He wielded those statistics today on the Steam forums as well. I pulled the GTA5 stats on him. Shocking, terribly shocking, GTA5 must be dying! Shame really, just started getting into it these last few months.
What went wrong with Elite Dangerous
- Thread starter Sole Hunter
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He wielded those statistics today on the Steam forums as well. I pulled the GTA5 stats on him. Shocking, terribly shocking, GTA5 must be dying! Shame really, just started getting into it these last few months.
No there is nothing wrong with loosing a ship as long as there is a reason for loosing it, if you have a valuable cargo and a pirate wants it and you don't give it up you may die, if you have a bounty on you and someone wants to collect it you may die. But when a group of players are just destroying ships for 'fun' then that is not OK, it breaks the whole feel of the game and is why so many players stay out of open.
Late to the thread - but my own tuppence (and ignoring the "executive control" elements, we know that's not making its way into this game so discussing it is a waste of time):
In my opinion, FD have absolutely failed to implement any of the features that make up the game world to any degree of depth. The principle driver behind any decent story (even one that isn't hand-crafted) are its characters / protagonists and ED isn't the game that it could be in this regard by any degree. Even the IP which could have been genuinely interesting has been given cursory, placeholder attention. The difference between Federation and Imperial space is non-existent, barring a few commodities. Even one of the core elements of the original game is dull and uninspiring; trading.
There are centuries of game lore which could be drawn on to develop a more fleshed out background. There could be surprises, new experiences and the unusual to see in space.
Explorers could discover abandoned bases or abandoned hulks in orbit around distant stars (or evidence that they were once there). Pirates could be hounded by that NPC that refuses to stop tracking them (and they could actually pirate...). Bounty hunting, being deputised by the local police, seeing a mercenary operation go crazy because a capitol ship jumped in unexpectedly, seeing a half-constructed dredger posted near a space station.
To be clear, it's not bad game. But it's not (in my opinion) a great game. It could be wonderful - it needs more in-game assets and more sense of life and variety.
In my opinion, FD have absolutely failed to implement any of the features that make up the game world to any degree of depth. The principle driver behind any decent story (even one that isn't hand-crafted) are its characters / protagonists and ED isn't the game that it could be in this regard by any degree. Even the IP which could have been genuinely interesting has been given cursory, placeholder attention. The difference between Federation and Imperial space is non-existent, barring a few commodities. Even one of the core elements of the original game is dull and uninspiring; trading.
There are centuries of game lore which could be drawn on to develop a more fleshed out background. There could be surprises, new experiences and the unusual to see in space.
Explorers could discover abandoned bases or abandoned hulks in orbit around distant stars (or evidence that they were once there). Pirates could be hounded by that NPC that refuses to stop tracking them (and they could actually pirate...). Bounty hunting, being deputised by the local police, seeing a mercenary operation go crazy because a capitol ship jumped in unexpectedly, seeing a half-constructed dredger posted near a space station.
To be clear, it's not bad game. But it's not (in my opinion) a great game. It could be wonderful - it needs more in-game assets and more sense of life and variety.
This very much - and my interest in NMS has dwindled since discovering their highly cavalier attitude towards realism. It's fair enough but what I love about finding these remote habitable places is their ice caps, their weather patterns and oceans. Seeing alien deserts spreading around the equator and a distant sun peeking over the horizon
NMS one planet one environment spread all over all arranged within 10 seconds flight of each other. Meh.
But mostly I'm replying to say that avatar looks fabulous on you
True but maybe not relevant. As I understand it game updates to ED would show as usage data so you'd see a usage spike just after an update - you do see this a little in the usage data but as it is so small it looks like very few units over the active base are updating. It may be that all of the users you think aren't included in the active base are updating via the ED client and not steam .... could be, it isn't possible to determine that with the spy data.
You have been missing the point though: People want more content. They want to find an abandoned pirate station in middle of space. They want to see stations built in asteroids. They want -variety- (Stuff like Freelancer had, man I love that game!
