No Single Player offline Mode then?

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I'd just like to say that I feel it was bad timing by FD to announce this information.
I am due to go to the release party next weekend and was really looking forward to seeing the new content and having a great time.
Now? I feel that DB & Co will just be swamped by angry backers.

You should be alright, think they have hired the White Nights as security
 
Not if they don't verify you as a licensed user (ie. MANAGE their DIGITAL RIGHTS) through that connection.
Until you see the implementation from the physical copies they distribute in the future you won't know if it's DRM free or not....so basically please stop arguing for this as the basis for your proposed litigation to stand on.

Even if, it is not the only leg. They clearly stated that you can play without any connection at all, regardless of whether you call it DRM or not. Which btw everyone outside of this forum does call DRM.
 
It wasn't a priority because they put the code server-side rather than in the client. That was a choice they made.

The natural upshot of that move killed offline.

So no, I stand by my statement that offline was clearly never a priority for Frontier. They said what they said during the Kickstarter for the reasons they said it, and the graphs show they did rather well out of it (I remember, I was there), but the fact remains that if they truly wanted to create an online / offline universe it would have been planned that way from the get-go.

What I think has happened is that they tried to implement what they thought they could do at the start of the project, and found it didn't work, because development had moved on to solely online mode - ignoring offline.

I have to say this really seems like the real version to me as well.

Their kickstarter was clearly on track to fail up until a variety of promises and features were added - including offline - indeed that seems to have been essential at the time to their single largest backer. Neogaf actually tracked this at the time as "David Braben is totally failing to kickstart elite".

So essentially ... this amounts to thousands (10s? 100s?) of what, with the refunds, would seem to amount to interest free loans provided for years.

They don't teach that move in accounting class.
 
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We have no plans to shut the servers down anytime soon. This is a core project for the company and we intend developing for it as long as we can.

Michael

Why are people going on about shutting servers down before the game is even released ? Why would FD be thinking about that Don't seem logical to me
 
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For that very small minority I feel sorry they are unable to join the rest of humanity on the internet, but now they wanna sue FD and take down the only good company making the space sim of our dreams. Bravo...*Slow golf clap*

Boom! That's a humdinger right there! Your overwhelming empathy for others has just slapped me in the face like a cold fish.
 
Not if they don't verify you as a licensed user (ie. MANAGE their DIGITAL RIGHTS) through that connection.

As an example, I HAVE to connect to google to use google...but they don't validate me as a verified consumer (they just sell my browsing habits on to their advertising partners) so there's no DRM from using their servers.

Until you see the implementation from the physical copies they distribute in the future you won't know if it's DRM free or not....so basically please stop arguing for this as the basis for your proposed litigation to stand on.

But.. but... but... They clearly do. Are you seriously suggesting that you won't have to have an account and log in to play online in the finished game (boxed copy or no).. Surely you can't be suggesting that...
 
Even if, it is not the only leg. They clearly stated that you can play without any connection at all, regardless of whether you call it DRM or not. Which btw everyone outside of this forum does call DRM.

Everyone outside this forum being wikipedia? Or the lawyers and courts that you're still thinking of pursuing FD through because of a failure to deliver a portion of the game that wasn't even mentioned in their KS pledge?

But.. but... but... They clearly do. Are you seriously suggesting that you won't have to have an account and log in to play online in the finished game (boxed copy or no).. Surely you can't be suggesting that...
I have no idea - but legally speaking, if they needed to implement a DRM-free version in order to avoid litigation, it's more than possible in theory....

I'm just playing the devil's advocate though and pointing out the legalities to jamotide of trying to chase up a KS project - I do sincerely hope that no-one feels the need to pursue it through the courts and that FD settle their KS refunds as necessary through a calmer method ^^
 
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Even with big hard drives I don't think the 400 billion star galaxy could be held on a local system. We would be playing a subset of the full game

That's fine by me. Honestly, it is. Having a galaxy with "just" 500 or so million stars would not limit my gameplay, nor would it make the game any less enjoyable. I must have played FE2 and FFE for literally tens of thousands of hours over the years, probably more than any other game I've ever played, and I spent 99% of my time between the Federation Systems, the Imperial Systems and the Alliance, with the occasional stop at La Soeur du Dan Ham. I liked knowing that there were lots of systems around me, I liked knowing that I could have gone there had I chosen to do so, but I never actually felt the need to jump to some unexplored, uninhabited system in the -20,-57 sector, so in that sense, having 500 million or 400 billion systems makes absolutely no difference for me, and I know many other players feel the same.

