Retro Gamer Interview - History is repeating all over again it seems

Devil's Refugee · Feb 7, 2015

For anyone interested, I'd urge you to read Retro Gamer #136 with an interview from David Braben about the 30 year history of Elite. In it you'll find all manner of issues that Frontier have clearly failed to learn from, and have repeated now that plague the game design today. In fact, comparing linked missions in FFE to the Community Grind we've been forced to accept shows the lack of intelligence behind some of the decisions today. David himself admits that this is a game for him. I'll try to scan a full copy but suspect there will be copyright issues so here are a couple of snippets.

Kubicide · Feb 7, 2015

Too funny - or sad really. Thanks for posting. Yeah, history is repeating itself. Hard to say much more than that...

Erimus Kamzel · Feb 7, 2015

Its the same old story. The vision and ambition is always there in the early stages, then financial reality kicks in and profit margins win out. Look at the game vision that was being sold to backers, and compare it to what they got. You would think it was 2 different products from 2 different development studios; one that makes deep reaching PC orientated gameplay, the other specialists at churning out short-lived console crap. Still, as we keep hearing, its early days and we at least have the foundation of what a lot of people tell us will be a great game with years of development content ahead of it.

Keep the faith, and keep on FDs case to deliver some of the vision they sold us.

Devil's Refugee · Feb 7, 2015

Erimus said:
Its the same old story. The vision and ambition is always there in the early stages, then financial reality kicks in and profit margins win out. Look at the game vision that was being sold to backers, and compare it to what they got. You would think it was 2 different products from 2 different development studios; one that makes deep reaching PC orientated gameplay, the other specialists at churning out short-lived console crap. Still, as we keep hearing, its early days and we at least have the foundation of what a lot of people tell us will be a great game with years of development content ahead of it.

Keep the faith, and keep on FDs case to deliver some of the vision they sold us.

i know it's early days, that's perhaps the only saving grace to point to but when history's lessons are ignored you have to question whether any of the vision will be delivered or if ED will be consigned to gaming's history of failures and used in Uni classes as a case study.

Hadron-Higgs-Boson · Feb 7, 2015

The next interesting thing to happen in Elite wil be when either DB gets properly interviewed post launch or a reviewer actually bases a review on playing the game and talking to players for +ve and -ve points, of which there are plenty on both sides, rather than reading the press release and clipping a few of the pre-render press shots.

I had a blast playing for a few hours this morning, despite being ready to murder the idiot who dreamt up USS's. But the Myth and Hype of ED is almost a different game to the one we are playing, or so it feels.

Devil's Refugee · Feb 7, 2015

I set up an interview for DB with Discovery Channel (Space) but this will be more about the Galaxy and astrophysics than the gameplay. However the interviewer is a keen gamer (plays Eve and other space sims and also an Elite fan) so I expect some game related aspects to come out of it. Should be out next week, I'll post it up on its own thread.

Hadron-Higgs-Boson · Feb 7, 2015

Devil's Refugee said:
I set up an interview for DB with Discovery Channel (Space) but this will be more about the Galaxy and astrophysics than the gameplay. However the interviewer is a keen gamer (plays Eve and other space sims and also an Elite fan) so I expect some game related aspects to come out of it. Should be out next week, I'll post it up on its own thread.

Wil look forward to seeing/reading that, thank you

Titus Balls · Feb 7, 2015

The one saving grace in all of this is the time between the two.

When FE2/FFE were release, the Internet was still in that early Bell curve stage - the idea of a patch for a game was almost non-existent - games got pushed out and that was that. Maybe if they had another year they could have achieved their vision.

Today, ED does feel less than what we have in FE2/FFE, but with time and dedication the team can potentially turn it around and make these things work. The difficultly they are faced with is making it work in an online game where the effects are seen by everyone - no small task.

So tl;dr is time will tell if they can achieve the same vision DB had 20 years ago.

Kalearne · Feb 7, 2015

A lot of this is just venting anger, and a bit of worry. Don't read too much into it or take it too seriously.

What eats at me (and I've tried to stop it) is how similar this is to EA's model on game release.
Big up a game, sell everyone on the preorder.
Change the specs before release, release half a game even by the modified specs.
Promise community input and news from dev team. Do neither.

The bit I don't want to happen is that promised features keep getting pushed back and forgotten and eventually they end up as a paid for expansion.

I don't think FD will be that bad.. I hope FD won't be that bad.

I also get disappointed when I read news articles like this from third parties but never seem to get this information from the publisher (in this case FD)

I haven't logged on in three days so far, I'm 2.5kLy from civ space and just can't bring myself to log in right now, maybe tomorrow.

Jex =TE= · Feb 9, 2015

Is this interview about Elite 2: Frontier, because it reads like it could be for ED??

Devil's Refugee · Feb 9, 2015

The interview charts the history of Elite, from the original to now. Yes, you could Find/ Replace the references with "Elite Dangerous" and it would all still apply...

finchywinchy · Feb 9, 2015

Devil's Refugee said:
The interview charts the history of Elite, from the original to now. Yes, you could Find/ Replace the references with "Elite Dangerous" and it would all still apply...

