The thargoids are just creatures of habit. Or maybe at Thargoid world Thursday is war day, and they only go to war on Thursdays.
Repeat the same Guardian unlock 18 times? Really?
- Thread starter Mr_sukebe
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The thargoids are just creatures of habit. Or maybe at Thargoid world Thursday is war day, and they only go to war on Thursdays.
You believe that the entire galaxy has the same calendar right? You must be a very bright fanboi.
Did you really take that seriously?
Well I hope you are right on that one.
Won't make too much difference to me either way though, because like you, it's highly unlikely I will actually go and do that. It's fun the first few times, but the definition of insane to go do it that many times.
Agree Ant and to all others who have posted similar. Not fun gameplay. It’s concerning that this sort of mechanic is the best that can be thought of / implemented after 3/4 years of development.
I think they're trying to say, "We respect our player's time." but somehow it always comes out as, "We love to waste our players time with RNG and needlessly repetitive fetch quests devoid of fun."
3 plus years and we're still no closer to deciphering Frontier-ese. Has anyone tried putting the developer's quotes through a spectrograph reader and seeing what secret coded images turn up?
This has been the biggest joke I ever heard from him. Think PP, think Engineers (in release version!!), think revamp of engineers, actually almost anything. What they don't get is that there needs to be a skill curve or actual progression if they want to keep players engaged for hundreds of hours. But all they come up is repetition. I am talking a long break again. Maybe the Q4 update will bring some good changes - same hope as every year. But man, I wish they would rethink their design approach!
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It's irrelevant if they love it or not. The design sucks so badly in so many areas of this game and every year we see the same cycle. New content get introduced, outrage in the community over stupid grind, then they reduce it until it's just barely tolerable.
After 3yrs of the same mistakes it's fair to say that the responsibility sits squarely on some designer lap.
"Personal narative" and "We value your time" will only remembered as memes as they are vacuous sound bites turned pranks.
If this game gameplay design was of the same calibre than it's art and sound it would be a 10/10.
Talk about finding a way to turn gold into lead....
Why would they do that? People RIGHT NOW are playing for hundreds of hours, happy or not, engaged or not, tens of thousands of people play on steam alone every day. Elite's game design has always been extremely sub par, over complicated, convoluted and almost insulting, but somehow the game is still going strong. Not exceptionally strong, but it's definitely far from dying out. Why change now?
The first three years I spend a LOT money on paintjobs, ship kits and merchandise. Last year I stoped. I hope there are many others like me.
The point is also that the game is fun, at least for me it is. It's just extremely frustrating that 75% of the content sucks so badly that I have come up with challenges like learning FAoff. The game has very good parts, they just don't use them. Instead they introduce mechanics that have the appeal of mobile f2p games.
Without a direct competitor in the market there is no financial incentive for them to improve their game design. For now we're still stuck with relying on FD's sense of worksmanship to provide incentive for them to make better game design decisions. Unfortunately that hasn't been working because they are either unwilling or incapable of thinking differently. They seem to be inflexible in this regard as is evidenced by them always falling back on repetition, repetition, repetition as their go-to solution for everything game design-related in ED.
Their idea of a solution to public dissatisfaction about this outdated and sub par approach to game design is to make the tediously repetitive tasks even more convoluted and needlessly complicated. Almost like their office mantra is "Tedium means 'fun'. More tedium means more 'fun'". The sooner ED gets an actual competitor in the market the better for the sake of gameplay quality in this game, unfortunately that doesn't look like it will happen any time soon.
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No, and it's a real shame that SC/NMS failed so hard, if only for the reasons you give. They can afford to be lazy and unimaginative.
I was also really interested to complete the Ancient ruins mission to obtain the Guardian knowledge for Ram Tah. The thought of visiting new sites and solving puzzles to unlock the messages sounded right up my street.
But am I being harsh by thinking this was horribly implemented?
Working out what each symbol meant was ok. But then once you’ve cracked that, the puzzle solving is over and the relentless obelisk scanning begins. I could have lived with this however it seemed entirely random which symbols related to what type of info (so you have to scan each and every one). Coupled with the fact a message started coming up on some obelisk scans saying I had the wrong items (when I didn’t) drained all the fun out of the mission.
Finally the lack of a data record in the mission log showing how many scans had been recorded per data type and therefore how many were remaining (I know inbox messages supplied info as and when but it’s jot a practical means of tracking progress) was ultimately in my view - a massive oversight. The mission was nearly unplayable without the use of external guides.
