First off - this thread
has been tremendously illuminating for me, as a new player, coming from absolutely zero background with the Elite franchise.
Although I'd heard of Elite Dangerous at various times over the past few years, I had never heard of the original games, nor seen them in stores here (the US) when I was young. I'm sorry I missed it, because it looks like it must've been awesome and I likely would have loved it as a kid (I was enamored of late 80s / early 90s flight games like Falcon 3.0, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe). As mentioned, I've spent virtually all of the last decade playing many, many hours in combat flight sims like Rise of Flight, IL-2 Great Battles, and (a bit of) DCS. So of course the appeal of ED for me is in the spaceship combat, and especially the PVP aspect - since humans always make the best opponents in these kinds of games. Flight games are my oldest and deepest passion in gaming, bar none.
With that said, this thread has been hugely influential in opening my eyes up to the many other kinds of players attracted to Elite. Because of my single-minded focus, huge swathes of the game are still largely a mystery to me. There have been some really great respondents in here that have helped me to better round out my understanding of these other parts of the game. I'm talking of course about exploration, playing the BGS, participating in thargoid hunting, and other types of, if not peaceful, then at least not-necessarily-PVP types of activities.
Those activities, so I've learned, were a big part of the original Elite games. A lot of current players - or at least a lot of the players who've decided to contribute to this thread - were drawn to the original games' charms, and have been fans of the franchise for decades. This thread has absolutely helped me empathize with where they're coming from. Some if not many of them were Kickstarter backers, and have been onboard since the beginning of this reboot / remake / whatever's lifespan. They've seen the ebbs and flows of the game, been through the tough early days when money was hard to come by, the introduction of engineering, and more.
Clearly, at least to me, the biggest and most transformative change wrought to the franchise by Elite Dangerous was the introduction of multiplayer. This took a series that had always been about the singleplayer experience and translated it, with no small amount of as-yet still unresolved growth pains, into a modern multiplayer game with hints of MMO. I don't think I can point to any better example of the repercussions of that change than this thread, and the wide variety of voices we've heard in it, from all sides.
I think it goes without saying that this transition to multiplayer has not been without its casualties. Probably the least affected are the committed singleplayers. Just as in the flight sims from which I come, there are folks who have no interest in multiplayer at all, are are extremely content to do their purely PVE career without a care in the world for all the drama and nonsense that
inevitably follow every single competitive multiplayer game. I suspect those players are happily plugging away as we speak, not bothering to look at these forums at all except to maybe get information about the newest patch or whatever. Their game of Elite Dangerous is truly the old Elite in new trappings (very nice ones, at that).
On the other end of the spectrum (if you'll pardon the expression) are the PVP players. I don't know how many current PVPers were players of the original 1984 version of Elite, but the demographic does seem to skew a little bit younger than the overall ED demo, especially the "84ers." The PVPers seem to share a few common traits - many of them come from deep backgrounds with other multiplayer games, and many of them have "done it all" in Elite Dangerous, and settled on PVP (and not infrequently ganking) as the only thing that really keeps them invested in playing the game. For them, Elite offers an open world where they can find heavily skill-based organic and arranged PVP. In theory, this could be organized around in-game themes like PowerPlay or BGS or Community Goals, but in practice, it mostly resolves as 1v1s, wingfights and ganking.
Stuck in the middle, in this formulation, are the co-op PVE folks. It's these folks to whom I originally addressed this thread, and it's been my good fortune to receive a good number of replies on the subject. I sincerely feel for these folks, because on the one hand, a lot of the people who want to do purely PVE activities are in Solo, and on the other, you have Open and its gankers / PVPers who think nothing of pulling a CMDR for any reason, or no reason. It genuinely feels like the purely co-op folks got the shortest stick, at least from my perspective. Outside of wing missions, there's very little truly in-game sanctioned co-op activity to do; most of it amounts to some variation of "parallel play", be it combat, trade or mining, where each player is sort of doing their own thing, but that thing is ostensibly in the service of a larger goal (say influencing the BGS, for example).
Granted - I'm weakest in my understanding around these PVE co-op activities, and it's possible I'm leaving some out. My apologies if I've missed something important. But I do feel I've at least hit the high points in these various main groups or player types inhabiting Elite.
Now, it's tempting to try to allot each of these groups to a game mode and say it's all good, but outside of singleplayers going to Solo, this thread has demonstrated that there really isn't much appetite for that - i.e. shunting co-opers to PG and PVPers to Open, or whatever. So we wind up with PVE co-opers in the same mode - Open - as the hardcore PVPers, and this thread is resplendent with responses about how
that is working out.
So... has my view changed about Open? Yes, absolutely it has. I see very clearly now that this game mode fails all three of these player groups.
- Open fails singeplayers because: If, as this week's livestream quote from Mr. Braben indicates, the "richness" of the Elite experience is predicated in part on "making things go wrong for other people," then singleplayers - insofar as NPCs have been nerfed, relative to the old games - are getting short shrift in Solo. The NPCs there are not challenging enough to keep with series' tradition. Yawns ensue - there are plenty of threads raised on this forum indicating the same, too.
- Open fails PVE co-op because: The ruthlessness inherent in having an entire group of your most experienced players deciding that PVP and/or ganking are the only fun left in the game means that PVE co-op players are up against some tremendously stiff competition in Open. Especially so after the introduction of Engineering and the wild power creep those upgrades represent. Because those PVE players can't get even the promise of spontaneous co-op without the real risk of PVP, they get short shrift. The lack of meaningful co-op gameplay options only exacerbates this.
- Open fails PVPers because: the PVPers have been forced to play alongside the PVEers and made to feel like actual monsters when they play the game literally as intended, per its creator's own words. They're told to go use CQC for "legit" PVP - with its long queue times, inability (oh the irony) to actually play with your friends and/or wingmates on your actual team, and in the literal worst ships in the game. Of course that's a very poor substitute for the truly capable combat ships in the game, and most don't bother.
The TLDR is that I feel strongly that Open is a poor solution for many of the players in the Elite community, and especially so for the ones who are looking for emergent co-op PVE experiences. They are possible to have, but they come always with the added possibility of unwanted PVP. I don't think this is me telling anyone they're wrong - this is the Open game mode working as intended, by Braben's own account. I do think it's unfortunate, and even moreso because I don't really have a better solution to offer. Open is what it is, and players in it will do what they do.
All I can do, and what was done for me as well, is offer a friend request, and try to share whatever information, knowledge or similar that I can with other players. Regardless of their chosen play style. Because I do not play this game with malice aforethought. It's a video game, I shoot at targets, they shoot at me, it's great fun and a real skill challenge for me. That's the beginning and end of it, and "it's the game," at least as I experience it, in Open. Nobody is wrong for feeling otherwise, but they need to address FDev about their implementation of these modes if they want satisfaction, not the players using the modes literally as intended.
![[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/234/234580.jpg?1612617334){kind=avatar}
