just silly. Won't do it. Ever.
4) Bounty hunting and other mercenary work - if you like it, this is fine. It also often does not work well, and nearly dead NPCs returning fully healed in seconds after fleeing are no big incentive to do it. Also immortal pirate lords who resurrect themselves every time after being killed so that you never can hand in the mission are not very inviting play.
Trading seems to work fine, it is a bit static because nothing much changes, but there are much worse games, so why not?
The engineers idea was not a highlight of FDevs ideas, and the connected grind is logically bad. The same thing, including limiting the amount of mods you can do in a time period could have been implemented so much better and more fitting to the ED world and with grind which at least makes sense. When I visited Elvira Martuuk (the only engineer I have at this time) I saw her station sits on a artificial mountain of Soontil Relics - she must have 1000s of tons of the crap...
The Guardians in itself are a nice side story and a part of the world, but the connected grind for the modules is less nice. Rest - see above.
So what I do, is mostly exploring, but also get to know a bit of the world in the local bubble, doing favors for factions and so on. I may even find the motivation and time to look at Shinrarta Dezhra, and the Founders World since I got the permit lately. I know I cannot compete with most of the long time players who had years to complete the engineering/Guardian grind, so I will continue to play solo and I am actually quite happy with this, setting my own objectives.
I've done a bit of exploration, got a lot of first discovereds out there, done a fair few first scans in the bubble too, just to have my name on it. But other than that - there is little to no point in "discovering" new things, as even if you do, you cannot interact with any of it, other than shooting it. There is 1 (ONE) other alien race out there, and they are hostile. The guardians are extinct from what we can tell.
So in a nutshell, there are two spacefaring civilisations out there, and they are at war, because a galaxy with 400 billion star systems isn't big enough for 2 races.
BGS: couldn't really care about that.
Bounty Hunting: Fun for a while, when you hit deadly, you are halfway done with the grind. Slog it out and kill more so you will never have to BH ever again.
There is little point in piracy, as the C&P system won't let you become a murder hobo. And smuggled goods pay peanuts anyway.
Good point and one I meant to make in my earlier reply. It is utterly inconceivable that there are no other forms of intelligent, possibly space faring life forms elsewhere in the galaxy and while too late now as the game canon is well established, the introduction of other alien races should be on the agenda for future ED versions. Not necessarily hostile, but present as you fly around or into different areas.
Sorry to nit pick here - but it is very logical, that there are only two races besides us humans and both are very old, one of them extinct. Why?
If you look at Earths history, and start counting from the moment where earth may have looked like earth (blue planet, clouds, looked like an ELW) up to today you have a huge time span, where live developed on earth. In this Wikipedia page one can see it, and I am sure there are even better pages.
The time of humans is around 250.000 to 300.000 years, if you count the Neanderthals. The time where Earth may have looked like an ELW from space, and had the beginnings of life mostly in the ocean, and a few plants on dry land is around 2 billion years! So - the relation between Earth's entire 'earth like' history and the human period is around 1 : 8000!
Since all ELWs out there started at different times and are at different points of development, the probability to find sentient life like us humans is around 1/8000. But that includes the Stone Age, and so on. The technology period starts around 1800 - and in the game we have 3300, so around 1500 years of technology and say 500 to 1000 years of space travel. This means that the probability to meet another race in space is very low.
So - if we could land on ELWs we probably most of the time would find only a few primitive animals and plants, or plants only, because the animal life still is in the ocean.
I have read this argument years before (cannot find it at the moment), and it is logically sound: There cannot be many space faring and technologically advanced races at the same time in the Galaxy, except when one of these races has an unusual long time span in their history - the Thargoids fit well, and the extinct Guardians fit too.
There is no reason to think that it would be different on Ammonia worlds, so the argument holds for Ammonia worlds too.
That does not mean, that ED could not introduce other races, since it is only a game. But I do understand that the developers opted not to do it.
For me the meaning of this game, as any computer game, is to have fun.
As long as i have fun, i play. If it's not fun any more, i move on. I don't get paid for playing, it's a game and not a job.
Anybody playing a game which he doesn't enjoy has to evaluate his choices, improve or move on. It's one of the few things that are really as simple as that.
As long as i have fun, i play. If it's not fun any more, i move on. I don't get paid for playing, it's a game and not a job.
Anybody playing a game which he doesn't enjoy has to evaluate his choices, improve or move on. It's one of the few things that are really as simple as that.
This is an excellent story, but I'd like to point out, as I did in my post above, that aside from your initial experiences (the "getting to know the game" phase) the rest of your gameplay has been motivated by out-of-game reasons, not in-game ones. All the BGS work, all the mapping projects....those are for the benefit of out-of-game groups of people and/or third party tools. To put it plainly: the game looks and plays exactly the same whether or not your BGS faction is the most powerful in the Bubble or the least. It looks and plays exactly the same whether or not you've mapped 100 mining hotspots or just one.
