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Things Elite Dangerous can learn from No Man's Sky
- Thread starter vitz3
- Start date
Forget what ED can learn from NMS. Go watch the Gamescom SC 3.0 demo video. That guy who said he was looking at images that would blow the faces off Elite players, must have been referring to this! I don't know about face blowing but mind blowing for sure! Sorry FD, 2.2 looks pretty nice but SC stole the show with this.
That is not the same as what actually happened when players tried to meet each other. They weren't looking to "interact" only to see each other in-game as they walked up to each other. They used third-party methods to coordinate so that they were on the exact same planet in the exact same location and they still couldn't see each other. The reason is that NMS players don't "exist" in the game as anything more than an instanced "hitbox". From what we can tell isn't even a model for the player in-game as you never see yourself (except your weapon) and you never see another player so they have probably just coded a generic hitbox "volume" to represent the player's interactions. Each player is playing NMS in a completely self-contained, individual universe where it is not even technically or theoretically possible to "meet" another player. This is not what Sean Murray told players. Saying something is "unlikely" because of the size of the universe is not the same as something being impossible because the game is not even coded to allow it to happen.
Like I said, no one asked for or expected a "multiplayer" game. They expected that, at the very least, they could "meet" another player in-game even if there is no interaction mechanic and all they do is "wave" at each other as they pass by. That was something that Sean Murray said was possible and it very clearly wasn't. When he was asked about it he tried to sidestep the issue very badly, first by saying there were "too many players" playing the game, then making some ridiculous comments about having his "mind blown" about the game, etc., without addressing the actual issue and why it wasn't working. Essentially he flat-out lied about something being possible, and when players tried to test this he refused to give a straight answer to the question.
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If it's even legit, the movement of the ship is beyond crap, I won't hold my breath.
I think the OP made the mistake of assuming they could have a rational conversation about two space based video games on a forum filled with rabid ED fanboys.
As a "gamer" who enjoys the space genre more than any other, there is plenty of room for more than one or two titles. While NMS isn't going for the same objectives as Elite does, I am still having a great time playing it, and I frankly can't abide with all the hate being thrown at it primarily from those who haven't even played the game.
I suspect that most of those in this thread who are hating on the game have also not played it themselves. Thus, their opinion means nothing. NMS is one of those games where watching someone else play it and playing it yourself are lightyears apart in terms of the experience. The game needs some work just like ED needed work at version 1.04, but I have been having just as much fun getting to know NMS as I did with Elite Dangerous.
The fact that so many have written it off without even playing it is a real shame, but in the end, those folks are only cheating themselves out of a space based adventure they might really like.
I will never understand people who let others make their game buying decisions for them. Especially these days with the internet where lies and total rue the day over facts and actual hands on experience.
As a "gamer" who enjoys the space genre more than any other, there is plenty of room for more than one or two titles. While NMS isn't going for the same objectives as Elite does, I am still having a great time playing it, and I frankly can't abide with all the hate being thrown at it primarily from those who haven't even played the game.
I suspect that most of those in this thread who are hating on the game have also not played it themselves. Thus, their opinion means nothing. NMS is one of those games where watching someone else play it and playing it yourself are lightyears apart in terms of the experience. The game needs some work just like ED needed work at version 1.04, but I have been having just as much fun getting to know NMS as I did with Elite Dangerous.
The fact that so many have written it off without even playing it is a real shame, but in the end, those folks are only cheating themselves out of a space based adventure they might really like.
I will never understand people who let others make their game buying decisions for them. Especially these days with the internet where lies and total rue the day over facts and actual hands on experience.
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All of that ends rather quickly once you have added the 43 slots to your suit and 30+ to your ship, allowing for upgrades that all but eliminate everything you are complaining about. The planet you start out on can also have a major impact on your first impressions. But making a judgment call on that game with less than 30 hours invested is an opinion not worth listening to. Simply because that player hasn't even come close to what your character ultimately becomes for the bulk of the adventure.
The major thing that NMS has shown me is that FD is really selling themselves short by taking so bloody long to introduce their own landable planets with atmospheres and the ability to fully explore those planets. The seamless entry into a planet's atmosphere in NMS is a unique and thrilling video game moment which I would love to experience from the controls of my Federal Corvette! Seeing the black of space dissolve into a blue sky with clouds and populated terrain with the nose of your ship glowing red along with the roar from the friction of re-entry would be awesome, and will likely trump any other experience we have in Elite Dangerous.
Rather than pushing it back further and further as a serious new addition, they should be making it their top priority. Anything else is a distraction by comparison.
That is what NMS features have shown me as its relates to Elite Dangerous.
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I am an Elite dangerous player with over 1000 hours playtime but I am hardly a "rabid fanboy" who won't take a balanced look at a game, whether it's Elite or any other game I play. In the case of Elite even though it is one of my favourite games (and I actually rank it alongside Bioshock in terms of what it has accomplished for the sci-fi gaming industry) I have been highly critical of some of the changes in 2.1.05 despite generally seeing 2.1 as a positive step forward for the game. Simply being a fan of a game that you enjoy playing doesn't mean that you won't be critical of aspects that you feel need improvement, nor does it mean you won't be able to view another game with a balanced viewpoint. I purchased NMS hoping for a "distraction" from Elite so my expectations were not very high, but I was quite disappointed even with those modest expectations. NMS is simply not a very good or polished game, for various reasons, and only part of those have to do with the game being "overhyped". The bigger issue here is that Sean Murray blatantly misrepresented the game, claimed there would be features that did not appear in the finished product we got on Aug. 12, and then failed to address any of these discrepancies in what anyone would consider a sufficient manner. NMS is just not a game that I feel can be compared favorably to Elite in any meaningful way.
You do realize that the average Elite player has put around 60 hours of gameplay within the first year, and this is considered a "high" number of average hours for a typical game? Putting 30 hours into NMS is more than enough to comment on the gameplay and scope of the game, you shouldn't need to put in 100 hours into a game to decide if it is worth playing or if the basic gameplay mechanics are sound. In fact I realized how limited NMS gameplay was within the first 10-20 hours. I will continue to play it to see if my gameplay experience "changes" but I doubt I will put more than 50 hours into the game if it doesn't get notably improved with patches or new content and given that there are no obvious revenue streams for Hello Games to do this I doubt it will happen. I put a total of around 50 hours into Battlefield Hardline and that was about 30 hours more than I needed to invest to know it was a very problematic game in comparison to Battlefield 4 which I have around 280 hours into. Generally if a player is willing to invest 10-20 hours into a game and the game has not "delivered" a good gameplay experience by that point it is simply not a well-designed game. For most players Elite started "delivering" a gameplay experience almost right from the start and there are many players (myself included) who felt the game was delivering everything we needed it to deliver even when I only had a T6 or Asp because the core gameplay mechanics were solid and immersive.
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I don't understand why people are slinging hours-played around to discredit people's arguments. Capturing people in those first crucial hours and providing a fun experience is critical, it's very valid criticism.
I'd find some of the arguments here bewildering without knowing more about the posters - many old axes being ground. I find the NMS crafting a bit of a joke, it's just a standard upgrade path run via resources/mining/sub-crafting parts - utterly useless in a multiplayer situation, there's no balances or choices to make just low rank to top rank, maybe which bits you upgrade first. No way of crafting different results, no trade offs to make and nothing like what was teased really - it's something from a much simpler game. Which NMS is and there's no insult in that, they're very different beasts.
Some folk want to wander through a completely random sci-fi universe of book covers and artificially arranged planets in technicolour skyboxes (oops) with fluffy friends and things kept nice'n'simple - others want a game set in somewhere that feels like here where we live, that actually looks like it and which offers huge scope and scale with lots of detail and complexity. Oh and things that'll make your eyes bleed, allegedly.
Neither are wrong - this is a tiny difference in what people like - look at all the football games and the amount of people who love those. It should be no surprise most here want the more complex game, it's what brought us here in the first place.
