i for one want to see the game improve more on the network side of things. like proper client/server tech, possibly cloud solutions. the graphics in the game still hold up fantastically well. while it's no star citizen, it at least runs great and still looks good as well. but the network stuff... really needs to be improved drastically.
How will Elite Dangerous use 'next-gen' gaming tech?
- Thread starter TheSisko
- Start date
Yeah its difficult with P2P. Players don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee for client-server support.
The graphics are pretty good from a distance and in the cockpit. It doesn't look nice in first person. ED needs graphics upgrades in order to thrive among triple A games of the next-gen console era. This is the kind of graphical fidelity that we can expect for next-gen consoles:
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Is Client/Server support really more expensive than the current solution ?
Frontier also has servers at Amazon and elsewhere.
Changing to a Client/Server would really be unbearable without subscription funding ?
I'd be fine if ED didn't go chasing the next big things in graphics in order to make it look even flashier and modern. I'd rather them focus on new content/features. Now if a specific bit of tech is needed to make that new content (eg: atmospheric planets), then that's cool. Also if it can improve performance its cool.
But better graphics for better graphics sake? Nah, not really a priority in my eyes.
But better graphics for better graphics sake? Nah, not really a priority in my eyes.
Probably yes. Most MMO games....lets call them free games for now.....that use a client server model and don't have a subscription model are heavily monetised, and I don't mean just the decoration type stuff we also get, I mean monetised in a way that makes it far more difficult to play without paying a certain minimum amount for boosts and upgrades. You pay for extra storage, you pay for travel skills and mounts, you pay for scrolls and potions. Every item in the shop has game-play benefits, such as extra armour, faster travel speeds etc.
Games with a large player bases that use a client server model would not survive without heavy monetisation of common game-play actions. Similar things in ED to other monetised MMO's games would be, for instance, buying a monthly licence to use a Docking Computer. Buying a monthly 30% upgrade to shields. Atlantica Online, for instance, sold scrolls in the shop to increase offense and defense by 30%, making player to player combat impossible without paying money. Basically it's described as pay-to-win but what it is essentially designed to do is to replace the monthly fee with a nearly compulsory monthly purchase through the item shop.
A nightmare indeed and also a game distort if you have to pay to win.
However I thought that the paintjobs and the kits would be enough to finance a client / server.
There are many other micro-transactions without influence on the game, that could be created, also.
there are exactly two games that require a monthly subscription that i know of. final fantasy and world of warcraft. there are many, in fact the vast majority of multiplayer games use a client/server solution. none of them require you to pay a monthly fee. many even are free2play. most have ingame transactions. elite already has an ingame shop.
but there isn't any content aimed at first person either. the station interiors/exteriors aren't supposed to be viewed from a first person, on foot, perspective. once we get space legs, we'll see more detailed environments. cockpit level of details i would presume. because the cockpits are currently the only thing that's designed to be viewed from a first person perspective.
but most of these games have aggressive monetazation schemes going on, and quite a few of those also incorporate pay-to-win mechanics, so instead of paying a monthly fee, you ahve to pay for "power upgrades" that gives you like more damage or more defence... then we have these timelimited stuff like battle passes.... so they are simply moving the montly subscription to other stuff, and also, things that used to be free in games, are now put behind a paywall...
I play LOTRO, F2P, you buy quest packs, purchase storage, buy scrolls, buy fast travel skills, buy milestone skills, crafting recipes, crafting skills.
I play Black Desert F2P. You buy storage slots, market scrolls to increase profit and etc, similar to LOTRO.
I certainly haven't played every free to play game, but in almost every major free to play game I have played it was practically compulsory to use real money to actually play properly or competitively. It's true that Elite has an in-game shop, but nothing in the shop makes any change to the way the game plays. For instance would you play $30 for a monthly licence that allows you to use the DC and the SCA, because that's how most F2P games make money in the shop, by making something that's extremely desirable in game and then charging a fee to access it.
