Please define "content" and "gameplay"

[Pocketstealer]

Content is what it's in the game, gameplay is what you can do with the content.

Elite doesn't have neither for any decent gamer that isn't in this niche category.
Space games are very intriguing for everyone and anyone wants to play a good Space game(but there are not).

Eliteangerous doesn't care about bigger population and only cares about "Hardcore" gamers that buy skins/season pass. Their bussines strategy is pretty clear on this.

What is content:
If you look at WoW a MMORPG, that people always said it had content is because after 5 minutes of moving in a direction you will see something else. Sky will turn green/blue, you will see water, desert, a volcano, trees, forest, bridge. There is a lot of new things to see. Human eye/mind is very good at "seeing" repetition. Thats why procedural generation never works without tons and tons of content. Just because the planet is slightly blue than the one i saw 2 minutes ago doesn't make it "unique" for a computer it is but not for humans.

Elite doesn't have that. It has 40 ships that are TIERED that means once you got from a hauler you will never pilot it again(I am not talking about special snowflakes), this lowers content when you put tiers.
Planets looks nice? But thats the first 3 planets you land on and the feeling is the same.
Hard to reach good looking content. If you put "good looking" content 50 hours into the game and put a stupid waitting mechanic (LOADING Friendship DRIVE the 50th time i a row) people won't feel satisfied. Is low reward for high work. Not working(the low sheer of people that explore is the example).

So content for NORMAL JOE that buys the game is non existent.


Gameplay - The stuff you can actually do in the game.
Missions? Static, text based again niche category so low i cannot believe it. A dynamic when you enter a system would be 5x times better and a turn system automatic rather than land on X planets to get VIRTUAL CREDITS(Yes not gold, silvers, there are credits that are virtual currency, internet banking is so low in Elite).
Fights - Wierd and it is tedious if you want to make money out of them. I agree to be a challenge, it's not a challenge when i need to kill 10x Anacondas to get my rebuy back. Low reward high risk.
Minning - Not worth it and tedious and unrewarding.
Trading - This is the most . Ever played Patrician? Or any trading game? Yes you don't need to waste 120410201 hours just to find a system that actually make good profits or check "3rd party systems" it should be something better. Trading isn't fun when i waste 3 hours just to find a route. That's not trading. (And i love trading Games, Patrician is one of my favourite).

Elite as a sandbox i expected this:
Dynamic Missions, Dynamic rewards, Faction joining and actually make politics attack, gaining favours to attack a system. Calling support in a system to fight off bounty hunting.
Missions to escort traders, Missions from players to escort them, dynamic respawn points of ships(because entering/logging out isn't gameplay).
Nothing in the gameplay is rewarding for the amount of work you do. Not even fun to say the least.


As it is now Eliteangerous is a NICHE game for NICHE people and it goes on that more and more. It's proven over and over again, from all people that bought the game 10% play on a WEEKLY(not daily) for less than 2 hours.

I respect the wishes of everyone else, if it remains a niche game i will just wait the Standard Space Game where everyone can have fun not only the VR IMMERSION Elite playing guys that played the original 30 years ago.

Thargoids jokes are useless for new players, aliens as well since its forum/reddit rather than in game events. Community interaction =/= gameplay.

 

[NVNM]

Regarding gameplay: What gameplay there is in ED does not evolve. Mining is exactly the same regardless of what ship you do it in, except for a few very minor time savers in the form of more limpet drones and refinery slots. Exploration is exactly the same no matter what. The only aspect of gameplay that seems to change is the combat since higher level NPCs are less stupid about it.

 

[rp198419]

Just like griefers in ED there are griefers on the Forum. I look for the positive threads but being human am often attracted to the negative ones. Some have very good ideas from their limited perspective of how they play the game but many do not. Many who complain will post. Many who don't will not. Don't let the very small percentage of people who actually post negatives on the Forum suggest that they are dominant. It just looks that way. Given 1.7 million in sales the last time I looked and another million+ with the soon to be released PS4 version I don't see them complaining a lot.

With 2.3 there is a hair debate thread with 700+ posts still going up arguing pro and con not being long enough. Is this really a game breaker for some? It is a game not reality. My sister in real life tried long and short hair. It always worked for her given her mood. Get a life or perhaps a new avatar hairdo! It costs nothing in the game versus real life with expensive stylists and maybe one will grow to like it.

