It all begins to make sense now - RE: The current state of things

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
The main problem with your theory is that it implies there's a time Frontier weren't accused of those things.

Betraying their loyal players: offlinegate, before they even released Alpha
Introducing features "no-one" asked for which "don't connect to the rest of the game": powerplay and CQC were widely criticised for this at the time
Releasing without expected features/MVP release: "Hey, what happened to the design from the DDF?" - 1.0 release
Poor communications: the Kickstarter was widely criticised on day 1 for not even having a video with it, just a bit of text.
Microtransactions for cosmetics: there on day 1 [1]
Releasing too early and without particular bug fixes/expected features: pretty much every release.
Releasing too late after extensive delays: also pretty much every release.
Staff turnover: according to the forums of the time, those staff who have since left / moved to other projects were terrible and ruining the game, and certainly didn't play it.

Seriously. Frontier now, Frontier four years ago, Frontier eight years ago. Same company, same vision, same everything ... same forum complaints.

[1] The in-game store, sure, that's newer. You had to buy them on Frontier's website on the basis of a single screenshot and hope they'd look good on your ship afterwards, and everyone complained that they were basic, lacking variety, and not even available for half the ships.
 

m0rl0ck

M
Rubbernuke said:
Its a shame that it took such a massive disaster to prompt FD into action though.
Click to expand...
Have they taken any action tho?
Under extreme pressure, generated by poor reviews, they rolled out patches that, as far as i can tell, havent fixed the most pressing problems in Odyssey and they have changed their PR tactics.
I think they have mostly done this so they can show the shareholders that they are doing something. Shareholders who are no doubt upset that hundreds of millions of dollars of stock value has recently been lost.

They got our money and we got a broken product and an update to the spin, that doesnt sound like a fair trade to me.

Talk is cheap and if the recent patches are improving odysseys major problems, i havent seen it.
 

VR jefranklin18

VR jefranklin18
Rubbernuke said:
Part of me wants to think FD (having what, five CMs for ED?) has learnt the value of tight CM / player relations. FD used to do and be good at it (the Powerplay / dev forum on Discord was good when it was running) and slowly this drained away to nothing, just feeding the other half of me who feels a lot of this is cynical damage control from upper management.

For a lot of people (probably including me now, sadly) the damage has been done and EDs magic has truly died....which is sad. FD need to get out of this mindset of sugar rush gameplay that is already stale and fill in the six years of placeholder they themselves made. In the long run making the placeholders 'real' will do far more good, and can be done without massive upheaval.
Click to expand...
I've just seen it too many times over the last 6 years with Frontier. They have zero credibility with me when it comes improvements in communications - it'll be better for a period of time before dropping off again (my bet clearly being after the console launch as they need to make the PS4/Xbox players wanted). They now have zero credibility with me for the long term vision of ED (it had been teetering on the edge for ages) and the gulf of difference between trailer footage and what is actually in game does leave me severe doubts in other areas.

Unlike the majority, I do not blame the shareholders - an institutional investor with a diversified portfolio is not going to give a rats whether ED has FPS or not*. It is the board (granted yes they hold shares as well) and the game director that is at fault for where we are.

* Interestingly the Rogue Trader video linked in another thread highlighted some thing of interest: Braben has the largest shareholding (31%) but one of the institutional investors has been buying up and with them and the other institutional investors (plus 10cent), they have just about a large enough holding to shake things up in the boardroom should they want to
 
Last edited:

Riverside

Riverside
Whether it's true or not I couldn't really say but I do get the impression from the Odd launch that the people working on the user interfaces and lighting in particular don't have a complete understanding of how to modify the existing ones and that in trying to improve the situation in a way that's compliant with the game designers' and producers' requests a lot of stuff no longer matches the well established design language and aesthetic.

I'm sure Frontier (the company) will recover from this, but it does currently look like 'the golden era' of ED has passed.

Still, Onwards & Upwards, albeit with fingers crossed ;)
 

Raliel

Raliel
I am one who feels cheated by the whole debacle. I paid extra to Alpha test, and we were constantly assured that what we saw in Alpha was not the final version. Then we get the so called final version and it is more broken than Alpha. All we got for helping was a suit skin set that everyone who pre-ordered got anyway. The lighting is very, very broken, gameplay is broken much of the time, high-end computers suffer more than mid-range in FPS due to the game not being optimized properly. The new gameplay is generally ten or more years behind any other game. Lots of small tweaks to things that are not really needed at the cost of seriously fixing the problems that are inherent in the coding. I love the game, and love what "space legs" adds to the game, but SERIOUSLY please be more honest about the true issues (the fact that they have had to disable a whole bunch of lighting on textures to deal with the fact that they now have a system that cannot handle the old lighting nor even the new)
 

simulacrae

simulacrae
5ds0ko.jpg
 

Kestrel1

Kestrel1
Ian Doncaster said:
Seriously. Frontier now, Frontier four years ago, Frontier eight years ago. Same company, same vision, same everything ... same forum complaints.
Click to expand...
Yep. I don't post in Elite communities often, but I read a lot. It's always the same.

