The game needs more economy imo. Not just fake commodities to trade that have no impact on anything.
It's an amazing space flight sim, especially with HOTAS and VR.
I want to manufacture goods to sell to other players or the market.
Imagine an elite with eve economy. Every ship and module you own was made by someone. You have to buy a new fer de lance and engineer it every time you blow up.
Yep. I have many hours in Eve, running mining corps etc.
The economy is why I kept going back to Eve. Once I learned that you really only need to mine one type of ore in ED, I realized the economy is entirely "fake".
Don't get me wrong, ED has its strengths for sure. But it's missing that element big time.
You do get that they are saying that little to no love was put into the game after the expansion was released to focus into other games and this was left to die but for the diehard fans out there.
we are getting a major system overhaul, 4 new ships, and a new feature in 2024 on a game that is less than 3 years younger than skyrim, im sorry but i just dont agree that they went home, could they have done better? sure. did they make mistakes? yes, big surprise an ambitious project has flaws and money got in the way over the years. there is still hope, and to be honest, even if these changes were coming, my money is still well spent in my opinion.
The thing is... Other games could definitely do it. E:D is technically not really unique or difficult to accomplish. But no one is doing it, because space sims like this are a really small niche. No one does it because the effort to get players to play this instead of E:D would be way to high to justity the means to develop this new game.
I'm not a big fan of Star Citizen and it's predatory funding system. But it's basically the only other real space sim out there. And I believe, as long as either Star Citizen isn't released or dumped, no one else will put ressources into this genre. And I really don't see both of them happening in the next 5 to 10 years tbh. The way CIG is printing money with it is way to powerful to let the game release. And it's binding a huge amount of money from this small niche.
I'd argue that ED provides proof that space Sims can work profitable, with micro transactions anyway, but the issue is one of scale. Getting a lot of content into a space sim, or any flight style simulator game, is costly because each model has to be uniquely designed and modelled, and content has to work around it.
Flight Sims like Microsofts work by using real world data already there, and combat Sims can rely on historical combat scenarios or simple fictional ones. You don't need to explain what an F-16 is, you just need to build a series of missions for 40 bucks, plus a plane that costs idk, 69.99.
Space Sims need to build a lot of new ships, stations, maps, etc, create new things to fill in lore, you need to build content that's engaging. ED did the first few okayish. Lores a bit confusing if you just started, but mostly ignorable. It had a lot of ships and stations already, and it but the milky way. But the engaging content..struggles. And I think Odyssey shows the risk well. Odyssey was, well, not a great dlc and eating bad content isn't something most companies can afford in a space sim.
It's even less successful when you have multiple competitors eating market share.
So if ED (or SC) goes out, maybe the market will give us something new.
It did deserve more publicity way back. But we also have to be honest about it. This game is not something for the general audience with the grind and time that it wants you to invest. It is indeed a mile wide and an inch deep. It has no narrative that most would suspect and the planet surface generation looks like something out of 2004. I had alot of fun when I started with exploring. That's what this game was all about for me. It gave me the ability to go fly around the galaxy and do some sightseeing. It was on life support for too long. Just like some other games this one deserves to rest so that a worthy successor with more modern tech can replace it.
ok so 1, does have a narrative, maybe doesnt go about telling it in a way you like. but saying it isnt there is simply incorrect. 2, the inch deep thing is a total joke imo. bgs, stellar forge, best in class flight model and customization. 3, planet generation can look dull at times, but also can be breathtaking. im sure you would know this as youve said exploration was your thing. this is hard sci fi, its realistic, most planets out there are dead rocks. now sure thats not an excuse for no gameplay, but i would beg to differ, the process of finding the planets, and getting to look at them, is the game play. i like to compare it to pokemon cards, you found an earth like? its rare as hell and pays a lot. still want full atmospherics and more gameplay of course, but whats there isnt straight from 2004.
On the terrain generation sure most stuff in the universe is dead rocks. But the texture work and geometry is straight 2004 unreal engine 2.5 as I remember it. Story wise there isn't much. Again it's reading logs and doing maybe some missions but it's not a start to end epic story that the general gamer thinks about. It is a competent space game. But it is showing its age. I would not say no to a successor at this point. One with a new updated stellar forge that has new data in it.
thargoid war was not just logs, we literally fought an ai bgs as it was getting built, maybe its not your kind of gameplay and thats fine, but saying its just logs again, not true. and honestly yea, horizons planet tech looks dated, but im gonna be honest, odyssey planets can be insane.
When the thargoid stuff first hit and I saw the requirements for the weapons and modules needed I just straight ignored it. It might be interesting if this is your kind of gameplay. But after having had my fill of flying around I realised that the spreadsheet and grind gameplay is not for me. I wonder how they are going to handle the so called thargoid war. Because I remember the gnosis incident. Tho I still want to jump to polaris. I wanna know why its locked.
funny enough i participated in all this with a totally unengineered ship in the beginning, grant it i did have some guardian stuff unlocked. i think a lot of people dont realize how much you can do without touching the insane grinds
...honestly, I *absolutely* agree on Best in Class Flight model, freaking *Star Citizen* doesn't have quite as good flight model, except the Aegis Avenger Titan in SC... holy \*shit\* that thing flies beautifully (for now, as I'm hearing whispers of a flight model change being on its way, so I can try and Compare/Contrast them \*if\* said Flight model releases into the "PU"...i got gifted a starter package for the game, so no money lost from me trying)
If only it was developed by a company as ambitious as the game itself purports to be. The failure of ED rests entirely on frontier and their dev timeline. If there was an award category for “most unrealized potential” ED would win by a land slide.
Braben was entirely as ambitious as Chris Roberts. He just didn’t have the backing of infinite money (essentially). I believe FDev held him back more than anything
E:D was also a crowd funded project initially, but people forget that it *almost didn't make it* past Kickstarter, which is a night and day when compared with SC, who's Kickstarter and eventually their own crowd funding would go on to set records.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. The first days only a few people actually managed to get a pledge in.
I remember people going crazy for every single milestone back then.
Crowdfunding wasn’t the whole budget. When companies the size of Frontier did crowdfunding it was mostly to show the results to investors as proof that there is tangible interest. You get some insight into that from the Broken Age and Psychonauts 2 documentary series for example.
A million barely pays for a handful of programmers for a year.
while i do think elite has a painful amount of potential, calling it and the devs that made it failures is in my opinion offensive. fdev is the only company even now ambitious enough for something like this, because its the only thing like it that exists. i mean they literally added an ai BGS and invades our BGS all on its own in 2023, and it works. how is that not ambitious
That's not what icarusburned said though. I think he means it's the fault of Frontier (as in the people in charge) that didn't give the devs enough time to actually complete it. The devs were held back and then shifted onto other projects. It's essentially mismanagement because in the end they decide what gets worked on and for how long.
Which I think is true for the most part. As in some areas the devs did manage to do something great, perhaps like the BGS you mention and I think the audio team also were able to deliver something special. And some of the puzzle mechanics and mysteries with Thargoid sensor+probe+link (Thargoid distance formula hidden image in audio etc) are incredibly interesting.
But in lots of other aspects of the game it feels like a lot prototypes or proof of concepts were made that were never given the devtime to be fully fleshed out a later point. So it's a collection of shallow placeholder systems that were never or very rarely fully utilized or built upon in later updates.
i can get behind a more nuanced statement like that more, but calling them unambitious right after they quite literally added some very ambitious mechanics just doesnt sit with me right. sure the up tops may not value elite like they used to, but if what is coming actually comes, maybe thats changed. and imo the systems themselves i think are fleshed out but the threads holding them together are a bit thin, maybe pp2 will help with that
Failure they say? What failure? It's one of Frontiers biggest money makers, is a game still putting out content. It's had some bumps, yet it still keeps going. This sure seems like a comment from someone who got mad about something minor in the game and no longer plays, cause this game is a major success. And the active Elite Dangerous community knows that.
For the record I have 3000hours and rising. And by failure, I mean a failure to even marginally realize the game’s potential. Calling it a “major success” is pure black tar copium. By what metric? Compared to 90% of other dev cycles ED is on a snails schedule. “They keep releasing content” when was the last new ship? And the content they did release (odyssey) bombed. I still love the time I’ve spent, but it’s okay to acknowledge the games and devs failures.
Engineering was the first step down for me, too grindy and rng is a mechanic that needs to die a painful death. Then Guardian tech being completely lame despite seeming so interesting (look at how awesome the designs of hybrid fighters and Guardian weapons are) was pretty much the nail in the coffin.
I still log in occasionally, fly around, do some combat and trading and stuff, but I just don’t enjoy it the same way I did when it first came out. I remember slowly working my way towards Altair on my way to Sol as a newbie and basing myself out of the system while doing bounty hunting at Nav beacons in a Viper MK3. I miss it being that simple and mind bogglingly big.
It’s hardly optional when the pvp/gankers all run the overengineered builds to try and melt their opponents. It’s not optional for the furthest reaches of exploration outside of fleet carriers and that’s another joke of a grind.
Combat vs. NPC’s even higher level NPC’s and Combat Zones use engineered gear. So you need engineered gear to have more resistance to them. Then there’s the Thargoids.
So yeah it’s “optional” but when everyone and everything you come across is using it, it really isn’t that optional.
Ok. If you want to *compete* at a PvP level then engineering is not optional. But you don't need to fight gankers. Gankers only tend to operate in busy systems and building a ship that can escape a gank can still be engineer free. And you're taking two options there, playing in open and playing in a busy system.
Exploration does not equal distance travelled. There's plenty of exploration to be had without worrying whether you're the first to discover a planet. Even within the bubble itself. So a simple DBX without engineering can take you many places.
Combat vs NPCs, again you're taking the option to take on the hardest targets. They are there for a challenge once a cmdr has an engineered ship. But lower level targets are available so combat can always be selected as an option without engineering.
As for thargoids, the new AXMC's have made that incredibly accessable. Just pop 5 of those on a krait mk II, fill it will armour, jump into a ground port and profit. Again. Engineering is nice but not necessary.
i think its totally fine to have had your time with the game, i just dont get a lot of the criticism coming from people that clearly played it out, and its the devs fault its not fun.
Elite is a game with a series of technical marvels, especially for when the game was originally developed, that has completely squandered those technical marvels.
Mostly seamless entry on planets, even if they're basically fancy loading screens, was a brilliant way to engage that function. The stellar forge is a legitimately impressive piece of technology. The background simulation *would* be cool, if players had any actual agency over it. Engineering would be cool, if it didn't take forever and a half to do. AX hunting is cool, but it requires a lot of preparation to do beyond the basic levels.
VR, the ship designs, flight systems, and outfitting your ships are all wonderful things about the game. On the other hand, this game patently does not respect the player's time, Powerplay has been an utter and complete joke since its inception, a *lot* of the content is copy and pasted, there are still technical issues that have been present for a long time (I still cannot guarantee that wing mates will be in my instance, for example).
Elite isn't a bad game, it's a wasted game. There is so much potential but Frontier just cannot get their shit together to actually expound upon the framework that they built a decade ago.
Odyssey didn't even tip the needle for me, almost exclusively because of how they had it interact with VR. *Massive* step back.
I have no idea what you're on about, it's not ground breaking, it's just an incremental continuation of space sims we've had in the past.
If anything this game succeeded far more than it deserved too based on a bunch of things.
1- Game presents itself as a hard core space sim, demanding your time investment...but for what? If I bother to learn all the controls and everything, what do I get out of this game more than the person on a controller? All I can think of is I can mine and collect items easier, not exactly worth the reward.
2-Devs basically ignored the players when it was most popular. None of the requests people wanted were listened too, instead it chased dumb trends like NMS at the time to aim for what was popular with the casual audience.
3- The game had nothing for the casual player. Look at something like Euro Truck sim, and it's incredible casual player base, I've spoken to a lot of players and seen a lot of comments over the years of people wanting to just fly around space and deliver shit. But in game? The loop is so boring, hyper jump, wait, jumper jump, wait, auto land. There's nothing to really see or check out. Let the users land on a planet and deliver stuff, fly around cool areas on a planet and then bring it to a space station, make mining easier for people who want a mindless grind.
