Re-installed EVE Online a couple of days. ED could learn a lot from EVE.

[Katkon]

Full disclaimer: I'm not a long-time EVE player, I played it casually on and off for about 6 months. ED is obviously a completely different game, and with an arguably less toxic community. Still, even as a devout fan and premium backer of ED, it's hard to ignore some of the great features in EVE.

With that out of the way.... here is a random list of some of the things that I really like the most in EVE, and which I feel ED would do well to replicate in some way, shape or form down the road:

* That feeling of "life". The EVE universe is truly alive, and brimming with players. It's things like the local chat menu that shows me who's nearby, along with my ability to communicate real-time with any player online. It helps that players congregate and mess around by major centers such as Jita. In comparison, ED feels empty. Certainly we're restricted by the limit to some 30 odd players per instance and the scale of the universe. But chat features could help overcome that feeling of loneliness.

* COLOUR! I love the non-black look of the systems. I get that ED is more realistic, but I simply find the game "too black" and would love to see much more variety. Many will disagree with me here.

* Missions. Much more involved than ED. Sure, the base mechanics are similar (go there, shoot stuff, pick things up etc.) but the mission zones all look quite different, with varying mission structures, craft etc. And the NPC dialogue is more involved.

* Weather and random objects in space. Various missions involve flying through toxic gas clouds or debris fields. ED has the latter but on a much smaller scale, and they don't ever seem to contain anything of interest.

* Meaningful exploration. Not only does it take skill to find stuff, but it can be fun to go off in search of things. This is much more limited in ED.

* The feeling of real and imminent danger. It's palpable. Nothing like ED even in Open.

* The variety of ships and outfitting options (and the lack of engineer upgrades!). I quite like the more passive skill-based learning.

* The player-driven.... everything.

There's much more. Again, I can appreciate that a point-and-click game like EVE Online is totally different from a first-person space flight game like ED (with actual flight mechanics!), BUT I think there's much ED can learn from EVE nonetheless. It's certainly competing for my time, right now at least!

 

[Darth Ender]

I dont play eve. Never will so long as it's not using a twitch flight model.

But yes, all of those things would be welcome additions to varying degrees.

a player augmented economy would be a perfect way to begin finishing the incomplete core gameplay in the game. Rather than be fully player driven like Eve is or fully fake like it currently is, it would be player augmented. meaning the following.

Each system is given a rate of production of certain goods that make sense to be produced at a given station in the system. Also a given rate of trade to nearby systems.
They're also given a certain rate of consumption of those goods and other materials used to make those goods as well as goods traded from other systems.

Each faction is given a certain amount of money that is consumed and replenished based on the trading of goods. This money is divided amongst purchasing goods for consumption and assigning bounties and missions per faction.

This all self balances without player interaction.

Players are then the x-factors in the game's economy. Through trading and missions and bounties and buying and selling ships / modules etc we can increase or decrease a faction and thus a system's wealth and change how much of something they produce or consume from their normal trade partners, or remove their trade partners completely by tanking the partner's economy and killing off or seriously limiting their production of goods.

In this way players can back factions to the point of creating massive economic empires or destroying them. With real in-game impacts to what ships are then available and what goods are available. Making it necessary for people to mine or trade etc for a purpose other than your own personal wealth.

EDIT: credits btw would no longer be limitless. While it may be too hard to set a fixed amount of credits in the entire game and emulate inflation, it wouldn't be that hard to simulate certain aspects of inflation to set a natural limiting factor to players impacting the economies of systems by tying the economy state of a faction to the rewards they make available for missions and bounties, the selling and buying price they set for ships / modules / trade goods, and all of that would impact the amount of missions / bounties and etc. So while you can do all this, you can't get insanely wealthy just grinding the same systems etc.


However, this probably wont ever come to pass because Elite dangerous has an identity crisis where it wants to be a sandbox (similar to eve) but also wants to narrate a story that they have a preconceived plot to. Too much player control means you can't write such a story that you want. You instead have to create an on-going story based solely on current player actions and the game state. Something that is unlikely to be something we'll see implemented. So instead we get a compromise that makes nobody happy. No tight, engaging plot and story ....no fully immersed and engaging gameplay.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I player Eve once, for several years.

Biggest waste of money ever.

 

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

I think Eve is too complicated. The problem with ED and Star Citizen is they're trying to be too complicated.

I don't want an economy simulator. The more you simulate every detail of reality, the more time consuming and life destroying your game becomes.

Eventually you become this guy...

But I totally agree that they really need to make it easier for players to get together and do fun things in the sand box together. Chat rooms where people could meet up and explore together would be part of that.

I think the development focus should be more on creating fun experiences for single and multi players. Instead we're recreating reality which involves tediously grinding for money to buy stuff. I already live in such a reality. I don't have time for two jobs.

