I loved Elite but can't bring myself to buy this remake... Tell me I'm wrong!!

[rtho782]

I loved the first Elite on the Atari ST as a kid. I loved X:BTF when I was older. I played EVE from beta to 2012.

I feel I'd love E. The screenshots are gorgeous and I have a high end PC to do them justice, but Elite for me was all about the single player experience. I'm worried I'd be wasting £40 on E.

I get that there is no offline mode. It's 2014 and I have a decent internet connection that doesn't go down, so this doesn't bother me.

However, I don't want to play an MMO. I quit EVE for a reason.

I understand I can play "Solo Mode". This is good as I have no desire to play Elite as a pirate, or be pirated. I'd like to play with friends I guess (Can I play invite only?) but would rather play solo than play with the general public.

From reading up, and seeing the kickstarter bonuses, it seems there are a couple of classes of players:

1. Those that kickstarted, and have a decal, who can go to a certain "founder system", and get the benefits of being "Elite" without being "Elite", so faster faction rep and better store prices.
2. The rest of us.

If I join now, I'm forever in the "pleb" class with no way to ever join the other class. As this game is avoiding Steam and other large distribution platforms, and has a bit of a cult beta following, it seems that a decent percentage of players will be category 1, so I even more feel like a pleb.

Solo play seems my only hope, but.....

Even though I can play on my own, I am forced to partake in a player driven economy, a-la EVE. This means there are professional margin traders with economics degrees and lots of excel spreadsheets, who will suck the profit margin out of everything until it becomes a massive effort to make any money anywhere. There will be a big effort to prevent "inflation" and every money faucet will be balanced by a money sink, until the game becomes a grind.

I want to be able to do a few trade runs between an Agri and an Indy world and make some cash to buy a beam laser, not grind for months making 0.00001 CR per ton of foodstuff.

I may well be completely wrong with all my logic above, and indeed I hope I am. I really want you to correct me of my assumptions, and I hope I'm crazy. I have never played the game so who am I to judge!

But, if I am drawing these conclusions, maybe others will, and by correcting me, maybe others will find this thread and buy the game

 

[Macgyver]

You are wrong.
i hated this game at first, now I freaking love it.

OMG, once you learn

How to fit and intradiction module and bounty warrant to your ship
That outposts don't scan you for smuggled goods ( if your cargo hauling, or doing black box missions)

use the Sidewinder
upgrade power core and shields, keep the pulse lasers for bounty warrants
or keep cargo 4 ton unit for running black box or smuggled goods.

those are the newbies two choices until you make some money.
this is the fastest most fun way to make money, the above two options.

space speed changes all the time, so keep speed in the blue once you have locked onto a destination or you will overshoot the target due to planetary mass and gravity changes.

 

[Krait_79]

I loved the first Elite on the Atari ST as a kid. I loved X:BTF when I was older. I played EVE from beta to 2012.

I feel I'd love E. The screenshots are gorgeous and I have a high end PC to do them justice, but Elite for me was all about the single player experience. I'm worried I'd be wasting £40 on E.

I get that there is no offline mode. It's 2014 and I have a decent internet connection that doesn't go down, so this doesn't bother me.

However, I don't want to play an MMO. I quit EVE for a reason.

I understand I can play "Solo Mode". This is good as I have no desire to play Elite as a pirate, or be pirated. I'd like to play with friends I guess (Can I play invite only?) but would rather play solo than play with the general public.

From reading up, and seeing the kickstarter bonuses, it seems there are a couple of classes of players:

1. Those that kickstarted, and have a decal, who can go to a certain "founder system", and get the benefits of being "Elite" without being "Elite", so faster faction rep and better store prices.
2. The rest of us.

If I join now, I'm forever in the "pleb" class with no way to ever join the other class. As this game is avoiding Steam and other large distribution platforms, and has a bit of a cult beta following, it seems that a decent percentage of players will be category 1, so I even more feel like a pleb.

Solo play seems my only hope, but.....

Even though I can play on my own, I am forced to partake in a player driven economy, a-la EVE. This means there are professional margin traders with economics degrees and lots of excel spreadsheets, who will suck the profit margin out of everything until it becomes a massive effort to make any money anywhere. There will be a big effort to prevent "inflation" and every money faucet will be balanced by a money sink, until the game becomes a grind.

I want to be able to do a few trade runs between an Agri and an Indy world and make some cash to buy a beam laser, not grind for months making 0.00001 CR per ton of foodstuff.

