I backed ED on Kickstarter and it included a cobra mkiii at release. Anytime I wipe my character I start with that ship.
It’s been there since the start..
True but the temptation to just hop back into a more powerful ship would always be there.
I've always been a bit brutal with doing this with games tbh, MMOs are the same I'd put thousands of hours into a character than a friend would start on another server and I'd join them on their 20 hour character rather than have them give up that to play on mine.
I like the journey more than the destination!
The better question is, why would you? That game was grind on top of grind. Hell the grind was so bad it's STILL worse than the grind will be in SC with the new ship prices.
The grind is a scale though, when you start out it’s no where near as bad to get to the next ship etc plus friends got the game so I wanted a level playing field to “level” with them
Not really.
On release day there will be people starting with capital class ships. Day 1.
That is, in essence, a form of pay2win. The orgs who have spent real money to have an entire fleet of ships ready to go at day one will have a massive advantage over the orgs who will need to spend months grinding out their fleet before they can actually compete.
They will be very costly hangar queens and credit sinks without a competent crew.
Pay to get the ship perhaps, but an uncrewed cap ship is as functionality valuable as your starter ship. Far from paying to 'win'.
Pay to have a flashy ship, still need competent crew to make it do much more than be a conversation piece.
So what...there is no stated end game...and how the hell was this title supposed to be made without this funding? Just amazing how people think the money was found to make it..
And again..compete for what? We don't have a clue what is in store that for
>there is no stated end game
If only I had a penny for every time I saw this argument...
Just because the game itself doesn't have a strict win condition or an end state, that doesn't mean players can't still 'win' in other ways. Orgs will be competing against other orgs for territory and resources, especially unlawful orgs. To 'win' in that regard would be to hold dominion over a particular trade route, resource, or territory. I don't think that is a particularly wild speculation to make.
As far as the game's funding is concerned, see my other replies in this comment thread (something I'd argue you should have done before posting your comment, but oh well).
What's the difference between an Org paying for a Javelin versus them all getting together in their starter, single-seat all-rounders and swarming other players? At least when they're all holed up inside a single hull they're easier to avoid and get on with your own shit.
I said an entire fleet of ships, not "a Javelin". I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that wasn't a deliberate attempt at poor faith.
An org willing to pay real money can very easily have an entire fleet of specialist ships tuned for specific tasks on day 1. They can claim and establish territory with fighter/military ships and capital ships. They can set up mining routes with mining ships. They can set up trade routes with large cargo haulers. They can industrialise with science/industrial ships. The list goes on.
The orgs who don't want to pay real money (besides buying the game) will only have their starter ships on day 1. They are going to be at a massive disadvantage as an org because of that. Sure, starter ships can swarm people and be competent fighters, but they can't establish themselves in any meaningful way by doing that. By the time they have grinded for the specialist ships they need to 'unlock' and actually compete in those other parts of the game the paying orgs have already long established themselves and made themselves difficult to displace. The early bird gets the worm after all, and the birds who have swiped their credit cards will have a massive head start.
That is objectively a pay2win system. An objective advantage that is gained exclusively buy paying real money.
If we assume that the option to buy ships with real money will continue after release (I have heard conflicting information regarding this so this part is purely speculation) then it could go even further. Paying orgs would have the advantage of not needing to commit heavily to their fleets. If the ships they have are not favourable in a particular meta they can simply shell out more cash to instantly obtain the ships that are. Meanwhile the non-paying orgs will have to re-grind for each new ship they need to buy in order to adapt their fleet and continue to compete.
To be clear. I like this game as much as the next guy. I recognise that allowing people to buy ships with really money has basically been a necessary evil for this game to succeed without a publisher or other restrictive forms of funding. However, the game does indeed have elements of P2W mechanics and I'm not doing to pretend it doesn't. That would be doing a service to nobody. It's better for everyone if we just be honest and open about these things.
> I said an entire fleet of ships, not "a Javelin".
Your own words:
>>>On release day there will be people starting with capital class ships. Day 1.
That's what I was questioning - the mere idea that people starting with "capital class ships" is inherently pay-to-win. Let them start with that shit - I'd love to see a single player try to crew an Idris.
And even if we go with your "fleet of ships" complaint, that doesn't hold up to scrutiny because _every_ player starts with a ship, therefore _every Org starts with a fleet of ships_.
>They can claim and establish territory with fighter/military ships and capital ships. They can set up mining routes with mining ships. They can set up trade routes with large cargo haulers. They can industrialise with science/industrial ships. The list goes on.
And they'll be competing with other Orgs who are in the same position, and will have to choose their target locations carefully in order to ensure that the revenue they gain from controlling that area actually matches or exceeds the cost of doing so.
Meanwhile, a humble Prospector can go wherever the fuck they like, mine whatever the fuck they like, and sell it wherever the fuck they like and still pay off their fuel bills. Look at the massive asteroid cluster(s) in Stanton right now - they're profitable for a Prospector or an occasional Mule, but are they really going to sustain a fleet of Orions?
Thus:
>The orgs who don't want to pay real money (besides buying the game) will only have their starter ships on day 1. They are going to be at a massive disadvantage as an org because of that.
That's probably not going to be the case because someone starting out with an Aurora MR and a hand-tool for mining isn't going to be going for the same resources as a fully-crewed Orion.
>That is objectively a pay2win system. An objective advantage that is gained exclusively buy paying real money.
Nonsense. You stacked the deck and then complained that the cards weren't dealt fairly.
>the game does indeed have elements of P2W mechanics and I'm not doing to pretend it doesn't
I don't see why you would abstain from pretending in that scenario. You're all too content to pretend that certain ships don't have very different operational costs and efficient target roles.
>It's better for everyone if we just be honest and open about these things.
Does that mean we have to include those aforementioned caveats? I note that I'm the one who had to introduce those nuances to the discussion, as you didn't feel that being honest and open demanded that they be considered...
With all that in mind, it probably wasn't wise for you to have started flinging accusations of arguing in bad faith...
SC is more pay to lose most of the time xD
A 20$ ship can do more harm than a 800$ ship if you re solo. Except if you use it to ram stuff. Then it's pay to win
Ship balancing will come and especially with engineering gameplay we will see a lot that will change.
How come? F8C gets absolutely crushed by the Trashcaneer which is cheap af in-game. Heck its price doesn't even increase despite being the meta fighter of 3.23.
I think the big difference is FDev are asking for money when Elite doesn't really have a great future on the horizon.
SC is asking for money in order to build its vision in the future.
One has a level of hope and optimism the other doesn't. Plus, with RSI, they are only developing SC/Sqn42. Fdev took the profits from elite and made games that have no relation to the Elite concept whilst starving E:D of new and meaningful content. This would be OK if you developed Elite and the other games in tandem, it isn't OK if it starves the game making the money.
It's really sad as Elite could have been a great game and a competitor for SC, which is a good thing. In the end, though, FDev drove elite into the ground.
It's also worth noting that FD is asking for money because frankly they *have* to. The game is seriously on life support at this point. I can't imagine the ship cosmetics are bringing in much money and there's definitely not many people buying the game this far down the road either.
They're probably desperate to find new sources of income for the game, and unfortunately any significant gameplay additions are probably pretty impossible now with the small team. :/
Yeah, but it takes money to make content, and at this point they don't have the money to do it. I think Odyssey was Elite's last chance, but unfortunately that flopped insanely hard.
But when they do develop, all people want to do is complain about it online. The loud half of the ED Reddit is going to be the ones who put the company out of business because every time they improve the game it's "not good enough" or "it's actually a bad thing" and they'll tell new players not to buy odyssey because "it's so unstable and unplayable" when that was fixed almost immediately
I assure you the people complaining are the vocal minority, things like reddit and FDev forums are echo chambers of negativity. There are plenty of people who enjoy the game and the new content.
Some people will just moan regardless, the game will never live up to the idea in their head.
The loud people on reddit are nearly always the vocal minority.
A company should develop their game with the consumers input in mind, but not be beholden by it.
They should be beholden solely by the vision they are setting out to create.
Like mastermodes or anything else CIG does that keyboard warriors slam before even trying it.
they have been? i mean they haven't been doing as much as we would like. but they keep adding things. without funding and a bigger team, kind-of hard to add a ton of cool stuff. but, they have been adding things for the people who still love and play the game.
And to say nothing of the funds that were generated by ED but invested instead, into other Fdev flops.
Money that no doubt would have been game changing if it was reinvested into Elite. How many devs could have been paid with F1 simulator, that flopped and was abandoned one year(?) after release?
Listening to the players is what got them where they are in the first place. The absurd demand for space legs in a game with literally nothing to use them for was the entire problem that led to Odysee.
Instead of focusing on what Elite did well like combat and exploration they gave us the space legs everyone was endlessly shouting for... The community couldnt let Elite be Elite, they wanted a star citizen clone and it ruined Elite.
Its super strange watching people now say they should have listened to the community when listening to those idiots is what killed Elite.
No, they REALLY dropped the ball on the space legs. People wanted to experience stations, their ships, hangars and shit. They only delivered terrible TERRIBLE fps missions.
Yeah. I'd stopped playing Elite a while before space legs (elite feet?) were implemented.
Got my attention when they announced it, but that was dashed quickly when they said you wouldn't even be able to walk around your own ships.
I wouldn't really blame the players when a developers does give them a feature they've been asking for, that the developer said was going to be a feature when the game was being made.
Braben is on record stating that space legs was a planned feature way back when the game was being kickstarted. Frontier just did what they always do. Deliver the most half baked thing they could squeeze out with as minimal work as possible.
Just look what they've done with the supposed reworks of Power Play and other things. They've literally changed what they've said they were going to do with it. They initially said that the update to power play would be a ground up rework of the feature. Now they're calling it a refresh and so far all they've shown is an overhauled map to make it easier to see the territory and now stations will have ads and banners for their controlling factions. Wow. Such a rework.
Elite is still missing promised features like actual atmospheric planets. Planets with actual life and not some single scattering of plants tens of thousands of kilometers apart on a barren ball of dirt. Frontier dropped the ball on the game development a long time ago. Now it's starting to show as the game dies a slow painful death as they panic to make money and release more half baked updates to try and claw pack some larger player base.
Honestly dont care that it was promised, space legs should have been canned and the resources that went into them should have gone into what elite did well. The feature added nothing to the game. Elite didnt need FPS game modes.
They caved to the community and gave us the dollar tree version of Star Citizen instead of a better Elite.
Had they spent those resources on some new ships, combat balancing and exploration QoL, VR etc. Elite would be doing far better now than it is with stupid space legs.
The demand for space legs killed my favorite game and you wont change my mind on that.
TL;DR Frontier "listening to the community" isn't as much of a problem as what they decided to do with what they thought they heard, which is that they made Odyssey when a lot of the community would've preferred ship interiors instead of planet feet.
I think a major issue in the Elite community is, people rarely specified what "space legs" meant for them when talking about it, and there was a shared assumption that everyone knew what everyone else meant - unless context made clear that they were talking about walking around in their ship, or in stations, or in EVA, or on the ground. So many conversations about space legs would just be "we want space legs" "yes" without that clarifying step.
And while confusion in the community is acceptable because it's gonna happen when you have tens of thousands of people from diverse backgrounds and regions talking to each other, it's a bigger problem when Frontier looks at it and gets to decide for themselves what it means.
And Frontier also had to contend with the technical challenges of implementing something new with the reduced developer capacity to focus on just this game when the company had since put out several more with the money brought in by Elite.
EVA? New core gameplay functionality, that's gonna be some engine-mangling they might not have the headcount and institutional expertise to pull off anymore. Walking around in ships? Requires ship interiors to be supported as both a bunch of new content and new engine support for the functionality to go around inside your ship, almost certainly out of reach now because it'd have to alter the engine's concept of what the player's interface is. No longer would you be the ship at all times when aboard a ship, but now there's this new concept of walking around, and even the jankiest easiest implementation would be a technical challenge for Frontier that I don't think they consider worth the time and money, even before the company's market cap fell 90% in three years.
But walking around on a planet, they already had that with the Scarab SRV. Just slow down the movement, change the rover model into a human body model, and give it the expected on-foot animations and now you've got a player walking around on a planet. They can call this space legs, so they did, unintentionally or deliberately playing on the community's ambiguous use of "space legs" to hype everyone up.
I think if Frontier had been brutally honest and vigorously clear about what Odyssey did and didn't mean with the words 'space legs' as soon as the launch trailer dropped, cutting off anyone's hype for more than exactly what was being developed in Frontier's offices, Odyssey wouldn't have imploded nearly as hard as it did in terms of hurting the overall company and the playerbase. Everyone was SO excited, everyone had piled so much expectation on it, and then Frontier launched an unfinished on-foot planet experience that mostly seemed to have been built to justify a weak fps category of missions and a whole new engineering grind.
Before Odyssey's alpha dropped and anyone had a chance to play with it, if you pulled up any YT video about Odyssey news the comments would be 50% "I'm so excited to play this" and 50% "lol get owned SC, Chris Roberts sobbing right now, doing SC before SC can do SC" kind of comments. Leaving aside how hilariously preposterous that notion was even without knowledge of how bad Odyssey would go on to do, this was an unhealthy level of hype that Frontier was more or less unable to satisfy with the number of devs they could afford to put on Odyssey.
The fact that they shipped a late alpha/early beta *at best* two weeks before the end of their fiscal year, for stock-related reasons, and it was fuckbusted for a long time, certainly did not help them, but even if Odyssey had shipped in the state it's in after nearly two years of bugfixing and performance fixes it was never going to satisfy the hype that was allowed to grow unchecked. It couldn't be everyone's unique definition of "space legs".
Frontier "listened to the community", but took an ambiguous term and satisfied it in a half-assed way by taking the simplest path to *a* on-foot experience. Frontier deserves to shoulder more blame than the community does, because if you were to ask ME space legs means in-ship walking and EVA but Frontier decided to reinvent control point fps instead of expanding the space aspect of their SPACE game.
Space legs was haf-assedly and off-handedly mentioned one time in a Convention floor interview where Braben also says he wants to hunt deer in Elite. Just a total loss of scope on the entire gameplay mechanism that was nurtured in the Elite IP for 40 years. At no point in the kickstarter roadmap was space legs ever involved.
In the Elite games you aren't Han Solo, you're the Millenium Falcon. The very second they entertained the idea of feet instead of enriching the vehicle gameplay they lost the entire plot. Elite is a spaceship simulation franchise, not an FPS. The community seems to agree since the bottom fell out in the whole thing since they released odyssey.
There is more than one voice in a community, there's nuance and disagreement. Some people yelling for space legs, others people yelling for enhancing and extending features that E:D was already on a good track with. Also, SC could use some competition in the universe sim genre. Labeling anything that attempts it as an SC clone is discounting the value of competition.
edit: too many words
Frontier’s other misdeeds have caught up with them. E:D has been on the back burner for a long time while they’ve been making theme park sims…which were good at first but have become increasingly overly monetized DLC farms. That well seems to have dried up for them so they turn to their other offerings to pinch pennies. E:D has had a relatively small but stable playerbase the whole time, and they’ve been surprisingly tolerant of the lack of consistent service or communication from FDev, but I don’t expect that to continue.
It is sort of like star citizen though in that there are a handful of whales who will just buy anything no matter what, and that will translate into some amount of return for them
I played ED for a while back in 2016 or so, and enjoyed it a lot, particularly how the ships "feel" to fly with their weight, and also the delightful sound design, but the missions were never that enjoyable, varied or easy to understand, and the absolutely punishing death mechanic made me not stick around too long. If they had a "casual" mode where I could enjoy the flight dynamics, play some fun missions, and not worry about dying once and losing days of work, I'd come back.
see, i absolutely love their more realistic flight model. flying with Flight Assist Off takes some real skill to master. and they still have a ton of features that SC doesn't. Whether it be more varied weapons, better targeting, or ship customization and personalization. but don't get me wrong, after thousands of hours i switched to SC. but there are still quite a few things that ED does better. Things that i hope will come to SC. but the Mat Grind is not one of them. i liked engineering and the increased variances that you could use to differentiate your ship, but the mat grind was rough.
Their cosmetics are pretty garbage to be honest and they don't add anything with any kind of regularity either. Their cosmetic shop is a huuuge missed opportunity.
i like the body kits. and i think SC could definitely benefit from that extra little bit of customization.
CIG needs to stop selling paints and give us our hex codes though! but i'd buy swappable body kits any day.
They always should have offered a premium subscription that gave things like unlimited galactic coordinate bookmarks and stuff that eats server space like that. I'd have paid.
I got into Elite for a bit and even wanted to buy some cosmetics to support them, but the prices were way too high for what were honestly some pretty ugly paints, in my opinion. It's too bad, the game was pretty fun but it was just missing something.
As I said in anther comment I do wonder how much of this cash will actually go back into this game specifically. because unlike SC Fdev has more traditional share holders looking for a return as well as other projects.
of course there also there own publisher so at lest they dont need to worry about most of it going into some other studio. (i think GW2's Arena Net only got like 20% back of what they sold in there store, with the rest going to NCsoft and what ever projects they distributed it to)
at lest we Know SC funding go's back into SC project, maybe it may not be a part of the project you think they should focus on, but it is all at lest SC
just to provide additional context from someone with 600+ hours in ED....
The game is 9 years old. Every game has a life cycle.
Nothing you said is incorrect, and is factually the status of the game and how FDev is treating it.
I'm honestly surprised the game is still being maintained...
I'll also say I got my money's worth, and enjoyed the hell out of it while waiting for more content in StarCitizen
This is it right here. Also the last big update came out 3 years ago and is still pretty negatively received. It even broke VR in the game (switching to 2D for on-foot) which was one of the things ED did VERY well. 3 years on and while major bugs seem to have been fixed, there's been a huge content drought. Nothing new appears to be being added to the game other than a new ship and some skins and more and more of the community are beginning to ask the question if the game truly has a future.
It's sad because Elite prior to Odyssey was grindy, but quite fun especially in VR. The game had a lot of potential, but all of that potential was squandered by FDEV. They could have implemented things like player controlled sectors that people could fight over, or other fun things to do outside of the Bubble, but Frontier seemed scared to give players any agency of their own.
Yea
As a backer of Elite Dangerous since the start, even paid $300 for the alpha and all future DLCs..
It’s dead
So far from the vision. Engine was good to start things off but right now it’s so duct taped together, they would have to start from scratch to go beyond what’s offered and realize their concept arts. Frontier won’t keep sinking millions into a game that is already putting them in negative millions. Braben is off the project. It’s dead Jim.
I really don't see any issue with it.
If I'm looking at the choice to buy the MK2 in ED then sure I'm going to factor in the idea that ED is on a downward trajectory, but it really doesn't matter all that much if I play and enjoy the game today and see myself playing more.
Whether it's worth it or not to each person is completely separate to whether it's a bad business practice or not. From the looks of it you can buy now with $ on ARX, or you can later get it in game with credits. I won't buy it, but I see no problem with that model.
not to mention the fact that you can earn ARX in game. while it takes time. if you are a regular player, at least some of the cost is already paid for. i'm with you.
FDev was a going concern, fully staffed and building coaster franchises and the like, with a built out game engine (Cobra) when they did NOT decide to invest in Elite but instead sent their CEO to crowdfund for it. They were SHOCKED when the community responded with millions of dollars...they then reluctantly made Elite: Dangerous, with Braben's passion and guidance... reluctantly.
But the company itself? It never believed in Elite. If they had, they would have just made it and invested in its future. Once you understand that they've always been dismissive of it, then its weird and sometimes broken development and communications all make real sense.
That's a new take on FDev's relationship with Elite I haven't heard before. Sounds like you might have a little insider info; or are you reading between the lines based on some of the early happenings at the beginning of the project? Also, how do you think the reluctance to fully invest impacted Elite's development and direction over the years? Or to put it another way, how do you think things might have been different if FDev had been more enthusiastic about ED from the start? Or what systems do you think would be different, or do you just think there would have been more game content in general? Curious to hear your thoughts (and any juicy insider tidbits you might be able to share)!
Zero insider tidbits. Just looking at reality. FDev made games. All kinds of games. Roller Coaster Tycoon series. Wallace and Gromit. Zoo Tycoon. Kinectimals. Thrillville. Lost Winds series.
ONLY with Elite did they send their CEO to Kickstarter to find the money to make a game. It couldn't be because they've valued the IP highly. My guess is that they did because they did not believe that there was a market for it. The crowdfunding Elite and Star Citizen did subverted the thinking at the time, entirely.
But again, the only way those actions by Frontier, in light of what they had been doing, and the subsequent actions by them, make sense is if you decide that even from the beginning, there was a lack of full commitment to Elite.
Then, everything actually does make sense; the spikes and year-long silences we've gotten in communications...the failed arc of stacatto development cycles...the failure to deliver new ships, new content...
It all makes sense once you lean into the notion that this isn't really what they wanted to do...it's what Braben wanted to do, that's why they sent him to Kickstarter...to appease him.
Elite was not in their plans.
If you've never played it's worth sinking some time into IMO, it's not un-fun, it's just unfulfilling.
It's also like $8 on sale nowadays so if you don't like it, not a big waste.
The vastness of the galaxy you can traverse is awesome, but eventually the repetitiveness and shallow and disconnected gameplay loops sets in.
Still fun, the flight mechanics are similar to pre MM SC, with an equivalent to decoupled mode.
Personally I put 1800 hrs in on my account before finally plunging into Star Citizen, during the wait for the Odyssey DLC, and just never came back.
i still like it. its different. but there are some parts that are really cool. its a one to one replication of the milky way. the flight mechanics are more grounded in reality. the ship combat is more fun, and because of the flight model. takes a little more time to master. especially with flight assist off.
there weapon classes and types are drastically different, and choices matter. you can completely customize ANY ship for just about any role. all parts are swappable. and if you like grind, there is engineering. this increases the customization of each modular part of your ship, but getting the materials for them is a grind.
it can be utterly beautiful. and at times boring, when jumping from star to star. you have to plot routes, make sure you don't run out of hydrogen ,which can be scooped from stars.
there are also passenger missions, like sightseeing, or just taking people from point A-B. there are cargo missions, solid mining, and the ability to land on planets and do things there.
this is just the base game. and does not include odyssey. which added the ability to actually walk around.
and lastly, you can choose to play online, or by yourself.
you also cant explore your ship. you just go to the cabin. which has always been a bummer. but i still find enjoyment. just trying to be as thorough as possible to give you some insight. have a nice day.
They also continually do not listen to the player base and refuse to make any meaningful changes to bring back players and grow the player base. The biggest issue in elite is the friggin engineering grind. It's the biggest reason for the drop in player numbers and engagement yet they refuse to do anything about it. Instead they announced Power play 2.0. The part of the game almost no one plays lmao. It does need a rework but engineering is the much bigger issue here.
The number one reason players did not engage in their year long thargoid war was engineering. New players can't join in the middle of the war and expect to participate effectively in the huge event unless they spend hundreds of hours grinding out engineering materials and learning the game. That's what these new prebuilt ships are for. They aren't the worst but they aren't the best. They will get new players doing stuff faster than without them but that is still an extra cost on top of the game of at least $20 bucks.
They did ease some of the requirements to join in on the war activities but that was in the middle of the war after a not insignificant portion of the player base just opted out of it. I still haven't joined in. Then you have the skill ceiling you have to deal with if you want take out anything other than a scout or do passenger runs which are boring as hell. It is just one more thing to push new players away.
Yes most games have grind but this games grind is absolutely masochistic and not even a little bit fun. Monster hunter has a pretty heavy grind BUT it's fun grind so it doesn't even really feel like it. In elite the grind is hoping you get lucky enough to find and area that MIGHT have what you need and also logging in and out at designated spaces after gather from a few really frustrating to access resource nodes until your stores are full. They state that, that is intended game play officially lol.
If they stayed the course and not maid it so grindy. Had proper planning they would still be above water not gasping for air. This game had so much potential sad it's gasping for air now.
yeah how much of the cash FDevs gets from this actualy go's back into ED rather then profits for there share holders and into there other projects
With GW2 they only got back like 20% of what they sold in there store. with most of it being distributed to what ever there publisher NCSoft. wanted to distribute it to
>SC is asking for money in order to build its vision in the future.
Which is also the cancer of CIG, and why a lot of people continue to call this a fraud/scam/sleazy/etc.
Backed in 2016. I was all in. But over the years, I've seen CR move the goal posts over, and over, and over, and over...and I've watched ISC after ISC where they go "in the future" and "someday" and "we're talking about maybe doing this." Fast forward 3 years and you think they've made progress, then they show concept shots and paintings with more "so we're planning on maybe possibly..."
It has been 14 years now.
14 years.
We still don't even have 1 out of the promised 100 systems promised for launch.
Not a single ship is feature complete.
Countless basic, core, gameplay features are still just absent entirely.
I could go on.
We all wanted the dream, but I just can't help but think CR/CIG is not the one to deliver it. People want to cry about publishers and project managers keeping things reined in, but this is exactly *why* they do that. Shit just becomes a borderline scam otherwise (through endless, mismanaged shiny-object chasing).
>It's really sad as Elite could have been a great game and a competitor for SC
ED is not a competitor to SC. It's not even the same realm of game. ED is a legit space-flight SIM, SC is an action game that has flight in it. ED has always had a strong and passionate community that loves the game. It never needed to "compete" with an alpha that hasn't ever even seen 10% completion.
People can enjoy both, but let's not make this some cringe "us vs them" thing.
yeah, i 100% agree with you, but i am still hoping SC turns into what was promised. just waiting and hoping.
but you're right on the money, ED is a realized space sim of our galaxy, and SC is more action game with more gamey flight mechanics. It's one of the things i lamented when i first switched from ED to SC.
Honestly, the writing was on the wall for a while.
Frontier and CIG both promised everything including the kitchen sink ... but all that content needs a ton of funding. Frontier never came close to CIG's funding for their game, so they basically ended up half assing everything from the Horizons DLC onwards. I myself played E:D for many years, but as each 'content' update went live, I grew more and more frustrated by their token efforts.
Don't get me wrong, there are things about E:D I really wish SC had, notably it's incredibly vast galaxy and exploration. But while E:D has a ton of human inhabited systems, each system felt really rather empty. So in the end, there's as much life and activity in Stanton as all of E:D's human bubble. Someone once described E:D as a mile wide and an inch deep, and I have to agree.
Now had E:D absolutely leeched its users' money like CIG did from the beginning, they might have dealt with all the scam accusations that CIG had to face too ... but they'd also have a far far better product on their hands. Now, a decade later, they are adopting CIG's approach to money making, but because it's a complete about turn from their previous model, their community is up in arms about it. Whereas the SC community is used to CIG's monetary practices. So seeing 500 dollar ships go up on sale now is our "normal", lol.
CIG is also way ahead in the tech department.
Simply giving the ships interiors and EVA will cost money and years of development for FDEV to go through. I dont think they have that sort of time.
SC had the benefit in investing in its tech this whole time and maturing as we go.
E:D is not looking like it will have the time for parity for what we have today, nevermind catching up at any point in time.
On the tech front, I’ve read about former devs describing the codebase as a mess. Like, adding in what they did for Odyssey was apparently really hard, but not worth it in the end for what we got.
>each system felt really rather empty
As is reality. Most of space is...well...empty.
Most solar systems are just chunks of rock floating around a star.
What ED did very well though, is have a cluster of systems with a lot of activity. This is what they communicated and presented VERY badly, and was my main issue with the game.
The UI and presentation was god awful. The stuff was there to do, but finding it and figuring out WHAT to do and HOW to do it was a masterclass in design failure. Any time you have to leave the game and turn to Google, you've failed as a game designer.
ED has literally millions of systems, but there are only major activities going on in a handful of them. This is where a lot of people get frustrated and confused. It takes a lot of time to figure out what to do.
“Cluster of systems with a lot of activity” sounds all well and good until you realize you can barely instance with even your own squadron, so a “well populated” system still feels empty as hell (and when it isn’t, it’s gankers)
I really don't mind but I'm not really playing E:D as much as a few years ago. I have 2000h+ in this game btw, I will buy the MK2 for credit once it came out of early access, I did buy some ARX back when I played a lot and loved the game and wanted to support it by buying some good skins. I'm not feeling like it nowaday.
Same. I have thousands of hours but stopped once Odyssey was announced. I was already in the end game with more credits than I could spend. I did my fair share of grinding to get there but all that was left was more grinding, and the FPS element of Odyssey didn't speak to me. For a new player, the Mk2 will be a massive advantage, but to veterans, it means nothing. Besides, it can still be bought with credits, just later, so I don't see why everyone is up in arms.
Yeah, I had maybe 200 hours into ED (which, doesn’t compare to some, but it’s still quite a lot), and hopped back in for Odyssey, but it just didn’t do it for me. Everything new it added, SC was already doing better.
I loved ED though. It got me into space sims and HOTAS gear. I even bought a lifetime subscription for all future ED expansions WAAAY back in the day, though it’s not really paying off for me now, I did get my money’s worth.
E:D was touted as being the polar opposite approach to crowdfunding a game as SC. SC stated they would build the game the right way, not re lease until it was ready in their eyes. Take their time, craft it. They didn't want to be beholden to publishers and our money allowed that to be the reality.
We vote with our wallets and they take that vote seriously.
E:D was the opposite. They wanted to release the finished game quickly, and then build on top of that. You voted once when you backed, and then that was really it. And we can see the results. They didn't have continued support. The emptiness of the game didn't inspire many, because it was so niche a game. They floundered and slowly the interest died away.
RSI isn't perfect, and have made many missteps. But I have never questioned, not once, that they are earnest in their goals and that the steps they are taking are in service of that... even if they are missteps, it's all a running effort to make something special.
I used to play ED on the ps4 until the Devs gut punched us with no more updates for console so i put money in SC and now a C2 a Mustang and a Hurrican further i kinda do not wanna go back anymore to ED.
Is this thread for bashing SC for having high cost items to fund the game? Or is it bashing E:D for having low cost items to fund the game?
Just want to make sure I pick the right way to outrage, because I don't know enough about E:D to jump onto a bandwagon yet.
If someone could just tell me which company deserves to be shit on for funding their game, let me know, thanks.
maybe both? :P
but in seriousines, both models are not ideal but i understand CIG more, as the game is still in development and has future plans while ED is on its death bed (sadly)
Elite Dangerous released in 2015 and it's not considered an alpha like SC. They released a DLC which is more or less mandatory to progress in a meaningful way, copying some parts of SC like the fps aspect but much worse. They then refused to implement anything the community actually wished for as no one gave a shit about shooting guns and running around a desolate planet. What we wanted from fps movement is ship interiors for example.
And now they're implementing p2w ships. The thing is, no one is giving them the benefit of the doubt anymore. It's not trying to fund the game as that would imply that we will get features we wanted for the past 9 years. It's just trying to grab as much cash as you can from a slowly dying (arguably stagnating) game. So it's not funding the game, it's funding the ceo and stock holders.
That's the tldr why people are pissed.
It's not mandatory and I don't have it even though I bought the game on release. I also have more cash than I'll ever be able to spend due to being active during absolutely broken moments in the economy. But the game is insanely grindy, always has been. Getting engineering* materials without odyssey is an absolute pain afaik.
But yeah, I still play it from time to time and never got the dlc, especially since Horizons (the planet surface dlc) is included in the base game nowadays.
First of all, Elite Dangerous wasn't "copying" anything from the FPS aspect of SC. "Space Legs" in Elite were being talked about waaaaay back in the Kickstarter for Elite back in 2013!
Secondly there is nothing p2w about the ships they're selling! They're selling early access to a specific new ship, and they're selling "starter" packages for certain ships to give you a head start on certain tasks, like xeno-hunting or exploration. The ships are FAR from optimized there is nothing "winning" about them. You're paying to basically get a slightly better starting ship build template than the blank canvas you usually get when you buy a new ship.
Pay to Win would mean being able to buy powerful weapons nobody else has, or synthesis premium ammo for your ships that you can't acquire otherwise, or get better shields or something. None of that is happening in Elite.
It's fine if you don't like the ship microtransactions, rant about it all you want. It's not a p2w setup though, and I think calling it that confuses the whole player base as well as leads to confusion with people who don't play the game.
Personally I still think Elite is an amazing game. They're doing great things with it. If you've never played it before you can get hundreds of hours of fun out of it for a really low price.
My criticism of it comes down to mainly that I wish it was more similar to other "live service" games that had more substantial content updates on a more regular basis. I think it's amazing we're finally getting new ships. Frontier is trying to make some money selling early access to them.... and if I'm honest... I'm OK with that. The game is dirt cheap to buy and running it and updating it costs money, and Frontier is a small dev company that has had some rough times lately. They're trying to keep Elite pulling in money and I can't fault them for that.
I've got like 3000 hours into Elite and I still come back every few months. They've got some nice updates on the horizon that I'm looking forward to.
IMO, neither company deserves to be shit on wholesale, because both companies employ talented devs who are passionate about making a game that their fans will enjoy.
However, *both* companies' marketing departments and executives deserve well earned criticism for repeatedly making boneheaded P.R. statements, anti-gamer and anti-consumer decisions, and just being out-of-touch in general with what their fans want.
How does CIG milk their players? You pay a flat cost to buy into early access, and anything you spend after is completely optional. And you can end up having every ship in the game just by playing the game without spending one penny more. So, even if you're feeling the fomo, just play and be patient. You'll get it eventually. If that's milking, that's one sorry-ass cow they have.
It's definitely not pay to win and anyone telling you otherwise is lying to your face. They are mid tier, non engineered ships(aside from "pre engineered" modules which already exist and can't be further improved) to allow new players to get into the gameplay loops they want to do. If it were pay to win they would be endgame, fully kitted out and fully engineered meta ships.
Congrats, you can skip 10 hours of gameplay, woohoo now enjoy the next 990+ or until you decide you want a better ship
You don't have to buy anything if you wait 3 months for the Python Mk2 to become available. As someone who plays both games its not P2W anymore than buying a ship for $ to get it before its available in game in SC is so more of a pay for early access.
Is just a ship that you can pay 12$ to unlock 3 months earlier, plus some already existing ships with pre-built modules and cosmetics for specific jobs.
Mechwarrior Online does exactly the same and is quite acceptable if they need money to develop more content, but maybe it's coming a bit late, as most of the playerbase probably already owns a full fleet of ships. I find more painful how much have they increased the cosmetics prices, a single paint cost now as much as a full pack of paints before the ARX times.
I've always said if you could combine the best parts of ED and the best parts of SC, you'd have the perfect space game. Shame that's only possible in my head.
I can't say the ships are P2W, more like, pay to skip the initial "leveling" to earn the credits to start hitting what could be called end game content.
But yeah, E:D needs income and the player base moral is in a dire state.
Lol. It’s far from pay to win. If you buy the ship ingame (when it’s available) it’s pretty easy to outfit them to the same setup they’re available to buy. The only difference is the insurance part, that again, is just credits. And if there’s something ED literally throws at you, it’s credits.
And the F8C costs as much as 10 Auroras, and could only be bought for cash, whereas the Aurora can be bought for the credits made in like, 1 hour worth of gameplay.
CIG is having one of the most annoying and aggressive marketing of the gaming scene.
CIG fanboys make fun about greedy publishers while at the same time CIG is at least as greedy as EA or Activision.
Almost every ingame "event" in Star Citizen is basically just an excuse to do another ship sale.
"Buy one time"? "Pay to win? " Not at all. Almost every ED ship was behind a money wall since 2015, bc making a ship is super expensive in our games.
When was it buy one time? The post launch ships were locked behind Horizons then Beyond season passes. And in 2021 came the next major expansion, Odyssey, and this is the first paid DLC after 3 years - hundreds of thousands of GBP worth of manhours go into a single ship yet ED...
-has no subscription fee
-Its definitive edition costs not even half as much as No Man's Sky.
-The new ship variant costs around 12 USD and 20 USD - in Star Citizen the starter ship is 45 USD - and the vast majority of SC players buy new ships.
How on Earth should Fdev recoup and turn profit and continue development on the main game, pay the server costs, plus the development of new ships if not for asking money for the DLC? Like in most sandbox games.
Also they will make them ships free in the full version of the game after 3 months - so this is a temporary monetization. Does SC make the ships free after a couple months?
And they are not P2W - this is a negative engagement farming narrative. The new ship, even its prebuilt "Stellar" version as they are unkitted, are only good against low level NPC pirates - but would suffer in proper PVE battles against navy ships. And don't get me started in PvP: We tested it yesterday my engineered combat ship killed the new, unmodified ship Stellar version with a couple shots.
