We are all going to DIE! A lot....
Elite / Frontier Thargoid took my cobra out in under 10 seconds
- Thread starter graeme.firth
- Start date
As soon as I read a post going on about 'free flight' and/or 'Newtonian Physics', 99% of the time I glance at the poster, and it's bounder. As a player of Elite on the speccy, Amstrad 1512 and 1640, Elite+, Frontier and F:FE, and now Elite: Dangerous, I really cannot recognise the game that he talks about from the game(s) I play(ed).
Elite Dangerous isn't perfect, but neither was Frontier or F:FE. I've barely picked up any of my other games since installing Elite Dangerous, so give it a go. You might like it, you might not. If you don't, c'est la vie, we've all been there, sucked it up and moved on. If you do, then o7 Commander!
Elite Dangerous isn't perfect, but neither was Frontier or F:FE. I've barely picked up any of my other games since installing Elite Dangerous, so give it a go. You might like it, you might not. If you don't, c'est la vie, we've all been there, sucked it up and moved on. If you do, then o7 Commander!
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Geez..ED has poor graphics and sound? um I guess we differ in opinion. ED has amazing sound for a modern game. I first played through FFE many years ago and it initially it took me a while to get used to ED last year, but now I'm loving it. Well, ships were more restricted in normal flight in ED probably because ED is MMO and unchecked high fractions of lightspeed would have broken the game with multiplayer so ED had to be a compromise of frameshift drive, flightassist and interdictions. You can't zip by close to atmosphere planets because they haven't been fleshed out yet. But it's great what they have now in the stations, ships, planetoids/moons, rings, asteroids, nightsky stars, close up suns. We had the X games in the long wait since FFE and they never had planet landings and the backdrops were just fantasy. FFE could be real fast but it was mostly the dreamware effect. Playing it only in real time would have taken months and years. Sometimes with FFE running, I would leave an approach to orbit in real time and come back to it hours later to pretend my ship was really flying while I did other things, lol. ED plausibly figures in the 50 years since the time of FFE hyperdrive now takes seconds instead of days for a jump, and accelerating to high fractions of lightspeed in normal space is no longer necessary with frameshift supercruise, ala warp drive. Although sometimes I wish there was a third type of frameshift where you could zip around at constant tenths of lightspeed. Have the same effect i.e. drop out when "smashing" and same auto-dropout of frameshift into a local close area of a planetoid maybe causing more damage.
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As a counter balance to the wall of flaming text - have a look at : https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/338869-Love-for-Elite
Which is my opinion of the game - also as an ex Elite/FE2/FFE player
Supercruise = "warp", in the comment you're referring to, so the point stands; with the game-destroying space speed limits, you have slow taxiing velocity, warp speed... and nothing in-between.
When you apply thrust to a spaceship, it accelerates. No excuses. No 'space speed limits'. No need for time acceleration - the more you accelerate, the faster you go, the less time a journey takes.
As i've always said, warp drive's a great compliment to spaceflight, but no substitute for it. ED is, literally, Elite sans spaceflight. No freedom of movement. Everything's restricted, from basic rotation and acceleration to celestial body approaches and gravity play etc. All the fun stuff that made the previous games so cool is entirely absent in ED.
Ooh you big fibber! I've never once mentioned "Newtonian physics", unless directly quoting someone else's use of the term, as i did just there.
You know, in reference to people who employ it as a ham-fisted euphemism for not having space speed limits.
But i don't even consider it in such esoteric terms. It's just spaceflight, innit. Open throttles, accelerate / decelerate, 'nuff said. Nothing convoluted or extravagant about it. Just the minimum freedom you expect from an Elite title.
I mean acceleration / deceleration of the ship, thru space. Not the other way around (per FSD / warp drive). Ie. in (ahem) "normal space" (do we really have to call it that? Really?)