I may well be completely wrong with all my logic above, and indeed I hope I am. I really want you to correct me of my assumptions, and I hope I'm crazy. I have never played the game so who am I to judge!

But, if I am drawing these conclusions, maybe others will, and by correcting me, maybe others will find this thread and buy the game

I've hardly done any trading at all. The vast majority of my wealth has come from bounty hunting, smuggling and exploring. If you do wish to trade however it will be easy enough to find systems hardly effected by other players trading.

 

[Brandon31]

I loved the first Elite on the Atari ST as a kid. I loved X:BTF when I was older. I played EVE from beta to 2012.

I feel I'd love E. The screenshots are gorgeous and I have a high end PC to do them justice, but Elite for me was all about the single player experience. I'm worried I'd be wasting £40 on E.

I get that there is no offline mode. It's 2014 and I have a decent internet connection that doesn't go down, so this doesn't bother me.

However, I don't want to play an MMO. I quit EVE for a reason.

I understand I can play "Solo Mode". This is good as I have no desire to play Elite as a pirate, or be pirated. I'd like to play with friends I guess (Can I play invite only?) but would rather play solo than play with the general public.

From reading up, and seeing the kickstarter bonuses, it seems there are a couple of classes of players:

1. Those that kickstarted, and have a decal, who can go to a certain "founder system", and get the benefits of being "Elite" without being "Elite", so faster faction rep and better store prices.
2. The rest of us.

If I join now, I'm forever in the "pleb" class with no way to ever join the other class. As this game is avoiding Steam and other large distribution platforms, and has a bit of a cult beta following, it seems that a decent percentage of players will be category 1, so I even more feel like a pleb.

Solo play seems my only hope, but.....

Even though I can play on my own, I am forced to partake in a player driven economy, a-la EVE. This means there are professional margin traders with economics degrees and lots of excel spreadsheets, who will suck the profit margin out of everything until it becomes a massive effort to make any money anywhere. There will be a big effort to prevent "inflation" and every money faucet will be balanced by a money sink, until the game becomes a grind.

I want to be able to do a few trade runs between an Agri and an Indy world and make some cash to buy a beam laser, not grind for months making 0.00001 CR per ton of foodstuff.

I may well be completely wrong with all my logic above, and indeed I hope I am. I really want you to correct me of my assumptions, and I hope I'm crazy. I have never played the game so who am I to judge!

But, if I am drawing these conclusions, maybe others will, and by correcting me, maybe others will find this thread and buy the game

I understand how you feel, but honestly due to the sheer size of the galaxy simulated your worries are really unfounded. I have played a lot of solo and it really is just like playing a normal single player game.

 

[rtho782]

I've hardly done any trading at all. The vast majority of my wealth has come from bounty hunting, smuggling and exploring. If you do wish to trade however it will be easy enough to find systems hardly effected by other players trading.

So, it's not "grindy" in the way an MMO is?

 

[killminster]

I think I've read that there will be some way of earning a permit to the founders system so you wont forever be a pleb. It's the Pilots Federation system so you are already a member, perhaps you will need to attain a certain rank before they let you in. As for the decal? pff I think that idea has been quietly dropped so don't worry about it.

You can have as much or as little involvement with other players as you wish so my advice would be go for it, you'll love it. There's loads of stuff properly tying it to the previous games so I doubt you'll be too disappointed.

 

[CMDR_Irishbros]

You asked,

You are wrong!

 

[Nutter]

This is your only chance to explore our milky way with awesome Nebula, amazing solar systems and a whole heap of fun in-between. Of course there are other games like lemmings and robocod... it's a tough choice!

 

[MadDogMurdock]

Populated space is huge. Those pro-traders with their tools will all get drawn to the same places.

You'll easily be able to find some less popular areas and do your solo thing.

 

[SharkH]

I haven't seen anything in this game given to the backers so I should feel as "pleb". You meant their insurance discount or the free eagle/free cobra?

 

[ste]

I had my fears too about the whole online thing, but really if you liked the original you will like this one. You can play it in exactly the same way. Except better graphics and sound, more depth and more things to do. Play solo and you can entirely ignore the other players/wont even feel their effect.

 

[Space]

I am fed up of this "Elite = Space MMO = Eve" reasoning. Elite is nothing like Eve, and you should not even care about which equipment other players have in a universe where you can run and never meet a player ever again. Plus, cooperation is borderline "barely" in the game, so player to player interactions are cumbersome, buggy, and rare.

