My new player experience (262 hours of play time) - It doesn't have to be this way
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Nice to meet you too! Bye!
It comes up often, huh? Maybe the people are telling you something?
https://steamdb.info/app/359320/charts/#6y
Don't worry I expected to get a bunch of flack for daring to suggest this game could be so much more than it is. I'll be fine.
Just gonna' post this again because I re-watched it and it's SO analogous.Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ZO_Ffa11E
Different genre entirely, but so many space games were made this past decade and none of them really nailed it. Elite is so close. I really just want it to succeed, and my feedback (which I realize will likely be ignored) is given with just the smallest glimmer of hope that maybe this game is heading in the right direction now (starting with colonization, even if totally broken now).
O7
Eve, DayZ, and Elite are some of my favorite games. I have an unhealthy amount of hours in all of them. I enjoy them for what they are and they each provide a different experience. If I want the Eve experience, I play Eve.
Elite is its own vibe.
You complained about not finding any players to fight. What you could have done is asked the community where you can find players to fight. Because there absolutely are places with organic PvP. I spent all of last night having fun fighting players.
You complained that engineering is a waldo scavenger hunt. How is that different from ratting in Eve? Or farming in Albion Online? They all have mindless activities you spend a lot of time doing to collect resources. Even in DayZ you can spend hours gearing up before actually getting into a fight, then get domed, and have to start all over again.
First, thank you for engaging positively. It was interesting pondering your questions.
Again, I'm not saying copy EVE. I'm simply explaining why it was engaging. In my original post I talked about wanting to create refineries because there were none near my system and I saw things being colonized around me, so literally out of my desperation for some kind of player interaction I wanted to make a refinery and extraction system so people could get things they need in an area where they were hard to acquire (it goes back to my old days in Jita). It wasn't because I wanted to see my credit number go up (and I realized early that colonization doesn't really pay anyway and I was fine with that). I wanted to provide that service because I was ABSOLUTELY STARVING for some kind of meaningful player interaction even if it meant just randomly seeing one or two people come in and land at the station I had built to pick up materials. Elite is a multiplayer game after all.
Interestingly I approached Engineering looking specifically for engineers who were part of my tribe. Not for any logical reason, but just because "I'd rather work with my people and help them". Instead there's a tree of "I know a guy" and it didn't draw me in at all. Also Engineering does nothing to promote player interaction. What if I could get engineered items from other players who became engineers themselves and trade with them? Maybe they don't like mining or hunting for rare materials. "Ok I'll go get what you need, and you build the thing for me, and you get to boost your skills, and I get the item I want." Something like that sounds fun. Or maybe if my friends can come in and specialize in certain skills and we try to work together to benefit from each other's strengths. That's what World of Warcraft got right. "We need x healers and x tanks and even better if you've done this raid before." You can't do everything alone, but if you all work together you can be successful. Again... I'm not saying make a copy of WOW. Facilitate player interaction.
YES! And along the way you have no idea who or what you will encounter, and anything can happen, and you must be careful. Other games adjusted their systems to facilitate more of that player interaction. Some of my favorite memories from those types of games are where my team and I got completely destroyed. It certainly felt bad at the time, but I remember them. I remember how clever the other players were and what happened. I'll never forget it. It was meaningful and memorable. I also remember my triumphs in those games. In Elite, what memories do I have? Visiting the black hole, colonizing a system even if it was disappointing when the economy system was bugged. That's all really. Nothing exciting or meaningful happened.
Not exactly. I know I used the DayZ/PubG survival/battleroyale model as a comparison but I'm not looking for DayZ or PubG in space. I did choose Open but not because I wanted to gank or go fight just for the heck of it. I was expecting to encounter other people at least occasionally in some sort of interaction. My favorite memory in EVE is actually sitting in Jita and making trade deals between large suppliers and buyers as a sort of broker. It wasn't fun because "number go up" as I made successful deals. It was fun because I was providing a service to several people that they desperately wanted (a stable supply of items at competitive prices). Who the heck wants to sit in one system and look at spreadsheets all day? Well... almost nobody which is why I was successful at filling that role. But that's the thing... there are so many ways to play EVE that aren't hard-coded in the game. However, the systems that are hard-coded were there to facilitate the player interaction and lots of people were able to find their niche.