Freelancer was almost entirely story-driven. After you played through the maybe 25-25 hours of story-driven gameplay you were able to fly around its handful of systems shooting exactly the same npcs that you shot in the story missions with a procedural mission generator that made the one in this game look like a HAL 9000, until you got bored. Don't get me wrong I loved Freelancer and it was given some extra longevity by a very active modding community but suggesting that it had more content and/or depth than this game is hilariously revisionist.
On and it had one abandoned pirate station which was placed there purely as a story driver and which you were taken to by said story. Yu do realise that E D could have had a million abandoned pirate stations included both in space and on surfaces and there's a very high chance that you would still just not have found one?
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The bold things can happen though but they have to be pretty rare to cover vast numbers of users and to be special when people find them. I've never seen a capitol ship, there are people who see them all the time playing the game very differently.
I agree on what you say though essentially - the lack of larger ships near stations/outposts is something I miss, with very little interaction it gave the impression so much more was going on
I agree, that if you join open, you consent to all that can happen in open, if you don't want to be at risk of 'all' that can happen, don't be in open, that is what the other game modes are there for, fully agree there.
HOWEVER.
I also want to point out that just because you 'can' blow up someone, does not mean you should do so at every turn and chance you get. If people blow up everyone they see, is it then little wonder that people will move away from that game mode unless they want to blow up everyone they see as well? And last I checked that is not the point of open, its 'open' not 'blow up everyone', open is meant that 'everything' can happen, PvP, and randomly getting blown up, is just a part of it, if that part becomes too big a part, then less people will be in open, and that's my point with previously mentioned, that if you play super aggressively, and use the whole "but I am allowed to" defence, then don't be surprised if people don't want to play with you.
Again, just because you 'can' do something, doesn't mean you 'should' do it. There is so so much more you can do then just blowing people up randomly.
And no I am not saying you specifically are doing that, but there are clearly people that are...and those are hurting the game, and they exist in all online multiplayer games, and they hurt the games there as well, eventually there will be measures against them, and they will wander over to another game where it is easier.
But yes, on first line, yes, PvP is combat, you can get attacked any time, but in general PvP is when there's a 'fight' that yes, can be lopsided, but if you just squash someone, it isn't really PvP, at best it is ganking, at worst, griefing.
This....
Go to a CG in open and it feels kind of "vibrant and living". But of course if you expected to explore planets and drive through cities with aliens we are only 6-7 years away of this dream. The game is still nice, but the time break from Horizons 2.0 to Engineer 2.1 is just too big. Frontier is loosing players every week (according to Steam statistics), but probably this is a normal process to bring them later fresh back with an awesome new release.
One thing I learned from Frontier Help during the "65 Cmdrs in one instance" Distant Worlds event is that NPC ships also count towards the session limit. The more NPCs, the fewer CMDRs fit into a session. To be able to go nuts adding signs of life and environmental traffic, FD would need to add Levels Of Detail to the way NPCs are represented at the netcode level, so for example a distant wing of ships in Supercruise or would be treated in netcode as a single entity, then only if a player got within interdiction range of one of them would they be promoted to individual interactable entities, or 'flavour' entities would be replicated as a very lightweight object without modelling each subsystem as is currently done (look in a verbose netlog), or objects could be added that are local only, and cannot be interacteeeed How this LOD promotion would be handled to not break the session entity limit, splitting sessions or whatever else is an 'interesting problem' in distributed systems terms.
I don't really understand why adding more assets, like a variety of station types is so expensive for FD. Are their production costs so impossibly high? The current stations certainly do not have any interior detail. Or is the difficulty in adding to the galaxy model so that new assets would be correctly distributed? The speculation comes down to a) are they working on a Manhattan Project for the game? or b) are resources spread across different features and seasons so that any one feature (of which 'new window dressing' is certainly only one minor one) progresses slowly. I think b) is the most likely.
