Proposal Discussion What is the long term draw of the game?

My point is, people are making a lot of assumptions, almost posting their hopes and dreams and quoting them as factual. Elite II : Frontier had billions of star systems, yet they were all the same with nothing really out there.
Don't get me wrong, I have faith in frontier developments to produce a magical game. But as of right now, it's still a 'wait and see', and I think some people have set their imaginary bars so high, that there going to be dissapointed.

Go to the DDF. and read. That will be a little less than "hopes and dreams"; but (huge) none the less. The DDF is what is (intended) for the game.:)
 
To see the dawn glitter on a ice moon, in orbit around a planet of a type that nobody has ever seen before, bathed in light of a star that has no name, and is the colour that nobody can describe.

That's the sort of thing I'd like to see :)

Beautifully said, Asp, that is exactly what I bought Elite for.
 

Stachel

Banned
Long term? I'm not sure what the short/medium term draw is. Making money, then more money and more money. No interaction, no challenge, nothing to spend it on, risk it for. No loss. No true reward. Just more money.

I'm kinda worried I've dropped £100 on something that I will play for 10 hrs max and forget and that will then crop up on Xbox One in 18 months, gutted, F2P with a list of £2.99 DLC 10 pages long. :eek:

Let's cut the whine and look at it objectively though: multiplayer is a wash. Limited co-op at best. Trading isn't really interesting to me. 'Exploring' isn't interesting to me either really. Doing procedural missions that are by their very nature soulless and automated a-la-radiant-quests in Skyrim isn't really interesting to me.

I can't impact anything. I can't own anything. I can't help anyone, work with others etc. There will be no meta game, no politics, no 'driving' force to make me want to play. I can't lose, I can't win. I can just get more money that, presumably, after a certain point, I can't even spend. I could visit lots of procedural systems with nothing in them I guess..

Honestly though, not sure where the game is if the PB is representative of the final game? It seems so sad that there will be hundreds or thousands of 'settled' systems that I can only interact with via a menu and a letter box hole in a spinning object.

So yeah, end game? I'm really looking for the start game at this point. ;)
 
There will be no meta game, no politics, no 'driving' force to make me want to play. I can't lose, I can't win. I can just get more money that, presumably, after a certain point, I can't even spend. I could visit lots of procedural systems with nothing in them I guess..

It's Elite, it's not supposed to have that strong of an "overall goal" or "driving force" to make you want to play.

I mean by the same logic, the original Elite was pointless, every Flight Sim ever made is pointless, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is pointless, Dwarf Fortress is pointless, every single player strategy game that is campaign-less is pointless, Soldak ARPGs are pointless, and so on and so forth.

Not every game is supposed to have a plot or provide some kind of arbitrary reward for playing it. Some games purely exist to be played for the sake of playing them, and a lot of people do like playing them.
 
In my opinion "the long term draw" of the game is different for each players:

some want a lot of money
some want the best ship configuration
some want the highest priced ship and show it off at azeban city
some want to explore all the places int he game
some want a lot of player interaction and co op
some want a lot of player interaction in order to kill other pilots

and so on, it's a sand box, you play it like you want but dont expect "my long term" to be like another player "long term"
 
Thank you all for your mature responses, something I appreciate about space sim communities. As someone that doesn't have the game I didn't want to make a bad investment, like a recent investment I made in an early access game that was a bit underwhelming.

Surprisingly, there were way too many GREAT replies to just reply to most of you personally as I desired to, It would've been a mega quote thread :cool:.
But I wanted to respond to all of you who had the inclination to hear back.

For some folks, the answer seems it's mainly about a suspension of disbelief of an immersion of being in space and having it as a entertaining escape from the labors of daily life, something that can't be palpably communicated, just tangibly experienced subjectively. That's something I always enjoyed as a gamer.

Other folks did a great job of explaining a lot of anticipated features, and I didn't see an overabundance of koolaid addiction, just a lot of good ole anticipation on design docs, and currently unwritten code, the nature of the beast. We have to take it with a grain of salt, so to speak, game development is a bit of a volatile process. It's like promising to deliver a hazardous explosive commodity to a station, sometimes the deliverer scrapes against the station wall on landing and the unexpected and unfortunate happens. Space explorers are big dreamers and visionaries, so I would expect no less. It was interesting that many of you reflected on what personally is drawing you to the game and illuminated things for me from a variety of perspectives, every post was worth reading, so thanks to all of you.

The size of the playfield, the variety of things to do and places to go will be the biggest long term draw. You will always be able to go where no one has gone before.

The best way to get a feel for what the game will be like is to read the DDA documents here http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=25164. Every planned feature is there.

The DDA thread was truly a great read last night, as well as the E-Book summarizing it real well, it should be required reading these days for anyone 'really curious' (RTFM I say).

The DDA shows the depth that is necessary to make the game interesting and versatile. It also shows the devs capabilities to make a great game, and holding a high vision without overburdening us with too much mundane micromanagement. Everything from varying fuel quality, skimming fuel from gas giants, sensor variations, misjumps where you can end up in unexplored space, the galaxy map, discovering new things, NPC behaviours, module malfunctions, hiring wingmen and controlling them, multiple ships able to be owned and managed (happy for that). That and a whole lot more was cool to see and hopefully can be pulled off. There is intellectual depth mixed with some adrenaline pumping action, a fine balance I personally desire.

I also got to thinking how this game may have opportunity to be fleshed out for years to come, and it takes years to make something truly great, something beyond all of our current scope. Unfortunately good development takes a lot of time and money. Trying to please everyone isn't going to work either. I don't have a problem in investing money on a worthy game that provides months, or even years, of enjoyment. Hopefully Frontier doesn't go the route of micro-transactions of game assets/game currency to sustain the game. Also hopefully earning in game credits doesn't take too many hundreds of hours to feel like you are still a pauper.

Most notably it seems to me, this genre requires an ability to suspend disbelief, a desire to really role play, so to speak. After all, this is the awesome hugeness of unexplored space dammnit!:D You have to love space and enjoy the 'life', not just seek that adrenaline fix in fragging people in CoD or be compelled to level up that character with the best weapons to be L337, or compete for sake of a 'need' to win. Space sims are truly their own niche and I do love them for all they bring to the table for their audience, its much of what made PC gaming so exciting in the early days, it broke out the walls. I'm just getting older and I hope I can appreciate them the way I used to. So far I really like what I see, and hopefully the mechanics will allow people to play a hundred hours and not feel like they have been there and done that, although at the end of the day that is truly subjective.
 
Although I quite like a lot of games that have you owning and managing lots of stuff, Elite was never that kind of game and I never thought while playing Elite 2 - "this would be better if I could own and manage lots of stuff", instead I thought - "this would be better if the worlds were more 'alive'", "this would be better if there were more choices of professions", "this would be better with more variation" etc.

Just like when playing Half-life, I never thought the game would be better if I could settle down and own a business in it. No, instead you just want to move on to the next adventure. Elite is an adventure game.
 
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