No Man's Sky recent success is good sign for Elite and future Space games/sims

[Dizzy B High]

I've played both ED and NMS quite extensively.

They are space games, set in massive universes, pointlessly big to be honest.

You can compare stuff all day long it does not make one game better than an other outright, it very much depends on the person playing it.

I could say a car is better than a bike, because it has an engine and can go faster, the bike rider can say that a bike is better because they can go down small paths in a forest which a car can't.
I know a lot of people who own both because each one has its own advantages and disadvantages, and they like the option to do different things.

It all depends on what you feel like doing, if any of the games were as great and fantastic as people claim them to be then why not go play them instead of arguing on here.
Ill tell you why, arguing on here gives people as much enjoyment as playing games does, doing the same thing all the time gets quite boring, people need variety.

Can we accept that people are different, people like different things at different times depending on their mood.

There is no this is better than this, it's all subjective you can argue your point all you like it does not make you universally right or wrong.

Trying to shut down and ridicule people because they think different to you is an exercise in futility.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I think I'm going to go Uncle, and respond from now on how it amazes me that NMS as a cartoon game needed so many developers. Their artwork surely must be done by toddles with crayons who are payed with biscuits, who also double up as the developers on the flight simulation which is as sophisticated as holding a paper plane in the air going: Neeeyoooow!

It's dishonest, but fun

 

[Dizzy B High]

I think I'm going to go Uncle, and respond from now on how it amazes me that NMS as a cartoon game needed so many developers. Their artwork surely must be done by toddles with crayons who are payed with biscuits, who also double up as the developers on the flight simulation which is as sophisticated as holding a paper plane in the air going: Neeeyoooow!

It's dishonest, but fun

So many Developers, Hello Games has a team of 16, 4 of which are artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Games

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

So many Developers, Hello Games has a team of 16, 4 of which are artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Games

I'm no good at this.

I already feel bad for slagging them off [sad]

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I'm no good at this.

I already feel bad for slagging them off [sad]

The game is pretty good, played a bit last night, but you can tell it's been made by a small team.

 

[M00ka]

So many Developers, Hello Games has a team of 16, 4 of which are artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Games

That can't be right. In this very thread, experts (they must be because they told us that) have stated categorically that the total workforce for HG is 15, oh wait, nope a couple swore on a stack of bibles it was 10, hell I don't know and don't really care

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

That can't be right. In this very thread, experts (they must be because they told us that) have stated categorically that the total workforce for HG is 15, oh wait, nope a couple swore on a stack of bibles it was 10, hell I don't know and don't really care

I thought it was -10 and that FDev should have been able to be made with 0 devs if NMS can be made with -10 devs.

 

[M00ka]

I thought it was -10 and that FDev should have been able to be made with 0 devs if NMS can be made with -10 devs.

Well there was that one guy who swore black and blue that the entire dev team was actually one pimply faced kid with a Pentium 1 in his parents basement ….

 

[CMDR Valleys]

No. it doesn't work like that. You're saying that having no terrain manipulation makes ED superior ? Also no space legs makes ED superior ? Also no base building mkes ED superior ? No crafting makes ED superior ? No procedural generation creatures and plants makes ED superior ? No relics to be dug out from the terrain makes ED superior ?
So a VW Golf not having a Lambo's speed and acceleration or luxury interior makes the Golf superior ?



So you're gonna pretend the planetary exploration doesn't count ? It counts and overcompensates for the lack of astronomical accuracy. It wipes the floor with ED planetary content which is just ridiculous at something like 0.0000000001% of NMS's planetary content waiting to be explored.
You can't ignore it, Horizons was made to give players planets to explore. That's just insane given the lack of stuff to be found anywhere !!!

I agree with you about the planet variety, and content available to NMS. Been playing for awhile but building a base is far more interesting than going out to the the Guardian ruins, or play around with the Thorgiod story line atm. Because of the lack of in game tools ito simply inaccessible to causal players.

NMS on contrast give you just enough progression to go over that hill, or speak to that NPC. Its procedural without constraints and doesn’t take itself too seriously which is good for causal gaming. ED on the other hand is going down the unforgiving and detailed path. The thought of going out to the ruins or the Thorgiod bases and collecting the cargo then loosing it too a small mistake makes death an all or nothing affair with hour and days of gameplay lost to a single decision and the ‘improved’ C&P system that they created as a result swept any casualness aside.

