Wanted to share this 2 yr old blog post

[JonSnowman]

I just stumbled across this blog post from 2 years ago, and felt the need to share:

https://thecakeisaliegaming.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/elite-dangerous-one-year-on/

The author calls out many of the shortcomings of elite such as the lack of a core narrative, player driven activities, persistent NPCs, etc.

[FONT=&quot]"For ED to succeed long-term, it is imperative that immersive role play, emergent gameplay and more meaningful interaction with both other players and NPCs is encouraged and facilitated. We need the power to create our own stories and events, to develop our characters and to build up communities around factions and regions."

[/FONT][FONT=&quot]The author goes on to say "[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Thankfully, FD are not totally oblivious to all this. Update 2.1 will bring specific contacts for factions and missions, providing some necessary personalisation. These will have an actual face and be consistent for all players, with your reputation determining who you deal with and the level of faction information you’ll have access to. And the expansion of the looting and crafting system will see the introduction of engineer characters, individuals spread throughout human space with their own personality, affiliations and specialisations..."

[/FONT][FONT=&quot]I have to say that 2 years on...FDEV seem totally oblivious to all of this...

The thing that gets me about this is that clearly people have been calling out the flaws in the core mechanics for at least two years, yet little progress has been made. 3.0 is not really promising anything in the way of core game changes. Just more mini games with the megaship interactions, and the utterly pointless Engineer updates.

Given they still have at least 9 months of dev time, I would like to see FDEV commit to much deeper core gameplay mechanics than they have mentioned so far. That means overhauls to things like the BSG, Powerplay, Persistent NPCs, Player created content...etc.[/FONT]

 

[Nagual]

So wanted to make a joke about The Galactica but I won't. Make up your own and pretend it's funny. Agree with that bar player created content. What ED seems to be doing just now is expanding, not growing. There is a profound difference. Expanding is essentially more of similar stuff, which is what we've been getting from the start. To my minds eye, the only thing that FDev have concentrated on over the past few years is everything combat based. Leaving everything else as an afterthought. Mining, exploration, piracy, bounty hunting, these are careers that need to have fulfilling gameplay elements in them not just more ships, more guns.

Now later this year we've a few more updates in which the first two are having some sort of update. I'm not going to try and guess what's going to change or get added, but I sincerely hope it's meaningful and not just a pretty or - if the material trader screen is anything to go by- ugly and cluttered UI. Mining needs skill added to it, some for of actual interaction, etc. Exploration is similar, not just more stuff to scan. Reasons to scan stuff, the ability to share stuff we find.

Plus it's the small things that FDev have continually ignored since the game started. A decent bookmark system would go a long way to helping people. Being able to send bookmarks to other players for instance. Being able to create bookmarks on a planets surface etc. I'm sure we all have something in mind we'd like to see added or tweaked.

I want to see ED continue to shine and grow but over the past year or so I have become totally jaded by the apparent disconnect between what FDevs Direction and the original direction we were given in kickstarter. I come back every so often, especially at new beta times to see whats changed etc.

 

[JonSnowman]

That's an interesting take, expanding rather than growing. Pretty accurate I'd say.

Combat is a good example of where they get caught up in changes and dev work that have no impact. The spent so much time in the past balancing ships for a handful of PvPers when the real combat changes should have been expansions to CZs, deeply integrating combat with core mechanics, etc.

CZ's are cool like 5 times. Then they're not.

Engineer's is another example. It get's talked about a lot but its a massive distraction IMO.

 

[Krieger]

Good find. It reminded me that at the time of ED's release many reviewers ended their review with something along the lines of "I'm curious how Frontier are going to make this huge galaxy into a living breathing place". At the time I thought: of course Frontier has a cunning plan for that!

But three years on I think the paragraph quoted below is (still) paramount.

"For ED to succeed long-term, it is imperative that immersive role play, emergent gameplay and more meaningful interaction with both other players and NPCs is encouraged and facilitated. We need the power to create our own stories and events, to develop our characters and to build up communities around factions and regions."

I'm happy with what Frontier has outlined for the Beyond chapters: fleshing out trading and exploration and adding squadrons to facilitate co-op play. But... so far ED's game mechanics came in the form of more or less isolated activity stations. As a result "Blaze your own trail" essentially means "You can choose in which order and frequency you visit the activity stations". To me this does not really feel like I'm telling my own story. Some gameplay concept is still missing that would allow players to string together all those activities into a story that can be interwoven with other player's stories. That sounds a bit vague, I know. That's because as a techie I'm a bit out of my league here. I don't want to suggest it is an easy task though.

But maybe Frontier does have a cunning plan for that. We'll see.

 

[GraXXoR]

That's an interesting take, expanding rather than growing. Pretty accurate I'd say.

Combat is a good example of where they get caught up in changes and dev work that have no impact. The spent so much time in the past balancing ships for a handful of PvPers when the real combat changes should have been expansions to CZs, deeply integrating combat with core mechanics, etc.

CZ's are cool like 5 times. Then they're not.

Engineer's is another example. It get's talked about a lot but its a massive distraction IMO.

This.

Though I’m
Curious what percentage of players play PvP vs PvE. FDEV don’t seem keen on releasing the info.

 

[Loskene]

The thing that gets me about this is that clearly people have been calling out the flaws in the core mechanics for at least two years, yet little progress has been made.

We've been calling out the inherent flaws in the core design ethic since before the game was even released! They've proven time and time again they're simply not willing to put the work in necessary to resolve these issues. Every time they told us they would the end result has been a fraction of what was necessary to actually achieve the goal, a solution in name only, boilerplate and tacked on that introduces more problems that it solves.

Your own post there illustrates this nicely. Look at what the author wrote, based on how Frontier described what they were going to do:

Update 2.1 will bring specific contacts for factions and missions, providing some necessary personalisation. These will have an actual face and be consistent for all players, with your reputation determining who you deal with and the level of faction information you’ll have access to. And the expansion of the looting and crafting system will see the introduction of engineer characters, individuals spread throughout human space with their own personality, affiliations and specialisations...

Now compare that to what we actually got, lazily implemented and horrifically unbalanced, and you start to see the problem. Now you could argue they delivered on that promise, in the same way you could argue that a Ford Fiesta is the same as a Bugatti Veyron in that they are both 4 wheeled driving machines, but all you need is a pair of eyes to notice the difference between the promise and the reality. This lack of distinction is what they prey on to claim that they "delivered what was promised" when they clearly did no such thing and had no intention of doing so.