Wonder if he's talking about his involvement with the rift, that has fail written all over it
No Single Player offline Mode then?
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Wonder if he's talking about his involvement with the rift, that has fail written all over it
What if they backtracked on the no offline play, but made it very plain that the offline component would be a massively stripped down version, with no access to the "walking around" expansions, and would not be patched in until after the Mac version gets released? Would people be less or more angry?
Nobody here would argue that the original intention was to have an offline incarnation of the game - this was included as a feature in response to requests from backers. The decision to include was probably based on some early concept feasibility study within FD and after consideration decided it could be done (with an impact on richness compared to what they were aiming for).
It seems many pledged on this basis and indeed many pre-ordered the game on this basis.
From what I can tell, and with all the necessary development that has occurred since KO, FD have now realised (albeit quite late) that within their own constraints, i.e. technology, resource, product quality, financials, etc. that this feature is now irreconcilable with their original intention.
This happens a lot in all development stream disciplines - perhaps not managed so well in this instance PR-wise.
I would suggest anyone who has pre-ordered the game on this basis (offline) is due a refund and FD should respect that.
It would surprise me if there were a significant proportion in this position (but of course there are many here) and from a progressive standpoint more and more people should gain good connectivity as time progresses and networks are expanded and upgraded and technology improves - and so this may have influenced FD in their decision. Taken over the long game as it were.
But beyond this what more is there to say?
It seems many pledged on this basis and indeed many pre-ordered the game on this basis.
From what I can tell, and with all the necessary development that has occurred since KO, FD have now realised (albeit quite late) that within their own constraints, i.e. technology, resource, product quality, financials, etc. that this feature is now irreconcilable with their original intention.
This happens a lot in all development stream disciplines - perhaps not managed so well in this instance PR-wise.
I would suggest anyone who has pre-ordered the game on this basis (offline) is due a refund and FD should respect that.
It would surprise me if there were a significant proportion in this position (but of course there are many here) and from a progressive standpoint more and more people should gain good connectivity as time progresses and networks are expanded and upgraded and technology improves - and so this may have influenced FD in their decision. Taken over the long game as it were.
But beyond this what more is there to say?
Well, you set the question up to only get a logical response. Why must the inclusion of Off-line come at a hefty pernalty to the Online? Remember that Off-line already was a weaksauce shadow of the Online, so it appears to me that the Online wouldn't suffer as much as people are led to believe.
In my case - less. Vastly less. Understand. I could care less about walking around in my spaceship offline. What I care about is being able to play Elite if I'm not at home on say, a laptop, or a netbook or any other device I can somehow cram the game into, I'd accept a 90% reduction in the galaxy size, a simplified economy, a pre-set story campaign that I could dip into if I so wished, a procedural mission generator for handling bounty hunting, trading and all the rest of it, and the ability to just tootle around at my own pace. 40 million star systems is still a mind boggling sum, more than one person is going to chew through in a reasonable sum of time, but I'd get an offline elite. Something I could play, DRM free, on my own system, whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted, however I wanted.
Is this so hard to grasp?
So for those of you who are saying that this change affects a small amount of people. This topic has had more replies in the last 24 hours and period then any other forum topic in the beta discussion. Considering most of the posts on this topic are against the removal of the offline mode it would seem that this affects more people then you think. Its also got enough attention that it has also been posted on various media site across the net.
I think they lack the manpower to do it before release. Plus they underestimated the complexity of the galaxy simulation. Now they know and go "there's no way we can do this and not delay for x months just for this feature alone"
It's just a guess, but i'd wager my guess is not far from reality.
I'm not saying that's a good thing, mind you. But i do not think they made thus decision without good reason.
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This forum topic sure got a huge amount of replies, but forums are echochambers. The media response? Not really all that much to be honest. And the comments there aren't massive in numbers either.
I still vote that FD should offer an offline SP mode post release, mind you.
This thread might have had a lot of traffic, but in reality it's just a handful of people defending themselves from the apologist army and only intermittedly a true point has been made. I wouldn't take this thread as measure for the discontent, moreso because Moderator-industry has seen threads merged into here that only sideways refer to the Off-line pivot.
Yes, solo online is still in.
There are also private groups dedicated to PvE which you might try.
There's usually a lead time on games media sites of anywhere between 48-96 hours before stories go live, usually to fact check and to analyse the validity and value of a story. It's breaking on the smaller sites now because they don't have the same "latency" of the editorial process, but if they're breaking it, that's usually the early warning shot across the bow, other, larger sites then tend to pick up on it and start thinking "well this might actually be worth reporting on after all".
Your looking at the confirmation which was as quoted as other repeated later and consistently until now.