Again, I'm not saying copy EVE. I'm simply explaining why it was engaging. In my original post I talked about wanting to create refineries because there were none near my system and I saw things being colonized around me, so literally out of my desperation for some kind of player interaction I wanted to make a refinery and extraction system so people could get things they need in an area where they were hard to acquire (it goes back to my old days in Jita). It wasn't because I wanted to see my credit number go up (and I realized early that colonization doesn't really pay anyway and I was fine with that). I wanted to provide that service because I was ABSOLUTELY STARVING for some kind of meaningful player interaction even if it meant just randomly seeing one or two people come in and land at the station I had built to pick up materials. Elite is a multiplayer game after all.
I'm not quite sure why, but I love mining. I wish I could sell my mined goods to other players that need them, but I'm ok with mining just slightly affecting a system economy. It's fine. I also enjoy the PVE that I tried because it felt like I could at least have some impact on the world around me by helping out one NPC faction or another. The immersion wasn't perfect, but it was engaging enough that I spent some time enjoying it. The problem with engineering is that it's basically a requirement for some activities (even PVE activities). Not a hard requirement but really if you're not engineering you're really holding yourself back, so when I finally stepped out to figure out how it worked I got pulled away from the activities that seemed engaging and thrown into what felt like a wild goose chase to systems and factions and NPCs that I really had no connection to or interest in. Some Engineer requires X bounty vouchers or something and my feeling was "Why? I would rather help my local faction win this civil war and do bounty vouchers for them, but instead I'm half-forced to fly across the galaxy and do the same task for you." It just feels arbitrary. It's not the grind itself that I was avoiding because I had enjoyed plenty of grinding already. It just pulled me out into another grind that I had no personal connection to and none of the characters or factions involved were meaningful to me in any way. Thargoids are another example. I have no interest in them and the game didn't require me to interact with them. I would rather focus on my small role elsewhere in the galaxy. The game didn't allow me to do that.
Interestingly I approached Engineering looking specifically for engineers who were part of my tribe. Not for any logical reason, but just because "I'd rather work with my people and help them". Instead there's a tree of "I know a guy" and it didn't draw me in at all. Also Engineering does nothing to promote player interaction. What if I could get engineered items from other players who became engineers themselves and trade with them? Maybe they don't like mining or hunting for rare materials. "Ok I'll go get what you need, and you build the thing for me, and you get to boost your skills, and I get the item I want." Something like that sounds fun. Or maybe if my friends can come in and specialize in certain skills and we try to work together to benefit from each other's strengths. That's what World of Warcraft got right. "We need x healers and x tanks and even better if you've done this raid before." You can't do everything alone, but if you all work together you can be successful. Again... I'm not saying make a copy of WOW. Facilitate player interaction.
YES! And along the way you have no idea who or what you will encounter, and anything can happen, and you must be careful. Other games adjusted their systems to facilitate more of that player interaction. Some of my favorite memories from those types of games are where my team and I got completely destroyed. It certainly felt bad at the time, but I remember them. I remember how clever the other players were and what happened. I'll never forget it. It was meaningful and memorable. I also remember my triumphs in those games. In Elite, what memories do I have? Visiting the black hole, colonizing a system even if it was disappointing when the economy system was bugged. That's all really. Nothing exciting or meaningful happened.
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You're looking for meaningful emergent interaction with players. Every gaming session is exciting because you never know what you'll run into.
