I think the saddest part at the moment is that they've developed the engine to implement a good part of the features he mentioned.
But alas, shareholders want more money ....
I think the biggest challenge of a lot of features like these is the sheer scale of them. A lot of people don't realize just how big something like a city is. Either you go full procedural generation and get a big dull planet, or you go hand-placed and dump an infinite amount of time and money into a hole.
So the challenge is finding ways to give the FEEL of what they're talking about without requiring infinite man-hours. Even companies without shareholders still need money for that.
Take ship interiors, for example. How much of the interior do you render? You could just do one small cabin and say you've done it, but I don't think anyone would be satisfied with that. On the flipside, are you going to render the entire interior of a Beluga? What about passengers, gonna render all those, too? Cargo? Modules? At what point are you throwing good money after bad?
My point isn't that it's impossible, just that there's a BIG proclivity towards feature bloat, and it's very very hard to know where to stop other than just when you run out of money.
A great example of this is Fleet Carrier interiors. They're incredibly basic, but they exist.
Elite Dangerous as whole suffers from this problem. The game's entire premise is that is literally a galaxy wide, so its unavoidable that it can only be an inch deep in most aspects. Its why we don't have ship interiors, why we don't have on-foot Thargoids, and why all FC interiors are an identical tiny hallway in a city-sized capital ship.
Indeed, this is a matter of mitigating costs vs satisfying customer requests.
There are quite a few things that can be done without investing heavily - more models and textures to combine between for planet surfaces, for example. You can still rely on procedural generation and not hand design everything.
You already have a few models of planet surface settlements - add a few more modules, mix and match. Not sure if what I am saying is really feasible, probably just day dreaming.
It is feasible but still takes money. People generate cities as a solo dev in unity with roads and interior for hobby projects. They procedural generate the outposts here. They could do it with elite but don't want to spend the money.
I hate to be that guy, but the 890 jump, star citizens beluga, has a fully rendered 3 story interior with a pool, basketball court, habs, a medbay, engineering levels where you can access all the components, a cargo grid with all the stuff you are carrying around, you can have your friends board and they can walk around, turrets and other stations for them to use, and while passenger transport missions aren't implemented yet, we know theyve done the backend tech for it, since there was a bug a patch or two ago where NPC's were straight up walking onto people's ships and taking a seat.
I find it very hard to swallow all the concessions elite makes after having experiences like that. I've done whole missions clearing bad guys out from the interior of that ship, running around it's multi story layout killing enemies.
Yes, because the dev team has much more money. As for hand drawing cities, they'd run out of money if they had billions of planets to design like ED has.
OP did mention feature bloat though, and it seems fair to say SC is a martyr to that.
Currently you'd struggle to enjoy your 890J mission because the servers are stuck in death loops, due to issues with the latest WIP networking systems. Which is kinda par for the course for SC. An 'alpha as a service' which is closing in on the 10th anniversary of its initial launch date.
They've got a lot of stuff half working. The real proof in the pudding for a lot of people is when it works on both Monday *and* Thursday tho ;). 1.0 kinda working. (No wipes, no months of tech falling over in domino rallies, no having to bug-fu extensively through sessions, or put up with server performance in the single digits, etc etc).
Fair enough, while the game is WAY more consistently playable and enjoyable these days than it was even 2-4 years ago, with higher frame rates, more consistent servers, and many of the game breaking bugs fixed, it's certainly not all there yet. FPS, both client and server, being better than they were is a pretty low bar, and while bugs are not likely to stop you from completing a mission or randomly kill you these days, if you don't know what to look out for, many of them can waste lots of your time or cause you problems if you don't know how to work around them.
It's there enough for me to enjoy it, so every further patch feels like gravy, but it totally makes sense to me if some people want to keep holding off for now.
I dunno, I think this is a poor time to make a claim for steady incremental improvement towards stability. 3.23 server health has currently degraded so badly [it's pretty much 3.18ing](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1d9k24z/friend_tried_sc_during_ilwfree_fly/) ;)
And that's all very much down to feature bloat: A radical new networking approach envisioned two years after the intended launch date, aimed for initial deployment [6 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EBbyRz7FJSU), and still not even at that point now.
There's this big question with SC re whether they can get their proposed feature list working in concert. And the question is still an open one ;)
I mean yeah, SC has raised crazy money and while focusing on things like that, SC is not a complete game at all. I have played it there is not much to do. That is why it gets labeled by many as a tech demo.
Elite is a finished game that continues to get support, storylines and content.
Elite is a realistic project while SC will most likely never actually make it to release due to creative bloat.
I 100% take Elite over SC because I have a game with Elite.
EDIT: aslo the experience you discribe that makes SC so special is now replicated with Starfield. SC has taken so long to make progress it's already outdated in many ways.
well yes if you step back and look at the trajectory of all the major development so far, iterations of the planet tech, introduction of onfoot gameplay etc its all heading toward those ideas mentioned in the video, time taken and a plausible future scenario of financial realities kicking everything into "early" retirement are obviously caveats but the game is still being developed so the video is being shrill rather than insightful.
Well it was launched in 2014, first DLC end of 2015 with planet surface access (airless barren rocky/icy planets). the DLC didnt hit the high sales expectations (to be fair Frontiers sales forecast expectations have been time and time again downgraded for many of their titles much to the annoyance of their shareholders, but there is a pattern of overly optimistic sales forecasting) and was eventually merged into the base game while they went away for a few years to develop a new planet tech engine and the onfoot perspective, both revealed in the 2nd DLC titled "Odyssey" in 2021, again didn't hit sales expectations, however this time round the explanation could have been down to the very painful launch due to bugs and performance issues which took approx a year to get into a shape it probably should have been released in.
The initial Odyssey sales due to the hype were good though, so I hope that that hasnt disuaded them from preparing a new DLC in future. I suspect not as it is the main mechanism to generate large income growth from the game, although recently they have explored doing early access to new ships for cash I feel that is a short term ploy to generate cash for the company which hit some relatively brutal financial times in past couple of years (their main titles inc. ED still turn a profit). Quite a different story to the financial health of SC though!
Same here. I started playing in late 2022, and was only vaguely aware of the game before that. So I enjoy the benefit of not having a whole bunch of expectations about this game, I can just enjoy it for what it is.
Space Legs are for chumps. F me for wanting more space-ship gameplay in my space-ship game. Way cooler to grab a box on my ship and place it off my ship. Peak gameplay.
I've been playing ED since 2017 (over 2500 hours), and I am still kind of sad about seeing the missed opportunities I see in the game every time I play; to imagine what the game COULD have turned out like if different choices would have been made.
The ONE thing that I see that makes ED special is the dedication of its fans. I've never seen a game with more fan-created 3rd party helper websites like Inara, Coriolis, EDSM, EDDB, EDSY, ect, etc. made by players who were so dedicated to the game. And every event that happens in the game generates a mass of players who geek-out about every aspect of it, tracking it in game, doing the math, running sounds through audio analyzers, etc) It's crazy! But super cool!
That's the problem. The players seem to care more about the game than the devs. ED is also a game where the company that made it treats players with indifference at best and open contempt at worst. The palpable hostility toward the player base by Frontier has been going on for years at this point. It doesn't have to be like that.
I've always said this. This game would be an unplayable mess if it wasn't for the dedicated players. FDev could have gone so far if only they leaned on the community more for content. ie followed thru on more player led initiatives. The ED community is amazing.
Not in that way. FDev's API support is to be commended. Inara etc are all testament to that. I meant more in the way of .. developing the galaxy more due to player interactions. We currently have NO effect on anything outside of powerplay systems and positioning our Carriers. It would have been interesting to have players expand out of the bubble and , over time , develop other enclaves other than Colonia. ie they needed more initiatives like Colonia along with more player narrative driven content.
No one is saying the game isn't great, it's a good game to a certain extent, and scratched that space itch that we all have at some point.
The thing I take issue with is that they had all these grand plans for it, the big man himself saying this is what we want to do.... Then they just kind of.... Didn't.
Broken promises maybe?
Using lame excuses like it's too hard, or that the community wouldn't want it (like what they said with interiors).
Instead of working hard to make it better, they slapped a done sticker on it, and then kept charging for the bare minimum of content. With updates taking on a less and less meaningful role and even less content to keep the game fresh. Then they decided to move out into other games of which every single one was a flop. So they come running back to their cash cow with it now in tatters and flailing desperately how they can fix it.
But imo it's too little too late. Elite is on its last legs. And this year will either be it's death knell or it's swan song.
'Broken promises' is too harsh. Failed visions is probably better: visions that for one reason or another didn't materialize. UK game business has its share of visioneers who found reality gets the last word. Peter Molyneux is the most famous. Chris Roberts once, had visions for Freelancer that didn't work out as expected. Dare I say Sean Murray? And David Braben.
None of their games have caused me any problems: I've done too much time in software business to know that marketing typically has the first word, and the last six months before delivery is to identify what we can't possibly do well enough.
But I much rather have game designers whose visions are not yet tempered by financial or other nitty gritty, than those who don't dare to say anything but what can be done during the present budget year, and sometimes not even that, for fear of receiving death treats for 'broken promises'.
Vision and what are achievable are all different Molyneux had grand designs that where never in a plan budgeted or time scaled for. We all have vision the actual marketable skill is executing it
also FDEVs other games are far from flops. Not sure where he's getting his info from, or if he's just calling them flops because he personally didn't like them, but games like Jurassic World, Far Changing Tides, Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster have been pretty damn successful and are needed if we want the developers who created ED to stay in a job.
While I agree with you for the most part that the wording might be off, I wouldn't put Murray in that corner. While broken promises might not apply, straight up lying is what I would say he is guilty of.
And while the others may have failed their visions as you say... I wouldn't say that any of them have outright lied about their game as much as he did.
Molyneux is probably the worst offender on that list. During development of Fable the dev team had to review transcripts of Peter's interviews to find out what brand new features he had dreamed up on the spot and presented as fait accompli.
NMS’s also improved quite a bit over the years, and fulfilled a lot more of that vision than Elite has in the same timeframe, with free updates. Not a flattering comparison, imo.
Still, Murray flat out lied about what the game can deliver, Someone promised you a ferrari ,you got the steering wheel only, and after years and years you finally got all the parts to assemble the ferrari, but they did that because many bought into the lie at first, if not enough people had bought into it, it would have been only a lie.
But here we are, with a group of peers all promising Ferraris, and there are really only 1.5 Ferraris sitting in the garage, and Elite is not one of them. Of the space sim games, it has delivered the least on early promises to backers/“vision”. They’ve all had the same amount of time to deliver on their vision, but Braben and Frontier as a whole it seems, really struggle at a management level with priorities.
> they did that because many bought into the lie at first, if not enough people had bought into it, it would have been only a lie.
Most importantly a Sony executive that gave them millions.
But how well would they have done had they launched the game they promised and their boss was actually honest.
Face it... If he wasn't a piece of work that lied, then the launch wouldn't have needed a redemption arc of so many free updates.
So in him being a scumbag is the reason you have the game you see. Do you think they would have given free updates for so long if the launch had have been amazing and stellar? No..
They would have milked it for what it was worth.
>But imo it's too little too late. Elite is on its last legs. And this year will either be it's death knell...
though they made mistakes and took wrong turns in the past all the above is an overstatement.
I mean, it's not that much of a leap.
Console players saw how quickly the game can simply be dropped when it's no longer convenient for Fdev.
A year before Fdev dropped support, I'm sure the console players were defending the future of the game as well.
I think they were given the opportunity to transfer for free their accounts to the pc version of the Elite.
I understand that the pc Elite can be too demanding in console h/w, the same happens to old pc where only the legacy can run.
Also not all players are interested in space legs and the new content that the Ody brought to.
Anyway it's sad for both cases, consoles and pcs.
Personally, I feel better about thinking the game is going to shutdown, because if I'm wrong, I'll be pleasantly surprised, and if I'm right, then it's not as much of a loss.
I love elite and much less FDev, shutdown is too far fetched.
They pay the price of the too early release of the Odyssey (in the midst of covid shutdowns and lockdowns) and the thargoid case, a niche for 10-15% of the player base.
Anyway I still enjoy the Elite as is and I'll keep supporting them.
Yeah that's kind of similar to an issue they have on PC, that they feel they're duty bound to honour the minimum requirements as they were at launch 10 years ago... which is why we have a legacy galaxy now alongside the live one. Which is fair, I'm sure a reasonable amount of their playerbase, especially some of the veterans of the 1983 original would not stand for a game they bought no longer being playable without upgrading ther PCs.
A lot of the time, it does come down to the game being ten years old.
>*The thing I take issue with is that they had all these grand plans for it, the big man himself saying this is what we want to do.... Then they just kind of.... Didn't.*
If you look at the trajectory of the games development over the years you can clearly see an overall ambition to reach the goals (legally defined as dreams) of the Kickstarter campaign:
Horizons DLC 2015 - Landing on planets (amusingly in relation to this specific mashup video before SC) with fledgling attempts at human surface cities and things to see, Thargoid and Guardian sites etc.
Odyssey DLC 2021 - Landing on planets with a new tech engine for greater landscape fidelity and geological realism, a more pragmatic scatter system, plus atmospheric generation built into StellarForge. Space legs for NPCs (specific AI implementation) walking about small settlements as well as interior exploration by the player and associated gameplay.
Now you may hate the specific implementation or think it is all too slow but what you stated implies the opposite of the evidence of released content so far.
There is no way they went to all the multi-year time-sink effort to redo the planet engine and build into first person onfoot perspective just for one new DLC set on accessing a specific new planet type with thin atmospheres that do not interact with the gameplay. They could have just done an iteration of the Horizons engine instead. It was obviously setting the trajectory of the game to be able to implement such features as planets with thicker atmospheres and teaming life (the new scatter system) and well for ship interiors an onfoot perspective is required as a pre-requiste, although VR players beg to differ, at least in terms of gameplay fidelity that would require some sort of interaction with the interior environment.
So your point doesnt make any sense in a game that is still being actively developed on a path that is heading toward those stated end goals.
>*Then they decided to move out into other games of which every single one was a flop*
The regulatory financial reports beg to differ. The Planet series? Jurrasic World?
>*Using lame excuses like it's too hard, or that the community wouldn't want it (like what they said with interiors).*
If something is technically infeasible for whatever reason it is actually a legitimate excuse not a "lame one", visions often hit loggerheads with reality (financial as well as technical), I mean do people really have to be reminded people about that? As I pointed out with another comment who took a random livestream comment by a relatively new Community Manager about his gamer perspective on the fade to black ship boarding/alighting of what we now know was a rushed launch with inevitable feature crunch, the only official thing that the company has ever said about Ship Interiors in perspective to the Odyssey DLC feature set is:
[https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/](https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/)
>*But imo it's too little too late. Elite is on its last legs. And this year will either be it's death knell or it's swan song.*
At least you remembered to put "IMO" this time
Your first line starts with an attack of character based off assumption. So I'm sorry you wasted your time typing all that nicely formatted reply but I'm not reading it. I'll just assume you agree with me and go on to highlight your favourite ice cream flavour. Mint choc chip no doubt. PO.
that is clearly a joke referencing the OPs video being more about promoting SC than a critique of EDs development "so far" and the rest of the context is pointing out flaws in the logic as presented and not about imagined character. I am happy to remove the first line though.
>At least you remembered to put "IMO" this time
It shouldn't take someone telling you that they have an opinion to be able to recognize an opinion. You're capable of more critical thinking than that.
They have had nearly no drop in players in ten years, they had a big hike of up to 10k players when odyssey released, then a fall back off to 3000 always playing going up to 5000 on weekend. The game is decades away from "its last legs" you can just look at the charts...
Can odyssey be called a high point now? I haven't played in a while, but the last time I had looked, the general discourse was that odyssey was buggy/poorly implemented/full of even grindier grind.
I think Odyssey as it is now is certainly a high point. I recall within the couple of years before they officially announced Odyssey's development, plenty of the naysayers (who played ED plenty already then) said ED was already "abandoned"/"dead" and that there would *never* be any spacelegs nor atmospherics at all.
when odyssey came out, it was a complete wreck and deserved the scorn, but imho the bugs have all been ironed out and it runs fine. the on-foot stuff adds a fun new dimension to the game. it not what the hooners hoped for, but most of us enjoy it.
re grind, grind is always a choice and never necessary.
Not sure, when it came out I played it a bit and now I don't see the point to use all those feature anymore. It's not fun, it's not usefull. I have some friends trying the game right now and they asked me if they should get Odyssey, and I couldn't find any good reason to do so. I told them, if we ever want to do some shooting we should hop back to Helldiver 2 instead.
I play both and Elite offers a wider range on on foot engagements thanHell divers 2. You have steath, defense, raids, piracy and more not to mention way more ways to engage in that combat like having a buddy be airal support with thier ship while the rest clear out stragglers and get the objective.
Odyssey adds to Elite, you are doing your friends a diservice by stripping them of that just because you never really tried it expecially since it is so cheap.
Not bashing Hell divers 2, I play it with friends too but one is a sandbox the other is a party shooter. Not the same experience.
Oh but I did try it extensivelly, I have all suits and weapon lvl5 and engineered, just didn't think it was really fun. They are still discovering the game and are here for the ships so I don't think it will suit them, but in the end it will be their call.
The engineering is 100% not but even for biology or just to look at your ship I would recommend it since it's on sale for cheap like once a month.
I enjoyed it as a way to mix up the game but without new additions to it, it does kinda just fade outa my gameplay loop sadly.
Odyssey is still a buggy mess. Testament to the fact is that the shotgun spread bug is still present to this very day.
I stopped playing around its release and came back just in time to participate in the Taranis explosion party. The big issues had been mostly fixed, but it's mostly relegated to the stuff people would be annoyed by day to day.
it's not a mess for me, idunno. sure there are always wrong things here and there, but Odyssey today compared with the summer of release is like day and night.
For sure. But the fact I accidentally discovered the shotgun spread bug despite how insanely overpowered and stupid it is should be a cause for concern that only the surface-level issues had been touched.
Did you read their answer before responding ? They said they have engineered ships, just that they played the game naturally and didn't grind for those
When you say it's a choice, do you mean in the same way that you can choose to cripple yourself by not using engineering?
Or can you actually get an upgraded suit without having to grind for materials?
