Back in January I made a thread to wish farewell to Ben Hennessey, the senior narrative designer for Frontier. My secret additional motive with that thread was to try and demonstrate support for GalNet itself, as it felt like it was starting to resemble the GalNet of 2019, shortly before it was shut down. Paired with all the departures, including other writers besides Hennessey, I was concerned we might be facing another managed decline of GalNet and wanted to get people talking just in case.
It's a few months on now, and GalNet has continued to slow down. So I'm back to talk openly about it.
There's three main periods of interest here. Firstly, back in 2020, regular GalNets and CGs disappeared. This was the culmination of a slow decline that had been going on for a few years prior - storylines were becoming sparser and stretched to fill the available time, often without CG support as official CGs had been largely replaced with player-submitted templates. Frontier then announced they'd be removing "off-camera" GalNet articles and player-submitted CGs, a "slight decrease" in content that would allow them to better support narratives with ingame involvement, like the Interstellar Initiatives. However, they also got cancelled a few months later, leaving nothing.
So GalNet died. For the next eight months, there were precisely three articles and zero CGs. It was a dark time for Elite. No storylines to get invested in, no CGs to fight for. Anecdotally, myself and many other players I knew just drifted away from game, because...nothing was happening in the galaxy. It's one reason why I consider GalNet this game's greatest feature. I've seen what happens when it's not there.
But then, GalNet came back. We got the Azimuth Saga, the NMLA, the long-awaited conclusion of Starship One, political intrigue in the Empire, the Federation, even the Alliance got a second politician! Weekly CGs, relatively fast-moving plots, better utilisation of already existing content like megaships, dredgers, branching paths, plot twists! Elite was back! I saw people screaming when Starship One was picked up again.
I also remember comments from Frontier staff suggesting that player feedback was one of the main reasons they revived GalNet - I'd imagine they also had some pretty damning metrics about player retention, of course. But whatever it was, it worked.
This era of GalNet was probably its greatest. It's the second period of interest here, culminating in the Proteus Wave, so I'll just call it the Azimuth Saga even though it had plenty of other storylines running concurrently. This graph shows the pace of GalNet during this time.
Stayed pretty steady throughout. When this period started Frontier said they had the narrative roughly planned out for the next two years, and it shows.
After the Proteus Wave, we entered the Aftermath era, where we are right now. Here's the graph for now.
Most notably after the arrival of the Titans, GalNet content seems to have entered another decline. Weekly CGs are gone, now being monthly if that. Before we had multiple storylines running simultaneously, now we effectively just have one, the Thargoids. As a storyline, it certainly can't be faulted for lack of ingame support, but at the same time it feels remarkably on-rails, just a vessel for ocassionally reporting on the current state of the war and new updates. That's not a bad thing by itself, but...at the cost of everything else?
Meanwhile, the narrative side is being stretched out again. This is probably more subjective, but it feels like the current era of GalNet can only hint at plotlines, rather than actually play them out like before. Take the Nemesis Failsafe. It's been nearly two years since Salvation's death and the most recent update was "Seo went to chat with Antal". Four months ago. What was said? I dunno, tune in in another four months and maybe you'll find out?
I never really expected Salvation to return or anything, but the same pattern plays out elsewhere. Maybe we'll figure out the mystery of the Thargoid abductions in another seven months? The mystery of the Thargoid-Guardian battlefield in another eight? The mystery of what the Titans even hoped to achieve in who knows when? It's much easier to ask questions than answer them. I'd list non-Thargoid examples too if we had any surviving non-Thargoid plotlines. In roughly the same timeframe, the Azimuth Saga almost had too many to count.
Now, maybe we're headed for another grand revival of GalNet once Powerplay 2.0 comes, as usual, The Next Update Will Fix It. I would love for that to be the case. Certainly some storylines, like the Federal elections, have been delayed for it. But I'm not convinced. And I'm concerned that four years on from the shutdown, those in charge at Frontier might have forgotten what a colossal mistake the previous decline and shutdown was.
Even if we're not going to lose GalNet entirely, its current state is close enough. Weeks are passing between articles, and even obvious continuations of current events are delayed or missing entirely, like the actual release of the Achilles FSD, or Oya's alerts being defeated. With the vast majority of remaining articles just reporting on progress against the Titans (and even then, intermittently), what happens when that is done? Will we see other storylines return to GalNet? Or will Frontier decide that because there hasn't been another major outcry like there was to the decline and shutdown of 2020, that they were right to let the writers go? Is "two articles a month, a CG if you're lucky" the new normal?
