Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter Launched

Completely accurate. I feel like I reached a point where I finally climbed over a wall I’d been struggling to climb for months and there was nothing on the other side, so I felt this great weight of disappointment as I stare into this abyss. It’s a damned shame.

VR resurrected my interest in this game in a big way. But I definitely agree the game needs more interesting content. Simply adding animated characters who talk to you at a space bar (like in Rebel Galaxy) would go a long way to making the game a more vibrant, colorful place to be in.

I’ve been meaning to pick this up on sale ever since I brought a rift, but I’ve idly watched several markdowns pass by since. I bounced pretty hard off the earlier X games, and I get the feeling that the cockpit n’ spreadsheets genre just isn’t for me.

Some kind of fake human interaction (not real ones, mind you) would do it for me.

You could use the takeoff and landing part of this game, and just add a progression to how difficult the landings and takeoffs you have to make are due to…SPACE STUFF…like gravitational fields and whatnot…and you’d pretty much have a great game, even if that’s all it did.

This is one of those games that really frustrated me, the sense of flying when you are engaged with objects that are close to you is so good, and it’s a miniscule part of the game. The fact that you spend so much time in “space”, without objects close to you is such a fundamental failure to understand what’s good about the game.

It’s really not very similar to X (which I bounced off as well, mostly because the cockpit was superfluous to the spreadsheet). It’s really all about the in-the-cockpit experience, to the detriment of some other areas of the game. I think it’s got the best space sim-ish flight model out there right now (I might even argue it’s in the all-time top 3), so if that’s appealing to you it’s worth a try. There’s plenty of fun to be had in just asteroid belt pew-pew. It’s gorgeous, has amazing sound, and is challenging.

It is a lonely game, that’s for sure. That lone pilot out in the void experience is a big part of what appeals to me, but will leave others cold. I’m happy bumbling about gawking at the scenery and soaking up the cockpit experience in VR. I recognize I’m an outlier and hope they get on a development path that appeals to the other voices in this thread. I mean, if you’re making a space sim and you’ve lost @BrianRubin, you obviously need to figure your shit out.

Word. To be clear i am with you. I LOVE this game, so so much. I still play it daily. But yeah it could be so much more.

It’s a great game and I love it. But you CAN burn out on it easily. Just like any other MMO, you can get stuck in some intense grinding. The trick is to vary the missions you take and avoid those grinds as much as possible. I’ve done combat, trading, passengers, some engineering and mining, planetary landings… there’s a lot to do.

Excellent point! I enjoy this stuff, too, but I can see how it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Same with the Truck Simulator games, and flight sims.

Aaaagh. It’s not an MMO, you can barely even play with friends! But like you say, you have a ton of the drawbacks of garbage of MMOs… just with basically none of the upside.

Yeah, I couldn’t come up with another term and technically it IS a massive online game with thousands of players… you just never encounter any of them. :)

Permadeath would make the 80,000 credits seem a little more risky.

The funny thing is, being the bounty hunter is the safe route to take. Because your hold is empty, any NPC pirate will leave you alone. You get to dictate any engagement you make, and you’re also outfitted with a combat ship so when the lasers do start to fly, you’re equipped to handle it. The poor miners, on the other hand…

So not only are we left with a weird situation where the only commodity of real value in a RES are the pirates hunting after garbage/worthless resources, but the path with the least risk is going after the highest reward. Such a perfect microcosm of how bonkers the whole game is. :)

Historically, mining usually occurs in fenced-off areas with armed guards and poor living conditions. Not sure how ED could emulate that.

We’ll see what happens with mining next year. It’s undergoing a significant revision, apparently. The only mining I’ve done thus far is accidentally spraying asteroids with multi-cannons while I’m bounty hunting.

“We’re going to improve the way that you detect and extract resources,” said lead designer Sandy Sammarco. “We want to give you options and variety and choice when you’re out there in the black. Importantly, what we’re going to try and evoke is the feeling of Wild West prospecting. Whether that’s through jeopardy — through crises and challenges, unforeseen, cropping up out there in the black while you’re trying to get rewards — or through the concept of striking it big and hitting the motherlode.”

They don’t need to go that far, they could just make mining profitable. There’s absolutely no money in piracy in this game at all. The only thing of value are the bounties on the pirates, but there’s no motive for them to pirate because there’s little of value to take. So why are they pirating?

It’s not just a matter of immersion/sanity either. There’s no value in being a player pirating NPCs, despite there being mechanisms in the game to do so. It cuts off entire playstyles.

That is some of the low-hanging fruit that grinds my gears with this game. They went to great lengths to simulate the entire galaxy, but real basic fundamental stuff like that has remained senseless for years. They did the hard stuff, then proceed to ignore all the easier stuff that would have a greater impact on most of the player base.

Like @scharmers said, they’re great engineers, just utterly clueless game designers.

I just dropped this in the FDEV idea box:

It makes NO sense that Y miners mine minerals that are worth X while being hunted by Z(=3Y) Pirates that are worth B(=25X). It should be the other way 'round. X times Y should be MORE than Z times B How else would the local miner community pay for the bounties? The current situation is just not making sense at all. The numbers do not add up.
How to fix? Well one could increase Y (the number of miners) but that would make bounty hunting in the REZ tedious and/or taxing on the machinery as there would be ten times as many ships in the belt. An easier fix to make this &%$# make sense is to drastically increase X (the value of the stuff being mined) so that XY > ZB. That way it would make sense the pirates are there because they would have something worth preying on. The miners would have a reason to brave the pirates because the stuff they are getting is so valueable. And the bounties the hunters are getting would have a sensible explanation.
So there you have it FDEV. Just add a couple zeroes behind the mineral prices throughout the galaxy. No more 102c for a ton of bauxite but 10k. A ton of painite is &%#@ing jackpot worth a million or more.

Mining is boring, they should do stuff that’s fun instead

Mining is way too fiddly, basically. It definitely needs to be more profitable as well. If I’m mining I shouldn’t have to give up 4-5 different freaking equipment slots to accommodate everything, which makes my ship useless for most other endeavors.

I love mining in space games. I hate it in Elite. Hate. It’s so stupid complicated. Just lemme point a mining beam at a rock and hoover that shit into my hold.

Well they’ve already said they’re re-working mining this year, so they hear you. We’ll see how that goes. :)

I don’t think making mining 100x more profiitable will do anything except make everyone miners, since it would suddenly be by far the quickest way to make money.

Do you guys think E:D should remain a hardcore space sim, or should FDev loosen up and add more MMO-ish gamey stuff? For instance, maybe add rare random drops to mining, like a free bobblehead or unique paint job. Something to keep the motivation high, other than earning credits/rep.

I remember spending hours in WoW fishing in Dalaran to get that giant sewer rat pet, and it was quite a thrill when I got one!