Good evenin' commanders!!
Excuse the stream of conciousness here but this has been on my mind a lot recently regarding ED. Back in the noughties, I would occasionally go Google Elite 4 in hope that a hint of news would surface about an official Elite sequel, I reckon I would do this about three times a year. Imagine my complete surprise when a KS campaign was announced for it, I was both nervous and excited that we might finally be getting another instalment of the Elite series. My thoughts were of course that the game would be multi-player, but I never really put good though into how this would affect everything else in the game at the time.
Fast forward to now, the game is getting polished for release in just under a month. The net-code is getting much, much better and although there are no grouping mechanics or fleshed out comms in-game, the potential is there for sure.
Yet I can't help thinking that multi-player first, may have opened a huge can of worms.
Take the problem of time compression, it is obvious that this wouldn't work in a multi-player game so the super-cruise system was proposed. The proposition was received well with DDF members as the initial solution was to allow for in-system hyperspace jumps.
We also have the problem of ridiculously slow speeds whilst outside of super-cruise and ridiculously high speeds inside super-cruise. This might become a stranger problem when planetary landings get introduced. It takes forever to get close to them in normal space, so do we hit a planets surface at super-cruise? Seems a wee bit silly. Yet these speed restrictions were introduced because of multi-player.
I was never too bothered about the offline mode being chopped, as I wanted it to be multi-player. It seems that this was Frontiers vision for the game from the start, and they had to chop and change a lot in the game to fit this vision. The game has many strong points: a strong visual aesthetic, great flight model, fun combat, a huge play-area; I'm just not sure that Frontiers multi-player first vision has helped the game in anyway in retrospect. I could be wrong though, it could end up being the greatest aspect of it, I just don't see it yet.
CMDR Smugallo, out! o7.
Excuse the stream of conciousness here but this has been on my mind a lot recently regarding ED. Back in the noughties, I would occasionally go Google Elite 4 in hope that a hint of news would surface about an official Elite sequel, I reckon I would do this about three times a year. Imagine my complete surprise when a KS campaign was announced for it, I was both nervous and excited that we might finally be getting another instalment of the Elite series. My thoughts were of course that the game would be multi-player, but I never really put good though into how this would affect everything else in the game at the time.
Fast forward to now, the game is getting polished for release in just under a month. The net-code is getting much, much better and although there are no grouping mechanics or fleshed out comms in-game, the potential is there for sure.
Yet I can't help thinking that multi-player first, may have opened a huge can of worms.
Take the problem of time compression, it is obvious that this wouldn't work in a multi-player game so the super-cruise system was proposed. The proposition was received well with DDF members as the initial solution was to allow for in-system hyperspace jumps.
We also have the problem of ridiculously slow speeds whilst outside of super-cruise and ridiculously high speeds inside super-cruise. This might become a stranger problem when planetary landings get introduced. It takes forever to get close to them in normal space, so do we hit a planets surface at super-cruise? Seems a wee bit silly. Yet these speed restrictions were introduced because of multi-player.
I was never too bothered about the offline mode being chopped, as I wanted it to be multi-player. It seems that this was Frontiers vision for the game from the start, and they had to chop and change a lot in the game to fit this vision. The game has many strong points: a strong visual aesthetic, great flight model, fun combat, a huge play-area; I'm just not sure that Frontiers multi-player first vision has helped the game in anyway in retrospect. I could be wrong though, it could end up being the greatest aspect of it, I just don't see it yet.
CMDR Smugallo, out! o7.
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