So here's the question, would you play money every month to FDEV to purchase needed in game functions? If you wouldn't then the Server/Client model isn't something you should support.
you're painting worst case scenarios which is totally valid. but for every bad example, i can name you a good example.
elite currently uses a cosmetic only business model which i think we can all support. i don't have issues with this getting expanded even further. space legs and player model cutomization certainly open ways for many ways of monetization.
i don't see we're getting gameplay altering effects through real money. the community wouldn't accept this. it would backfire and hurt the game more than it would help. but even here, we've not even reached pay2win territory, but just gameplay altering. let's take for example higher credit income rates. that's still no pay2win. everyone has access to credits. now, when we start to talk about buying high level guardian and engineering stuff, then we start to get into that territory. but still, every player can get those features eventually. many already have.
again, you're drawing worst case scenarios that i don't see a foundation for exist in the current game. btw., this all excludes that every player gets arx just by playing. overall i don't see ingame monetization being or becoming and issue in elite. pay2win is simply not accepted in our regions. and i don't see elite introducing more aggressive monetization systems either. it is not a free2play game after all. the next expansion will be paid for as well.
i take and accept all of this if we get a proper network model and a proper implementation of multiplayer in general. it is an optional component anyways. many players will still choose to play solo. but many would like to have a proper multiplayer game which we don't currently have. this is just huge potential wasted and i wouldn't let hypothetical worst case scenarios stand in the way of exploring this area.
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No these are not worst case or bad examples, they are common practice. Lord of The Rings Online, an oldy but still a good game, Black Desert Online, a modern and very popular MMO. There are my two examples, so your turn. It would be useful if you have actually played these games you are going to present as a good example.
Both LORTO and BDO have their own in-game money system, they both provide daily rewards just for logging in each day, no playing required. LOTRO requires payment for expansions, in fact I recently purchased the Minas Morgul expansion. What you are suggesting will comprise a huge extra outlay for FDEV but according to you they won't be implementing any extra monetisation at all. It's not just a huge initial outlay though is it? It's a continuing outlay, equipment has to be maintained and replaced, bandwidth has to be payed for on an ongoing basis, how are they going to finance this?
You also seem to have a rather different idea of F2P than most people. ED is a F2P game, once the initial purchase is made there is no more payment to be made to play the game. BDO uses the exact same model, initial purchase, but so far all their expansions have been free because of the monetisation. LOTRO, the initial play area is free for no outlay, but outside of that there are expansions that have to be paid for with actual money although if you were truly dedicated and played to an extent I am not willing to put in all these could be purchased using turbine points in game, but that's a huge investment of time required and nobody does that. F2P is merely an expression that a continuing regular payment isn't required to access the game. Paid expansions are common in many F2P as well as subscription games.
i still wonder how much money Frontier really makes with the cosmetics.
those new paintjobs i have seen in the shop, are either really ugly, or for ships i hardly ever use, or both.
after almost 5 years, i am still waiting to be able to purchase the "country flag" paintjobs for ALL of my ships... not just for the Viper and Cobra MK3.
they may sell a bit more, now that you can purchase some of them individually, instead of a whole pack when you just wanted one of them -> and they are hinding the price behind a premium currency, so player may miscalculate how much money they really spend on it.
those new paintjobs i have seen in the shop, are either really ugly, or for ships i hardly ever use, or both.
after almost 5 years, i am still waiting to be able to purchase the "country flag" paintjobs for ALL of my ships... not just for the Viper and Cobra MK3.
they may sell a bit more, now that you can purchase some of them individually, instead of a whole pack when you just wanted one of them -> and they are hinding the price behind a premium currency, so player may miscalculate how much money they really spend on it.
Now you are making huge generalizations...
So you do not see any game altering changes as that would "backfire"... so how would they pay for stuff then? how would FDev make enough money to keep a huge serverfarm up to handle all the stuff that would be moved from clients to servers?