As to most of the OP's list they're things NMS doesn't do either, so not really anything to learn *from* NMS as such - elite's earth likes are already pretty damn gorgeous and many of the others very pretty for a close fly by, they just need to follow through as we get closer down to the surface now... fingers crossed they don't rush it.
I'd find some of the arguments here bewildering without knowing more about the posters - many old axes being ground. I find the NMS crafting a bit of a joke, it's just a standard upgrade path run via resources/mining/sub-crafting parts - utterly useless in a multiplayer situation, there's no balances or choices to make just low rank to top rank, maybe which bits you upgrade first. No way of crafting different results, no trade offs to make and nothing like what was teased really - it's something from a much simpler game. Which NMS is and there's no insult in that, they're very different beasts.
Some folk want to wander through a completely random sci-fi universe of book covers and artificially arranged planets in technicolour skyboxes (oops) with fluffy friends and things kept nice'n'simple - others want a game set in somewhere that feels like here where we live, that actually looks like it and which offers huge scope and scale with lots of detail and complexity. Oh and things that'll make your eyes bleed, allegedly.
Neither are wrong - this is a tiny difference in what people like - look at all the football games and the amount of people who love those. It should be no surprise most here want the more complex game, it's what brought us here in the first place.
As to most of the OP's list they're things NMS doesn't do either, so not really anything to learn *from* NMS as such - elite's earth likes are already pretty damn gorgeous and many of the others very pretty for a close fly by, they just need to follow through as we get closer down to the surface now... fingers crossed they don't rush it.
No one is really complaining that there were no multiplayer features as no one was really expecting these. What is a big deal however is that many people who purchased NMS were told that there would at least be the potential to find another player, even if there were no specific interactions possible, and the omission of this was a major problem. Essentially they were sold an "online" game that had the potential to at least "see" other players and what they got was a single-player game with no way to even see another player in the entire NMS universe. When Sean Murry was asked about this, he completely avoided the issue and failed to even give a coherent reply. There was a good summary of this on twitter in meme form, here you go:
Ah, and that is part of the problem with the OP.
Its couched in a way that FD could learn from NMS. Implying FD hadn't already got plans for some of these things.
In other words, its not about FD learning from NMS, just about them implementing things that are already planned.
Not only that, but I suspect that when FD gets around to implementing features like inhabited planets they will probably do it in a completely different (and likely much better) way than NMS did anyways. To be fair FD has a much larger team than Hello Games, but they also didn't dig themselves into a hole of promising features that they weren't capable of delivering and then refusing to explain why those missing features weren't implemented. Granted, Elite did deal with the "offline" play debacle but that was more about the issue of certain players wanting refunds than the fact that it wasn't implemented due to various technical reasons and the communication was handled poorly by FD from a customer service/PR perspective. Generally speaking however FD has been quite clear about what they can and can't implement and I've generally been impressed with how much we've been getting this year in terms of gameplay options and updates.
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You're at the early stages of the game so yes, I agree it's a constant battle - plus I suspect the world you were dumped on (or chose to visit) isn't particularly inviting.
(a) Inventory management becomes easier as you and your ship improve over time
(b) Some worlds are not hostile to you so the only upkeep is your survival suit
(c) You can upgrade your gear which gives you better protection against the elements and/or longevity of your suit.
Basically it's followed the classic survival aspect of hard to begin with, easier over time.
