Exploration could use some love for sure. Special things to find, dangers to avoid/survive, etc... they can do a lot of these things before they even deal with planetary landings in my opinion.
What is the 'endgame'?
- Thread starter Lanz
- Start date
Exploration could use some love for sure. Special things to find, dangers to avoid/survive, etc... they can do a lot of these things before they even deal with planetary landings in my opinion.
Also for your endgame, I'd say create your own narrative and let it help you decide. I know it falls under the "imagination" (insert Spongebob Rainbow here) definition, but it works for me.
For example, I encountered a strange thing where even though I was allied with Mahon and in his homeworld of Gateway, an Elite Alliance Anaconda would intercept me and open fire - for no reason I could figure out. It wouldn't just interdict me, if I dropped into a USS it would pop in and chase me. It even open fired on me as I tried to dock at Dublin Citadel. And of course I couldn't fire back at him because if I did I'd get in trouble and end up wanted in my own home system.
How did I take this? I figured this guy had a personal grudge against me. My own personal Javert (Les Miserables reference). Why was that? Well, I'd been playing Powerplay with an eye on getting Merits but not so much on what was in the Alliance's best interests (hey, I was still trying to figure it out), so my personal Javert saw me as a parasite on the Alliance, one they'd be better off without.
Now even though the NPC hasn't shown up again, when my ship got destroyed during some weapons testing I was doing in a Combat Zone, I attributed it to him. I'm using this as a groundwork to give myself a reason to leave the Alliance and join another faction at some point.
So in a way I'm letting the game help me decide what I'll do next based on what it does to me.
For example, I encountered a strange thing where even though I was allied with Mahon and in his homeworld of Gateway, an Elite Alliance Anaconda would intercept me and open fire - for no reason I could figure out. It wouldn't just interdict me, if I dropped into a USS it would pop in and chase me. It even open fired on me as I tried to dock at Dublin Citadel. And of course I couldn't fire back at him because if I did I'd get in trouble and end up wanted in my own home system.
How did I take this? I figured this guy had a personal grudge against me. My own personal Javert (Les Miserables reference). Why was that? Well, I'd been playing Powerplay with an eye on getting Merits but not so much on what was in the Alliance's best interests (hey, I was still trying to figure it out), so my personal Javert saw me as a parasite on the Alliance, one they'd be better off without.
Now even though the NPC hasn't shown up again, when my ship got destroyed during some weapons testing I was doing in a Combat Zone, I attributed it to him. I'm using this as a groundwork to give myself a reason to leave the Alliance and join another faction at some point.
So in a way I'm letting the game help me decide what I'll do next based on what it does to me.
At that point, I think we have to call DB the best salesperson ever and hope for Mad Men: Dangerous.
See if you can survive without growing to resent that the game is lacking, that once you worked to earn the big toys there is nothing to do with them.
If you're not playing with friends you'll probably shelve the game quicker than if you were. The reason is because a friend will jaunt off to some distant system and come back with a Vulture and you'll be all "ooh" and "aaaah" and "I need that". Then you'll not consider conflict zones and RES sites as cash grinding, but fun. The cash will come but your mini-goal will always be to protect your friends, and from there to find things they haven't seen yet and say "yall come check this out" or "hey, anyone want to get an explorer and head out for a few days?". Then you'll be doing that and someone will say "hey, the commodities at this station are really really cheap, and one system over they are in high demand. Let's run a few over there to see if we can make any money" and you will make money. You'll do that for a while and maybe decide you no longer want to explore, now you want to trade. While you are trading you'll get interdicted a few times and your friends will come to your rescue. One of you will decide to just be an armed escort, and you'll do that a while and make some Cr. Next you'll resume the exploring goal. So you'll set off to do that again with your friends, and on your way out there you'll find a ringed planet with Palladium or maybe even Painite, and you'll say to your friends "hey, this stuff is expensive, I saw it for sale at like 36K a ton" and you'll say "Let's outfit to mine, I want to see how it works" and you will and you'll be mining then someone will come pirate your hatch and one of your friends will say "hey, I'll be the armed guard" and they'll do that and get Cr for defending your backside, and you'll mine and make a lot of Cr mining. Then you'll get tired of that and say "hey; let's go explore" and you'll rig to do that, and you'll be headed out that way when someone finds a station really really close to a RES site and you'll say "man we could really mop up here" so you do that for a while. Next thing you know you'll have 100m Cr and you'll be in a Python and have changed ships a dozen times and settled on the one you like, and it won't be the Anaconda. Then you'll explore.
This is fair, but it does leave the small dilemma of having a ship that's still a 'little fish' in an environment where I could run afoul hostile players in something much larger and more dangerous.
I hope they do. I see a lot of potential in using exlporation and mining as the cornerstone to industry and crafting. Exploration gets you the plans/technology, and then you mine for the materials needed to create something with those designs/technology.
