Excuse the catchy title, its a nod to The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
I'm not normally a writer of long posts but having read a thread in this forum about a CMDR E in his Eagle taking on a much bigger and well armed ship, showing true balls and courage, exactly the kind of stuff this game needs, I feel I need to express some thoughts and ideas I have about this game...
Way back in the days of the ZX-Spectrum I found a game that blew me away with it's concept of Space Trading, it was called Elite and I happily spent many hours in the evenings after work exploring and trading within this universe that incidentally, fitted on a single 720K floppy disk!. It didnt matter that the game used 3D wire-frame graphics and limited colours, the 'concept' was all that mattered. Ever since then, Elite was, and still is, my all time favorite game and I have played many space games since then trying to capture the original feeling I had with Elite all those years ago.
Fast forward to today..
We have Elite back!, its much meaner, bigger and more colourful than it's original predecessor, it's still in it's infancy, it's still growing, yet the framework is already there for we (the community) to really push this game beyond our wildest expectations, but ONLY if we want to. By that I mean this, without our participation the Elite: Dangerous universe is cold and empty, with just scripted NPC's flying around in a universe that is OURS by right!. We are the pioneers for Elite
angerous, we really do have the power to organize ourselves and take the Universe we have at our finger tips and push this to the next dimension of game playing...
As a relatively new player to this forum I cant help but feel some sympathy to those CMDR's who post that they are bored or find the game too harsh or not fun to play in. The problem is partly because we are used to playing games that generally go 'easy' on us, more forgiving for our mistakes and in general, mother coddle us into thinking we always have a safety net beneath our feet.. But this is Eliteangerous, it's not for everyone, it's game play mechanics is harder on us than most I've come across, putting aside the game's bugs which can be annoying or troublesome, Elite is a tough game to master and so it should be. If we can survive here, we can survive anywhere.
Now to the main reason for this post..
I have seen quite a few posts from people saying there is little or no *fun* in this game, well, not without lots of grinding at trading that is, and if trading isn't your thing then having to trade will be a real chore if you want that shiny new Python, Type 9, Anaconda etc that has your name written all over it, yours for a few million Cr's that is. The grind is here to stay, its a major part of the game, HOWEVER, the *fun* everyone is looking for is there as well, it's just that we have been somewhat 'conditioned' from our previous games to having it GIVEN to us by the game's developer's, yet the GREATEST content ingredient is US! Our participation as a community can fill the Elite Universe with *fun* and *involvement* many times over. We just have to break out of the habit of waiting for the Dev's to give us something new to play with and make our own universe fun to participate in the meantime.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Traders & Pirates, we need to start actively organizing groups/clans/guilds of Traders, Pirates, Smugglers, Fighters etc etc to form up and encourage by example, Group Participation. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of regular trade convoys through troubled systems with volunteer fighter escorts, which of course would be an incentive for CMDR pirates to organize themselves into packs to take on the fighter escorts and raid the rich trade convoys. Pirates in this scenario would add to the game's immersion feel as opposed to being seen differently as they are at present. We have Voice Comms such as TeamSpeak & Mumble for all players to make use of and further adds to the feeling of being a part of an ongoing adventure that no one can foresee what will happen from day to day. Players who get tired of say, Trading can if they wish, join a fighter escort clan/group/guild or join a pirate/explorer's guild if they so wish and further experience new avenue's of interest. We have the freedom of choice, we have the power to change a mostly solitary game play into one that is multi-level. Guilds/Clans etc etc can be based around the many starting worlds we presently have and of course those players who wish to still play the game on their own have that right as always. Heck, if I spent most of my time in Solo Play I would be very tempted to try out Open Play to see what I was missing out on!
I know I've over-simplified the general idea here, its 4am here and I need some sleep. I guess if we never try we wont know if it's a bad idea or not.
* I believe their might already be a group or two around already doing something along the lines I've listed above? Mobius? I'm not sure, might have read it in a post a while back. If thats the case then you need to push harder to let more people know what your doing and where to find you lol.