GalNet is the heart and soul of this game. It's what the playerbase is built upon. Please prove me wrong, Frontier.
o7
It's a few months on now, and GalNet has continued to slow down. So I'm back to talk openly about it.
There's three main periods of interest here. Firstly, back in 2020, regular GalNets and CGs disappeared. This was the culmination of a slow decline that had been going on for a few years prior - storylines were becoming sparser and stretched to fill the available time, often without CG support as official CGs had been largely replaced with player-submitted templates. Frontier then announced they'd be removing "off-camera" GalNet articles and player-submitted CGs, a "slight decrease" in content that would allow them to better support narratives with ingame involvement, like the Interstellar Initiatives. However, they also got cancelled a few months later, leaving nothing.
So GalNet died. For the next eight months, there were precisely three articles and zero CGs. It was a dark time for Elite. No storylines to get invested in, no CGs to fight for. Anecdotally, myself and many other players I knew just drifted away from game, because...nothing was happening in the galaxy. It's one reason why I consider GalNet this game's greatest feature. I've seen what happens when it's not there.
But then, GalNet came back. We got the Azimuth Saga, the NMLA, the long-awaited conclusion of Starship One, political intrigue in the Empire, the Federation, even the Alliance got a second politician! Weekly CGs, relatively fast-moving plots, better utilisation of already existing content like megaships, dredgers, branching paths, plot twists! Elite was back! I saw people screaming when Starship One was picked up again.
I also remember comments from Frontier staff suggesting that player feedback was one of the main reasons they revived GalNet - I'd imagine they also had some pretty damning metrics about player retention, of course. But whatever it was, it worked.
This era of GalNet was probably its greatest. It's the second period of interest here, culminating in the Proteus Wave, so I'll just call it the Azimuth Saga even though it had plenty of other storylines running concurrently. This graph shows the pace of GalNet during this time.
Stayed pretty steady throughout. When this period started Frontier said they had the narrative roughly planned out for the next two years, and it shows.
After the Proteus Wave, we entered the Aftermath era, where we are right now. Here's the graph for now.
Most notably after the arrival of the Titans, GalNet content seems to have entered another decline. Weekly CGs are gone, now being monthly if that. Before we had multiple storylines running simultaneously, now we effectively just have one, the Thargoids. As a storyline, it certainly can't be faulted for lack of ingame support, but at the same time it feels remarkably on-rails, just a vessel for ocassionally reporting on the current state of the war and new updates. That's not a bad thing by itself, but...at the cost of everything else?
Meanwhile, the narrative side is being stretched out again. This is probably more subjective, but it feels like the current era of GalNet can only hint at plotlines, rather than actually play them out like before. Take the Nemesis Failsafe. It's been nearly two years since Salvation's death and the most recent update was "Seo went to chat with Antal". Four months ago. What was said? I dunno, tune in in another four months and maybe you'll find out?
I never really expected Salvation to return or anything, but the same pattern plays out elsewhere. Maybe we'll figure out the mystery of the Thargoid abductions in another seven months? The mystery of the Thargoid-Guardian battlefield in another eight? The mystery of what the Titans even hoped to achieve in who knows when? It's much easier to ask questions than answer them. I'd list non-Thargoid examples too if we had any surviving non-Thargoid plotlines. In roughly the same timeframe, the Azimuth Saga almost had too many to count.
Now, maybe we're headed for another grand revival of GalNet once Powerplay 2.0 comes, as usual, The Next Update Will Fix It. I would love for that to be the case. Certainly some storylines, like the Federal elections, have been delayed for it. But I'm not convinced. And I'm concerned that four years on from the shutdown, those in charge at Frontier might have forgotten what a colossal mistake the previous decline and shutdown was.
Even if we're not going to lose GalNet entirely, its current state is close enough. Weeks are passing between articles, and even obvious continuations of current events are delayed or missing entirely, like the actual release of the Achilles FSD, or Oya's alerts being defeated. With the vast majority of remaining articles just reporting on progress against the Titans (and even then, intermittently), what happens when that is done? Will we see other storylines return to GalNet? Or will Frontier decide that because there hasn't been another major outcry like there was to the decline and shutdown of 2020, that they were right to let the writers go? Is "two articles a month, a CG if you're lucky" the new normal?
GalNet is the heart and soul of this game. It's what the playerbase is built upon. Please prove me wrong, Frontier.
o7