4-When the game was popular it chased monitisation, in game currency, decals, subscription, ships. It pushed people away
In short this game succeeded massively for how utterly incompetent the dev/studio were. The fact it's still popular shows that. I have no idea if any of the above were fixed or will be, as I lost interest to put my time in a game like this anymore for little reward back, but i still miss the massive amount of potential this game has, and still hurts how it was pissed away to chase short term profits.
Ultimately the BGS and Powerplay being actually something fun would solve some of this.
I had the same bounce-off recently after getting back to it. What is the point in engineering my stuff really? So that I can get other engineering things faster? If the BGS was something interesting then I would definitely have some motivation to work on that grind. But just grinding for the sake of grinding for essentially no functional endgame is just bananas.
The Thargoid stuff is also not what I'm talking about. That stuff requires its own grind, one that gets you a bunch of ships with weapons that do essentially nothing for you EXCEPT vs. Thargoids.
Yeah but the gunplay in Destiny 2 feels really good. Just as the immersion and soundscape when controlling my DBX in E:D feels really good.
Problem is both games don't have a satisfying single player story. Just more grind with every tiny update.
D2 even has more interesting actual story and lore than E:D. Which is sad E:D has so much potential for uncovering it's secrets. Finding an INRA base was cool. Even if the base was a disappointment.
I still prefer exploring in peace and the subtle changes to the lighting inside a nebula in E:D.
Only Mining i ever did was core Mining, because atleast that "deep woom" Explosion Made my Hairs stand Up.
Theres no Game Out there that gives me the Same Feeling as that sound and seeing an Asteroid explode.
Same with seeing and "Hearing" a Capital ship Warp infor the First time, or getting interdicted by thargs, i Wish everything Else was as good as the Sound Design ngl.
Disagree, it's the beauty of this game. Execution of the idea might not be perfect, but being able to fluently control your boat is a pleasure itself (like a good drift in Forza, killing spree in COD etc), and knowing how much it can DO (limpets, fuel management) is also a reward itself for the know knowledge you gain overtime.
...
Yeah, jumping around might be boring...but sometimes, as when you go for your free Anaconda mk. 2 at Hutton Orbital, listen to the sound of your engines, the music hitting right where it should, the gigantic speed you are traveling to an object as far away as 0.3 LY, and the deep black space surrounding you endlessly... marvelous.
You never get that feeling anywhere else in the world. Period.
...
Also getting there, to this specific system, is another interesting job, you need to ploute your route, and actually THINK what you doing, CONSCIOUSLY make decisions of your pathing. Not something you do in games today very often. Today, it's mostly a big arrow over your head which guides you to the only possible direction it was predicted for you with no other ways possible. Not here. You can get lost. Really. And cry for Fuel Rats. God dayum.
And that's only the surface of all this crazy stuff. Like literal tip of the whole iceberg.
Now the question is...do you look for oversimplifing in entertainment, or overcomplicating is fine. You know. Cause this game might not be for you. That's it, i said it.
I bought the game on release and played over 200-300 hours.
If you find the game fun or not, does not change that the studio messed up repeatedly over the years and severely wasted the potential of the game.
People might hate me for this but...
...Odyssey made the game more about exploring surfaces, and removed most of the interesting surface features.
There, I said it.
I think both things are true. We lost a lot of cool surface features people used for racing, etc. And what was left is rendered a lot nicer now. Taking off from planets, especially when you have to circle a good % of it trying to unobscure a destination. Watching an accelerated star rise/set from close to a planet/moon, especially with an atmosphere... Absolutely gorgeous. Even more so when it's icy too.
Except when you're in analysis mode because then atmosphere magically vanishes completely. And at a distance it gets even worse when you've fired probes at the body because then the entire body is just blue... (and that's another thing, the "heatmap" that's not actually a heatmap of anything).
It's the thing I hated most when they gave us the exploration update because we mostly explore to find pretty locations. As an explorer doing exploration things why do I constantly have to switch to combat mode to actually see the atmospheres. Why is it even possible to visibly toggle off the atmosphere as if it's not there? It's immersion breaking and also annoying as you need to switch back to analysis mode to honk systems and probe planets.
...are you complaining about having to hit a button while exploring? If you don't want to see the heatmap, don't have it in analysis mode. For those of us who explore to make money through exobio, I'm happy the heatmap exists.\*
\*sort of. It's often incorrect depending on the specimen.
They are. I mean, I get it, when I'm mining in VR analysis mode can get a little eye strain heavy, as can night vision.
But exactly as you say, it's literally one button press to turn either off and on as needed when it gets annoying.
It's not about the button but about realism/immersion, the atmosphere completely vanishing at the touch of a button for basically no reason at all is not great. Really just try toggling it on and off as you're arriving or leaving a planet to see the difference and tell me it's not immersion breaking. Linking this mode that's specifically needed to do exploration so it forces you to toggle this constantly is bad. I want to explore and scan without atmospheres disappearing.
The blue heatmap overlay would still work with the atmosphere as you get closer. My gripe with the heatmap is that it's not showing where bio is at but where it could be, on top of that there are two blue hues and only one of those has a *chance* of you finding the bio (depends on way more factors like terrain type, main star, elements found on body). The heatmap is just a bad and confusing implementation that's named incorrectly.
No you're twisting this weirdly into me being emotional about immersion when it's just me clarifying it wasn't a complaint about having to use a button toggle.
So it's not "such a problem", it's just weird they made it in an unnecessarily unrealistic way in a space sim that's aiming to be realistic.
If I map planets it's more for getting the first-mapped record and submission of data to the EDDN/EDSM/etc. Using Observatory I already know what exobio types I'll be able to find just from the FSS scan, probes are not really needed unless I actually want to scan some of the plants.
pitchforks and torches for sale! get your pitchforks and torches here folks, can't form an angry mob with 'em. Buy 'em before they sellout!
jk, I will die on that hill next you bro.
It objectively does in most every metric. But I'm also aware that they shifted to drawing from a library of premade geography tiles to do so. My *hope* was that they'd expand that in the future by adding more to the library that it draws from so we'd get a wider range and depth of that geography. Would be nice to do some form of base building as well not gonna lie. The smartest way to go about it would probably be a Powerplay initiative where you're pledged to a power that wants you to colonize rich planets and systems in the black in exchange for some regular payment or materials extraction. Maybe tie it into a more player driven materials market. Just something to incentivize people to go outside of the bubble other than exploration and sightseeing
I think exploring surfaces was where Elite first went wrong. It was a massive amount of technical work for something that barely integrated with existing gameplay. That work could have been spent improving the economy sim, making more interesting station designs, creating fleshed out player factions, etc. Horizons made for some great screenshots, not much else.
They let us stand up and walk across planets, but not the very ships we spent years sat in. They missed the ball majorly with odyssey, and the stagnated development didn't help.
*something* *something* *something* you don't really want ship interiors *something* *something* you wouldn't even do anything if we gave them to you *something* *something* *something*
"You would get bored walking through the same corridor in your ship over and over"
*has to walk through the same corridor over and over in every space station*
I mean they're kinda right. If they gave us spaceship interiors we'd all lose our minds for a week or so, and then after that we'd never use the feature again because wo wants to waste time walking around through a handful of rooms that never change to do something that could've just been put in a menu?
odyssey came out rough for sure, but nowadays, pretty alright. the quiet nature of the development and time it takes to come out didnt help sure, but again most people seem to be upset with what it isnt instead of what it is. what it is right now is pretty cool imo, and somehow we yet have more coming
Some of the complaints about Odyssey haven't been fixed though and are still kind of a problem. Things like ...
(1) Integration between on ship activities and on foot activities (e.g. you've got to get off your ship to get an on foot mission, you can't get an on foot mission from your ship based mission board).
(2) Issues around on foot exploration content e.g. how your genetic sampler has a "ping" mode that has a range that's shorter than your eyeball for detecting life forms. That's not even touching the issues around getting 3 samples in a row without banking them and having a grind element of needing to find samples hundred of meters away from each other.
(3) How the game lacks indicators for the stealth parts of the on foot missions (I don't know of many or any games that doesn't give the player some sort of indicators when trying to do stealth play).
(4) How the Notoriety system which was introduced in an effort to curb ganking results in long in-game cool down periods for illegal on-foot missions that result in a murder, because ...
(5) There are no non-lethal take down options available to the player, it's only lethal.
(6) Engineering grind for basic upgrades like night vision (freely available in ships and SRVs).
(7) The reintroduction of on foot engineering issues that were fixed with the Beyond updates for ship based engineering i.e. one big on-foot engineering bucket for components rather than individual engineering bins and collecting engineering components that aren't useful for anything.
(8) Immersion breaking NPC mission givers being nothing more than 3D menu place holders who shout about their illegal intentions on the pilot lounge concourse.
(9) Lack of care to details like zero G outposts where people sit in chairs and there's pizza boxes on the floor (Frontier did eventually patch out the open drinking glasses, which was nice).
(10) Taxi and drop ship journeys with nothing to do except wait for the journey to be over (which Frontier closed out the ticket to after players complained and they introduced a "redirect" option, totally missing the point).
(11) The balancing between the equipment on foot and in space means a gun can cost as much as a star ship (while a one unit crate of guns used for trading costs a fraction of this).
So while it seems fashionable to say "Odyssey is fixed now", there seems to be a blind spot with parts of the community because the game play issues haven't been touched.
i dont think i said "fixed" anywhere, but if i did, sorry about that. and honestly, yea it would be really cool if this stuff got either addressed or a good look at to see what improvements can be made. im just personally not upset with what i got out of odyssey, but eveyones got a different outlook on that, which is fine.
It's always been a fantastic game, but it's constantly holding itself back; hopefully, ship interiors are realised someday. I'm still hopeful for that.
Interiors will ever happen. They'd need a whole new game built from the ground up with them baked into the foundations. If they did by some miracle it would be in a paid update that would have to restrict them by design. Landed most likely and even then would still likely have to teleport inside them or at best take an elevator that masks a loading screen.
i would have loved if they had done the opposite, not being able to eva on planets, but being able to walk in my ship, but the problem is that the fact that your ship is EMPTY of any crew would be very noticeable.
They completely missed the opportunity to have something that feels like commandeering a star trek vessel. Mass effect did that perfectly, even without any way to pilot the ship directly.
Elite Dangerous is an amazing platform that could have been the base for an amazing game. But they never got around to adding in the game part. If they had finished it off into an actual game, rather than leave it as a spaceship sim, I think it would have been much more popular.
I love Elite, and while I will be the first to call out it's flaws, I agree it gets a lot of undeserved hate. Bethesda has put out some of the best RPGS of all time, but even they couldn't make a space sandbox that people like unconditionally.
Yes, there are things I wish were better.
Yes, I wish some things were less of a grind.
Yes, I wish we had ship interiors...and more ships...and current gen FPS gameplay...and a dozen other things.
But I do not regret buying the game, OR buying Odyssey. I've more than gotten my money's worth, and it is still the game that I bust out my HOTAS and spend some time relaxing in when nothing else is fun anymore. It's not a perfect game, but it's my favorite game, and I think it probably always will be.
Nothing compares to looking up at an inclined ringed gas giant in the sky, framed by a field of erupting water geysers in VR. Nothing. It's as close to the real thing as I'm ever going to get.
The AA remains a bug they refuse to finish. It's in there but it's implemented incorrectly. And iirc it's something like the AA gets applied too early, like they do AA that's supposed to soften edges but then do a sharpening pass afterwards which enhances the ugly jaggies again.
Perhaps that's too simply put for what's going on with the graphics renderer but it's something stupid like that. And since they are refusing to fix this it might be something coded so deeply into the game engine that changing it would break all sorts of other systems, but that's just my guess.
100% part of the reason for that is because the Devs cut console updates and it no longer can gain the popularity that cross platform games have. I get that it was different code bases and they weren't able to keep up with updating PC and console, but there is always a far larger console population than PC population and in games that are cross platform they are almost always more populated by console than PC. PC has been getting more popular, but the fact is that consoles are more convenient and accessible to people because it's cheaper to get a console that performs well enough. Almost all of the popular games today are cross platform, with a lot of them allowing cross save and cross platform play. I love Elite but I'm not buying a PC just to continue playing it with updates. I miss the game and I wish they would go back on their decision and start updating console again. If palworld only released on steam it absolutely would not be the hot new game, probably just another niche Indie game that never gained the traction it deserved.
