My biggest disappointment.

[Rlie]

I’ve been a huge Parkan fan when I was younger. Pax imperia, space rangers were decent games, but nothing will drive you into the feeling of sitting in a ship like space simulators. Wing commander, parkan, “X” series. But with years I realized that space simulator games are dying, I saw the whole franchise consists of, again, “x”, forgotten “freelancer” and that’s pretty much it.
And then I saw Elite Dangerous couple of years ago. My father told me he used to play the old one, he was speaking of a magnificent time he had playing. I watched a couple of trailers, gameplay videos, letsplays. I was amazed.
Truly speaking, Elite Dangerous is still one of my favorite games. It sure is. Me and my brother were dreaming about cooperating, exploring, fighting, finding something new in deep space, we are fond of scientific researches about space and were blasted out by new Elite.
And I absolutely love to play it still, no matter what. I do see some problems with balance and stuff, but no other games could bring me these emotions and I’ve never been that close to my favorite sci-fi series like Babylon 5, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and I’m so thankful that Elite Dangerous exists. Frontier Dev., thank you so much.
Just try to imagine the feeling I had when I saw adv about multi-crew...
I bought season pass immediately and then I bought one to my brother and I was like “stop doing anything you are doing right now, we got a whole universe to explore”
We went out to space, were delighted like kids trying to find out what could be better than this game.
But then came the understanding. We went to explore. He got nothing. Missions? Nope. Trading? Guess what. Engineering? Wrong answer. Scarab exploring???...no..
This is the biggest disappointment I had for a long time. I do love the game, but..how could that happen?

 

[IndigoWyrd]

I believe the phrase used was “If you use it, we’ll develop it more.”

This created a Catch-22: Multi-Crew is still spotty at times. There is also little benefit for the crew person. Who wants to put their game-time in for mere fractional rewards? Or no rewards at all?

So people don’t much use it, thus little has gone into further developing it, leading to fewer people using it... rinse and repeat.

 

[Trollymctrollerson]

Sounds like perfect logic to me. " here you go guys, abuse yourselves with our half baked feature to prove it's existence is worthwhile. If enough of you suffer long enough, we will take a look at it... after tea of course."

 

[krylite]

But then came the understanding. We went to explore. He got nothing. Missions? Nope. Trading? Guess what. Engineering? Wrong answer. Scarab exploring???...no..
This is the biggest disappointment I had for a long time. I do love the game, but..how could that happen?

I think the answer is rooted in realistic concerns and limitations. The tech isn't just there for a game to have an ultimate experience at this magnitude of scope of billions of stars especially the resources and financial backing to pull it off. It's still a long ways off from the holodeck experiences of TNG. Look at any other game out there and seriously ascertain their game world scope limitations, and how most games are illusions hidden in a level-design limited engine structure compared to the unprecedented ambition of ED's higher precision level of star system and galactic modeling. Then there are the marketing fibs of ponzis like CIG-land SC that claimed to be able to sim everything with more "backing" sometime in the "future" which I think contributed to unrealistic expectations of ED (and Frontier) by comparison. I think Frontier and FD will eventually continue to pioneer and expand on the leading edge with ED as tech and resources become more available and affordable to do so but realistically it's going to take years or even decades more imo to even approach the more ambitious sci-fi world game dreams.

(and assuming this isn't another disguised subtle troll and implication thread to bash ED, 3.3 now has a lot more discovery features you could try out if you haven't done so already. And I disagree with dismissing missions with one word as ED missions had been worked on (chained missions, etc.) and still far more involved and stable than SC)