Disclaimer: this is gonna be a long post and I honestly would love to keep this kind of constructive, because even if I have to say that in the last months the quality of the forums has dropped substantially, with people that should be in charge to keep the order only aiming to provoke the guys that simply do not agree with them, I still believe that the forums are the only place we have to communicate with the team about how we feel about the game and what we wish for it to be. I do not want to talk about a game mechanic in particular, even if I'd have a lot to say about many different "core mechanics" (being a long time player), this is more about how the different game mechanics interact, and how right now Elite Dangerous feels like some kind of chimera, with the core game suffocated by a lot of pointless mini-games.
First things first: what is Elite Dangerous?
Elite Dangerous is a massive multiplayer space sim. This is not something I'm coming about by myself, it's how Frontier Developmens present the game themselves in Steam. The strong points of Elite are the absolutely astonishing graphics, the rock solid flying model and the fact that every action done by the players have actual consequences in game. This is basically what Elite Dangerous is: people flying their ships doing stuff that have consequences in the Galaxy, even if they do not care about the consequences themselves. It may not seem much, but it's what makes Elite such an enjoyable experience.
So what's gone wrong at some point?
As I said before I'm kind of a veteran, I started playing 6 months before Horizons and I remember well what the game used to be for a new, aimless player. I've been in my Viper for so much before being able to buy a Vulture (yeah newbies, there was a time when buing a Vulture was a big deal), I had my problems with people trying to kill me without any reason (I refuse to call them gankers or griefers
), the infinite number of jumps (that was pre-engineering era), the short amount of money you could make because, at the time, there were very little opportunities to become rich in a short amount of time. I've always found mining (the old mining) and exploration quite boring for myself, so I dedicated myself to combat and delivery missions, slowly building up my finances to buy a Python, which had become the foundations for the big ships a couple of months later. At the time the game was quite balanced, credits were not granted and you needed time to buy the big ones, to build up a decent stash to fit them and fly them even considering the possibility of being blown up. There was some slighlt faster economical opportunities back there, but they were just faster than others, and being always a open player they were dangerous (at least to me), Ceos, Robigo... systems we all know.
Then... at some point Frontier started to introduce new features, which is not a problem per se of course: engineering, tourism and passenger missions, multicrew, new mining... if taken singularly they are all awesome features, something different for the players to do can only improve the game, the real problem is that fdev made these activities so advantageous instead of the old ones that trading, fighting, exploring etc became basically pointless in no time. Do you all remember how much the old passenger missions used to pay off? And let's not talk about mining. Soon we had people able to jump to the old progression curve in no time, flying around big ships without the enough experience to understand that such assets are not enough to be "safe" in the Galaxy. Passenger missions have been nerfed at some point, in a smaller proportion mining has been nerfed too, but clearly not enough. Credits have become pointless in the game, this is something that has appened in the last two years, there's no economical balance right now, try to trade some "useless" commodities, you'll see that a full cargo of some necessary commodity (let's say: food) are less lucrative than a single ton of some strange exotic material that isn't even requested by that station. What the game is telling you is that you should ignore anything else than mining, because the other activities are not as lucrative, and you need credits of course. Right now Elite Dangerous feels more like a "mining game" where miners themselves just want to do their stuff without any bothers, as some months ago it felt like bus drivers that didn't want to be bothered while transporting people around. A grind for money, nothing more, nothing less. And now we have fleet carriers that are basically some sort of personal economical activity for miners.
With engineers something similar happened. The old engineers used to be more random, they were not perfect, so FDev gave us an alternative, mostly to avoid the infamous god rolls... problem is that they didn't want to bother the old pvpers and force them to the new system, so they gave the opportunity to keep the god rolls... without actually solving the original issue of the old engineering, that was cool but unbalanced.We all remember the solution: they made the new engineers value better than god rolls, so at some point they gave god rolls to everyone, making the NPCs even dumber than they used to be with the old engineers.
If you read carefully you probably now understand what I think the main problem is. At some point the players found out that they don't want to be bothered in their regular activities, that they want to have easy access to all the features, that their personal way to play the game shouldn't be disturbed by any external factor.
We've got Thargoids, which are basically not a menace unless you go actively against them.
We've got BGS and PP for player interactions in an environment where you can easily avoid any of that.
NPCs can easily be reset by going to the main menu then logging back.
There's no actual consequences in siding for any of the different superpowers in the galaxy (or the single powers).
Actually at this point many actions have no real consequences for the single player anymore. Crime is irrelevant because money is easy, then you can afford to pay for any bounty or fee.