Maybe you come across a comically large amount of player corpses in Stary Sobor. But it's dead silent. Now you're paranoid. Are the bad guys still here? Did they leave? How safe is it to loot the bodies? Should you stash away your goodies first before looting so that you can come back for it later? If the bad guys left, can you track them? Now you're playing out a fully dynamic scenario that wasn't designed by some game developer but organically emerged from players interacting with each other.
As you know, Eve's economy is entirely (well, 99.9%) based on player manufacturing. Every weapon, ship hull, module, etc was at some point manufactured by a player somewhere. So when big wars break out demand actually goes up and people with the resources to do arbitrage make a killing on it. When big alliances go to war you often see innocent players being displaced because they were a small subsidiary of a big alliance and just got caught in the whirlwind of fighting. I once had to smuggle all of my best items out of my home station because a war was headed my way.
I get it. But I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
Games like DayZ and Eve are built from the ground up with emergent player interaction in mind. That's what those games are designed to be. And they have to be designed this way because there are so many ways that emergent player interaction can go wrong. There are so many examples of games that tried and failed because the core design just didn't work.
Elite is not that kind of game. It started out in the 80s as a single player game that used procedural generation to model the milky way galaxy. Today's modern iteration follows the spirit of that game. Multiplayer is sort of... bolted on top. It's just not a core component of the game. It's like a sideshow that allows people to interact with each other if they want to.
There are many things that allude to this fact:
- Peer-to-peer instance architecture. If you actually try to PvP competitively you'll notice a lot of teleporting and other network induced lag.
- There's a Solo game mode that still allows you to affect the galaxy played by people in Open mode.
- None of the markets are player driven and there is no way to transfer credits between players.
- ... and much more.
If you play the game for what it is then it's actually a pretty exceptional experience. There's so much to do and experience that I haven't come close to doing it all despite playing since launch.
I'm not sure how to explain it but there's a "way" to play Elite that I've figured out over the years. It's what works for me. I can see myself going at it for at least another decade this way. Other people found their way. If it clicks for you then it's pretty awesome. But it doesn't click for everyone.
Alright now I understand.
After watching that video, starting from the 12:30 mark it makes sense. The game has not evolved at all since the 1980s. I was completely baffled as to why they haven't used the awesome fundamentals of the game and ramped them up to 11 now that the internet exists. Everything is "bolted on" as you say. Powerplay, colonization, engineering, multiplayer, squads, FPS. Nothing really synergizes. The only thing that has really changed is the graphics and the UI. It might be that the developers set out to just make a fancy looking version of the 1980s game, and multiplayer was an afterthought.
Well that's really quite sad to me, but at least I understand it. It's an extreme version of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'm not saying any of this to disparage the game or the developers. It's a beautiful looking game and certainly if I stumbled on the game in the 80s I would have been excited. It has a lot of great fundamentals that I love, but so much untapped potential.
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I wouldn't say it hasn't evolved. It just evolved in a different direction.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by synergy, but there's definitely synergy in Elite. Engineering synergizes with everything because it's simply an upgrade path that let's you tune ships for specific purposes. Power Play synergizes with careers because it gives you bonuses based on the superpower you choose (so if you mine a lot you might go with a superpower that gives you bonus payouts for mining). And so on.
I think a more pertinent question is whether you actually enjoy doing these things in the game.
For some players (like yourself) it seems that the gameplay mechanic isn't as important as the meaning behind it. Like your example of trading at Jita in Eve. On paper that's actually pretty boring in terms of gameplay... you're just clicking a few buttons and watching numbers go up. But you enjoyed it because it was a player driven economy that you affected in some way. Maybe there's some fun social politics involved too.
But yea multiplayer simply isn't a core component of the game. Not even close. Sort of how No Man's Sky technically has multiplayer but it's not really core to the game. Elite is much deeper in multiplayer than No Man's Sky though.
I think of Elite as more like... cooperative PvE. And PvP is just a sideshow.
