Why the story is bad for the game.

[aspiringexpatriate]

I don't know how this isn't obvious. Did you miss the whole 'blaze your own trail' part of the game's identity?
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The story element of ED is a light dusting of sprinkles on an otherwise full bodied cake. It's not the strawberry filling. So stop thinking of the story as content, or as something that you have to do, or something that you should be doing. It's clear you have no intention (or ability) to get invested in it. That's unfortunate. Like I said, if you need the game to lead you to the fun/are incapable of making your own fun, you're not going to enjoy ED. Try Rebel Galaxy. It got a little dull for me, but sounds right up your alley.

Hmm... The missions are the FDev developed content to assist you in telling your own story. And right now they are broken. Right now they are relatively un-enticing, especially if you aren't already trying to help one of the minor factions. Right now they do not feel very dynamic. These are all issues which need to be addressed, and can be considered both content and story. That does not mean that the missions should be a CMDRs only access to "story", as the "story" is essentially world-building and then what players do with the galaxy.

Once you become invested in a storyline or minor faction or galactic power, the galaxy becomes a great place to live, fly, and get blown up in.

How can the game help CMDRs get more easily invested in the game? Well, hopefully Tier 2 NPCs will arrive this season, especially with passenger missions and the character creator. That should go a long way to help the people who cannot get involved in a mostly text-based storyline.

 

[Psycho Romeo]

Hmm... The missions are the FDev developed content to assist you in telling your own story. And right now they are broken. Right now they are relatively un-enticing, especially if you aren't already trying to help one of the minor factions. Right now they do not feel very dynamic. These are all issues which need to be addressed, and can be considered both content and story. That does not mean that the missions should be a CMDRs only access to "story", as the "story" is essentially world-building and then what players do with the galaxy.

Once you become invested in a storyline or minor faction or galactic power, the galaxy becomes a great place to live, fly, and get blown up in.

How can the game help CMDRs get more easily invested in the game? Well, hopefully Tier 2 NPCs will arrive this season, especially with passenger missions and the character creator. That should go a long way to help the people who cannot get involved in a mostly text-based storyline.

1) I agree the missions are a little bare, however they are getting better... Slowly.
2) Regarding tier 2 NPCs, I absolutely completely agree.

 

[Bambi]

I don't know how this isn't obvious. Did you miss the whole 'blaze your own trail' part of the game's identity?
.
The story element of ED is a light dusting of sprinkles on an otherwise full bodied cake. It's not the strawberry filling. So stop thinking of the story as content, or as something that you have to do, or something that you should be doing. It's clear you have no intention (or ability) to get invested in it. That's unfortunate. Like I said, if you need the game to lead you to the fun/are incapable of making your own fun, you're not going to enjoy ED. Try Rebel Galaxy. It got a little dull for me, but sounds right up your alley.

Missions are content. You can blaze your own trail but you miss out on the most interesting content. This impoverishes the game.

I'd also like to know what you mean with "making your own fun". There are a certain, limited set of activities you can do in the game, and while each of them can be fun, without them you can do nothing.

 

[Bambi]

That's what GalNet news is for. Even when I wasn't playing the game, I was following the community GalNet articles and putting the GalNet News Youtube channel on subscribe. What we need, essentially, is a 15-30 minute podcast rundown of the GalNet news stories, and right now we don't have that.

I said "good way". GalNet is not an enticing reading experience like say, books with short stories in Skyrim or Myst.

Um. I always assumed this was the goal, but, essentially, the Background Simulation, which would 'spawn' these dynamic community goals, isn't finished yet. There, frankly, should be hundreds if not thousands of one-time events across the galaxy. Every CMDR should get to experience something unique, and right now, we experience many things that appear to want to be unique, but when we share the stories, they appear canned. Now, is that our fault for not telling the stories better? Possibly. Is it FDev's fault for not having a clean background simulation doing what they said it would? Definitely. As far as I am aware, they are constantly working on the background simulation, but unfortunately, it is a very hard thing to test and bug proof, which they need to do before they can incorporate the Tier 2 NPCs which will help make every CMDRs interaction more unique.

Why would they release the game without one of the most important features? Why would they not have implemented it a year later? From what you're saying it seems like it may never come. All the more reason for them to stop their current attempts at manually faking it and start implementing at least one part of the background sim, dynamic events.

 

[Psycho Romeo]

Missions are content. You can blaze your own trail but you miss out on the most interesting content. This impoverishes the game.

I'd also like to know what you mean with "making your own fun". There are a certain, limited set of activities you can do in the game, and while each of them can be fun, without them you can do nothing.

Wow..

When you go to the mall on a Sunday afternoon, do you feel like you missed out on yesterday's sale items because the store didn't wait for you to show up? Does this impoverish your shopping experience?

