So I checked out Elite after ditching it for Star Citizen

[BluStar]

As many people probably know, the current drama in Star Citizen enticed me to check out elite again(2800 hours in Elite, about 1000 in Star citizen), i found mysefl playing it 3 hours a day daily even though I dont think it will last me very long.


Things I learned to appreciate in this game that I did not before:

There is relatively good amount of things to do in elite.
The space combat is very good.
The pvp is good, but could be better if engineers were removed from the game.
The galaxy is huge, you can find stuff.
While its not hard core spaceship simulator like Star Citizen with interiors, long travelling on foot etc, it often skips the boring parts for the sake of fun (i still want interiors).
The UI is clean, easy to understand.
Ships handle well, its not overcomplicated and you know what to expect from your ship.
The optimization is space is good.
Aliens.
Even though barebones, there are actual politics, BGS, and game tries to be alive.
Outfitting has a lot of depth.
Weapons have learning curve.
Ship builds have learning curve.
In my opinion, exploration suite is pretty good.
Relatively bug free, networking is not.
I prefer Elite supercruise over quantom beacon rubbish from star citizen.
Star map and system map are goods.
You can freely express your opinion on these forums, even though there are whiteknights here too. On star citizen spectrum by expressing your negative opinion you get banned for "indirectly attacking CIG staff". The cultism is very heavy over there.
You keep your progress indefinitely.


Now the bad things...

What happend to developing this game ? Where are all the new things that were promised, where is the feature rework that they talked about ?
They said they are not letting elite die, words are cool but where are actions ?
Why was i greeted with Cutscene when i launch the game with moving PNG's like this is some sort of highschool indie project game ?
Why keep reusing old assets and content ? Where is the new stuff.
What happened to fixing optimization for ground combat ?
New ships ? Hello ? There are so many role gaps, price gaps on the market ?
What happened to implementing CQC into main game ?
Powerplay open only .. What happened to it ? Powerplay was meant to be pvp addition to the game.
The guild system is barebones and abandoned.
Crew system needed major changes since its released, its still borked and useless. Still can use only 1 npc crew member at once.
Salvaging ?

 

[St0rmFury]

What's the current drama in SC?

 

[BluStar]

What's the current drama in SC?

they are pretty much wiping progress every month after saying they wont be wiping, kept players in dark about upcoming wipe and pulled bait and switch on people, wasted their time
here is simply no reason to play right now hence i checked Elite

 

[metatheurgist]

Powerplay open only .. What happened to it ? Powerplay was meant to be pvp addition to the game.

It really wasn't. That was the retcon after it failed. As to the rest, well Frontier could be like CIG and sell you a bill of goods and never deliver, but would that actually be an improvement?

What's the current drama in SC?

Same as the old drama.

 

[BluStar]

What's the current drama in SC?

 

[Riverside]

Interesting perspective OP, thanks for posting.

I've played ED almost exclusively every day for years (been playing legacy a lot lately), it can be easy to get tied up with stuff like (what I consider to be) poor UI design in some parts & forget that most of the UI is pretty great and just not perfect rather than deeply flawed.

I think it's a shame development seems to have slowed to a crawl and that there seems little to look forward to, but what the game has is fundamentally good, just rough around the edges.

 

[Martind Forlon]

I agree with pros put by OP and some of cons too, there are also cons with which I agree not, but this imo is overall good view from outside. I have here one quote which may be very important for ED future. I bolded text in few parts …

… Player Made Factions have played a key role in expressing your will over the shape of the bubble. This goal is at the heart of our plans for Elite and reflected in the Thargoid War. Our focus is now turning to investigate how upcoming systems will allow every player and player group to have a meaningful impact on the galaxy’s landscape. This means we will be closing applications for PMFs, however we will process any remaining applications.

I see there still a good chance for ED to make a great use of its huge background, but whether that will happen is fully in Frontier’s hands …

 

[Shabine]

New ships ? Hello ? There are so many role gaps, price gaps on the market ?

The problem is that there are no role gaps. This game's ships already overlap (especially in the medium multirole category) heavily. Exploration, PvP, PvE, stealth (cold running/silent running), planetary ops, mining, trading - this game's ships already cover every base multiple times. So many hulls are adaptable to AX, any PvP or PvE combat scenario, and so on, because modularity. And the content is stagnant, so new ships don't have much purpose.

This is why the game doesn't get new ships. Any new ships will be purely cosmetic without completely new gameplay elements and accompanying functionality. On top of that, Frontier probably don't want to spend time developing ships when they have all this content planned and are saddled with stamping out existing bugs. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see new ships and old ships from 1984, but there just isn't anything that a new ship could reasonably be expected to do better (or worse) than anything we have.

Cannibalizing the roles of popular hulls won't win points with players anyway, especially if they spent development time on that instead of giving us new things to do, or at least fixing some of the current problems with the game.

 

[GroG79]

Panther Clipper smthing

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

As many people probably know, the current drama in Star Citizen enticed me to check out elite again(2800 hours in Elite, about 1000 in Star citizen), i found mysefl playing it 3 hours a day daily even though I dont think it will last me very long.