What Elite Dangerous lack right now is consistency: my opinion is that the game itself is overly compliant to players' requests, which apparently would like to being able to satisfy any of their desire with no real effort. The complaints I read nowadays are mostly about the excessive grinding that is wasted by the occasional incident, or the things that are too difficult to achieve. I honestly don't know what the real numbers actually are, but I'm into the organised communities and they all share the problem of players going away from the game out of boredom. Maybe we've got many more "single players" than we had back in the day, when it was natural to look for organised groups to maximise your game experience, I honestly do not know. But this "lone-wolf" approach to the game is against the most enjoyable part of the game itself: the fact that we share a Galaxy and we basically can create content for each other.
Ok but... the solution?
Well honestly I don't know how the game could go back to the "old school hard game" it was some years ago, when finding a CMDR's Anaconda flying around was quite unusual. The damage is basically done: anybody with a few hours of playing can now consider themsleves "full geared" only to discover (in the hard way) that what's most important in this game is not the ship, nor the pilot's skills, but their actual experience avoiding conflicts or simply being smart enough to have the possibility of run away with a well fitted ship in case of danger, the beauty of this game is that this is not something you aquire in a few hours, you need to try and try with low level ships, to learn the hard way that there's better ways to do things, and that's basically the reason why I've been so fond of this game in the past. But just to begin with this game need to be completely rebalanced to give sense to any other activity in the game which isn't directly mining related, which means that mining should be nerfed a lot, like passenger missions have been in the past, trading should be revamped consistently, bounty hunting shouldn't be a continuous farming of stupid NPCs, conflict zones (which are a good step in the right direction, even if one too little) should be more remunerative considering how big and decisive the battle was, but most importantly we should be able to see real consequences in the Galaxy we live in. An high and a low security system are basically the same thing (interstellar factor excluded). Federal and Imperial systems feel the same except of the colour of the exterior lights of the stations. Missions are basically the single actions we do in the Galaxy without any content and with mild consequences. Hell, we've got illegal missions that make you kill NPCs in lawful jurisdictions that do not give you notoriety because you do not want bother your players with the consequences of crime & punishment. Thargoids do not even try to exterminate us, they simply stay where they are, waiting for us to hunt them. We can sell exploration data to the same faction again and again and again, and if we sell some interesting info like a new mining zone to the right factionwell it doesn't matter at all, we will not see megaships going round to exploit these new resources (for example).
The galaxy is not dangerous at all, anything we do is at our service and it is quite boring actually (I can't wait to read the useless comments about the "Well, if you are bored why do you play" and bla bla bla).
I hope that the "new era", or the "december update" will see a new approach from fdev about that, I hope to see them willingly threaten their playarbase into some dangerous situation, to give us back the thrill, that sense of being in danger and fighting for our lives, the one we used to have before Horizons, when an NPC had the same ship we had.
Is it too much to ask?
First things first: what is Elite Dangerous?
Elite Dangerous is a massive multiplayer space sim. This is not something I'm coming about by myself, it's how Frontier Developmens present the game themselves in Steam. The strong points of Elite are the absolutely astonishing graphics, the rock solid flying model and the fact that every action done by the players have actual consequences in game. This is basically what Elite Dangerous is: people flying their ships doing stuff that have consequences in the Galaxy, even if they do not care about the consequences themselves. It may not seem much, but it's what makes Elite such an enjoyable experience.
So what's gone wrong at some point?
As I said before I'm kind of a veteran, I started playing 6 months before Horizons and I remember well what the game used to be for a new, aimless player. I've been in my Viper for so much before being able to buy a Vulture (yeah newbies, there was a time when buing a Vulture was a big deal), I had my problems with people trying to kill me without any reason (I refuse to call them gankers or griefers
), the infinite number of jumps (that was pre-engineering era), the short amount of money you could make because, at the time, there were very little opportunities to become rich in a short amount of time. I've always found mining (the old mining) and exploration quite boring for myself, so I dedicated myself to combat and delivery missions, slowly building up my finances to buy a Python, which had become the foundations for the big ships a couple of months later. At the time the game was quite balanced, credits were not granted and you needed time to buy the big ones, to build up a decent stash to fit them and fly them even considering the possibility of being blown up. There was some slighlt faster economical opportunities back there, but they were just faster than others, and being always a open player they were dangerous (at least to me), Ceos, Robigo... systems we all know.Then... at some point Frontier started to introduce new features, which is not a problem per se of course: engineering, tourism and passenger missions, multicrew, new mining... if taken singularly they are all awesome features, something different for the players to do can only improve the game, the real problem is that fdev made these activities so advantageous instead of the old ones that trading, fighting, exploring etc became basically pointless in no time. Do you all remember how much the old passenger missions used to pay off? And let's not talk about mining. Soon we had people able to jump to the old progression curve in no time, flying around big ships without the enough experience to understand that such assets are not enough to be "safe" in the Galaxy. Passenger missions have been nerfed at some point, in a smaller proportion mining has been nerfed too, but clearly not enough. Credits have become pointless in the game, this is something that has appened in the last two years, there's no economical balance right now, try to trade some "useless" commodities, you'll see that a full cargo of some necessary commodity (let's say: food) are less lucrative than a single ton of some strange exotic material that isn't even requested by that station. What the game is telling you is that you should ignore anything else than mining, because the other activities are not as lucrative, and you need credits of course. Right now Elite Dangerous feels more like a "mining game" where miners themselves just want to do their stuff without any bothers, as some months ago it felt like bus drivers that didn't want to be bothered while transporting people around. A grind for money, nothing more, nothing less. And now we have fleet carriers that are basically some sort of personal economical activity for miners.