The bulletin board missions would be limited in variety and would begin to get a bit same-y after a while.

Variety really isn't everything: have you ever played Skyrim? A significant number of the quests in that game is of the "kill bandit" or "fetch item X and bring it back to me" type, but there are so many of them, and the NPCs are so different, that they're always fresh and no two quests feel exactly the same. And anyway, once again, I'd be more than willing to play a "limited" version of the game, provided it was offline. I don't need anything particularly fancy: atmosphere and immersiveness are far more important for me than an ever-evolving world.

The economy could not be dynamically active, except in a very limited way and it might be necessary to have random elements generated within it to avoid it becoming entirely predictable.
Good! I don't want the economy to be dynamically active if by *dynamically* you mean "influenced by the actions of other users". I want it to be dynamic as the result of random in-game events and, most importantly, of my actions, nothing more, nothing less. And if I have to choose between static and community-influenced dynamic, I'll pick static any day of the week. Like I said, for me an immersive experience is better than a dynamic one, but there can be no immersion if my game is influenced by what other players do.

In other words, the game might become stale and predictable which is the last thing any of us would want.

A well designed game will not become "stale and predictable", not for many years, sometimes not ever. There are many cases of single player games (and not just sandbox ones) that became neither stale nor predictable, and they had no online mode, in fact, some even predate the internet. If ED has to resort to constant user input to keep things interesting, to me that is not a "feature", but rather a design flaw, unless the main goal all along was to have an MMO and the single player mode was just a bone they threw at the old dogs to lure them in in the early stage. Not to mention the fact that, as someone has already pointed out a few hundred posts ago, if the "dynamic" aspect of the game is so user dependent, what's going to happen once people start to lose interest and the active population decreases? Stagnation?

I hope I didn't sound rude or harsh: I appreciate the very reasonable tone of your post.
 
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Why are people going on about shutting servers down before the game is even released ? Don't seem logical to me or am I just dumb?

because when all the 'no offline haters' have run off to every corner of the internet to 'tell on' FD for being naughty they want to sit in their armchairs and want the entire project fail

and some people who are scared of that possibility want FD to give them a cast iron, unbreakable, moses from the mountain like guarantee that theyll always, always, ALWAYS be there to provide a server for them

its been a great day
 
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I do hope this is the only major thing dropped that can't be considered at all. If we're destined for a slow dripfeed over the next month of 'actually... we're not doing that either' then I wouldn't want to be in FD's shoes.

As for this specific? Disappointed but not surprised. Nobody seems to make decent offline games any more. It must be a lost art to all these new developers who ask 'but where's the server?'

To be honest, I think the reactions of many in the community disappoint me more - the moment something doesn't affect someone personally, all that can be heard is 'sucks to be you', 'I feel for you', 'you should move on', 'don't see what the fuss is' etc. Whether personally I want offline mode or not, I look around this forum and ask 'do I really want to spend quality time with these anti-social people in a persistent universe? I'm not sure I want to in a forum, let alone real life, so why would I in ED, where I'm paying for the privilege?'.

You and I seem to be singing from the same song sheet.

It's so very disappointing to see so many "I'm alright" posts from the "Happy Onliners" many of whom have shown very little empathy for their fellows.
 
So you are saying it is not really always-on DRM if you really need to be always on. ok...

Yes there is a difference, you need a connection for this game to work...... basically like people moaning about having to be online to play World Of Warcraft or EVE.... the online part is a core game mechanic, it has nothing to do with anything else really, simply put the game does not work without a connection.
 
Not if they don't verify you as a licensed user (ie. MANAGE their DIGITAL RIGHTS) through that connection.

As an example, I HAVE to connect to google to use google...but they don't validate me as a verified consumer (they just sell my browsing habits on to their advertising partners) so there's no DRM from using their servers even though I have to have a constant connection to their servers to use their services...

Until you see the implementation from the physical copies they distribute in the future you won't know if it's DRM free or not...