Sure, the super-luminal speeds are, uh, super. It's all the other speeds - or lack thereof - i'm missing. You know, those speeds where appreciable motion actually occurs in (spit) "normal space". The range in which just about everything fun about spaceflight takes place. The stuff that gives meaning and purpose to a game like Elite. Or did in the previous installments anyway. IE. launch from planet surface, point at moon, open throttles and arrive 20 mins later, in real-time, without any transitions. Slide into orbit, or CFIT, whatever. If ED let me do that kind of stuff, i'd honestly be doing little else. Instead i play AJ's FFED3D v1.11, with a little Pioneer on the sides, cos they're the real deal and ED can't hold a candle to either.
And yes, i know you can yaw a little in ED - provided your diary's clear for the rest of the day, you could technically rotate 180° after finding yourself facing the wrong way on final approach to a landing pad. But how nerfed is that? In the previous games, and Pioneer, you can pull off that maneuovre in a second with a deft flick o' the wrist. Which for me, is just second nature. Play ED with a twist-yaw stick and you're just sat there wrenching the thing around trying to get any damned response out of it. With a mouse it's even worse.
As for free-fall - sorry but not possible with forced space-speed-limits. Gravity's an acceleration, verboten in ED. Same reason you can't indulge in proper orbital play (IE. elipticals, high dives etc. etc.).
As such, ED is not Elite.
Meteors had more fun physics.
Bounder - I do "get" some of where you're coming from.
Personally, I loathe that E: D is a multi-player take-it-or-leave-it game. I absolutely do. And this is the crux of most, if not all, of your abhorrence.
The desire to enable interdictions in order that muggings and piracy would be possible as well as other multi-player time-synchronised effects, was the design aspiration. Supercruise was the chosen solution.
The desire to constrain players into dog-fight combats in space was another design aspiration (and why not - this is True to the ORIGINAL AND BEST '84 ELITE.) Flight Assist and (variable) speed limit was the chosen solution. (Flight Assist Off was an addition, IMHO, that added a mere nod to Newton in the first instance, but has become "tuned" to *balance* multi-player combat. Bleurgh)
I was never a Frontier player myself. At the time I really thought it wasn't a true Elite successor. Props to Braben for designing the core around Newton, but it wasn't really for me. '84 Elite also had speed limits.
I loathe that I can't accept missions to complete next week next time I log on, because there is a real-time 24hr limit, and I don't particularly like that things can change dramatically while I have a weekend off, because as a weekend player that means a 2 week gap in my gaming. On balance, I have to accept these things because this is the price of being able to experience the delights of E: D.
Sure. it isn't all smashingly rosy from where I'm sitting, but on balance I do enjoy participating. It really is a proper Elite successor, but for people like me the: Elite part of E: D it is held back and perverted by E: D being a multi-player only game. In fact I enjoy participating in the things I alone choose to do in E: D so much that, where I was a person who player no computer games at, I have now become a person who plays a computer game. Just the one.
And while I regret the whole multiplayer only aspect, I have come to revere the amazing things that are happening in the game such as Guardians sites and even more so the story slowly unfolding surrounding UA, UP and now the Settlements - even though I cannot forever "discover" these things myself because, well, multiplayer. But the science and puzzles behind them are so deep and convoluted that it really does take multi players to decode them and progress forwards. (Although I still strongly believe this could be achieved collaboratively even in a single player frame of reference, with public forums such as this - as me and my mates playing '84 Elite - we used to collaborate and share similar game experiences even though we did it in a one-player universe.) I absolutely love that sciencey puzzley part of E: D of spectrograms and EMP and hidden maths. PvP combat you can stick right up Uranus as far as I'm concerned, I hate it with a passion and despise even the concept of it.
I was also just "meh" at planetary landings and SRV driving. For a long, long time. For what purpose? It was boring. Engineers? You can keep it as far as I'm concerned.... >>> Except, wait: let's do a little bit of this boring stuff to gain a greater FSD jump range. Not fun. But the reward was a useful one, I guess.
Even with Guardians, I was still a bit "meh" at SRV gameplay, even if I was utterly blown away by the original site's sky-map: mirroring the rising/setting of the binary partner potato planet.
Now, however, with the Settlement in the developing Thargoid story? Well, I am now begrudgingly accepting that planet-side gameplay is finally justified.
