What’s an example of something in a video game that you’ve done that you considered meaningful. I’m not slamming you. I’m genuinely curious
Now we're cooking with gas! Finally an interesting question. Let's start with a surprising one and go down the list.
- Overcooked: Not at all an MMO or a space game, but to be successful you need to strategize, collaborate, and learn how to execute well with your friends. It's exceptionally collaborative and within the context of the setting every player's contribution is critical for success, advancement, and reward. Player interaction is the core focus of that game, and that leads to lots of memorable interactions with your friends.
- Half Life and Half Life 2: Not a multiplayer game. No player interaction. It's not even an open-world game. Yet the game pulls you in and gives you the illusion of meaning because of its story, characters, art, music, sound. These are some things Elite does very well. The quality of the mechanics for interacting with other objects in the game is also something both Half Life and Elite do well. They don't pull you out of the experience or interrupt you while you're enjoying it. This is why Engineering in Elite is so frustrating because it takes you away from what Elite does well and sends you on a bizarre scavenger hunt; breaking the illusion. Half-life is an example of a game where every detail is hand-crafted to perfection to keep you in the illusion. For an open world space game like Elite or EVE, that same level of hand-crafted perfection is not necessary and maybe not even desired. Open world space games can have mechanics where players create the world and the experiences themselves, which in many ways is even more compelling and meaningful.
- Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2: Another game that isn't an MMO but was extremely compelling and sold like hotcakes. Once again, player cooperation is essential and sometimes the slightest misstep can hold your whole team back. Players who execute well become heroes, but even they can't play the game alone (except with bots, which are sometimes better than other players but bots just aren't as meaningful or interesting).
- World of Warcraft: Why is it the most popular MMO in history? Everybody played with their friends, and those who had no friends were quickly able to find them in-game and go collaborate with them on adventures. People made life-long personal relationships with total strangers through this game (I made at least 5 very close friends). It struck a perfect balance between being able to go out and explore the world solo and feel alone and free, and later come back together to explore a dungeon or do a raid where every player's contribution is critical. Your skill and execution was often just as important as your gear (which is something Elite did well, and Engineering didn't totally break it but threw a wrench in the system).
- EVE Online: I'll keep it simple because people are tired of hearing that name here. You can't sneeze in that game without having a meaningful interaction. If you never leave Jita and just trade things on the marketplace, you're making your mark on the galaxy and interacting with other players. Of course I've explained several times in this thread why EVE is inaccessible to many people, but maybe just maybe Elite could take a few small ideas from EVE and implement them in a cautious and thoughtful way (colonization is a good start).
- Player Unknown Battlegrounds: Every action determines your success and teamwork is critical unless you play solo. I have so many fond memories of success and failure in this game playing with friends. I think the game does have a shortcoming where after several hundred matches you begin to see the patterns, which is why they add new maps and mechanics to keep it going. The actions of other teams and other players sometimes matter more than your own, so avoiding conflict is preferable, but that's boring so you learn to treat every game as a throwaway and play aggressive. I'm not sure what lesson Elite might take from that.
- Rimworld: If you play ironman and don't load saved games, the first few playthroughs of this game are extremely immersive and you become personally attached to the characters in your colony. The mechanics require them to collaborate for success. They go through all kinds of victories and failures together. They aren't real players, of course, but a lot of the ways they interact or work together are similar to how good multiplayer games work. Interestingly my friends never got into this game but one of them did say "this game looks great but they need to add multiplayer". It would be very difficult to add multiplayer to this game in a way that works well, but again (as I've said several times in this thread) there's that recognition of the compelling mechanics and the hunger to experience them with other people.
For comparison, here are some great games that don't fit on the list: Civilization, Paradox games like Hearts of Iron or Stellaris, DOTA, Kerbal Space Program, Team Fortress 2, War Thunder, FTL. These games are more cerebral.
- DOTA requires extreme player collaboration, coordination, and timing, but unlike Overcooked I'm not getting immersed in the world (as simple as the world of Overcooked is). DOTA is more about adrenaline and finding the right time to execute for victory. The world itself is irrelevant. Overcooked is about running a restaurant and experiencing the follies and successes that come with managing food logistics with your friends in an interesting constrained environment. Hilarious.