This is a good post with good points, but with the caveat that all the mentioned items be working as they are meant to. When they don't, you end up going down the bucket list and crossing off things with an "NA" since they are bugged. That has really shortened the life of this game for me. It ran my entire group off to do other things. I still see them log into Steam but they play different games now because the time required to reach a goal in this game is too demanding just to have something bug out on you and make it all in vain. Imagine you play Monopoly and you go around and around the board but once you finally land on Park Place there is no card for it so you cannot buy it, so you just say "no Park Place" and now Boardwalk is a monopoly, but it's not, because the game won't let it be. So you downgrade to the next highest monopoly. Weeee that's fun.
I guess that Elite is simply not for you. Every possible route that people show you, you immediately dismiss as BORING, without even having scratched the surface of anything. You don't even want to look at the ships between the Cobra (first half-decent ship) and the Anaconda (biggest ship in game). Your only vision is "too kill everything" until you get bored again. How pitiful.
Elite is not story-based, it is not a RPG, there are no guilds, no achievements are unlocked, there are no pink unicorns and no magical level-ups. There is no end game and no "I win button". And it is unlikely that any future content will add one of these things. Sorry to disappoint you.
If 'every possible route' is A) Mining, B) Exploration, and C) Fighting other ships, then it's not a very large list. But by all means, since you seem to be so well-informed, do tell me about the enormous depth and details of the mining system, which I've only 'scratched the surface of'. By your telling it must be huge and wondrous, and my flying around an asteroid belt, shooting rocks with lasers then picking up bits with drones is nowhere close to how tremendously fun it actually is. Please enlighten me, oh pink carebear of space wisdom. That's why I started the thread after all.
edit: Or, really, elaborate on anything else that was said. So far everything else seems to boil down to stuff I have already done, and I'm not seeing a lot of examples of stuff I haven't done that differs so much as to offer a new experience. Otherwise, I'm being told to use my imagination.
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I laughed.
You and I are entertained in much the same way. I cannot collect stamps or butterflies, nor can I garden. Some can and find it enchanting. My past time IRL is obviously gaming, but also hunting and fishing. I like action. I am not a kill everything person, but I do want to be in an environment where it's possible you just might have to, and when you do, there's a reason and an outcome that's not just "here's some Cr you can use to buy more killing stuff" or "you owe us come CR because you killed stuff" or "don't come back here for a week, since we have Alzheimer's and will have totally forgotten about you by then, and we are horrible at book keeping".
Mining, meh. Bzzzzz plink... go get it... store it.. process it... bzzzz plink.. rinse and repeat.
Exploring, |||||||| Charging |||||||||| x infinity and big blue Sesame Street letter saying there was a new discovery! Hey, fat virtual crayons! Why not just have a small notification "new unexplored stuff available"? Hey, I'm 4 weeks into frame shifting 300 times a day and I'm almost where I want to be. I'll then turn around and do it all over again to come back. Not for me. I got 800LY out and thought "this sucks" and went back.
Power Play... more like Power players. If you're not online all the time you basically are just test driving it. Rep decay kills everything you try to do if you can't be on all the time. Imagine any other game, a real sandbox game, where you've built your entire fortress in space or on some planet and you're away from the PC for a few days. You come back and it's gone...it decayed. You have to start over. Miss a day and it crumbles.
Interaction with aggressors or cooperative play is the only interesting aspect of the game. Otherwise might as well be playing Tetris.
That has basically been my experience, yeah. I haven't done any co-op play because none of my friends are interested in playing, and the in-game player coordination is, apparently, completely non-existent (why does my super-futuristic sci-fi spaceship have less social functions than my smartphone?).
And, yeah, travel has been really boring. To me, seeing a planet I haven't seen before is a novelty that doesn't seem worth a whole day of 'load screens' there and back to just... look at it. No interactions, nothing to take back or use. Just look at it, scan it, and either stay out in the abyss where there is nothing to do but explore, or start the long trek back.
I wouldn't mind it so much if it had auto-pilot so I could read through Galnet or something while my ship is hopping around. It also wouldn't be so bad if exploration was basically mutually-exclusive with all other gameplay. If you want to explore you have to venture so far from civilization that all you can do is explore. It'd be nice if they had something more local. Pockets of space. Nebulae. Whatever.
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Discovered systems should have stations being built. That would create the new Route 66 (US thing) across the galaxy. You could get fuel and a burger (or fish and chips) and a beer (both countries) while traveling. At least have a rest area every 1000LY or so.
Powerplay seems like a good idea for endgame.
Because faction vs faction, the galaxy changes , nice pvp and strategy/tactics
Than you find out that the only way people play Powerplay (Because it's the most efficient) is by grinding defenseless npc's in solo, all while the strategy of powerplay is undermined by the fact everyone has a vote and makes it spiral out of control.
Because faction vs faction, the galaxy changes , nice pvp and strategy/tactics
Than you find out that the only way people play Powerplay (Because it's the most efficient) is by grinding defenseless npc's in solo, all while the strategy of powerplay is undermined by the fact everyone has a vote and makes it spiral out of control.
Some games rely on enticing end-game content to keep the player grinding.
Some games rely on deep or simply well designed game mechanics that are enough in an of themselves without the need to reward players.
Succesful games tend to rely a bit on both, but you can make an engaging game focusing mainly on one or the other.
Alas Elite Dangerous leans very heavily towards the first category, because it can't be the second category considering how shallow the game mechanics are.
