I must say I agree with most of what the OP has written. Elite lacks any meaningful way to get the player involved in a ‘living’ universe, therefore putting barriers to stories evolving into engaging content for a player, a group of players or even a squadron.
ED’s storytelling is just horrible, and there are many reasons for this, and they all come together.
GalNet is a ridiculously inefficient way to communicate a narrative. The newsflashes are usually limited to one or two paragraphs of condensed but superficial information. They are by text only and thereby lack creating the kind of atmosphere or thrill you’d see with a (non-template) picture or even a video feed. These newsflashes more often than not offer vague possibilities for future action but in my opinion lack the oomph to create enough traction to make people really feel interested about it so they jump up from the sofa and shout "Huzzah! I will do this!"
GalNet topics are also mostly detached islands. They mostly come out of the blue (Supratech burning anybody?) and last for a low number of months (if at all), railroading events to a predetermined outcome. That’s one of the biggest issues I see: You can’t DO anything. You don’t get personally involved on a story level and thus mostly stick to doing nothing, doing combat, doing trading or doing unlocking to come to a result; which in itself is again meaningless, because there are no consequences of action the player(s) can enforce on the galaxy.
Frontier tried to steer against this trend by implementing community goals and the Dangerous Games to get some sort of story out, but these are equally criticized by a part of the community as being shallow, lackluster and out of immersion. Plus, it has also been criticized that essentially, these ‘events’ cannot fail, thus being a part of the railroading accusation that has been repeatedly launched at FDev. The Dangerous Games were particularly singled out as being a hilarious way of implementing a new power by making their members do things that didn't really have anything to do with raising a power faction from the ashes. Colonia is basically the same where people are asked to ship tons of travel brochures across space to make a facion happen, which in itself is rather silly if you think about it.
Then there are the NPCs. In this context I am talking about the Major NPCs whose names you typically find in all the above mentioned attempts to set up a narrative. Two things I find striking here:
1. Established NPCs
These sadly not backed by refreshing their background stories, their latest developments or some gossip snippets and thus do not receive the visibility or exposure the should get when being so high and up in the galactic spotlight. Yes, they are named every once in a while but then more or less as ‘statement givers’ who respectfully fulfill their minimum duty of saying something to a sector spanning event. But you seldom get anything beyond that.
2. Event NPCs.
By these I mean those names that appear and disappera while a certain story unfolds. We had a number of Navy officers, Jasmina Halsey, Juanita Bishop and now the Rochesters. That’s well and good, but after a certain event is through, these often disapprea completely from view. Again, there is a feeling of something being discarded and next month, you get the next made-up Event NPC. While some may call this an element of shifting drama, others may call it uninspirational and superficial (again), because you don’t really get attached to anybody for any reason. A result you see quite often on the forums these days is players comparing all this to a galactic soap opera, sitcom or reality TV. This alone should make all alarm bells ring in the ED story department.
In the end, the narrative in the game seems to be a stage play no one has access to. No meaningful interaction is possible and events and stories unfold as the days come and go. This is not engaging or emergent gameplay, it’s just plain boring. Being boring is really one of the few things where ED’s “narrative” is good at.
Certainly, there are a number of books and novels out there and they may point you towards different locations in the game, but once again, it ends right there. Soontill Relics anybody? Yeah, there’s an omnious reference to Garry’s Reclamations, which readers will find revealing) but again, it’s missed opportunities to implement aspects of the stories into the game itself and thus create a link between what people read and what they play.
An exception to this were Drew Wagar’s books, Premonition in particular, where efforts were made to come up with ingame events and Frontier story injections that would culminate spectaculously in a book. In this case, FDev did it the other way round and used something I call “StarWars’ism”: Everyone’s a space family and everything has to be connected to everything else. The outcome was mixed, although mostly positive, but with Drew’s efforts the last bits of good storytelling left the galaxy.
Since then - or some might say even before that - we have been staring into a void.
The tutorials have been mentioned as kicking off a story of sorts, but I find them shallow and detached from the game in general. No story unfolds around the fledgling pilot, no consequences come out of maybe different choices or tutorial endings, and most of all, no follow-up opportunities are given.
EVE Online for example holds multiple wide and open story arcs (8 if I’m correct) with 20+ missions per arc that will take you through known space and show you places to come back to later. And you can play them again and again every three months or so. ED lack this completely. Power blocks are grindfests for ranks and ships that… are nice. This is about as unengaging as it can get and I reckon it may be very frustrating for new players being left stranded right beyond their tutorials.
Speaking about power blocks: Political content
This is a
very personal matter for me and other will disagree or hold other views. But I want to take the opportunity to just write it down here, because it really struck a cord in me.
The ED universe is a dark place. I get it. But so is the world from which we players seek a bit of relaxation and fun in a game universe.
That being said, I find some of the more recent story themes FDev chose to inject into their game appalling, unfitting and outright irresponsible. They have introduced political and violent moves against (religious) minorities, while beginning to paint an overwhelming political entity in a rather fascist way, or at least beginning to have fascist traits. It’s the parade process of the erosion of a democracy or let’s say “people oriented” community towards authoritarian rule that secures its power by lashing out against minorities by scapegoating and marginalizing them. We find a lot of this in Dystopian novels but sadly we also find a lot of this in our daily politics
I am German so I may just be a little bit too sensitive towards these authoritarian tendencies but I dare ask: Does the game really need this kind of story? Does it make the game better in terms of playing it? Of all the narratives possible, why chose something we can see on a daily basis in the real world?
Plus, as mentioned above, we players cannot enforce change. In some games the players plays the protagonist, the pariah, who eventually makes the tyranny crumble or the population revolt. In ED this is simply not possible (atm) because of the lacking game mechanics to do so. So what remains is the ‘bad feeling about this’ with the inability to change anything via the game we play while feeling the walls closing in around us and being constantly reminded that the game in that respect isn’t better than the world we live in.
I daresay the game deserves better, and so do we. I want to play a game and not watch the crazy world of 2018 in Sci-Fi.
This is really a bad combination: On the one hand we see next to no coherent storytelling in the game and on the other hand, those snippets we do see are related to oppression and minority bashing. I find this irresponsible.
Sure, some may say, there are other games out there that propagate these elements, but in general, they even focus around it and I know what I would get when buying these. Simply put, ED shouldn’t be one of these.
So what remains?
The OP and my predecessing writers have already mentioned a good number of opportunities. I’d just like to compile a number of those here and maybe pick up one or two in a later post:
- GalNet needs to have meaningful visuals, ideally as a complete newsletter of sorts with “clicky” content
- Power Blocks and some other groups need story or mission arcs that span a dozen or so missions and locations with recurring NPCs the player can build a relationship to in the later game
- Tutorials ideally are predecessors to these mission arcs
- Engineers should fulfill more roles than just module enabler. Maybe mentors or mission givers to distant or difficult terrain
- No throwaway “Dallas” or “Beverly Hills 902010” NPCs and Story templates. Make them mean something for the players
- Incorporate a bonus or achievement system for story accomplishment
- Make player choice count towards future events. Make it possible to support/dethrone some villain or to thwart/support a questionable operation and make it have an impact apart from a credit output
Wow, this took me about two hours to write down and I can only say that it's an important matter to me. I want ED to succeed in this because I still think it's a good game. Luckily, the player base seems still engaged enough to make up their own stories. I that weren't the case I really don't know where the game would stand today.
Fly safe!