I’m left feeling the implementation of these new Guardian gameplay mechanics leaves a lot to be desired.
I emphasis “implementation” as I love the idea behind a lot of this new content and fully support FD trying to give players new things to do.
But am I being harsh by thinking this was horribly implemented?
Working out what each symbol meant was ok. But then once you’ve cracked that, the puzzle solving is over and the relentless obelisk scanning begins. I could have lived with this however it seemed entirely random which symbols related to what type of info (so you have to scan each and every one). Coupled with the fact a message started coming up on some obelisk scans saying I had the wrong items (when I didn’t) drained all the fun out of the mission.
Finally the lack of a data record in the mission log showing how many scans had been recorded per data type and therefore how many were remaining (I know inbox messages supplied info as and when but it’s jot a practical means of tracking progress) was ultimately in my view - a massive oversight. The mission was nearly unplayable without the use of external guides.
I’m left feeling the implementation of these new Guardian gameplay mechanics leaves a lot to be desired.
I emphasis “implementation” as I love the idea behind a lot of this new content and fully support FD trying to give players new things to do.
I think the next X is coming. It SP, but ED demonstrated quite well that throwing SP and MP people together in one pot isn't a good idea anyway.
FD have demonstrated fantastic creativity with things like the hidden messages within Thargoid probes. But I suppose what gets me a bit is someone has spent time and effort in putting all that together for 0.1% of the player base to enjoy. Absolutely fantastic that it’s in the game, but there are other areas of the game that may have benefited from that resources.
I can only assume that tinkering with the the core elements of the ED game are technically very difficult as longtime players have been raising concerns re core gameplay for years.
Does kind of make you wonder how the same team that brought us the riddles associated with thargoid stuff also came up with "do the same thing a heap of times" as well. [sad]
I can tell you : the designer didn't understand anything of the probe puzzle. His only question was : "will it take a long time to solve ?" "Uhh yeah" "ok then, go ahead"
For the guardian mission it was the same question. Answer was "about a week, maybe 2". "Way too short, quadruple the requirements then!"
The probe puzzle was a lot of fun to crack I reckon.
Could be any number of things. My guess is the majority of development time was, no surprise, spent on the art/assets. It's quite nice looking I must say so myself.
However, in the implementation, they likely misjudged how it would be received by players. While flying to new/different sites is neat, when the goal of doing these puzzles is unlocking new weapons/modules, of course players are going to want to obtain them as fast as possible. They know how to make things look beautiful, they also know how to create fairly complex riddles/etc, but I'm not convinced they've figured out how to properly deal with repetitive tasks in a manner that can keep a majority of players engaged.
The riddles have been great, but one complaint they had been getting was that the majority of the player base experienced it via the forum, reddit, youtube, etc, rather than being in the game. So when the 3.0 series was first discussed the 'personal narrative' was brought up. They knew that the individual player wasn't going to have all the resources available to solve some of the more complex riddles that we've seen previously, so they couldn't go too far down the rabbit hole with the complexity/difficulty. In turn, they opted for repetition as a means to increase the challenge.
I really want to give them the benefit of the doubt in that they have the atmosphere, and the best of intentions on making this a great game. I think they just missed the mark in understanding how a large portion of the player base would view this. Heck, I even think they have the assets available to make some good fixes, whether it's by upping the blueprints to 3 per scan, or reducing the requirements some, but requiring the player to visit 3 separate systems (which from a lore standpoint, makes the most sense) to obtain each piece of the blueprint. It could even be a message that you get after the first scan that is decoded and points you to another system. Those things add depth, forces the player to not 'grind', and gets them out to other guardian sites.
This is just my take on this, and everyone has their own take on it, but I genuinely hope they take some feedback on this to heart. This is one example of where some proper beta testers (who could sign NDAs) would go a long ways to flush out some of these issues prior to hitting the masses.
I collected 16 Blueprints yesterday, and I thought I would go crazy after just a few runs.
Of course I had to make pauses every now and then, but just a thought about how I can do half now and come back later wasn't working for me.
And then in the middle of runs I heard how they removed the modules... lel.
Of course I had to make pauses every now and then, but just a thought about how I can do half now and come back later wasn't working for me.
And then in the middle of runs I heard how they removed the modules... lel.