It is clear your ignoring everything in front of you and even FD themselves know that this is a dropped feature that was highly requested but you seem to think a tutorial set qualifies as offline then my previous point stands. No one expected full online play offline but all of the static content in your client easily supports offline play if server side random seed generation was just passed to the client.
Literally the only difference needed is no online check, static random markets, missions, galaxy, instances (If you play solo offline the solo online invisible hand basically disappears). Modders will easily get around that and it will be open to anything since you don't have to deal with other players server side checks. Offline saves are a joke and only require a menu for save/load or if they are even more lazy just one save slot no menu but people can easily edit/move/copy the file. (Even if the save is "encrypted" allowing people to play offline would make it easy to edit the save file for offline play or user made mods, if a file is encrypted but the game has to decrypt it then it is a joke to figure out the key, this is why multiplayer needs server side checks but for offline single player it doesn't matter)
Yeah, who knows... But in all honesty, even though I'm affected by the decision, I hope that this stays contained for now. Wishing for a mediastorm is counter-productive. Just the other day overhere, a national children's holliday got totally ruined due to the media constantly focusing on the racistic connotations to that children's holliday. Riots, police intervention... the works. It boggles the mind.
If Forntier fumbles the always online launch, then it's time to break out the tar&feathers, from my point of view.
I would suggest that the offline game would have to be completely different from Online, for the reason of hacking.
Otherwise, I can foretell the future:
Hours after the version of the game with offline play comes out, a cracked version appears online and is promptly torrented like it's one of those episodes of Game Of Thrones where a bunch of main characters die.
Players quickly hack the offline database, and all the juicy details are posted online.
Online players, armed with their new cheat sheet, go out and spoil the game for those who want to play fair. The fair play brigade end up quitting the game, especially if they are not motivated by PvP. The online game then becomes the province of get-rich-quick, follow the arrow types with their cheat sheets, and PvP psychos.
The bulk of the online playerbase dwindles away.
Frontier decides that the game's future is on console. All the console versions are online-only, and feature entirely fictitious galaxies to avoid the problems faced by the PC release.
The console versions sell well enough on release to convince Frontier that they made the right choice. David Braben buys many new sweaters.
PC development is reduced to new skins and bobbleheads.
All the offline-only players complain about "console peasantry" and how Frontier "sucks" for "not living up to their promises re: expansions".
TLDR for most of this thread, but what Braben says in the newsletter actually matched up with what was said in the kickstarter - Offline mode that needs to synch with the server sometimes. Go and read it. As far as I can remember he's never said "there WILL be a totally off-line mode". At best he's said that it would be desirable and they would try to implement it, and it's never been promised for launch.
Yeeeuch. Don't remind me. I'm currently sat watching the Warlords of Draenor launch, suffice to say, the only thing most people are watching is the login screen. For three days straight. If that happens to Elite Dangerous I think these forums will turn distinctly radioactive. The only good thing to come from Blizzard's monumental cockup is that the forums have been such an inferno that I've been able to cook pizza simply by laying it flat on the monitor for fifteen minutes.
gravityztr
Banned
this is the kind of topic that let us have good times while we wait until the 22 november... lol
Damage limitation may be required then if it's started to spread through the internet. I think if FD made an announcement saying that they'll reconsider offline depending on the popularity of online after release, then that might ease a few sphinctors. But there'd have to be set dates for such a review of it and a timeframe for offline completion. However they'd need to increase revenue streams into FD with the online game for that to happen. Expansions and ship skin sales might not be enough.
I don't see why they should 180 based on the furore, that'd be bad. But they need to do something.
Console support offline more so than PCs typically especially since unlike PCs disc sales are still a thing for consoles while my PC has no disc drive. If elite dangerous was released to consoles first with via kickstarter it very likely would have offline mode because people would kick up a storm so large because previous Elite games didn't need online connectivity and consoles have to pay for multiplayer access not to mention the addition of offline would still be there in the kickstarter. (Consoles also typically already have built in DRM and so on)
Ironic you mention game of thrones, because they are fine with the piracy because they still earn a fortune and if anything it just shows how high the demand for their product is ( they don't condone it nor do they not submit take downs but they have got a good business model and it works ), http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...s-sets-piracy-world-record-but-does-hbo-care/
The game database is already offline most of the content has to be client side you can even see all the current system names and so on in your drive and it is only a matter of time before someone figures our their data structure and cracks open the static content database which is pretty much all the information you would need. (Sim City 5 was a good example of this)
Broken mechanics, dominant strategies are not due to data-mining but bad game design.
I don't think people could have realistically expected any more than FFE depth. It could have even been a selling point/driver toward the online game for some, and a fallback for others. Now we'll never know.
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