Is this game a grind? An attempt to answer...

[Petersen]

Where are the rides? The rides are exactly the same
In Wow you pick up a quest to kill a certain number of dwarfs and get credits
In Elite you pick up a quest to kill a certain number of pirates and get credits
-> theme park ride

In Wow you pick up a quest to deliver 10 duck eggs to a NPC
In Elite you pick up a quest to deliver 10 food canisters to a NPC
-> theme park ride

In WoW you grind for better gear
In Elite you grind for better gear

and somehow you think these games are in different genres? lol
Elite is 100% theme park like Wow, pure and simple

In Wow you can do different things, no one forces you what to do next. Queue up for PvP, go crafting, go exploring, take missions whereever you want. How is that not "open world"?
That graph is nonsense.

It´s sickening how misused the term open world is. In fact everything that is not a damn linear 2D side scroller is basically open world nowawdays, that doesn´t make it a sandbox though. Levels have nothing to do with it whatsoever.

Grinding for better gear isn't a ride. It's usually the incentive to ride the rides. While questing might be able to be considered a 'ride', it's a pretty awful one (and the only one Elite has? Yes, clearly Elite is "as theme park as it gets") in both Elite and WoW. PvP scenarios (Battle Grounds), Raiding, Dungeons, these are the worthwhile rides in WoW. They also have no analog in Elite.

I never said WoW wasn't open world. And those things you describe as justification for calling it that have nothing to do with it being open world.

Also, your hyperbole w.r.t. the commonality of open world games is incredibly ignorant and demonstrates an extremely shallow knowledge of current games.

 

[kreuzbichler]

Grinding for better gear isn't a ride. It's usually the incentive to ride the rides. While questing might be able to be considered a 'ride', it's a pretty awful one (and the only one Elite has? Yes, clearly Elite is "as theme park as it gets") in both Elite and WoW. PvP scenarios (Battle Grounds), Raiding, Dungeons, these are the worthwhile rides in WoW. They also have no analog in Elite.

I never said WoW wasn't open world. And those things you describe as justification for calling it that have nothing to do with it being open world.

Also, your hyperbole w.r.t. the commonality of open world games is incredibly ignorant and demonstrates an extremely shallow knowledge of current games.

what´s your point?
I complained about the graph showing WOW as polar opposite of Elite and pointed out why that is nonsense. They belong at exactly the same spot on the graph.
Theme Park is no polar opposite of Open World.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

Theme Park is no polar opposite of Open World.

In a themepark game I am restricted to the areas I can go, due to level requirements, or other things I need to 'unlock'. I start in a level 1-5 area, and progress to a level 6-10 area.

In an openworld I can go anywhere I want, whenever I want.

Are those not opposite designs?

(Of course others definition of themepark and openworld, may differ - but those are the definitions I used for the graph).

The gameplay you are talking about i.e. "The Rides" fit on the other tangent - "Progress" to "Emergent Gameplay". One axis refers to the type of world; Open or Locked. The other axis refers to type of gameplay. Overly simplistic maybe - but it's there to illustrate my own personal perspective, nothing more. I will perhaps edit the graph so that it says "Level Based World" as the polar opposite of "Open world".

 

[Petersen]

what´s your point?
I complained about the graph showing WOW as polar opposite of Elite and pointed out why that is nonsense. They belong at exactly the same spot on the graph.
Theme Park is no polar opposite of Open World.

So basically, we agree, but you're being a nerf about it. Maybe if you'd actually bothered to read my first response, you'd have realized that.

In a themepark game I am restricted to the areas I can go, due to level requirements, or other things I need to 'unlock'. I start in a level 1-5 area, and progress to a level 6-10 area.

Here's where you're going wrong. That's not really what the "theme park" descriptor means. That's more "on rails" (which are also not mutually exclusive with theme park, but tends to oppose open world only in the strictest terms of 'open'). Theme park means more there are certain activities (rides) that the game provides and you can really only do those handful of things (i.e. WoW, Battle Grounds, Dungeons, Raids, a small couple outdoor events, seasonal events, and relatively recently pet battling), and that's really all you can do.

Theme Park is opposed to Sandbox (not open-world. As seen with WoW, it's obviously open-world, but it's also clearly theme-park), as explained before. The latter is a game where you are given tools and an environment, and you affect that environment. But I'm sure somewhere there's games the blur even this line. That's one of the brilliant things about games: any time you want to draw some clear distinguishing lines, some game can come along and take the best (or in some cases worst) parts of both and become a whole new thing!

As for open world being "go anywhere I want, whenever I want", I'm not entirely certain that's a good definition. I think most people use the term to mean something like: "If for all (or very nearly all) points A and B, you can walk from point A to point B, then it is open world." Or perhaps it's is (or originally was) a term to distinguish between the level-based design of games like Sonic and Mario.

