I tried to warn the Steam fanboys who play ED already that this would happen. Steam is ADHD central and unless games lead you by the hand or use three buttons they very quickly get panned. You get one chance to make a good first impression. People who are stuck to Steam also don't know that ED was released months ago so they think 2000 players is all it has....
I think dismissing the complaints regarding ED as people needing to be "led by the hand" is intentionally disingenuous.
The game is relatively simple, excluding a few niche aspects such as the docking mechanics most of it also falls far more on the side of being an arcade game than simulator. The trading system is child's play compared to certain more heavily developed space-themed games, not to mention entirely NPC based, and the PvE elements revolve almost entirely around partially broken missions and sitting in a RES with a never ending stream of exceptionally dull NPCs to kill.
Even FD's attempts at livening up the game, such as Lugh, turned into offline farm-fests that were little more than glorified RES sites better done in solo mode than via online play and required little/no teamwork.
This might sound overly harsh for a game that was developed on a very limited budget and in a short time period: but it isn't being marketed as early access, and it certainly isn't being sold at that price point. So I cannot blame people for giving the game poor reviews.
People also seem to be cherry picking the complaints that are evidently poorly written, here are a few excerpts which hold somewhat more validity:
Steam Reviews said:
can players influence things, yes they can i wont say you cant... but the only way to truly have any impact is if you align yourself with hundreds of other players who want to do repetative missions over and over again and again to just ajust a systems government from one side to the other (...) And thats if it changes at all, as the devs. have pointed out several bugs in the regiem change and market/economic properties
the tutorials (if they can be called that) seemed to me more like a haphazardly put together series of equally confusing instructions that dont really tell you how to play, or what each button does. I learned via trial and error, and a good 45 min rearanging and organizing and reading and looking over my control key bindings.
this game is Filled with many bugs, and very confusing and just not working at times (...) Overall: ATM, not worth 60$, wait till a sale, or wait till there are several patches made to the game.
You just payed 70$ to play this game but after waiting for installation and downloading, you should probably take an hour to configure your controls, then another 2 hours to google how to do everything because, you know, game doesn't tell you ♥♥♥♥ about it.
I spent a few hours trying to find somthing to do. I traveled to different systems and I could not find anything interesting to do. You'd think this would be more than a sparse sandbox with it's huge galaxy, but that is what this is... sparse sandbox.
Why this game is a multiplayer I dont know!!! Its another single player with a chat room. (...) Only thing this game has going for it is graphics, great job.. yea
As it is, the game is very much lacking in actual content. It is no where near worth the price of $60.
And this is the reason why i stop playing after a few hours: There is absolutely no Player trading in game not with items or credits. (...) Addition: Dropping stuff in space is not player trading.
I used to have slightly more sympathy for FD, in the belief that they'd been rushed to release and the idea that this was an MMO was a miscommunication. It's certainly presented
like a sandbox MMO, but outside of third party reviews they go to great lengths not to explicitly define it as such on the ED website.
That sympathy has since dissolved:
As far as I'm concerned either their intent was to release an MMO, but they screwed up due to lack of experience with the genre, or they knew full well this was a single player game and tacked on an "MMO" label to increase sales and hashed together a few poorly-implemented multi-player functions in order to justify it. Oh yeah, and then didn't deliver on offline mode because "background simulation".
When was the last time that background sim excuse was used to justify DRM? Oh yeah, Sim City, so how come
EA don't get away with it but FD do?