...so basically please stop arguing for the lack of a DRM-free physical copy as an example of them failing a KS reward as the basis for your proposed litigation to stand on and just hope that they show some decent customer service and offer you a partial/full refund.

You see it right now! Play ED.... You must Login with your veryfied Email and a Password. The Game Needs by every Update a Verification Code. This is DRM.
Your Account is bound by Frontier! DRM!
 
You see it right now! Play ED.... You must Login with your veryfied Email and a Password. The Game Needs by every Update a Verification Code. This is DRM.
Your Account is bound by Frontier! DRM!

Is that from the physical DRM-free copy that was promised as a future reward? Or are you playing on the same downloaded copy of the beta that the rest of us are?
 
because when all the 'no offline haters' have run off to every corner of the internet to 'tell on' FD for being naughty they want to sit in their armchairs and want the entire project fail

and some people who are scared of that possibility want FD to give them a cast iron, unbreakable, moses from the mountain like guarantee that theyll always, always, ALWAYS be there to provide a server for them

its been a great day

The problem is people will no longer believe any guarentee FD makes.....at least not at the moment. They have a lot of trust to restore.
 
I have to say this really seems like the real version to me as well.

Their kickstarter was clearly on track to fail up until a variety of promises and features were added - including offline - indeed that seems to have been essential at the time to their single largest backer. Neogaf actually tracked this at the time as "David Braben is totally failing to kickstart elite".

So essentially ... this amounts to thousands (10s? 100s?) of what, with the refunds, would seem to amount to interest free loans provided for years.

They don't teach that move in accounting class.

See here for the business case breakdown.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=58789&page=350&p=1015492#post1015492
 


Yeah, to be honest, what with the mess Slightly Mad Studios got into with the UK Financial Services Authority regarding their "investors", I'd really love to see what a forensic accountant would make of all this. Because if left open to abuse I can see the "whoops we dropped this feature from our kickstarter, have a refund" as a path to all kinds of essentially free credit.
 
This really deserves to be quoted here:

"Let’s see. A company promises a very specific item, like offline single player play in order to glean more money from backers, and then waits until the very latest possible moment, before revealing that, “oh, sorry, we really won’t be doing that, psych.”

Seems to me that they would have known they were not going to have offline months and months ago, in fact from probably the very beginning, since you have to build the architecture pretty early on.

And now, when finally the people who in many cases backed this game BECAUSE offline was so explicitly promised, are told, “too bad for you, we’ve got your money and we will do as we see fit with it.”

Then, when they get mad and complain about being lied to, along come these strange creatures who try to justify the lies and spin it all around to make it look like the poor consumer is somehow at fault. “Most people are always online anyway, this is 2014, how 2013 of you to even think you would want a game that isn’t connected.” They are messing with your head, and implying, however obliquely and politely, that you are an idiot and passe merely because you expect a game that does not require a constant online connection.

You are being conditioned people. Conditioned by a very subtle pseudo peer pressure mechanic. The constant online is nothing more than DRM, plain and simple. They make up lame excuses to justify it, but in the end, it’s all fabrication designed to get you to swallow the constant online pill being shoved down your throat."

- JusticeInTruth, a guy from the RPS news
 
Let me just start by saying, respectfully, an online only game was NOT what I supported.

Servers are known to be buggy. Even World of Warcraft, the biggest MMO in history, has had bugged servers. And they are the best in the online industry.
I live in the middle of nowhere. Frontier, do you have ANY idea how bad my internet is? When it IS online (which is sporadic at best) I have a ping of around 300, 150 at best. It isn't great. Those of us that don't live in the USA often just don't always have the internet infrastructure to keep up.

Please, give us an offline option! You promised us this. I know that it won't be as dynamic as the online, but generally we guessed that because offline gamers are generally static. And we were/are ok with that. Please stick to your promise. Be aware, SimCity made similar claims to yours... aaaaaand look what happened. Awful launch that reached legendary proportions. If you guys goof this up, it could ruin your company permanently. Why? You don't have the money to take a large hit, unlike EA.

By changing the game to online only, you guys also are now selling/sold a product which was not what you claimed it to be. This is generally frowned upon, and is in many cases illegal, for good reason. And lastly, what happens when the servers go down? Do we just *stop* playing?

I feel super cheated
 
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