Heh. And you can replace 'publishers' with 'shareholders' as who to blame for it being rushed out, I suppose!

elaverick · Feb 9, 2015

Titus Balls said:
When FE2/FFE were release, the Internet was still in that early Bell curve stage - the idea of a patch for a game was almost non-existent - games got pushed out and that was that. Maybe if they had another year they could have achieved their vision.

Except of course FFE did have a patch. Infact it had two, both released on 3 1/4 inch floppies that I had to queue up for in either Future Zone or Electronics Boutique (can't remember which it was at the time). I think I've still got them in my FFE box somewhere.

finchywinchy · Feb 9, 2015

elaverick said:
Except of course FFE did have a patch. Infact it had two, both released on 3 1/4 inch floppies that I had to queue up for in either Future Zone or Electronics Boutique (can't remember which it was at the time). I think I've still got them in my FFE box somewhere.

+1 rep for the memories...

(I believe it was EB. 'twas in Bolton, at least)

satrycus · Feb 9, 2015

elaverick said:
Except of course FFE did have a patch. Infact it had two, both released on 3 1/4 inch floppies that I had to queue up for in either Future Zone or Electronics Boutique (can't remember which it was at the time). I think I've still got them in my FFE box somewhere.

TWO!? And the rest! I was still receiving patch disks in the post a year after it was released

Trigg · Feb 9, 2015

Back in the day of Elite II, you made a game, shipped a game and that was the end of it.

These days you can make half a game, ship it and then finish creating the game you originally wanted through DLCs and updates. With the initial budget Frontier had, there was no way they could release a fully completed AAA title with all the features they wanted to include and we wanted them to include. Fortunately the current game isn't the 'end product'.

Tryst · Feb 9, 2015

Erimus said:
Keep the faith, and keep on FDs case to deliver some of the vision they sold us.

What? Like the offline play they promised?

The database is not a problem these days, we have disks with several terrabytes of space now. I would rather have used the P2P method to share data between players who are all playing solo to use as data storage so they can be completely offline and still play it. Procedural generation means they can explore systems which are then created on their own private database but not overwritten by the one they download if they already have that system. It means we may all have slightly different systems when we play offline but, who cares as long as we can play offline? Personally, I would rather play offline all the time and explore systems that have not been explored by me before. Having an exploration module on my ship so I can use it on every new system I enter means I can get more out of the game than if it was generated for me by a server. I can find new stations, new systems, new planets and so on that I can then trade with. the core systems are already planned with stations and such, but others are hidden from me until I explore them. It means every player may have a very slightly different set of planets and stations than everyone else and no two games starting from scratch will be the same. We have plenty of disk space to store this data these days and nobody is ever going to explore the whole galaxy in their entire lifetime to require a huge disk for all the data. Even if several people play the game on the same PC and the data is constantly stored, there will never be so much data that it will fill a 1 Tb disk costing about £60 at most. By the time we would need a much bigger disk, 100 and 200Tb disks and bigger will be on the market. There really is no excuse for refusing offline play.

As for the rest of the promises? We'll see but DB promised Elite 4 over 10 years ago and didn't deliver on it, he's not above breaking his promises.

Jex =TE= · Feb 10, 2015

Devil's Refugee said:
The interview charts the history of Elite, from the original to now. Yes, you could Find/ Replace the references with "Elite Dangerous" and it would all still apply...

So what we're seeing here is perhaps Braben's lack of imagination? The last 3 Elite's have been the same game?

Devil's Refugee · Feb 10, 2015

Jex =TE= said:
So what we're seeing here is perhaps Braben's lack of imagination? The last 3 Elite's have been the same game?

I think the vision and imagination is there, the design and capability to deliver the vision isn't.

Janichsan · Feb 10, 2015

Trigg said:
Back in the day of Elite II, you made a game, shipped a game and that was the end of it.

These days you can make half a game, ship it and then finish creating the game you originally wanted through DLCs and updates. With the initial budget Frontier had, there was no way they could release a fully completed AAA title with all the features they wanted to include and we wanted them to include. Fortunately the current game isn't the 'end product'.

I wouldn't necessarily word it that negative, but I agree: when Frontier and First Encounters were released, they had to remain unchanged because there simply wasn't a feasible way to patch them afterwards. ED on the other hand is still developing. What we have now is not what we will have in a few months, let alone in a year.

Tryst said:
As for the rest of the promises? We'll see but DB promised Elite 4 over 10 years ago and didn't deliver on it, he's not above breaking his promises.

That's a pretty ignorant statement. Elite 4 did not materialise earlier because no publisher wanted to support the development. Only due to the advent of Kickstarter, DB could make the game he wanted to make (and currently about 300,000 wanted to play) for all these years. That might be news for you, but game development costs money and that has to come from somewhere.