Debate is healthy and FD does listen. But they are not going to improve the jump range of an FDL just because someone demands it! What works is helping players, positive posts, new ideas, thinking out of the box etc that makes this Forum great. Need some info on outfitting your ship? They will get lots of replies even though a good Forum search using Google will give them tons of info already discussed. I've never seen anything like it.

Asking for content versus gameplay will get a hundred different answers that many won't agree on. Seeing what does and does not work on the Forum is a better solution for me anyway.

Regards

I'm really glad for you that you seem to think FD can do no wrong. However, I agree with the OP. Half finished features that don't work properly (how long is it that the SRV scanner hasn't functioned properly?), missions that are all the same except for the wrapping paper, cosmetic nonsense like the commander creator (really?), very little for solo players and...there is so much. The dreaded, time-wasting. life-sucking RNGineers...

FD don't have a clue about real gameplay and never will have as long as every line of code is infected with RNG.

You may be an FD disciple who will never find fault with them; many of us are not.

 

[Ian Skippy]

I'm really glad for you that you seem to think FD can do no wrong. However, I agree with the OP. Half finished features that don't work properly (how long is it that the SRV scanner hasn't functioned properly?), missions that are all the same except for the wrapping paper, cosmetic nonsense like the commander creator (really?), very little for solo players and...there is so much. The dreaded, time-wasting. life-sucking RNGineers...

FD don't have a clue about real gameplay and never will have as long as every line of code is infected with RNG.

You may be an FD disciple who will never find fault with them; many of us are not.

Thanks for the hyperbole, Lord Dramaqueen. I am sure that improves the discussion

 

[rp198419]

Well OP, you seem to know what gameplay means in one of your other posts today:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/329578-Chapeau-to-the-guys-from-Frontier?p=5154318&viewfull=1#post5154318

So it's not clear if you're trolling or simply instigating for emotional responses here with this post. But I'll humor you with a reply...

Content = stuff used in the game that results in gameplay
Gameplay = it's what you do with game content stuff

But you know this already. And you know what is implied when folks say they want more content = they want more content that gives them better gameplay. And the 2.3 character thing adds content but very little to no gameplay unless you think of it as a mini-game to play with virtual dress-up or dolls or something. Maybe the question to ask is why do some folks think 'holo-me' adds good gameplay?

We haven't seen the multi-crew reveal yet but this is also easy to predict from what has been described by Sandro: it's yet more content that adds little to no gameplay. Wings added some gameplay but, in the end, teaming up with 3x others to do the same interactions with NPC's or players isn't adding much gameplay if anything. Players could have done this as a group before. Multi-crew is simply a variation of Wings for the most part.

Need a new lead designer with new ideas. Sandro seems to have run out of originality.

 

[Deleted member 110222]

You're my content.

 

[starman]

The real problem DBOBE doesn't play the game like we play it. He doesn't experience the pain. Hi DBOBE reviewed your game In 84 ED Backer and part of the reason we are all here

I would recommend looking at the original Design document that was largely ignored.

The main priorities now are growing Frontier as a company to satisfy shareholders. This involves diversification into growth market. ED and Space sims are very niche.

Still don't understand how they haven't tapped the general Star Citizen crowd. OK I have some ideas

Marketing is pretty poor. Of course they won't hire me.

 

[starman]

"Need a new lead designer with new ideas. Sandro seems to have run out of originality. "

Well they won't hire me.

Probably because we share the same hairstyle and love of hats.

However they seemed to have featured my likeness in the early Avatar demo.

Make Elite Dangerous great again..

Maybe hire some Y gen. They seem to know it all.


Licensing the film rights would be a good move but its 'never going to happen'.

Planet Coaster: The Movie?

Elite Dangerous: Lego Movie ? Might work


[video=youtube;rGQUKzSDhrg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGQUKzSDhrg[/video]

 

[Junky Juke]

You're my content.

