Introduction
I saw an interview with David B. himself in the latest issue of PC Gamer, in which he said they "got Elite: Dangerous (ED) wrong". That got me thinking it was time for my own personal love / hate / want post. For the record I don't think Frontier got it wrong, but I would say there's room for improvement.
What I Love
These are the things that keep me coming back to the game, despite my various complaints. This is the stuff Frontier has absolutely nailed, so kudos to you on every point!
What I Hate
So here's the list of what I hate. In my view, these are all flaws that need correcting. Badly. Yesterday. Please and thank you.
What I Want
Beyond the stuff I love, which I hope never changes, and the stuff I hate, which I hope changes immediately, there's the stuff I want. That is, these are the gameplay additions I think would improve the game.
Conclusion
I'm sure I've forgot stuff, but I think those are the major love / hate / want points. I don't know whether the devs follow these forums or not, but I'm hoping this makes its way to them. What do you say, ED community? Do you agree? Disagree? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
I saw an interview with David B. himself in the latest issue of PC Gamer, in which he said they "got Elite: Dangerous (ED) wrong". That got me thinking it was time for my own personal love / hate / want post. For the record I don't think Frontier got it wrong, but I would say there's room for improvement.
What I Love
These are the things that keep me coming back to the game, despite my various complaints. This is the stuff Frontier has absolutely nailed, so kudos to you on every point!
- Realism. Space actually looks like space, not some silly artist's conception with multi-colored, super-beautiful (and wholly ) nebulae everywhere. Too many space-based games feel like you're flying through perpetual clouds of vibrant color (e.g., Homeworld). ED's space is largely black, its galaxy at proper scale with stars, planets, everything essentially as in the real Milky Way. No other game has ever made me feel like I'm roaming our actual galaxy, and this experience is wonderful. ED is a work of art for this if nothing else.
- The graphics. Beyond artistic direction, the graphics implementation is largely first rate. I was disappointed when they toned down effects and what not in asteroid belts, but they're still pretty good. Dropping out of super-cruise into a field of asteroids as far as the eye can see remains amazing. Again, no other game gives me such a view of our galaxy.
- The audio. The audio is almost perfect. The music is brilliant, most of the sound effects are fantastic, and the implementation seems top notch. I wish the super-cruise didn't sound like a whiny, underpowered blender, but otherwise things are largely great. I particularly love the way audio is affected when the canopy is pierced. Just awesome. Some more ship-specific ambient noises to distinguish things would be a nice add.
- Planetary landings. The planetary landings are amazing. No loss of scale, an incredible wealth of detail, they simply feel right. It isn't some game where you land on a "planet" and drive across it in a few minutes. These are 1:1 scale worlds, highly detailed in their terrain. I'm never going to land on another world in real life; ED fulfills that fantasy better than I'd ever hoped.
- Flight controls. ED is one of those truly rare space sims in which different ships feel and fly like their own things. Too often in games I've jumped from one ship to another with barely a difference. I'm not sure how, but ED manages to give each individual ship a flying personality; each new class is a new experience.
What I Hate
So here's the list of what I hate. In my view, these are all flaws that need correcting. Badly. Yesterday. Please and thank you.
- Interdiction. The mini-game remains rather broken, too many interdictions being unbreakable and lost instantly as the escape vector indicator pops behind you. The frequency tergiversates between "never" and "sucks horribly". With no missions on my log, no cargo in my hold, and no significant Power Play considerations, I regularly get interdicted in every system, at every entrance into super-cruise. I've been interdicted four times in a row across the same 20 Ls of space, struggling to make any headway before the next jackass NPC wastes my time. It's bloody ridiculous! It ruins the experience of a beautiful vast lonely galaxy when it's apparently chock full of griefing NPC's. Being pestered and constantly is what open play is for; give us solo players a slider or something to minimize or disable the ridiculous NPC interdictions.
- Stupid chat. Remember those interdictions I was talking about? They're rendered more obviously stupid when multiple NPCs are chatting me with the same "flavor" text as they dual/triple-interdict me. How hard is it to write more dialogue?! Having three separate NPCs chirp at me instantly upon entering a system about how I have such tasty cargo in my empty hold is beyond stupid.
- Stupid AI. There are a few ways in which the AI is stupid:
- The flight AI can be brain dead. I've popped Anacondas in a Cobra Mk III because they're too dumb to fire back. That feels like clubbing the world's largest baby seal to death. For fifteen minutes.