It is very good that some people find pleasure in doing all of this. But the fact remains that forcing players to "make up their own adventure" is not necessarily a good thing. As I said, in 1984 the technology simply wasn't there to offer anything more. Today, a game should allow you to "make up your own adventure", sure, but by shaping the virtual environment in permanent or semi-permanent ways, by introducing lasting consequences to your actions, by forcing you to make choices and justifying where you put your allegiance. Elite does none of this. Elite is a game where you can be both Federal Admiral and Imperial King, a game where no matter how powerful your PMF, you still have to ask permission to land into your home station, a game where joining a powerplay faction gives no tangible advantage (nor intangible, say a special paintjob) aside from rather flimsy perks reached only at the last Rank, a game where the discovery of an ELW has no consequence whatsoever aside from another line in some Excel spreadsheet, a game where your trading activity can at best have the effect of depleting the stock of a commodity, without having any wide impact on a dynamic economy. And the list could go on and on.
It is a collection of closed boxes/gameplay loops, packaged with beautiful graphics and a convincing flight mechanics. But these boxes are hardly connected, and nothing you do in one of them has any effect on the others, and indeed hardly much of an effect in general, with the exception of numbers growing on-screen (credits) or (meaningless) ranks being achieved.
You demonstrate that even with these limits, it is possible to have fun for months or years with it. But it requires a particular disposition, and numerous out-of-game tools. And the time you spent with it is more due to the person you are than it is due to the quality of what the game has to offer.
Deleted member 38366
D
Yep, you're correct.
The most common descriptions for this condition are
Otherwise, it's extremely difficult to find long-term motivation with the very limited set of "Minigames" that ELITE offers.
The Game itself so far has made little to no attempts to provide intrinsic Gameplay for long-term Player cohesion.
In the distant past, the Ship/Fleet progression was a long-term intrinsic game goal for most Players, but the income curves have reduced this progression into a fast-path (remaining exception would be Engineering them).
FDev over the years has received an insane amount of good suggestions to connect the dots/Gameplay islands and provide Sandboxed intrinsic and long-term Gameplay Options.
Unfortunately, there's little we Players could do about that, those things are not in our hands.
I take it something like that was never a Design Goal, we're playing something that's more of a modernized 1984 remake of the original ELITE.
In a sense, we as Players are mostly Spectators instead of Actors when it comes to the Galaxy. With all Pros and Cons that come along with that.
The most common descriptions for this condition are
- lack of Depth
- "a mile wide but only an inch deep"
- lack of a Sandbox
Otherwise, it's extremely difficult to find long-term motivation with the very limited set of "Minigames" that ELITE offers.
The Game itself so far has made little to no attempts to provide intrinsic Gameplay for long-term Player cohesion.
In the distant past, the Ship/Fleet progression was a long-term intrinsic game goal for most Players, but the income curves have reduced this progression into a fast-path (remaining exception would be Engineering them).
FDev over the years has received an insane amount of good suggestions to connect the dots/Gameplay islands and provide Sandboxed intrinsic and long-term Gameplay Options.
Unfortunately, there's little we Players could do about that, those things are not in our hands.
I take it something like that was never a Design Goal, we're playing something that's more of a modernized 1984 remake of the original ELITE.
In a sense, we as Players are mostly Spectators instead of Actors when it comes to the Galaxy. With all Pros and Cons that come along with that.
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The thing is, some people will tell you: "ah but that's part of Braben's vision. You're supposed to be a meaningless individual not the Hero of the Galaxy. Go play some other game if you want to be Luke Skywalker".
But that utterly misses the point. You can still be a relatively meaningless individual, while your actions could have an effect on your local environment, without ever becoming the King of the Bubble. But not even those local consequences are present. As you say "minigame" is a good description. Let's play the mining minigame, let's play the bounty hunter minigame...
I don't even comment on Frontier's reception of player feedback, because I'd rather not list all the many, many extremely detailed suggestions for improvement they received over the years, none of which were ever implemented.
In my eyes they are present. And it's not only that i return to a station and they welcome me as ally, but your actions actually affect the system and even systems around you.
Actually i dare to even say that for the sake of the game the effects are stronger than reasonably could be expected. I mean, even now a single pilot can make the difference between a faction being just one of many or being the most important one in the system. I wouldn't be aware of any real life equivalent, where a single combat pilot or a single truck driver made all the difference for a nation or their equivalent to progress from obscurity to be a dominating power.
The fact that this is possible, has been done and still is being done in ED shows shows that your actions have impact, above and beyond any realism. It's perfectly fine for this game, i have no complains about it. I just want to point out that your actions matter. I personally of course play like a merc-for-hire and accept missions from several factions. Thus i counteract my own contributions (except to my bank account), eliminating or at least marginalizing my visible impact to the systems i work in. So yes, if you also play anything like that, you're unlikely to ever find that you changed anything. But that's then how chose to play.
