In praise of Elite and the 'casual' player

[Capt. Hook]

I've been playing Elite dangerous on and off since the Kickstarter days. Work and home pressures just don't give me hours at a time to play it alas. But hold on. I'm not complaining, hear me out.

For a casual player like me Elite is a brilliant game. I can dip in and out whenever I like and the whole sandbox gamestyle means I have no pesky narrative to adhere to. New features are fun and evolve the game along nicely. Hell, I'm old enough to remember playing Elite on a bbc micro computer back in the day and I'm still constantly amazed by how graphics and gameplay have been utterly transformed in last 30 years.

The other thing, for me, at least which I find so cool is that it's a game I can play with my son (7 ). He loves playing navigator and we have planned trips across the galaxy to visit astronomical sites. Tracking down the voyager probe was a blast and spun off a trip to the Science Museum in London. How many games can do that?

Ok. I get it. My playing style is niche. It's not high octane. It has, for example, taken me since KS days to hit Elite in exploration and I'm only just nudging elite trade status now. Dont talk to me about my combat status!

I also totally respect other players wanting and challenging Frontier to do more. Having new, exciting gameplay is such a brilliant draw for new and existing players to the game and to keep it going. Elite is also blessed in that it has generated a whole heap of player generated videos, literature and discussion that really augments and develops the community.

I guess what im trying to say is that essentially I think Elite is such a great game because it caters to such a wide demographic which alot of other games dont do as well and that isn't always said. So, er, well done, thankyou and long may it continue.

 

[M00ka]

Nicely said Commander and don't sell yourself short, I think you may be closer to the type of player DBOBE and Co envisaged than what we currently have.

I have always thought that FD must be sitting their scratching their collective heads at us (the players) sometimes. I believe, although I have no evidence, that FD imaged the majority of players would hang around their starting systems for a few weeks then head straight out into the black. Think of it as a continuous outward population explosion. But it never happened, the bubble became home, the safe place, so reluctantly (in my opinion) FD were forced to dump everything in such a small area. The majority of content, engineers, everything nice a handy for those that just won't leave home.

I kind of feel sorry for FD, they built this great sandbox, one of the biggest ever for a game, and most of us play in just one small little area of it, blasé or at least mildly ignorant of what is out there for us to discover.

 

[CMDR John Luke Paperbone]

Elite has the problem any other game has. Once you do everything there is to do, multiple times, it becomes stale and boring.

So if you really love the game and want to play it for long in the future, your only chance is taking it slow.

In this forum the harsher criticism comes from multiple Elite commanders, with billions in the bank, with every ship in the game, and with many of them fully engineered. Go figure.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I'm casual myself and can only say that playing this casually got me nowhere. It's even made a regression when they decided to nerf vanilla and goalpost the progression with additional engineer grind.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Yeah. The same thing is evil if you do have more time to play because it also means it never ends... until you want it to. The problem is when you don’t want it to

 

[Ziljan]

I kind of feel sorry for FD, they built this great sandbox, one of the biggest ever for a game, and most of us play in just one small little area of it, blasé or at least mildly ignorant of what is out there for us to discover.

I feel sorry for FD as well, but it's more because they made a decision to:

1) have a tiny amount of top-down tightly controlled and excessively sparse narrative content (rather than creating a robust set of highly malleable mechanics & user generated content)
2) implement an extremely limited set of proc-gen generic discoverables & hand placed objects that amount to little more than mining grinds & audio files, and when we're extremely lucky: dead-ender audio-visual puzzles, all of which have little to no actual gameplay value nor interconnected significance
3) create a "sandbox" with no actual sand in it, by which I mean players have little to no actual ownership or ability to shape the universe except by changing flavor text in the BGS.
4) leave their best IP dangling in maintenance mode for years while they focused on forgettable cash cow titles.

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

Elite has the problem any other game has. Once you do everything there is to do, multiple times, it becomes stale and boring.

I disagree, DayZ for example you can own everything and from a game mechanics PoV have done everything multiple times and as long as you the player mix things up the game keeps on giving. The issue with Elite (and other games) is the repetition being nothing more than repetition with different scenery and why I strongly advocate greater persistence and effect in game from player actions.

