The environment is beautiful, the sound design is spectacular, the flight mechanics are great, the srv is fun to drive, combat is engaging, exploration is a procgen slot machine, the voice acted narrative gems are awesome, the guardian station animations are sweet, core mining in particular is great (I'm sure I am leaving out so many more positives),
BUT
the progression mechanics around guardian module unlocks, engineer access, materials acquisition , ship unlocks, system permit unlocks, are a repetitive mess of fetch quests and redundant tasks.
If you get down to it, any game progression has a limited range of mechanics - but what distinguishes a positive experience from a boring repetitive one is the underlying character story or experience.
ED by design pulls the player out of the character experience and puts them into a person sitting at a computer experience in its treatment of grind. You know as a player you have to sit and run through message delivery mission quest over and over to to unlock that FAS. You are not focused on the text of the missions, the static portraits of the contacts ("Ooh I wet myself"), you simply stare at that bar and wait for the rank progression mission to pop. It's about what, 30 of these identical loops to get the Dropship?
The point is the game design understands that you do not care about the game experience, you care about the thing at the end of the tunnel, and you are going to burn x minutes looking at ARX ads.
It's probably not fair that this is a "sinister" design, but it is certainly not designed to be "fun".
When I think about "fun" grind experiences, in Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, Witcher, Dragon Age, even Cyberpunk for crafting and skill development purposes- there is this underlying story, variation in setting, a more personal presence of the character in the environment. It is often the case that these progression experiences give intermediate gear or skill, introduce NPCs, involve travel and exploration that advances a larger narrative.
So how can you make a procgen universe more personal than a spreadsheet column result?
In my opinion, even though we all want our "own" experience of the environment, a series of chained missions for each unlock would insert the player in the game much more as a character than as a person at a computer. The current design funnels players into a redundant loop of exercises without story, better to have a series of varied activities with some sort of backstory.
It all takes work though, and as long as thousands of people are willing to hit that crystal forest, there is no pressure to change. I guess we are lucky there are folks like Exigeous and DTEA to ease our pain and show us the quick and easy path through the dark side.
in fact, now that I’m about to become a space billionaire I’ve been thinking I should invest in a big ol’ space truck for hauling, I’m not in it for profit so sub-galactic average buy orders will suit me, and trit can be a charitable donation because fun is it’s own reward and I’m a bleeding heart at, err, heart?
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
