I've not posted here in a long time.
This might be more long-winded than my original Twitter thread (which you can read here) but given some of the posts highlighted by Drew Wager about the state of ED at the moment I thought I'd jump to both defend Frontier but also highlight that change is possible if they were willing to put some of that Tencent investment back into the engine.
In August last year I left my job to pursue building a huge open world game, I'd say the concept was if you took the best bits of Elite, Eve, Skyrim, SW: Galaxies and stuck them in a blender, then Gateway was the result. Firstly, before the baying Reddit mob jumps in, I'm not a developer but I do understand technology so this was a studio effort from the ground up and I was the Founder. I found myself working with people with vastly more experience than I'll ever dream to have, people with 20 years apiece in the industry; Creative Director from DMC, Narrative Designer, ex-Sony Producers, Concept Artists from the movie industry, ex-studio head of Wargaming, stuff happened which attracted them to the design overall. Game design, concept art design, narrative design was all worked on while a procedural engine was created in the background to simulate the environment a la Elite/ No Man's Sky. We worked with the Astrophysics Dept at St Andrews University and also discussed propulsion gameplay design with Icarus Interstellar.
We chatted to Syd Mead, Chris Foss, Chris Moore, Fred Gambino... all the old lags of sci-fi (Foss' words, not mine) about the overall look and feel of the game; this was to be a retro sci-fi game, less industrial looking than Elite or Eve and more like an old Asimov book cover. We spoke with Kevin J Anderson to knock out some novellas based on the original concepts. Titan Books showed interest in a 'Art of Gateway' hardcover, and we had a few brands like Aston Martin, Bugatti, Bosch wanting to get involved in designing something in context in-game (Aston wanted a sleek cruiser ship for players for example)
The game was designed to take place within a 'peculiar galaxy', one which was colliding with another, but events took a turn which meant we'd need to base it back in the old Milky Way. That is, we had agreement in principal to work on with Frederik Pohl's Gateway universe from his novels, and tie the game to a new TV series in the works by Skybound (them what does The Walking Dead). Things were on a roll.
We had technical partners to help design and build out the player driven economy model, we had technical partners to design and build out a new NPC AI system which fed player interaction back into their own learning systems so they started to 'behave' and learn from your input, after all living in a galaxy needs to feel like it's alive. That same system would also help generate stories in-game along with the narrative team so there was ever evolving content to chase across the galaxy for.
Part of the design was also to make the galaxy an unknown, exploration is hazardous and so you'd really only start with a partial map of the Milky Way. Resources needed to be managed if you wanted to colonise a portion of space, but it was definitely designed to be more like Elite (cockpit) than Eve (Spreadsheet) here for exploration. We wanted aliens, after all they were part of Pohl's original novels too, but we'd hide them so discovery would mean something, something rewarding to be the first player to find a new race (like, if you discovered a new trade route, you'd own the right to skim a percentage of trades because you found it). I toyed with the concept of allowing players to write their own lore and ingest this in-game somehow, rather than sit on a web server or forum someplace else. Players needed to drive the game after launch as much as we needed to make it ourselves, but how to manage this content would also be an issue and a full time job at the start.
We sought investment to take it further. We failed. We spoke to Sony, Microsoft, various VCs, all were gushing in platitudes but the wallets remained closed (many are only interested in jumping in when the game is almost complete, not at the start)
The games industry is notorious for wanting huge vertical slices of gameplay over pretty much everything else, something we just didn't have the money to produce. We had an engine but they wanted to see much more. They're also fixated on teams that have worked together, despite the pedigree behind the names we were misfits, and not even acquiring a known IP like Gateway itself was enough to carry it over the line.
During those several months I had a lot of conversations throughout the industry, developers, publishers, and more. I spoke with people involved in Elite Dangerous in various capacities, it's a small world despite a big galaxy.
Game development is hard, full of failures, full of people making the same mistakes over and over again. I look at Elite and others with fresh eyes and appreciate the effort to get them this far, the fact it raised that amount on Kickstarter when so many others barely scratch a living out of it (Infinity: Battlescape for example). I also understand a little more that the design decisions taken early on have painted Frontier and Elite into corners they can't get out of, and it shows the limitations of the COBRA engine here. It's also a good indication when comparing Elite to something like Space Engine as to how limiting creating a game on top of a high-grade astrophysics engine can be (they still struggle with planetary clipping for example). You won't get planetary landings because I don't believe the engine can cope with the world sizes, which is why we're restricted to moons. You won't get planetary landings because of the amount of new designs and content needed to make a planet like Lave feel alive and lived on. Creating it for one planet would be bad enough, creating it for the hundreds of occupied worlds across the bubble is insane.