Yes but like any single-player game you eventually figure it out and are satisfied with the experience and move on. I think I would have gotten the same level of enjoyment from the 1980 game, but none of the disappointment because I wouldn't have seen "300 billion systems and multiplayer" and expected some sort of grand multiplayer universe to explore. The ~1000? systems total from the 1980 game are enough for a single-player experience like this.
On one hand, it's incredibly misleading to add multiplayer to a game like this. On the other hand, probably 90% of the total copies sold were because people expected some kind of multiplayer. I bought the game in 2015 because my friend wanted to play with him, and 4 other friends did the same thing. And then we tried to do a combat mission together and spent an hour trying to figure out why we were never fighting in the same zone. They would have missed out on a lot of sales if they didn't add multiplayer, as bad as it was (is?).
I assume you can co-op missions and detected signals and combat zones now?
That would suck for me. Cyberpunk is one of my favorite single player games and it's done+dusted for me until the next version comes out. Elite is one of my favorite space games and I'm still playing it since 2015.
I'm also dipping into the bolted on multiplayer elements all the time. I've set up some lucrative fleet carrier trades, fought against players, explored with players, etc. It's not the same as DayZ/Eve but it has its own charm.
It is what it is. I'm happy with it and so are many other people. Could it have been more? Maybe.
Star Citizen has been promising exactly what you're hoping for and they're still in development hell.
I think the reality is that these games are extremely difficult/expensive to build and each space game needs to make some major trade offs. We only have what... like... 5 (?) major space games? Elite, NMS, X4, Eve, and SC. Since 2010? All the rest are either dead or so limited in scope that they don't qualify.
Yep you just gotta create a Wing. You can also create a Squadron for you and your buddies.
There's actually an update to Squadrons that's coming later this year:
Not really. Discounting Dayz mod, the games are the same age, but Dayz gets 55-75k concurrent players. Is that supposed to be bad after 10 years?
I am 75yrs old, have played Elite since it started in 2016 I think it was . Other than a few weeks at the beginning when I joined Mobius for a while I have always played in "Open" I got ganked a few times until I figured out combat. Like most I started on trade until I got enough credits for a Python and then made a fortune from mining. Did all the stuff required to engineer my ships.
Ground out the Federation requirements for the Federal Corvette and never really looked back after that. Went on a few Exploration trips but got bored with the sameness in one ship. When Fleet Carriers were introduced I had enough credits to get one. Best decision I made as it allowed me to really go on an exploration trip with all my ships to avoid boredom and lack of company.
Shortly after that, about 2yrs ago I set out from the bubble on a long term exploration trip to SagX based on exploration and mining for Tritium fuel and other mining goodies. Reached SagX and was finally able to buy the suits and equipment needed for Biological scanning and now I have a couple of FC jumps left to reach Colonia where I shall likely sell most of the 11000 tons minus the tritium of goodies in my hold and see how i have fared with the First Footfall and Bio/Geo finds I have aboard.
Will likely hang around Colonia for a while until I get itchy feet and then probably slowly make my way back to the bubble again from there. Although I am pretty healthy at my age I am not sure I will make it. So, if a few years from now anyone finds a lost unmanned FC called Orlandine that can be my last resting place
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Although piling in the hours the first few years and also having periods where I didn't play at all I now play around 1-2hrs a day. In Combat I am classed Dangerous. I am Elite II in Trade and Elite V in Exploration. I believe that people like the OP have just picked the wrong game. Personally I see EDO as a blank canvas in which the player can create his own story.
If I do eventually make it back to the bubble I look forward to all the wonderful new stuff introduced in the last couple of years to learn. Players calling EDO boring lack imagination to my thinking.
Ground out the Federation requirements for the Federal Corvette and never really looked back after that. Went on a few Exploration trips but got bored with the sameness in one ship. When Fleet Carriers were introduced I had enough credits to get one. Best decision I made as it allowed me to really go on an exploration trip with all my ships to avoid boredom and lack of company.