And what I mean by 'making your own fun' is doing what you feel like doing? Example, I feel like tearing into a python with frag cannons, so I'll load my courier up with frags, grab an interdictor and look for trouble. Or I feel like griefing the feds, so I'll go do that. Looking for hull demolishing SRV jumps maybe? Or perhaps I'll start hating on space khaleesi and start messing with her systems. and You only have a whole galaxy worth of things to poke and prod. The story is but a small part of that.

I think that's what you're missing. The story is but a small part of the game. Modern MMO trends have ingrained the idea that content must be spoon fed to the player for the full range of 80 levels. That's stale and boring and leaves little room for emergent experiences. While ED has its (many) flaws, running perpendicular to this trend is something that it got right.

 

[Psycho Romeo]

Why would they release the game without one of the most important features? Why would they not have implemented it a year later? From what you're saying it seems like it may never come. All the more reason for them to stop their current attempts at manually faking it and start implementing at least one part of the background sim, dynamic events.

Why they released the incomplete background sim is beyond me. This is as vital as the galaxy generator itself I think. However, I don't think that the loremaster has much else to do than sit around writing galnet entries and spawning CGs, so I highly doubt they're losing out on any time.

Nobody would like it if the galaxy just dropped dead for 16 months while they hammer out a more dynamic back end.

 

[aspiringexpatriate]

Why would they release the game without one of the most important features? Why would they not have implemented it a year later? From what you're saying it seems like it may never come. All the more reason for them to stop their current attempts at manually faking it and start implementing at least one part of the background sim, dynamic events.

The Background Simulation exists, and it has from early Alpha (so I'm told), and I believe it has all the complexities built into how it operates. We got our first hint of Tier 2 NPCs with missions given by "station commander" or "station medical officer". Technically, every mission on the bulletin board is issued by a Tier 2 NPC representing the minor faction it's branded with. These are unimportant distinctions until the character creator comes online and procedurally generates faces for those NPCs.

As for the "dynamic community goals," well, frankly, I don't know what you think Power Play weekly tasks are if they're not community goals which are "dynamically generated by player participation." The system uses the same mechanics as Community Goals, but with less variety and limited rewards.

The only support for my theory that this is what FDev thought they were is the fact that authored CGs nearly disappeared in the months after 1.3 was released. When player demand called for them to return, they did.

The background simulation does exist and it is as complex as they've always wanted, but what we see of it and how we can currently interact with it is not as complex as it should be, because those game mechanics simply do not exist yet.

Now, there are massive flaws and balance issues with minor factions and CMDR interaction, but for the most part, the BGS does work.

When Horizon's released, there is clear evidence that the population of the galaxy increased or was redistributed. The BGS ideally generates these changes and applies them dynamically over the course of the year, but that mechanic has not been implemented into the game yet. There is no means for a CMDR to affect population of a system, so the dynamic representation of population in the BGS has not been made available. It is still there, under the hood.

Why did they release a game without full access to the myriad of features they eventually want the CMDRs to have access to? Because the first two years of development of this game was made off the backs of Frontier Developments and a crowd-sourced $2 million dollars. They had the COBRA engine, but Stellar Forge and the BGS had to be built over the past three years, and frankly, they had absolutely no idea the game would be successful enough to fund a season 2 or 3. According to FDev, there is comet data in the galaxy simulation now, but they've not figured out the best way to render it, so we don't get to see comets, yet. They didn't spend the resources to implement these features into the game, while they still built the structure for their future implementation into both the Stellar Forge and Background Simulation.

FDev's implementation of Elite: Dangerous has one key concept - design priorities. Gutayama vessels still don't have the CMDR's Chair from the concept art! is it sad? Yes. Is it important enough to push forward? No. Personally, I want them to spend the next 4 months on fixing the background simulation. Others want them to fix Power Play. Others want passenger missions, or multi-crew, or the Commander generator.

As far as we know, right now they are actively working on:

1. volcanic planets without atmosphere
2. multi-crew
3. fighter ship deployment
4. background simulation fixes
5. power play rebalancing and updating
6. various new SRVs
7. new ships
8. an avatar/face generator

And that's only what they have explicitly told us they are currently working on.

Personally, I don't think we will get BGS generated dynamic events until we get Tier 2 NPCs. Right now, there is no personality to the procedurally generated content. A simple thing as adding a face should help that. Passenger missions will aide that even more. Those are all things they have said will come during Season 2. The addition of those things should also include a re-balancing/focusing of Power Play. It's had a year of testing, so they should know how to implement what they want out of it now.

They've never announced new developments to the background sim. Hell, they barely include them clearly on the patch notes.

So will we get dynamically generated missions with more varied storylines and personality?

I don't see how they can introduce all the mechanics those things will require to work without sliding them in by the end of the year.

Is it possible that they will never come?

Sure. Of course it is.

 

[Wariamu]

I agree that, while this doesn't need to be a Warcraft or destiny, the game needs to give players a better sense of the past, present and future of the game universe without have to buy books or spend way too much tome searching in the dark corners of the forums and the rest of the internet. I definitely agree there.

 

[Jenner]

Holy necro, Batman!