Despite all the really bad design decisions form ED for the last 2 years which has littered the game with poorly implemented features eg Power Play, Plantry landing content and multi crew (tbh they focused on getting JPE launched alongside the film), NMS is no replacement for ED when it comes to ship to ship combat. Hopefully they are given the time to produce some compelling planet side content this time around that leaves you with the same ‘one more hill’ feeling you get from NMS and crucially for Elite as a game that ‘I’ll pay for one more season feeling’. As it stands ED simply didnt deliver on Horizons theres no real content planet side apart from the non interactable bases, or skimmer bait we have at the moment.

Here’s hoping for Q4... think I wrote that line before somewhere.....

Fly safe cmdr’s ED has some competition which can only be a good thing. FD pick up the pace guys and gals

 

[babelfisch]

Bolded portion: This is only true if your customers are objectively correct. This doesn't actually happen often, and when it does, it tends to be pretty unanimous. The rest of the time, it's noise based on subjective opinion, and nothing more. If your product is good, and it is something that has demand, then you don't really need to pay the noise much mind at all, nor should you. If you did as you claim you would, you would get nothing else done, and likely not even that, because you couldn't keep up with it.

On topic: I haven't looked at recent numbers, but if NMS has truly lost 50% of it's peak and/or concurrent players week over week this soon after Next, that is really bad news. That's something that should be expected after 1-2 months, not one week. Time will tell the truth of the matter, but there are a number of people on this forum with big mouths that might have to find a way to accept that maybe Frontier does know what they are doing, and that they are going about this the right way.

I do still stand by what I said earlier though, because it's hard to argue against it at this point in the game's development. More planet types to land on please, as a priority item.

Riôt

Sorry but the steam charts part is nonsense. It's just natural that the peak numbers are higher just after the update gets deployed because everyone wants to try it as soon as possible. The same happens with ED updates, newly released games, etc.
You are of course right that real trends will only be visible after a few months and I'd say that looking at peak numbers is generally a bad idea. Looking at the average concurrent stats tells us way more about the active player base and even that can be flawed. Personally I expect that both games will have more or less the same amount of active players once the Q4 updates drops and I think it's good when we have more than one healthy space game with a good future. It gives people something to do when they are bored after spending hundreds of hours with one game.

 

[cheesenbiscuits]

Shooting rocks and inventory management for what appears to be a large portion of the game has little interest with me.
I'm talking about NMS(awkward)

 

[M00ka]

Shooting rocks and inventory management for what appears to be a large portion of the game has little interest with me.
I'm talking about NMS(awkward)

Be careful, in NMS that is called emergent gameplay and is to be lauded. However in Elite it is called grind and a reason to post endless rants.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Shooting rocks and inventory management for what appears to be a large portion of the game has little interest with me.
I'm talking about NMS(awkward)

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Fun!

 

[Brian of Ardagh]

The game is pretty good, played a bit last night, but you can tell it's been made by a small team.

I have to agree with this. I have a creative save and decided to try my hand at base building, underground. Very buggy, the ground around my base kept changing, my base computer was inside the rock, a second exit I made ended up with it's opening on top of one of my structures and the other exit/entrance has 2 openings up top. If I enter one opening from up top I make it to the base, if I exit from the same hole I end up exiting at a different opening. The other odd thing is that part of my base is inside a trading post up above even though it's many hundreds of feet away when you are on the surface. I get a notice that I've entered the trading post whilst I'm hundreds of feet away. I blew out a hole above my base just to prove I'm nowhere near the base but I still get the notice, so part of my base can't be modified.

I have to say it is a lot of fun to use the base building tools in creative mode. It's extremely unrealistic if you want it to be but it is fun. I've built ramps all over the place into the sky, 1000s of feet, with multiple glass bottom platforms and a building at the top. One ramp extends all the way over and down to the landing pad of the trading post. Another platform extends over a floating plateau of rock with a ramp down so I can get to it without flying. While a bunch of floating plateaus is weird enough there are many non-avian animals living on it, not sure how they could survive there seeing as there's no water or food but hey, it's all fantasy.

 

[Barking_Mad]

That would be extremely difficult to implement. Imagine, you are in the middle of the interdiction mini-game and a damn dialogue box pops up giving you a series of phrases to say to the NPC. Yep that would work. Or we wait until you have dropped out of SC and back to normal space, same thing. Are you going to immediately throttle down to have a chat to some NPC who just pulled you from SC or will you dump chaff/boost and/or deploy weapons and open fire?

In any case, the dialogue tree would be very limited in it's response, even if there were a couple of hundred NPC phrases after a week we would have heard most of them!

If we look at the early ideas for npc dialogue I suspect that comms will be between players and higher tier npc's, not every Joe Bloggs NPC. So these would be far fewer but I suspect the interactions would be more meaningful in terms of being offered missions/information etc. They'd potentially add much more excitement and depth to situations too. I'm looking forward to seeing what the audio team will do.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

If we look at the early ideas for npc dialogue I suspect that comms will be between players and higher tier npc's, not every Joe Bloggs NPC. So these would be far fewer but I suspect the interactions would be more meaningful in terms of being offered missions/information etc. They'd potentially add much more excitement and depth to situations too. I'm looking forward to seeing what the audio team will do.

I want comms between me and Joe Bloggs NPCs. Even at simplest terms.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

Please keep in mind that the discussion was about the amount of effort needed to create a game like NMS or Elite.

While I can understand that the graphical style of NMS is appealing to some, the more realistic approach of Elite requires way more effort. NMS uses lots of colours, low poly models, no detailed textures and applies some shaders to it. Creating this cartoonish style and making it look good is pretty easy. Now compare that to the amount of work that is needed just to implement a huge multicannon in ED, all the details, the animations, textures, etc. and it should be clear why Elite needs a bigger team, and that's just one example.
On the story, I very much agree with you that Elite needs to let us experience our personal narrative in a better way, but that's not what I was talking about. Just take a look at this recap on stuff that happened since Thargoid scouts have been spotted:



That's just one of the different story lines that happen in Elite, if you regularly read galnet there is lots of other stuff going on. Elite has a very rich background lore and it gets constantly expanded. You are right to criticise that individual players can't really take part in the story, for most it's just information that creates a believable universe. But you still need people to come up with this stuff, write it and translate it into a dozen different languages. These things don't exist in NMS. When it comes to lore the game is emptier than some random moon in Elite. The story in NMS is no story, it just gives people something to do. It's probably comparable to Portal (which is a very good game in my opinion), the 'story' just serves to guide you through a set of checkpoints and asks some philophical questions, but it doesn't fill an entire universe with lore like Elite, Skyrim or The Witcher. And before someone gets that wrong as well, I am not comparing the singleplayer campaign of The Witcher with Elite, I am talking about the richness of the background lore.

I could go on about the sound, stellar forge, the BGS, the flight model, the combat system, etc. Elite is way more complex and sophisticated than NMS and that's why it needs more developers.

Building the avatar and NPC creator in Elite was probably more effort than the entirety of NMS' flora and fauna, simply because Hello Games don't need to make sure that it looks believable.

The issue is, the art team =/= coders (at least in the most cases thats not how it is) and as much as Elite has a rich lore, the gameplay elements don't support it, the gameplay is poorly and boringly designed. Thats really where ED needs to step up a lot. ED surely has not much more to do than NMS, and it palys a lot more broing becase you repeat the same shallow things.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

The issue is, the art team =/= coders (at least in the most cases thats not how it is) and as much as Elite has a rich lore, the gameplay elements don't support it, the gameplay is poorly and boringly designed. Thats really where ED needs to step up a lot. ED surely has not much more to do than NMS, and it palys a lot more broing becase you repeat the same shallow things.

NMS so far fo me is just a shooting rocks game at the moment, I know that can change later on, but you can say the same for ED too. NMS has it's own shallow repetative gameplay. Give it a few months of people doing the same stuff in NMS they will be saying the same thing.

 

[babelfisch]

The issue is, the art team =/= coders (at least in the most cases thats not how it is) and as much as Elite has a rich lore, the gameplay elements don't support it, the gameplay is poorly and boringly designed. Thats really where ED needs to step up a lot. ED surely has not much more to do than NMS, and it palys a lot more broing becase you repeat the same shallow things.

I would say that both games have boring and poorly designed gameplay. It doesn't bother me that much in Elite because it takes place in a setting which is truly awesome while looking at NMS just makes me vomit. That's 100% subjective though.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

The issue is, the art team =/= coders (at least in the most cases thats not how it is) and as much as Elite has a rich lore, the gameplay elements don't support it, the gameplay is poorly and boringly designed. Thats really where ED needs to step up a lot. ED surely has not much more to do than NMS, and it palys a lot more broing becase you repeat the same shallow things.

Oh come on! I saw this thread dead and buried on page 4! [mad]