Shortly after that, about 2yrs ago I set out from the bubble on a long term exploration trip to SagX based on exploration and mining for Tritium fuel and other mining goodies. Reached SagX and was finally able to buy the suits and equipment needed for Biological scanning and now I have a couple of FC jumps left to reach Colonia where I shall likely sell most of the 11000 tons minus the tritium of goodies in my hold and see how i have fared with the First Footfall and Bio/Geo finds I have aboard.
Will likely hang around Colonia for a while until I get itchy feet and then probably slowly make my way back to the bubble again from there. Although I am pretty healthy at my age I am not sure I will make it. So, if a few years from now anyone finds a lost unmanned FC called Orlandine that can be my last resting place
.Although piling in the hours the first few years and also having periods where I didn't play at all I now play around 1-2hrs a day. In Combat I am classed Dangerous. I am Elite II in Trade and Elite V in Exploration. I believe that people like the OP have just picked the wrong game. Personally I see EDO as a blank canvas in which the player can create his own story.
If I do eventually make it back to the bubble I look forward to all the wonderful new stuff introduced in the last couple of years to learn. Players calling EDO boring lack imagination to my thinking.
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Just want to say: you're awesome.I am 75yrs old, have played Elite since it started in 2016 I think it was . Other than a few weeks at the beginning when I joined Mobius for a while I have always played in "Open" I got ganked a few times until I figured out combat. Like most I started on trade until I got enough credits for a Python and then made a fortune from mining. Did all the stuff required to engineer my ships.
Ground out the Federation requirements for the Federal Corvette and never really looked back after that. Went on a few Exploration trips but got bored with the sameness in one ship. When Fleet Carriers were introduced I had enough credits to get one. Best decision I made as it allowed me to really go on an exploration trip with all my ships to avoid boredom and lack of company.
Shortly after that, about 2yrs ago I set out from the bubble on a long term exploration trip to SagX based on exploration and mining for Tritium fuel and other mining goodies. Reached SagX and was finally able to buy the suits and equipment needed for Biological scanning and now I have a couple of FC jumps to Colonia where I shall likely sell most of the 11000 tons minus the tritium of goodies in my hold and see how i have fared with the First Footfall and Bio/Geo finds I have aboard.
Will likely hang around Colonia for a while until I get itchy feet and then probably slowly make my way back to the bubble again from there. Although I am pretty healthy at my age I am not sure I will make it. So, if a few years from now anyone finds a lost unmanned FC called Orlandine that can be my last resting place
Although piling in the hours the first few years and also having periods where I didn't play at all I now play around 1-2hrs a day. In Combat I am classed Dangerous. I am Elite II in Trade and Elite V in Exploration. I believe that people like the OP have just picked the wrong game. Personally I see EDO as a blank canvas in which the player can create his own story.
If I do eventually make it back to the bubble I look forward to all the wonderful new stuff introduced in the last couple of years to learn. Players calling EDO boring lack imagination to my thinking.
I'll keep an eye out for your FC in the bubble!
You can visit any active CG in the open game and you will find players and PvP there, even more than you want, and you will also find out what your ~ 300 hours in the game are worth
Why are you comparing Elite to EVE? It's not correct, it's like comparing Civilization to Half-Life, just because the action takes place on Earth. The only thing they have in common is that the action takes place in space. Elite is a first-person pilot simulator, in EVE you don't control the ship yourself, you just give commands.
Did you build a station with large landing pads and a good supply of the metals needed for colonization? So, a Coriolis, and the supporting infrastructure. (For the commodities which are required in large numbers, nobody will go to medium pads, it'd take too long to load up the same amount. Also, people will always avoid surface settlements when they can. But if you did all that, you should also make sure that the station's data is uploaded to EDDN, especially Inara, because nobody will find it otherwise.
However, even if you do manage to attract customers (personally, I've done my bulk cargo trades at a player colony), chances are good that you won't see anyone yourself, not when they might just be doing it in solo / PG mode out of habit.