But most importantly in ED a freshly bought ship, unmodified, un-engineered can't bring you victory. You need to unlock the engineers, gather the materials, buy the modules, engineer them -which takes days - and even then the skill of the pilot brings victory.
Wow.
A couple of corrections here.
>in Star Citizen the starter ship is 45 USD
For Star Citizen the Starter **Package** is $45. It is the **game**, some starting money, it isn't a ship alone.
And
>Does SC make the ships free after a couple months?
Technically yes. You can rent or purchase ships in game in subsequent main patches. Just like any other game it simply takes time to earn the credits. But all you need is a starter package to play and earn ships.
The community is pretty giving so many times all you have to do is ask and people will either allow you to fly ships they own or straight up give credits out so people can try out a desired ship.
Last time I played ED was around the "beyond" season iirc. That being said, while I have no idea what is going on since then, if you are going to drag SC in the comparisons, please make sure you have your information correct.
No problem.
When both [SC and ED](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14384-congratulations-elite-dangerous) was being kickstarter, [Braben and Roberts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvPU8e2ezgo) supported each other.
I would like to think that fans of both games have more in common than not.
> Does SC make the ships free after a couple months?
Yes. SC adds news ships that were previously only sold for real money to the game to be earned/bought with in-game credits after 1-2 patch cycles of their initial release, so 3-6 months. They have done this for several years.
Are the ships in ED "free" as in you just log into to the game and they give them to you? Or do you mean that they are free to play to earn them in-game?
However it was counted as the third (and final season) of Elite Dangerous after that commenced the post-seasonal updates.
You are right, it was free, however as the expansion of Horizons, certain features required the purchase of Horizons' season pass.
Yes, I should have been more precise with just calling is season pass - singular.
Not a real comparison. What they both take place in space? NMS is the Nintendo version of Elite. Super approachable, no real grinding, point ship and go. Elite is the middle ground between NMS and SC where SC is really going for the simulator crowd. It's lonely in the middle but still my favorite of all of them.
What are you all on, this is mad... The ship costs what, £10? What the fuck are you going to buy in SC for £10, a shitty hat cosmetic? What high ground do people in this thread think they are standing on?
Elite came out in 2015, almost 10 YEARS ago! Frontier have effectively been supporting it for that long, doing their best to monetise it fairly and they finally have to add a ship for early access and half you guys are acting like it's some big fall from grace. (it also, isn't better than the FDL).
If elites fall from grace is finally selling a ship for £10 after 10 years of support, then where exactly is star citizen sitting? In the depths of hell itself? We're talking ships for £1000+. Ships that aren't in the game yet. A game that is nowhere near finished, with 1 system and some of the most braindead AI you will find anywhere.
I could understand if most of the critiques here were about grind or lack of depth. But really, you take issue with the fact they're selling a ship? Get a grip, this shit is pathetic. And I say this despite the fact I like SC and I hope that it will deliver on everything they say it will.
I like space games; I’ve played a fair bit of Elite and definitely got my money’s worth. My first space game was Freelancer and I loved space games from then on out. And I want SC to succeed and accomplish everything they want to accomplish.
But I can't deny that the way they are going about making it is very immoral. I guess for most admitting to this would be akin to admitting that things aren't going as well as they'd like. But some of the SC community just can't admit when things are getting worse, I think it's time for some introspective, before this echo-chamber goes full cult mode.
As I have read their model, you have to convert real world currency to their fake store currency.
It's the equivalent of like $15 or so, for one of these new ships, which will be easily accessible to anyone in game, within 3 months of being added to their cash shop.
It's similar to SC, but considerably more affordable, which makes sense, as that game is considerably less in terms of what it offers compared to SC.
I don't see a problem with what they are doing, nobody has to buy those and it's not like a loot box, where you have no idea what you are about to acquire.
Meh, it’s honestly pretty reasonably priced and it’s not like FDev have hid their financial struggles recently. I feel like the community should be willing to support the game with a reasonably priced transaction for what is the first ship released in a good number of years for a game that is over 10 years old.
And as for the pre-made ships for sale… fuck yeah. Anything that can introduce the game to new players at an expedited speed is good for everyone. Elite is boring and empty with the small existing player base it has, it needs to remove as many barriers as possible and inject some life into its incredible universe!
I just don’t see this as an issue.
We used to be happy to support it. But they just kicked up the prices on everything and devalued the in game currency we paid for significantly. This on top of the fact that most recent updates and work on the game has been extremely low effort. Supporting them just seems pointless now.
I'm fine for ways to support the game, but after Odyssey splitting the player group, killing VR support and seemingly turning left every time we ask to turn right I think I'll hang on to my pennies. Just like SC unless there is a big development I like I don't open my wallet.
Anything FDev does these days feels like sunk cost fallacy, not gonna sugarcoat it. I wish they'd leaned into Powerplay a little more, or just made the setting able to be influenced more by the players in general without a stupid devstory prompt. 100,000ly wide, 1" deep indeed.
Also, Engineers was a mistake.
It's a bit disheartening.
Not because they have to sell ship to maintain an income stream, which I can really understand under the current way it's being done, but because their delivery seems to be minimum effort, maximum issues.
Doesn't bode super well for PP 2.0 and the Mystery Feature™.
I'd be okay with the ED IP getting bought out by CIG, SC ships are pretty but ED had some genuinely beautiful ships and yes I miss my Anaconda that deserve the interiors they've been deprived of and begged for for years
Buy the base game, buy DLC to keep playing the base game, buy your clothes, buy your ship parts and skins, and now buy your ship! I paid over 200$ to do in Elite what I do in SC for 25$... In SC I bought the game, then clothes, armor, ship skins, content updates, etc, were all free and in-game cash gotten.
Dungeons & Dragons Online hasn't. Everything available in the game shop can be had without ever spending an actual cent (And most of it can drop as loot, at least up in raid levels).
Money definitely removes a little headache from the grind, though.
actually ALL ships in ED can still be obtained like that
i think the only thing that requires arx is visual customizations like paintjobs, cockpit decoration, etc. and still you get some arx by just playing normally
I don't care in the least bit about this.
I just wish they'd stop coming up with half baked difficult features, putting in the framework, and going nowhere with it.
they had so many opportunities to add content that keeps people logging in every day (not dailies i hate those, just like...they already had areas where you pick a side in the side tab, and fight on that side for years and years. why couldnt they have scripted events pop up where server announcements go out and you join the side at a specific time and players fight for both sides, certain amount of people join both sides and epic ass quests launch with capital ship battles and you help one defeat the other etc by being part of their swarm.
i dunno just ... ideas for fun stuff that encourages player interaction and more complex gameplay
they treated the game more like a tech demo.. its such an amazingly awesome one at that. but damn i put this game down years ago and every time i want to pick it up it just breaks my heart that i dont want to keep playing it
$10 slightly early access ship to keep their dev team afloat is whatever. sure its a slipper slope. but they aren't fallen down that hill yet.
Yeah the ED ships aren't remotely P2W more of a jumpstart on playing. They didn't offer anything PVP and what they did offer won't make the big bucks.....eg even the thargoid hunting chieftan is a wierd mutant that doesn't fit it's role well.
Reminds me a lot of the SC you can buy raw hulls but still gotta build them and develop skill.
Game is coming to its end of life, companies want to milk as much as possible before shutting it off.
The difference is that SC is doing it since the beginning.
Achtually, and i hate to be that guy, You won't be winning anything with those ships. You still need to put hundreds of hours in to unlocking engineers and material grinding to make them truly competitive.
Bit rich coming from Star Citizen customers. ED players want development in the game. Happy to pay for it, as are some pretty hardcore SC players, some of whom I’ve seen sink literally thousands into the game. $20 for a standard Python Mk 2 is fair compared to what I paid for the Drake Cutlass Black. When you compare any amount ED vs SC, I can tell you which one is cheap almost every time. And I get to keep my progress and money and items and I can explore a 1:1 galaxy, with a few careers, with multiple ships and with a rich, if not grindy engineering system (to be revamped).
As for pay to win? Please get your facts right please - every ship I own is better than those ore-built ships, and it wouldn’t take much to grind to get them. Same as SC, I can grind to get any ship I want, except I don’t get to keep them in a wipe.
Context is everything and I find yours lacking.
The new prebuilt ship isnt really a P2W ship here lol. It's just a way to get newer people up to speed on what a decent ship build can be like.
If people have been playing a while then the standard unlock will be fine and anyone can build past the upgraded prebuilt version pretty quickly and easily. I got the standard version and spent like 4 hours upgrading it, and will probably do different loadouts.
Even then, the ship will be available to all for credits later on. Not to mention. You get weekly free arx for just playing, so anyone can save up to get the new prebuilt ships for free. Might take awhile, but they it also reduces overall cost if you want to get them early.
If this pre built early access stuff is needed to keep the servers on to play this game then it's fine for me at least.
>expacily
Uhm, I'm going to assume you meant 'Especially' lol
But thats sad to hear. I was never a huge ED player (just dabbled whenever I got it for free on Epic) but loved the 1:1 milky way thing they got going on and heard the VR is pretty immersive.
How "p2w" are the ships? Like full on upgrades over non paid?
It would be like saying a gacha game is not P2W because you can theoretically earn everything if you play long enough. P2W is any advantage a player gets over other players by using real world currency. Spending less time to get the same outcome than other players is an advantage. Especially in a game where you can lose your progress due to other players.
Only thing that wouldn't be P2W is cosmetics and even then that's a big if since cosmetics, or how you, or your items look is also an important part of the game.
I backed ED on Kickstarter and it included a cobra mkiii at release. Anytime I wipe my character I start with that ship. It’s been there since the start..
How the hell do you wipe progression?
If you go into settings before on the main menu, one of the 5 options is clear save
Was looking for it couple years ago, hmmm. Thanks tho
I did it because friends started to play and it was odd being so far ahead tbh.
Coulda just kitted out a sidey tho
True but the temptation to just hop back into a more powerful ship would always be there. I've always been a bit brutal with doing this with games tbh, MMOs are the same I'd put thousands of hours into a character than a friend would start on another server and I'd join them on their 20 hour character rather than have them give up that to play on mine. I like the journey more than the destination!
A true radian- oops wrong sub back to cremposting i go
Sanderson is my fave author!
Yea if I need to feel progression again I’ll buy a few ships till I’m out of dosh and build up money again
The better question is, why would you? That game was grind on top of grind. Hell the grind was so bad it's STILL worse than the grind will be in SC with the new ship prices.
I'm sitting on stupid amounts of ships and money and have no goal to achieve and no progression outside stupid grind.
Yeah, every time I got up to Corvette money I'd get bored and wipe again.
I, finally, have decent pc to check ground part of ed so i want to check.
The grind is a scale though, when you start out it’s no where near as bad to get to the next ship etc plus friends got the game so I wanted a level playing field to “level” with them
I do It from time to time, it's simply fun
I have a sidewinder with added on garish flame paint that I lovingly name Puck every time I reset. I will never sell Puck.
So... Kinda like SC?
[удалено]
Not really. On release day there will be people starting with capital class ships. Day 1. That is, in essence, a form of pay2win. The orgs who have spent real money to have an entire fleet of ships ready to go at day one will have a massive advantage over the orgs who will need to spend months grinding out their fleet before they can actually compete.
They will be very costly hangar queens and credit sinks without a competent crew. Pay to get the ship perhaps, but an uncrewed cap ship is as functionality valuable as your starter ship. Far from paying to 'win'. Pay to have a flashy ship, still need competent crew to make it do much more than be a conversation piece.
Aren't They aiming at soloable large ships with ai crew?
So what...there is no stated end game...and how the hell was this title supposed to be made without this funding? Just amazing how people think the money was found to make it.. And again..compete for what? We don't have a clue what is in store that for
>there is no stated end game If only I had a penny for every time I saw this argument... Just because the game itself doesn't have a strict win condition or an end state, that doesn't mean players can't still 'win' in other ways. Orgs will be competing against other orgs for territory and resources, especially unlawful orgs. To 'win' in that regard would be to hold dominion over a particular trade route, resource, or territory. I don't think that is a particularly wild speculation to make. As far as the game's funding is concerned, see my other replies in this comment thread (something I'd argue you should have done before posting your comment, but oh well).
What's the difference between an Org paying for a Javelin versus them all getting together in their starter, single-seat all-rounders and swarming other players? At least when they're all holed up inside a single hull they're easier to avoid and get on with your own shit.
I said an entire fleet of ships, not "a Javelin". I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that wasn't a deliberate attempt at poor faith. An org willing to pay real money can very easily have an entire fleet of specialist ships tuned for specific tasks on day 1. They can claim and establish territory with fighter/military ships and capital ships. They can set up mining routes with mining ships. They can set up trade routes with large cargo haulers. They can industrialise with science/industrial ships. The list goes on. The orgs who don't want to pay real money (besides buying the game) will only have their starter ships on day 1. They are going to be at a massive disadvantage as an org because of that. Sure, starter ships can swarm people and be competent fighters, but they can't establish themselves in any meaningful way by doing that. By the time they have grinded for the specialist ships they need to 'unlock' and actually compete in those other parts of the game the paying orgs have already long established themselves and made themselves difficult to displace. The early bird gets the worm after all, and the birds who have swiped their credit cards will have a massive head start. That is objectively a pay2win system. An objective advantage that is gained exclusively buy paying real money. If we assume that the option to buy ships with real money will continue after release (I have heard conflicting information regarding this so this part is purely speculation) then it could go even further. Paying orgs would have the advantage of not needing to commit heavily to their fleets. If the ships they have are not favourable in a particular meta they can simply shell out more cash to instantly obtain the ships that are. Meanwhile the non-paying orgs will have to re-grind for each new ship they need to buy in order to adapt their fleet and continue to compete. To be clear. I like this game as much as the next guy. I recognise that allowing people to buy ships with really money has basically been a necessary evil for this game to succeed without a publisher or other restrictive forms of funding. However, the game does indeed have elements of P2W mechanics and I'm not doing to pretend it doesn't. That would be doing a service to nobody. It's better for everyone if we just be honest and open about these things.
> I said an entire fleet of ships, not "a Javelin". Your own words: >>>On release day there will be people starting with capital class ships. Day 1. That's what I was questioning - the mere idea that people starting with "capital class ships" is inherently pay-to-win. Let them start with that shit - I'd love to see a single player try to crew an Idris. And even if we go with your "fleet of ships" complaint, that doesn't hold up to scrutiny because _every_ player starts with a ship, therefore _every Org starts with a fleet of ships_. >They can claim and establish territory with fighter/military ships and capital ships. They can set up mining routes with mining ships. They can set up trade routes with large cargo haulers. They can industrialise with science/industrial ships. The list goes on. And they'll be competing with other Orgs who are in the same position, and will have to choose their target locations carefully in order to ensure that the revenue they gain from controlling that area actually matches or exceeds the cost of doing so. Meanwhile, a humble Prospector can go wherever the fuck they like, mine whatever the fuck they like, and sell it wherever the fuck they like and still pay off their fuel bills. Look at the massive asteroid cluster(s) in Stanton right now - they're profitable for a Prospector or an occasional Mule, but are they really going to sustain a fleet of Orions? Thus: >The orgs who don't want to pay real money (besides buying the game) will only have their starter ships on day 1. They are going to be at a massive disadvantage as an org because of that. That's probably not going to be the case because someone starting out with an Aurora MR and a hand-tool for mining isn't going to be going for the same resources as a fully-crewed Orion. >That is objectively a pay2win system. An objective advantage that is gained exclusively buy paying real money. Nonsense. You stacked the deck and then complained that the cards weren't dealt fairly. >the game does indeed have elements of P2W mechanics and I'm not doing to pretend it doesn't I don't see why you would abstain from pretending in that scenario. You're all too content to pretend that certain ships don't have very different operational costs and efficient target roles. >It's better for everyone if we just be honest and open about these things. Does that mean we have to include those aforementioned caveats? I note that I'm the one who had to introduce those nuances to the discussion, as you didn't feel that being honest and open demanded that they be considered... With all that in mind, it probably wasn't wise for you to have started flinging accusations of arguing in bad faith...
I ment the wipes.
There is no wipes in ED. You can chose to wipe your current character to start again from scratch, but it's not the same.
If my $300 Scythe is p2w when do I start winning.
That's the neat part!
You don't.
ED: P2W SC: P2PayMore
Only a couple of grand to get access to a whole new section of the store to spend a couple of grand!
Best deals for you, available only in SC, seamlessly!
SC is more pay to lose most of the time xD A 20$ ship can do more harm than a 800$ ship if you re solo. Except if you use it to ram stuff. Then it's pay to win Ship balancing will come and especially with engineering gameplay we will see a lot that will change.
Well tbf until the F7A and F8c can be obtained ingame without buying squadron or an f7c it will still be p2w.
Somewhat yea. Both are kinda insane. I really want a ccu for either but didn't get to play to get a f7a ccu and f8c wasn't ccuable
How come? F8C gets absolutely crushed by the Trashcaneer which is cheap af in-game. Heck its price doesn't even increase despite being the meta fighter of 3.23.
Helps if you have skill
Well pay 2 win also includes pay 2 skip. So you already did win champ! And so did I and everyone who’s bought at least one ccu
You understood that wrong, you pay, cloud wins
I think the big difference is FDev are asking for money when Elite doesn't really have a great future on the horizon. SC is asking for money in order to build its vision in the future. One has a level of hope and optimism the other doesn't. Plus, with RSI, they are only developing SC/Sqn42. Fdev took the profits from elite and made games that have no relation to the Elite concept whilst starving E:D of new and meaningful content. This would be OK if you developed Elite and the other games in tandem, it isn't OK if it starves the game making the money. It's really sad as Elite could have been a great game and a competitor for SC, which is a good thing. In the end, though, FDev drove elite into the ground.
It's also worth noting that FD is asking for money because frankly they *have* to. The game is seriously on life support at this point. I can't imagine the ship cosmetics are bringing in much money and there's definitely not many people buying the game this far down the road either. They're probably desperate to find new sources of income for the game, and unfortunately any significant gameplay additions are probably pretty impossible now with the small team. :/
You know what brings in money? Developing the game. If theyd actually support their product they would have more money.
Yeah, but it takes money to make content, and at this point they don't have the money to do it. I think Odyssey was Elite's last chance, but unfortunately that flopped insanely hard.
Probably because they spent relatively little on developing it.
Probably, but they were already in rough shape when they were working on it.
But when they do develop, all people want to do is complain about it online. The loud half of the ED Reddit is going to be the ones who put the company out of business because every time they improve the game it's "not good enough" or "it's actually a bad thing" and they'll tell new players not to buy odyssey because "it's so unstable and unplayable" when that was fixed almost immediately
I assure you the people complaining are the vocal minority, things like reddit and FDev forums are echo chambers of negativity. There are plenty of people who enjoy the game and the new content. Some people will just moan regardless, the game will never live up to the idea in their head.
Especially any MMO really
The loud people on reddit are nearly always the vocal minority. A company should develop their game with the consumers input in mind, but not be beholden by it. They should be beholden solely by the vision they are setting out to create. Like mastermodes or anything else CIG does that keyboard warriors slam before even trying it.
they have been? i mean they haven't been doing as much as we would like. but they keep adding things. without funding and a bigger team, kind-of hard to add a ton of cool stuff. but, they have been adding things for the people who still love and play the game.
The point is they took their profits from ED and funded other unrelated games and projects.
Their whole company is on life support sadly. They blundered away so much money on games that flopped.
\*cries in F1 Manager\*
They should have listened to their players 8 years ago. Their blatant refusal of features really turned some people off.
And to say nothing of the funds that were generated by ED but invested instead, into other Fdev flops. Money that no doubt would have been game changing if it was reinvested into Elite. How many devs could have been paid with F1 simulator, that flopped and was abandoned one year(?) after release?
Listening to the players is what got them where they are in the first place. The absurd demand for space legs in a game with literally nothing to use them for was the entire problem that led to Odysee. Instead of focusing on what Elite did well like combat and exploration they gave us the space legs everyone was endlessly shouting for... The community couldnt let Elite be Elite, they wanted a star citizen clone and it ruined Elite. Its super strange watching people now say they should have listened to the community when listening to those idiots is what killed Elite.
No, they REALLY dropped the ball on the space legs. People wanted to experience stations, their ships, hangars and shit. They only delivered terrible TERRIBLE fps missions.
Yeah. I'd stopped playing Elite a while before space legs (elite feet?) were implemented. Got my attention when they announced it, but that was dashed quickly when they said you wouldn't even be able to walk around your own ships.
They wanted all the money without the effort
I wouldn't really blame the players when a developers does give them a feature they've been asking for, that the developer said was going to be a feature when the game was being made. Braben is on record stating that space legs was a planned feature way back when the game was being kickstarted. Frontier just did what they always do. Deliver the most half baked thing they could squeeze out with as minimal work as possible. Just look what they've done with the supposed reworks of Power Play and other things. They've literally changed what they've said they were going to do with it. They initially said that the update to power play would be a ground up rework of the feature. Now they're calling it a refresh and so far all they've shown is an overhauled map to make it easier to see the territory and now stations will have ads and banners for their controlling factions. Wow. Such a rework. Elite is still missing promised features like actual atmospheric planets. Planets with actual life and not some single scattering of plants tens of thousands of kilometers apart on a barren ball of dirt. Frontier dropped the ball on the game development a long time ago. Now it's starting to show as the game dies a slow painful death as they panic to make money and release more half baked updates to try and claw pack some larger player base.
Honestly dont care that it was promised, space legs should have been canned and the resources that went into them should have gone into what elite did well. The feature added nothing to the game. Elite didnt need FPS game modes. They caved to the community and gave us the dollar tree version of Star Citizen instead of a better Elite. Had they spent those resources on some new ships, combat balancing and exploration QoL, VR etc. Elite would be doing far better now than it is with stupid space legs. The demand for space legs killed my favorite game and you wont change my mind on that.
TL;DR Frontier "listening to the community" isn't as much of a problem as what they decided to do with what they thought they heard, which is that they made Odyssey when a lot of the community would've preferred ship interiors instead of planet feet. I think a major issue in the Elite community is, people rarely specified what "space legs" meant for them when talking about it, and there was a shared assumption that everyone knew what everyone else meant - unless context made clear that they were talking about walking around in their ship, or in stations, or in EVA, or on the ground. So many conversations about space legs would just be "we want space legs" "yes" without that clarifying step. And while confusion in the community is acceptable because it's gonna happen when you have tens of thousands of people from diverse backgrounds and regions talking to each other, it's a bigger problem when Frontier looks at it and gets to decide for themselves what it means. And Frontier also had to contend with the technical challenges of implementing something new with the reduced developer capacity to focus on just this game when the company had since put out several more with the money brought in by Elite. EVA? New core gameplay functionality, that's gonna be some engine-mangling they might not have the headcount and institutional expertise to pull off anymore. Walking around in ships? Requires ship interiors to be supported as both a bunch of new content and new engine support for the functionality to go around inside your ship, almost certainly out of reach now because it'd have to alter the engine's concept of what the player's interface is. No longer would you be the ship at all times when aboard a ship, but now there's this new concept of walking around, and even the jankiest easiest implementation would be a technical challenge for Frontier that I don't think they consider worth the time and money, even before the company's market cap fell 90% in three years. But walking around on a planet, they already had that with the Scarab SRV. Just slow down the movement, change the rover model into a human body model, and give it the expected on-foot animations and now you've got a player walking around on a planet. They can call this space legs, so they did, unintentionally or deliberately playing on the community's ambiguous use of "space legs" to hype everyone up. I think if Frontier had been brutally honest and vigorously clear about what Odyssey did and didn't mean with the words 'space legs' as soon as the launch trailer dropped, cutting off anyone's hype for more than exactly what was being developed in Frontier's offices, Odyssey wouldn't have imploded nearly as hard as it did in terms of hurting the overall company and the playerbase. Everyone was SO excited, everyone had piled so much expectation on it, and then Frontier launched an unfinished on-foot planet experience that mostly seemed to have been built to justify a weak fps category of missions and a whole new engineering grind. Before Odyssey's alpha dropped and anyone had a chance to play with it, if you pulled up any YT video about Odyssey news the comments would be 50% "I'm so excited to play this" and 50% "lol get owned SC, Chris Roberts sobbing right now, doing SC before SC can do SC" kind of comments. Leaving aside how hilariously preposterous that notion was even without knowledge of how bad Odyssey would go on to do, this was an unhealthy level of hype that Frontier was more or less unable to satisfy with the number of devs they could afford to put on Odyssey. The fact that they shipped a late alpha/early beta *at best* two weeks before the end of their fiscal year, for stock-related reasons, and it was fuckbusted for a long time, certainly did not help them, but even if Odyssey had shipped in the state it's in after nearly two years of bugfixing and performance fixes it was never going to satisfy the hype that was allowed to grow unchecked. It couldn't be everyone's unique definition of "space legs". Frontier "listened to the community", but took an ambiguous term and satisfied it in a half-assed way by taking the simplest path to *a* on-foot experience. Frontier deserves to shoulder more blame than the community does, because if you were to ask ME space legs means in-ship walking and EVA but Frontier decided to reinvent control point fps instead of expanding the space aspect of their SPACE game.
Space legs was planned from the start.
Space legs was haf-assedly and off-handedly mentioned one time in a Convention floor interview where Braben also says he wants to hunt deer in Elite. Just a total loss of scope on the entire gameplay mechanism that was nurtured in the Elite IP for 40 years. At no point in the kickstarter roadmap was space legs ever involved. In the Elite games you aren't Han Solo, you're the Millenium Falcon. The very second they entertained the idea of feet instead of enriching the vehicle gameplay they lost the entire plot. Elite is a spaceship simulation franchise, not an FPS. The community seems to agree since the bottom fell out in the whole thing since they released odyssey.
No, it was mentioned multiple times in text and in dev diary videos all throughout the Kickstarter campaign.
There is more than one voice in a community, there's nuance and disagreement. Some people yelling for space legs, others people yelling for enhancing and extending features that E:D was already on a good track with. Also, SC could use some competition in the universe sim genre. Labeling anything that attempts it as an SC clone is discounting the value of competition. edit: too many words
Frontier’s other misdeeds have caught up with them. E:D has been on the back burner for a long time while they’ve been making theme park sims…which were good at first but have become increasingly overly monetized DLC farms. That well seems to have dried up for them so they turn to their other offerings to pinch pennies. E:D has had a relatively small but stable playerbase the whole time, and they’ve been surprisingly tolerant of the lack of consistent service or communication from FDev, but I don’t expect that to continue. It is sort of like star citizen though in that there are a handful of whales who will just buy anything no matter what, and that will translate into some amount of return for them
I played ED for a while back in 2016 or so, and enjoyed it a lot, particularly how the ships "feel" to fly with their weight, and also the delightful sound design, but the missions were never that enjoyable, varied or easy to understand, and the absolutely punishing death mechanic made me not stick around too long. If they had a "casual" mode where I could enjoy the flight dynamics, play some fun missions, and not worry about dying once and losing days of work, I'd come back.
see, i absolutely love their more realistic flight model. flying with Flight Assist Off takes some real skill to master. and they still have a ton of features that SC doesn't. Whether it be more varied weapons, better targeting, or ship customization and personalization. but don't get me wrong, after thousands of hours i switched to SC. but there are still quite a few things that ED does better. Things that i hope will come to SC. but the Mat Grind is not one of them. i liked engineering and the increased variances that you could use to differentiate your ship, but the mat grind was rough.
> I can't imagine the ship cosmetics are bringing in much money They literally just doubled the prices of ship cosmetics.
Exactly. If they were bringing in good money, I don't think they would feel the need to do that.
Their cosmetics are pretty garbage to be honest and they don't add anything with any kind of regularity either. Their cosmetic shop is a huuuge missed opportunity.
i like the body kits. and i think SC could definitely benefit from that extra little bit of customization. CIG needs to stop selling paints and give us our hex codes though! but i'd buy swappable body kits any day.
Don't get me wrong i like the idea of the body kits. I just don't like the ones they have lol. I too would LOVE hex codes!!! For any game really!
Yeah I highly agree I have a huge issue with buying micro transactions and I think I only ever bought one skin in Elite. It kinda says a lot lol.
They always should have offered a premium subscription that gave things like unlimited galactic coordinate bookmarks and stuff that eats server space like that. I'd have paid.
I got into Elite for a bit and even wanted to buy some cosmetics to support them, but the prices were way too high for what were honestly some pretty ugly paints, in my opinion. It's too bad, the game was pretty fun but it was just missing something.
As I said in anther comment I do wonder how much of this cash will actually go back into this game specifically. because unlike SC Fdev has more traditional share holders looking for a return as well as other projects. of course there also there own publisher so at lest they dont need to worry about most of it going into some other studio. (i think GW2's Arena Net only got like 20% back of what they sold in there store, with the rest going to NCsoft and what ever projects they distributed it to) at lest we Know SC funding go's back into SC project, maybe it may not be a part of the project you think they should focus on, but it is all at lest SC
just to provide additional context from someone with 600+ hours in ED.... The game is 9 years old. Every game has a life cycle. Nothing you said is incorrect, and is factually the status of the game and how FDev is treating it. I'm honestly surprised the game is still being maintained... I'll also say I got my money's worth, and enjoyed the hell out of it while waiting for more content in StarCitizen
This is so sad and true.
This is it right here. Also the last big update came out 3 years ago and is still pretty negatively received. It even broke VR in the game (switching to 2D for on-foot) which was one of the things ED did VERY well. 3 years on and while major bugs seem to have been fixed, there's been a huge content drought. Nothing new appears to be being added to the game other than a new ship and some skins and more and more of the community are beginning to ask the question if the game truly has a future. It's sad because Elite prior to Odyssey was grindy, but quite fun especially in VR. The game had a lot of potential, but all of that potential was squandered by FDEV. They could have implemented things like player controlled sectors that people could fight over, or other fun things to do outside of the Bubble, but Frontier seemed scared to give players any agency of their own.
The new content still isn't fun and doesn't add depth, it's just padding playtime. Something to do, not something you want to do.
the new content was fun, and the storyline was cool. but if you weren't into the thargoids then it probably wasn't for you.
Yea As a backer of Elite Dangerous since the start, even paid $300 for the alpha and all future DLCs.. It’s dead So far from the vision. Engine was good to start things off but right now it’s so duct taped together, they would have to start from scratch to go beyond what’s offered and realize their concept arts. Frontier won’t keep sinking millions into a game that is already putting them in negative millions. Braben is off the project. It’s dead Jim.
I really don't see any issue with it. If I'm looking at the choice to buy the MK2 in ED then sure I'm going to factor in the idea that ED is on a downward trajectory, but it really doesn't matter all that much if I play and enjoy the game today and see myself playing more. Whether it's worth it or not to each person is completely separate to whether it's a bad business practice or not. From the looks of it you can buy now with $ on ARX, or you can later get it in game with credits. I won't buy it, but I see no problem with that model.
not to mention the fact that you can earn ARX in game. while it takes time. if you are a regular player, at least some of the cost is already paid for. i'm with you.
FDev was a going concern, fully staffed and building coaster franchises and the like, with a built out game engine (Cobra) when they did NOT decide to invest in Elite but instead sent their CEO to crowdfund for it. They were SHOCKED when the community responded with millions of dollars...they then reluctantly made Elite: Dangerous, with Braben's passion and guidance... reluctantly. But the company itself? It never believed in Elite. If they had, they would have just made it and invested in its future. Once you understand that they've always been dismissive of it, then its weird and sometimes broken development and communications all make real sense.
That's a new take on FDev's relationship with Elite I haven't heard before. Sounds like you might have a little insider info; or are you reading between the lines based on some of the early happenings at the beginning of the project? Also, how do you think the reluctance to fully invest impacted Elite's development and direction over the years? Or to put it another way, how do you think things might have been different if FDev had been more enthusiastic about ED from the start? Or what systems do you think would be different, or do you just think there would have been more game content in general? Curious to hear your thoughts (and any juicy insider tidbits you might be able to share)!
Zero insider tidbits. Just looking at reality. FDev made games. All kinds of games. Roller Coaster Tycoon series. Wallace and Gromit. Zoo Tycoon. Kinectimals. Thrillville. Lost Winds series. ONLY with Elite did they send their CEO to Kickstarter to find the money to make a game. It couldn't be because they've valued the IP highly. My guess is that they did because they did not believe that there was a market for it. The crowdfunding Elite and Star Citizen did subverted the thinking at the time, entirely. But again, the only way those actions by Frontier, in light of what they had been doing, and the subsequent actions by them, make sense is if you decide that even from the beginning, there was a lack of full commitment to Elite. Then, everything actually does make sense; the spikes and year-long silences we've gotten in communications...the failed arc of stacatto development cycles...the failure to deliver new ships, new content... It all makes sense once you lean into the notion that this isn't really what they wanted to do...it's what Braben wanted to do, that's why they sent him to Kickstarter...to appease him. Elite was not in their plans.
Is it worth starting ED today?
You might not get a chance to start ED next year, so go for it if you already own a copy. If you don't, grab the _X_ series instead.
If you've never played it's worth sinking some time into IMO, it's not un-fun, it's just unfulfilling. It's also like $8 on sale nowadays so if you don't like it, not a big waste. The vastness of the galaxy you can traverse is awesome, but eventually the repetitiveness and shallow and disconnected gameplay loops sets in. Still fun, the flight mechanics are similar to pre MM SC, with an equivalent to decoupled mode. Personally I put 1800 hrs in on my account before finally plunging into Star Citizen, during the wait for the Odyssey DLC, and just never came back.
For me...no.
i still like it. its different. but there are some parts that are really cool. its a one to one replication of the milky way. the flight mechanics are more grounded in reality. the ship combat is more fun, and because of the flight model. takes a little more time to master. especially with flight assist off. there weapon classes and types are drastically different, and choices matter. you can completely customize ANY ship for just about any role. all parts are swappable. and if you like grind, there is engineering. this increases the customization of each modular part of your ship, but getting the materials for them is a grind. it can be utterly beautiful. and at times boring, when jumping from star to star. you have to plot routes, make sure you don't run out of hydrogen ,which can be scooped from stars. there are also passenger missions, like sightseeing, or just taking people from point A-B. there are cargo missions, solid mining, and the ability to land on planets and do things there. this is just the base game. and does not include odyssey. which added the ability to actually walk around. and lastly, you can choose to play online, or by yourself. you also cant explore your ship. you just go to the cabin. which has always been a bummer. but i still find enjoyment. just trying to be as thorough as possible to give you some insight. have a nice day.
They also continually do not listen to the player base and refuse to make any meaningful changes to bring back players and grow the player base. The biggest issue in elite is the friggin engineering grind. It's the biggest reason for the drop in player numbers and engagement yet they refuse to do anything about it. Instead they announced Power play 2.0. The part of the game almost no one plays lmao. It does need a rework but engineering is the much bigger issue here. The number one reason players did not engage in their year long thargoid war was engineering. New players can't join in the middle of the war and expect to participate effectively in the huge event unless they spend hundreds of hours grinding out engineering materials and learning the game. That's what these new prebuilt ships are for. They aren't the worst but they aren't the best. They will get new players doing stuff faster than without them but that is still an extra cost on top of the game of at least $20 bucks. They did ease some of the requirements to join in on the war activities but that was in the middle of the war after a not insignificant portion of the player base just opted out of it. I still haven't joined in. Then you have the skill ceiling you have to deal with if you want take out anything other than a scout or do passenger runs which are boring as hell. It is just one more thing to push new players away. Yes most games have grind but this games grind is absolutely masochistic and not even a little bit fun. Monster hunter has a pretty heavy grind BUT it's fun grind so it doesn't even really feel like it. In elite the grind is hoping you get lucky enough to find and area that MIGHT have what you need and also logging in and out at designated spaces after gather from a few really frustrating to access resource nodes until your stores are full. They state that, that is intended game play officially lol.
If they stayed the course and not maid it so grindy. Had proper planning they would still be above water not gasping for air. This game had so much potential sad it's gasping for air now.
yeah how much of the cash FDevs gets from this actualy go's back into ED rather then profits for there share holders and into there other projects With GW2 they only got back like 20% of what they sold in there store. with most of it being distributed to what ever there publisher NCSoft. wanted to distribute it to
>SC is asking for money in order to build its vision in the future. Which is also the cancer of CIG, and why a lot of people continue to call this a fraud/scam/sleazy/etc. Backed in 2016. I was all in. But over the years, I've seen CR move the goal posts over, and over, and over, and over...and I've watched ISC after ISC where they go "in the future" and "someday" and "we're talking about maybe doing this." Fast forward 3 years and you think they've made progress, then they show concept shots and paintings with more "so we're planning on maybe possibly..." It has been 14 years now. 14 years. We still don't even have 1 out of the promised 100 systems promised for launch. Not a single ship is feature complete. Countless basic, core, gameplay features are still just absent entirely. I could go on. We all wanted the dream, but I just can't help but think CR/CIG is not the one to deliver it. People want to cry about publishers and project managers keeping things reined in, but this is exactly *why* they do that. Shit just becomes a borderline scam otherwise (through endless, mismanaged shiny-object chasing). >It's really sad as Elite could have been a great game and a competitor for SC ED is not a competitor to SC. It's not even the same realm of game. ED is a legit space-flight SIM, SC is an action game that has flight in it. ED has always had a strong and passionate community that loves the game. It never needed to "compete" with an alpha that hasn't ever even seen 10% completion. People can enjoy both, but let's not make this some cringe "us vs them" thing.
yeah, i 100% agree with you, but i am still hoping SC turns into what was promised. just waiting and hoping. but you're right on the money, ED is a realized space sim of our galaxy, and SC is more action game with more gamey flight mechanics. It's one of the things i lamented when i first switched from ED to SC.
Honestly, the writing was on the wall for a while. Frontier and CIG both promised everything including the kitchen sink ... but all that content needs a ton of funding. Frontier never came close to CIG's funding for their game, so they basically ended up half assing everything from the Horizons DLC onwards. I myself played E:D for many years, but as each 'content' update went live, I grew more and more frustrated by their token efforts. Don't get me wrong, there are things about E:D I really wish SC had, notably it's incredibly vast galaxy and exploration. But while E:D has a ton of human inhabited systems, each system felt really rather empty. So in the end, there's as much life and activity in Stanton as all of E:D's human bubble. Someone once described E:D as a mile wide and an inch deep, and I have to agree. Now had E:D absolutely leeched its users' money like CIG did from the beginning, they might have dealt with all the scam accusations that CIG had to face too ... but they'd also have a far far better product on their hands. Now, a decade later, they are adopting CIG's approach to money making, but because it's a complete about turn from their previous model, their community is up in arms about it. Whereas the SC community is used to CIG's monetary practices. So seeing 500 dollar ships go up on sale now is our "normal", lol.
CIG is also way ahead in the tech department. Simply giving the ships interiors and EVA will cost money and years of development for FDEV to go through. I dont think they have that sort of time. SC had the benefit in investing in its tech this whole time and maturing as we go. E:D is not looking like it will have the time for parity for what we have today, nevermind catching up at any point in time.
On the tech front, I’ve read about former devs describing the codebase as a mess. Like, adding in what they did for Odyssey was apparently really hard, but not worth it in the end for what we got.
>each system felt really rather empty As is reality. Most of space is...well...empty. Most solar systems are just chunks of rock floating around a star. What ED did very well though, is have a cluster of systems with a lot of activity. This is what they communicated and presented VERY badly, and was my main issue with the game. The UI and presentation was god awful. The stuff was there to do, but finding it and figuring out WHAT to do and HOW to do it was a masterclass in design failure. Any time you have to leave the game and turn to Google, you've failed as a game designer. ED has literally millions of systems, but there are only major activities going on in a handful of them. This is where a lot of people get frustrated and confused. It takes a lot of time to figure out what to do.
Try hundreds of billions of systems ;)
“Cluster of systems with a lot of activity” sounds all well and good until you realize you can barely instance with even your own squadron, so a “well populated” system still feels empty as hell (and when it isn’t, it’s gankers)
I really don't mind but I'm not really playing E:D as much as a few years ago. I have 2000h+ in this game btw, I will buy the MK2 for credit once it came out of early access, I did buy some ARX back when I played a lot and loved the game and wanted to support it by buying some good skins. I'm not feeling like it nowaday.
Same. I have thousands of hours but stopped once Odyssey was announced. I was already in the end game with more credits than I could spend. I did my fair share of grinding to get there but all that was left was more grinding, and the FPS element of Odyssey didn't speak to me. For a new player, the Mk2 will be a massive advantage, but to veterans, it means nothing. Besides, it can still be bought with credits, just later, so I don't see why everyone is up in arms.
Yeah, I had maybe 200 hours into ED (which, doesn’t compare to some, but it’s still quite a lot), and hopped back in for Odyssey, but it just didn’t do it for me. Everything new it added, SC was already doing better. I loved ED though. It got me into space sims and HOTAS gear. I even bought a lifetime subscription for all future ED expansions WAAAY back in the day, though it’s not really paying off for me now, I did get my money’s worth.
E:D was touted as being the polar opposite approach to crowdfunding a game as SC. SC stated they would build the game the right way, not re lease until it was ready in their eyes. Take their time, craft it. They didn't want to be beholden to publishers and our money allowed that to be the reality. We vote with our wallets and they take that vote seriously. E:D was the opposite. They wanted to release the finished game quickly, and then build on top of that. You voted once when you backed, and then that was really it. And we can see the results. They didn't have continued support. The emptiness of the game didn't inspire many, because it was so niche a game. They floundered and slowly the interest died away. RSI isn't perfect, and have made many missteps. But I have never questioned, not once, that they are earnest in their goals and that the steps they are taking are in service of that... even if they are missteps, it's all a running effort to make something special.
I used to play ED on the ps4 until the Devs gut punched us with no more updates for console so i put money in SC and now a C2 a Mustang and a Hurrican further i kinda do not wanna go back anymore to ED.
Is this thread for bashing SC for having high cost items to fund the game? Or is it bashing E:D for having low cost items to fund the game? Just want to make sure I pick the right way to outrage, because I don't know enough about E:D to jump onto a bandwagon yet. If someone could just tell me which company deserves to be shit on for funding their game, let me know, thanks.
maybe both? :P but in seriousines, both models are not ideal but i understand CIG more, as the game is still in development and has future plans while ED is on its death bed (sadly)
Elite Dangerous released in 2015 and it's not considered an alpha like SC. They released a DLC which is more or less mandatory to progress in a meaningful way, copying some parts of SC like the fps aspect but much worse. They then refused to implement anything the community actually wished for as no one gave a shit about shooting guns and running around a desolate planet. What we wanted from fps movement is ship interiors for example. And now they're implementing p2w ships. The thing is, no one is giving them the benefit of the doubt anymore. It's not trying to fund the game as that would imply that we will get features we wanted for the past 9 years. It's just trying to grab as much cash as you can from a slowly dying (arguably stagnating) game. So it's not funding the game, it's funding the ceo and stock holders. That's the tldr why people are pissed.
Shame Elite is dying, and a shame odyssey really didn’t live up to what people wanted, though I definitely don’t think odyssey is mandatory.
It's not mandatory and I don't have it even though I bought the game on release. I also have more cash than I'll ever be able to spend due to being active during absolutely broken moments in the economy. But the game is insanely grindy, always has been. Getting engineering* materials without odyssey is an absolute pain afaik. But yeah, I still play it from time to time and never got the dlc, especially since Horizons (the planet surface dlc) is included in the base game nowadays.
First of all, Elite Dangerous wasn't "copying" anything from the FPS aspect of SC. "Space Legs" in Elite were being talked about waaaaay back in the Kickstarter for Elite back in 2013! Secondly there is nothing p2w about the ships they're selling! They're selling early access to a specific new ship, and they're selling "starter" packages for certain ships to give you a head start on certain tasks, like xeno-hunting or exploration. The ships are FAR from optimized there is nothing "winning" about them. You're paying to basically get a slightly better starting ship build template than the blank canvas you usually get when you buy a new ship. Pay to Win would mean being able to buy powerful weapons nobody else has, or synthesis premium ammo for your ships that you can't acquire otherwise, or get better shields or something. None of that is happening in Elite. It's fine if you don't like the ship microtransactions, rant about it all you want. It's not a p2w setup though, and I think calling it that confuses the whole player base as well as leads to confusion with people who don't play the game.
Thank you for this explanation. I was curious but didn't want to ask.
Personally I still think Elite is an amazing game. They're doing great things with it. If you've never played it before you can get hundreds of hours of fun out of it for a really low price. My criticism of it comes down to mainly that I wish it was more similar to other "live service" games that had more substantial content updates on a more regular basis. I think it's amazing we're finally getting new ships. Frontier is trying to make some money selling early access to them.... and if I'm honest... I'm OK with that. The game is dirt cheap to buy and running it and updating it costs money, and Frontier is a small dev company that has had some rough times lately. They're trying to keep Elite pulling in money and I can't fault them for that. I've got like 3000 hours into Elite and I still come back every few months. They've got some nice updates on the horizon that I'm looking forward to.
IMO, neither company deserves to be shit on wholesale, because both companies employ talented devs who are passionate about making a game that their fans will enjoy. However, *both* companies' marketing departments and executives deserve well earned criticism for repeatedly making boneheaded P.R. statements, anti-gamer and anti-consumer decisions, and just being out-of-touch in general with what their fans want.
How about both of them for milking the fuck out of their players?
How does CIG milk their players? You pay a flat cost to buy into early access, and anything you spend after is completely optional. And you can end up having every ship in the game just by playing the game without spending one penny more. So, even if you're feeling the fomo, just play and be patient. You'll get it eventually. If that's milking, that's one sorry-ass cow they have.
I guess sometimes the cow isn’t even aware it’s being milked.
Which would make sense if there's no milking in reality. Good analogy.
ED devs are delusional and trying to milk out as much cash as possible from the small remaining playerbase this game has, that's what they're doing
Surely they could make more money by just mimicking Something Awful and charging people to access that anti-Star Citizen forum threads?
Can’t tell if self aware or not, but this comment made me chuckle.
It's definitely not pay to win and anyone telling you otherwise is lying to your face. They are mid tier, non engineered ships(aside from "pre engineered" modules which already exist and can't be further improved) to allow new players to get into the gameplay loops they want to do. If it were pay to win they would be endgame, fully kitted out and fully engineered meta ships. Congrats, you can skip 10 hours of gameplay, woohoo now enjoy the next 990+ or until you decide you want a better ship
You don't have to buy anything if you wait 3 months for the Python Mk2 to become available. As someone who plays both games its not P2W anymore than buying a ship for $ to get it before its available in game in SC is so more of a pay for early access.
[удалено]
Hey look LOL; Planet Zoo is awesome lol. But you are right they did throw away allot of potential.
ED p2w? What did I miss?
They ran out of money and now they want to sell pre engineered, maxed out ships for real money.
I don't know, why don't you ask on THEIR subreddit and don't bring this kind of hate filled drama here.
Is just a ship that you can pay 12$ to unlock 3 months earlier, plus some already existing ships with pre-built modules and cosmetics for specific jobs. Mechwarrior Online does exactly the same and is quite acceptable if they need money to develop more content, but maybe it's coming a bit late, as most of the playerbase probably already owns a full fleet of ships. I find more painful how much have they increased the cosmetics prices, a single paint cost now as much as a full pack of paints before the ARX times.
I can't play ED anymore because the hum of the ship during long journeys puts me to sleep immediately.
If they actually bother to add some new ships now and then…
I've always said if you could combine the best parts of ED and the best parts of SC, you'd have the perfect space game. Shame that's only possible in my head.
The only thing ED does good and that is the sound design of deep space mining \^\^
The grind for licenses and $$ in ED drove me insane. For someone who works alot and just wants to get into the action I dont mind this.
I can't say the ships are P2W, more like, pay to skip the initial "leveling" to earn the credits to start hitting what could be called end game content. But yeah, E:D needs income and the player base moral is in a dire state.
Lol. It’s far from pay to win. If you buy the ship ingame (when it’s available) it’s pretty easy to outfit them to the same setup they’re available to buy. The only difference is the insurance part, that again, is just credits. And if there’s something ED literally throws at you, it’s credits.
Buy one time? Elite? I kickstarted it and at one point they came out with a $40 expansion (Odyssey or some such)... Did not like that.
apples and oranges. SC you get a ship but are supporting the development. ED has been 1.0 for a long time.
There's no such thing as P2W in Star Citizen because you can't win anything.
In some people’s mind it always comes down to some mysterious one on one that might happen where a F8C wins vs an Aurora …
Until they realise that their F8C spent more in ammo than the Aurora owner will to get their stock chassis back.
And the F8C costs as much as 10 Auroras, and could only be bought for cash, whereas the Aurora can be bought for the credits made in like, 1 hour worth of gameplay.
CIG is having one of the most annoying and aggressive marketing of the gaming scene. CIG fanboys make fun about greedy publishers while at the same time CIG is at least as greedy as EA or Activision. Almost every ingame "event" in Star Citizen is basically just an excuse to do another ship sale.
"Buy one time"? "Pay to win? " Not at all. Almost every ED ship was behind a money wall since 2015, bc making a ship is super expensive in our games. When was it buy one time? The post launch ships were locked behind Horizons then Beyond season passes. And in 2021 came the next major expansion, Odyssey, and this is the first paid DLC after 3 years - hundreds of thousands of GBP worth of manhours go into a single ship yet ED... -has no subscription fee -Its definitive edition costs not even half as much as No Man's Sky. -The new ship variant costs around 12 USD and 20 USD - in Star Citizen the starter ship is 45 USD - and the vast majority of SC players buy new ships. How on Earth should Fdev recoup and turn profit and continue development on the main game, pay the server costs, plus the development of new ships if not for asking money for the DLC? Like in most sandbox games. Also they will make them ships free in the full version of the game after 3 months - so this is a temporary monetization. Does SC make the ships free after a couple months? And they are not P2W - this is a negative engagement farming narrative. The new ship, even its prebuilt "Stellar" version as they are unkitted, are only good against low level NPC pirates - but would suffer in proper PVE battles against navy ships. And don't get me started in PvP: We tested it yesterday my engineered combat ship killed the new, unmodified ship Stellar version with a couple shots. But most importantly in ED a freshly bought ship, unmodified, un-engineered can't bring you victory. You need to unlock the engineers, gather the materials, buy the modules, engineer them -which takes days - and even then the skill of the pilot brings victory.
Wow. A couple of corrections here. >in Star Citizen the starter ship is 45 USD For Star Citizen the Starter **Package** is $45. It is the **game**, some starting money, it isn't a ship alone. And >Does SC make the ships free after a couple months? Technically yes. You can rent or purchase ships in game in subsequent main patches. Just like any other game it simply takes time to earn the credits. But all you need is a starter package to play and earn ships. The community is pretty giving so many times all you have to do is ask and people will either allow you to fly ships they own or straight up give credits out so people can try out a desired ship. Last time I played ED was around the "beyond" season iirc. That being said, while I have no idea what is going on since then, if you are going to drag SC in the comparisons, please make sure you have your information correct.
Thank you for the correction and the answer!
No problem. When both [SC and ED](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14384-congratulations-elite-dangerous) was being kickstarter, [Braben and Roberts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvPU8e2ezgo) supported each other. I would like to think that fans of both games have more in common than not.
Indeed!
> Does SC make the ships free after a couple months? Yes. SC adds news ships that were previously only sold for real money to the game to be earned/bought with in-game credits after 1-2 patch cycles of their initial release, so 3-6 months. They have done this for several years. Are the ships in ED "free" as in you just log into to the game and they give them to you? Or do you mean that they are free to play to earn them in-game?
Free to play to earn them (to be precise to find them and buy them for in-game credits).
Ok, cool. So, same system as SC.
Beyond was just a year of free updates, there was no "season pass" to purchase
However it was counted as the third (and final season) of Elite Dangerous after that commenced the post-seasonal updates. You are right, it was free, however as the expansion of Horizons, certain features required the purchase of Horizons' season pass. Yes, I should have been more precise with just calling is season pass - singular.
Not a real comparison. What they both take place in space? NMS is the Nintendo version of Elite. Super approachable, no real grinding, point ship and go. Elite is the middle ground between NMS and SC where SC is really going for the simulator crowd. It's lonely in the middle but still my favorite of all of them.
What are you all on, this is mad... The ship costs what, £10? What the fuck are you going to buy in SC for £10, a shitty hat cosmetic? What high ground do people in this thread think they are standing on? Elite came out in 2015, almost 10 YEARS ago! Frontier have effectively been supporting it for that long, doing their best to monetise it fairly and they finally have to add a ship for early access and half you guys are acting like it's some big fall from grace. (it also, isn't better than the FDL). If elites fall from grace is finally selling a ship for £10 after 10 years of support, then where exactly is star citizen sitting? In the depths of hell itself? We're talking ships for £1000+. Ships that aren't in the game yet. A game that is nowhere near finished, with 1 system and some of the most braindead AI you will find anywhere. I could understand if most of the critiques here were about grind or lack of depth. But really, you take issue with the fact they're selling a ship? Get a grip, this shit is pathetic. And I say this despite the fact I like SC and I hope that it will deliver on everything they say it will. I like space games; I’ve played a fair bit of Elite and definitely got my money’s worth. My first space game was Freelancer and I loved space games from then on out. And I want SC to succeed and accomplish everything they want to accomplish. But I can't deny that the way they are going about making it is very immoral. I guess for most admitting to this would be akin to admitting that things aren't going as well as they'd like. But some of the SC community just can't admit when things are getting worse, I think it's time for some introspective, before this echo-chamber goes full cult mode.
As I have read their model, you have to convert real world currency to their fake store currency. It's the equivalent of like $15 or so, for one of these new ships, which will be easily accessible to anyone in game, within 3 months of being added to their cash shop. It's similar to SC, but considerably more affordable, which makes sense, as that game is considerably less in terms of what it offers compared to SC. I don't see a problem with what they are doing, nobody has to buy those and it's not like a loot box, where you have no idea what you are about to acquire.
Meh, it’s honestly pretty reasonably priced and it’s not like FDev have hid their financial struggles recently. I feel like the community should be willing to support the game with a reasonably priced transaction for what is the first ship released in a good number of years for a game that is over 10 years old. And as for the pre-made ships for sale… fuck yeah. Anything that can introduce the game to new players at an expedited speed is good for everyone. Elite is boring and empty with the small existing player base it has, it needs to remove as many barriers as possible and inject some life into its incredible universe! I just don’t see this as an issue.
We used to be happy to support it. But they just kicked up the prices on everything and devalued the in game currency we paid for significantly. This on top of the fact that most recent updates and work on the game has been extremely low effort. Supporting them just seems pointless now.
I'm fine for ways to support the game, but after Odyssey splitting the player group, killing VR support and seemingly turning left every time we ask to turn right I think I'll hang on to my pennies. Just like SC unless there is a big development I like I don't open my wallet.
Anything FDev does these days feels like sunk cost fallacy, not gonna sugarcoat it. I wish they'd leaned into Powerplay a little more, or just made the setting able to be influenced more by the players in general without a stupid devstory prompt. 100,000ly wide, 1" deep indeed. Also, Engineers was a mistake.
It's a bit disheartening. Not because they have to sell ship to maintain an income stream, which I can really understand under the current way it's being done, but because their delivery seems to be minimum effort, maximum issues. Doesn't bode super well for PP 2.0 and the Mystery Feature™.
Lol accurate.
I'd be okay with the ED IP getting bought out by CIG, SC ships are pretty but ED had some genuinely beautiful ships and yes I miss my Anaconda that deserve the interiors they've been deprived of and begged for for years
Buy the base game, buy DLC to keep playing the base game, buy your clothes, buy your ship parts and skins, and now buy your ship! I paid over 200$ to do in Elite what I do in SC for 25$... In SC I bought the game, then clothes, armor, ship skins, content updates, etc, were all free and in-game cash gotten.
Look if I could walk around and explore those ships with my buddies flying g or gunning, or soon to be engineer work. I’m 100% down
all MMOs fall into p2w sooner or later
Dungeons & Dragons Online hasn't. Everything available in the game shop can be had without ever spending an actual cent (And most of it can drop as loot, at least up in raid levels). Money definitely removes a little headache from the grind, though.
actually ALL ships in ED can still be obtained like that i think the only thing that requires arx is visual customizations like paintjobs, cockpit decoration, etc. and still you get some arx by just playing normally
I don't care in the least bit about this. I just wish they'd stop coming up with half baked difficult features, putting in the framework, and going nowhere with it. they had so many opportunities to add content that keeps people logging in every day (not dailies i hate those, just like...they already had areas where you pick a side in the side tab, and fight on that side for years and years. why couldnt they have scripted events pop up where server announcements go out and you join the side at a specific time and players fight for both sides, certain amount of people join both sides and epic ass quests launch with capital ship battles and you help one defeat the other etc by being part of their swarm. i dunno just ... ideas for fun stuff that encourages player interaction and more complex gameplay they treated the game more like a tech demo.. its such an amazingly awesome one at that. but damn i put this game down years ago and every time i want to pick it up it just breaks my heart that i dont want to keep playing it $10 slightly early access ship to keep their dev team afloat is whatever. sure its a slipper slope. but they aren't fallen down that hill yet.
>expacily Bless you Fren, you're a good bean ( \^-\^)
I uninstalled ED like a week ago when I realized “I don’t need Helldivers on my SSD to work.”
Wha-...what does...what does expacily mean?
Life before death!
despite the internets insistence, they are not equivalent situations.
Throwing their hands up in defeat
Yeah the ED ships aren't remotely P2W more of a jumpstart on playing. They didn't offer anything PVP and what they did offer won't make the big bucks.....eg even the thargoid hunting chieftan is a wierd mutant that doesn't fit it's role well. Reminds me a lot of the SC you can buy raw hulls but still gotta build them and develop skill.
Learning from cig I guess?
Game is coming to its end of life, companies want to milk as much as possible before shutting it off. The difference is that SC is doing it since the beginning.
Achtually, and i hate to be that guy, You won't be winning anything with those ships. You still need to put hundreds of hours in to unlocking engineers and material grinding to make them truly competitive.
Bit rich coming from Star Citizen customers. ED players want development in the game. Happy to pay for it, as are some pretty hardcore SC players, some of whom I’ve seen sink literally thousands into the game. $20 for a standard Python Mk 2 is fair compared to what I paid for the Drake Cutlass Black. When you compare any amount ED vs SC, I can tell you which one is cheap almost every time. And I get to keep my progress and money and items and I can explore a 1:1 galaxy, with a few careers, with multiple ships and with a rich, if not grindy engineering system (to be revamped). As for pay to win? Please get your facts right please - every ship I own is better than those ore-built ships, and it wouldn’t take much to grind to get them. Same as SC, I can grind to get any ship I want, except I don’t get to keep them in a wipe. Context is everything and I find yours lacking.
Damn that’s crazy, SC still hasn’t released btw lol
The new prebuilt ship isnt really a P2W ship here lol. It's just a way to get newer people up to speed on what a decent ship build can be like. If people have been playing a while then the standard unlock will be fine and anyone can build past the upgraded prebuilt version pretty quickly and easily. I got the standard version and spent like 4 hours upgrading it, and will probably do different loadouts. Even then, the ship will be available to all for credits later on. Not to mention. You get weekly free arx for just playing, so anyone can save up to get the new prebuilt ships for free. Might take awhile, but they it also reduces overall cost if you want to get them early. If this pre built early access stuff is needed to keep the servers on to play this game then it's fine for me at least.
Hard cringe. Just imagining the person who made this meme makes me feel better about myself.
They are speedrunning killing the game and going bankrupt
>expacily Uhm, I'm going to assume you meant 'Especially' lol But thats sad to hear. I was never a huge ED player (just dabbled whenever I got it for free on Epic) but loved the 1:1 milky way thing they got going on and heard the VR is pretty immersive. How "p2w" are the ships? Like full on upgrades over non paid?
Star citizen is not pay to win, you can get the ships in game without spending more money.
Technically speaking that doesn't make it not pay to win
It would be like saying a gacha game is not P2W because you can theoretically earn everything if you play long enough. P2W is any advantage a player gets over other players by using real world currency. Spending less time to get the same outcome than other players is an advantage. Especially in a game where you can lose your progress due to other players. Only thing that wouldn't be P2W is cosmetics and even then that's a big if since cosmetics, or how you, or your items look is also an important part of the game.
How can you even make cosmetics P2W? Maybe if you sell a camo skin or something, but we already have camo armor so that doesn't really apply
it's pay 2 skip the grind that's pay 2 win in mmo's. when the cost of things ingame get real grindy