Probably the single largest contribution to my first drop-off in playing Elite was when they dropped Mac support. I used to be able to take a short break from working or other types of web browsing or small projects or whatever, and run a few missions in Elite or shuffle some PowerPlay commodities back and forth. As soon as it became necessary to reboot into Windows, the time commitment became greater because I couldn't casually tab back and forth between Elite and something else, plus all of the sudden Elite was competing for my attention with a plethora of other Windows games many of which are much more entertaining and respectful of the player's time.
After that, it was just all the downgrades in the aesthetics: changes they made to the in-game lore and the play mechanics which became increasingly "here's a special case one-time only rule which we have inserted to prevent you from doing one particular thing" or "here's a McGuffin technology which all of the sudden exists in the game world but it's only used for this one specific thing even though its implications would realistically change everything about the way the human populated galaxy works" or "these things have no mass and take up no volume but these other things do, and you can take the massless, volumeless things and use them to make things which have mass and volume." Basically everything having to do with engineers, with the materials system, with the changes to the way NPC and mission-giver comms work, it's just soooo stupid and lame and cringey now. And all the cut-paste art assets got way out of hand, like with megaships having biodomes clipped from planetary surface installations and then resized and put onto a rotating ring but they're facing dome-out, or worse still they just cut/paste a dome onto the front of a megaship.
The changes that keep coming in are all really really cringe, really lowbrow and uncool, and basically near everything that is cool or classy or interesting about the game is stuff that simply hasn't been ruined yet; stuff that is left over from the early days of the game when the creators were all more or less on the same page about what they were making, and what it all was supposed to add up to. Now it's just a grab bag of really amateur-hour features cribbed mostly from the types of games (phone clicker games, chinese MMOs, social media games, F2P loot shooters) I would never in a million years ever play in the first place, with aesthetic and storytelling choices that have more in common with the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboots or JRPGs than, say, 2001 A Space Odyssey or The Expanse or I dunno at this point even something like Star Citizen.
So it's not a cool interesting world to immerse yourself in anymore. I don't care about it. I can't get into the make-believe aspect of it, the fun fiction of it. None of it is worth paying attention to anymore. So what you're left with is a low level arcade game kind of world, and a mixed bag of play mechanics and progression systems, some good, some bad, all of them disconnected from each other. And for a while that was something I could work with, too, albeit in limited doses before the irritation with all the other things started to outweigh the fun of flying the ships and just enjoying the look of the game and the sheer mechanical pleasure of it all.
It's just that there's so much wasted time in this game, so much mandatory fiddling around, so many broken interfaces, so many times that the game does everything it can to make you hate it. Every obnoxious interface quirk, short of continuously throwing out a popup window saying "this game sucks" (and they come pretty close to doing that, too, with the addition of exploration vs combat mode and the popup message which appears and covers up your message window EVERY TIME you try to activate a scanner while in combat mode, or a hardpoint while in exploration mode). It's just so in-your-face about being a bad game now. It used to be that there were problems you could maybe work around or choose to ignore or features you could choose to skip or dumb ideas you could choose to headcanon out of your own experience, but everything is placed FRONT AND CENTER IN ALL CAPS IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN now. And you can't turn it off or otherwise customize your experience to avoid these kinds of things.
But, y'know it's still fun to fly the ships and shoot things (less so now that there's HP inflation and bullet sponge enemies), and if the multiplayer aspect of the game weren't such a trash fire I'd probably still play it every day. But Wings and Multicrew still don't really work, plus we still can't mix wings and multicrew, we still can't have any shared assets in common, we still can't share our missions or achieve any goals as a group, PowerPlay is dead in the water; and I was kinda hoping that Squadron Fleet Carriers might open up some possibilities for group play, but it looks like that's not happening, either, which means none of my friends are coming back to this game.
The last time I uninstalled Elite was right after they introduced ARX, but what really broke me was the scanner times for planets with surface POIs. Eventually Frontier made overtures towards fixing this issue, and so I figured I'd probably reinstall once they had that issue sorted out, but it seems like they just kludged a workaround together rather than tackling the issue, so I decided I'd wait for Fleet Carriers to be released because at that point in time my player group/squadron was still tentatively planning to acquire one and use it as a focal point for group activities, but then . . . uh, actually how much time did pass between the original release window for carriers and now? Anyway that's how long I've not been playing Elite, and it's probably the longest stretch I've ever gone without playing it at all even occasionally.
I'm not planning to reinstall when the carriers update goes live, because the initial launch is just going to be another broken beta and once people start screaming on reddit they'll change a bunch of stuff in the 3-8 weeks post-patch, but my tentative plan is to monitor the situation and possibly reinstall once the carriers update has semi-stabilized. The reason I'll be reinstalling, oddly enough, has nothing to do with carriers and everything to do with an under-discussed feature: queueing for CQC matches from within the regular game. If this feature works, and works well, it will probably be enough to mitigate my other frustrations with the game for a good while. Otherwise, I dunno I might be done unless Frontier makes some serious changes to Fleet Carriers or group play in general.
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thanks, you're a real winner.
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