- Team Fortress places almost no value on your actions. Yes collaboration is required but it's really a meat grinder game. Fun, but compare it to Left 4 Dead and you'll notice the key difference.
- FTL is also great but you can see through the curtains pretty quickly and realize how much RNG plays into it.
- Kerbal, Civ, and Paradox games are fun mental exercises but difficult to get meaningfully invested in; require no collaboration or multiplayer.
So there you go. That's what's at the top of my Steam playtime list, except for WOW and EVE which I didn't play on steam. Let's not talk about where those might fall on my playtime list.
Edit: I guess I didn't really answer your question directly. I don't really think of any one thing but the whole experience of small things that I did in those games. Working as a commodity broker in Jita in EVE was fun and meaningful even though it was spreadsheets in space. Just the fact that that sort of role can exist and the impact it has on the rest of the game is meaningful. Not exciting, but that's what open-ended games are about. Go chase the excitement, or play a quieter but useful role elsewhere. For overcooked it was just the collection of small interactions with friends and the social side of the game. World of Warcraft was meaningful because of the full experience my guild and friends went through; our moments of triumph and defeat. No single thing. The game just facilitated that experience with its design. Rimworld, moments where you barely survive and the one character that survives manages to make it to the end of the game. Left 4 Dead was more bonding with friends like Overcooked. For PubG there were many difficult situations my friends and I found ourselves in and we managed to get out of some of them. That was memorable and meaningful. The game mechanics and diversity of the map facilitated those experiences. Half-life, although a single player game, is just an unforgettable experience for the reasons I listed. Strangely, I don't really remember many experiences from DOTA, Hearts of Iron, Team Fortress 2, FTL, Kerbal, Civ, and others. Not that those weren't good games, but just a different type of experience.
What are my memories from Elite? Excitement at the initial prospect, confusion as to whether some capability simply wasn't in the game or if I just didn't understand the UI, dismay when I realized most of the ships in game aren't even real players, and annoyance when I realize the game requires me to go do engineering for some NPC I haven't developed any relationship with and can't possibly understand (why do they need me to do these odd tasks that have nothing to do with engineering?). Yep.
Edit 2: Another one I forgot to mention is
Dark and Darker. It's early access and a bit janky, but there are so many different ways to play that game. It's very unique and absolutely the mechanics encourage player interaction. I've had many hilarious, exciting, and memorable moments in that game. You never really know if someone is hostile, or trying to trick you, or if they want to simply be mischievous. Lots of people like to collaborate and work as a team. It's just fun and the gameplay mechanics work out beautifully to facilitate open-ended player interactions with potential danger and reward and triumph.
Leaving aside that both ED's player base and its detractors don't agree at all on what ED should have done differently I think the "still fell short" is to an extent based on a flaw of perception.
What exactly is it that we disagree on as far as game design? On one side, all I see here is "we don't want Elite to be EVE" and a bunch of dismissive comments. On the other side I see a group of players repeatedly and consistently saying "Elite is great and I enjoyed it for a time but why hasn't it evolved in this obvious direction?". I have yet to see one response explaining how any of these commonly proposed improvements would disrupt the existing core mechanics that people already love almost universally. And again I point to system colonization as an example. Former players became absolutely ecstatic when they heard colonization came to the game, and hopeful that finally after all these years the game might be moving in the right direction. Ultimately they were let down by the implementation and the stability of how colonization was rolled out, but that's an execution issue not a design or direction issue.
The game isn't perfect, of course - trivially "ED but without the bugs" would be a better game than ED. But all the broad complaints levelled at ED today - it's buggy, it's got some really weird design decisions, a lot of features are underbaked, the multiplayer is flaky, it's got so much missed potential - were complaints also heard ten years ago.
Perhaps I have a new perspective on bugs after trying Star Citizen, but I don't remember encountering any bugs in Elite other than being disconnected every once in a while (more on some days than others, strangely). Most of Elite's features are not underbaked; just the ones they've added in the past few years. And yes I acknowledge that missed potential was mentioned years ago. I only found out about that after going back and looking through historical posts and old videos. It's nice to know people agree with me but ultimately perplexing why Elite never evolved in the obvious direction with so much consistent feedback from the players.
