Game Bashing On Steam

[Dragsham]

Been playing since the first days, and I loved this game. Spent gobs on a HOTAS.. and more on a VR headset, and more on prescription lenses for the headset.. just because of this game. Thousands of hours played.

And yet, since the release of O... I've been playing less and less. Its not a single big reason, it's kind of an accumulation of small ones ..No VR support.. There are better/other FPS games out there. Performance issues. I don't want a carrier or a shiny new space suit.. The lack of FDevs apparent Give-a-F### .. The thought of being forced to buy the upgrade eventually.. FC congestion so bad in some systems you can't seem to find the stations.. The list goes on. I haven't played seriously in 6 months ? It just seems too much effort to drag out the gear and set it up.

Odyssey is.. well, it sucks for me. Nothing there I wanted. So, if I did review it, it would be a solid thumbs down. Bugs, performance issues.. all damaging the original game. Do I want to spend my $50 on what appears to me as a downgrade or features I don't care about ? No. I do not. I'd ask for a refund if I had bought it.

But I waited it out since the release of Odyssey.. I really had hope they'd do something to repair the game and their image over the past 7 or 8 months. And then I heard about dropping consoles ( not the I play on a console ). I don't see how cutting out a big chunk of players ( IE: $$$ ) is going to actually HELP. Maintaining one code base is developer speak for "we don't know what we're doing" or "we're spread to thin without enough resources to make it all work". Finally it all made sense. "O" is just a cash grab before the ship goes under, with a second string crew at the helm, experienced officers having taken their leave at previous ports.. All I seem to see is DOOM..

Parties over, CMDRs. It just seems like it's all going downhill. I'd rather remember the good times.

Bottom Hat : If I had the will to log in, cash all my stuff out, and give it away, you could "haz it" .

I get what you mean. The investment the grind the same old ...
And yeah your right it's not been handled well and the contents misguided, not very elitesque.
But that's how it is. We have to assume new content will fill the void. Link the what is now 2 games together.
PP bgs pvp smuggling piracy new ships grappling hook (slipped that one in there) all need sorting.
Personally I think its so monumental the stuff needed to get it done, time money etc. If ever?
I bought oddity because and it still is, gorgeous in vr. I still love it Just for that reason. And the community I am part of ingame.
Balls in fdevs court

 

[MDHansen]

1. Don't read stuff on Steam discussions or review pages, it's usually trash anyway
2. Block anyone you have no interest in talking to, be talked to by, or at any given time see what they write moan about (my forumlist counts over 30 people now, and increasing weekly)
3. Be happy we live in (part of the) world where different opinions are encouraged

 

[Bottom Hat]

1. Don't read stuff on Steam discussions or review pages, it's usually trash anyway
2. Block anyone you have no interest in talking to, be talked to by, or at any given time see what they write moan about (my forumlist counts over 30 people now, and increasing weekly)
3. Be happy we live in (part of the) world where different opinions are encouraged

I don't like your opinion - shush please old chap!


(Hoping I'm not on the block list!?)

 

[Erei]

1. Don't read stuff on Steam discussions or review pages, it's usually trash anyway
2. Block anyone you have no interest in talking to, be talked to by, or at any given time see what they write moan about (my forumlist counts over 30 people now, and increasing weekly)
3. Be happy we live in (part of the) world where different opinions are encouraged

Be happy different opinions are encouraged, but don't read them and block the people who express them.

I'm sure this is healthy logic encouraging the exchange of ideas !

 

[Leadfoot]

I don't like your opinion - shush please old chap!

Old chap! Get off my lawn, youngin'.

 

[Leadfoot]

Can I complain about having to read tripe?

You can, but you have to remember that it's TJ's fault you have to read it.

 

[gorankar]

At least Steam reviews are from people that actually purchased the game, unlike metacritic. You have to own a copy to leave a review on steam. EDO earned it's bad reviews from people that actually have the game.

It's not as bad as it was. If it launched in the state it is right now, it might not have received as many bad reviews. I really just wish EDO had something in it that interests me. Pretty much a total loss no matter how much they fix up the performance. The spaceship game is still strong though. So I'm still there.

 

[Cmdr Eratosthenes]

Two things I guess:-

1) Steam = basically the peanut gallery. Go look at any forum for any game on there
2) The opinions being the same as bottoms thing

 

[Rat Catcher]

Had I played the game on steam, I would have left a negative review of the expansion on launch, detailing the reasons why. (read some of them, they are really quite 'interesting')
But, I would have revised the review a couple of months ago to include the improvements that have been made since launch day.

According to the AMD software counter, I've played a bit of EDO (I no longer launch Horizons on my desktop PC, only on my laptop when moving my FC long distances) since December...

So, for me, on good hardware, it is quite playable. Others, I am aware, may not be quite so fortunate.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Part of me thinks ED is great. EDO made me pick it up again, despite the performance flaws and bizarre design decisions. But the deeply cynical monetization, wannabe-EA communication and lack of community engagement, make me strongly dislike FD as a company.

