No Single Player offline Mode then?

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Juniper

Juniper
psykokow said:
I am a big backer too, so it is a major announcement... and should be given the scrutiny it is getting here, and Frontier need to know the scale of unhappiness its caused.
It may not change anything, but at least they will be able to see the effect...
I know people who backed purely for the single player offline mode... and they are very frustrated and disappointed.
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Indeed. As I recall, it was a very big thing for your fellow mod Styggron... but I also know there were others too.

In reality, me included. There is no way I would have pledged as high as I did if I wasn't given the firm impression that there would be an offline mode of some description. I don't like online games generally.
 

mbpoblet

mbpoblet
Skeloton said:
Im certain there are plenty of ways to implement it. Just something or someone is stopping them from doing it.
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They already implemented a full (albeit slightly less "realistic") offline Milky Way over twenty years ago in Frontier: Elite 2.

Elite: Dangerous' galaxy is much more complex and realistic, sure... but they can't make me believe that over twenty years of Moore's law are not enough to make it possible.

Brookes has already made it clear that they aren't implementing 3d party servers not because of "technical reasons", but because they don't want to:

Michael Brookes said:
The problem here is that you'd have access to the server which isn't something we'd want to allow as it contains the secrets of the galaxy. Which was also an issue with an online version.
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This is not a technical issue. This is intentional EA-style always-on DRM, on a game that promised to be DRM free (look in the Kickstarter FAQ).

I wouldn't even be surprised if in the next newsletter they stated their intention to limit the game to 900p 30fps to "ensure a more cinematic experience".
 

Tim Wheatley

Tim Wheatley
Ref Minor said:
Back in the day late 2012 / early 2013 I was surprised about how many of the original backers were planning to only play offline.

This is a really shabby way for FD to replay their support.
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Indeed, and I'm assuming not a large portion of the ED community have even realized this is happening yet...
 

FX2K

FX2K
Errantthought said:
*/snip*

Until we know EXACTLY what "from time to time" means, isn't this a bit alarmist? If you have zero internet access you certainly have room to be upset, perhaps you intended to visit a friend or the library to install and never expected to take it online again except to patch when necessary. But just because each time you trade a commodity it connects to the server now, does not indicate that it will bee necessary to do so in the final product. Since y aren't part of the galactic economy when in single play I don't expect it to be necessary. Missions shouldn't need this either. *snip*
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time to time has been clarified as

Michael Brookes said:
At the moment it's whenever you need to conduct a server moderated transaction like trading.
Michael
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And yes, he does say "at the moment", which leads to assumptions that it may be required less in the future, but they have also clearly stated that offline mode is not going to be part of the game, in this thread and the newsletter.

Michael Brookes said:
Because that then becomes another product we have to create and support and that just isn't possible. We have considered many alternatives to see if we could make this work, but unfortunately this is what we've had to do.
Michael
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I would say that is definitive information.
 

Juniper

Juniper
Tim Wheatley said:
AGAIN - NOTHING TO DO WITH KICKSTARTER. People who bought from the dev directly a matter of weeks ago were still being told about offline mode.
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Both have legitimate grievances though, no? After all, there are some KS backers who paid a lot more than who bought in a "store".

It's good to know that there are potential avenues to follow if Frontier are unable to make good on this.
 

Tar Stone

Banned
Tar Stone
I'm genuinely starting to think that they have only started to explore the potential of the online galaxy and what can be done with it - and want to go further in that direction.

If that's the case, the offline stuff would pale in comparison, and would need some serious work and time to be anywhere near the same level.

Speaking for myself, I didn't expect some of the magic that online open actually does divvy up at times, and I'd really like to see that developed further. They really are onto something special in that regard.

What's come about today however is a mess, don't get me wrong.
 

Tim Wheatley

Tim Wheatley
Atinus said:
You don't know that.
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As a developer you either:
- Develop and make decisions based on core features, offline, online, etc. You develop to maintain these features.
- Develop until you reach a point where you cannot support all features, normally this will happen quite early during development.

Which do you think happened? There is absolutely no way that they ran into a development decision on this last night.
 

Tim Wheatley

Tim Wheatley
mbpoblet said:
This is not a technical issue. This is intentional EA-style always-on DRM, on a game that promised to be DRM free (look in the Kickstarter FAQ).

I wouldn't even be surprised if in the next newsletter they stated their intention to limit the game to 900p 30fps to "ensure a more cinematic experience".
Click to expand...

Please stop referring to the KS FAQ, people dwell on it. All these things were said much more recent than that, right in this forum or on the Zaonce store pages. :)
 

Belan

Belan
The argument presented in this thread says that the devs "promised" offline mode. No matter how many times you present the same paragraph, the word "promise" will not appear, well unless you edit it to say that.

I'm sorry, but I've seen this many times over many games, and I have never once heard of anyone win a case over a feature that was taken out of a beta. Come to think of it, I've never seen it go any further than ranting on a forum. As long as they don't advertise it after the game goes live no one has a leg to stand on.
 

Mobius

Mobius
frontier quote
"Update! The above is the intended single player experience. However it will be possible to have a single player game without connecting to the galaxy server. You won't get the features of the evolving galaxy (although we will investigate minimising those differences) and you probably won't be able to sync between server and non-server (again we'll investigate)."
 

Juniper

Juniper
Atinus said:
You don't know that.
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Stephen Usher pointed it out earlier. The cloud servers are Amazon AWS. That means they're using Linux.

It was stupid of me not to realise it before. Porting that to Windows in any form would be a sizeable undertaking. Even mocking it out would be challenging.

Offline mode was dead as a concept the moment they made those technical decisions - which happened very early on in development.

So I re-iterate. They've known about this for a long time.
 

Tim Wheatley

Tim Wheatley
Juniper said:
Both have legitimate grievances though, no? After all, there are some KS backers who paid a lot more than who bought in a "store".

It's good to know that there are potential avenues to follow if Frontier are unable to make good on this.
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Yes, I suspect many (like me) backed on KS, upped pledges on the Frontier backers portal, then upped again with Zaonce.
 

the darkwalker

the darkwalker
Tim Wheatley said:
As a developer you either:
- Develop and make decisions based on core features, offline, online, etc. You develop to maintain these features.
- Develop until you reach a point where you cannot support all features, normally this will happen quite early during development.

Which do you think happened? There is absolutely no way that they ran into a development decision on this last night.
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of course they knew this well before.
are they really THAT desperate for money? this situation smells fishy as hell

Juniper said:
Stephen Usher pointed it out earlier. The cloud servers are Amazon AWS. That means they're using Linux.


It was stupid of me not to realise it before. Porting that to Windows in any form would be a sizeable undertaking. Even mocking it out would be challenging.


Offline mode was dead as a concept the moment they made those technical decisions - which happened very early on in development.


So I re-iterate. They've known about this for a long time.
Click to expand...
this explains everything. disgusting!
 
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