The impression I get from all of these failed features (CQC, PowerPlay, FPS) is they have big ambitions but can't quite reach it... CQC could be really fun. PowerPlay could be engaging. FPS could be mind blowing. The only thing that's frustrating to me is these features end up being abandoned; the ambition never fully realized. They have an ambitious idea, ship an MVP, the players go "meh", and they just abandon it. Imagine if all of the effort that went into CQC, PowerPlay, and FPS went into the things that (IMO!) worked out quite nicely. Mining improvements, SLFs, fleet carriers, those voice-over dialogue mystery POI things, etc.

I disagree slightly with your assessment though. Odyssey did have one major difference from other releases. The magnitude of the performance issues and bugs. I mean it's really bad. It's so bad that it's going to take a long while to fix.

The interface overhaul is a perfect example: selling one-of-a-kind modules by default when refitting. I mean, damn. Elite has shipped bugs before, sure, but this is an absolutely mind-blowing oversight IMO. In my view that's the worst bug of the entire release. It's caused people to lose one-of-a-kind items that they've had for years. Items they've grinded hard for. It's so inexcusable that even I, a lurker, comes out to post about it.
 

khalismur

K
dm0815 said:
What a coincidence. I've just read an article on the Factorio blog and how the team manages their code.



And they wrote something about UI as well.
Click to expand...
Oh common, you can't compare Factorio devs level of opennes and polish to ED. Granted, Factorio's codebase is considerably less complex than ED, but the amount of optimization, polish and communication Wube does is very rare.
Jibroni Gibironi said:
I think he's referring to Star Citizen since he referred to this "redacted" reference as also being a space game with FPS gameplay.
Click to expand...
Be careful. Threads are being locked by the bare mention of [REDACTED] lately. It's no surprise, as EDO is much more comparable to [REDACTED] than Horizons, I wonder which one will be ready for release first.
 

Chorda

Chorda
CMDR Harada said:
Why an FPS : Again, what's popular ? To people who don't play games, The FPS genre. Therefore, Elite needed an FPS so it could 'compete' and 'expand it's market share'. Plus, [REDACTED] was doing one, so FDev needed one too. This was a 'suit' decision. Discussions about 'space-legs' have been going on for years.. but most of them concerned being able to explore your ship, the station, or the local planet flora/fauna. An FPS was NOT the primary purpose for 'space legs'.
Click to expand...
Isn't it more likely that the FPS angle was a natural extension of the game's ship to ship combat zones, and provided the obvious and necessary gameplay that FDev had been quite transparent was required in order for them to justify development time and cost for space legs? I was surprised we got working stealth mechanics along with it, so does that mean there was some board member who had a stalk on for the Thief games and demanded that market share be exploited too? Odyssey is not this cynical bolt-on many would characterise it as; there's a huge amount of attention to detail, and yes, sadly much of that was lost on us due to a flawed and hopelessly buggy launch. But it's still there, and shows a certain love and passion on the part of the devs. I don't see it as simply a soulless cash grab.

CMDR Harada said:
DB isn't in charge anymore. He's chained to the board of directors, who in turn are slaves to profit/loss statements generated in the depths of Finance ( the last layer of Hell, into which even Dante dared not venture ).
Click to expand...

CMDR Harada said:
And the list goes on. FDev is corporate now. It's been consumed by Pod People, who look and talk like gamers, but are in reality soul-less minions who'd prefer to curl up with a good spreadsheet and review deferred tax annuity regulations.
Click to expand...

A lot of assumptions about DB throughout here. His passion lies with the code and much less with the gameplay, it always has. He's talked at length about how thrilling it was to go through the '84 assembly and eliminate 10 bytes of wasted space so that they could shoe-horn in stuff like fuel scoops. That's what gets his blood pumping. Originally they (he and Ian Bell) wanted 2 to the power 48 galaxies before Acorn wisely told them that was going expose the inherently shallow nature of this procedural generation, and insisted they cut it down to 8! The focus on generative code is also what produced 'lore' like edible poets and predatory arts graduates; randomizations borne of a love of procedural content, that have since gained a certain level of affection and nostalgia with the community. On the whole, while I agree with you that Elite has become something of a multi-headed mess of half-developed features, and is certainly suffering a lack of integrity due to shareholder obligations, I think it's still a stretch to claim this is all down to evil corporate overlords.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom