I must have missed that, which raises another problem - their communications are all over the place.
Without wanting to sound like a Frontier apologist, what more do you want them to do? They put out a regular newsletter, they’ve given interviews about the new content in 1.1, and there’s a changelog for the patch which is in beta. They’ve never ever said ships would be in 1.1. The closest thing I can find is a statement that ships are a priority for development along with player wings.
They did? What? What happened? Where are the good hunting grounds now?
A less-lucrative but simpler option to get started is just fly to the Nav Beacon in a system, hang around there targeting every ship you come across, and just open fire when you see one pop up as “Wanted” instead of “Clean.” That’s all I’ve been doing so far, and it’s been working out pretty well.
I wanted them to release a more fully featured game, rather than slap a 1.0 on something clearly half-built, sod off on holiday for three weeks, and then dribble out some hotfixes. The vast majority of 1.1 is bugfixing and balancing, a lot of which I suspect could have gone into the weekly patches were it not for the need to pad out 1.1. The major content drop here is “community goals”, which in essence is organised collaborative grinding rather than purely solo. I’m pleased that they’re making progress, and there are some very welcome changes in 1.1, but I’m also frustrated at seeing them tinker round the edges when they should be filling out the middle.
In terms of communications - their newsletters have become very very light on content or information, the interviews tend to have little detail (Braben seems to have disappeared), and the forums may as well be filled with Zyklon B. They even seem to have abandoned the development forum for premium backers to help design the game. Yes, the devs do post and respond, but getting a clear idea of what will or won’t be in this or that update, or when in the future we may see something is still difficult.
KevinC
3846
Sam, this doesn’t do anything to alleviate your feeling that Frontier is poor at communication, but what I do to casually keep abreast of what is going on in Elite is to pop into the Elite Dangerous subreddit every now and then and just quickly scan for developer posts. I don’t mean that developers are posting on Reddit, I just mean that a redditor will typically link the post, and those posts tend to be upvoted for visibility.
The Frontier devs communicate heavily on their forums, so I use the EliteDangerous subreddit as a way of filtering the important bits for me. It’s like my crowdsourced Elite RSS feed. :)
Cheers, I’m not really a reddit user, just mainly go there when somebody links it. I’ll keep an eye on that.
In other patch news, the changes to weapon heat are interesting. Apparently the cooling efficiency will drop as your WEP capacitor empties, such that it’s possible to rapidly overheat the ship and cause hull damage with sustained discharge of thermal weapons.
I wanted them to release a more fully featured game, rather than slap a 1.0 on something clearly half-built, sod off on holiday for three weeks, and then dribble out some hotfixes.
That’s absolutely reasonable, but it’s nowt to do with communication.
In terms of communications - their newsletters have become very very light on content or information,
That’s just, like, your opinion man. I mean, most games don’t even get newsletters.
Yes, the devs do post and respond, but getting a clear idea of what will or won’t be in this or that update, or when in the future we may see something is still difficult.
There’s an enormous and very detailed changelog!
I’m also frustrated at seeing them tinker round the edges when they should be filling out the middle.
I don’t really know what you expect them to do to “fill out the middle”. They’ve said the major content updates are going to be wings, more ships (including controllable capital ships), planetary landings and ship boarding/station wandering. That’s all you can expect for the next year or more other than “tinkering”, ie messing around with the injected events, maybe some new station/planet/mission types. You’ve every right to be disappointed in that, but they’ve not been communicating anything else for a long while.
Sorry, I should be clearer. They play their cards very close to their chest as to what will or won’t be in a release, so that you don’t really know until the changelog drops whether you should even expect new ships or not (for example). I don’t think it was unreasonable to expect that the FDL was going to be in 1.1 since they teased it a few weeks ago as “coming soon”. The same as 1.1 was “coming soon”. There are even people querying it in the beta forum.
I don’t really know what you expect them to do to “fill out the middle”. They’ve said the major content updates are going to be wings, more ships, planetary landings and ship boarding.
Yup, and that’s what I want (well, ships, gear, more types of stations and planetary landings mainly), but even if they dripfed the ships in one per month (which clearly they aren’t) then that would take 15 months to get to the planned “full complement” of 30. Even the X games launch with a far greater number than that. Elite has been in development on and off for years, hasn’t it? What’s there is brilliant, but there was much less in 1.0 than I was expecting.
I do accept that most of my problem is in my head as frustration and impatience, but at the same time I think FDEV have a lot of catching up to do. Everybody is going to have different priorities for what they want to see improved or expanded next, Wings are obviously important to a lot of people, and the game itself needs better comms and team functionality, but they’re not the draw of Elite for me.
Sam, c’mon now. If they told us everything, people would just have more to bitch and moan about every step of the way, and they’d just get more fed up and disillusioned with their own fan base that much more quickly because they’d feel they’d have to claw and fight for every little thing. That’s how rivet countery-type folks work.
Yes, that’s true. They do have to be careful. In a way, that’s a testament both to the quality of what was delivered as well as the passion of the fanbase. If Elite had been a disaster at launch (a la X Rebirth), I wouldn’t have nearly so much trouble waiting to see improvements.
Now THAT I can get behind. GIMME MORE! ;)
Yup, and that’s what I want (well, ships, gear, more types of stations and planetary landings mainly), but even if they dripfed the ships in one per month (which clearly they aren’t) then that would take 15 months to get to the planned “full complement” of 30. Even the X games launch with a far greater number than that. Elite has been in development on and off for years, hasn’t it? What’s there is brilliant, but there was much less in 1.0 than I was expecting.
See, I’m in too minds about the timing. On the one hand, it’s clearly not a 1.0 release (if nothing else, then the multiplayer and comms side should have been way more robust at launch). On the other hand, I was pretty staggered how complete the game felt when I jumped into the premium beta - I hadn’t expected anything like so much progress a year and a half after the thing was funded - especially when the initial Kickstarter pitch was criticised at the time as being somewhat half-baked, and the addition of major content/features came pretty rapidly in comparison to other Kickstarter/Early Access games I’m familiar with. Moreover, all the key features I wanted in the game at the start are there now, apart from planetary landings.
So, overall I’m extremely happy with the pace of development but maybe a little disappointed (or at least understanding of other people’s disappointment) at the current state. Personally I find that a better place to be in than more happy at the current state and disappointed in the pace of improvement.
Joe_M
3855
And it has arrived…
image
Commence hours of fiddling.
LOL, nice response.
I actually got my Thrustmaster T-16000M! It’s the first joystick I’ve owned since I played Tie Fighter in college. It’s probably for that reason I have NO idea how to set it up or what to do. I plugged it in and tried to manually configure it and it’s AWFUL compared to using the 360 controller. I don’t have any idea how to set this up so I am happy with it - there are 12 buttons along the base but I have no idea where they are in relation to one another without looking down at them, the 360 controller I can have thrusters and power distribution mapped to right-analog and d-pad (respectively) but it looks like either buttons or keyboard for those things if I try and use the 'stick… Ugh. I just wish I knew more about how best to set this up. Right now with a 360 controller I only need the keyboard for like (L)anding gear, (J)ump, and A/D for Yaw (which is the only really annoying part of it, but I only really yaw when lining up on a landing pad or to course correct in super cruise, I don’t believe I’ve ever felt the need to yaw in combat).
The big thing the 360 controller feels best for is menu navigation - right now I hold X and tap left or right to see the Left UI or Right UI, and can use the bumpers to tab between screens and the D-pad for menu navigation. I can’t even imagine trying to do that with a joystick.
Oh, also the throttle being a slider on the back of the joystick is much less friendly than using the bumpers on the controller. I fear I have a brand new $50 joystick I’ll never use.
I went from the 360 controller to the Saitek X52 Pro (found at a local Bargain Hunt store brand new in a scuffed up box!). The hardest part for me was learning how to access the left and right nav panels. It’s much more intuitive with the controller. Also, using freelook mode in the cockpit is nearly impossible with the mouse nub on the side of the throttle. I can’t get used to it. Both of these problems should go away once I finish building the ED Tracker thingie.
Other than that, switching to a HOTAS setup has been absolutely sublime. Ship combat is soooooo much fun now. And my landings have improved greatly. ED feels like a whole new game.
Oh, I should say I did have problems setting up a profile since Saitek’s profile editor looks like a relic from the 90’s. Found this excellent link to walk me through it, which is mostly deleting the default profiles and disabling clutch mode.
Joe_M
3859
Cool, thanks Gordon!
And LOL Brian. I spent the better part of a month convincing myself to spring for this thing.
Unfortunately the game doesn’t like having both the tutorial and the main game installed, so I think I will have to do some futzing around with the product folder to do the tutorial before diving into the real thing.
You only need the full game installed and you can find the tutorials in the main menu. You don’t need to install the tutorials separately from within the launcher unless that’s ALL you have access to.