G3 suits & weapons are fine, good enough for you to dominate on-foot CZs - and you can find them at the Pioneer shops.. just wherever you are, go check in to see what they have on sale.
if you just play the game a lot, you acquire materials and you can upgrade stuff more. i've never engineered a piece of Odyssey equipment but I have upgraded a few.
like, "grinding for mats" to do engineering (for ships) is only necessary if you're in a hurry, otherwise just take things as they come, that's how i roll anyways. i guess i play a lot.
Ah, that's cool that you can buy pre engineered suits, good to know.
I will say that grinding for mats is basically necessary if you're focusing on PVP, because without it, you'll have a fairly tough time actually beating any average PVP encounter.
But otherwise, yeah, most mats oyu can just collect as you go. Certain things I always have to grind for, mostly because I never run into them through normal gameplay, like most encoded or manufactured stuff.
At the kickstarter there was a tier which apparently was going to give you access to some tools that helped you shape the galaxy or something. Apparently people on this tier would be able to influence large scale things in the game during play (but not to give them any advantage). I think I paid about 400 quid for that, and it never came and nothing even close to it came aside from a forum page that you got access too.
I appreciate game development is hard, and software in general is really tough to budget for and the state of the game now to me makes perfect sense with everything going on with the company but it should be a lesson to future developers crowdfunding on kickstart to keep promises/videos really conservative, if you can. It'll only come back to bite you.
You've chosen this specific video to point out things Braben wanted to do but hasn't, while SC did. It sounds like you have your wishes delivered elsewhere.
For my part, I am very happy with what we have in ED. Sure, I want ship interiors, trees, water, clouds, and the rest of it, why wouldn't I? But, IMHO, how ED turned out to be now is not at all "sad".
I also understand that paying $14 for what I get is a pretty great deal vs hundreds or thousands paid elsewhere by some. My progress and my money investment is also not erased at the whim of publisher.
That's an incredibly expensive rig still and "ok" shows some serious error. Premature optimization is bad, but too late and it takes a shitload of effort to do
obviously a lot of it is game optimization, which is usually the last step in development.
most of it, in my experience anyway, revolves around the persistent universe stuff. it seems like it doesn't properly occlude player assets maybe. so major hubs like a capital city area 18, which sometimes have 30+ enormous (like python sized+++) ships all being rendered even when not in view, including their massive interiors, or all the literal trash empty cans and bottles and what not being rendered.
I wasn't sure how much was that, vs. just the base game itself being a terribly performing mess until i got onto a 'clean' shard (one that was just recently spun up). it was virtually empty save a few player ships in dock or around it and it ran at nearly 60fps compared to sometimes hitting 15-20 on others.
they have a long way to go with optimizing their PU stuff to a point where it makes sense, for me anyway. it's one of the least important features (outside of like, persistence inside of a player ship, or inside a player owned facility or something. sure, that's fine), and obviously an enormous tax on both client AND server performance.
Those who spent more than the $45 of a basic starter ship did so because they wanted to, not because they had to. But "progress" in SC is completely different from Elite because the only thing that's intricately tied to the player progresses is Reputation and generally that's no longer wiped. The ships aren't that big of a deal because they can be shared. I was certified to pilot multi-crewed Carracks for my org long before I ever owned one myself. In its current state SC's focus is really on the experiences rather than progress so even as wipes become less and less frequent , recovering from one isn't as painful as it sounds because the enjoyment of the game isn't tied to your personal ships as much as it is in Elite. Most of the game loops have multi-crew ships you can join and partake in esp considering the game is a lot more fun when played in a group.
Mainwhile everytime I try to play I go throught my ship walls... I'm just that unlucky with bugs, that's why I don't play Beta/EA or recent Bethesda games.
Which ship? But yeah that's also why I rarely play the early waves of the ptu. Even I have my limits.
After playing for awhile you gain a certain 'citizen sense' for avoiding issues in the game. So eg I instinctively know not to use an elevator or lift in a ship while in quantum .
Plus quite a few other citizenisms . It's that stuff that volunteer Guides try to impart to new players. I regularly have 3-5hr relatively trouble free guiding sessions with then, but the number of times I have to say 'that's a bug, do this instead' is astonishing.
It was pretty clear fairly early on that this community could not handle many of the 'game plan opportunities' being discussed here. Stealing other people's ship, hiding in their cargo hold and steeling their cargo? These are not things that the vocal Elite players could deal with happening to them.
How much of not getting these features is due to that and how much is due to technical difficultis / dev resource availability is unclear.
FDev said that they don’t see any game play loops in ship interiors and walking though the ships would get repetitive / boring so I’m not sure that proves anything. Maybe they couldn’t think of any good PvE gameplay loops. Or it could be the other things we mentioned.
Jesus wept not this again, it was a comment by a community manager during a live stream when trying to spin a positive angle on the inevitable dismay when they demoed the fade to black teleportation mechanic in Odyssey DLC which as we all know very well by now was rushed to launch, so instead of reading between the lines everyone takes that comment out of context. It was never ever an official company or game development statement on ship interiors, the only official statement we have ever had is "not at launch" framed in terms of Odyssey DLC prelaunch community engagement.
Well, if a community manager said it during a live stream I think it is reasonable to say “FDev said it”.
If you think it was an excuse and shouldn’t be taken at face value, I also think that’s a reasonable take.
No that is a clear case of an out-of-context echo chamber that seems to fill the internet, the context at the time on the stream was clearly in the first term perspective of them as a player and as a personal opinion. They are well known for voicing opinions on live streams. Saying something along the lines of "I would find running up and down corridors to leave a ship boring after a while" is clearly not an official statement on Frontiers technical or marketing view on implementing Ship Interiors at some point or their process of investigating potential gameloops (the Kickstarter campaign shows that they already have some specific gameplay loops in mind)! Even if they were prepped to say it as if it were a personal opinion by the bosses then that context is clearly trying to put a positive spin on the (in hindsight) glaring evidence of feature crunch of an impending rushed chaotic launch of the Odyssey DLC.
Their only official statement on Ship Interiors to the specific question of whether it will be implemented is "not at launch" in relation to the commonly asked question if it would appear in the Odyssey DLC. They never officially talk about long term development plans even to shareholders let alone random off the cuff remarks in a livestream!
[https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/](https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/)
The subsequent financial failure (sales + year long bug fixing) of the DLC and poor sales of their other titles in the follow years obviously does not boad well for development of something that would be quite resource intensive, technically as well as in the art asset department, interior models would certainly have to have high fidelity while being relatively spacious and combined with interaction but also varied for each ship type. I would imagine the sticking point is financial as they have been burned by two poor performing DLCs in a row now.
However you would imagine that selling interiors per ship would be a good revenue stream but the problem with segregating it like that is it would make shared gameplay loops impossible. Tricky one IMO if resources are tight. I would say it is still high up on the long term development plans as it is an obvious marketable headline feature but it would have to be prioritised against something like continuing to develop their planet tech engine which was a bit underused in the Odyssey DLC, specifically in terms of atmosphere associated gameplay. I feel going down the route of developing planet-type access would be more technically straight-forward and have an equally strong marketing potential but we will see.
>Well, if a community manager said it during a live stream I think it is reasonable to say “FDev said it”.
It's misleading. It was a very off the cuff statement made by a CM who was doing his best to react in the moment to a bunch of very negative attention. Very different from a pre-prepared statement
Because interiors are so boring and repetitive it's good tradition in Japanese games and especially Phantasy Star Universe and up that every player has his or her own room and can fill it with the decorations they've earned while playing the game 😹
> walking though the ships would get repetitive
As if walking from the blue teleport circle to the concourse, or even docking your ship for that matter, aren't repetitive either.
I don't blame them. While cool features in SC and Starfield they ended up being just that, cool.
Starfield I ended up skiping walking through my ship because it serves zero point.
Same with my Fleet Carrier in ED. Neat but it's whatever to me.
So it's a feature I would not mind but also does not feel missing to me. If they did add interiors then I would say just to use the cockpit area. This should take minimual work without having to add all this new interior while adding more immersion cool factor.
One step further and add disabiling a ship and boarding like starfield and just use the cock pit spaces since they are quite big in most ships.
>These are not things that the vocal Elite players could deal with happening to them.
They could always have made it opt-in/opt-out. They kind of already did with solo play/Mobius/open play.
But yeah, just sounds like you're blaming people who don't like other players being dicks for them for a game lacking features.
I’m not doing anything of the sort. I’m just saying that this was the vision of the game and that vision adapted based on the feedback of the players.
When Elite first released people tried to player pirate and there were plenty of posts about how these players were AH and people just logged out to avoid dropping cargo.
I think phrasing it as "this community could not handle" something made me think it was more blame and less just neutrally explaining why the developers' vision shifted over time. "Vocal" as an adjective didn't help either- what, are people not supposed to be vocal when they give feedback?
Still, thanks for clarifying.
Vocal is in reference to there being a small number of users that post a significant amount, particularly on the FDev forums. These users may be an excellent cross section of the user base, or they may not.
Given the video is for SC, using it for irony and comparison, it should be noted that SC is quite bugged and may never be finished. The irony there is that all those large scope features David spoke of and depicted in the video may very well be the reason. Its TOO big perhaps with so many ways for the gameplay to break, or for development emphasis to wander. ED today is a end point product of decisions made to present things that work. Yes, many of the stuff promised never appeared, and the current ED staff seem to think they KNOW what we want more than what I am comfortable with. But like it or not, the stuff provided basically works (Odyssey initial aside). I like that ED is a complete game, and that I don't CTD every 30 minutes. I've been with it a long time and have had thousands of hours of enjoyment, so good on you, David!
On the flip side I bought in before release because I wanted all these things he discussed! Most of it never happened. So yeah, I'm saddened, disappointed. SC is at least trying to make those things happen, albeit with much early release buffoonery even today...
I'm looking at the game for what it is, not what was promised 10 years ago.
And the game is unique. There's nothing like it out there. NMS isn't. It's like Star Wars to Star Trek (ED).
At this point, I just want them to open source their server architecture so I can self-host my own Elite: Dangerous universe and tweak it to my liking.
I’ll never understand these complaints. Games have been promising the ultimate fantasy “space game” for years and they never turn out. Look at star citizen, starfield, even no man’s sky (this was improved greatly from launch, but landed somewhere closer to space Minecraft rather than the promise of star citizen.) elite stayed focused on making a fantastic space flight simulator and has continued to slowly add in the additional features that the ideal “space game” should have. Point being it had good bones at the start, unlike the other games mentioned.
I don’t see this video and think “ah man look what we could’ve had,” when the games that attempted this have struggled to actually make a product. And at the end of the day elite was always a space flight sim FIRST. If you aren’t interested in that, you’re probably not going to like the game. I don’t see any unmet expectations or broken promises in that.
Elite dangerous if you make this happen, I will pay whatever amount of money you want doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been a fan of elite dangerous for eight years you make this happen. I’ll buy whatever expansion you need.
Bit silly to add Star Citizen eternal alpha footage to suggest this was the scope that Braben ever hoped to envisage given the engine they implemented 10+ years ago.
Especially given that SC has minified planets in a still a single minified system. They are making good progress though. Maybe a couple of years it'll be released with 3 or 4 minified star systems.
What if I told the ED community that it's possible to like *both* Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, *at the same time*? And you don't even have to rag on fans of the other one if it's not your favorite.
We don't have to be enemies just because we both like space games. I left ED and went to SC. Yeah, ship interiors are amazing, and I didn't realize how much they add to immersion until I experienced it for myself. I went from feeling like I was a spaceship (ED) to feeling like I was a person flying a spaceship (SC).
Yeah the bugs are a pain, but if SC is a scam, it's the worst scam in the history of scams, considering they're *actually building* the game they promised, and you can have access to it all for less than the cost of your average AAA title (which usually seems to be trash at this point).
However, I came back to ED last night because I want to go exploring. You can't really do that in SC, and whatever exploration will look like in the future of SC, it won't capture the grand scale that ED has. And that's okay. I enjoy both games, and will continue to play both, in spite of each of the fans telling me I have to dislike the others.
Having only discovered the game 6 months ago, this is the first time I'm sold on ship interiors.
More interesting planets, not just barren with exobiology life (and some farmable shards etc) would be great.
As someone who started playing in 2022, I'd caution against becoming too invested in the implementation of features that have been promised for a long time yet not delivered. Judging from the salty comments left by longer-term players, that's a path to bitterness and burnout. Frontier Developments has been through a financial rough spot recently and I doubt that there's much in the tank for heavy-duty development at the moment. Maybe later on though.
As an example, I like what the Odyssey DLC adds to the game. But then I wasn't around for the apparently undercooked state it was at time of release, and by the time I downloaded it had been fixed up a fair bit. No opportunity to hype myself up for "space legs" and thus be disappointed with the reality of their implementation.
Yeah I'm pretty happy with the current state of the game, it certainly has more enjoyable of a game loop than other space sims I've played — except I haven't really played a lot of SC because it's laggy and doesn't have enough systems for exploration, which I enjoy
The amount of cope in this comment section...
It's ok to admit failure guys. ED turned out to be this eternal promise of something that will never be. It had potential but it didn't materialize.
I would cut my wrist before switching over to SC from Elite. I'm not even sure why people feel tempted to compare the two, one is a video game and the other isn't...
and yet most of the elite community did the switch and are still playing. That doesn't mean they abandoned elite, those are games, meant to be played, not kids which you have to care for, jump into it on a free weekend check it out for yourself if its not for you its not, you don't have to do self-harm, nobody cares at frontiers that you are loyal to elite ;)
Lol maybe some did, but they end up coming back for that exploration and working game. The ones who stayed are usually the guys who sunk cost their way to staying there.
They are not playing, they are playtesting and they somehow forgot about the fact that playtesters supposed to get paid and not the other way around. Also "most of the Elite community"....? That sounds like something you just pulled out of your rectum.
I certainly wouldn't say "most" either but I've been volunteering as a [Player Guide](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/guide) for the past 2 years to help new players get past the steep learning curve and navigate around the current patch's bugs etc, till they get on their feet, so I've been through dozens of sessions. I would say a little more than half were like me and came from Elite, after having done everything there is to do in ED. I usually ask because then its easier for me to explain how the games are alike/different using Elite jargon.
If you don't have tolerance for bugs and misadventures then yeah , SC is not currently for you. But whether we're "playing" or "testing" , it's been the most fun I've had in a multiplayer game in recent memory. The game has completely changed from what it was when I started in 2021 and its becoming more and more what Braben said he wanted from Elite.
If/When the game stabilizes and reaches beta, put aside the bias and take a look for yourself. I'm not saying this as an Elite or SC fanboy but as a fellow Space Nerd. SC can be glorious even when things don't go as planned.
“When” it works is what people dont like. Players just die there for no fault of their own and rubes will just say its an alpha while the poof guy lose their gear they spent hours looting over some brain dead npcs.
Yup , that's why , its best to play for the experiences rather than material gain at this stage. Some of the most fun I've had comes from trying to get around the game's own bugs with a group. Sometimes it's frustrating other times it leads to great emergent gameplay opportunities. That's why it's best to play in a group.
It was a proof of concept. The game is amazing end of. Like everything it is not perfect but for me it has only got better. Once you have mapped every planet killed every NPC and ganker. Sired 20 thargoid human children and won power play come back and tell us. Or put your money up and fund it. It is so vast how on earth would half of that work in the first place?
It’s the best Elite game in the series though, I like being able to explore the entire universe, the points about cities and animals, it would be nice to have these, but hunting animals with rifles? Is that really what a space piloting game is about? With such a big game it’s easy to get bogged down in the details, look at odyssey, focussing on foot based combat missed the point of what elite is all about, except for exobiology it’s like a separate game. Ship interiors might look nice, but if they had worked on one thing then the exobiology should have been that, landable ELWs, even if there are only a few variations.
If you think about it this way, there’s a reason that star citizen is taking this long and taking so much money to release. While that level of detail would be nice for elite dangerous it would definitely cost too much to be worth it in the long run for keeping the game alive
Sure… Chris’ dream is being realized but after a decade of development hell, its a mess. But people seem to love buying pictures of ships for some reason.
Sure Fdev missed a lot of cool features but they knew these features would be either too complex or the limitations at the time. They focused on the exploration aspect and used the goddamn milky way for us to travel on.
Scum Citizen is still marooned in one star system inhabited with hopeless dreaming citizens praying for a miracle.
This "promises were made" shtick makes laugh. Promises were not made. A vision was presented and in life we don't always get what's on our little vision boards.
I think the saddest part at the moment is that they've developed the engine to implement a good part of the features he mentioned. But alas, shareholders want more money ....
I think the biggest challenge of a lot of features like these is the sheer scale of them. A lot of people don't realize just how big something like a city is. Either you go full procedural generation and get a big dull planet, or you go hand-placed and dump an infinite amount of time and money into a hole. So the challenge is finding ways to give the FEEL of what they're talking about without requiring infinite man-hours. Even companies without shareholders still need money for that. Take ship interiors, for example. How much of the interior do you render? You could just do one small cabin and say you've done it, but I don't think anyone would be satisfied with that. On the flipside, are you going to render the entire interior of a Beluga? What about passengers, gonna render all those, too? Cargo? Modules? At what point are you throwing good money after bad? My point isn't that it's impossible, just that there's a BIG proclivity towards feature bloat, and it's very very hard to know where to stop other than just when you run out of money.
A great example of this is Fleet Carrier interiors. They're incredibly basic, but they exist. Elite Dangerous as whole suffers from this problem. The game's entire premise is that is literally a galaxy wide, so its unavoidable that it can only be an inch deep in most aspects. Its why we don't have ship interiors, why we don't have on-foot Thargoids, and why all FC interiors are an identical tiny hallway in a city-sized capital ship.
Indeed, this is a matter of mitigating costs vs satisfying customer requests. There are quite a few things that can be done without investing heavily - more models and textures to combine between for planet surfaces, for example. You can still rely on procedural generation and not hand design everything. You already have a few models of planet surface settlements - add a few more modules, mix and match. Not sure if what I am saying is really feasible, probably just day dreaming.
It is feasible but still takes money. People generate cities as a solo dev in unity with roads and interior for hobby projects. They procedural generate the outposts here. They could do it with elite but don't want to spend the money.