Getting Elite this far is an incredible achievement but it will never be the game each of us want it to be. It won't have a player based economy that thrives itself, it won't have player driven content because the tools and engine just aren't built that way. I see the ability to design ship skins and commander suits a reality, sell them on the FD store and they skim a cut, but I doubt there will be real player crafting in-game to sell on a station. Games this big need player tools but they also need content, a lot of it, and writing narratives for a play area as big as the Milky Way is not easy which is why we wanted the community involved. Frontier could still do this but it requires a complete overhaul of the core design and engine. I took a brief look at the roadmap for Beyond, it's incremental and won't bring sweeping changes some yearn for. I recently read the Powerplay proposals, it staggers me a little why this is still in the game. Most of what happened with the Thargoids was scripted gameplay triggers, and decyphering all the little hints and clues only played to a hardcore minority while the rest of us watched then chased the results for ourselves. If you wanted an emergent war you'd need to rebuild the AI completely to react that way. Beyond is more like Destiny 2. More of the same but with more skins.
In fact, to change Elite Dangerous to be more than it will ever be (narrative, player economy, living NPCs etc) requires the same kind of transformation that took Elite 1984 to Frontier: Elite 2. It would be an entirely new game from the ground up.
I find playing Elite a good way to wind down because nothing goes on. Much like No Man's Sky, or Eve, I log in, play a little, don't really progress much because nothing pushes me to, log off. It's not the game I wanted to make, and failed at. But having tried getting one off the ground I can see the potential for Elite if Frontier let go of a few things. Suffice to say, I'm using my original concepts for Gateway before the IP to create a novel from myself, seems a waste to let it die.
Final thoughts, and unrelated to Elite in a way: Indie developers are a funny bunch. Having failed I took a look at the scene and saw just how saturated the sci-fi space genre is with small teams all building the same thing. Some have phenomenal tech, like Infinity: Battlescape (planetary rendering is epic, real MMO space battles which I always wanted in Elite) and others like Prosperous Universe build completely different experiences based on trading and exploration (purely browser based stuff, very heavy on realism). If only some of these folks understood that working together to build something bigger had more value in my mind to players than trying to eke out an existence alone.
Maybe something Frontier could take a note of, and talk to other teams building things that could one day benefit Elite.
See you out in the black o7
This might be more long-winded than my original Twitter thread (which you can read here) but given some of the posts highlighted by Drew Wager about the state of ED at the moment I thought I'd jump to both defend Frontier but also highlight that change is possible if they were willing to put some of that Tencent investment back into the engine.
In August last year I left my job to pursue building a huge open world game, I'd say the concept was if you took the best bits of Elite, Eve, Skyrim, SW: Galaxies and stuck them in a blender, then Gateway was the result. Firstly, before the baying Reddit mob jumps in, I'm not a developer but I do understand technology so this was a studio effort from the ground up and I was the Founder. I found myself working with people with vastly more experience than I'll ever dream to have, people with 20 years apiece in the industry; Creative Director from DMC, Narrative Designer, ex-Sony Producers, Concept Artists from the movie industry, ex-studio head of Wargaming, stuff happened which attracted them to the design overall. Game design, concept art design, narrative design was all worked on while a procedural engine was created in the background to simulate the environment a la Elite/ No Man's Sky. We worked with the Astrophysics Dept at St Andrews University and also discussed propulsion gameplay design with Icarus Interstellar.
We chatted to Syd Mead, Chris Foss, Chris Moore, Fred Gambino... all the old lags of sci-fi (Foss' words, not mine) about the overall look and feel of the game; this was to be a retro sci-fi game, less industrial looking than Elite or Eve and more like an old Asimov book cover. We spoke with Kevin J Anderson to knock out some novellas based on the original concepts. Titan Books showed interest in a 'Art of Gateway' hardcover, and we had a few brands like Aston Martin, Bugatti, Bosch wanting to get involved in designing something in context in-game (Aston wanted a sleek cruiser ship for players for example)
The game was designed to take place within a 'peculiar galaxy', one which was colliding with another, but events took a turn which meant we'd need to base it back in the old Milky Way. That is, we had agreement in principal to work on with Frederik Pohl's Gateway universe from his novels, and tie the game to a new TV series in the works by Skybound (them what does The Walking Dead). Things were on a roll.
We had technical partners to help design and build out the player driven economy model, we had technical partners to design and build out a new NPC AI system which fed player interaction back into their own learning systems so they started to 'behave' and learn from your input, after all living in a galaxy needs to feel like it's alive. That same system would also help generate stories in-game along with the narrative team so there was ever evolving content to chase across the galaxy for.