- The fine system when I'm docking can be quite unfair, as I've been hit plenty of times while I'm slowing for docking by idiot AI security vessels racing along on full boost. They're the ones "driving" like morons, but I'm the one who gets hit with the fine. This really needs fixing.
- Said security vessels are also way too "thin skinned" when it comes to friendly fire. I've learned there are just certain classes of ships I shouldn't be bounty hunting with them around, because as soon as said ships pop chaff my lasers go wild and can hit security vessels. The result is every security vessel in the area pouncing on me instantly and blowing me to bits. Which is just stupid when I'm obviously locked on to a wanted criminal they should be shooting in the first place. The solution seems obvious: ignore incoming fire from any vessel not locked on to you.
- Economic balance. The game is so badly tilted toward combat, economically speaking, that it makes no sense to do anything else. I despise this. I bought ED for so much more. I'd love to explore, I'd love to seek out long and profitable trade routes on my own, but if I ever want to buy a Python I really have no viable choice beyond grinding bounty hunting in a resource extraction zone. Several factors play into this:
- The payout for weeks of (calendar time) scanning and exploration is a ridiculously tiny fraction of what I can make in half an hour bounty hunting in a resource extraction zone. Most stars and planets aren't even worth scanning. Who thinks that's a smart idea in a game that has so much room to explore?!
- You can earn good money through trading, but only if you chance across a really juicy mission or already have enough credits to buy the top-end ships. The Hauler and Type 6 are nice for the newbie, but the next logical ship, the Type 7, is presently useless. You can't avoid broken, instant-interdictions, and one bit of bad luck and you're out millions of insurance and lost cargo. The Type 7 can't protect itself, can't run away, and now can't even use shield cell banks to stay alive until the FSD is ready because of the new heat rules. It's been rendered a thoroughly useless waste of credits.
- Busy work. In the real world it's 2016, and folks can send me money from anywhere in the world via a plethora of options. Yet in the far flung future pilots must often return to the station where they picked up a mission to get paid. Really?! They don't have Western Union or something?! ED is grind-ish enough without this nonsense. It should stop. Period. The same is true of bounties. I have dozens of little bounties in obscure systems on my log that aren't worth the travel time to collect, some that I can't even hope to collect as the system politics have changed. This stuff ought to be redeemable from anywhere.
- Useless ships. The gaps in the ship progression are painfully huge. You start with a Sidewinder, which sucks. You have to grind for a while before you can afford anything better, but the awesome, all-purpose Cobra Mk III is really quite affordable even if outfitting it well takes a while. The ASP is arguably an improvement in some respects, but for straight up combat the next step is really a Federal Dropship, which is a large price jump. NB: This was originally written before the Vulture was introduced, which blunts my point a bit. I can purchase and outfit a very deadly Cobra Mk III for about 9M CR, whereas a Federal Drop Ship with the right bells and whistles is more like 70M CR. And what's next? A Python. The base price may be a "mere" 57M, but you need roughly another 100M for serious outfitting. In short, the "progression" is a series of increasingly nutty quantum leaps. Don't even talk to me about an Anaconda.
What I Want
Beyond the stuff I love, which I hope never changes, and the stuff I hate, which I hope changes immediately, there's the stuff I want. That is, these are the gameplay additions I think would improve the game.
- Ship names. Almost every other space-sim game I've played has had the notion of naming my own ship, but not ED. It seems like a completely ridiculous omission by this point. He never once said "I'm captain James T. Kirk of some unnamed Constitution class vessel." Seriously, get with the program here. Yes, you're going to have people naming their ship ridiculous things, but that's no different than the ridiculous CMDR names.
- Newtonian mechanics. You're almost there with flight assist off, so close it's a painful physics tease, the main thing being a sad speed cap. I realize you're trying to balance realism against game play, but you're already 90% of the way there. Why not let me hurtle along as fast as I want with flight assist off? Make it more "unsafe" somehow if you like to balance it out, but please give me a real Newtonian space simulator; Evochron Mercenary does it beautifully for reference.
- Factions should matter. There are faction-specific ships you can unlock as you rise through the ranks, but few are worth the effort. Sure, everything you do bumps various faction numbers, but none of them seem to mean much. Minor factions could disappear completely from the game, and I don't think I'd even notice. The same is largely true of Power Play, though at least there I get a decent salary for some effort.
