I wouldn’t go THAT far. Frontier have developed some mechanics of the game pretty good, but yes they’ve developed a lot of crap mechanics too.
My own personal hit or miss of game mechanics in Elite:
- + SRV Wave Scanner: Good job here, one of my favorite mechanics in the game honestly.
- + Surface Salvage Mission Search Reticle: I love this mechanic, how the search reticle bounces around allowing the player to zero in on what they are after. I wish this was used more often in the game, ESPECIALLY for searching surface map heat zones on planets for things like geysers and organics.
- + Flight Model: Frontier knocked it out of the park when they developed this, super well done.
- + Neutron Jumps: One of my favorite mechanics added since 1.0, they greatly help to make traveling through space interesting and fun. Of course, these were originally a bug by Frontier and they wanted to fix it, but thankfully the community uproar and crusade convinced them to keep it in. Disturbing that Frontier completely missed the potential they had gifted into their lap…
- + Passengers: Fun feature, could have been more with some passenger morale mechanics, but overall this was done pretty well.
- + Mining: I think mining sits in a good place mechanics wise right now. My biggest beef is that ice mining is so terribly unprofitable, other than that I like how it is currently.
- ~ Trading: Works well enough, the new 3.0 tools are very nice, but trading missions are lackluster. The new depot mechanic should have been a huge boon to trading but Frontier did not think beyond their nose and a huge opportunity was missed. Plus super fun smuggling missions from the past can no longer be found. Trading should be in a much better state than it is.
- ~ Engineers: Good concept with the 3.0 revision, unfortunately it’s dragged down by the time consuming grade grind Sandro added. They got it close to good but shot their own foot (on purpose too) IMHO.
- ~ Material Traders: Great idea, but they made the trade up rations far too punishing, so much as to almost make it untenable. Again the insistence on grind walls sours a good idea.
- ~ Ship Launched Fighters: As a combat feature this is designed well, but like usual Frontier completely forgot about the non-combat players. Mining SLF’s? Exploration SLF’s?
- - USS Mechanics: Far too passive and random, no player agency AT ALL. A better way of doing this would be to utilize the scanner honk to ping several signal sources within a set radius, allowing the pilot to identify and choose from those found. Slowly supercruising around just waiting for the RNG Gods to bless you with a USS is not fun and totally un-engaging.
- - Power Play: A very neat idea horribly executed. Far too grindy and completely unplayable for anyone other than the hardcore.
- - Multicrew: Sounded good in the preview, but the live version was less than half of what it was supposed to be. Pure combat feature. Wasted potential, wasted dev time, forever doomed to be barely used by anyone.
- - Tech Brokers: Terrible grind wall, the unlock requirements are completely unreasonable and not fun. Could have been easily designed far better, some dev fell asleep at the wheel on this one.
- - Wing Missions: Great idea, again badly executed. Should have been “shareable missions” instead, completely replacing their normal counterpart missions, with rewards that are split among the wing members or given in full to a solo player making the effort. Now mission board dilution is at an all time high and we have players ignoring wing missions which pay worse than normal ones. Could have been a fantastic improvement to the game, but once again Frontier’s vision was super narrow and they did not think beyond their own limited concept.
- - Thargoids: Excellent art and sound all around, but the gameplay and execution of the “war” has been less than satisfying for a number of reasons. Too any CG’s to unlock things, not enough in game news or NPC reactions to make it feel like a danger, not enough player interactions to include anyone other than those who go out to specifically find Thargoids, and even then it’s difficult to find them.
- - Exploration: Super basic mechanics for exploration, for four years now they have barely changed at all. With a life size Milky Way in the game this is a travesty. Huge potential wasted for such a long timeframe.
Frontier has developed some good mechanics over the years for Elite, although after listing them all I realize that the ones I like are rather minor while the ones I dislike are pretty major. And one was fully a mistake that they almost “fixed”, LOL.
I don’t think my defense of Frontier went so well here…
Agree with this list!
I think they need to reduce the cost of turrets slightly, especially to make multicrew more of a thing - but most of all, I think they should BUFF the damage of all turrets so they are the same as Gimballed weapons.
On the surface, that sounds OP - but it really isn't because:
a) The turret tracking is incredibly slow, especially when you are really close to a target ship or because you end up rolling and manuevering everywhere, so the turrets don't have time to adjust.
b) Chaff is underused and it confused both Gimbals and Turrets.
Considering turrets, as they are now:
1) 1/3 of the damage of Fixed weapons
2) 2/3 of the damage of Gimballed weapons.
3) cost 3x as much as Fixed
4) cost 4x as much as Gimballed
5) No HUGE turrets.
Turrets SUCK in this game - SO BAD - if they were at least the same damage as Gimbals to account for their OVERINFLATED price tag, it would mean multicrew would be way more of a thing.
They have slow tracking and they are super expensive and aren't immune to chaff.
Just such bad implimentation and mechanics.
