I backed SC with a single (lowe-end) ship. About the cost of a good AAA game. The difference is that SC is guaranteed to give us Squadron 42, the single-player story driven game (ala Wing Comander 2015/2016). So even if the PU fails miserably, S42 is likely to be worth the entry price given the "chariman's" previous games. If the PU is good then the game will explode like EVE in its hayday. If not then the tsunami will consume it but we'll still have S42 in our hands.
How many of you don't play anymore?
- Thread starter Snowdog
- Start date
I backed SC with a single (lowe-end) ship. About the cost of a good AAA game. The difference is that SC is guaranteed to give us Squadron 42, the single-player story driven game (ala Wing Comander 2015/2016). So even if the PU fails miserably, S42 is likely to be worth the entry price given the "chariman's" previous games. If the PU is good then the game will explode like EVE in its hayday. If not then the tsunami will consume it but we'll still have S42 in our hands.
Tox Laximus
Banned
Everyone seems to be on a quest for 'meaningful content'. No-one ever seems to clarify what 'meaningful' is. If people are looking for meaning, I'd suggest religion might provide better options.
Campaign type missions is what I would like, lots of missions to achieve a goal with a prize of money or ships and/or ship hardware.
Not necessarily 'specific details', but a general roadmap of the order things are probably going looked at, and what things are still being considered after all discussions in the DDAs, would go a long way. I love the game, and I don't expect it to reach its full potential for a good couple of years yet, but just knowing things like crews, passenger shipping, AI wingmen, expanded mining, expanded exploration, transponders, ironman mode, escape pods and complex mission chains are still in the mix would help.
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I suspect the fact of the matter is FDev don't know about the concrete implementation of these themselves, as it will depend on how sales go this year, and what direction the console release pushes things in.
Cradle2Grave
Banned
While we're at it - the screens that come in a starport - ya know the menu/commodities, etc. When the different screens come up or change they take like a second to do so and they flicker. I know this is for affect but by god I hate that flickering.
There. I feel better now.
There. I feel better now.
Everyone seems to be on a quest for 'meaningful content'. No-one ever seems to clarify what 'meaningful' is. If people are looking for meaning, I'd suggest religion might provide better options.
I think meaningful content means additional depth and fleshing out of what is a nice start. So improved missions with multiple paths. More things to find for explorers. Additional weapon types. More types of rewards than just money for completing objectives. I really like the game but it does need a bit more 'stuff' to put the icing on the cake.
Nobody has ever asked for specifics. Know what a roadmap is?
On topic, I haven't played for 2 months, logged in for 30 mins after 1.1 and found that my choices hadn't changed at all.
Will log in and check out 1.2 but just don't have the motivation to play this for more than 30 minutes at a time.
Went on a discovery trip after launch, after a few days I realised there wasn't actually anything to discover. And it was boring me to death.
Tried missions, bounty hunting and trading. Then I asked myself, is this it? So I came on the forums and a lot of people were asking the same question.
I look at the launcher icon on my desktop and ask myself if I want to camp a RES or Nav point, or do the same repetitive meaningless missions....and the answer is no.
Frontier know exactly how many people are still logging on, they'll never share that data. Participants in the Community goals numbering barely in the hundreds should be some sort of indication.
But I'll keep checking each update to see if they've added any content/depth/sand.
Everyone seems to be on a quest for 'meaningful content'. No-one ever seems to clarify what 'meaningful' is. If people are looking for meaning, I'd suggest religion might provide better options.
Something to do that took more than a bathroom break to think up. Trading is silly how its set up, smuggling a joke, mining a pathetic joke, bounty hunting a repawning DM, and the USS system scream "placeholder". Influence doesn't matter, rank doesn't matter. I'd be happy with just more interesting and difficult missions. Missions that are more than ONE jump every time. Missions that require bigger ships (rare cargo missions and assassination missions the only ones currently). Missions that are not "hunt for the magic USS" going minimum speed.
Trading that makes sense, when is the last time anyone really had a reason to trade anything but the highest priced commodities? Trading is just basic at best and broken if you think about it.
Smuggling? Make 1/2 price and take more time than trading or even bounty hunting.
Bounty hunting. Spawn, spawn, spawn spawn etc, cash in, return, spawn spawn spawn.
Mining. Oh god, the type of person who enjoys this must be really fun to be around in RL.