Despite that, ED did sell pretty well over those ten years.
Indeed it did. Elite did a lot of things nobody else did. But there's a reason we didn't stick around. A lot of people (including my entire list of friends) jumped into this massive "multiplayer" open-world space game after seeing how well the combat and flight mechanics were built, but we were let down when several obvious and commonly requested components were left out. Especially now that it's been 10 years.
where is the competition? ED is a decade old and still basically the only multiplayer spaceship-flying game of its sort out there. SC is stuck in eternal pre-release, a few other attempts failed to get even that far, but barely anyone even tried, even long after ED showed that it could be done.
Exactly! Where?!?! It's not a money issue because Star Citizen and EVE are still going strong. Star Citizen is super beautiful but totally broken and yet it pulls in $100M a year of crowd funding 13 years later. No Man's Sky apparently resurrected itself through a miracle and scratches the itch for some people (I should try it even though I'm the kind of person who sees through dynamic procedural generation pretty quickly).
Star Citizen is the best substitute for people who are looking for (or can put up with) a hyper-micro detailed experience, and EVE is the best substitute for people who don't mind the pager going off at 3AM so they can save the system from destruction. And here is Elite sitting perfectly in the middle right in the sweet spot and FDev refuses to take up the empty space. Again, maybe colonization is the first tiny step toward that goal.
But the "missed potential" is an illusion. Building fun spaceship flying games is hard [1], expensive, and has a limited market.
No no no. Elite has all the hard work done. The core game mechanics are already built and work well. It's expensive to add an FPS to the game, but they did it for some reason. It's not bad to have it, but it doesn't take advantage of the existing mechanics that would work well if you just let the players build more of the in-game assets themselves and drive the economy themselves. They're adding more and more ships because ships sell well (as Star Citizen clearly shows).
If there were even five games in the "MMO(ish) spaceship-flying" genre, no-one would be bothering to criticise ED that much for what it does badly. They'd all be playing the other four which do that stuff better, and the people playing ED would be the ones who prioritise the stuff it does well.
Sure. If some other company makes a game with a galaxy based on our own, at the same scale, with the same appropriate level of detail, I and many others would flock to it. That's why people are talking about Elite and not some other game. Nobody has those core fundamentals so perfectly positioned.
In fact, that's an interesting idea. Can I download the system data from Spansh and EDSM, put it in my own database, re-name the characters/factions and other IP, and then make my own simple UI multiplayer game that does everything people have been requesting for the past decade? I'm not skilled enough to build my own 3D interface or flight model, so I would be missing that important piece, but I could build everything else and find some other way to handle combat and travel. Fun idea. I bet the system data is subject to some legal restriction. FDev did do the work to initially generate the universe. Still, a fun idea.
The problem starts with "set in space". The thing about space is that it's extremely large and extremely empty, which isn't an environment lending itself to gameplay. But take away those components and you've got no real reason to set it in space in the first place
What? That's the most compelling thing about "set in space". There's so much to explore and places to build and resources to find and ways to maneuver. The assets are easy to create relative to other games (unless you go super micro like Star Citizen). Interestingly, there was an old Pirate MMO in 2008:
https://www.mmorpg.com/pirates-of-the-burning-sea It ultimately failed because they had a really bad UI and all kinds of technical problems, but look at a few of the features they were aiming for:
- Port Control | Fight for control of over 80 Caribbean ports.
- Elections and Economy | Get elected as Port Governor or participate in the game's player-driven economy.
Does that sound familiar, anyone? Ring a bell? I was so sad when that game shut down even in its broken state. But at least they dared to dream.
Edit: Actually they came back somehow? I didn't know that.
https://www.burningsea.com/en My old account doesn't seem to exist, but I'll try a new one.
Edit 2: Looks like they reorganized under a non-profit to keep the game running after their only developer had to leave. The game still has players! But the UI is confusing. More confusing that Elite's UI. It makes Elite look great. Good fundamentals, as I've been saying.