Crafting, to be fair, is meaningless in both games as it's a means to an end - something to do to keep you playing. However in ED I find the time spent to be at risk as you don't know the outcome whereas with NMS you do. 2 different approaches for 2 different games
(Incidentally - I come from a Rust / Diablo 3 background so appreciate both methods .. D3 was like how ED is now and Blizzard eventually saw sense - I only hope FD do too)I'm not sure exactly how much time I've spent on NMS so far as there is no game timer, but I would estimate somewhere between 20-30 hours. I haven't even left my home system as it has 6 planets with various terrains/climates and I want to completely explore these planets before I move on. Already I've made about 1.5 million credits and have spent all of this on upgrades so far. I've purchased a new ship with 22 slots, a new multitool with 8 slots, and upgraded my exosuit to 25 slot capacity, I've also learned about 30 Korvax words and have raised my reputation with them. I would have added even more exosuit slots but I need to get more credits first. Even at this point however I've noticed some extremely limited game mechanics. Some "survival" aspects are just annoying rather than challenging. I have to keep "refuelling" both my life support and hazard shielding, but this is just "remembering" to do this. Finding enough zinc was a little "challenging" on my starting planet (which had extreme freezing temperatures that dropped below -80 degrees) and I almost died before I figured out that the yellow flowers give me zinc to recharge my temperature shielding. Once repaired my scanner and knew what I was doing it wasn't particularly difficult to find enough zinc to keep the suit shielding topped up however. The next inhabited planet in the system had toxic acid rain, but it was the exact same "mechanism" to survive as the freezing planet, except that it was a "toxic" meter that I needed to refill with zinc. The third inhabited planet had some background radiation, and again, I refilled the hazard shielding with the same zinc. I didn't have to "learn" or "adapt" to the new hazards, I just stockpiled a single oxide element and refilled a meter as it gradually dropped over time. That's not exactly an engaging or immersive "survival" process. If they had different element to power different types of hazard shielding, or if there was some "skill" in surviving harsh environments, I could see this as an interesting process where you get "better" at dealing with the hazards. But you don't. It's just a meter with a different hazard "symbol" and once you get "ahead" of the resource curve (which is very easy to do once you learn how to find zinc) there is no "challenge" at all. Not to mention that you can just jump in your cockpit and "recharge" your hazard shielding to full strength instantly without even collecting any zinc at all.
The creatures, while interesting, are also surprisingly limited. The only hostile creature on my starting planet was an aggressive spider-like creature. Then I saw a similar creature on the third planet. The birds were also similar with a 4-wing pattern and have relatively little variation so far. What doesn't make sense here is that the three inhabited planets in my staring system were in completely different climates but this did not have any discernible impact on the creatures. The first planet had extreme freezing temperatures (-35 daytime to -80 nighttime temps), the second was toxic rain and the third was radioactive decay. But none of that mattered, I still saw similar spiders and birds on these three planets. There was also no logical "pattern" to the creatures based on their climate, the creatures on the freezing planet did not have fur and the creatures on the toxic rain planet did not have scales or other adaption to survive their environment. Not to mention that the species discovery listing is "bugged" so I can't even find the last species on the third inhabited planet in the system which I want to do before I jump to the next system.
Even the spaceflight mechanics are annoying. Every single time you land your ship and take off again it uses 25% of your thruster fuel. I have enough plutonium in my ship's cargo hold to refuel this several times, but I have to do this every four times. It's like having a car with a 5 L fuel tank that can only go 40 km before you need to refuel it, so you carry a bunch of gas cans in the trunk instead of installing a larger fuel tank. It's extremely annoying and isn't a well thought out game mechanic at all. I really don't know what Hello Games was thinking or why they didn't beta test some of this stuff but I feel that NMS was a half-finished game that might have been a good "beta" version but was simply not ready for release.
That's great - lots of things you don't like about NMS ... appreciate you sharing - plenty of things for FD to take note of in what not to do.
What did NMS do right that you liked ?
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Just to add - the starting planets are quite tame. When travelling the path to the core (in gold) takes you along similar tame systems. Move off the path and they get quite rough
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So far, there are few things that I would consider truly exceptional, but there are some aspects that I will give them credit for. The creatures are interesting and the procedural generation system for this (even if it isn't climate-driven as I hoped) was tested well enough that the creatures don't look ridiculous or unrealistic. In that sense I think the creatures are the game's strongest point as they are actually the main thing motivating me to keep playing. So that is one thing that Elite can learn from NMS in terms of making you feel like you're "discovering" a new species or creature. As I said this is already getting repetitive even within my starting system but I haven't tested its limits yet. Elite had the same issue with physical properties of planets that I noticed on my SagA trip so I think this is more about the limits of a procedural generation system combined with the fact that I am extremely detail-focused and will notice repetitive patterns or properties if they are there to find. I will give NMS credit for doing this right however.