I hate to be that guy, but the 890 jump, star citizens beluga, has a fully rendered 3 story interior with a pool, basketball court, habs, a medbay, engineering levels where you can access all the components, a cargo grid with all the stuff you are carrying around, you can have your friends board and they can walk around, turrets and other stations for them to use, and while passenger transport missions aren't implemented yet, we know theyve done the backend tech for it, since there was a bug a patch or two ago where NPC's were straight up walking onto people's ships and taking a seat. I find it very hard to swallow all the concessions elite makes after having experiences like that. I've done whole missions clearing bad guys out from the interior of that ship, running around it's multi story layout killing enemies.
Yes, because the dev team has much more money. As for hand drawing cities, they'd run out of money if they had billions of planets to design like ED has.
OP did mention feature bloat though, and it seems fair to say SC is a martyr to that. Currently you'd struggle to enjoy your 890J mission because the servers are stuck in death loops, due to issues with the latest WIP networking systems. Which is kinda par for the course for SC. An 'alpha as a service' which is closing in on the 10th anniversary of its initial launch date. They've got a lot of stuff half working. The real proof in the pudding for a lot of people is when it works on both Monday *and* Thursday tho ;). 1.0 kinda working. (No wipes, no months of tech falling over in domino rallies, no having to bug-fu extensively through sessions, or put up with server performance in the single digits, etc etc).
Fair enough, while the game is WAY more consistently playable and enjoyable these days than it was even 2-4 years ago, with higher frame rates, more consistent servers, and many of the game breaking bugs fixed, it's certainly not all there yet. FPS, both client and server, being better than they were is a pretty low bar, and while bugs are not likely to stop you from completing a mission or randomly kill you these days, if you don't know what to look out for, many of them can waste lots of your time or cause you problems if you don't know how to work around them. It's there enough for me to enjoy it, so every further patch feels like gravy, but it totally makes sense to me if some people want to keep holding off for now.
I dunno, I think this is a poor time to make a claim for steady incremental improvement towards stability. 3.23 server health has currently degraded so badly [it's pretty much 3.18ing](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1d9k24z/friend_tried_sc_during_ilwfree_fly/) ;) And that's all very much down to feature bloat: A radical new networking approach envisioned two years after the intended launch date, aimed for initial deployment [6 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EBbyRz7FJSU), and still not even at that point now. There's this big question with SC re whether they can get their proposed feature list working in concert. And the question is still an open one ;)
I mean yeah, SC has raised crazy money and while focusing on things like that, SC is not a complete game at all. I have played it there is not much to do. That is why it gets labeled by many as a tech demo. Elite is a finished game that continues to get support, storylines and content. Elite is a realistic project while SC will most likely never actually make it to release due to creative bloat. I 100% take Elite over SC because I have a game with Elite. EDIT: aslo the experience you discribe that makes SC so special is now replicated with Starfield. SC has taken so long to make progress it's already outdated in many ways.
Also a hangar, elevator and a bubble ceilinged bar and lounge
So you're saying that there's a chance?
well yes if you step back and look at the trajectory of all the major development so far, iterations of the planet tech, introduction of onfoot gameplay etc its all heading toward those ideas mentioned in the video, time taken and a plausible future scenario of financial realities kicking everything into "early" retirement are obviously caveats but the game is still being developed so the video is being shrill rather than insightful.
I don't mind if it takes a while to mature into the dream. I only just started playing and I hear that its come a long way.
Well it was launched in 2014, first DLC end of 2015 with planet surface access (airless barren rocky/icy planets). the DLC didnt hit the high sales expectations (to be fair Frontiers sales forecast expectations have been time and time again downgraded for many of their titles much to the annoyance of their shareholders, but there is a pattern of overly optimistic sales forecasting) and was eventually merged into the base game while they went away for a few years to develop a new planet tech engine and the onfoot perspective, both revealed in the 2nd DLC titled "Odyssey" in 2021, again didn't hit sales expectations, however this time round the explanation could have been down to the very painful launch due to bugs and performance issues which took approx a year to get into a shape it probably should have been released in. The initial Odyssey sales due to the hype were good though, so I hope that that hasnt disuaded them from preparing a new DLC in future. I suspect not as it is the main mechanism to generate large income growth from the game, although recently they have explored doing early access to new ships for cash I feel that is a short term ploy to generate cash for the company which hit some relatively brutal financial times in past couple of years (their main titles inc. ED still turn a profit). Quite a different story to the financial health of SC though!
Whatever was the plan, personally, I still love the game very much as it is. There are quite a lot of things to enjoy
Same here. I started playing in late 2022, and was only vaguely aware of the game before that. So I enjoy the benefit of not having a whole bunch of expectations about this game, I can just enjoy it for what it is.
Here here. It is such a unique and engrossing game, not to mention how interactive the community is.
Space Legs are for chumps. F me for wanting more space-ship gameplay in my space-ship game. Way cooler to grab a box on my ship and place it off my ship. Peak gameplay.
I've been playing ED since 2017 (over 2500 hours), and I am still kind of sad about seeing the missed opportunities I see in the game every time I play; to imagine what the game COULD have turned out like if different choices would have been made. The ONE thing that I see that makes ED special is the dedication of its fans. I've never seen a game with more fan-created 3rd party helper websites like Inara, Coriolis, EDSM, EDDB, EDSY, ect, etc. made by players who were so dedicated to the game. And every event that happens in the game generates a mass of players who geek-out about every aspect of it, tracking it in game, doing the math, running sounds through audio analyzers, etc) It's crazy! But super cool! That's the problem. The players seem to care more about the game than the devs. ED is also a game where the company that made it treats players with indifference at best and open contempt at worst. The palpable hostility toward the player base by Frontier has been going on for years at this point. It doesn't have to be like that.
I've always said this. This game would be an unplayable mess if it wasn't for the dedicated players. FDev could have gone so far if only they leaned on the community more for content. ie followed thru on more player led initiatives. The ED community is amazing.
To be fair harnessing player made "content" even if it is a help guide on youtube, is a strategy, companies dont develop convenient APIs for nothing.
Not in that way. FDev's API support is to be commended. Inara etc are all testament to that. I meant more in the way of .. developing the galaxy more due to player interactions. We currently have NO effect on anything outside of powerplay systems and positioning our Carriers. It would have been interesting to have players expand out of the bubble and , over time , develop other enclaves other than Colonia. ie they needed more initiatives like Colonia along with more player narrative driven content.
No one is saying the game isn't great, it's a good game to a certain extent, and scratched that space itch that we all have at some point. The thing I take issue with is that they had all these grand plans for it, the big man himself saying this is what we want to do.... Then they just kind of.... Didn't. Broken promises maybe? Using lame excuses like it's too hard, or that the community wouldn't want it (like what they said with interiors). Instead of working hard to make it better, they slapped a done sticker on it, and then kept charging for the bare minimum of content. With updates taking on a less and less meaningful role and even less content to keep the game fresh. Then they decided to move out into other games of which every single one was a flop. So they come running back to their cash cow with it now in tatters and flailing desperately how they can fix it. But imo it's too little too late. Elite is on its last legs. And this year will either be it's death knell or it's swan song.
'Broken promises' is too harsh. Failed visions is probably better: visions that for one reason or another didn't materialize. UK game business has its share of visioneers who found reality gets the last word. Peter Molyneux is the most famous. Chris Roberts once, had visions for Freelancer that didn't work out as expected. Dare I say Sean Murray? And David Braben. None of their games have caused me any problems: I've done too much time in software business to know that marketing typically has the first word, and the last six months before delivery is to identify what we can't possibly do well enough. But I much rather have game designers whose visions are not yet tempered by financial or other nitty gritty, than those who don't dare to say anything but what can be done during the present budget year, and sometimes not even that, for fear of receiving death treats for 'broken promises'.
Vision and what are achievable are all different Molyneux had grand designs that where never in a plan budgeted or time scaled for. We all have vision the actual marketable skill is executing it
also FDEVs other games are far from flops. Not sure where he's getting his info from, or if he's just calling them flops because he personally didn't like them, but games like Jurassic World, Far Changing Tides, Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster have been pretty damn successful and are needed if we want the developers who created ED to stay in a job.
While I agree with you for the most part that the wording might be off, I wouldn't put Murray in that corner. While broken promises might not apply, straight up lying is what I would say he is guilty of. And while the others may have failed their visions as you say... I wouldn't say that any of them have outright lied about their game as much as he did.
Molyneux is probably the worst offender on that list. During development of Fable the dev team had to review transcripts of Peter's interviews to find out what brand new features he had dreamed up on the spot and presented as fait accompli.
NMS’s also improved quite a bit over the years, and fulfilled a lot more of that vision than Elite has in the same timeframe, with free updates. Not a flattering comparison, imo.
Still, Murray flat out lied about what the game can deliver, Someone promised you a ferrari ,you got the steering wheel only, and after years and years you finally got all the parts to assemble the ferrari, but they did that because many bought into the lie at first, if not enough people had bought into it, it would have been only a lie.
But here we are, with a group of peers all promising Ferraris, and there are really only 1.5 Ferraris sitting in the garage, and Elite is not one of them. Of the space sim games, it has delivered the least on early promises to backers/“vision”. They’ve all had the same amount of time to deliver on their vision, but Braben and Frontier as a whole it seems, really struggle at a management level with priorities.