Yes, it might have an impact on the development of the minor faction. But so what? We're talking of text on screen changing into other text on screen, and some ships that were orange on the radar now are green. The world you interact with and your own gameplay do not change at all, no matter how much BGS work you put in.
Then what changes would you want? Which would not break the game?
It's easy to just say "this is not good enough" and "no". FD must know that well enough, they are from GB after all. The harder part is to say what you want. And while i see what you are hinting at, i couldn't spontaneously come up with something in that direction which wouldn't be gamebreaking in the long run.
So, which changes would you expect, which alter your gameplay but don't negatively affect the game?
The issue is more with the framing of the BGS. The BGS really should be renamed "trade control" or something like that so that we don't get the ridiculous scenario of near constant wars in established civilised systems between factions aligned to the same superpower while systems important enough to have a permit lock are allowed to be taken by a different power. That last one makes as much sense as China invading New York and America only sending the national guard and then leaving it. But changing to more literal trade wars would fit with the tone of the setting and avoid the ridiculousness that the BGS representing system ownership imposes on the Galaxy.
I have always loved how Elite has makes you realise that you are not the chosen one. You are not on some unique mission to rescue a prince/ss, nor defeat some dark lord, there is no sacred/special voyage that can only you can complete. Just the opposite. You are merely some pea rattling around in the tin-can of your own choice, set in a sea of other such cans.
Indeed, the game rams down your throat your utter insignificance. Excepting becoming friendly with factions (whether you agree with them or not), and maybe helping out on a CG now and again, as an individual it is clear that you as meaningful as a mote of dust in the dark unforgiving infinity of space. All things pass, as will you, and all will be long forgotten. In which case you are at liberty to do whatever damn thing you fancy, in whatever manner you enjoy.
For me the 'end-game' (certainly of acquisition) came when I got my second Python, and mothballed my Anaconda (I don't enjoy flying it). Since then I'm been fluffing around in an Alliance Chieftain, simply because it's a hoot to fly - oddly feeling a bit like a sumo-sized DbS.
Indeed, the game rams down your throat your utter insignificance. Excepting becoming friendly with factions (whether you agree with them or not), and maybe helping out on a CG now and again, as an individual it is clear that you as meaningful as a mote of dust in the dark unforgiving infinity of space. All things pass, as will you, and all will be long forgotten. In which case you are at liberty to do whatever damn thing you fancy, in whatever manner you enjoy.
For me the 'end-game' (certainly of acquisition) came when I got my second Python, and mothballed my Anaconda (I don't enjoy flying it). Since then I'm been fluffing around in an Alliance Chieftain, simply because it's a hoot to fly - oddly feeling a bit like a sumo-sized DbS.
Random things off the top of my head:
1) controlling a system should mean having the power to build new starports, under the constraint of having enough funds, of attracting enough population to run them, and to be able to defend them.
2) being in your home system should give you free docking privileges, discounts on modules and ships.
3) there should be "high-value" systems, coveted by many factions. Perhaps because of mining opportunities, or because they have a tourist attraction that brings in revenue. The control of such a system would bring in more income than a low-value one.
4) there should be a macro-level of maintenance, planning trade routes between the systems you control in order to export/import the necessary goods. The NPC cargo ships should then be visible in-game, in need of escort/protection in some cases.
I'm not saying that designing a videogame is easy. It's hard. But a Big Time software house like Frontier should be able to do "hard", and then some.
Roleplay it.
If you get killed, take the freewinder
Fly without rebuy.
Defend n00bs from other n00bs
Learn FAoff PvP with mouse
You make your own meaning. Pick a faction or allegiance to support, and the game transforms. Find like-minded people to pursue your faction goals. But watch out, you may never play anything else...
Uhm, that's like saying: I wrote an awesome book. But I won't sell you the story, only the blank pages, and you have to write your own story.
I see you analogy and yes, there is that theory too, that the odds of two space faring civilizations being of same age are very slim to none. This doesn't stop FDev to add a 4th or 5th civilisation somewhere to the game? We are not talking Raxxla here. But in general. 400 billion star systems, there's gotta be something or someone else out there that isn't hell bound on flipping the station status switches from OK to Burning every Thursday.
Even if that civilisation might not be able to do LY worth of jumps, still, what stops us from helping them?
The Prime directive?
We have a few billion people in space, and all adhere to that code? Hell let's break it and watch others advance! What are they going to do? Fine me with 200Cr?
Deleted member 38366
D
Not a book, rather a Playground. What you do with that is up to you.
The "Story"... well, there is one, supposedly even several storylines. But so far, those were more or less background noise with Thargoids being a limited exception.
Most stories run untold, for individuals or Groups. There's plenty of such publications though, sometimes in the Forum, a few in Discords, alot on INARA or EDSM Logs.
But those are the personal/group Stories that represent the "life in the Galaxy".
In the past, GALnet Player submissions were a thing but it was way too limited in function to really work well; only a miniscule of submitted News ever appeared somewhere, i.e. at a local Station news board.