If this were beta 1 I'd be like "hey its cool these are going to be expanded and real stuff put in I'm sure".
Now, I'm not so sure.
Because they want to keep their dedicated playerbase well informed and happy? After all, they don't have to promise anything, only saying something like "we'd like to add this and that, which should work like this - IF we manage to make it work" should be more than enough. Telling us if DDF still has any relevance would be a good start.
One thing is for sure: patience is not a problem - I was following Infinity: Quest for the Earth for five or six years, and I was playing Mortal online for more than a year. I can be pretty stubborn when it comes to game of waiting
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The game has failed. In the press, in general opinion, and will never recover.
It's a game that needs years of development, but is already an old game from last year.
Turn out the lights, and remember this next time some cult-status "game genius" claims to be making the next big thing. This game is simply terrible and unrecoverable, as is commonly known outside the ultra-fans echo chamber.
It's a game that needs years of development, but is already an old game from last year.
Turn out the lights, and remember this next time some cult-status "game genius" claims to be making the next big thing. This game is simply terrible and unrecoverable, as is commonly known outside the ultra-fans echo chamber.
OK. Simple mission chains leading to a goal? Branching campaign type missions a la 'Wing Commander', 'Freespace' and that type of 'canned simulation'? Dynamic campaign type missions where the difficulty depends on the conditions of the simulation a la Falcon 4 or Starshatter? How do you co-ordinate these things across the fractured, instances universe? Sounds like a nightmare to program!
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All of these would be nice, but fitting them into a procedurally generated, multiplayer simulation that uses instances must be bloomin' hard. Hand-crafted missions would run out quickly, without a constant influx of new content. Dynamic missions would become 'samey' quickly without a wide variety of templates (which we've already seen with the current implementation). Frontier: First Encounters handled the issue by using both the random bulletin boards + hand-placed missions, Skyrim had mostly hand-placed content + the 'Radiant Quest' system (which was really no better than Elite or any other games random missions). Either way, I thing we're still looking at another year or two of piecemeal development before all career choices have decent mission content, that flows dynamically from the underlying simulation. Unfortunately, I don't think sporadic 'community goals' will cut it over that period of time.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me:
1. All those minor factions to have goals, different stats which govern how they work (outwardly aggressive, sneaky, law abiding, loyalty to major factions, treatment of members, etc, etc), to form and break alliances with other factions, to have internal disputes between members that could cause a power struggle or split. Politics, dirty dealings, backstabbing.
2. For those factions to contain characters to interact with, who can tell you about their history and what's going on.
3. Those characters to give you interesting missions based on what is happening in and around the faction. To let you know how you've affected things even if your own part in it is tiny. To make you care just a little.
4. Random characters you meet who do something more than shoot you/not shoot you.
5. Options. Different ways of approaching a situation, hard choices, morally ambiguous outcomes.
6. Surprises!!! For things to happen that I didn't except. The data package I failed to deliver on time has repercussions when someone comes looking for it. Or for the deep space explorer to stumble on something they shouldn't have seen.
And why is there a tutorial for stalking enemy ships through a ring system using stealth mechanics, when there's no good reason to do it in the game?
I think trying to get the p2p multiplayer up and running as sucked up so much development time, that current implementations of a lot of mechanics didn't get the love they needed, so I partially agree with your post. However, the implementation of a dynamic political and economic simulation of an entire galaxy, without some levels of abstraction that people will point to and say things like 'that's just silly', is a pretty big (read: impossible) job I'd imagine.
Everyone seems to be on a quest for 'meaningful content'. No-one ever seems to clarify what 'meaningful' is. If people are looking for meaning, I'd suggest religion might provide better options.
having meaning."meaningful elements in a language"
| synonyms: | significant, relevant, important, consequential, material, telling, pithy, weighty, valid, worthwhile, purposeful |
Everyone seems to be on a quest for 'meaningful content'. No-one ever seems to clarify what 'meaningful' is. If people are looking for meaning, I'd suggest religion might provide better options.
Some people don't like to mindlessly play a game, girding there way threw.
We wan't some goal, something significant to look forward when playing Elite Dangerous.
This game is incredible foundation for the most amazing game ever created but for now thats just it, JUST a foundation, without content that will immerse players in to playing this game by providing complex long term goals that you can look forward to. People will just play for few weeks and leave it in a corner like many already did.