 

[DaMorgs]

There's been a few posts like this over the last couple of years. Put on your helmet, there's flak coming LOL

For the record I agree with you

Time to hide....

 

[Don Alvarez]

Played for like a week. Only game I played with an in-game web browser to help endure the grind.

 

[SkUnimatrix]

Played for like a week. Only game I played with an in-game web browser to help endure the grind.

Elite with a mod that allows you to watch netflix while playing isn't any better.

 

[Jukelo]

Played for like a week. Only game I played with an in-game web browser to help endure the grind.

Did you read the OP, and do you have anything of worth to say to the points they brought up instead of stupidly starting the hate train?
In case you have somehow clicked the wrong link, this thread isn't titled "What is your opinion of EVE in general?".

 

[DefiledDragon]

Full disclaimer: I'm not a long-time EVE player, I played it casually on and off for about 6 months. ED is obviously a completely different game, and with an arguably less toxic community. Still, even as a devout fan and premium backer of ED, it's hard to ignore some of the great features in EVE.

With that out of the way.... here is a random list of some of the things that I really like the most in EVE, and which I feel ED would do well to replicate in some way, shape or form down the road:

* That feeling of "life". The EVE universe is truly alive, and brimming with players. It's things like the local chat menu that shows me who's nearby, along with my ability to communicate real-time with any player online. It helps that players congregate and mess around by major centers such as Jita. In comparison, ED feels empty. Certainly we're restricted by the limit to some 30 odd players per instance and the scale of the universe. But chat features could help overcome that feeling of loneliness.

* COLOUR! I love the non-black look of the systems. I get that ED is more realistic, but I simply find the game "too black" and would love to see much more variety. Many will disagree with me here.

* Missions. Much more involved than ED. Sure, the base mechanics are similar (go there, shoot stuff, pick things up etc.) but the mission zones all look quite different, with varying mission structures, craft etc. And the NPC dialogue is more involved.

* Weather and random objects in space. Various missions involve flying through toxic gas clouds or debris fields. ED has the latter but on a much smaller scale, and they don't ever seem to contain anything of interest.

* Meaningful exploration. Not only does it take skill to find stuff, but it can be fun to go off in search of things. This is much more limited in ED.

* The feeling of real and imminent danger. It's palpable. Nothing like ED even in Open.

* The variety of ships and outfitting options (and the lack of engineer upgrades!). I quite like the more passive skill-based learning.

* The player-driven.... everything.

There's much more. Again, I can appreciate that a point-and-click game like EVE Online is totally different from a first-person space flight game like ED (with actual flight mechanics!), BUT I think there's much ED can learn from EVE nonetheless. It's certainly competing for my time, right now at least!

Now you've done it. Better stuff a hardback copy of the Beano down your trousers!

 

[VR Morgan Grimes]

Let's give Elite another ten years and see how it compares, Eve was pretty basic early on too but the sentiment is good

 

[RamirezKurita]

If there's any game that Elite could do with learning from, it's not Eve. Eve is a fundamentally different game with it's emphasis on player involvement, while Elite is more about players just being a ragtag bunch of misfit mercenaries that roam the galaxy to seek their fortune.

No, the game Elite could learn from is Dwarf Fortress. Although DF is a very different game in terms of gameplay, they share the massive design emphasis on procedural development and storytelling. DF's degree of implementation of procedural generation is literally years ahead of Elite, with each procedurally generated world having a huge amount of persistent NPCs all with their own motivations, personalities and goals. The whole world's economy and political structure can change through both player activity and general happenings, all done procedurally. Everything has a purpose, everyone has a reason for existing.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

First of all, if I wanted Eve, I'd play Eve. That said, how do you know that E: D isn't planning much of what you've suggested? It took Eve more than a decade to incorporate a lot of this stuff.....yet you seem to think that E: D should do it in under 3 years.

 

[markuslig]

EVE, interesting game, could never get into it, I had no idea what was going... i did like the passive skill thingy, cant remember anything else from the game that i like, oh yes i made a pretty girl, lol Anyway some version of some skill building would be nice.

 

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

No, the game Elite could learn from is Dwarf Fortress. Although DF is a very different game in terms of gameplay, they share the massive design emphasis on procedural development and storytelling.

I never heard of Dwarf Fortress. I looked it up. I wouldn't want ED to go in that direction. A world simulator is boring. You play games to escape from the tedium of the world not create an alternate tedious world.

But those guys are excellent programmers. I bet they could overhaul the BGS and mission system in a couple of months. Frontier should hire them.

