Frontier Developments plc,
Elite: Dangerous is a good game, some may even say that it is a great game. While most of us know that what we see today is not the final state and that patches/hotfixes and major updates are on the way, I came to this forum to provide a little insight into the wants of the (open / non-solo) community.
While it is widely understood that some sort of social interaction infrastructure is on the way, a recent post on Massively.com highlights exactly what this good/great game "could" become - sending this game into the "greatest of all time" category.
Of note, I'd wager an alarmingly large number of the E/D player-base does or has played EVE Online. This single shard technology is incredibly difficult to implement, I'm sure. But it's worth it. It's completely worth the effort. I've copy/pasted the last few paragraphs of that post above that highlights the importance of single shard (i.e. everyone plays within the same instance).
Please read below.
Sincerely,
Chocol8milkman
World-building and sandbox gameplay
by Brendan "Nyphur" Drain on 21-Dec-2014
Much of the criticism being levied against Elite: Dangerous right now is for its poor social tools and handling of multiplayer. If you choose to play Elite in Solo mode, then you won't bump into any other players, but you'll still be playing through the Elite servers and will still need to be online to play. The Open Play game mode throws you into the galaxy with other players, but you're actually in just one of hundreds of instances, each with a limit of up to 32 players. It's essentially a seamless lobby system that tries to match you into an instance with players of the same skill level, and that's led to a few problems.
Playing with friends is currently difficult because you frequently end up in different instances, and there are reports that players can evade PvP by simply quitting and logging in again to hopefully get matched into a different instance. This heavily fractured model is the polar opposite of EVE Online's single-shard sandbox, which has only one instance of each star system and can support thousands of players flooding into any one at a given moment.
I've written before about how EVE's single-shard design leads to more cohesive communities and makes actions in the game world much more meaningful, and I still believe that's true. Territorial warfare in EVE is significant only because there's a single copy of each star system to fight over, and piracy is an actual threat only because you can't bypass it by switching instances. News of wars and other player events are also a big deal to EVE players because they all happen on the same server and so are relevant to every single player. Elite's heavily instanced nature means it currently isn't capable of that level of interaction, which I think makes the gameplay a lot shallower.
EVE's original developers often said that Elite was part of their inspiration, but they've always been two fundamentally different games. EVE has always been a more strategic game that rewards players for learning the game mechanics, outwitting their opponents, grouping together for planned activities, and working out the optimum ways to do things. Conversely, Elite: Dangerous is an action game that favours practise, twitch-based skill, and ship progression. The limited social tools and lack of group gameplay in Elite really harm what could be an amazing multiplayer game, so I really hope that's one of the first major features to get some post-release attention.
Having played it for a few days now, I can honestly say that Elite: Dangerous is the sequel to Frontier that I've always wanted. It's still a primarily solitary experience based around exploring a galaxy and progressing to larger ships, but now it's got shiny graphics and is interspersed with the occasional freelance player on the same journey we are. But no matter how addictive Elite's minute-to-minute gameplay might be, the constantly changing nature of its instanced server model means it lacks the sense that you're in a real living world or a sense of how many other people are playing. It's missing that one element that makes MMOs special, and that puts EVE Online in a class by itself: persistence.
Elite: Dangerous is a good game, some may even say that it is a great game. While most of us know that what we see today is not the final state and that patches/hotfixes and major updates are on the way, I came to this forum to provide a little insight into the wants of the (open / non-solo) community.
While it is widely understood that some sort of social interaction infrastructure is on the way, a recent post on Massively.com highlights exactly what this good/great game "could" become - sending this game into the "greatest of all time" category.
Of note, I'd wager an alarmingly large number of the E/D player-base does or has played EVE Online. This single shard technology is incredibly difficult to implement, I'm sure. But it's worth it. It's completely worth the effort. I've copy/pasted the last few paragraphs of that post above that highlights the importance of single shard (i.e. everyone plays within the same instance).
Please read below.
Sincerely,
Chocol8milkman
World-building and sandbox gameplay
by Brendan "Nyphur" Drain on 21-Dec-2014
Much of the criticism being levied against Elite: Dangerous right now is for its poor social tools and handling of multiplayer. If you choose to play Elite in Solo mode, then you won't bump into any other players, but you'll still be playing through the Elite servers and will still need to be online to play. The Open Play game mode throws you into the galaxy with other players, but you're actually in just one of hundreds of instances, each with a limit of up to 32 players. It's essentially a seamless lobby system that tries to match you into an instance with players of the same skill level, and that's led to a few problems.
Playing with friends is currently difficult because you frequently end up in different instances, and there are reports that players can evade PvP by simply quitting and logging in again to hopefully get matched into a different instance. This heavily fractured model is the polar opposite of EVE Online's single-shard sandbox, which has only one instance of each star system and can support thousands of players flooding into any one at a given moment.
I've written before about how EVE's single-shard design leads to more cohesive communities and makes actions in the game world much more meaningful, and I still believe that's true. Territorial warfare in EVE is significant only because there's a single copy of each star system to fight over, and piracy is an actual threat only because you can't bypass it by switching instances. News of wars and other player events are also a big deal to EVE players because they all happen on the same server and so are relevant to every single player. Elite's heavily instanced nature means it currently isn't capable of that level of interaction, which I think makes the gameplay a lot shallower.
EVE's original developers often said that Elite was part of their inspiration, but they've always been two fundamentally different games. EVE has always been a more strategic game that rewards players for learning the game mechanics, outwitting their opponents, grouping together for planned activities, and working out the optimum ways to do things. Conversely, Elite: Dangerous is an action game that favours practise, twitch-based skill, and ship progression. The limited social tools and lack of group gameplay in Elite really harm what could be an amazing multiplayer game, so I really hope that's one of the first major features to get some post-release attention.
Having played it for a few days now, I can honestly say that Elite: Dangerous is the sequel to Frontier that I've always wanted. It's still a primarily solitary experience based around exploring a galaxy and progressing to larger ships, but now it's got shiny graphics and is interspersed with the occasional freelance player on the same journey we are. But no matter how addictive Elite's minute-to-minute gameplay might be, the constantly changing nature of its instanced server model means it lacks the sense that you're in a real living world or a sense of how many other people are playing. It's missing that one element that makes MMOs special, and that puts EVE Online in a class by itself: persistence.