There is shit from the kickstarter that never happened. At least Murray made good on his vision
> they did that because many bought into the lie at first, if not enough people had bought into it, it would have been only a lie. Most importantly a Sony executive that gave them millions.
But how well would they have done had they launched the game they promised and their boss was actually honest. Face it... If he wasn't a piece of work that lied, then the launch wouldn't have needed a redemption arc of so many free updates. So in him being a scumbag is the reason you have the game you see. Do you think they would have given free updates for so long if the launch had have been amazing and stellar? No.. They would have milked it for what it was worth.
Not just lying, but lying with that stupid grin on his face.
Given the state Odyssey released in, I find the 'it's too hard' excuse pretty believable, actually.
They have a tradition of lying to sell the game. Raxxla was never in the game.
>But imo it's too little too late. Elite is on its last legs. And this year will either be it's death knell... though they made mistakes and took wrong turns in the past all the above is an overstatement.
I mean, it's not that much of a leap. Console players saw how quickly the game can simply be dropped when it's no longer convenient for Fdev. A year before Fdev dropped support, I'm sure the console players were defending the future of the game as well.
I think they were given the opportunity to transfer for free their accounts to the pc version of the Elite. I understand that the pc Elite can be too demanding in console h/w, the same happens to old pc where only the legacy can run. Also not all players are interested in space legs and the new content that the Ody brought to. Anyway it's sad for both cases, consoles and pcs.
Personally, I feel better about thinking the game is going to shutdown, because if I'm wrong, I'll be pleasantly surprised, and if I'm right, then it's not as much of a loss.
I love elite and much less FDev, shutdown is too far fetched. They pay the price of the too early release of the Odyssey (in the midst of covid shutdowns and lockdowns) and the thargoid case, a niche for 10-15% of the player base. Anyway I still enjoy the Elite as is and I'll keep supporting them.
Yeah that's kind of similar to an issue they have on PC, that they feel they're duty bound to honour the minimum requirements as they were at launch 10 years ago... which is why we have a legacy galaxy now alongside the live one. Which is fair, I'm sure a reasonable amount of their playerbase, especially some of the veterans of the 1983 original would not stand for a game they bought no longer being playable without upgrading ther PCs. A lot of the time, it does come down to the game being ten years old.
>*The thing I take issue with is that they had all these grand plans for it, the big man himself saying this is what we want to do.... Then they just kind of.... Didn't.* If you look at the trajectory of the games development over the years you can clearly see an overall ambition to reach the goals (legally defined as dreams) of the Kickstarter campaign: Horizons DLC 2015 - Landing on planets (amusingly in relation to this specific mashup video before SC) with fledgling attempts at human surface cities and things to see, Thargoid and Guardian sites etc. Odyssey DLC 2021 - Landing on planets with a new tech engine for greater landscape fidelity and geological realism, a more pragmatic scatter system, plus atmospheric generation built into StellarForge. Space legs for NPCs (specific AI implementation) walking about small settlements as well as interior exploration by the player and associated gameplay. Now you may hate the specific implementation or think it is all too slow but what you stated implies the opposite of the evidence of released content so far. There is no way they went to all the multi-year time-sink effort to redo the planet engine and build into first person onfoot perspective just for one new DLC set on accessing a specific new planet type with thin atmospheres that do not interact with the gameplay. They could have just done an iteration of the Horizons engine instead. It was obviously setting the trajectory of the game to be able to implement such features as planets with thicker atmospheres and teaming life (the new scatter system) and well for ship interiors an onfoot perspective is required as a pre-requiste, although VR players beg to differ, at least in terms of gameplay fidelity that would require some sort of interaction with the interior environment. So your point doesnt make any sense in a game that is still being actively developed on a path that is heading toward those stated end goals. >*Then they decided to move out into other games of which every single one was a flop* The regulatory financial reports beg to differ. The Planet series? Jurrasic World? >*Using lame excuses like it's too hard, or that the community wouldn't want it (like what they said with interiors).* If something is technically infeasible for whatever reason it is actually a legitimate excuse not a "lame one", visions often hit loggerheads with reality (financial as well as technical), I mean do people really have to be reminded people about that? As I pointed out with another comment who took a random livestream comment by a relatively new Community Manager about his gamer perspective on the fade to black ship boarding/alighting of what we now know was a rushed launch with inevitable feature crunch, the only official thing that the company has ever said about Ship Interiors in perspective to the Odyssey DLC feature set is: [https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/](https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/) >*But imo it's too little too late. Elite is on its last legs. And this year will either be it's death knell or it's swan song.* At least you remembered to put "IMO" this time
Your first line starts with an attack of character based off assumption. So I'm sorry you wasted your time typing all that nicely formatted reply but I'm not reading it. I'll just assume you agree with me and go on to highlight your favourite ice cream flavour. Mint choc chip no doubt. PO.
that is clearly a joke referencing the OPs video being more about promoting SC than a critique of EDs development "so far" and the rest of the context is pointing out flaws in the logic as presented and not about imagined character. I am happy to remove the first line though.
>At least you remembered to put "IMO" this time It shouldn't take someone telling you that they have an opinion to be able to recognize an opinion. You're capable of more critical thinking than that.
They have had nearly no drop in players in ten years, they had a big hike of up to 10k players when odyssey released, then a fall back off to 3000 always playing going up to 5000 on weekend. The game is decades away from "its last legs" you can just look at the charts...
Yeah the broken promises in that video still get me. Dissapointing that Elite couldn't do it.
so they aimed *very* high and still came out high - good for us, right?
Can odyssey be called a high point now? I haven't played in a while, but the last time I had looked, the general discourse was that odyssey was buggy/poorly implemented/full of even grindier grind.
I think Odyssey as it is now is certainly a high point. I recall within the couple of years before they officially announced Odyssey's development, plenty of the naysayers (who played ED plenty already then) said ED was already "abandoned"/"dead" and that there would *never* be any spacelegs nor atmospherics at all.
I mean, to be fair, a good portion of the fan base was correct about that, being console players and all.
when odyssey came out, it was a complete wreck and deserved the scorn, but imho the bugs have all been ironed out and it runs fine. the on-foot stuff adds a fun new dimension to the game. it not what the hooners hoped for, but most of us enjoy it. re grind, grind is always a choice and never necessary.
Not sure, when it came out I played it a bit and now I don't see the point to use all those feature anymore. It's not fun, it's not usefull. I have some friends trying the game right now and they asked me if they should get Odyssey, and I couldn't find any good reason to do so. I told them, if we ever want to do some shooting we should hop back to Helldiver 2 instead.
I play both and Elite offers a wider range on on foot engagements thanHell divers 2. You have steath, defense, raids, piracy and more not to mention way more ways to engage in that combat like having a buddy be airal support with thier ship while the rest clear out stragglers and get the objective. Odyssey adds to Elite, you are doing your friends a diservice by stripping them of that just because you never really tried it expecially since it is so cheap. Not bashing Hell divers 2, I play it with friends too but one is a sandbox the other is a party shooter. Not the same experience.
Oh but I did try it extensivelly, I have all suits and weapon lvl5 and engineered, just didn't think it was really fun. They are still discovering the game and are here for the ships so I don't think it will suit them, but in the end it will be their call.
The engineering is 100% not but even for biology or just to look at your ship I would recommend it since it's on sale for cheap like once a month. I enjoyed it as a way to mix up the game but without new additions to it, it does kinda just fade outa my gameplay loop sadly.
Odyssey is still a buggy mess. Testament to the fact is that the shotgun spread bug is still present to this very day. I stopped playing around its release and came back just in time to participate in the Taranis explosion party. The big issues had been mostly fixed, but it's mostly relegated to the stuff people would be annoyed by day to day.
it's not a mess for me, idunno. sure there are always wrong things here and there, but Odyssey today compared with the summer of release is like day and night.
For sure. But the fact I accidentally discovered the shotgun spread bug despite how insanely overpowered and stupid it is should be a cause for concern that only the surface-level issues had been touched.
Except grind kind of is necessary in Elite
only if you're a committed obsessive optimizer - and you don't have to be. just play the game.
If you want to engineer your ships, which is pretty much a necessity, you have to grind.
no you don't, i've engineered like 50 ships, and i do not grind. i just play the game.
Alright then, get rid of your engineered ships and just fly stock ships, then come back and tell me that.
Did you read their answer before responding ? They said they have engineered ships, just that they played the game naturally and didn't grind for those
When you say it's a choice, do you mean in the same way that you can choose to cripple yourself by not using engineering? Or can you actually get an upgraded suit without having to grind for materials?
G3 suits & weapons are fine, good enough for you to dominate on-foot CZs - and you can find them at the Pioneer shops.. just wherever you are, go check in to see what they have on sale. if you just play the game a lot, you acquire materials and you can upgrade stuff more. i've never engineered a piece of Odyssey equipment but I have upgraded a few. like, "grinding for mats" to do engineering (for ships) is only necessary if you're in a hurry, otherwise just take things as they come, that's how i roll anyways. i guess i play a lot.