Look at ESO, a pretty popular MMO. they started out with a subscription, then they removed the requirement for subscription and moved to pay-to-play version, with their crown shop. Now they allow you buy lots of stuff in the crown shop, and if pay upo for the subscription, you get some SERIOUS game advantages in certain areas, like crafting bags, that allows you store as much crafting material that you can get your hands on. Double bank space!
Now consider how easy it would for FDev to something similar.... get the monthly subscriptioon, and now you can store double the amount of ships per station and double modules, and double up on materials/data needed for engineering.... That is just one example...
And ofcourse an even bigger shop with more stuff... think space legs, and we could now see a new category of buyiung "furniture" for your personal crew quarters etc
And once the free-play take root, it would be easy to start slip towards how mobile games works, where they make things take even longer in game, and then sell bypasses to skip the wait... regardless of how good your intentions as developer might be, the economy people will have the last decision on what you should add.. this have been evident in several studios, just look at the continuation train wreck that is Fallout 76...
And frankly, I do not give a hoot about you want to move to a pay-to-win game mechanics because of the perceived better workings of things, as many players like me would not accept that, so I guess you would be the whale that would spend thousands of pounds to pay for this while the rest of us refuse to pay for that sort of monetization...
But if a player has spent a finite amount on buying 'premium currency' the baseline has already been set.
Despite being a game, it does reflect real life in one measure, prices rise far more often than they fall... Developer time, even on cosmetics, has to be paid for and their salary will rise regularly (as we are talking a UK company - other countries may vary) so the 'cost' of production will rise accordingly.
As buying is optional, should a player decide the real price is obfuscated by the changing 'value' of a premium currency based on amount purchased, and further blurred by being given the same currency 'free' for just playing, the best recourse, surely, is to not purchase with real money but to wait until 'free' Arx equate to the value of a wanted cosmetic?
what you say may be true,
but its also a fact that those intermediate currencies have that psychological effect that you may forget the worth you are paying.
I did.
Quite a few threads were started, a number were suppressed by mods, but most knew it was inevitable, so meltdown was muted.
My main push was to give Mac users an offline mode, based on the comment from Sir David Braben:
(link now broken: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=60284&page=14&p=1024593&highlight=#post1024593 )
"We have no intention of taking the servers down, but I understand what you are getting at. We plan to archive the game from time to time (ie matching client and servers and game world state), and would release such an archive if the servers were to come down. That would also address the issue of how you preserve an online game for the future, from the whole 'retro' perspective."
And from a Mac user's point of view the servers were "coming down". Sadly this gained no traction, and no empathy from many other CMDRs. Typical comments were "just bootcamp" or "buy a proper computer", so useful
I'll also add that the minimum PC specs have at times been lower than consoles, so you really need to start blaming min-spec PC players as much as console players.
I am hoping "next-gen" does mean separating the codebase, leave min-spec PCs and PS4/Xbox to one branch, and 2020 as the live branch, with higher spec requirements.
Hopefully they do more with VR.
Doesn't Apple share some of the blame here? I don't see any major games being released on that platform. I recall something about compute shaders not being available on Mac hardware, I don't know if that's true or not but the lack of major releases on Mac is telling. Either the platform API/Hardware isn't good enough or the potential market for games on Mac isn't big enough for game publishers to support.
Its not just graphics. Being able to use SSD as virtual memory offers a lot of potential to game developers.
I'll not disagree that if one wishes to know exacly how much, a calculation if needed to determine this - but, as with any purchase, the final decision if entirely subjective in that does one consider the outlay matching the perceived worth or a little expensive?
I really like some of the recent 'Premium' PJ's that came into the store over the Christmas period, was able to 'purchase' one with 'free' Arx quite happily, but do consider them too expensive if I was spending Arx I'd bought with real currency
(even though the 'price' arrived at feels excessive as I didn't buy a massive amount of Arx)I'm not defending our Premium currency completely, it works well enough for me for future 'bling' as a single purchase will buy stuff as & when I want it and allows me to budget a fixed amount rather than several purchases over a period of time.
New Era is DLC.