Perhaps I am naive and more ignorant than I think I already am, but I really believe that many issues that players have with Elite could have been circumvented by allowing or requiring Frontier developers to play their games meaningfully, that is, with no developer tool handwavium, for it is precisely the travel time between goals and the choke points between goals that players will remember. (In the throes of combat or discovery, the commanders awareness and consciousness is so occupied that boredom is usually not an immediate issue.)
I understand that Frontier's time and resources are always at a premium, so management may perceive their expensive game designers spending precious work hours playing and testing their designs to be a waste of an always constrained budget. Yes, it's simply cheaper to rely on feedback by players. However, relying on feedback, instead of designers actually playing the game as played by the consumer, may be great financially in the short run, but for the long term longevity of the game I am not so sure. There is always that wise adage to remember. You can hear a description of how an apple tastes, but you really do not know what an apple tastes like until you have actually bitten into one. Players can describe what the frustration with the rng in Elite feels like, but even with all the empathy in the world, unless developers feel the frustration themselves they will not only amend it meaningfully enough for most users, but more importantly, they will not come up with creative and innovative ways to address issues.
Creative inspiration and revolutionary and brilliant game design doesn't happen upon request. It's an organic and seemingly mysterious process based upon, I believe, lengthy experience and prolonged immersion. As a retired classical musician, I think of game design as similar to music composition. My most esteemed composers and those generally agreed by my peers to be the greatest were virtuosos in their own right (the only notable exception being R. Wagner). They were some of the greatest at playing their respective instruments. In other words, they were players first. If playing the piano were a video game, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Bartok would have pawned everyone; Commander Harry Potter would have been insta-popped.
Elite Dangerous is a great game, but it cannot stagnate on its laurels. Patching is treading water. Development must not limit itself to the known and safe.
Go Beyond
Fly Dangerous
o7
I understand that Frontier's time and resources are always at a premium, so management may perceive their expensive game designers spending precious work hours playing and testing their designs to be a waste of an always constrained budget. Yes, it's simply cheaper to rely on feedback by players. However, relying on feedback, instead of designers actually playing the game as played by the consumer, may be great financially in the short run, but for the long term longevity of the game I am not so sure. There is always that wise adage to remember. You can hear a description of how an apple tastes, but you really do not know what an apple tastes like until you have actually bitten into one. Players can describe what the frustration with the rng in Elite feels like, but even with all the empathy in the world, unless developers feel the frustration themselves they will not only amend it meaningfully enough for most users, but more importantly, they will not come up with creative and innovative ways to address issues.
Creative inspiration and revolutionary and brilliant game design doesn't happen upon request. It's an organic and seemingly mysterious process based upon, I believe, lengthy experience and prolonged immersion. As a retired classical musician, I think of game design as similar to music composition. My most esteemed composers and those generally agreed by my peers to be the greatest were virtuosos in their own right (the only notable exception being R. Wagner). They were some of the greatest at playing their respective instruments. In other words, they were players first. If playing the piano were a video game, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Bartok would have pawned everyone; Commander Harry Potter would have been insta-popped.
Elite Dangerous is a great game, but it cannot stagnate on its laurels. Patching is treading water. Development must not limit itself to the known and safe.
Go Beyond
Fly Dangerous
o7