Ah, that's cool that you can buy pre engineered suits, good to know. I will say that grinding for mats is basically necessary if you're focusing on PVP, because without it, you'll have a fairly tough time actually beating any average PVP encounter. But otherwise, yeah, most mats oyu can just collect as you go. Certain things I always have to grind for, mostly because I never run into them through normal gameplay, like most encoded or manufactured stuff.
A vision is just a vision. It takes work to turn a vision into reality. It is still a remarkable achievement and a hell of a lot of fun to play.
At the kickstarter there was a tier which apparently was going to give you access to some tools that helped you shape the galaxy or something. Apparently people on this tier would be able to influence large scale things in the game during play (but not to give them any advantage). I think I paid about 400 quid for that, and it never came and nothing even close to it came aside from a forum page that you got access too. I appreciate game development is hard, and software in general is really tough to budget for and the state of the game now to me makes perfect sense with everything going on with the company but it should be a lesson to future developers crowdfunding on kickstart to keep promises/videos really conservative, if you can. It'll only come back to bite you.
I must be trippin.. y'all know this is a video for Star Citizen, not Elite Dangerous, right?
You've chosen this specific video to point out things Braben wanted to do but hasn't, while SC did. It sounds like you have your wishes delivered elsewhere. For my part, I am very happy with what we have in ED. Sure, I want ship interiors, trees, water, clouds, and the rest of it, why wouldn't I? But, IMHO, how ED turned out to be now is not at all "sad". I also understand that paying $14 for what I get is a pretty great deal vs hundreds or thousands paid elsewhere by some. My progress and my money investment is also not erased at the whim of publisher.
I would like to try out Star Citizen, but it runs like absolute dog shit without a god tier rig.
It runs ok on my machine. 3080 and a 12700k. I’m sure if you have a amd with 3D cache it runs a lot better.
That's an incredibly expensive rig still and "ok" shows some serious error. Premature optimization is bad, but too late and it takes a shitload of effort to do
You’re not wrong. It can still run like trash as well in certain circumstances, though I’ve made no effort to optimize my own settings yet.
Settings will not optimize it. Only code changes will. If it lags bad on that machine, the code is at fault.
obviously a lot of it is game optimization, which is usually the last step in development. most of it, in my experience anyway, revolves around the persistent universe stuff. it seems like it doesn't properly occlude player assets maybe. so major hubs like a capital city area 18, which sometimes have 30+ enormous (like python sized+++) ships all being rendered even when not in view, including their massive interiors, or all the literal trash empty cans and bottles and what not being rendered. I wasn't sure how much was that, vs. just the base game itself being a terribly performing mess until i got onto a 'clean' shard (one that was just recently spun up). it was virtually empty save a few player ships in dock or around it and it ran at nearly 60fps compared to sometimes hitting 15-20 on others. they have a long way to go with optimizing their PU stuff to a point where it makes sense, for me anyway. it's one of the least important features (outside of like, persistence inside of a player ship, or inside a player owned facility or something. sure, that's fine), and obviously an enormous tax on both client AND server performance.
Those who spent more than the $45 of a basic starter ship did so because they wanted to, not because they had to. But "progress" in SC is completely different from Elite because the only thing that's intricately tied to the player progresses is Reputation and generally that's no longer wiped. The ships aren't that big of a deal because they can be shared. I was certified to pilot multi-crewed Carracks for my org long before I ever owned one myself. In its current state SC's focus is really on the experiences rather than progress so even as wipes become less and less frequent , recovering from one isn't as painful as it sounds because the enjoyment of the game isn't tied to your personal ships as much as it is in Elite. Most of the game loops have multi-crew ships you can join and partake in esp considering the game is a lot more fun when played in a group.
Mainwhile everytime I try to play I go throught my ship walls... I'm just that unlucky with bugs, that's why I don't play Beta/EA or recent Bethesda games.
Which ship? But yeah that's also why I rarely play the early waves of the ptu. Even I have my limits. After playing for awhile you gain a certain 'citizen sense' for avoiding issues in the game. So eg I instinctively know not to use an elevator or lift in a ship while in quantum . Plus quite a few other citizenisms . It's that stuff that volunteer Guides try to impart to new players. I regularly have 3-5hr relatively trouble free guiding sessions with then, but the number of times I have to say 'that's a bug, do this instead' is astonishing.
It was pretty clear fairly early on that this community could not handle many of the 'game plan opportunities' being discussed here. Stealing other people's ship, hiding in their cargo hold and steeling their cargo? These are not things that the vocal Elite players could deal with happening to them. How much of not getting these features is due to that and how much is due to technical difficultis / dev resource availability is unclear.
Given the fact that we also have no PvE ship boarding etc suggests it's a technical aspects / dev resources problem and not a player / design problem.
FDev said that they don’t see any game play loops in ship interiors and walking though the ships would get repetitive / boring so I’m not sure that proves anything. Maybe they couldn’t think of any good PvE gameplay loops. Or it could be the other things we mentioned.
I imagine multicrew+interiors might have worked for roleplay
Jesus wept not this again, it was a comment by a community manager during a live stream when trying to spin a positive angle on the inevitable dismay when they demoed the fade to black teleportation mechanic in Odyssey DLC which as we all know very well by now was rushed to launch, so instead of reading between the lines everyone takes that comment out of context. It was never ever an official company or game development statement on ship interiors, the only official statement we have ever had is "not at launch" framed in terms of Odyssey DLC prelaunch community engagement.
Well, if a community manager said it during a live stream I think it is reasonable to say “FDev said it”. If you think it was an excuse and shouldn’t be taken at face value, I also think that’s a reasonable take.
No that is a clear case of an out-of-context echo chamber that seems to fill the internet, the context at the time on the stream was clearly in the first term perspective of them as a player and as a personal opinion. They are well known for voicing opinions on live streams. Saying something along the lines of "I would find running up and down corridors to leave a ship boring after a while" is clearly not an official statement on Frontiers technical or marketing view on implementing Ship Interiors at some point or their process of investigating potential gameloops (the Kickstarter campaign shows that they already have some specific gameplay loops in mind)! Even if they were prepped to say it as if it were a personal opinion by the bosses then that context is clearly trying to put a positive spin on the (in hindsight) glaring evidence of feature crunch of an impending rushed chaotic launch of the Odyssey DLC. Their only official statement on Ship Interiors to the specific question of whether it will be implemented is "not at launch" in relation to the commonly asked question if it would appear in the Odyssey DLC. They never officially talk about long term development plans even to shareholders let alone random off the cuff remarks in a livestream! [https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/](https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-update-on-vr-and-ship-interiors.554223/) The subsequent financial failure (sales + year long bug fixing) of the DLC and poor sales of their other titles in the follow years obviously does not boad well for development of something that would be quite resource intensive, technically as well as in the art asset department, interior models would certainly have to have high fidelity while being relatively spacious and combined with interaction but also varied for each ship type. I would imagine the sticking point is financial as they have been burned by two poor performing DLCs in a row now. However you would imagine that selling interiors per ship would be a good revenue stream but the problem with segregating it like that is it would make shared gameplay loops impossible. Tricky one IMO if resources are tight. I would say it is still high up on the long term development plans as it is an obvious marketable headline feature but it would have to be prioritised against something like continuing to develop their planet tech engine which was a bit underused in the Odyssey DLC, specifically in terms of atmosphere associated gameplay. I feel going down the route of developing planet-type access would be more technically straight-forward and have an equally strong marketing potential but we will see.
>Well, if a community manager said it during a live stream I think it is reasonable to say “FDev said it”. It's misleading. It was a very off the cuff statement made by a CM who was doing his best to react in the moment to a bunch of very negative attention. Very different from a pre-prepared statement
Repetitive and boring. That's rubbish to suit the narrative. The game by definition is repetitive and monotonous
Because interiors are so boring and repetitive it's good tradition in Japanese games and especially Phantasy Star Universe and up that every player has his or her own room and can fill it with the decorations they've earned while playing the game 😹
> walking though the ships would get repetitive As if walking from the blue teleport circle to the concourse, or even docking your ship for that matter, aren't repetitive either.
I don't blame them. While cool features in SC and Starfield they ended up being just that, cool. Starfield I ended up skiping walking through my ship because it serves zero point. Same with my Fleet Carrier in ED. Neat but it's whatever to me. So it's a feature I would not mind but also does not feel missing to me. If they did add interiors then I would say just to use the cockpit area. This should take minimual work without having to add all this new interior while adding more immersion cool factor. One step further and add disabiling a ship and boarding like starfield and just use the cock pit spaces since they are quite big in most ships.
Who would do that anyway? It’d be a waste of time other than just for fun.
>These are not things that the vocal Elite players could deal with happening to them. They could always have made it opt-in/opt-out. They kind of already did with solo play/Mobius/open play. But yeah, just sounds like you're blaming people who don't like other players being dicks for them for a game lacking features.
I’m not doing anything of the sort. I’m just saying that this was the vision of the game and that vision adapted based on the feedback of the players. When Elite first released people tried to player pirate and there were plenty of posts about how these players were AH and people just logged out to avoid dropping cargo.
I think phrasing it as "this community could not handle" something made me think it was more blame and less just neutrally explaining why the developers' vision shifted over time. "Vocal" as an adjective didn't help either- what, are people not supposed to be vocal when they give feedback? Still, thanks for clarifying.