I'm getting worried now :O

 

[Iskariot]

So, yesterday we had a very exhaustive preview of some of the upcoming new features of ED. For a single day I was happy to see a relaxed atmosphere here on the dangerous forums. Many happy threads raising everywhere gave me a feeling of peace. Today I fired my browser just to find (again) many new threads about lack of content and bad gameplay despite FD is giving us, step by step, tons over tons of new things to do every time that we log in, plus a continuous work on fixing and tweaking.

So, what am I missing here? is there something as a veteran gamer I'm struggling to catch? why people keep whining about half finished things, no content, shallow gameplay and so on?
Probably power play, exploration, a gazillion of solar systems, piracy, bounty hunting, PVP, stock trading, mission running, player driven content, roleplaying, character creator, multicrew, wings, BGS, ship outfitting, aliens, planetary landing, communication, first person flight model, external and internal cameras, rare goods trading, mining, puzzles, native virtual reality, smuggling, storyline, news & journalism.... are not game content and gameplay, but a mirage. Something that only lives in our bugged heads.

I play and played a hundreds of games in my life (I started in late 1980's) and except for rare masterworks like the ultima series, the elder scrolls and eve online I never (never!) found something like elite dangerous. It has the potential to become an infinite ever growing experience.

At this point I surrender and I kindly ask you modern gamers what's your definition of "content" and "gameplay". Please define those terms and help me to understand the true meaning of your posts. Maybe all this daily threads will start to make sense to me and maybe someone from Frontier will suddenly understand that they are on the wrong road to happiness and success and avoid to waste their energy, while trying to make us happy for 100-500-1000 hours of our miserably short lives.

An old forum dad.
JJ

I agree.
But there will always be endless whining. There will always be a few.
It is in our nature.
We are homo whineus foreverus.

If people post their ideas, criticisms and suggestions in a positive and constructive way then I have no problems with it at all and I am glad that many players do so, but sometime the entitlement is strong with some people and they seem unable to accept that when push comes to shove this is FD's game.
Also the fact that this is a massive project that takes a lot of time to develop seems lost on them.

 

[Deleted member 110222]

I'm getting worried now :O

<3 <3 <3

 

[Panticus]

I agree.
But there will always be endless whining. There will always be a few.
It is in our nature.
We are homo whineus foreverus.

If people post their ideas, criticisms and suggestions in a positive and constructive way then I have no problems with it at all and I am glad that many players do so, but sometime the entitlement is strong with some people and they seem unable to accept that when push comes to shove this is FD's game.
Also the fact that this is a massive project that takes a lot of time to develop seems lost on them.

Nope. Homo sapiens - it means 'man the wise.' Wise enough not to be taken for a ride and do grindy gameplay and look at baubles.

 

[Whitehair]

Nope. Homo sapiens - it means 'man the wise.' Wise enough not to be taken for a ride and do grindy gameplay and look at baubles.

Wise enough to focus on the task at ha .......ooooH shineys!

 

[Panticus]

Wise enough to focus on the task at ha .......ooooH shineys!

..too wise to spend a whole day staring at a dot and working through endless loading screens I'm afraid..at least I am.

 

[MajorHavoc]

Gameplay is the flying and driving, content is the gameworld. Whilst flying and driving I can shoot at things in the gameworld and collect objects. Bit simplistic discription but covers quite a bit imo.

 

[Bomba Luigi]

Content: Stuff
Gameplay: Doing stuff

 

[Cmdr Hobgoblin]

So, yesterday we had a very exhaustive preview of some of the upcoming new features of ED. For a single day I was happy to see a relaxed atmosphere here on the dangerous forums. Many happy threads raising everywhere gave me a feeling of peace. Today I fired my browser just to find (again) many new threads about lack of content and bad gameplay despite FD is giving us, step by step, tons over tons of new things to do every time that we log in, plus a continuous work on fixing and tweaking.

So, what am I missing here? is there something as a veteran gamer I'm struggling to catch? why people keep whining about half finished things, no content, shallow gameplay and so on?
Probably power play, exploration, a gazillion of solar systems, piracy, bounty hunting, PVP, stock trading, mission running, player driven content, roleplaying, character creator, multicrew, wings, BGS, ship outfitting, aliens, planetary landing, communication, first person flight model, external and internal cameras, rare goods trading, mining, puzzles, native virtual reality, smuggling, storyline, news & journalism.... are not game content and gameplay, but a mirage. Something that only lives in our bugged heads.