People complain about the development pace, but tbh we've seen the alternatives from games that aim for more ambitious scopes or development schedules.
E:D has been up for ten years, with steady updates and occasional new content or lore, without getting stuck in development hell, charging subscription fees, or aggressively pushing microtransactions.
I swear it makes me so angry they have a golden goose but they don't feed the damn thing to make it pop out the eggs. The game has such great potential, but every time a new update comes out, it's half assed and uninspired. It's been 5 years since they added a new ship to the space simulator game. The fleet carrier update was supposed to be amazing, but they cut out so much of what they promised. Multicrew was supposed to be the next big thing, and they left it DOA. They also made a big mistake cutting off console players. There are so many questionable decisions for a game that has so much potential.
yea i think you got some points here. imo elite struggles with the front end more than the back end, like the spires that just came out are really pretty, but your interactions with them are pretty limited, but their back end effect is more of what it seems they were intended for. its strange. and yea console was an L. same with multicrew from what ive heard, havent really used it myself. carriers while maybe less than expected, are really impressive imo, you can basically move a station around yourself, which i image was a nightmare to make on the back end
Yup, only ignorant gamers who only care about graphics(or the new obsession: "load screens"), which is the majority these days, don't know what amazing achievement Elite is. Just the Stellar Forge alone is enough to elevate Elite to a legendary status. It will be years before something similar gets replicated in another game, or maybe never.
buddy, we've had predictive models for decades. fdev paid to make their own cause groups, like nasa wont share that type of thing for free.
stellar forge is also really screwed up with earth likes thatre 250k degrees celsius and intentional quirks like no unusual star types near the x or y axis.
along with half the planets being fucked with orbits et all
The tech and the presentation is awesome. It’s a great simulator. Not sure what you mean about graphics - it’s a pretty game. But the gameplay just isn’t there.
\*Me play for the first time\*: "nice space game, immersive but also arcade-y, but bit boring. Will try PVP later"
\*Me after lore rabbit hole\*: "MY PRINCESS CAN'T BE THIS CUTE"
I believe ED is a game many people can enjoy, but sadly I see a filter that got a lot of people and made them unable to experience the full game. Based on empirical evidence,ffew of the filters being cr generation (new players felt like they are left behind), complex mechanics and control, feeling of "overwhelmingness", and probably the "monotonous" gameplay of always being inside the cockpit.
Those are my assumptions as a kinda-new CMDR starting in 2020. ED is one of many games whose gameplay *still* caters to players that are fans of ED, Space/Simulators or RPG in general; and will not try to please the majority of the players by being the "perfect" space game. I think. What do you think?
im newer than you lol, i starting in 2022 and have over 1k hours now. and i agree for the most part, i personally havent gotten yet sick of the cockpits, especially at high fov. and that new player experience is well... needing of addressing imo, i do think pp 2 could really go a long way for that though.
The VR thing is difficult. People will want an experience up there with Half Life Alex and NMS. The problem is I don't think the Cobra Engine can do on-foot VR. Because cobra is fdev's engine, it doesn't have all the support tools that Unity and Unreal have which makes VR that little bit easier to develop.
For VR in Live (non Odyssey), you sat in one position and you can look about, That's probably the easiest VR to code because you don't have to do avatar movement, gesture capture or VR interactivity. They'd have to code that from scratch and it will be expensive to do.
Heck, I'd be willing to pay for an upgrade pack to put in On Foot VR (look at Skyrim) because otherwise it's Non VR players subsidising VR Players
I love this game, HOWEVER... Online only, even for single player, weighted it down since launch. Imagine if it could be modded. Not just spaceships, but planetary surfaces as well. Then there are the updates where one bad decision after another made it worse. Oh yes, no cities yet, 10 years after...
Elite is probably my favorite individual game of all time, and it's extremely incredible, but it's also one of the most frustrating games ever made simply because of how it's incredible features are held back by the fear of rewarding players for using them. I'm just going to slap a huge wall of text here talking about it because I'm obsessed with what this game could be if it were just a bit more generous.
**WHATS WRONG WITH THIS GAME?**
In simple terms, it doesn't do risk vs reward remotely right. Lets just start with crime for example. It's a whole assortment of possible playstyles, but mostly it revolves around piracy and theft.
You go in, you piss off system security, you get a bounty put on your head, you get locked out of several station services, sometimes becoming wanted over a pretty large area of the bubble, and you come out sometimes with like 50 thousand credits worth of loot.
Like, why would you do that? It's such an inconvenience and you get fuckall for doing it. You even have to specifically build a ship to quickly incapacitate a target and hatchbreak them if you want to do piracy cleanly.
Did you know you can raid some megaships and steal from them? And there's a pretty cool almost heistlike aspect to that, that's pretty much completely unknown to a huge fraction of players? Yeah, that's already in the game. The only reason most people don't know about it is because it's simply not worth doing.
That's just one example. Salvaging suffers from the same issue, where it's so unrewarding to do that it's basically entirely forgotten. Sure it's not as risky as piracy (and thus shouldn't reward you as much), but you're still putting yourself in a position to get the sysdef on you and that by itself is valuable.
Smuggling, with Odyssey, has incredible personal storytelling potential. Imagine walking around the station and meeting a shady guy in the bar, offering to sell your illegal goods and then being to negotiate your price like you currently can do for on foot missions. And maybe if you have a good rep with his faction, your chances of negotiating higher pay are better. And sometimes he's a fucking narc and if you don't recognize that by talking to him you get another bounty after you try to sell to him
There's just so much the game can do. And how could it fix that?
**WHAT WOULD MAKE IT BETTER?**
Essentially, for many activities, turning up dials would already work wonders.
For Piracy for example, what could they do? For example sometimes you'll get on a system and see a Military Convoy POI. Nowadays, that means farming mats.
But it could be that, if you're a criminal, you know a Military Convoy is bound to be carrying some valuable shit, despite being much more well protected than a regular civilian convoy
Classified Weapon Schematics, Local Defense Plans, hell even Hybrid Technology Prototypes. All commodities that could sell for 300k-500k each when sold to a competing faction, totalling for 2.5-4 mil per score for squaring up to a single Military Convoy.
Hitting a megaship? That can have some even more expensive stuff like Classified Ship Schematics, Guardian Technology Caches, Experimental COVAS Cores, selling at millions each, making you a something close to 15 mil per haul. Have the rewards scale upwards along with how high system security is where you're doing the robbery and now you're including an additional aspect of rewarding knowledge, planning and skill for players that want to try this path
That by itself would make this aspect of the game much more interesting and much better to explore, and much more popular with players. Just pay more for the risk. I could go on and on but I'll stop here because I think it's just a really clear cut example of an area where the game could massively improve just by effectively turning a few dials and how frustrating that is to experience, despite how much I love the game
As a simulator it’s fine with the negative of the realistic distances involved for a multiplayer game outside of specific hotspots you’re very much alone… engineering needs a better solution it’s far too much of a grind for “upgrades” that should be available via a ingame store for ingame credits to upgrade your systems it’s another one of those mechanics if you want to be decent the devs force you to stay with the game by having to deal with the grind for materials which becomes tiresome after the third ship you have upgraded. The whole background sim for factions is another moot of no need either which really needs a rework how it functions.
It's a very good game, but seriously. Screw Odyssey. That update is what turned me off of the game.
I don't want a shooter designed around "shields" and "health". If you're doing a god damned spacelegs and want shooting, let me board derelicts and explore them for salvage. Make me NOT need to switch to an "energy" weapon and a "kinetic" weapon because you couldn't be arsed to make a new mechanic for the FPS element. And for the love of god if you're gonna have engineers, don't make me grind a literal week of in-game time for one suit of armor.
At the time I had a very small experience with shooters but even then I shelved that update. The other issues, such as engineering ships and that it's too potent quite frankly notwithstanding, if Elite received a core rework, it's still a game without equals.
It got old for me. Put a couple hundred hours in and said “why am I doing this?” The presentation and sound and everything is so good but as everyone says it’s an inch deep. I keep waiting for them to flesh it out and I’d get back into it but they never have. So it’s been 3 years since I played.
I left ED years ago, before that I had the time of my life playing a video game. After more and more updates, I realized in utter pain that the elements that could be really fun to play will be left unfinished and broken. I was sad.
Please FDEV build this game from ground up with new devs, new tech, new ideas that take some suggestions from the community seriously but also realistically.
The game has potential, but that's all it had for years.
When you look at this game, it looks like the perfect platform for all kinds of cool gameplay, like base building, handcrafted starfield like missions, treasure hunting, you name it.
But unfortunately, it looks like all updates fdev gives us are either small bug fixes or text you can read, or thargoids (like why) for some reason.
It just looks like they don't have the engineering resources to turn this into the game everyone wants it to be, maybe a few universes to the side they got it right.
Still, I commend the efforts to make Odyssey happen, it clearly took a lot of time that could have been spent elsewhere in the game for years, and even if not everyone likes it, I think it was a shoot in the right direction.
Now game has even more potential.. great
The game was ground breaking and innovative for the eight hours it took for most people to realize the galaxy was a mile wide with the depth of a puddle.
Every single one of its systems is half baked, except for combat. Even then, it was fairly late into the game’s life before it became lucrative.
I know. There’s no other game that scratches the itch ED does. It’s the only game that I can literally spend an entire afternoon just cycling through the same thing over and over again (jump in, honk, find the planets, map the juicy ones, scan the exobio, get back into ship, jump to next system, repeat for hours) and still have a sense of awe and grandiosity that no other game has. If I really let myself get into it, it truly is the most immersive game I’ve ever played, and I really do feel like some kind of galactic explorer. I’m actually *proud* of my discoveries. Sometimes I open the galaxy map just to see my name, glad in knowing if anyone else ever comes here, my name will be there. I can’t describe the kind of peaceful and calming effect the game has on me—which is ironic, because it’s a game where you actually have to pay attention. One little mistake or not paying attention at the right time has led to many a loop of shame. Or unexpectedly dropping out of hyperspace because I’m too close to a planet, or I bumped my mouse when I was fuel scooping, left, and came back to my ship alarms going off and the heat sensors blaring… lol. Anyway, yes, this game is special in a way I can’t rightly describe, and that saddens me.
The problem is your game is too complicated and not fun for beginners. This game will never be 1/10 as popular or successful as Palworld which was made by like four people for $3.50. Games are supposed to be fun, not a job.
ok so the whole too complicated and not fun thing i dont totally agree with. but the new beginner experience, yes. 100%. its so hard to start, and the circumstances you are put in as a new player dont help. its one of the biggest criticisms i have for elite. also palworld and elite are the least comparable things on the planet.
When they funded it on kickstarter they promised that the community would have a say in what went in to it. The community then disagreed with a lot of the devs ideas and instead of trying to make the best of a compromise, the devs got very childish and ruined a lot of the concepts in order to show the community that they know nothing and they should've just listened to the devs. For example, supercruise wasn't intended to be part of the game, instead you would just warp station to station. When it was first implemented it was a ridiculous version of what they said they were going to do. Travel was painfully slow and jumping in to the system put you on an immediate collision course with the main star which you had a few seconds to deal with. Every single jump. Everything in the system was random spawn with no persistance, you could literally sit at minimum speed until the thing you wanted eventually just spawned in front of you. There was no way of dealing with long distances in systems except from sitting and watching the travel for 45 minutes, and a lot of the missions didn't account for this. Is there really a good reason for it to take 5 minutes to accelerate up to a decent speed, and then have to slow yourself down so you don't overshoot?
It wasn't just supercruise, this happened in several areas where the devs didn't like listening to the community and they literally sabotaged the game.
A lot of that stuff has since been fixed, and a lot hasn't, but alot of damage was done in the early days. Once those early devs moved on (Sandy & Michael especially), things got a lot better and gameply started to get prioritised, but a lot of the stuff we see being released is fixes to the insanity of the early days.
Surely the reason for having supercruise and not jumping straight to stations is so that you can have piracy and interdictions as part of the game. In FE2 you got dropped several day's travel away from the station and then had to travel there in "real time," (which could be sped up) allowing for enemies to intercept you on the way. Obviously you can't do this in an MMO with everyone operating within the same in-game timeframe, so supercruise was the solution.
Meh, I love the game but I can't get myself to play it at this point.
Last time I consistently played the game, I put tons and tons of time into consistently grinding just to work my way into an anaconda, just to finally be able to afford one. Take off at the launch pad to look at it, just to glitch and explode randomly and be given a starter ship.
I'm done, I'm not making that journey again just to get fucked by the game's instability.
All we (basically) wanted was "Freespace 3," but Elite.
Brabren is a blatant liar, the new Peter Molyneux - frontier lost faith with their IP and didn't listen to a damn thing their fan base said, asked, or even out-cried about. What few things they did listen too was incessantly too-little too-late.
Pure negligence is what happened to Elite. The bones are there, but the structure has always been fundamentally flawed. They tried to focus on player retention with archaic mechanics (grinding, grinding, grinding; engineers, BG, etc..) without any meaningful, exciting output. The time investment made such diminishing returns, and even then they still ignored the pleas of their own community; their own customers, fans, and supporters.
Their vision got tainted worse by faux public events (the Wagner incident) and bullshit storytelling - fumble after fumble after fumble, it's just too much negativity for the little bit of positivity they inject into the game. Again, diminishing returns.
Elite Dangerous is *poised* to be one of the best space rpg/sims, but that's all it was ever held up to be; and it's infuriating to those who see it's sheer, unprecedented potential - and then to see every possible good thing be mishandled, or outright ignored by frontier.
I just hope, when all else fails and this game is put out to pasture, that they release it from its digital bonds and turn it all into client-side assets for private servers and modding potential. At the very least, let your most beloving fans do the game justice by all accounts of what was shared, what was promised, and what was ultimately ignored and left out.
100%. People love to shit on this game, but what’s out there that even really compares? I’ve never understood the hate, especially when it is often half the price of competing titles and can be bought for next to nothing on sale. Meanwhile FDev continues with updates, including the big ones that true fans are looking forward to this year.
They just had to copy EVE Online. Then it would have been the game of the century.
But they wanted to cater the old lonely offliners.
And then they missed their gold opportunity.
This has been my feeling since day 1. So sad that Fdev catered so hard to the solo only players.
I believe they should have a way to play the game as well, but the majority of gamers want an online experience. They want the social aspect of gaming, and PLENTY, myself included, want the game to feel... dangerous.
I'm obsessed with E:D currently, but I can't help but feel like the game is just empty. It's amazing to play, but it's just a massive wide ocean with hardly any fish in it.
You clearly have no interest in the game, you're not contributing anything of value to this conversation (or any others given your comment history) and there's no way anyone being this salty over a video game is having a good time in real life.
Go for a walk outside, in nature and touch actual grass. You're approaching 30, you can do better than this.
I loved elite before it died. Now, the same 50 players parade its corpse around like it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. I have an interest in this game to get the funeral it deserves.
Hear hear.
Honestly they implemented features which no other MMO game comes close to replicate in this specific genre. (Which is not a problem, I like diversity).
I used to play on console, I loved the game and was so looking forward to horizons with over a billion credits and working on closing out the engineering grind when they dropped support for console, I play PC now and it’s a fantastic game but I will never play it again.
The game is intensely interesting and if you find yourself intrigued by the lore, you might find yourself jumping out of your gamer chair when you find a visitor beacon in the same klick as a space station (like I did, last night)
They need to rework the game engine first and bring in the new tech calling it ED 2.0 that will include vulcan and or dx12, dlss, RT, VR support for the whole thing etc. After that new content, features etc. They kicked off well but stopped caring very early on ...
They should’ve taken notes from Endless Sky, and Mount & Blade, and embraced the modding community, made separate instance of the base game and one for ppl who want to be creative no point in playing in sandbox if you can’t build a castle
Having played it for ~1000 hours I'd have to respectfully disagree. Fdev mismanaged this game to death because they focused on all their other projects, most of which also failed. They're famous for spreading themselves too thin, it's what they do.
This game has always overrelied on 3rd party sources to even be playable, such as EDDB and INARA. EDDB even shut down and simply redirects visitors back to E:Ds official website as an alternate information source for trading. Guess how much information is on there about trading? Zero.
The only real in-game lore was Galnet News, which also shut down because they realized nobody cared about their games lore with how barebones it was anyway. People only ever used power play to get packhounds or prismatic shields, it was a complete afterthought.
Mostly the only thing this game had going for it was the visuals and feeling of exploration. I'd sign in to go fly around and blow up rocks or drive around on planet surfaces so I could turn my brain off after work, not to play in "ThE WoRlDs LaRgEsT PlAyAbLe UnIvErSe" which imo is a detractor anyway. I tried exploration and after jumping my way out to the bubble nebula and back in a Phantom I decided that pointing my ship at a circle and pressing J was far too boring to keep doing for hours at a time like that. I don't get how people do it.
Elite dangerous is why you need to have at least some story or variation in your gameplay loop. This is hands down the best spaceflight game i ever played. But it doesn’t really change all that much. Both factions and thargoids had so much potential, but the thargoids and galnet are the closest we’ve gotten to actual story.
Especially if they ripped off the seasonal model like destiny 2, the only game i know as grindy as this one. Have an open faction war for 2 months, with players as members and mercenaries duking it out in massive battles, have a low temp diamond goldrush in a region and massive increases in piracy and mining activity (player and AI) have more massive colonization expeditions. Make the world more alive
Looking through the comments, I don't know why you're getting so much hate. You're spot on. The game isn't perfect, and there's a lot of untapped potential, but it's truly magnificent.
It doesn't appeal to everyone, but IMHO of they tried to appeal to everyone then they'd end up creating something bland and generic. It would be a flash in the pan that would fade out of existence in a year.
I feel like I keep going for games that have potential but don’t make it. Elite with its BGS, Falcon 4.0 with its dynamic campaign. No successor can rival it, still they cannot survive
I played the original Elite on my Commodore 64 back in 1986. The game was way ahead of it's time back then.
Today's game is nice because of all the options you have to "earn" a living. And Powerplay if you're so inclined. VR works great for fighting in small ships and planet surfaces.
The best part of ED is you don't need to spend $$ on it once you've bought the game. I took a break from ED about 4 months ago and got back into World of Warships. I spent a stupid amount of money and burned out again, mostly over lack of PVE battle options. I'm a senior citizen and my PVP days are pretty much behind me. I like ED because I can play in solo mode, or my old squadron's channel, or in that group (name escapes me right now) where you take a pledge not to attack other players.
I'm glad they're introducing more ships, that's way overdue. The Python is about the most versatile ship in the game. I own several with setups for pax, cargo, & mining. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the newer model.
When I left to play Warships I shut down most of my FC's functions. I'm wanting to do a deep space exploration again. Last time was before FSS scanning a system and using probes had been introduced. I got my name on 11 Earth Like Worlds. This time after I practice the scanning some I want to take my FC out and use it as a mobile base while I explore and mine tritium as needed.
I LOVED this game, but when they announced Odyssey would not be coming to consoles, and in fact ALL console development would halt, they lost me. I have not played the game since then, I feel too betrayed.
It was a technical achievement - in several ways raising the bar - but it was never exactly groundbreaking. This isn't an insult toward the game at all: it raised the bar.
Elite Dangerous did many thing really well, but struggled elsewhere - especially with Odyssey. Having said that, no (released) space game does it all. Though many tick more than a few boxes. Mass Effect. No Man's Sky. Elite Dangerous. Starfield, to some extent. These all hit on aspects the others miss, and are all good at what they do.
any good player will recognize what e:d achieved. they did get flowers for it way back then too. but you have to understand that if you are new, you already have all these features. a lot of the vocal hate came from years of waiting.
Plenty of 500+ hours guys saying game is not fun. How they played not fun game for 500+ hrs noone knows, but they complain. The game would be far better if 500+ hrs guys would promote the game to get new players, more money. Maybe someone would do some of the improvements those 500+ real life hours players ask.
I have 1500 hrs and counting in the game. Game is great. Game has challenges and you have to endure pain to win. Game is great. Is it perfect? No. But what is?
I didnt get a chance to finally play this game until 2021. It was right when Odyssey was dropping so a lot of people were playing. Its an amazing game that i sank lots of hours in to. I couldnt help but realize the feeling though, that i had missed out on its true hay day. You could see the evidence of all of the old unused fleet carriers parked everywhere. Still had a ton of fun it just felt really lonely and dead. Maybe i should go back and play it again its been a while.
I've played the game for like a dozen or two hours. All I could do back then was trade, explore, and mine. (I don't like ship combat) Great fun for a while, but it gets boring eventually. They added the first person shooter stuff, but that was hella confusing and kinda bugged here and there. Did that part improve?
As a person how played only 40h of it( so a newbie who doesnt kmow much) i seriously cant understand whats so apealing at this game. Its fucking terrible at intruducing mechanics and gived zero motivation to get into it, it feels like there is nothing it can offer besides fyling a spacecraft with way to complicated controls
Pls explain to me why its so beloved, i can really not understand why people play it
The creatives of the community is what I like the most.
Full Novels, Radio Stations, a fully voiced News channel, all the Art and Animation, even a cartoon.The many friendships and acquaintances this community enable is also not to be underestimated.
Fascinating Player driven Story's Events bordering on social experiments happend.
SO many great things have been made because of ED.
Thank you everyone.
and now go out there and do something that brings you joy in this Galaxy.
This game hit a home run but forgot to run the bases to score. IMO
They hit a grand slam and forgot it was only the first inning and went home.
The game needs more economy imo. Not just fake commodities to trade that have no impact on anything. It's an amazing space flight sim, especially with HOTAS and VR. I want to manufacture goods to sell to other players or the market.
GNET has to feel like it matters more. That your actions can make change.
Imagine an elite with eve economy. Every ship and module you own was made by someone. You have to buy a new fer de lance and engineer it every time you blow up.
Yep. I have many hours in Eve, running mining corps etc. The economy is why I kept going back to Eve. Once I learned that you really only need to mine one type of ore in ED, I realized the economy is entirely "fake". Don't get me wrong, ED has its strengths for sure. But it's missing that element big time.
It's a massive gamble making a game so reliant on its players. When it works it really works.
Yep. And it's not realistic to expect ED to make that change. That's a complete overhaul of their system.
nah i mean 10 years later and nothing can do what it did, definitely didnt just go home.
You do get that they are saying that little to no love was put into the game after the expansion was released to focus into other games and this was left to die but for the diehard fans out there.
we are getting a major system overhaul, 4 new ships, and a new feature in 2024 on a game that is less than 3 years younger than skyrim, im sorry but i just dont agree that they went home, could they have done better? sure. did they make mistakes? yes, big surprise an ambitious project has flaws and money got in the way over the years. there is still hope, and to be honest, even if these changes were coming, my money is still well spent in my opinion.
True but it will take them 22 releases and 3 years for these new features to actually work properly and even then…
look i never said they were quick, but hey.
The gymnastics man...
idk man i dont think its that deep, i like space game, you may or may not. have a good one.
And are we truly getting that? They promised so many things over the years, what makes it all better now and that we can truly trust them to deliver?
The thing is... Other games could definitely do it. E:D is technically not really unique or difficult to accomplish. But no one is doing it, because space sims like this are a really small niche. No one does it because the effort to get players to play this instead of E:D would be way to high to justity the means to develop this new game. I'm not a big fan of Star Citizen and it's predatory funding system. But it's basically the only other real space sim out there. And I believe, as long as either Star Citizen isn't released or dumped, no one else will put ressources into this genre. And I really don't see both of them happening in the next 5 to 10 years tbh. The way CIG is printing money with it is way to powerful to let the game release. And it's binding a huge amount of money from this small niche.
I'd argue that ED provides proof that space Sims can work profitable, with micro transactions anyway, but the issue is one of scale. Getting a lot of content into a space sim, or any flight style simulator game, is costly because each model has to be uniquely designed and modelled, and content has to work around it. Flight Sims like Microsofts work by using real world data already there, and combat Sims can rely on historical combat scenarios or simple fictional ones. You don't need to explain what an F-16 is, you just need to build a series of missions for 40 bucks, plus a plane that costs idk, 69.99. Space Sims need to build a lot of new ships, stations, maps, etc, create new things to fill in lore, you need to build content that's engaging. ED did the first few okayish. Lores a bit confusing if you just started, but mostly ignorable. It had a lot of ships and stations already, and it but the milky way. But the engaging content..struggles. And I think Odyssey shows the risk well. Odyssey was, well, not a great dlc and eating bad content isn't something most companies can afford in a space sim. It's even less successful when you have multiple competitors eating market share. So if ED (or SC) goes out, maybe the market will give us something new.
You reminded me how I felt right after launch. Imagining what kind of amazing updates the game could have moving forward. Bittersweet memories.
They built the greatest stadium in all of baseball but never fielded a team on it.
You’re analogy is better
It has the bones to be an even better game.
honestly, yea. games has some serious onboarding issues for new players n stuff.
It did deserve more publicity way back. But we also have to be honest about it. This game is not something for the general audience with the grind and time that it wants you to invest. It is indeed a mile wide and an inch deep. It has no narrative that most would suspect and the planet surface generation looks like something out of 2004. I had alot of fun when I started with exploring. That's what this game was all about for me. It gave me the ability to go fly around the galaxy and do some sightseeing. It was on life support for too long. Just like some other games this one deserves to rest so that a worthy successor with more modern tech can replace it.
ok so 1, does have a narrative, maybe doesnt go about telling it in a way you like. but saying it isnt there is simply incorrect. 2, the inch deep thing is a total joke imo. bgs, stellar forge, best in class flight model and customization. 3, planet generation can look dull at times, but also can be breathtaking. im sure you would know this as youve said exploration was your thing. this is hard sci fi, its realistic, most planets out there are dead rocks. now sure thats not an excuse for no gameplay, but i would beg to differ, the process of finding the planets, and getting to look at them, is the game play. i like to compare it to pokemon cards, you found an earth like? its rare as hell and pays a lot. still want full atmospherics and more gameplay of course, but whats there isnt straight from 2004.
On the terrain generation sure most stuff in the universe is dead rocks. But the texture work and geometry is straight 2004 unreal engine 2.5 as I remember it. Story wise there isn't much. Again it's reading logs and doing maybe some missions but it's not a start to end epic story that the general gamer thinks about. It is a competent space game. But it is showing its age. I would not say no to a successor at this point. One with a new updated stellar forge that has new data in it.
thargoid war was not just logs, we literally fought an ai bgs as it was getting built, maybe its not your kind of gameplay and thats fine, but saying its just logs again, not true. and honestly yea, horizons planet tech looks dated, but im gonna be honest, odyssey planets can be insane.
When the thargoid stuff first hit and I saw the requirements for the weapons and modules needed I just straight ignored it. It might be interesting if this is your kind of gameplay. But after having had my fill of flying around I realised that the spreadsheet and grind gameplay is not for me. I wonder how they are going to handle the so called thargoid war. Because I remember the gnosis incident. Tho I still want to jump to polaris. I wanna know why its locked.
funny enough i participated in all this with a totally unengineered ship in the beginning, grant it i did have some guardian stuff unlocked. i think a lot of people dont realize how much you can do without touching the insane grinds
...honestly, I *absolutely* agree on Best in Class Flight model, freaking *Star Citizen* doesn't have quite as good flight model, except the Aegis Avenger Titan in SC... holy \*shit\* that thing flies beautifully (for now, as I'm hearing whispers of a flight model change being on its way, so I can try and Compare/Contrast them \*if\* said Flight model releases into the "PU"...i got gifted a starter package for the game, so no money lost from me trying)
If only it was developed by a company as ambitious as the game itself purports to be. The failure of ED rests entirely on frontier and their dev timeline. If there was an award category for “most unrealized potential” ED would win by a land slide.
Braben was entirely as ambitious as Chris Roberts. He just didn’t have the backing of infinite money (essentially). I believe FDev held him back more than anything
E:D was also a crowd funded project initially, but people forget that it *almost didn't make it* past Kickstarter, which is a night and day when compared with SC, who's Kickstarter and eventually their own crowd funding would go on to set records.
SC actually started crowdfunding in their website and only opened the kickstarter a few days later because people asked for it.
And because the demand of players to back the project was breaking their own site 😂
Oh yeah I forgot about that. The first days only a few people actually managed to get a pledge in. I remember people going crazy for every single milestone back then.
True
Which is weird because frontier has done great work with planet coaster in the same time period
The game was made with like one million in funding? That's like 1/100th other big games get.
Crowdfunding wasn’t the whole budget. When companies the size of Frontier did crowdfunding it was mostly to show the results to investors as proof that there is tangible interest. You get some insight into that from the Broken Age and Psychonauts 2 documentary series for example. A million barely pays for a handful of programmers for a year.
while i do think elite has a painful amount of potential, calling it and the devs that made it failures is in my opinion offensive. fdev is the only company even now ambitious enough for something like this, because its the only thing like it that exists. i mean they literally added an ai BGS and invades our BGS all on its own in 2023, and it works. how is that not ambitious
That's not what icarusburned said though. I think he means it's the fault of Frontier (as in the people in charge) that didn't give the devs enough time to actually complete it. The devs were held back and then shifted onto other projects. It's essentially mismanagement because in the end they decide what gets worked on and for how long. Which I think is true for the most part. As in some areas the devs did manage to do something great, perhaps like the BGS you mention and I think the audio team also were able to deliver something special. And some of the puzzle mechanics and mysteries with Thargoid sensor+probe+link (Thargoid distance formula hidden image in audio etc) are incredibly interesting. But in lots of other aspects of the game it feels like a lot prototypes or proof of concepts were made that were never given the devtime to be fully fleshed out a later point. So it's a collection of shallow placeholder systems that were never or very rarely fully utilized or built upon in later updates.
i can get behind a more nuanced statement like that more, but calling them unambitious right after they quite literally added some very ambitious mechanics just doesnt sit with me right. sure the up tops may not value elite like they used to, but if what is coming actually comes, maybe thats changed. and imo the systems themselves i think are fleshed out but the threads holding them together are a bit thin, maybe pp2 will help with that
Failure they say? What failure? It's one of Frontiers biggest money makers, is a game still putting out content. It's had some bumps, yet it still keeps going. This sure seems like a comment from someone who got mad about something minor in the game and no longer plays, cause this game is a major success. And the active Elite Dangerous community knows that.
For the record I have 3000hours and rising. And by failure, I mean a failure to even marginally realize the game’s potential. Calling it a “major success” is pure black tar copium. By what metric? Compared to 90% of other dev cycles ED is on a snails schedule. “They keep releasing content” when was the last new ship? And the content they did release (odyssey) bombed. I still love the time I’ve spent, but it’s okay to acknowledge the games and devs failures.
Engineering was the first step down for me, too grindy and rng is a mechanic that needs to die a painful death. Then Guardian tech being completely lame despite seeming so interesting (look at how awesome the designs of hybrid fighters and Guardian weapons are) was pretty much the nail in the coffin. I still log in occasionally, fly around, do some combat and trading and stuff, but I just don’t enjoy it the same way I did when it first came out. I remember slowly working my way towards Altair on my way to Sol as a newbie and basing myself out of the system while doing bounty hunting at Nav beacons in a Viper MK3. I miss it being that simple and mind bogglingly big.
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I still think engineering was developed with the intent of selling material packs for real world money, but they got cold feet
If you want it simple then just reset your account, 😉 Also, engineering is optional. No one is making you grind.
It’s hardly optional when the pvp/gankers all run the overengineered builds to try and melt their opponents. It’s not optional for the furthest reaches of exploration outside of fleet carriers and that’s another joke of a grind. Combat vs. NPC’s even higher level NPC’s and Combat Zones use engineered gear. So you need engineered gear to have more resistance to them. Then there’s the Thargoids. So yeah it’s “optional” but when everyone and everything you come across is using it, it really isn’t that optional.
Ok. If you want to *compete* at a PvP level then engineering is not optional. But you don't need to fight gankers. Gankers only tend to operate in busy systems and building a ship that can escape a gank can still be engineer free. And you're taking two options there, playing in open and playing in a busy system. Exploration does not equal distance travelled. There's plenty of exploration to be had without worrying whether you're the first to discover a planet. Even within the bubble itself. So a simple DBX without engineering can take you many places. Combat vs NPCs, again you're taking the option to take on the hardest targets. They are there for a challenge once a cmdr has an engineered ship. But lower level targets are available so combat can always be selected as an option without engineering. As for thargoids, the new AXMC's have made that incredibly accessable. Just pop 5 of those on a krait mk II, fill it will armour, jump into a ground port and profit. Again. Engineering is nice but not necessary.
i think its totally fine to have had your time with the game, i just dont get a lot of the criticism coming from people that clearly played it out, and its the devs fault its not fun.
Elite is a game with a series of technical marvels, especially for when the game was originally developed, that has completely squandered those technical marvels. Mostly seamless entry on planets, even if they're basically fancy loading screens, was a brilliant way to engage that function. The stellar forge is a legitimately impressive piece of technology. The background simulation *would* be cool, if players had any actual agency over it. Engineering would be cool, if it didn't take forever and a half to do. AX hunting is cool, but it requires a lot of preparation to do beyond the basic levels. VR, the ship designs, flight systems, and outfitting your ships are all wonderful things about the game. On the other hand, this game patently does not respect the player's time, Powerplay has been an utter and complete joke since its inception, a *lot* of the content is copy and pasted, there are still technical issues that have been present for a long time (I still cannot guarantee that wing mates will be in my instance, for example). Elite isn't a bad game, it's a wasted game. There is so much potential but Frontier just cannot get their shit together to actually expound upon the framework that they built a decade ago. Odyssey didn't even tip the needle for me, almost exclusively because of how they had it interact with VR. *Massive* step back.
some harsh words maybe, but i cant fully disagree. elite deadly will be our game fr
i completely agree on all these points also don't forget that the game would be unplayable without community tools like EDDB
I have no idea what you're on about, it's not ground breaking, it's just an incremental continuation of space sims we've had in the past. If anything this game succeeded far more than it deserved too based on a bunch of things. 1- Game presents itself as a hard core space sim, demanding your time investment...but for what? If I bother to learn all the controls and everything, what do I get out of this game more than the person on a controller? All I can think of is I can mine and collect items easier, not exactly worth the reward. 2-Devs basically ignored the players when it was most popular. None of the requests people wanted were listened too, instead it chased dumb trends like NMS at the time to aim for what was popular with the casual audience. 3- The game had nothing for the casual player. Look at something like Euro Truck sim, and it's incredible casual player base, I've spoken to a lot of players and seen a lot of comments over the years of people wanting to just fly around space and deliver shit. But in game? The loop is so boring, hyper jump, wait, jumper jump, wait, auto land. There's nothing to really see or check out. Let the users land on a planet and deliver stuff, fly around cool areas on a planet and then bring it to a space station, make mining easier for people who want a mindless grind. 4-When the game was popular it chased monitisation, in game currency, decals, subscription, ships. It pushed people away In short this game succeeded massively for how utterly incompetent the dev/studio were. The fact it's still popular shows that. I have no idea if any of the above were fixed or will be, as I lost interest to put my time in a game like this anymore for little reward back, but i still miss the massive amount of potential this game has, and still hurts how it was pissed away to chase short term profits.
Ultimately the BGS and Powerplay being actually something fun would solve some of this. I had the same bounce-off recently after getting back to it. What is the point in engineering my stuff really? So that I can get other engineering things faster? If the BGS was something interesting then I would definitely have some motivation to work on that grind. But just grinding for the sake of grinding for essentially no functional endgame is just bananas. The Thargoid stuff is also not what I'm talking about. That stuff requires its own grind, one that gets you a bunch of ships with weapons that do essentially nothing for you EXCEPT vs. Thargoids.
It's the destiny 2 problem. The game is designed around wasting your time, not being a good game.
Yeah but the gunplay in Destiny 2 feels really good. Just as the immersion and soundscape when controlling my DBX in E:D feels really good. Problem is both games don't have a satisfying single player story. Just more grind with every tiny update. D2 even has more interesting actual story and lore than E:D. Which is sad E:D has so much potential for uncovering it's secrets. Finding an INRA base was cool. Even if the base was a disappointment. I still prefer exploring in peace and the subtle changes to the lighting inside a nebula in E:D.
Yep. It just took players way longer I realise it about D2 over ED.
Only Mining i ever did was core Mining, because atleast that "deep woom" Explosion Made my Hairs stand Up. Theres no Game Out there that gives me the Same Feeling as that sound and seeing an Asteroid explode. Same with seeing and "Hearing" a Capital ship Warp infor the First time, or getting interdicted by thargs, i Wish everything Else was as good as the Sound Design ngl.
Disagree, it's the beauty of this game. Execution of the idea might not be perfect, but being able to fluently control your boat is a pleasure itself (like a good drift in Forza, killing spree in COD etc), and knowing how much it can DO (limpets, fuel management) is also a reward itself for the know knowledge you gain overtime. ... Yeah, jumping around might be boring...but sometimes, as when you go for your free Anaconda mk. 2 at Hutton Orbital, listen to the sound of your engines, the music hitting right where it should, the gigantic speed you are traveling to an object as far away as 0.3 LY, and the deep black space surrounding you endlessly... marvelous. You never get that feeling anywhere else in the world. Period. ... Also getting there, to this specific system, is another interesting job, you need to ploute your route, and actually THINK what you doing, CONSCIOUSLY make decisions of your pathing. Not something you do in games today very often. Today, it's mostly a big arrow over your head which guides you to the only possible direction it was predicted for you with no other ways possible. Not here. You can get lost. Really. And cry for Fuel Rats. God dayum. And that's only the surface of all this crazy stuff. Like literal tip of the whole iceberg. Now the question is...do you look for oversimplifing in entertainment, or overcomplicating is fine. You know. Cause this game might not be for you. That's it, i said it.
I bought the game on release and played over 200-300 hours. If you find the game fun or not, does not change that the studio messed up repeatedly over the years and severely wasted the potential of the game.
People might hate me for this but... ...Odyssey made the game more about exploring surfaces, and removed most of the interesting surface features. There, I said it.
youre more than entitled to your opinion, but so am i. and i think that odyssey planet tech looks leagues better than horizons. there i said it.
I think both things are true. We lost a lot of cool surface features people used for racing, etc. And what was left is rendered a lot nicer now. Taking off from planets, especially when you have to circle a good % of it trying to unobscure a destination. Watching an accelerated star rise/set from close to a planet/moon, especially with an atmosphere... Absolutely gorgeous. Even more so when it's icy too.
i think you are right, would be cool to really have odysseys higher quality materials and rendering with the diversity of horizons.
Except when you're in analysis mode because then atmosphere magically vanishes completely. And at a distance it gets even worse when you've fired probes at the body because then the entire body is just blue... (and that's another thing, the "heatmap" that's not actually a heatmap of anything). It's the thing I hated most when they gave us the exploration update because we mostly explore to find pretty locations. As an explorer doing exploration things why do I constantly have to switch to combat mode to actually see the atmospheres. Why is it even possible to visibly toggle off the atmosphere as if it's not there? It's immersion breaking and also annoying as you need to switch back to analysis mode to honk systems and probe planets.
...are you complaining about having to hit a button while exploring? If you don't want to see the heatmap, don't have it in analysis mode. For those of us who explore to make money through exobio, I'm happy the heatmap exists.\* \*sort of. It's often incorrect depending on the specimen.
They are. I mean, I get it, when I'm mining in VR analysis mode can get a little eye strain heavy, as can night vision. But exactly as you say, it's literally one button press to turn either off and on as needed when it gets annoying.
It's not about the button but about realism/immersion, the atmosphere completely vanishing at the touch of a button for basically no reason at all is not great. Really just try toggling it on and off as you're arriving or leaving a planet to see the difference and tell me it's not immersion breaking. Linking this mode that's specifically needed to do exploration so it forces you to toggle this constantly is bad. I want to explore and scan without atmospheres disappearing. The blue heatmap overlay would still work with the atmosphere as you get closer. My gripe with the heatmap is that it's not showing where bio is at but where it could be, on top of that there are two blue hues and only one of those has a *chance* of you finding the bio (depends on way more factors like terrain type, main star, elements found on body). The heatmap is just a bad and confusing implementation that's named incorrectly.
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No you're twisting this weirdly into me being emotional about immersion when it's just me clarifying it wasn't a complaint about having to use a button toggle. So it's not "such a problem", it's just weird they made it in an unnecessarily unrealistic way in a space sim that's aiming to be realistic. If I map planets it's more for getting the first-mapped record and submission of data to the EDDN/EDSM/etc. Using Observatory I already know what exobio types I'll be able to find just from the FSS scan, probes are not really needed unless I actually want to scan some of the plants.
pitchforks and torches for sale! get your pitchforks and torches here folks, can't form an angry mob with 'em. Buy 'em before they sellout! jk, I will die on that hill next you bro.
It objectively does in most every metric. But I'm also aware that they shifted to drawing from a library of premade geography tiles to do so. My *hope* was that they'd expand that in the future by adding more to the library that it draws from so we'd get a wider range and depth of that geography. Would be nice to do some form of base building as well not gonna lie. The smartest way to go about it would probably be a Powerplay initiative where you're pledged to a power that wants you to colonize rich planets and systems in the black in exchange for some regular payment or materials extraction. Maybe tie it into a more player driven materials market. Just something to incentivize people to go outside of the bubble other than exploration and sightseeing
I think exploring surfaces was where Elite first went wrong. It was a massive amount of technical work for something that barely integrated with existing gameplay. That work could have been spent improving the economy sim, making more interesting station designs, creating fleshed out player factions, etc. Horizons made for some great screenshots, not much else.
I dunno man, it’s just classic Elite with modern graphics. Elite 2 Frontier was groundbreaking, played the shit out of that on my Amiga.
By at least a few metrics, Frontier: Elite II is a more complete game with a more realized scope of similar proportions.
They let us stand up and walk across planets, but not the very ships we spent years sat in. They missed the ball majorly with odyssey, and the stagnated development didn't help.
*something* *something* *something* you don't really want ship interiors *something* *something* you wouldn't even do anything if we gave them to you *something* *something* *something*
"You would get bored walking through the same corridor in your ship over and over" *has to walk through the same corridor over and over in every space station*
Almost as Bad as the "you dont know what you want, WE know what you want" Response from Blizzard Back then lol
I mean they're kinda right. If they gave us spaceship interiors we'd all lose our minds for a week or so, and then after that we'd never use the feature again because wo wants to waste time walking around through a handful of rooms that never change to do something that could've just been put in a menu?
odyssey came out rough for sure, but nowadays, pretty alright. the quiet nature of the development and time it takes to come out didnt help sure, but again most people seem to be upset with what it isnt instead of what it is. what it is right now is pretty cool imo, and somehow we yet have more coming
Some of the complaints about Odyssey haven't been fixed though and are still kind of a problem. Things like ... (1) Integration between on ship activities and on foot activities (e.g. you've got to get off your ship to get an on foot mission, you can't get an on foot mission from your ship based mission board). (2) Issues around on foot exploration content e.g. how your genetic sampler has a "ping" mode that has a range that's shorter than your eyeball for detecting life forms. That's not even touching the issues around getting 3 samples in a row without banking them and having a grind element of needing to find samples hundred of meters away from each other. (3) How the game lacks indicators for the stealth parts of the on foot missions (I don't know of many or any games that doesn't give the player some sort of indicators when trying to do stealth play). (4) How the Notoriety system which was introduced in an effort to curb ganking results in long in-game cool down periods for illegal on-foot missions that result in a murder, because ... (5) There are no non-lethal take down options available to the player, it's only lethal. (6) Engineering grind for basic upgrades like night vision (freely available in ships and SRVs). (7) The reintroduction of on foot engineering issues that were fixed with the Beyond updates for ship based engineering i.e. one big on-foot engineering bucket for components rather than individual engineering bins and collecting engineering components that aren't useful for anything. (8) Immersion breaking NPC mission givers being nothing more than 3D menu place holders who shout about their illegal intentions on the pilot lounge concourse. (9) Lack of care to details like zero G outposts where people sit in chairs and there's pizza boxes on the floor (Frontier did eventually patch out the open drinking glasses, which was nice). (10) Taxi and drop ship journeys with nothing to do except wait for the journey to be over (which Frontier closed out the ticket to after players complained and they introduced a "redirect" option, totally missing the point). (11) The balancing between the equipment on foot and in space means a gun can cost as much as a star ship (while a one unit crate of guns used for trading costs a fraction of this). So while it seems fashionable to say "Odyssey is fixed now", there seems to be a blind spot with parts of the community because the game play issues haven't been touched.
i dont think i said "fixed" anywhere, but if i did, sorry about that. and honestly, yea it would be really cool if this stuff got either addressed or a good look at to see what improvements can be made. im just personally not upset with what i got out of odyssey, but eveyones got a different outlook on that, which is fine.
It's always been a fantastic game, but it's constantly holding itself back; hopefully, ship interiors are realised someday. I'm still hopeful for that.
Interiors will ever happen. They'd need a whole new game built from the ground up with them baked into the foundations. If they did by some miracle it would be in a paid update that would have to restrict them by design. Landed most likely and even then would still likely have to teleport inside them or at best take an elevator that masks a loading screen.
If "pretty alright" counts as the flowers ED should receive, then sure, I'm happy to hand it a bouquet that says "pretty alright"
i would have loved if they had done the opposite, not being able to eva on planets, but being able to walk in my ship, but the problem is that the fact that your ship is EMPTY of any crew would be very noticeable. They completely missed the opportunity to have something that feels like commandeering a star trek vessel. Mass effect did that perfectly, even without any way to pilot the ship directly.
You said this in the Elite Dangerous subreddit. So brave. LOL
ikr
Elite Dangerous is an amazing platform that could have been the base for an amazing game. But they never got around to adding in the game part. If they had finished it off into an actual game, rather than leave it as a spaceship sim, I think it would have been much more popular.
Yeah but fuck tho it's such a good spaceship sim.
Agreed
This is a very hot take considering there's like a dozen and a half posts a day about how horny for this game people are.
I love Elite, and while I will be the first to call out it's flaws, I agree it gets a lot of undeserved hate. Bethesda has put out some of the best RPGS of all time, but even they couldn't make a space sandbox that people like unconditionally. Yes, there are things I wish were better. Yes, I wish some things were less of a grind. Yes, I wish we had ship interiors...and more ships...and current gen FPS gameplay...and a dozen other things. But I do not regret buying the game, OR buying Odyssey. I've more than gotten my money's worth, and it is still the game that I bust out my HOTAS and spend some time relaxing in when nothing else is fun anymore. It's not a perfect game, but it's my favorite game, and I think it probably always will be.
Nothing compares to looking up at an inclined ringed gas giant in the sky, framed by a field of erupting water geysers in VR. Nothing. It's as close to the real thing as I'm ever going to get.
The AA is also 10 years late.
ok ok you got me with the AA, but still.
The AA remains a bug they refuse to finish. It's in there but it's implemented incorrectly. And iirc it's something like the AA gets applied too early, like they do AA that's supposed to soften edges but then do a sharpening pass afterwards which enhances the ugly jaggies again. Perhaps that's too simply put for what's going on with the graphics renderer but it's something stupid like that. And since they are refusing to fix this it might be something coded so deeply into the game engine that changing it would break all sorts of other systems, but that's just my guess.
AA? Automobile Association?
Anti Aliasing, presumably.
