Let's imagine for a second - what if you could not distinguish the people from the machines? If PvE was, well, every bit like PvP?
I will
not shoot at another ship without being sure it's a NPC. I never, ever, attack players unprovoked, even if by all accounts I should be attacking them on sight.
So, it would just completely prevent me from doing anything where I need to shoot first, like bounty hunting. Or, more likely, it would drive me to play solo, either by choosing the mode or by using my firewall to block out every player.
However, it's not impossible to cater for both the PvE, PvP and "I just want to hang out" crowd in one and the same universe; it does require a lot of careful design, though, to make it work. As it is, ED plays out mostly like a single player game with some multiplayer tacked on, although, it's fun as it is (for the time being, anyway). Interestingly, the only really competitive part where you gain or lose something persistent is actually exploration. I wish that PvP mechanics were more fleshed out with more meaningful gains and losses.
Depends on what you mean by PvE crowd and PvP crowd. Each of those gameplay styles have many branches; in PvP, for example, you can easily identify the arena PvP players (want well defined, balanced fights), the conquest players (want clearly defined and attainable objectives that actually matter to the game world), the sheep (want to be always at risk of a player attacking them), the wolves (want to be able to attack unsuspecting players), plus many permutations and subgroups.
And some of those are completely incompatible. If I can ever be attacked by a player without my explicit consent, no matter how rare it is, I'm simply not playing, regardless of how good the game otherwise is; some PvP players will never be happy if anyone can simply choose to never be subject to PvP. There are PvP players that will only play if losing doesn't cost them anything, while some will only play if they can inflict penalties on the losers. And so on.
The thing is that ultimately you really can't please everyone, whatever feature you have, someone will like it and someone will find it to be a show-stopper (eg. you have people who detest exploration because of the existence of ADS! - while other explorers swear by it).
While not exactly my case, my behavior do change drastically depending on whether I can effectively explore the whole game world/universe/whatever in full. If exploring it all is a feasible proposition, I won't rest until I have looked at every nook and cranny, unlocked every secret, and fully exploring the game becomes my main objective; if the game is either infinite or too large to be reasonably explored in full, I will typically only explore until I've seen a fair sample of what the game has to offer, and then eschew exploring except as a support activity. Kinda like how I play Minecraft and Terraria differently; in Minecraft I stay put and only explore as needed to find building materials, whereas in Terraria my first objective is to explore the world fully and I typically delete the game world after I've been through all it has to offer.
I personally think that the game would have been better off done in a MMO style (it's advertized as such on Steam, btw, and when I saw MMO + Space flight + Elite it was a "must buy this" moment for me - finding the first isn't really true was a bit of a let-down to be honest), single server, single persistent world. However, it's fun as it is and has some great elements - space flight is lovely, exploring the milky way doubly so, fighting itself is rather fun.
Whether it's a MMO depends on what you consider a MMO. Even in its Steam page it does make clear that players can choose to not be involved with anyone else; it's even listed as a single player game (well, as single-player, multi-player, MMO, and co-op, all at once).
And whether it would be better as a pure MMO depends on who you are talking to. Making it online only already required a number of compromises, such as removing time dilation/compression like the older games used. I backed the game's Kickstart for the offline mode, the one that was removed a mere month before launch; if I had known it would always require an online connection I would never have backed it.
Perhaps what might be interesting for people arguing for or against different playstyles is to read about the
Bartle types (
http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm ) which talks about the different kinds of experiences different kind of people look for in games. It explains how depending on personal preferences people find different things attractive in online games. The same way why some people prefer single player games to multi player, or the PvP style over PvE.
I think FD would be best of to provide as much as possible for ALL types of players. Especially Socializers would benefit from a PvE setting.
There are a few automated Bartle Tests online, such as
the one from Gamer DNA. My score in that, when it comes to the Killer archetype (the one typically interested in open world PvP), is 0%.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the Bartle archetypes, while still as valid now as when they were developed in the 90s, are a very rough classification. Someone that plays to make noobs cry, and someone that plays to punish griefers and defend noobs, will both be the Killer archetype, despite how different their play styles are.
I'm not sure the rest of Bartle's article is still meaningful nowadays, though, at least in games that allow players to completely opt out of PvP. The article is, for the most part, about how each player archetype (Killer, Explorer, Achiever, Socializer) affects the game's desirability for both itself and the other archetypes, and its main conclusion is that Killer archetype players tend to drive everyone else out of the game, pointing to a need to make the game less enticing for Killer players and more enticing for the other archetypes (specially Explorer, which is seen as the only archetype that balances somewhat the Killer archetype players). But it gets there from the point of view that allowing players to have negative interactions is, if not essential, at least highly desirable for every game, and thus doesn't tackle what happens when negative interactions can be opted out. It should still be useful to analyze, say, the open mode by itself, but I don't think its conclusions can be applied to the ED game as a whole.