What I do applaud though and agree with the OP is Elite being fairly easy to dip in and out of. Where it does penalise the gamer casual or otherwise is forcing you to repeat things to achieve certain outcomes i.e. there are relatively few fast-track solutions or skill-based rewards.

 

[Sylow]

Ok. I get it. My playing style is niche. It's not high octane. It has, for example, taken me since KS days to hit Elite in exploration and I'm only just nudging elite trade status now. Dont talk to me about my combat status!

Hehe. In contrast, it's exploration which i probably won't be Elite still for a long time. I think you are doing good. Probably even better than me.

 

[Jumpin' Jack Flash]

Hi There!

I'm of a similar mind to how you see the game. I've also been playing Elite since the kickstarter phase, and as one forum member ('EUS' ) pointed out in a topic I recently posted on the forum, I've been a Forum member for eleven years....Yike's ....I didn't realize it was that long ago!
I played Frontier Elite 2 when it was first released on the Amiga, and like you my son who was then aged about six years old would also join me in playing the game.
So...here we are in 2019, in the last year or so my Grandson who is aged five years is now my 'Co pilot', and is learning the basics of the current game. That in itself is an amazing experience for me, I'm hard pressed to think of a computer space adventure game that has had that longevity over time, perhaps Egosoft's X series is a close contender, but that is another topic.

It's quite easy to criticize the current game, but isn't that true of all computer games in this genre?. For example, just recently I've been joining with other players (in solo & open) in supplying the 'Generation' ship in the Upaniklis system with materials etc. It's been interesting in many ways, how a system can be quite devoid of players most of the time, then suddenly over a few days, hundreds of ships are passing too and fro between adjacent systems. To roughly quote a certain Captain Kirk, "There's life there Jim, but not as we know it"
Each ship that travels through these systems are 'real' people, playing the game in their own way. Of course, there are many others that are computer controlled, but essentially there is 'life'. Ok, that said it did, or has, crossed my mind that perhaps there could be more of an interaction between the generation ship and the players, npc's, and the general areas in this system. The Generation ship is populated?....where are they?....do they have their own smaller ships to interact with items/objects and real players (or npc's) in the system. Why can't I trade directly with the ship, would it be more interesting to be able to dock with the ship and see/experience their culture at first hand, and maybe even do some tasks/missions for those people to broaden the experience?....just some thoughts that cross my mind whilst playing.

Anyway, I'll most likely be playing the game at sometime today, and this coming week. I'm retired from working life now so I have the time to play the game almost anytime I like. I'm grateful to Frontier for providing me with an interesting and fun game to play. I've also accrued enough 'Arx' through gameplay alone to pick a skin or two for one of my ships today, so it's all good as they say.
I hope Elite Dangerous continues to grow as time moves on, I just hope Atmospheric Planets and Space Legs get's to be a feature long before I'm too old to enjoy it!

Jack

 

[Capt. Hook]

[/QUOTE] I've also been playing Elite since the kickstarter phase, and as one forum member ('EUS' ) pointed out in a topic I recently posted on the forum, I've been a Forum member for eleven years....Yike's ....I didn't realize it was that long ago!
[/QUOTE]

11 years. That is impressive! 7 years according to my details...

Would you believe my elite claim to fame is that a group of us at school back in the day (with the help of a enthusiastic teacher) got the BBC micro version of Elite to run on a Dragon 32 computer.

I think at this stage I've played every version of the game much like yourself.

 

[Phazon Xenomorph]

I never knew of any Elite game until Dangerous and only from a friend. I was more into the Descent series as a kid, with some Freespace/2 thrown in, oh and Homeworld/Cataclysm.

 

[Darkfyre99]

I've been playing Elite dangerous on and off since the Kickstarter days. Work and home pressures just don't give me hours at a time to play it alas. But hold on. I'm not complaining, hear me out.

For a casual player like me...

Personally, I consider myself a time-poor gamer, as opposed to a casual gamer. When I have time to play this game, I try to make every minute count, so I tend to focus on it completely. Casual gamer, at least to me, implies that a game isn't a gamer's sole, or even primary, focus.

YMMV

Ok. I get it. My playing style is niche. It's not high octane. It has, for example, taken me since KS days to hit Elite in exploration and I'm only just nudging elite trade status now. Dont talk to me about my combat status!