It's gotten to the point where I actively dislike the idea of giving them money, whereas for many of us it was the opposite initially. Pretty wild how they managed to completely leak away all the goodwill and support of so many people.

Just look at the New Communication Era starring Honest Arf. It was basically little more than a few posts about how performance would improve any patch now, followed by a promise of better communication, followed by silence. Then they end console development, have no plan for account transfers, stay silent again with some vague "no more transfers of any kind for now". Meanwhile the rest is stuck with a months-old post with seemingly procgen'd corp-speak about clarifying the answers to core questions to streamline the information pipelines or whatever inane babbling it was.

FD consistently fails to treat its customers as human beings. You know, give normal answers to normal questions the way normal people do. I don't like it when EA does it, don't like it when FD does it either.

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

At least Steam reviews are from people that actually purchased the game, unlike metacritic. You have to own a copy to leave a review on steam. EDO earned it's bad reviews from people that actually have the game.

It amazes me that people fail to understand this, they simply cannot and will not accept the reality of Odyssey being a really bad expansion and want to wish it all away. This will be a stone around Frontiers neck for years really only getting resolved by ditching the player base or releasing high quality products recognised by a large number of people.

Every game has its issues, not every game has fundamental flaws. Elite Dangerous started well, grew and then... I don't know, had its funding & investment pulled maybe, or was wasted, or went into developing something else

I hope Frontier can get things back on track.

 

[VR Dextrovix]

FD consistently fails to treat its customers as human beings. You know, give normal answers to normal questions the way normal people do. I don't like it when EA does it, don't like it when FD does it either.

I agree with Ian Skippy's entire post, but this part is exactly how I feel about FD circa 2017 for me. It's been a slow erosion since then of my trust in them, along with their long periods of silences and carefully word ambiguous statements when they are made.

I want FD to tell me they've dropped any further development of VR, because they've almost but not quite said so. That's my beef with them, and I hate them for their weasel words and ambiguity. I resent what they did in Odyssey which was supposed to be "rebuilding the game from the ground up" and made it a performance hog, and ruined the VR experience which I have played ED exclusively in. A 2D rendered screen with a grey background is an insult to my eyes when the Odyssey content is presented!

Maybe as a long-standing player I've been spoilt with the earlier days where there was a lot more engagement with FD and it felt mutual. I guess FD are moving on with dinosaurs or racing games or whatever, and that's why there's less resources or care for the ED community. But it still stinks, and the only way I can show my displeasure at this is to no longer fill their coffers with ED trinkets that I used to, nor get involved in any community activities (not that anything FD has organised for five years is really worth it).

There's no point rewarding what I see is a betrayal of what ED was, compared to what the latest Oddity has made it, and it's FD's fault entirely for their poor efforts and communication.

 

[xzanfr]

I agree with Ian Skippy's entire post, but this part is exactly how I feel about FD circa 2017 for me. It's been a slow erosion since then of my trust in them, along with their long periods of silences and carefully word ambiguous statements when they are made.

Maybe as a long-standing player I've been spoilt with the earlier days where there was a long more engagement with FD and it felt mutual. I guess FD are moving on with dinosaurs or racing games or whatever, and that's why there's less resources or care for the ED community. But it still stinks, and the only way I can show my displeasure at this is to no longer fill their coffers with ED trinkets that I used to.

There's no point rewarding what I see is a betrayal of what ED was, compared to what the latest Oddity has become!

For me FD lost trust when we had to fight for the founders decal - it's a tiny and inconsequential thing but set a precedence for FD to say and imply something then go back on it.
I'm still here though, enjoying the game; You don't need to trust a company or believe a word they say to enjoy their product, just treat all communications with a pinch of salt.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It amazes me that people fail to understand this, they simply cannot and will not accept the reality of Odyssey being a really bad expansion and want to wish it all away. This will be a stone around Frontiers neck for years really only getting resolved by ditching the player base or releasing high quality products recognised by a large number of people.

Every game has its issues, not every game has fundamental flaws. Elite Dangerous started well, grew and then... I don't know, had its funding & investment pulled maybe, or was wasted, or went into developing something else

I hope Frontier can get things back on track.

It is also worth remembering just how bad a lot of Elite Dangerous / Horizons was at release
- the original Engineers implementation was a nightmare which caused Odyssey-level ragequits in some communities
- Multicrew was a complete disaster on release
- instancing in general was horrendous (yes, compared with now) until at least 2.2
- Wings was an expansion rather than a baseline feature; Squadrons - support for the idea that people might want to play the game together with more than three friends - didn't arrive until years later
- Powerplay was a complete design disaster, CQC was likewise released missing numerous crucial features for that sort of side-game.
- "Offlinegate" led to them having to issue a bunch of refunds and apologies before they'd even released the game
- there were regular runs of the story just ... going missing for a bit. Lots of promised events, similarly, were announced to great fanfare and then quietly never happened.
- the first accusations that they'd "lost their way" I think were in the DDF itself. Or maybe the Kickstarter comments.