I play and played a hundreds of games in my life (I started in late 1980's) and except for rare masterworks like the ultima series, the elder scrolls and eve online I never (never!) found something like elite dangerous. It has the potential to become an infinite ever growing experience.

At this point I surrender and I kindly ask you modern gamers what's your definition of "content" and "gameplay". Please define those terms and help me to understand the true meaning of your posts. Maybe all this daily threads will start to make sense to me and maybe someone from Frontier will suddenly understand that they are on the wrong road to happiness and success and avoid to waste their energy, while trying to make us happy for 100-500-1000 hours of our miserably short lives.

An old forum dad.
JJ

I am getting incredibly angry at posts like yours. It is snarky, condescending and dismissing.
Your age is not relevant.

Does my post get more important, because I am soon 40? I don't think so. So please stop being so condescending towards younger gamers and, in general, people that dislike the game for what it is. I have played my fair share of C64 and DOS games, including the old Elite, but I really see no point of bringing it up constantly or be arrogant about it.
It is not witty, it is obnoxious.

Anyway, the main problem is, that Elite is running on a few missions and activities which are endlessly repeated and that is it. You can fill your wallet over time, but there is little to spend it on. Same goes for mining. It fills your wallet(very slowly though), but there is no meaningful mechanic about it. In Eve, Mining is vital for the Industry. And the Industry is actually player driven. If I want to, I can mine the minerals for all ships I fly myself and actually build them. Behind every game mechanic in Eve is a plethora of things to know and to discover. Which makes the game fun. It also has a very well balanced risk/reward system. Which Elite does not have.

And no, the Background Simulation is not a meaningful game mechanic. There might be thousands of minor factions in Elite, but nothing you do has any meaningful impact. Who cares if a station switches the owner? Who cares if they plop down a new one somewhere? You don't need it. There is nothing new to be had. I can get the same modules anywhere else. But for what? You fly the missions for the sake of doing them after a while. It becomes boring and tedious after a while. That is why people complain about it. I fought quite some wars in Elite, but I never felt any sort of satisfaction or sense of accomplishment when it was over and the faction I was flying for won. I was like "shrug, let's look for the next" and after a few, I uninstalled Elite. On the other hand, I am playing Eve since 9 Years and keep going back to play X3:TC or even X2 once in a while.

Once you have the ship you want, there is no reason to continue. Fill up your wallet for what? Fly for some weird faction you don't care about just to kill time? There are other games to be played that actually provide something, like a story that you can actually take part in. To know about the story in Elite, I only need to go to a Wiki once a week. I don't even need to own the game. And if you follow stats about the game (http://steamspy.com/app/359320), then you see that it is the same for a lot of players. They pick it up, do the missions for a while and leave.

Elite might have a number of game mechanics in place, but they are all shallow and explored within minutes. There is nothing special about them, standard game with no real depth to discover. The number of modules is too limited to provide any sort of deep game play and you are limited to a few builds that are viable. Weapons are also balanced via ammo, which is a further downer, because it makes only a few really viable if you are looking for sustained combat. All Combat also happens within a few kilometers, variation is hardly possible and all ships basically fly the same, just slower. In Eve, you have fundamental differences how you use your ship and it also depends on your outfitting how you fly them. And there you don't even have direct control.

What this game needs is money sinks that are fun. A whole plethora of new modules to use to make different builds possible that actually feel different. Also, ship bonuses for their role would be great. Why is there is no real snipers in the game? Why are there no missile boats? Why is all combat within 3km or less without Engineers? Why are KWS not passive and why can I scan an entire planet in 30 seconds but need extra Drones to know what is in an Asteroid? Why is everything limited so vastly, like SCB or Heat Sinks? Just so I have to fly back all 20 minutes to restock? That is not fun, it is tedious.

a gazillion of solar systems

That is not a measurement of "content", because unless there is a real reason to have all those systems (see the sov system in Eve), they are only providing an inflated number, nothing else. See the No Man's Sky debacle.


I am sorry if your bar is so low, that you cannot see those issues and feel the need to dismiss those opinions with the typical "I am holier than you", because you feel your age makes you more relevant, but take down the purple fanboi glasses and see the game for what it is. Then maybe you understand the criticism.