 

[Cmdr Andy B]

there are over 200,000 populated systems, quite a few of them with more than one commodities market in them, as such there are plenty of trade routes that never get touched by human players, the system i'm in has had one human visitor in the last 24 hours - me.

with that in mind i think your worries over the games economy are unfounded as there will always be out of the way places to make cash. add to this mining, bounty hunting, exploration and missions and there are plenty of ways of making money in the game.

there are also community created resources to help you find that perfect trade route so rather than making it more difficult the player driven economy actually makes it easier to make credits.

 

[anikaiful]

Populated space is huge. Those pro-traders with their tools will all get drawn to the same places.

You'll easily be able to find some less popular areas and do your solo thing.

Heh, galaxy's way too big for anyone to dominate all the markets out there, not even if a few Earth-fuls of players were doing that.

 

[rtho782]

Thanks all, I didn't intend to come across as hostile, I'm just used to buying games deeply discounted from Steam and don't want to drop £40 without being sure, I'm currently kicking myself for not snapping it up for £20 in kickstarter

These two especially make me feel much better:

Populated space is huge. Those pro-traders with their tools will all get drawn to the same places.

You'll easily be able to find some less popular areas and do your solo thing.

I think I've read that there will be some way of earning a permit to the founders system so you wont forever be a pleb. It's the Pilots Federation system so you are already a member, perhaps you will need to attain a certain rank before they let you in.

Thanks

 

[neXib]

Not to crap on other similar games, but I can usually spot a well built foundation of a game within 10 seconds of picking up a controller or viewing gameplay of it. Elite has got the basics right. The game has that sort of feel that if you encounter difficulty, you can just think of a solution, and then that is possible. Some games try to do this but end up just having solutions that some isolated devs think of, but in this game I feel the freedom works.

Quite frankly I keep thinking this game should be boring, because there's just so simple gameplay things in here, but the fact is that everything is beautiful and the base mechanics are really really well done. Once you get into it you'll start seeing opportunities, figure out new ways to use things like silent running, build strategy for exploring or combat etc.

Unless you are the "throwing toys out of the pram" type once you meet a little adversity you really need to be strange not to like this game.

(I'm not the MMO type either, but I usually play in Open play now, I can take the risk, just keeping rebuy money available, and I haven't seen that many humans, hanging around Sol is not my thing when there's 400 billion star systems to find)

 

[smsKONG]

The founder benefits aren't that big a deal (and in some cases don't work at the minute!). Plus if you are going to play solo or group (with your friends) then no one else's progress matters...

Just treat the fluctuation of markets and faction rivalries as part of the background simulation - in other words try not to think of it as other players messing with your galaxy!
It will mean you can't bank on trade runs remaining profitable but the npcs affect this as well as players so don't focus on it as a negative but as a positive - it forces you to move around over time etc..

I'm not saying that the game wil be for you - but if you enjoyed elite in the 80s and 90s then this game shouldn't disappoint too much.

Remember that development will (hopefully ) be continuous so there'll be more to come.

 

[Mikey2305]

Yup, you are wrong... Come and enjoy. Im in solo and its awesome...

 

[Krait_79]

So, it's not "grindy" in the way an MMO is?

Depends what you want from the game. Some of the ships are very expensive and if you want one then i guess you could say it's a bit of a grind. I'm happy enough in my Viper at the moment and didn't have to work too hard for it.

As they add more ships they should cover a greater range of price points.

It's easy enough to enjoy this without it feeling like a grind though.

 

[FaolGlas]

You are wrong! Game is a good one.

Playing Solo you won't feel the impact of the other players, or if you do, can just move elsewhere in the sprawling universe that is ours to explore (ok, galaxy, picky, picky!)

You can "play solo with friends only" using Group play, so that option is open too. You are the same pilot with same ship and rep etc, so all progress moves on over.

The earlier starters have no advantage over you other than playing longer, if they didn't wipe, but since ED is no race nor is PVP commonplace even in Open (still haven't been interdicted by a player once, must be due to the odd places I hang out), it really is of no-never-mind who else has what, it won't leave you disadvantaged, you'll be progressing at your own pace just the same, as fast or slow as that may be.

Come join us, the big black beckons!

EDIT - I never trade, made about 20 or 30K trading, 1.6 million from bounty hunting, 200K exploring. Rest from mission running. So, no fear about other places impacting your money making opportunities either.