I don't think players are us are niche, but rather the largest demographic in the game. IIRC, before SteamStats went behind a pay wall, the median AND average time played over two weeks was 10 hours.

 

[Old Duck]

Having played ED for awhile now, I find myself in the exact opposite camp. I think, "Maybe I'll play ED for an hour today," having been away for awhile, and then I think, "What's the point?" I was much more hooked by the game when I was playing it more seriously - working hard for a new ship or pushing a BGS flip. Without any sort of driving purpose, the casual play has played itself out for me.

 

[Rubbernuke]

The problem for me is, once you want to do more advanced things those features and choices that enable causal play become disadvantages. From going from an ideal level of challenge in Beta and Gamma each subsequent update (bar AI blips) ED has become less and less memorable.

 

[Dutchman141]

I've played the original Elite in 1984 on the C64 for I don't know how many hours, heh I still have the whole box, cassette, novel and poster somewhere in the attic.
ED was my dream come true, a new iteration of the game I loved so much.
After four of five years of ED there are enough things that I would like to see different and yes I do complain sometimes and have taken breaks, some lasting a couple months, but hey here I am getting close to 3000 hours and still playing.

ED is the only current game that has gotten so many hours of my life, that says something imho.
And once they fix the long geological poi scan times in the fss I plan to add a lot more hours.

Despite all the complaining and whining Fdev must've done something right, no?

 

[pippo]

Elite has the problem any other game has. Once you do everything there is to do, multiple times, it becomes stale and boring.

So if you really love the game and want to play it for long in the future, your only chance is taking it slow.

In this forum the harsher criticism comes from multiple Elite commanders, with billions in the bank, with every ship in the game, and with many of them fully engineered. Go figure.

Like everything in life, it's all about good measure.

I enjoy chocolate, but some people develop diabetes with it.
I do enjoy a nice cool beer but some people develop alcoholism with it.
I do enjoy a juicy burger once in a while but some people suffer obesity and heart problems because of it.
I do enjoy Elite Dangerous, but some folks seem to develop boredom after burnout because of it, go figure.

I haven't played Elite Dangerous since June because I'm in between two jobs and two houses at the moment. No doubt this will be part of the reason I will enjoy playing when I next get the chance.

 

[CMDR John Luke Paperbone]

Despite all the complaining and whining Fdev must've done something right, no?

They did indeed, at least for me. It's one of the games i spent more hours on in my whole life.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Like everything in life, it's all about good measure.

I enjoy chocolate, but some people develop diabetes with it.
I do enjoy a nice cool beer but some people develop alcoholism with it.
I do enjoy a juicy burger once in a while but some people suffer obesity and heart problems because of it.
I do enjoy Elite Dangerous, but some folks seem to develop boredom after burnout because of it, go figure.

I haven't played Elite Dangerous since June because I'm in between two jobs and two houses at the moment. No doubt this will be part of the reason I will enjoy playing when I next get the chance.

I enjoy chocolate, but it's all wrap and little taste most of the time.
I do enjoy a nice cool beer but there is little point trying to sell it to me in winter.
I do enjoy a juicy burger once in a while but they are often designed to leave you hungry.
I do enjoy Elite Dangerous, but FD decided to take a dump on my progress and ruin it with power creep.

 

[Ezren]

This thread is a nice change of pace from the "Elite Dangerous only provided me hundreds of hours of playtime!"

 

[Sylow]

I do enjoy Elite Dangerous, but FD decided to take a dump on my progress and ruin it with power creep.

I know what you mean. I also would be all too happy if they'd remove engineers immediately. Nerfing it a lot also would do it. Neither is likely to happen, so I just occasionally rant about it.

Despite all of it, I also dare to say that it has become much more manageable than it once was. It's still not "fun" per se. But also is not the nightmare it once was. Especially as even moderate grade engineering goes a long way by now.

And the base game still is fun for me. Merely controlling a spaceship, flying around for one or another hour, I just enjoy it. That's the big merit of ED, even after all this time, the mere core of the game is still so enjoyable to me, that I accept all the nonsense they added over the years.

Of course, by now I generally only play three or four hours a week, late at night on weekends. But I guess that's also part of what's keeping the game fresh for me: playing in small doses.