Things I learned to appreciate in this game that I did not before:

There is relatively good amount of things to do in elite.
The space combat is very good.
The pvp is good, but could be better if engineers were removed from the game.
The galaxy is huge, you can find stuff.
While its not hard core spaceship simulator like Star Citizen with interiors, long travelling on foot etc, it often skips the boring parts for the sake of fun (i still want interiors).
The UI is clean, easy to understand.
Ships handle well, its not overcomplicated and you know what to expect from your ship.
The optimization is space is good.
Aliens.
Even though barebones, there are actual politics, BGS, and game tries to be alive.
Outfitting has a lot of depth.
Weapons have learning curve.
Ship builds have learning curve.
In my opinion, exploration suite is pretty good.
Relatively bug free, networking is not.
I prefer Elite supercruise over quantom beacon rubbish from star citizen.
Star map and system map are goods.
You can freely express your opinion on these forums, even though there are whiteknights here too. On star citizen spectrum by expressing your negative opinion you get banned for "indirectly attacking CIG staff". The cultism is very heavy over there.
You keep your progress indefinitely.


Now the bad things...

What happend to developing this game ? Where are all the new things that were promised, where is the feature rework that they talked about ?
They said they are not letting elite die, words are cool but where are actions ?
Why was i greeted with Cutscene when i launch the game with moving PNG's like this is some sort of highschool indie project game ?
Why keep reusing old assets and content ? Where is the new stuff.
What happened to fixing optimization for ground combat ?
New ships ? Hello ? There are so many role gaps, price gaps on the market ?
What happened to implementing CQC into main game ?
Powerplay open only .. What happened to it ? Powerplay was meant to be pvp addition to the game.
The guild system is barebones and abandoned.
Crew system needed major changes since its released, its still borked and useless. Still can use only 1 npc crew member at once.
Salvaging ?

Powerplay isn't open only but there are sufficiently many groups on different sides that stick to out-of-game pledges to play in open that PvP continually retains a prominent and meaningful place in it, and keeps powerplay from being stale, or being just RP window-dressing. Fed-Empire conflict is the place to go.

 

[William J Smith]

I must admit I did look into backing SC when it was first announced, also into backing Elite, but both times went for the "I want to pay full price for a space sim game that lets me fly in the void somewhere and get upto all the old naughty stuff I fondly remember from my days playing Elite and Elite frontier" Translation: lets wait for the reviews
2014 rolls by and Fdev get my money(along with the money for the expansions, a midnight black paint job and my beloved Jack o'Lantern dash ornament(I have to put that else he gets angry and plots revenge with the thargoid ))

SC .... I'm still waiting for the full game coming up on 10 yrs later........


Bill

And yeah.. I'm aware of the issues Elite dangerous has had over the years.... but at least we GOT a game

 

[Northpin]

You can freely express your opinion on these forums, even though there are whiteknights here too

You cannot have WhiteKnights without BrownKnights

What happend to developing this game ? Where are all the new things that were promised, where is the feature rework that they talked about ?
They said they are not letting elite die, words are cool but where are actions ?
Why was i greeted with Cutscene when i launch the game with moving PNG's like this is some sort of highschool indie project game ?
Why keep reusing old assets and content ? Where is the new stuff.
What happened to fixing optimization for ground combat ?
New ships ? Hello ? There are so many role gaps, price gaps on the market ?
What happened to implementing CQC into main game ?
Powerplay open only .. What happened to it ? Powerplay was meant to be pvp addition to the game.
The guild system is barebones and abandoned.
Crew system needed major changes since its released, its still borked and useless. Still can use only 1 npc crew member at once.
Salvaging ?

They're slowly building the Narrative. U14 developed it significantly
U15 is promising great stuff too

Ground Combat is pretty much optimized - you shoudnt have any issues given the fact you have a strong enough computer to run SC

New Ships? Nope...
Except the missing Panther Clipper that will cover the need for a big hauler to load/unload carrier faster, there are no gaps in the roles.

IIRC, CQC games can be signed in from the main game. I remember i read about this

PowerPlay Open Only? That will never happen IMO - since the game doent limit the gameplay options based on the mode you play.
The modes are only a player filter, not a game feature filter. And let's not forget the game designer that hinted this left Frontier 6 months after. Or they were let out.
PVP is always possible as a voluntary layer superimposed over the PVE game that is Elite, but you cannot force people into PVP.

Only 1 npc as crew is a design choice and there aren't any signs this design choice would be changed.
However, i'd really love to have the NPC crew taking a chair in my cockpit and having a slightly more active role while taking that chair.

 

[Rubbernuke]

PowerPlay Open Only? That will never happen IMO - since the game doent limit the gameplay options based on the mode you play.
The modes are only a player filter, not a game feature filter. And let's not forget the game designer that hinted this left Frontier 6 months after. Or they were let out.
PVP is always possible as a voluntary layer superimposed over the PVE game that is Elite, but you cannot force people into PVP.

It was suggested as a solution to substitute NPCs that failed to fill the non POI parts of Powerplay.

 

[Old Duck]

With so many good space games out there, why does Star Citizen get ALL the attention?