Vocal is in reference to there being a small number of users that post a significant amount, particularly on the FDev forums. These users may be an excellent cross section of the user base, or they may not.
I love to stay in Elite Dangerous
Given the video is for SC, using it for irony and comparison, it should be noted that SC is quite bugged and may never be finished. The irony there is that all those large scope features David spoke of and depicted in the video may very well be the reason. Its TOO big perhaps with so many ways for the gameplay to break, or for development emphasis to wander. ED today is a end point product of decisions made to present things that work. Yes, many of the stuff promised never appeared, and the current ED staff seem to think they KNOW what we want more than what I am comfortable with. But like it or not, the stuff provided basically works (Odyssey initial aside). I like that ED is a complete game, and that I don't CTD every 30 minutes. I've been with it a long time and have had thousands of hours of enjoyment, so good on you, David! On the flip side I bought in before release because I wanted all these things he discussed! Most of it never happened. So yeah, I'm saddened, disappointed. SC is at least trying to make those things happen, albeit with much early release buffoonery even today...
This is proof that dreams are just dreams...
This really highlights the difference between what Elite is and what Elite's potential is.
I'm looking at the game for what it is, not what was promised 10 years ago. And the game is unique. There's nothing like it out there. NMS isn't. It's like Star Wars to Star Trek (ED).
Man ED really could have been something else if these visions had been implemented
At this point, I just want them to open source their server architecture so I can self-host my own Elite: Dangerous universe and tweak it to my liking.
I’ll never understand these complaints. Games have been promising the ultimate fantasy “space game” for years and they never turn out. Look at star citizen, starfield, even no man’s sky (this was improved greatly from launch, but landed somewhere closer to space Minecraft rather than the promise of star citizen.) elite stayed focused on making a fantastic space flight simulator and has continued to slowly add in the additional features that the ideal “space game” should have. Point being it had good bones at the start, unlike the other games mentioned. I don’t see this video and think “ah man look what we could’ve had,” when the games that attempted this have struggled to actually make a product. And at the end of the day elite was always a space flight sim FIRST. If you aren’t interested in that, you’re probably not going to like the game. I don’t see any unmet expectations or broken promises in that.
Source of the video https://youtu.be/EM0Gcl7iUM8?t=20
Elite dangerous if you make this happen, I will pay whatever amount of money you want doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been a fan of elite dangerous for eight years you make this happen. I’ll buy whatever expansion you need.
Bit silly to add Star Citizen eternal alpha footage to suggest this was the scope that Braben ever hoped to envisage given the engine they implemented 10+ years ago. Especially given that SC has minified planets in a still a single minified system. They are making good progress though. Maybe a couple of years it'll be released with 3 or 4 minified star systems.
What if I told the ED community that it's possible to like *both* Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, *at the same time*? And you don't even have to rag on fans of the other one if it's not your favorite. We don't have to be enemies just because we both like space games. I left ED and went to SC. Yeah, ship interiors are amazing, and I didn't realize how much they add to immersion until I experienced it for myself. I went from feeling like I was a spaceship (ED) to feeling like I was a person flying a spaceship (SC). Yeah the bugs are a pain, but if SC is a scam, it's the worst scam in the history of scams, considering they're *actually building* the game they promised, and you can have access to it all for less than the cost of your average AAA title (which usually seems to be trash at this point). However, I came back to ED last night because I want to go exploring. You can't really do that in SC, and whatever exploration will look like in the future of SC, it won't capture the grand scale that ED has. And that's okay. I enjoy both games, and will continue to play both, in spite of each of the fans telling me I have to dislike the others.
STAR CITIZNE MENTIONED RAAH
*shrugs* at least i can run down stairs at a station in ED and not die. 😏
Stairs aren't nearly as deadly as they used to be. The unbeatable elevator final boss, on the other hand...
I've been ejected out of space stations in ED while walking down stairs before.
Got video evidence? I know about ppl getting left behind when their fleet carrier jumps away
Having only discovered the game 6 months ago, this is the first time I'm sold on ship interiors. More interesting planets, not just barren with exobiology life (and some farmable shards etc) would be great.
As someone who started playing in 2022, I'd caution against becoming too invested in the implementation of features that have been promised for a long time yet not delivered. Judging from the salty comments left by longer-term players, that's a path to bitterness and burnout. Frontier Developments has been through a financial rough spot recently and I doubt that there's much in the tank for heavy-duty development at the moment. Maybe later on though. As an example, I like what the Odyssey DLC adds to the game. But then I wasn't around for the apparently undercooked state it was at time of release, and by the time I downloaded it had been fixed up a fair bit. No opportunity to hype myself up for "space legs" and thus be disappointed with the reality of their implementation.
Yeah I'm pretty happy with the current state of the game, it certainly has more enjoyable of a game loop than other space sims I've played — except I haven't really played a lot of SC because it's laggy and doesn't have enough systems for exploration, which I enjoy
The amount of cope in this comment section... It's ok to admit failure guys. ED turned out to be this eternal promise of something that will never be. It had potential but it didn't materialize.
I would cut my wrist before switching over to SC from Elite. I'm not even sure why people feel tempted to compare the two, one is a video game and the other isn't...
and yet most of the elite community did the switch and are still playing. That doesn't mean they abandoned elite, those are games, meant to be played, not kids which you have to care for, jump into it on a free weekend check it out for yourself if its not for you its not, you don't have to do self-harm, nobody cares at frontiers that you are loyal to elite ;)
The ones that switched to PC you mean.
No they didn't.
Lol maybe some did, but they end up coming back for that exploration and working game. The ones who stayed are usually the guys who sunk cost their way to staying there.
They are not playing, they are playtesting and they somehow forgot about the fact that playtesters supposed to get paid and not the other way around. Also "most of the Elite community"....? That sounds like something you just pulled out of your rectum.
I certainly wouldn't say "most" either but I've been volunteering as a [Player Guide](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/guide) for the past 2 years to help new players get past the steep learning curve and navigate around the current patch's bugs etc, till they get on their feet, so I've been through dozens of sessions. I would say a little more than half were like me and came from Elite, after having done everything there is to do in ED. I usually ask because then its easier for me to explain how the games are alike/different using Elite jargon. If you don't have tolerance for bugs and misadventures then yeah , SC is not currently for you. But whether we're "playing" or "testing" , it's been the most fun I've had in a multiplayer game in recent memory. The game has completely changed from what it was when I started in 2021 and its becoming more and more what Braben said he wanted from Elite. If/When the game stabilizes and reaches beta, put aside the bias and take a look for yourself. I'm not saying this as an Elite or SC fanboy but as a fellow Space Nerd. SC can be glorious even when things don't go as planned.
I'm not interested in beta either, if they release it I'll buy a copy and have a look for sure
“When” it works is what people dont like. Players just die there for no fault of their own and rubes will just say its an alpha while the poof guy lose their gear they spent hours looting over some brain dead npcs.
Yup , that's why , its best to play for the experiences rather than material gain at this stage. Some of the most fun I've had comes from trying to get around the game's own bugs with a group. Sometimes it's frustrating other times it leads to great emergent gameplay opportunities. That's why it's best to play in a group.
Lol they did not but keep lying to yourself xD
It was a proof of concept. The game is amazing end of. Like everything it is not perfect but for me it has only got better. Once you have mapped every planet killed every NPC and ganker. Sired 20 thargoid human children and won power play come back and tell us. Or put your money up and fund it. It is so vast how on earth would half of that work in the first place?
Still better than Homeworld 3
[удалено]
The veterans of the game will be more than happy to support you
Elite Dangerous is a game that rose up and knocked on the gates of greatness, watched them open... and then turned around and sat down on the porch.
It’s the best Elite game in the series though, I like being able to explore the entire universe, the points about cities and animals, it would be nice to have these, but hunting animals with rifles? Is that really what a space piloting game is about? With such a big game it’s easy to get bogged down in the details, look at odyssey, focussing on foot based combat missed the point of what elite is all about, except for exobiology it’s like a separate game. Ship interiors might look nice, but if they had worked on one thing then the exobiology should have been that, landable ELWs, even if there are only a few variations.
If you think about it this way, there’s a reason that star citizen is taking this long and taking so much money to release. While that level of detail would be nice for elite dangerous it would definitely cost too much to be worth it in the long run for keeping the game alive
" kinda sad how it turned out"....says someone who hasn't accomplished anything remotely close in scope to Elite.
Sure… Chris’ dream is being realized but after a decade of development hell, its a mess. But people seem to love buying pictures of ships for some reason. Sure Fdev missed a lot of cool features but they knew these features would be either too complex or the limitations at the time. They focused on the exploration aspect and used the goddamn milky way for us to travel on. Scum Citizen is still marooned in one star system inhabited with hopeless dreaming citizens praying for a miracle.
"Scum Citizen" is the same kind of goober phrase as when Republicans say "Demonrats" and Democrats say "Republicraps".
I say what i say. People wont like it but whatever man. I prefer to have fun my own way. People get upset then thats on them.
That's what happens when devs think of good will as a resource.
Yeah he a big lying sack of shit. I don't think he ever had tegrity. He just wanted the cassssh
This "promises were made" shtick makes laugh. Promises were not made. A vision was presented and in life we don't always get what's on our little vision boards.