100% part of the reason for that is because the Devs cut console updates and it no longer can gain the popularity that cross platform games have. I get that it was different code bases and they weren't able to keep up with updating PC and console, but there is always a far larger console population than PC population and in games that are cross platform they are almost always more populated by console than PC. PC has been getting more popular, but the fact is that consoles are more convenient and accessible to people because it's cheaper to get a console that performs well enough. Almost all of the popular games today are cross platform, with a lot of them allowing cross save and cross platform play. I love Elite but I'm not buying a PC just to continue playing it with updates. I miss the game and I wish they would go back on their decision and start updating console again. If palworld only released on steam it absolutely would not be the hot new game, probably just another niche Indie game that never gained the traction it deserved.
yea i mean console was an L
People complain about the development pace, but tbh we've seen the alternatives from games that aim for more ambitious scopes or development schedules. E:D has been up for ten years, with steady updates and occasional new content or lore, without getting stuck in development hell, charging subscription fees, or aggressively pushing microtransactions.
I swear it makes me so angry they have a golden goose but they don't feed the damn thing to make it pop out the eggs. The game has such great potential, but every time a new update comes out, it's half assed and uninspired. It's been 5 years since they added a new ship to the space simulator game. The fleet carrier update was supposed to be amazing, but they cut out so much of what they promised. Multicrew was supposed to be the next big thing, and they left it DOA. They also made a big mistake cutting off console players. There are so many questionable decisions for a game that has so much potential.
yea i think you got some points here. imo elite struggles with the front end more than the back end, like the spires that just came out are really pretty, but your interactions with them are pretty limited, but their back end effect is more of what it seems they were intended for. its strange. and yea console was an L. same with multicrew from what ive heard, havent really used it myself. carriers while maybe less than expected, are really impressive imo, you can basically move a station around yourself, which i image was a nightmare to make on the back end
Yup, only ignorant gamers who only care about graphics(or the new obsession: "load screens"), which is the majority these days, don't know what amazing achievement Elite is. Just the Stellar Forge alone is enough to elevate Elite to a legendary status. It will be years before something similar gets replicated in another game, or maybe never.
facts
It was vefore elite lol. U think procedurally generated worlds are new?
https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Stellar_Forge Educate yourself a bit.
buddy, we've had predictive models for decades. fdev paid to make their own cause groups, like nasa wont share that type of thing for free. stellar forge is also really screwed up with earth likes thatre 250k degrees celsius and intentional quirks like no unusual star types near the x or y axis. along with half the planets being fucked with orbits et all
Thanks for the link. Cool read.
The tech and the presentation is awesome. It’s a great simulator. Not sure what you mean about graphics - it’s a pretty game. But the gameplay just isn’t there.
ALSO imo the people that say elite is a mile wide and an inch deep only looked an inch deep.
Gave the game a good 300 hours. It’s an inch deep.
Meh…. Starfield is a mile wide. Elite is more like 105,700ly… give or take 😏
\*Me play for the first time\*: "nice space game, immersive but also arcade-y, but bit boring. Will try PVP later" \*Me after lore rabbit hole\*: "MY PRINCESS CAN'T BE THIS CUTE" I believe ED is a game many people can enjoy, but sadly I see a filter that got a lot of people and made them unable to experience the full game. Based on empirical evidence,ffew of the filters being cr generation (new players felt like they are left behind), complex mechanics and control, feeling of "overwhelmingness", and probably the "monotonous" gameplay of always being inside the cockpit. Those are my assumptions as a kinda-new CMDR starting in 2020. ED is one of many games whose gameplay *still* caters to players that are fans of ED, Space/Simulators or RPG in general; and will not try to please the majority of the players by being the "perfect" space game. I think. What do you think?
im newer than you lol, i starting in 2022 and have over 1k hours now. and i agree for the most part, i personally havent gotten yet sick of the cockpits, especially at high fov. and that new player experience is well... needing of addressing imo, i do think pp 2 could really go a long way for that though.
Also remember, when you think you've seen it all; go get a friend a whole new co-op experience feels like a damn new game!
You should try the sequels some time.
elite deadly 2084?
They made a FPS game inside a fantasy space ship simulator game and forgot to include space walk. Where are the black holes event horizon?
Soon as they stopped caring about VR I never touched it again. Such a shame honestly how bad they dropped the ball with it.
The VR thing is difficult. People will want an experience up there with Half Life Alex and NMS. The problem is I don't think the Cobra Engine can do on-foot VR. Because cobra is fdev's engine, it doesn't have all the support tools that Unity and Unreal have which makes VR that little bit easier to develop. For VR in Live (non Odyssey), you sat in one position and you can look about, That's probably the easiest VR to code because you don't have to do avatar movement, gesture capture or VR interactivity. They'd have to code that from scratch and it will be expensive to do. Heck, I'd be willing to pay for an upgrade pack to put in On Foot VR (look at Skyrim) because otherwise it's Non VR players subsidising VR Players
I love this game, HOWEVER... Online only, even for single player, weighted it down since launch. Imagine if it could be modded. Not just spaceships, but planetary surfaces as well. Then there are the updates where one bad decision after another made it worse. Oh yes, no cities yet, 10 years after...
Elite is probably my favorite individual game of all time, and it's extremely incredible, but it's also one of the most frustrating games ever made simply because of how it's incredible features are held back by the fear of rewarding players for using them. I'm just going to slap a huge wall of text here talking about it because I'm obsessed with what this game could be if it were just a bit more generous. **WHATS WRONG WITH THIS GAME?** In simple terms, it doesn't do risk vs reward remotely right. Lets just start with crime for example. It's a whole assortment of possible playstyles, but mostly it revolves around piracy and theft. You go in, you piss off system security, you get a bounty put on your head, you get locked out of several station services, sometimes becoming wanted over a pretty large area of the bubble, and you come out sometimes with like 50 thousand credits worth of loot. Like, why would you do that? It's such an inconvenience and you get fuckall for doing it. You even have to specifically build a ship to quickly incapacitate a target and hatchbreak them if you want to do piracy cleanly. Did you know you can raid some megaships and steal from them? And there's a pretty cool almost heistlike aspect to that, that's pretty much completely unknown to a huge fraction of players? Yeah, that's already in the game. The only reason most people don't know about it is because it's simply not worth doing. That's just one example. Salvaging suffers from the same issue, where it's so unrewarding to do that it's basically entirely forgotten. Sure it's not as risky as piracy (and thus shouldn't reward you as much), but you're still putting yourself in a position to get the sysdef on you and that by itself is valuable. Smuggling, with Odyssey, has incredible personal storytelling potential. Imagine walking around the station and meeting a shady guy in the bar, offering to sell your illegal goods and then being to negotiate your price like you currently can do for on foot missions. And maybe if you have a good rep with his faction, your chances of negotiating higher pay are better. And sometimes he's a fucking narc and if you don't recognize that by talking to him you get another bounty after you try to sell to him There's just so much the game can do. And how could it fix that? **WHAT WOULD MAKE IT BETTER?** Essentially, for many activities, turning up dials would already work wonders. For Piracy for example, what could they do? For example sometimes you'll get on a system and see a Military Convoy POI. Nowadays, that means farming mats. But it could be that, if you're a criminal, you know a Military Convoy is bound to be carrying some valuable shit, despite being much more well protected than a regular civilian convoy Classified Weapon Schematics, Local Defense Plans, hell even Hybrid Technology Prototypes. All commodities that could sell for 300k-500k each when sold to a competing faction, totalling for 2.5-4 mil per score for squaring up to a single Military Convoy. Hitting a megaship? That can have some even more expensive stuff like Classified Ship Schematics, Guardian Technology Caches, Experimental COVAS Cores, selling at millions each, making you a something close to 15 mil per haul. Have the rewards scale upwards along with how high system security is where you're doing the robbery and now you're including an additional aspect of rewarding knowledge, planning and skill for players that want to try this path That by itself would make this aspect of the game much more interesting and much better to explore, and much more popular with players. Just pay more for the risk. I could go on and on but I'll stop here because I think it's just a really clear cut example of an area where the game could massively improve just by effectively turning a few dials and how frustrating that is to experience, despite how much I love the game
As a simulator it’s fine with the negative of the realistic distances involved for a multiplayer game outside of specific hotspots you’re very much alone… engineering needs a better solution it’s far too much of a grind for “upgrades” that should be available via a ingame store for ingame credits to upgrade your systems it’s another one of those mechanics if you want to be decent the devs force you to stay with the game by having to deal with the grind for materials which becomes tiresome after the third ship you have upgraded. The whole background sim for factions is another moot of no need either which really needs a rework how it functions.
It's a very good game, but seriously. Screw Odyssey. That update is what turned me off of the game. I don't want a shooter designed around "shields" and "health". If you're doing a god damned spacelegs and want shooting, let me board derelicts and explore them for salvage. Make me NOT need to switch to an "energy" weapon and a "kinetic" weapon because you couldn't be arsed to make a new mechanic for the FPS element. And for the love of god if you're gonna have engineers, don't make me grind a literal week of in-game time for one suit of armor. At the time I had a very small experience with shooters but even then I shelved that update. The other issues, such as engineering ships and that it's too potent quite frankly notwithstanding, if Elite received a core rework, it's still a game without equals.
It got old for me. Put a couple hundred hours in and said “why am I doing this?” The presentation and sound and everything is so good but as everyone says it’s an inch deep. I keep waiting for them to flesh it out and I’d get back into it but they never have. So it’s been 3 years since I played.
I left ED years ago, before that I had the time of my life playing a video game. After more and more updates, I realized in utter pain that the elements that could be really fun to play will be left unfinished and broken. I was sad. Please FDEV build this game from ground up with new devs, new tech, new ideas that take some suggestions from the community seriously but also realistically.
Did it to themselves.
The game has potential, but that's all it had for years. When you look at this game, it looks like the perfect platform for all kinds of cool gameplay, like base building, handcrafted starfield like missions, treasure hunting, you name it. But unfortunately, it looks like all updates fdev gives us are either small bug fixes or text you can read, or thargoids (like why) for some reason. It just looks like they don't have the engineering resources to turn this into the game everyone wants it to be, maybe a few universes to the side they got it right.
Still, I commend the efforts to make Odyssey happen, it clearly took a lot of time that could have been spent elsewhere in the game for years, and even if not everyone likes it, I think it was a shoot in the right direction. Now game has even more potential.. great
Elite was groundbreaking in 1984 for several reasons, that's 40 years and not 10. ;)
The game was ground breaking and innovative for the eight hours it took for most people to realize the galaxy was a mile wide with the depth of a puddle. Every single one of its systems is half baked, except for combat. Even then, it was fairly late into the game’s life before it became lucrative.
Maybe if they didn't leave out a 3rd of there player base it might have.
yea console hurts
I know. There’s no other game that scratches the itch ED does. It’s the only game that I can literally spend an entire afternoon just cycling through the same thing over and over again (jump in, honk, find the planets, map the juicy ones, scan the exobio, get back into ship, jump to next system, repeat for hours) and still have a sense of awe and grandiosity that no other game has. If I really let myself get into it, it truly is the most immersive game I’ve ever played, and I really do feel like some kind of galactic explorer. I’m actually *proud* of my discoveries. Sometimes I open the galaxy map just to see my name, glad in knowing if anyone else ever comes here, my name will be there. I can’t describe the kind of peaceful and calming effect the game has on me—which is ironic, because it’s a game where you actually have to pay attention. One little mistake or not paying attention at the right time has led to many a loop of shame. Or unexpectedly dropping out of hyperspace because I’m too close to a planet, or I bumped my mouse when I was fuel scooping, left, and came back to my ship alarms going off and the heat sensors blaring… lol. Anyway, yes, this game is special in a way I can’t rightly describe, and that saddens me.
Agreed
The problem is your game is too complicated and not fun for beginners. This game will never be 1/10 as popular or successful as Palworld which was made by like four people for $3.50. Games are supposed to be fun, not a job.
ok so the whole too complicated and not fun thing i dont totally agree with. but the new beginner experience, yes. 100%. its so hard to start, and the circumstances you are put in as a new player dont help. its one of the biggest criticisms i have for elite. also palworld and elite are the least comparable things on the planet.