 

[Leadfoot]

I like your perspective and review. You seem to have made a good list of both good and bad points.

One of the reasons the number of things stopped being developed was because of the mess known as Odyssey. It started out really well in the alpha testing (they did not do any beta testing) but what was released wasn't in the "approved by the players" version. For some odd reason it looked like they went back to the very first pre-alpha version, and suddenly everyone had frame rate drops down below 10 frames per second.

Frontier spent the last year and a half fixing it. They're still fixing it. They're getting it to where it needs to be. But if it had just been the version everyone was glowing over at the end of the alpha test we'd be a long ways past this point.

Unfortunately because of all the fixes a lot of the stuff we would like to have them work on have not been getting done because fixes need to be done first.

Because of the mess Odyssey was a huge financial disaster for frontier. And because of that, less work and effort was directed into it. Still waiting for atmospheric landings on planets with more than just a thin atmosphere.

Even though they have animals in their zoo games and dinosaurs in their dinosaur game we still don't have anything crawling around on any of the planets we can land on. I myself was expecting that they would be using some of that work done on walking creatures to be added to this game. Maybe one day. Yes I am still hoping.

The main problem with development here is that a lot of the original team has left leaving visions of Doom everywhere and threads of Doom popping up every so often.

The problems you're referring to at the other game being wiped out every so often is obvious; it's still baking, and every so often progress gets wiped when you're testing things and building things. Everyone thinks that it's a great game until their progress gets wiped out and they have to start over again.

I actually built my computer to play the other game. I gave up waiting for once Elite dangerous was released. Maybe one day when the other game gets released I may give it a try. I'm not going to bash it but I think they're working too hard on the little tiny nuts and bolts rather than getting the game to stand up on its own two feet and actually earn money for them as an actual game.

As I've stated many times before, it is living on its Kickstarter money, not an actual revenue at the store. If backers stop feeding it Kickstarter money, just cut the thing off, the developers will actually be forced to make it work, and actually make money for them. Lord knows they've had enough time to work on major issues so far.

That will solve the "wiping every so often" problem.

A wise accountant once said that there comes a Time in the life of every project when you have to shoot the engineers and release the damn thing.

And that's my 2¢ on the matter.

Now, if we can just pump enough money into frontier maybe, just maybe, we may get some of the thicker atmospheres we've been hoping for, maybe gas giants with space whales in them, and maybe a crawling thing or two on some of the planets eating the odd number of plants that they've created. Nature needs a balance. Something has to eat those plants. They don't have to be big. They just have to exist so that we can examine their DNA samples.

 

[Leadfoot]

With so many good space games out there, why does Star Citizen get ALL the attention?

It's mainly because you can walk inside the ship, almost like a second life, where you can even have your own cabin with its own bathroom and yes, it's actually going to have a toilet in there. Not sure what we're going to do with virtual poo. I guess do a virtual flush.

 

[Neilski]

Frontier spent the last year and a half fixing it. They're still fixing it. They're getting it to where it needs to be.

Are they really still fixing it? (The performance issues, I mean, and I think you mean.) I had the clear impression that they had stopped improving the performance quite a long time ago, having eventually reached a not-really-acceptable level.
As for the more general fixing, they seem to be introducing new bugs at least as fast as they fix existing ones, and they are ignoring long-standing QOL bugs and issues.

I'd happily throw more money at ED if it would help. Not sure they have a funding model that will make that viable though, so what will be will be.

 

[Old Duck]

It's mainly because you can walk inside the ship, almost like a second life, where you can even have your own cabin with its own bathroom and yes, it's actually going to have a toilet in there. Not sure what we're going to do with virtual poo. I guess do a virtual flush.

I have my own cabin and bathroom and toilet in Space Engineers. The toilet even recharges my space suit, LOL. Though now that I think about it, I sit on the toilet fully suited up... Not sure how that works, unless there's a valve on my suit butt. Hmmm...

 

[Leadfoot]

Are they really still fixing it? (The performance issues, I mean, and I think you mean.) I had the clear impression that they had stopped improving the performance quite a long time ago, having eventually reached a not-really-acceptable level.

Honestly, that's a good question. Every update that has come out with patch notes on it you will always see performance issues being addressed. Now because I'm not a programmer I can't actually say what performance issues are being addressed. I just go by the patch notes.

As far as new bugs are concerned, every time you take something that's broken and try to fix it you find out what else is broken because of what you just fixed.

I almost get the impression that instead of reworking it, they would just work on a completely revised version of odyssey, properly alpha test it, then properly beta test it, and then release it once everyone is happy with it. That was the way it was supposed to be. I guess since I'm not in charge, all I can do is wish.

 

[Leadfoot]

I have my own cabin and bathroom and toilet in Space Engineers. The toilet even recharges my space suit, LOL. Though now that I think about it, I sit on the toilet fully suited up... Not sure how that works, unless there's a valve on my suit butt. Hmmm...

I guess we should all be thankful that you're not able to use a third view camera to take screenshots in that position.

I have to assume it's a Toto toilet because I'll bet there's no toilet paper around and those things have that little spray device that cleans your bottom.