[video=youtube;EJgo11eaxSs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJgo11eaxSs[/video]

 

[Lucian667]

I also played Eve for about 6 to 9 months. I eventually quit because it felt like having a second job and one crappy, tedious, boring job was more than enough for me. ED sometimes has moments like that but is nowhere near as bad as Eve.

 

[AceFlares]

You missed out:

Needing two accounts at least and several chars with different skill sets to accomplish anything worthwhile and just survive in low sec or 0.0.

The necessity for a TV, second PC or two screens to watch stuff on while you're camped in station by 10000 dweebs, mining or gate camping.

Listening to nabheads on comms. Imagine being in a room with several beavis and butthead clones who found a large stash of coke. It's probably the same experience.

Lack of mission variety. There's only a clutch of missions and dungeons. They're just in different places and only there to grind faction rep/credits. Brains out no fun experienced.

The credit farmers.

The credit buyers.

Pay to win

The steep learning curve and incredibly slow progress for the average Joe. The game didn't go free to play after several years and a huge dip in numbers for nothing.

I could go on, and on, and well on forever.

 

[DaveB]

ED HAS learned a lot from EvE.

Seems to me a lot of those things are FD in general and Mr Braben in particular looking at EvE and saying "Don't like that bit. Make sure we don't do that." but also a number of features have come "full circle", being inspired in EvE by the original Elite and how they were developed and used by the players in EvE influencing how they "returned" to the Elite franchise in ED. The amount of player influence in the galactic economy as a whole has been discussed ad nauseam so I'm not going to revisit it, but a few of the other points do deserve a reply.

Several of the things you highlight are part of what makes the EvE universe seem so much "smaller" than the ED universe to me.

The colors and the "weather" - to me at least - make it "gamey" and frankly detract from the EvE experience as far as I'm concerned. I'm actually quite glad that those didn't make it into ED in anything resembling the form they take in EvE.

As far as exploration goes, I agree with you that it's a career in ED that could do with a lot of attention. I think EvE would be a valid source of inspiration for FD in this regard but any changes arising from that inspiration would have to be implemented - for want of a better way to describe it - "ED style" rather than "EvE style". The "feel" of the two games is very different and that's a good thing. While the groups of players that enjoy the two games do overlap they are far from identical and between them they cater to more "space gamers" than either can do alone.

 

[the100thmonkey]

I do wonder whether it's possible to actually simulate the economy of 20,000 star systems and trillions of people. My guess would be that the current implementation is something approaching what the devs' initial feasibility assessment indicated was doable on their initial backend.

Giving an econmy malleable demand and supply factors with relationships to other local economies sounds like it would produce some really interesting gameplay, but again I wonder whether it was discounted because not only would it have broken the initial conception of players as cogs in the machine, with players able to shut down entire groups of systems, but also because of the added computational overheads - the bubble would become a complex system with potential butterfly effects originating in one system affecting economies hundreds of light years away, with each impact on each economy within the web being calculated server-side with two-way effects for each of a system's relationship bubble . That sounds computationally rather.... Intensive.

Eve's player-driven economy sidesteps that by letting the players set the prices.

 

[Tacyon]

Not directed at OP or anyone in particular nor to incite ...

1) if you've not played Eve consecutively for more than a few months or at all, stop making comparative statements. You have no basis with which to speak from.
2) give ED as much time, trials, and tribulations as Eve has had since inception and ED could be just as polished. Notice I didn't say "perfect as". Eve is still FAR from perfect.
3) If you spell color - colour, then that is all you have to say. You don't know what you're talking about. (I kid, I kid ) I personally do not like the well lit space of eve. Space is a dark and foreboding environment. Not a cafeteria.

Some of your comparisons (missions, debris fields, and other diversities) if you play Eve (insert grind) long enough, you'll see the same things, patterns, & stuff over and over again. Albeit on a larger scale. So much so that there is a mission helper site that tell you where to sit and point to shoot enemy "X" that will spawn when you do "Y". It's a game. PvP is the only unknown and WILL get your adrenaline pumpin quickly when you're in their sights and range.

I've played Eve consecutively since 2009 (note sig avatar) and ED pretty much since beta backing. Two very different "games" but ones that share some commonalities. Eve is more of thinking game like chess and why some here "just don't get it". ED I feel is more of space COD with an sort of economy.

Sometimes I want pizza and sometimes I feel like having Sushi (see cafeteria reference above). I think there is a place for both and not everyone will like both. It's just the way it is.

Now, that being said, I agree there are successes that could be learned from Eve Online by FDev. I won't be holding my breath though as it seems they can't even listen to their own beta testers let alone go and study someone else who's already done it successfully for longer than a 10 year plan.

 

[Commander Biscuit]

I tried Eve, it seemed promising until I realized there was no way to take my ship off the rails. If that game had learned from all other space sims about freedom then ED probably never would've even gotten off the ground.