The problem is with these threads that they tend not to take into account that like many 'flash, bang, wallop...NEXT' titles this is a game always intended to evolve over an extended period of time (albeit perhaps not as quickly as some would wish). It makes for a ripe breeding ground for 'its not what I expected or wanted- and I waited for years for it', and 'its empty now and content comes too slowly (it will die)', and 'It needs to be more like that other game, and if it doesn't it will die'. I could go on but you get the drift.
More and more I think there is no right answer, those who bash down criticism on the basis DB, or any other dev. said something and therefore it is always to be thus are in all likelihood wrong, and in the same way those that predict all sorts of doom because the game isn't how they would like it to be, or worse, because its not like something else are just as wrong but for different reasons. I think that ED has a very endearing quality in that it already has many unique attributes and does things its own way, perhaps more so in that the future of this game is like the Galaxy it seeks to portray- its future content is a great unknown. We get the headlines and the marketing babble but as to how it will happen we do not know (in many respects I suspect neither do the devs). The fact that it works in terms of years, not months or weeks like some games means if you get jaded by it (and in that respect I always tend to think that the people who complain so spend far too much time playing computer games) just drop it for a while. It will be there when you come back and most likely different from when you left and ready to be enjoyed again.
More and more I think there is no right answer, those who bash down criticism on the basis DB, or any other dev. said something and therefore it is always to be thus are in all likelihood wrong, and in the same way those that predict all sorts of doom because the game isn't how they would like it to be, or worse, because its not like something else are just as wrong but for different reasons. I think that ED has a very endearing quality in that it already has many unique attributes and does things its own way, perhaps more so in that the future of this game is like the Galaxy it seeks to portray- its future content is a great unknown. We get the headlines and the marketing babble but as to how it will happen we do not know (in many respects I suspect neither do the devs). The fact that it works in terms of years, not months or weeks like some games means if you get jaded by it (and in that respect I always tend to think that the people who complain so spend far too much time playing computer games) just drop it for a while. It will be there when you come back and most likely different from when you left and ready to be enjoyed again.
This I've heard before and it makes me wonder, what kind of difference should there be? there are design differences in ships, but you want maybe more radical station differences in terms of design?
My main point is that to me, it is like saying New York and Tokyo have no differences, except when it comes to food.
While it is most certainly not directly untrue, there is much more to it, but that is a layer, that we right now, do not have access to, since we are stuck in ships, however I do believe this will change, but yeah, when it comes to space, you..generally don't have that much room when it comes to culture, remember the main population of the game still live on the ground, billions upon billions of people, yet you don't see those because you are in space, and from there, yeah, it all definitely can seem the same.
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I suspect they balance return vs. effort - new stations requires a lot of new art/design/textures and ways to explain stations changing etc for a return that is a minimal visual only change.
I reckon their time is going into mission generation and making those weave into more of an individual's story, and probably the AI elements to provide more challenging fights - by the time real war starts the enemy need to provide a serious enough challenge for the story to progress in the directions they want. If they show up and get crushed there'll be only disappointment. Those are huge and challenging tasks, even without a Horizon's checklist of increased complexity in the systems to keep to.
They've taken a big bite! It's exciting, and that only adds to the frustration of waiting - but like kids before christmas it's only because we want what's possibly in that box
Ian Phillips
Volunteer Moderator
Really what I'm driving at is the lack of a sense of life in the game. A lack of interaction with the NPCs. I don't expect players to be saving the galaxy, it is supposed to be this vast galaxy. But then, that makes the sense that I might have made a difference to someone all the more important. Almost RPG elements, I guess.
I'm past the point of judging what the game may become. I'll judge it on what it is right now. I'm not really focussing on the Fed vs. Imp stations and surrounding area - it's just one example of where I would have expected that FD would have exploited the IP that exists already to improve the game experience across the board and differentiate a bit between these major in-game entities.
I agree. And so does FD apparantly, or else they wouldnt have been working on persistent NPCs to interact with in 2.1.
This is a glorious juxtaposition. Let us admire it as we would a beautiful close-orbiting binary
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