All great suggestions! Now try to imagine getting all of the above to work, with characters with personality traits, across multiple factions, over 100,000 inhabited star systems, without too much repetition creeping in. Now imagine trying to get it to work with instancing, where you could possibly be assisting one of those characters, at the same time, in another instance I'm killing him. How does that work? The more important the NPC, or the larger the consequences to the game at large, the more obvious inconsistences are going to be.
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Simple answer, don't do it - fall back on generic randomly generated NPCs, and canned 'simple' missions that have limited impact on the galaxy at large, so you can abstract out the details (which is what we've got). I'd love an MMO Dune-esque, Crusader Kings II in space, where we all actually pilot or ships as in Elite - but I can't see it happening soon.
Set your own goals. It's a cliché, and people are fed up with the cliché, but its the journey not the destination. Yes the game could provide better short/medium-term goals, but in the end, what meaningful goal in the long-term can there be in an open-ended simulation, other than those you set yourself?
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Why did I stop playing earlier Elites? Well the first I stopped because I became Elite, but the second and third I just drifted away from after making milllions of credits, and getting/flying the ships I wanted. Did I 'grind' to get those ships? Nope. I suspect I'll do the same in this one - but it will still be a few hundred hours away - still trading to the Asp in a Cobra at present. I'll have got my money's worth ,and I won't think the game was terrible given the content I've seen. Heck, I'll take 10 Elites (or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s with freeplay modes) over most recent releases.
Now look up synonyms for 'subjective' and see where you can go from there.
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Good ideas, and I agree with your points.
So far, FDev has been almost exclusively focused on features (Wings for instance), mechanics and necessary fixes (a LOT of them, still some fixing needed). Content-wise, very little has happened besides community goals. Even so, community goals are handcrafted. I have been in the (very) hopeful wagon since early Beta, and I can't avoid feeling that ED is quite a bit wanting in the gameplay department.
I am probably not the only one. Checking on the Who's Online numbers, they went from 2500+ members or so in January to around 1000/1200 nowadays.... Clearly people are sitting out ED, waiting/wanting for more.
EDIT: As FDev does not indicate anywhere the number of online players, there is no real objective way to gauge the actual following. My guess is those numbers went down quite a bit too. The Server State page is very bare and non informative to say the least.... Maybe on purpose?
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This looks like the most accurate review of ED so far. And it's short enough to be printed on a coaster.
Well first off, all characters wouldn't be completely unique. They would have common traits with others across the galaxy. The procedural generation thing, doesn't just work with planets. That doesn't matter too much, because players wouldn't be working with all characters everywhere. Probably just a handful in a few systems. But they would still be the characters that that particular player is dealing with which I think is the important part.
As for for instancing and persistancy, all I can say is this:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7494
BTW, that design discussion thread more than anything else persuaded me to buy the game. I knew they could do space, I wasn't sure if they could fill it.
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Set your own goals. It's a cliché, and people are fed up with the cliché, but its the journey not the destination. Yes the game could provide better short/medium-term goals, but in the end, what meaningful goal in the long-term can there be in an open-ended simulation, other than those you set yourself?
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Why did I stop playing earlier Elites? Well the first I stopped because I became Elite, but the second and third I just drifted away from after making milllions of credits, and getting/flying the ships I wanted. Did I 'grind' to get those ships? Nope. I suspect I'll do the same in this one - but it will still be a few hundred hours away - still trading to the Asp in a Cobra at present. I'll have got my money's worth ,and I won't think the game was terrible given the content I've seen. Heck, I'll take 10 Elites (or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s with freeplay modes) over most recent releases.
Now look up synonyms for 'subjective' and see where you can go from there.
Yes but you are still talking about Grinding.
Travel between two most profitable stations over and over and over again thousands of times to get Elite rank in trading,
Kill same enemy over and over and over again to get Elite in combat,
Discovered same meaningful space over and over again to get Elite in exploring.
Trading should be reserve for building your own economic empire, with your own NPC trading ships and small outpost.
Combat should be in complex warzones and not simple capital ship that infinitely spawns small ships to kill.
And exploring should be interesting long term scanning planets to discovered minerals, metals, get samples to test them for micro life and others. Not simple scan from 50 ls done move on.
Space is HUGE 400 billion stars yet we are limited as spectators nothing else.