So what do you guys think?
I'm not normally a writer of long posts but having read a thread in this forum about a CMDR E in his Eagle taking on a much bigger and well armed ship, showing true balls and courage, exactly the kind of stuff this game needs, I feel I need to express some thoughts and ideas I have about this game...
Way back in the days of the ZX-Spectrum I found a game that blew me away with it's concept of Space Trading, it was called Elite and I happily spent many hours in the evenings after work exploring and trading within this universe that incidentally, fitted on a single 720K floppy disk!. It didnt matter that the game used 3D wire-frame graphics and limited colours, the 'concept' was all that mattered. Ever since then, Elite was, and still is, my all time favorite game and I have played many space games since then trying to capture the original feeling I had with Elite all those years ago.
Fast forward to today..
We have Elite back!, its much meaner, bigger and more colourful than it's original predecessor, it's still in it's infancy, it's still growing, yet the framework is already there for we (the community) to really push this game beyond our wildest expectations, but ONLY if we want to. By that I mean this, without our participation the Elite: Dangerous universe is cold and empty, with just scripted NPC's flying around in a universe that is OURS by right!. We are the pioneers for Elite
angerous, we really do have the power to organize ourselves and take the Universe we have at our finger tips and push this to the next dimension of game playing... As a relatively new player to this forum I cant help but feel some sympathy to those CMDR's who post that they are bored or find the game too harsh or not fun to play in. The problem is partly because we are used to playing games that generally go 'easy' on us, more forgiving for our mistakes and in general, mother coddle us into thinking we always have a safety net beneath our feet.. But this is Elite
angerous, it's not for everyone, it's game play mechanics is harder on us than most I've come across, putting aside the game's bugs which can be annoying or troublesome, Elite is a tough game to master and so it should be. If we can survive here, we can survive anywhere.Now to the main reason for this post..
I have seen quite a few posts from people saying there is little or no *fun* in this game, well, not without lots of grinding at trading that is, and if trading isn't your thing then having to trade will be a real chore if you want that shiny new Python, Type 9, Anaconda etc that has your name written all over it, yours for a few million Cr's that is. The grind is here to stay, its a major part of the game, HOWEVER, the *fun* everyone is looking for is there as well, it's just that we have been somewhat 'conditioned' from our previous games to having it GIVEN to us by the game's developer's, yet the GREATEST content ingredient is US! Our participation as a community can fill the Elite Universe with *fun* and *involvement* many times over. We just have to break out of the habit of waiting for the Dev's to give us something new to play with and make our own universe fun to participate in the meantime.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Traders & Pirates, we need to start actively organizing groups/clans/guilds of Traders, Pirates, Smugglers, Fighters etc etc to form up and encourage by example, Group Participation. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of regular trade convoys through troubled systems with volunteer fighter escorts, which of course would be an incentive for CMDR pirates to organize themselves into packs to take on the fighter escorts and raid the rich trade convoys. Pirates in this scenario would add to the game's immersion feel as opposed to being seen differently as they are at present. We have Voice Comms such as TeamSpeak & Mumble for all players to make use of and further adds to the feeling of being a part of an ongoing adventure that no one can foresee what will happen from day to day. Players who get tired of say, Trading can if they wish, join a fighter escort clan/group/guild or join a pirate/explorer's guild if they so wish and further experience new avenue's of interest. We have the freedom of choice, we have the power to change a mostly solitary game play into one that is multi-level. Guilds/Clans etc etc can be based around the many starting worlds we presently have and of course those players who wish to still play the game on their own have that right as always. Heck, if I spent most of my time in Solo Play I would be very tempted to try out Open Play to see what I was missing out on!
I know I've over-simplified the general idea here, its 4am here and I need some sleep. I guess if we never try we wont know if it's a bad idea or not.
* I believe their might already be a group or two around already doing something along the lines I've listed above? Mobius? I'm not sure, might have read it in a post a while back. If thats the case then you need to push harder to let more people know what your doing and where to find you lol.
So what do you guys think?