Part of the design was also to make the galaxy an unknown, exploration is hazardous and so you'd really only start with a partial map of the Milky Way. Resources needed to be managed if you wanted to colonise a portion of space, but it was definitely designed to be more like Elite (cockpit) than Eve (Spreadsheet) here for exploration. We wanted aliens, after all they were part of Pohl's original novels too, but we'd hide them so discovery would mean something, something rewarding to be the first player to find a new race (like, if you discovered a new trade route, you'd own the right to skim a percentage of trades because you found it). I toyed with the concept of allowing players to write their own lore and ingest this in-game somehow, rather than sit on a web server or forum someplace else. Players needed to drive the game after launch as much as we needed to make it ourselves, but how to manage this content would also be an issue and a full time job at the start.
We sought investment to take it further. We failed. We spoke to Sony, Microsoft, various VCs, all were gushing in platitudes but the wallets remained closed (many are only interested in jumping in when the game is almost complete, not at the start)
The games industry is notorious for wanting huge vertical slices of gameplay over pretty much everything else, something we just didn't have the money to produce. We had an engine but they wanted to see much more. They're also fixated on teams that have worked together, despite the pedigree behind the names we were misfits, and not even acquiring a known IP like Gateway itself was enough to carry it over the line.
During those several months I had a lot of conversations throughout the industry, developers, publishers, and more. I spoke with people involved in Elite Dangerous in various capacities, it's a small world despite a big galaxy.
Game development is hard, full of failures, full of people making the same mistakes over and over again. I look at Elite and others with fresh eyes and appreciate the effort to get them this far, the fact it raised that amount on Kickstarter when so many others barely scratch a living out of it (Infinity: Battlescape for example). I also understand a little more that the design decisions taken early on have painted Frontier and Elite into corners they can't get out of, and it shows the limitations of the COBRA engine here. It's also a good indication when comparing Elite to something like Space Engine as to how limiting creating a game on top of a high-grade astrophysics engine can be (they still struggle with planetary clipping for example). You won't get planetary landings because I don't believe the engine can cope with the world sizes, which is why we're restricted to moons. You won't get planetary landings because of the amount of new designs and content needed to make a planet like Lave feel alive and lived on. Creating it for one planet would be bad enough, creating it for the hundreds of occupied worlds across the bubble is insane.
Getting Elite this far is an incredible achievement but it will never be the game each of us want it to be. It won't have a player based economy that thrives itself, it won't have player driven content because the tools and engine just aren't built that way. I see the ability to design ship skins and commander suits a reality, sell them on the FD store and they skim a cut, but I doubt there will be real player crafting in-game to sell on a station. Games this big need player tools but they also need content, a lot of it, and writing narratives for a play area as big as the Milky Way is not easy which is why we wanted the community involved. Frontier could still do this but it requires a complete overhaul of the core design and engine. I took a brief look at the roadmap for Beyond, it's incremental and won't bring sweeping changes some yearn for. I recently read the Powerplay proposals, it staggers me a little why this is still in the game. Most of what happened with the Thargoids was scripted gameplay triggers, and decyphering all the little hints and clues only played to a hardcore minority while the rest of us watched then chased the results for ourselves. If you wanted an emergent war you'd need to rebuild the AI completely to react that way. Beyond is more like Destiny 2. More of the same but with more skins.
In fact, to change Elite Dangerous to be more than it will ever be (narrative, player economy, living NPCs etc) requires the same kind of transformation that took Elite 1984 to Frontier: Elite 2. It would be an entirely new game from the ground up.
I find playing Elite a good way to wind down because nothing goes on. Much like No Man's Sky, or Eve, I log in, play a little, don't really progress much because nothing pushes me to, log off. It's not the game I wanted to make, and failed at. But having tried getting one off the ground I can see the potential for Elite if Frontier let go of a few things. Suffice to say, I'm using my original concepts for Gateway before the IP to create a novel from myself, seems a waste to let it die.
Final thoughts, and unrelated to Elite in a way: Indie developers are a funny bunch. Having failed I took a look at the scene and saw just how saturated the sci-fi space genre is with small teams all building the same thing. Some have phenomenal tech, like Infinity: Battlescape (planetary rendering is epic, real MMO space battles which I always wanted in Elite) and others like Prosperous Universe build completely different experiences based on trading and exploration (purely browser based stuff, very heavy on realism). If only some of these folks understood that working together to build something bigger had more value in my mind to players than trying to eke out an existence alone.
Maybe something Frontier could take a note of, and talk to other teams building things that could one day benefit Elite.
See you out in the black o7
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