Sure, back in early 2021 when we were looking at the Odyssey delays, Horizons was still flawed and buggy but basically worked ... but it took them years to get it there. The initial release of Horizons on Steam ended up in the same sort of "Mixed" position that recent Odyssey reviews are and took years to improve.

Looking back at it, Frontier have never been particularly good at developing Elite Dangerous - they've just been considerably better at it than everyone else out there. This is what it is - fundamentally flawed, buggy, poorly balanced, missing obvious features - and yet still compelling enough at the "giant world to play in" that I've spent ... hmm, that can't be right, never mind ... playing it over the last eight years.

Will in five years time we be looking happily at Odyssey Update 64, ready to be disappointed by the poorly-performing badly-designed release of the Elite: Nexterer DLC? Will those of us who've been around this cycle a few times be advising people again not to pre-order, while those who've joined more recently will be saying "yeah, but that was a while ago, they've improved since"? Will optimists be saying "this is going to completely change the game!" while realists will be saying "it'll be more Elite Dangerous, but with surfboards, it's not going to make you like the game if you didn't already"? Hopefully that's what we have to look forward to - because the alternative is "doom".

 

[Bottom Hat]

caused Odyssey-level ragequits

I am tempted to adopt this phrase into my forum vernacular!

Nonetheless, you wrote some brilliant points there Ian, well structured as always too.

 

[Bottom Hat]

Part of me thinks ED is great. EDO made me pick it up again, despite the performance flaws and bizarre design decisions. But the deeply cynical monetization, wannabe-EA communication and lack of community engagement, make me strongly dislike FD as a company.

It's gotten to the point where I actively dislike the idea of giving them money, whereas for many of us it was the opposite initially. Pretty wild how they managed to completely leak away all the goodwill and support of so many people.

Just look at the New Communication Era starring Honest Arf. It was basically little more than a few posts about how performance would improve any patch now, followed by a promise of better communication, followed by silence. Then they end console development, have no plan for account transfers, stay silent again with some vague "no more transfers of any kind for now". Meanwhile the rest is stuck with a months-old post with seemingly procgen'd corp-speak about clarifying the answers to core questions to streamline the information pipelines or whatever inane babbling it was.

FD consistently fails to treat its customers as human beings. You know, give normal answers to normal questions the way normal people do. I don't like it when EA does it, don't like it when FD does it either.

Well said Ian, summarises how many of my friends feel.

 

[Keloot]

I have over 5000 hrs in the game, I like it.
Would I recommend the game? Absolutely.
Do I get frustrated at times? Sure do!
Will I keep playing? Yep!
Really don't understand all the negative reviews, unless they are among the group of people who insist on instant gratification. Anytime you have upgrades to any kind of program, you are going to have bugs. That's just the nature of the beast. No programming is perfect. Every game is buggy when there is an update, it just seems like the Elite Dangerous community has more than their fair share of people that insist on perfection every time, that is not possible.

There are some tedious and tiring aspects of the game but overall, it's an enjoyable game with many different challenges within the game. It seems that there are some who believe that they should reach the top tier within a very short time. No.
Some, but not all, of the negative reviews seem to come from people who are used to getting their way and when they don't, they resort to belligerent and nasty posting.

Try the game, if you don't like it, get a refund and quit playing.
There are several games that I've played, didn't like, and quit playing. Didn't bash the programmers or the company that owns the games. I simply quit playing.

If you play the game through steam and like the game, go to steam and post your review.

I also noticed that there are quite a few in these forums that like bashing the game, the programmers and Frontier, seems like they spend more time in the forum bashing than they do playing. I'm not talking about the people that post legitimate questions or gripes. We all have some gripes, that's different from bashing.

the mostrly negative views ware made by yamiks becuase he wanted to bash the game because fdev didnt gave him a review copy so he organized his discord and youtube channel to negatively review the game. .. most of the bashing is just that bashing its not even any argument lol

 

[d8veh]

Yes, most of us agree that people have different opinions. All games on Steam have reviews. Some have more good reviews than bad and some are the other way round. I'm no expert, but I reckon that those games that have the highest proportion of bad reviews are bad compared with those that get the highest proportion of good ones.

One other thing. Only go by player reviews, not journalist or professional reviews. Several years ago, they would be more or less in agreement with each other, but now they're more or less diametrically opposite.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Well said Ian, summarises how many of my friends feel.

many?

 

[Stealthie]

Meh.

"Review bombing" is the latest thing that all the cool kids are doing.

Whether it be Steam, Trustpilot, Rotten Tomatos, IMDB, or whatever, a bunch of outraged pleb's get together on Twitter and resolve to vent their anger by clicking on something over and over again because, apparently, that's how you change the world these days.