- Meaningful power play. My complaints here are similar to the faction system in that it just doesn't matter much. Pledging to one power is basically the same as pledging to any other power, and the resulting mechanics aren't very interesting. It all pretty much boils down to schlepping supplies from HQ to systems for very little reward until you hit rank four. The power play rewards and mechanics largely aren't worth the trouble.
- Location should matter. I often find my time in space more peaceful in a system controlled by a hostile power than I do back home in "friendly" space! I can fly through systems controlled by other Power Play leaders without incident yet be pounced upon constantly in the home system of my faction. This may be just another aspect in which the interdiction system sucks, but the notion of safe space versus hostile space versus anarchist systems is very poorly done. Getting interdicted regularly by another faction's NPC enforcers in the home system of mine is just stupid.
- Ship transport. Part of the reason I stick to a particular region of space and don't wander much is simply because I can't easily move my operations. When trading still made sense I had a Type 7 for hauling, an ASP Explorer for exploration, and my Federal Dropship for combat. There's no way to move those easily from one system to another, which cramps my freedom to explore and/or inhabit different parts of the galaxy. I think the game would benefit greatly from the ability to have those vessels delivered to other stations for me.
- Atmospheric landings. The landings on barren worlds are wonderful as I said earlier, but the incomplete system remains schizoid. The inability to land on planets with atmosphere, or at least fly into the upper atmosphere in the case of gas giants, makes the universe an inconsistent place. It breaks the realism and immersion when sometimes I go into orbital cruise over what is obviously a "real" planet, yet other times drop unceremoniously in front of what's clearly a pretty but non-functional ornament hanging in space.
- Worthwhile missions. Seriously, why am I still getting missions on my board that offer 5k CR in payout?! That's fine when I started playing in a Sidewinder. Hell, I'd have killed for missions that would pay 10k CR back then. But I've ranked up quite a bit; I'm saving for a Python; anything less than 500k CR is just a waste of my time. And frankly almost none of the missions are worthwhile compared to bounty hunting in a resource extraction zone, but that just underscores an earlier point. I want missions that are worth doing.
- Exploration missions. On that same topic, we really should have exploration missions. It could make exploration a viable avenue for earning. If I knew I had a multi-million CR payout waiting for me to make it N-thousand LY out and back again, it would make it economically feasible to explore.
- Ship login. I'd be inclined to do more things in ED if my login were tied to a ship and not a character. I realize it's more "realistic" to be a single character that flies one ship at a time, always forcing me login to where I was last. But this basically punishes exploration, trade runs, and trying to do a variety of things in the game. If you explore seriously you're going to be out in the black for a long time. And while you're there you lose your Power Play standing, you can't trade, you can't do bounty hunting, you're just gone. The same is true if you're out trying to discover (or running) good trade routes. The game would be a lot more fun if I could log into any of my ships wherever they were when I last logged out; it's a long overdue concession to fun.
- Better galaxy map. The galaxy map is nice, but it's not quite what it should be yet. It seems to me like it's missing what I take to be some very basic features. Things like easily seeing the nearest star capable of fuel-scooping, comparing different flight routes, intelligently determining a route that my ship can fly without running out of gas, showing me the nearest systems ripe for exploration, saving my notes on trade routes, looking up and comparing last known commodity prices, etc. A better galaxy map would mean smarter decisions and less hassle playing.
- Cargo storage. If you won't let us log into different ships, then for goodness sake give us cargo storage at stations. You don't give me ships that are acceptably all-in-one vehicles in the first place, so I need a specific ship for mining. And then after painstakingly eking out a few units of platinum or painite, I'm punished by my inability to switch ships until my hold is empty. Mining doesn't pay for beans without getting missions, so being able to hold on to that ore until somebody actually wants it is the only way mining makes economic sense. Remove this silly restriction or give us cargo storage, one of the two.
- MP3 player. Seriously folks, if ever a game cried out for an MP3 player it's ED. The game deliberately confronts you with the prospect of spending huge chunks of your life in the cockpit. As much as I love the in-game music, being able to load up my own playlists and play MP3s from my hard drive should be supported at a bare minimum. That all games don't do this these days is ridiculous.
Conclusion
I'm sure I've forgot stuff, but I think those are the major love / hate / want points. I don't know whether the devs follow these forums or not, but I'm hoping this makes its way to them. What do you say, ED community? Do you agree? Disagree? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
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