Bottom line is that for me, E: D is *fun* and a rewarding pastime. A true Elite successor, even if some of the Elite-ness is held back by it being a multi-player only game.
Yours Aye
Mark H
Personally, I loathe that E: D is a multi-player take-it-or-leave-it game. I absolutely do. And this is the crux of most, if not all, of your abhorrence.
The desire to enable interdictions in order that muggings and piracy would be possible as well as other multi-player time-synchronised effects, was the design aspiration. Supercruise was the chosen solution.
The desire to constrain players into dog-fight combats in space was another design aspiration (and why not - this is True to the ORIGINAL AND BEST '84 ELITE.) Flight Assist and (variable) speed limit was the chosen solution. (Flight Assist Off was an addition, IMHO, that added a mere nod to Newton in the first instance, but has become "tuned" to *balance* multi-player combat. Bleurgh)
I was never a Frontier player myself. At the time I really thought it wasn't a true Elite successor. Props to Braben for designing the core around Newton, but it wasn't really for me. '84 Elite also had speed limits.
I loathe that I can't accept missions to complete next week next time I log on, because there is a real-time 24hr limit, and I don't particularly like that things can change dramatically while I have a weekend off, because as a weekend player that means a 2 week gap in my gaming. On balance, I have to accept these things because this is the price of being able to experience the delights of E: D.
Sure. it isn't all smashingly rosy from where I'm sitting, but on balance I do enjoy participating. It really is a proper Elite successor, but for people like me the: Elite part of E: D it is held back and perverted by E: D being a multi-player only game. In fact I enjoy participating in the things I alone choose to do in E: D so much that, where I was a person who player no computer games at, I have now become a person who plays a computer game. Just the one.
And while I regret the whole multiplayer only aspect, I have come to revere the amazing things that are happening in the game such as Guardians sites and even more so the story slowly unfolding surrounding UA, UP and now the Settlements - even though I cannot forever "discover" these things myself because, well, multiplayer. But the science and puzzles behind them are so deep and convoluted that it really does take multi players to decode them and progress forwards. (Although I still strongly believe this could be achieved collaboratively even in a single player frame of reference, with public forums such as this - as me and my mates playing '84 Elite - we used to collaborate and share similar game experiences even though we did it in a one-player universe.) I absolutely love that sciencey puzzley part of E: D of spectrograms and EMP and hidden maths. PvP combat you can stick right up Uranus as far as I'm concerned, I hate it with a passion and despise even the concept of it.
I was also just "meh" at planetary landings and SRV driving. For a long, long time. For what purpose? It was boring. Engineers? You can keep it as far as I'm concerned.... >>> Except, wait: let's do a little bit of this boring stuff to gain a greater FSD jump range. Not fun. But the reward was a useful one, I guess.
Even with Guardians, I was still a bit "meh" at SRV gameplay, even if I was utterly blown away by the original site's sky-map: mirroring the rising/setting of the binary partner potato planet.
Now, however, with the Settlement in the developing Thargoid story? Well, I am now begrudgingly accepting that planet-side gameplay is finally justified.
Bottom line is that for me, E: D is *fun* and a rewarding pastime. A true Elite successor, even if some of the Elite-ness is held back by it being a multi-player only game.
Yours Aye
Mark H
It's kind of a moot argument that classic Elite had speed limits - sure it did, but only insofar as it also had monochrome wireframe graphics... it was an innate limitation, in what was, at its core, a sandbox space sim with unparalleled freedom. To that end, FE2 & FFE were faithful successors - logical steps forwards.
Putting space speed limits back in today is akin to returning to wireframe GFX... a massively regressive step back from what Elite really wants to be at its heart.
And i disagree that it's necessary for multiplayer dogfighting - supercruise as an alternative to time acceleration, certainly. But space speed limits are quite unnecessary, and don't fit at all. There's no good reason we couldn't re-zero our 'blue zone' handling envelope at the touch of a button, without physically decelerating, since velocity in space is purely a function of arbitrary reference frames, which can just as easily be virtual as physical.