If you want player interaction, it's best to ask others where to go. Although if you're not social enough for that, then you can also figure out yourself where players would be attracted to: for starters, a Community Goal is bound to have plenty of players. Then there's always Shinrarta Dezhra, once you have the permit (Elite rank in anything), Engineer systems, and so on.
Oh, one more thing:
There are always carriers with open buy orders for Tritium, with prices set well above the galactic average, so that other players load them up. There are some popular systems where carriers hang out to do this, but you can just look for them on Inara too. The FCOC Discord has people advertising their carriers as well.
And hey, if you want to keep track of where the carriers you helped fuel go to later, you can put a bookmark on them, and if they have a shipyard, you could store a Sidewinder too.
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If you're still around @Linux Kernel , I'd just like to share my perspective. Since I was born in '87 I was too young to experience the Elite series in any of its earlier incarnations, and thus have any nostalgia for them. I started playing Elite Dangerous in late 2022, so I'm not subject to any potential sunk cost fallacies that might arise from being involved since the Kickstarter days. I haven't played any MMOs, my gaming background is more from the Doom/Quake/Half-Life/Serious Sam side of things. I added Elite Dangerous to my Steam wishlist years ago, but only relatively recently did I fancy breaking of out playing classic-style FPS and into space sims. Elite Dangerous was my choice and in retrospect I think it was the right one for me.
The things that attracted me and which have also kept me playing since I started:
1. Scale. Elite Dangerous is the only game I know of that actually lets one fly a proper spaceship around the Milky Way at a 1:1 scale. Space Engine is pretty to look at, but has no gameplay, EVE doesn't let you actually fly your ships, and Star Citizen is a mess due to being in development hell for over a decade.
2. Flight model. With my HOSAS controller setup (what I moved on to since starting with a HOTAS), the complexity of operations, and the choices in modules and engineering, it feels damn close to actually piloting a spacecraft. Each ship feels distinctive in motion. This enhances the experiences of flying and outfitting them.
3. Community. I've had some great times with other players of this game, both online and in meatspace. There are YouTube channels, Discord servers, conventions, and third-party tools and resources that are an excellent supplement to the game itself.
4. Developer support. It was apparently going through a bit of a dry spell right when I started, and it seems like I often heard the refrain that Elite Dangerous was a "dead game". Considering the updates since then and the growth in player numbers, I find this quite funny now. The changes to make Anti-Xeno combat more accessible, the Powerplay rework, the addition of SCO frame shift drives, system colonisation, and the upcoming updates such as Vanguards are all steps in the right direction, generally speaking. They're not perfect and FDev have certainly made some missteps, none of that is enough to outweigh all the things I enjoy about this game.
The things that attracted me and which have also kept me playing since I started:
1. Scale. Elite Dangerous is the only game I know of that actually lets one fly a proper spaceship around the Milky Way at a 1:1 scale. Space Engine is pretty to look at, but has no gameplay, EVE doesn't let you actually fly your ships, and Star Citizen is a mess due to being in development hell for over a decade.
2. Flight model. With my HOSAS controller setup (what I moved on to since starting with a HOTAS), the complexity of operations, and the choices in modules and engineering, it feels damn close to actually piloting a spacecraft. Each ship feels distinctive in motion. This enhances the experiences of flying and outfitting them.
3. Community. I've had some great times with other players of this game, both online and in meatspace. There are YouTube channels, Discord servers, conventions, and third-party tools and resources that are an excellent supplement to the game itself.
4. Developer support. It was apparently going through a bit of a dry spell right when I started, and it seems like I often heard the refrain that Elite Dangerous was a "dead game". Considering the updates since then and the growth in player numbers, I find this quite funny now. The changes to make Anti-Xeno combat more accessible, the Powerplay rework, the addition of SCO frame shift drives, system colonisation, and the upcoming updates such as Vanguards are all steps in the right direction, generally speaking. They're not perfect and FDev have certainly made some missteps, none of that is enough to outweigh all the things I enjoy about this game.