 

[shadragon]

Hey JJ. It isn't the word definitions, its the entitlement some gamers have. They have no patience to wait for new features, they don't want to work for better ships, they want it all and they want it now. They want a Corvette on day one and when they get it, it'll be treated with a "meh, is that all?"

It's an instant gratification world for them and any delays are intolerable. That's on them. I remember a time when there was no Internet, no cell phones or Google. They don't.

 

[Trueno33]

So, yesterday we had a very exhaustive preview of some of the upcoming new features of ED. For a single day I was happy to see a relaxed atmosphere here on the dangerous forums. Many happy threads raising everywhere gave me a feeling of peace. Today I fired my browser just to find (again) many new threads about lack of content and bad gameplay despite FD is giving us, step by step, tons over tons of new things to do every time that we log in, plus a continuous work on fixing and tweaking.

So, what am I missing here? is there something as a veteran gamer I'm struggling to catch? why people keep whining about half finished things, no content, shallow gameplay and so on?
Probably power play, exploration, a gazillion of solar systems, piracy, bounty hunting, PVP, stock trading, mission running, player driven content, roleplaying, character creator, multicrew, wings, BGS, ship outfitting, aliens, planetary landing, communication, first person flight model, external and internal cameras, rare goods trading, mining, puzzles, native virtual reality, smuggling, storyline, news & journalism.... are not game content and gameplay, but a mirage. Something that only lives in our bugged heads.

I play and played a hundreds of games in my life (I started in late 1980's) and except for rare masterworks like the ultima series, the elder scrolls and eve online I never (never!) found something like elite dangerous. It has the potential to become an infinite ever growing experience.

At this point I surrender and I kindly ask you modern gamers what's your definition of "content" and "gameplay". Please define those terms and help me to understand the true meaning of your posts. Maybe all this daily threads will start to make sense to me and maybe someone from Frontier will suddenly understand that they are on the wrong road to happiness and success and avoid to waste their energy, while trying to make us happy for 100-500-1000 hours of our miserably short lives.

An old forum dad.
JJ

I am a follower of worthabuy reviews in youtube. Mack there usually confronts the continuos "dumbing down" in "modern gaming". X- ray vision is the most blatant example of this, but there are others. That´s why I´m not so angry when some npc manages to destroy me in ED. i still love challenge.
Edit: in the new sniper game you can see your enemies straight through walls and other obstacles. It´s quite appalling

 

[Junky Juke]

I am getting incredibly angry at posts like yours. It is snarky, condescending and dismissing.
Your age is not relevant.

I did not mean to be any of the bad and offensive adjectives you are attributing to me. Nor I'm standing on the altar of wisdom here. I'm sincerely asking to the contemporary age game players what they mean when talking about content and lack of it and trying to understand if I can share the same terms and concepts with them.
Also I'm not interested in your complaints about a game you clearly consider inferior to your beloved 10+ years of development space game called Eve Online. CCP had to struggle hard to pack their game in the actual form. And many heads have fallen under the hammer of one of the most toxic and self entitled communities I have ever seen. Do not forget that Eve at the first stages was a complete mess, with a lot of problems, complete lack of content, bad gameplay and an incompetent dev team and community managers. They often had their hands bound by the community and had to renounce to their vision (I can't forget the lazer protest against Incarna... holy sht). At least FD have the balls to keep up with their vision, pushing the game in that direction and listening now and then the players feedback.

Hey JJ. It isn't the word definitions, its the entitlement some gamers have. They have no patience to wait for new features, they don't want to work for better ships, they want it all and they want it now. They want a Corvette on day one and when they get it, it'll be treated with a "meh, is that all?"

It's an instant gratification world for them and any delays are intolerable. That's on them. I remember a time when there was no Internet, no cell phones or Google. They don't.

Yes, many young guys have the peculiarity to self spoil everything fast, greedily eating videogames to the point that they can't feel any fun with any game they own. We are talking about expensive games here.
As a music shool teacher I try to do my best with them, but it seems to be an unstoppable trend. They often want to directly get to the final result, bypassing all the work you have to do to "earn" the music

Content: Stuff
Gameplay: Doing stuff

You have a good point here