With engineers something similar happened. The old engineers used to be more random, they were not perfect, so FDev gave us an alternative, mostly to avoid the infamous god rolls... problem is that they didn't want to bother the old pvpers and force them to the new system, so they gave the opportunity to keep the god rolls... without actually solving the original issue of the old engineering, that was cool but unbalanced.We all remember the solution: they made the new engineers value better than god rolls, so at some point they gave god rolls to everyone, making the NPCs even dumber than they used to be with the old engineers.
If you read carefully you probably now understand what I think the main problem is. At some point the players found out that they don't want to be bothered in their regular activities, that they want to have easy access to all the features, that their personal way to play the game shouldn't be disturbed by any external factor.
We've got Thargoids, which are basically not a menace unless you go actively against them.
We've got BGS and PP for player interactions in an environment where you can easily avoid any of that.
NPCs can easily be reset by going to the main menu then logging back.
There's no actual consequences in siding for any of the different superpowers in the galaxy (or the single powers).
Actually at this point many actions have no real consequences for the single player anymore. Crime is irrelevant because money is easy, then you can afford to pay for any bounty or fee.
What Elite Dangerous lack right now is consistency: my opinion is that the game itself is overly compliant to players' requests, which apparently would like to being able to satisfy any of their desire with no real effort. The complaints I read nowadays are mostly about the excessive grinding that is wasted by the occasional incident, or the things that are too difficult to achieve. I honestly don't know what the real numbers actually are, but I'm into the organised communities and they all share the problem of players going away from the game out of boredom. Maybe we've got many more "single players" than we had back in the day, when it was natural to look for organised groups to maximise your game experience, I honestly do not know. But this "lone-wolf" approach to the game is against the most enjoyable part of the game itself: the fact that we share a Galaxy and we basically can create content for each other.
Ok but... the solution?
Well honestly I don't know how the game could go back to the "old school hard game" it was some years ago, when finding a CMDR's Anaconda flying around was quite unusual. The damage is basically done: anybody with a few hours of playing can now consider themsleves "full geared" only to discover (in the hard way) that what's most important in this game is not the ship, nor the pilot's skills, but their actual experience avoiding conflicts or simply being smart enough to have the possibility of run away with a well fitted ship in case of danger, the beauty of this game is that this is not something you aquire in a few hours, you need to try and try with low level ships, to learn the hard way that there's better ways to do things, and that's basically the reason why I've been so fond of this game in the past. But just to begin with this game need to be completely rebalanced to give sense to any other activity in the game which isn't directly mining related, which means that mining should be nerfed a lot, like passenger missions have been in the past, trading should be revamped consistently, bounty hunting shouldn't be a continuous farming of stupid NPCs, conflict zones (which are a good step in the right direction, even if one too little) should be more remunerative considering how big and decisive the battle was, but most importantly we should be able to see real consequences in the Galaxy we live in. An high and a low security system are basically the same thing (interstellar factor excluded). Federal and Imperial systems feel the same except of the colour of the exterior lights of the stations. Missions are basically the single actions we do in the Galaxy without any content and with mild consequences. Hell, we've got illegal missions that make you kill NPCs in lawful jurisdictions that do not give you notoriety because you do not want bother your players with the consequences of crime & punishment. Thargoids do not even try to exterminate us, they simply stay where they are, waiting for us to hunt them. We can sell exploration data to the same faction again and again and again, and if we sell some interesting info like a new mining zone to the right factionwell it doesn't matter at all, we will not see megaships going round to exploit these new resources (for example).
The galaxy is not dangerous at all, anything we do is at our service and it is quite boring actually (I can't wait to read the useless comments about the "Well, if you are bored why do you play" and bla bla bla).
I hope that the "new era", or the "december update" will see a new approach from fdev about that, I hope to see them willingly threaten their playarbase into some dangerous situation, to give us back the thrill, that sense of being in danger and fighting for our lives, the one we used to have before Horizons, when an NPC had the same ship we had.
Is it too much to ask?
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