The interactions with alien species (which for me only includes the Korvax so far) is also interesting if a bit limited. Learning the language only one word at a time is quite tedious, I would have preferred if the Knowledge stones gave us a data "drop" of 3-4 words at once. The sense of "learning" something is nice though and if FD implemented something like this to allow us to "communicate" with the barnacles or unknown artefacts, that would be amazing.
The customizability of the ship and multitool is also a nice feature in the sense that I have a lot of non-combat options to emphasise mining or survival instead of just being purely combat-based. The ability to make a "utility weapon" that is adaptable to various situations (mining beam/boltcaster/plasma grenades) is also nice as it emphasises that there is more than just combat to think about if you're doing space exploration. At present Elite has really relegated exploration to a fairly limited interaction mechanic (jumping and scanning) and it would be nice to have truly useful exploration options to make your ship and gear focused on more non-combat tasks. Some examples of this in Elite would be giving us mods for reduced FSD cooldown times, mods for improved scanners with increased scan ranges, improved surface scanners with reduced planetary scan times or some other features to emphasise a truly "science/exploration" focused ship build. You can do this to some extent in NMS (at least with the multitool) and that does help give you a sense of being an "explorer" rather than a heavily-armed "privateer" who sometimes goes exploring when there happens to be nothing to shoot at.
The issue is that these individual features that I enjoy are not drawn together in a coherent manner. It's like Sean Murray had an issue with ADHD where he jumped from one unfinished aspect of the game to another without taking the time to truly "finish" anything. It's possible that these issues will all be improved or fixed with future patches, but Murray has basically admitted that they will likely need to charge for "paid" DLC and after the disappointment players have experienced with the game so far it's unlikely that Hello Games will get enough future funding to develop NMS anywhere near its full potential. I'm willing to keep playing for now until I feel I've truly hit the "limit" of what I can get out of the game but the fact that I'm already seeing the limitations and flaws after only 20 hours is not a good sign so far.
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+Rep for the fact that you didn't just auto-bash NMS (as that seems to be the norm these days [kids voice] "It's not ED so it must be bad")
That's what I took from NMS too, as per my posts, that exploration really is that - you walk around with a scanner looking for things to catalogue; when you scan all the creatures of a planet you receive a nice bonus; you can manipulate your multi-tool to extend the range for finding things and scanning them; etc.
All things that NMS did well that FD could look at and for themselves work out why.
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I am at 50 hours ... If I am honest I will say that my enthusiasm is waning and the only thing keeping me in there is teh desire to reach the core, but I quickly add that the lack of desire is not specific to NMS ... Rust I play on/off over the months - post patch it's daily to slowly become periodic : couple of weeks back to back then a hiatus for a few weeks; ED I play extremely periodically (last time I think was a few months ago); only D3 draws me in daily and that's perhaps the most repetitive game I know ... I think I just like smashing monsters
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I'm slowly reading through this as I get time. But this stood out:
I really have to take issue with this. I realise that this is an aesthetic matter and pretty subjective, but I've been surprised at how realistic the rocky planet surfaces do not look in ED.
As far as I can describe them, they look as though someone screwed up some paper, scanned it and then mapped the scan to the surfaces. Together with the clunky planetary approach system, the fact that planet surfaces don't measure up to SpaceEngine (for example) has been quite off-putting for me as far as Horizons is concerned.
(There've been numerous posts since Avetorian's here so I won't spend time picking at the fact that his rebuttals were all variants on "Yes, but ED is going to get that one day". But I did notice it.)
I really have to take issue with this. I realise that this is an aesthetic matter and pretty subjective, but I've been surprised at how realistic the rocky planet surfaces do not look in ED.
As far as I can describe them, they look as though someone screwed up some paper, scanned it and then mapped the scan to the surfaces. Together with the clunky planetary approach system, the fact that planet surfaces don't measure up to SpaceEngine (for example) has been quite off-putting for me as far as Horizons is concerned.
(There've been numerous posts since Avetorian's here so I won't spend time picking at the fact that his rebuttals were all variants on "Yes, but ED is going to get that one day". But I did notice it.)