Much of the compromises attributed to the multiplayer aspect are simply more accurately described as false dichotomies, and missed opportunities... There is no fundamental conflict between in-game velocity and network latency; it's been built into the game due to their measuring absolute speed WRT coordinate space, rather than relative speed WRT surrounding entities. As momentum builds, positional accuracy becomes more certain, not less, and interaction windows reduce - lowering network overheads, instead of raising them.
Aside from the sorely impoverished flight mechanics, just look at the terribly awkward and clunky "duh, missions!" board, and fractured "passenger lounge", with its neurotic passenger likes and dislikes etc. - OK so you missed out on FE2 & FFE, but with them FD established a far superior 'bulletin board' system that much better represented the life, feel and realism of starport activities. Had they carried this over into the multiplayer game, we could browse for all our missions on something akin to Craigslist, with most of the content provided by ourselves, with all the zany randomness that would entail, from 2nd hand module sales, permits and licences / docs (legit and fakes), new and used ship sales, ride hailing, jobs wanted / offered, rewarded missing persons / wanted posters (great for emergent bounty hunting, retribution missions / hitman contracts / mafia hits etc.), as well as black market and contraband dealers (as we had in FE2/FFE)...
In short, FE2 & FFE built upon and further developed the concepts introduced in classic Elite, whereas ED makes an about-turn on that whole principle and abandons everything that made the prequels so compelling.
If ED had developed upon FE2 & FFE in the same manner those games built upon classic Elite, it would've broken t'interwebz and taken over the world.. and that's what stings the most. The potential greatness they've squandered, for the mediocrity they've settled for... it's just idiotic sacrilege..
Glad you like the game, and it's somewhat understandable having missed out on FE2 / FFE, but for me it's a total washout, and could've been so much more..
Putting space speed limits back in today is akin to returning to wireframe GFX... a massively regressive step back from what Elite really wants to be at its heart.
And i disagree that it's necessary for multiplayer dogfighting - supercruise as an alternative to time acceleration, certainly. But space speed limits are quite unnecessary, and don't fit at all. There's no good reason we couldn't re-zero our 'blue zone' handling envelope at the touch of a button, without physically decelerating, since velocity in space is purely a function of arbitrary reference frames, which can just as easily be virtual as physical.
Much of the compromises attributed to the multiplayer aspect are simply more accurately described as false dichotomies, and missed opportunities... There is no fundamental conflict between in-game velocity and network latency; it's been built into the game due to their measuring absolute speed WRT coordinate space, rather than relative speed WRT surrounding entities. As momentum builds, positional accuracy becomes more certain, not less, and interaction windows reduce - lowering network overheads, instead of raising them.
Aside from the sorely impoverished flight mechanics, just look at the terribly awkward and clunky "duh, missions!" board, and fractured "passenger lounge", with its neurotic passenger likes and dislikes etc. - OK so you missed out on FE2 & FFE, but with them FD established a far superior 'bulletin board' system that much better represented the life, feel and realism of starport activities. Had they carried this over into the multiplayer game, we could browse for all our missions on something akin to Craigslist, with most of the content provided by ourselves, with all the zany randomness that would entail, from 2nd hand module sales, permits and licences / docs (legit and fakes), new and used ship sales, ride hailing, jobs wanted / offered, rewarded missing persons / wanted posters (great for emergent bounty hunting, retribution missions / hitman contracts / mafia hits etc.), as well as black market and contraband dealers (as we had in FE2/FFE)...
In short, FE2 & FFE built upon and further developed the concepts introduced in classic Elite, whereas ED makes an about-turn on that whole principle and abandons everything that made the prequels so compelling.
If ED had developed upon FE2 & FFE in the same manner those games built upon classic Elite, it would've broken t'interwebz and taken over the world.. and that's what stings the most. The potential greatness they've squandered, for the mediocrity they've settled for... it's just idiotic sacrilege..
Glad you like the game, and it's somewhat understandable having missed out on FE2 / FFE, but for me it's a total washout, and could've been so much more..
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