 

[Daffan]

The game is a grind

The best way to "win" is

Play solo, grind npcs and trades until your eyes bleed. You win every CG/Soon to be Powerplay merits just by grinding npcs/trades in solo.

If you like competition in games, the way to win is solo grinding in Elite.

No skill or emergent gameplay involved really.

 

[Portent]

People keep talking about Elite being a grind. Other people keep saying "all games are a grind", and others still say, "there's no such thing as a grind". I feel there is so much misunderstanding on the issue - so I attempted to illustrate my take own the matter.

http://i.imgur.com/1CL05gc.jpg

I believe that a grind is anything that you are not enjoying - nothing to do with whether there is progression or not.
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Any enjoyable game is not a grind, and if you get some sort of progression out of it then that's icing on the cake.
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I love your graphic and the presentation is excellent but unfortunately I think you've got the fundamentals wrong in the first sentence.
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However, for me personally, at the moment I have a T7 and am trying to make enough cash to get to a T9 so in my opinion I'm grinding the game to make the cash (because the effort I'm making is outweighing my enjoyment of the game). But, when I swap into my Cobra (for exploration) or Viper (for combat) I'm enjoying myself so much more in the same game but it doesn't feel like a grind (so its not - but I'm still progressing in terms of credits earned, combat rank and exploration rank) - It's going to take me longer to get there but I'm enjoying the experience so much more.
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I think whether its a grind or not is very simply tied to whether each person considers their effort a good use of their quality time.
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But that's just me.

 

[shadragon]

The release has been announced, but the date hasn't.

It's available on Steam for pre-purchase.

 

[B33 ENN]

I believe that a grind is anything that you are not enjoying... Any enjoyable game is not a grind ...at the moment I have a T7 and am trying to make enough cash to get to a T9 so in my opinion I'm grinding the game to make the cash (because the effort I'm making is outweighing my enjoyment of the game). But, when I swap into my Cobra (for exploration) or Viper (for combat) I'm enjoying myself so much more in the same game but it doesn't feel like a grind (so its not - but I'm still progressing in terms of credits earned, combat rank and exploration rank) - It's going to take me longer to get there but I'm enjoying the experience so much more.

That's what I've been saying myself. All games have repetitive mechanics, with tasks based on retrieve/deliver and search/destroy. However, it's about having fun while doing them. The problem in Elite is, in certain activities, like trading, exploring and mining, the fun evaporates as fast as the novelty wears off.

The mechanics of those activities are unchallenging, and soon you are doing them for the credits rather than for their own sake. Once that happens, most players default to the minimum grind/maximum return activity of trading and drop the exploring and mining. The only activity in the game that has balance of fun and effort, challenge and risk, is combat.

If there was a more dynamic market, with more colour and variation, influenced by player activity, then trading would be more interesting. For example, as a rare specialist, would love to see my bringing exotic goods from far flung places to my local system have some sort of impact to make me valuable to the local faction, and see it improve its popularity and prosperity.

If I decided to explore, I'd like to see the same benefit of selling the information for high rewards, but also have to balance that with some risks and challenges of venturing into the unknown. I'd like the activity of exploring to require some skills in piloting, deduction and investigation, beyond just press a button and point at object.

 

[Ekar]

I don't yet see the innovation talked about in interviews like this:

http://www.pcgamer.com/david-braben-on-the-ambitious-future-of-elite-dangerous/

My hope is that it's a financial pressure that has re-ordered Frontier's priorities to get the game out, and before Star Citizen, and then later start to replace the simplistic mechanics with more sophisticated techniques.
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Reading that stuff again, it does sound like another game.

You might get the occasional gold rush, which changes the status of a particular place. Players will be running in to try and get some of the gold that's been discovered in some outlying system. But what else will happen is that a whole raft of other things will be in demand. The need for food and equipment will skyrocket.

There are also things that can turn into missions. If you come across a shipwreck, there could be a lot of things behind it. You could search it and find something interesting, but it might also be a trap. Or it might be that there's something very bad indeed there, whether it's a disease that later gets spread, or something that's a threat to your ship. But you won't know which one of those it is without investigating.

A load of players will get together and all buy food at the same time to drive the price up or down and manipulate the stock market. So we'll be putting in automated mission generation that will trigger when that happens. That feels natural. There will be advantages to co-operating with other players to break the system and mess with the stock markets.

You can set a filter to say you only want to go through systems that have a reasonable level of law enforcement, so there's less chance of being attacked. But that might mean that your route ends up being longer.

These may seem like traditional single-player missions, but they can quite easily involve other players. You can contact your friends and say that this is going to be really hard, can you help me with this? And you can share the spoils once it's done. So there are official missions, but you might also get a message from another player asking for help escorting a ship through dangerous territory

The emergent missions you stumble into while exploring are the most fun, when something comes up that you can take advantage of. That can be very exciting.

edit: I notice the theme that most of the stuff talked about here relates to possibilities of emergent gameplay (relating back to the OP).