[O.A. VIDEO] Does Elite Dangerous Have a Content Problem?

[DoctorDanny]

What I find hard to understand is how, after all the amazing community feedback they had with the UA and UP mystery, FD just gave up on that direction and started spewing out an endless stream of RNG spam.

A cynical and rather worrying reasoning would be that they need too many people to provide the UA/UP content.
I fear that the Elite : Dangerous Development team numbers less than 10 full time employees.

Just look at the time it is taking FD to deliver the Horizons content. There's no way that the content delivered over the past two years translates to a game in full development.

 

[lenna]

ED = Jack of all trades and master of none

Missed this earlier - simply put and very true. Some seem to unrealistically expect ED to either shift towards their preferred style of gameplay OR be master of all styles of gameplay.

That being said, adding some caves and tunnels should address the "lack of depth" arguments.

 

[Ignition]

Missed this earlier - simply put and very true. Some seem to unrealistically expect ED to either shift towards their preferred style of gameplay OR be master of all styles of gameplay.

That being said, adding some caves and tunnels should address the "lack of depth" arguments.

I don't care which profession they develop first, the problem is there's no profession in elite with enough complexity to play it.

I can't blaze my own trail because any profession is so dull that gets boring in 20 minutes.

 

[NeilF]

I don't care which profession they develop first, the problem is there's no profession in elite with enough complexity to play it.

I can't blaze my own trail because any profession is so dull that gets boring in 20 minutes.

Yep, we've had 3-4yrs of mostly dead end questionable bolt ons that have all too often hardly moved gameplay forwards at all...

We're actually risking reaching the 4yr mark without for example piracy having any more depth/purpose, and even our combat scenarios all but still vapid placeholders.

As I posted elsewhere:-

Why can't I jump (holo-me) into a fighter, stationed at a capital ship, either with a Wing of friends or a Wing of NPCs (giving simple attack this/defend that commands), and undertake a mission to escort a convoy of civilian ships through an asteroid field to an asteroid base far in the distance. During the jouney I'll come under attack from Thargoid scouts and we (my Wing) need to scout and defend to try and get as many of those ships in the convoy through.

Why in 2018 can't I even undertake that level of simplistic combat scenario in Elite Dangerous?

And imagine if that gameplay was there right now! Imagine if those assets were in the game... Because then, with Squadron Fleet carriers we might then be talking about re-using them for PvE gameplay, and shock horror maybe for Powerplay/Faction PvP gameplay...

But instead, for 3+ years now all we've generally had is shallow simplistic bolt on after shallow simplistic bolt on few of which actually add much gameplay depth, and an alarnming number of which generally just collect dust for most CMDRs.

 

[Soon(TM)]

I like how you classified those two as "content". Thanks for the laugh and +rep.

Technically power play and CQC are/were content.

Just not very well developed content.

Wow...

OK, Elite doesn't have a content problem: some have a problem with Elite's content.

Now that's a laugh right there!

 

[Manxx]

Without doubt the content issue in Elite Dangerous is quite obvious.
I think the entire design philosophy of the game just aggravates a large part of the community.
Unfortunately the dev team have little interest in providing much deeper content which is just allienating a lot of players.

I find your comments probably have a lot of truth to them.
I've seen posts wherein Devs have been told about something, agreed it was an issue but nothing was ever done because fanboys came to the defense of the "Poor" developer and years later people are still finding it an issue.
I've been playing a number of fabulous games recently. Elite Dangerous, Skyrim, Rebirth..

These are all games with several things in common.
1. They are all multi faceted games that can appeal to many with a fairly good foundation, some more than others.
2. They're all older some playing them and are just being rehashed again and again to bleed as much cash as possible from them
3. They lack resources to maintain them properly. Some like Skyrim are still running 2011 graphics and can't improve without community addons. Its a dead game walking.
4. All of them have a very strong fanboy population.

My definition of fanboys are folks whose love of the game is so intense and their feeling of being part of the companies team so strong and twisted that they attack their own player community for providing any opinion that doesn't excuse every thing the company or developers do or don't do.
It's literally a customer who attacks other customers who are trying to ask for product improvements. These are the people who protect the product from improving and help it to become a dead game walking. A game frozen in time.
Since fanboys explain away all of the bugs and excuse all of the delays and fight anyone who says differently, the company can hide behind the fanboys. They're a fantastic asset. And they can reduce staff to match the new reduced workload.
Ever wonder why the company leaves all bug reports, complaints and suggestions public? Its because the fanboys will shoot down most of them.

Elite is already well beyond the point of recovery. Its a dead game walking. They're trying to spice it up a little here and there, trying to appear like their doing something new but its not.
Its sad really, the game has wonderful graphics and components. But at its heart the formula is - Waste your time and attack/harass to spice things up. Mission payouts are actually affected by how much of your time they waste.

Someone mentioned a list of graphic objects the game has as content. And I guess it is content in the very strictest sense. I work in Unreal Engine 4.19. I'm pretty sure if you just dumped some graphic objects into an area you could run around in and offered it to the public, most would not see the list of graphic objects as "Content". The graphic objects are meaningless without something to do WITH them. That's the content in my mind.