Just curious what folks think on this. If the DDF had been involved during the design stage of the Engineers, would we have come up with something better than what we have? There seems to be no end of complaints about this expansion that I can't help feeling a lot of the problems with it could have been nipped in the bud at an earlier stage if we had been given more involvement.
My personal feeling is that stuff too far detached from DDF has not been very successful for ED. CGs are quite ok, wings were necessary and work reasonably well, powerplay was a relative fail, CQC was ok, but should've been integrated better with the main game, Horizons is good though material hunting and synthesis is somewhat boring, Engineers is grindy and RNG frustrating.
Sticking to the basics, expanding on missions, bgs, wings, exploration, navy ranks, storyline and lore, bringing in stuff from DDF when possible would have had a more positive outcome in my opinion.
Yes, I think that the community should be involved more. I don't want to see design by committee as some call it, it's not possible to incorporate everyone's desires and ideas, a player suggesting a certain feature or mechanic cannot foresee the resulting technical implications etc.
What I do want to see though is the developers presenting their ideas and future content sooner rather than right before deployment. Getting feedback from the community and adjusting the new mechanics if really required. The major Engineer mechanics have been revealed I believe a few weeks before Beta in some live sessions. When players raised concerns about those mechanics, the answer was that those concerns will be addressed in Beta because "that's what Betas are for". Yet 2.1 Beta lasted only 3 weeks and the only adjustments possible in that timeframe were a few balance passes. Let's be honest, you cannot change the mechanics of a new update fundamentally a few weeks or one month before it's set to hit.
I feel that if FDEV had communicated with the players sooner, they wouldn't now be forced to work on things like favors and storage, or have to deal with issues like the bad Steam reviews. I don't even know what's going on with special effects and how balanced the game will be.
I don't see anything bad with revealing mechanics earlier in the concept phase. The kind of players to follow developer's posts and keep informed about the game's progress are those that already purchased the LEP or the season pass, keeping season content a "surprise" isn't going to significantly influence running sales of that season. On the other hand increased communication might help match the expectations of the public better, or at least help them accommodate to new features by explaining the reasons behind certain decisions, or how some mechanics interact with the bigger picture.
Two of the common complaints leveled at FDEV over 2.1 are "do you even play your own game" and "you know nothing about game design". Having a large group of people with lots of different gaming experience who are some of the most active players of ED would have killed off both these points.
"We're going to design it our own way and it will be fine" is viable when you're doing something nobody's done before, but something as repeated as "how should a loot system work" or "how should gear upgrades work"... FDEV should really have picked an existing (good) mechanic and improved on it, not pick the same (bad) mechanic for both.
My guess is that had we had the very notion of RNG, and some other aspects such as the number of components needed and their drop rates, been floated to us in the DDF that it would have been voted against. They are of course free to ignore our advice but the very purpose of it was to enable the devs to float ideas and see what a small group of interested people thought of those ideas. These ideas could then be rethought, refined and further evaluated before going into open Beta or Gamma.
The DDF have all but been forgotten about and I can't help but think that the game would be in a better place than it is now if they hadn't done that.
The DDF have all but been forgotten about and I can't help but think that the game would be in a better place than it is now if they hadn't done that.
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Nope.
Well, that just about says it all.
There used to be a link to the Design Discussion archive but I can't seem to find it. It would give you some insight into what was going on before the game was released, during the Alpha through to Gamma stages.
EDIT: Found it!
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forumdisplay.php/36-Design-Discussion-Archive
You may find some of what you find interesting reading, if a little long winded at times.
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It would still lead to conservative choices, which aren't always the right choices. Odd-sounding mechanics, lurid art choices or silly-sounding plotlines can often be better than the safe option.
Personally, if I was making a space game I would have no interest at all in what everybody else thought. I'd rather be judged on my own (probably terrible) decisions than spend the rest of my life blaming angry internet people for my compromises.
Admittedly there are a load of things I'd have done differently with ED, but it's the Frontier version I'm paying for.
Invoke the name of the DDF and you get the DDA.
Here is a thread with a lot of crafting. It's mostly in the discussion.