Mining? Head for the closest RES, move 50km out from the beacon, then shoot asteroids along their axis of rotation, pick up the bits that come out using collector drones, fiddle with the refinery, rinse and repeat. If you feel really, really bored use prospector limpets to try and be picky, though you'll probably waste more time doing that than you would bulk-mining. You will see the entirety of the gameplay associated with mining in the first 5 minutes, and there is absolutely no skill or thought process involved. The most demanding task will probably be to look for a pristine metallic planetary ring within inhabited space on google.
Trading? Considering the economy is virtually entirely NPC driven and there are arguably no long-term trends in the evolution of price and supply (unlike, say, EVE), just find a high-sec high pop high-tech system not too far from a high sec high pop refinery system, ferry stuff back and forth ad vitam æternam. And forget about 75% of the in-game commodities: they're not worth trading. You'll of course see the extent of what trading has to offer from a gameplay perspective in the first 10 minutes of doing it: access the commodity market, buy stuff. Fly to other station, access the commodity market, sell stuff. Now compare that to EVE where the economy is complex enough to let you engage in long term speculation based on the evolving politics of the universe...
Smuggling: Trading but a bit more tedious when picking a route and more involved in that you have to fly faster and have tighter control over your ship to enter the dock without crashing. Being scanned isn't really a threat though since the game only spawns NPCs (including the police) at predefined locations after you've entered the instance, way too far out to be able to scan you in time, instead of randomly (or why not, procedurally, yay persistent NPCs) setting their location to add some spice and difficulty. Of course all this extra involvement is balanced out by lower rewards (please don't mention the powerplay bonuses, smuggling shouldn't be limited to a couple spots where powerplay bonuses make things profitable), because in Elite Dangerous fun is a currency and you have to pay for it. Then again, just like trading, you'll see the extent of what it has to offer in a matter of minutes. You'd expect the concept of dealing with the underworld to be a bit more involved than a mere "I want to sell illegal things" menu option.
Exploration: Mechanically speaking the dumbest of them all. Jump to system, press the ADS button for a few seconds, profit. For extra credits you can fly to the discovered bodies and keep the nose pointed at them long enough to complete a scan. Shoul take about 1 minute grand total. Once that's done, you can jump to another system and do it again. And again. And again. And again again, because the transaction server is having trouble registering your scans anyway. Again, don't expect any knock-on effect: nobody cares that you went there, no minor faction will expand into those systems if you're not doing it as part of a CG, and players have far better options for mining in pristine metallic rings in the civilized bubble anyway. Not that it would matter anyway since FD limited the purchase of exploration data to a 20ly bubble around stations. You will find some pretty sights on your journey out there though, but that in itself has no gameplay value. Where is the complex gameplay you'd associate with surveying stellar bodies?
Bounty hunting: Combat is of course the most fleshed out part of the game, so that's a positive. On the specific topic of bounty hunting though, you would expect something more to it than just farming RES. Luckily with 1.3 FD added a bit more to it, with targets now flying around in supercruise too. A step in the right direction. Hopefuly eventually we get some more bounty tracking instead of just mindless combat. Bounty hunting should be more of a detective's job, going after a target's tracks, checking station traffic reports, doing some guesswork, and then only ending the chase with a glorious battle.
Piracy: Pick low sec system, interdict hauler, shoot hatch or launch limpets, scoop up all 20t of hydrogen fuel and run away while punny police vipers plink away at your shields. Takes 10 minutes, doesn't require much skill. The cargo NPCs carry doesn't seem to be linked to the local economy, so there's a lost opportunity for some depth. Just like smuggling, the fact you're selling to a black market isn't used to improve the gameplay either. Now PVP piracy at least adds, by its very nature, some flavour to an activity that is like the rest very shallow gameplay wise. By the way, the crime update was a joke and didn't add any sense of consequence to criminal actions. One day maybe the police response will become a thing and force us pirates to make a balanced choice between sticking to anarchy system or risking our hides for higher profit in 'high security' space.
Some people here advised the OP to try a bit of everything, but that's the issue. The entirety of the gameplay associated with each profession is immediatly available to the player, and you need no more than half an hour to see everything there is to see in each of them, with the exception of PVP combat maybe. A good game of the scale Elite wants to be should have deep and interwoven mechanics. Elite fails in this regard, so all that is left is grinding for the best money can buy while using your imagination to pretend you're enjoying it. All of this in a curated universe where your actions are utterly irrelevant except when the devs want you to feel otherwise through the deeply involved task of filling up a CG's progress bar.
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The game itself has no 'endgame'. The game ends on server shutdown.
dayrth
Volunteer Moderator
If that's all you've seen when exploring, then you haven't done exploring. Brows some of the exploration threads and see what others have discovered.
...but back to the point. There is no goal to aim for, (unless you set one yourself). The way to get enjoyment out of this game is to do the things you enjoy. Don't worry about how much money you have or how big your ship is. If you don't like trading then don't trade. If Exploring is not your thing, don't do that. If you want excitement, try smuggling, piracy of bounty hunting the more notorious pirate or psyco commanders.