I had an interesting experience last night that this thread reminds me of.
I was in a 3-way skype call with a couple of friends, mostly talking about projects we were collaborating on. And all three of us were playing different games at the same time. I was in ED, one of the others was in FFXIV and the third was in Guild Wars. We ended up in a side discussion of what we liked about the games we were each playing. One of the others came up with something rather insightful and quite on-topic for the discussion at hand....
He said "To me, what you're playing is a simulation not a game. I actually want the game experience not the simulation." - Now it seems to me that there is a full spectrum here, in terms of peoples preferences, some features (eg 3rd person view) lend themselves more to what my friend was describing as a "game experience" and others lean more towards the "simulation experience" and every title out there fits somewhere along that spectrum based on the features included and how they are implemented.
The conversation continued as all three of us played our respective games and it was amusing to hear the comments we each made about the games as we played - but the interesting thing was, if you strip out the game-specific references a lot of the things we were saying had the same underlying themes. "Darn, the quests all the way over there?" "How many ls to the station and how long to complete the mission?" or one all three of us had in common.. "nononono... you should not have aggro'd on me, you......"
I think a lot of the "nothing to do"/"use your imagination"/"this is awesome"/"this will fail" stuff probably comes down to where on that spectrum between "pure sim" and "pure game" we perceive ED to be, (a purely subjective measure) and where that is compared to the experience we are looking for.
As we can all agree on, ED is an ongoing WIP and there are features that truly need more development. I'm confident we'll get that. What I don't think is likely to happen is that there will be a radical move to make it "more simmy" or "more gamey", because where it's at in those terms is pretty much the thing that defines Elite as Elite.
I was in a 3-way skype call with a couple of friends, mostly talking about projects we were collaborating on. And all three of us were playing different games at the same time. I was in ED, one of the others was in FFXIV and the third was in Guild Wars. We ended up in a side discussion of what we liked about the games we were each playing. One of the others came up with something rather insightful and quite on-topic for the discussion at hand....
He said "To me, what you're playing is a simulation not a game. I actually want the game experience not the simulation." - Now it seems to me that there is a full spectrum here, in terms of peoples preferences, some features (eg 3rd person view) lend themselves more to what my friend was describing as a "game experience" and others lean more towards the "simulation experience" and every title out there fits somewhere along that spectrum based on the features included and how they are implemented.
The conversation continued as all three of us played our respective games and it was amusing to hear the comments we each made about the games as we played - but the interesting thing was, if you strip out the game-specific references a lot of the things we were saying had the same underlying themes. "Darn, the quests all the way over there?" "How many ls to the station and how long to complete the mission?" or one all three of us had in common.. "nononono... you should not have aggro'd on me, you......"
I think a lot of the "nothing to do"/"use your imagination"/"this is awesome"/"this will fail" stuff probably comes down to where on that spectrum between "pure sim" and "pure game" we perceive ED to be, (a purely subjective measure) and where that is compared to the experience we are looking for.
As we can all agree on, ED is an ongoing WIP and there are features that truly need more development. I'm confident we'll get that. What I don't think is likely to happen is that there will be a radical move to make it "more simmy" or "more gamey", because where it's at in those terms is pretty much the thing that defines Elite as Elite.