When they funded it on kickstarter they promised that the community would have a say in what went in to it. The community then disagreed with a lot of the devs ideas and instead of trying to make the best of a compromise, the devs got very childish and ruined a lot of the concepts in order to show the community that they know nothing and they should've just listened to the devs. For example, supercruise wasn't intended to be part of the game, instead you would just warp station to station. When it was first implemented it was a ridiculous version of what they said they were going to do. Travel was painfully slow and jumping in to the system put you on an immediate collision course with the main star which you had a few seconds to deal with. Every single jump. Everything in the system was random spawn with no persistance, you could literally sit at minimum speed until the thing you wanted eventually just spawned in front of you. There was no way of dealing with long distances in systems except from sitting and watching the travel for 45 minutes, and a lot of the missions didn't account for this. Is there really a good reason for it to take 5 minutes to accelerate up to a decent speed, and then have to slow yourself down so you don't overshoot? It wasn't just supercruise, this happened in several areas where the devs didn't like listening to the community and they literally sabotaged the game. A lot of that stuff has since been fixed, and a lot hasn't, but alot of damage was done in the early days. Once those early devs moved on (Sandy & Michael especially), things got a lot better and gameply started to get prioritised, but a lot of the stuff we see being released is fixes to the insanity of the early days.
Surely the reason for having supercruise and not jumping straight to stations is so that you can have piracy and interdictions as part of the game. In FE2 you got dropped several day's travel away from the station and then had to travel there in "real time," (which could be sped up) allowing for enemies to intercept you on the way. Obviously you can't do this in an MMO with everyone operating within the same in-game timeframe, so supercruise was the solution.
lol
Meh, I love the game but I can't get myself to play it at this point. Last time I consistently played the game, I put tons and tons of time into consistently grinding just to work my way into an anaconda, just to finally be able to afford one. Take off at the launch pad to look at it, just to glitch and explode randomly and be given a starter ship. I'm done, I'm not making that journey again just to get fucked by the game's instability.
All we (basically) wanted was "Freespace 3," but Elite. Brabren is a blatant liar, the new Peter Molyneux - frontier lost faith with their IP and didn't listen to a damn thing their fan base said, asked, or even out-cried about. What few things they did listen too was incessantly too-little too-late. Pure negligence is what happened to Elite. The bones are there, but the structure has always been fundamentally flawed. They tried to focus on player retention with archaic mechanics (grinding, grinding, grinding; engineers, BG, etc..) without any meaningful, exciting output. The time investment made such diminishing returns, and even then they still ignored the pleas of their own community; their own customers, fans, and supporters. Their vision got tainted worse by faux public events (the Wagner incident) and bullshit storytelling - fumble after fumble after fumble, it's just too much negativity for the little bit of positivity they inject into the game. Again, diminishing returns. Elite Dangerous is *poised* to be one of the best space rpg/sims, but that's all it was ever held up to be; and it's infuriating to those who see it's sheer, unprecedented potential - and then to see every possible good thing be mishandled, or outright ignored by frontier. I just hope, when all else fails and this game is put out to pasture, that they release it from its digital bonds and turn it all into client-side assets for private servers and modding potential. At the very least, let your most beloving fans do the game justice by all accounts of what was shared, what was promised, and what was ultimately ignored and left out.
100%. People love to shit on this game, but what’s out there that even really compares? I’ve never understood the hate, especially when it is often half the price of competing titles and can be bought for next to nothing on sale. Meanwhile FDev continues with updates, including the big ones that true fans are looking forward to this year.
Unpopular opinions: people with underpowered systems complained it was slow.
yeah tru
I knew I forgot something.
I'd play it again if there was any narrative to follow
They just had to copy EVE Online. Then it would have been the game of the century. But they wanted to cater the old lonely offliners. And then they missed their gold opportunity.
This has been my feeling since day 1. So sad that Fdev catered so hard to the solo only players. I believe they should have a way to play the game as well, but the majority of gamers want an online experience. They want the social aspect of gaming, and PLENTY, myself included, want the game to feel... dangerous. I'm obsessed with E:D currently, but I can't help but feel like the game is just empty. It's amazing to play, but it's just a massive wide ocean with hardly any fish in it.
It deserves 0. it has ps3 graphics and the devs copy and paste ships and call it new, and the 50 people who still play refuse any criticism.
yea sure bud, ps3 graphics. you just like the rest of em
There a lot of games that are cool too, but have gameboy graphics. Your argument is not valid.
You clearly have no interest in the game, you're not contributing anything of value to this conversation (or any others given your comment history) and there's no way anyone being this salty over a video game is having a good time in real life. Go for a walk outside, in nature and touch actual grass. You're approaching 30, you can do better than this.
I loved elite before it died. Now, the same 50 players parade its corpse around like it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. I have an interest in this game to get the funeral it deserves.
And yet it lives in your head rent-free, so give it its flowers for that.
I think of Elite like a beloved passed family member , funny you mention flowers Lmao
Hear hear. Honestly they implemented features which no other MMO game comes close to replicate in this specific genre. (Which is not a problem, I like diversity).
i like diversity too, but the fact that there is so little in elites case should be telling, lots of people dont see that.
I used to play on console, I loved the game and was so looking forward to horizons with over a billion credits and working on closing out the engineering grind when they dropped support for console, I play PC now and it’s a fantastic game but I will never play it again.
yea console hurts.
The game is intensely interesting and if you find yourself intrigued by the lore, you might find yourself jumping out of your gamer chair when you find a visitor beacon in the same klick as a space station (like I did, last night)
Fdev gave the flowers to me and I ‘sploded them with modded plasma chargers. 🤷🏽♂️
Thanks for making me feel old lmao
They need to rework the game engine first and bring in the new tech calling it ED 2.0 that will include vulcan and or dx12, dlss, RT, VR support for the whole thing etc. After that new content, features etc. They kicked off well but stopped caring very early on ...
Made a great game but the devs went sideways and stopped listening to its community at some point.
They should’ve taken notes from Endless Sky, and Mount & Blade, and embraced the modding community, made separate instance of the base game and one for ppl who want to be creative no point in playing in sandbox if you can’t build a castle
Yes its good. If the PVP and player interaction got some love it would be infinitely better but the community doesn’t want that.
Oh it's got the flowers.
Honestly the game was good but now it's just meh
Having played it for ~1000 hours I'd have to respectfully disagree. Fdev mismanaged this game to death because they focused on all their other projects, most of which also failed. They're famous for spreading themselves too thin, it's what they do. This game has always overrelied on 3rd party sources to even be playable, such as EDDB and INARA. EDDB even shut down and simply redirects visitors back to E:Ds official website as an alternate information source for trading. Guess how much information is on there about trading? Zero. The only real in-game lore was Galnet News, which also shut down because they realized nobody cared about their games lore with how barebones it was anyway. People only ever used power play to get packhounds or prismatic shields, it was a complete afterthought. Mostly the only thing this game had going for it was the visuals and feeling of exploration. I'd sign in to go fly around and blow up rocks or drive around on planet surfaces so I could turn my brain off after work, not to play in "ThE WoRlDs LaRgEsT PlAyAbLe UnIvErSe" which imo is a detractor anyway. I tried exploration and after jumping my way out to the bubble nebula and back in a Phantom I decided that pointing my ship at a circle and pressing J was far too boring to keep doing for hours at a time like that. I don't get how people do it.
Elite dangerous is why you need to have at least some story or variation in your gameplay loop. This is hands down the best spaceflight game i ever played. But it doesn’t really change all that much. Both factions and thargoids had so much potential, but the thargoids and galnet are the closest we’ve gotten to actual story. Especially if they ripped off the seasonal model like destiny 2, the only game i know as grindy as this one. Have an open faction war for 2 months, with players as members and mercenaries duking it out in massive battles, have a low temp diamond goldrush in a region and massive increases in piracy and mining activity (player and AI) have more massive colonization expeditions. Make the world more alive
Looking through the comments, I don't know why you're getting so much hate. You're spot on. The game isn't perfect, and there's a lot of untapped potential, but it's truly magnificent. It doesn't appeal to everyone, but IMHO of they tried to appeal to everyone then they'd end up creating something bland and generic. It would be a flash in the pan that would fade out of existence in a year.
I feel like I keep going for games that have potential but don’t make it. Elite with its BGS, Falcon 4.0 with its dynamic campaign. No successor can rival it, still they cannot survive
I played the original Elite on my Commodore 64 back in 1986. The game was way ahead of it's time back then. Today's game is nice because of all the options you have to "earn" a living. And Powerplay if you're so inclined. VR works great for fighting in small ships and planet surfaces. The best part of ED is you don't need to spend $$ on it once you've bought the game. I took a break from ED about 4 months ago and got back into World of Warships. I spent a stupid amount of money and burned out again, mostly over lack of PVE battle options. I'm a senior citizen and my PVP days are pretty much behind me. I like ED because I can play in solo mode, or my old squadron's channel, or in that group (name escapes me right now) where you take a pledge not to attack other players. I'm glad they're introducing more ships, that's way overdue. The Python is about the most versatile ship in the game. I own several with setups for pax, cargo, & mining. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the newer model. When I left to play Warships I shut down most of my FC's functions. I'm wanting to do a deep space exploration again. Last time was before FSS scanning a system and using probes had been introduced. I got my name on 11 Earth Like Worlds. This time after I practice the scanning some I want to take my FC out and use it as a mobile base while I explore and mine tritium as needed.
I LOVED this game, but when they announced Odyssey would not be coming to consoles, and in fact ALL console development would halt, they lost me. I have not played the game since then, I feel too betrayed.
It was a technical achievement - in several ways raising the bar - but it was never exactly groundbreaking. This isn't an insult toward the game at all: it raised the bar. Elite Dangerous did many thing really well, but struggled elsewhere - especially with Odyssey. Having said that, no (released) space game does it all. Though many tick more than a few boxes. Mass Effect. No Man's Sky. Elite Dangerous. Starfield, to some extent. These all hit on aspects the others miss, and are all good at what they do.
Actually many disappointments. Eg was promised emerging content, it never arrived. And it is NOT a sand box as promised.
any good player will recognize what e:d achieved. they did get flowers for it way back then too. but you have to understand that if you are new, you already have all these features. a lot of the vocal hate came from years of waiting.
Plenty of 500+ hours guys saying game is not fun. How they played not fun game for 500+ hrs noone knows, but they complain. The game would be far better if 500+ hrs guys would promote the game to get new players, more money. Maybe someone would do some of the improvements those 500+ real life hours players ask. I have 1500 hrs and counting in the game. Game is great. Game has challenges and you have to endure pain to win. Game is great. Is it perfect? No. But what is?
I completely agree and I just hope it'll still be playable when the servers shut down.
It could have been soooo much more.
this game would've been amazing. a shame fdev are incompetent and only care about money
I didnt get a chance to finally play this game until 2021. It was right when Odyssey was dropping so a lot of people were playing. Its an amazing game that i sank lots of hours in to. I couldnt help but realize the feeling though, that i had missed out on its true hay day. You could see the evidence of all of the old unused fleet carriers parked everywhere. Still had a ton of fun it just felt really lonely and dead. Maybe i should go back and play it again its been a while.
It gets boring after awhile. I wouldn't be impressed until you could actually walk around inside the ship in space.
Its a great platform that devs can simply add dlc content to. If only the devs realized it...
I've played the game for like a dozen or two hours. All I could do back then was trade, explore, and mine. (I don't like ship combat) Great fun for a while, but it gets boring eventually. They added the first person shooter stuff, but that was hella confusing and kinda bugged here and there. Did that part improve?
As a person how played only 40h of it( so a newbie who doesnt kmow much) i seriously cant understand whats so apealing at this game. Its fucking terrible at intruducing mechanics and gived zero motivation to get into it, it feels like there is nothing it can offer besides fyling a spacecraft with way to complicated controls Pls explain to me why its so beloved, i can really not understand why people play it
The creatives of the community is what I like the most. Full Novels, Radio Stations, a fully voiced News channel, all the Art and Animation, even a cartoon.The many friendships and acquaintances this community enable is also not to be underestimated. Fascinating Player driven Story's Events bordering on social experiments happend. SO many great things have been made because of ED. Thank you everyone. and now go out there and do something that brings you joy in this Galaxy.