And here is one on salvage. Aka the loot part of loot and crafting.
So I have been reading the thread a bit, and I can now see why Engineers ended up the way it did.
If you read the discussion you can tell how crafting part is pushed more towards what it turned out to be now.
It doesn't describe engineers in detail, but you can clearly see how it influenced the direction.
I think people need to stop talking about the DDF as if it is some sort of holy book. From what I see, it clearly has a strong influence on the game, and should actually be blamed for the current state of the game. To me it seems that the majority of ED features, good bad or otherwise, can be linked back to the DDF.
I think the DDFers need to get their heads out of Uranus, and actually read the DDA and see how much of it is in game(in one form or another) and how much the DDF/DDA is actually a problem for them.
Here is a thread with a lot of crafting. It's mostly in the discussion.
And here is one on salvage. Aka the loot part of loot and crafting.
So I have been reading the thread a bit, and I can now see why Engineers ended up the way it did.
If you read the discussion you can tell how crafting part is pushed more towards what it turned out to be now.
It doesn't describe engineers in detail, but you can clearly see how it influenced the direction.
I think people need to stop talking about the DDF as if it is some sort of holy book. From what I see, it clearly has a strong influence on the game, and should actually be blamed for the current state of the game. To me it seems that the majority of ED features, good bad or otherwise, can be linked back to the DDF.
I think the DDFers need to get their heads out of Uranus, and actually read the DDA and see how much of it is in game(in one form or another) and how much the DDF/DDA is actually a problem for them.
True, it was discussed. But nobody suggested that it should be drawn out the way it ended up, as far as I remember.
We were asked questions, or given gameplay mechanics. and those involved gave their opinions on those. Many of those conversations lead to beneficial things. I think the good outweighs the bad. But I doubt that we would have what we currently have had that involvement continued.
This is true that no single user in that forum suggested, in detail, what and how crafting would work that it so ended up as it is now.
There were some pretty decent suggestions, that I think would be much better than the current system.
BUT, FDev has to take everyone's suggestions into account, not just what we think are good ones. They were all backers, IIRC.
And I can see how that mixed bag of suggestions turned into what it is now.
I agree that the Good > bad.
What I am saying is, you can't pull the DDF card on an unwanted/bad feature when said feature took it's roots in the DDF.
True, but there is a chance it could be just as bad, if not worse... or better. We'd can't be sure.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Correct.
I admit that over the year or so we were talking to Frontier via the DDF we may have given them some ideas; may have helped them see things from a slightly different angle; but all in all what we see today is solely down to FD. Everything we see in game is down to them. Everything.
Even the great supercruise mechanic that is heralded as the DDFs greatest accomplishment was actually Frontiers idea. The only thing we did then was to unanimously agree the hotspot idea was not what we wanted.
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Let's also be realistic here - There's been plenty of posts on the forums from a variety of people critiquing Power Play and FD did nothing about it. There's also been plenty of posts on the forums critiquing Engineers and what do you think FD will do ? Don't overestimate our ability to influence FD .. they're going to frack the game up in their own manner regardless
Achilles7
Banned
Exactly the same holds for non backers, of course....
Agreed..but my insinuation would have been slightly diluted if I had used an all-inclusive statement...did I really have to explain that?
NB - Do you check ALL of my posts Mr Maynard? hehehe
That's the bit that concerns me most. I wasn't too worried until Power Play and The Engineers turned up. It kind of felt like being on the backseat as the person driving passes out.Let's also be realistic here - There's been plenty of posts on the forums from a variety of people critiquing Power Play and FD did nothing about it. There's also been plenty of posts on the forums critiquing Engineers and what do you think FD will do ? Don't overestimate our ability to influence FD .. they're going to frack the game up in their own manner regardless
What the DDF would have done in reality was what they get from the forums anyway, just in a more succinct way. They would have may have caught the Engineers RNG thing and FD may have changed things but at the end of the day FD will do what FD will do. The DDF was certainly of use during the early days of production in conjunction with the Alpha/Beta forums, there were several posts over that time, that while they were little things they did add up like they way fuel was used and displayed, and having an audio warning for getting attacked.