4701

For those who already own the game, this gets knocked down to $44.99 at checkout.

4702

Thanks–it looks like current players get a 25% discount off that for a new “season” of content. Beyond planetary landings what is it supposed to include?

Oops, too slow.

4703

Just got back, couldnt find no working connection during the elite meet event.

It was great meeting The Man himself, Sir David B DME, gaming rockstar extraordinaire. He’s literally a childhood star for me. And I got to exchange grins and handshakes with the man :D

I also got to ask a question to the team, and this is what I asked: How will the transition between spaceflight and atmospheric flight be handled? The answer i got was: Seamless. You will supercruise at the planet and your speed will seamlessly decrease as you enter the planets gravity well until it makes sense for regular atmospheric flight.

There’s gonna be a buggy called a surface recon vehicle that can be used for ah… surface recon. It is tiny, has thrusters for getting out of crevices or righting itself if you flip it. If you die in it, you will respawn at the ship. Its said to be huge fun in VR :D

I did not take notes, just trying to hear and make sense of the questions and answers over all the noise took all of my concentration and I missed quite a few. There was some interesting talk about Procedural Generation and some less interesting talk about the background simulation and planetary population numbers. And the devs promised to make an Irish flag skin for the viper. When asked about Thargoids (aliens) Braben grinned a lot and told people to wait and see and keep banging away at those anomalous containers people are finding. A bit later he was asked about bits of far off space that are cordoned off. He said wait and see and had a very happy glint in his eyes. Definitely something to do with them Thargoids if you ask me.

Oh and we all are getting a free ship if we get ED:H, a cobra mkIV which is heavier and more badass than a regular cobra. Also has an increased mark number so yay!

That lifetime pass is too steep for my limited funds, so I pre-ordered the beta for ED:H.

4704

The problem with that is they need funding to keep development going. They cannot maintain the same team if revenues go down.

When the deatmatch and Xbox version were announced the playerbase raged for obvious reasons, none of that is seen as a priority (or even necessary), but they answered saying they needed the revenue and one way to get that quickly is expanding the playerbase. So Xbox version becomes a priority.

Now they probably calculated that only part of the playerbase will update to the expansion, and deduced the numbers they need to price the expansion.

That’s where the big problem is. It seems they really need that cash, and in my opinion this strategy will cannibalize their actually active players even more. It’s not a business that can go long term.

So there’s this issue of how you can manage to keep money flowing while you maintain the same team. The old lifetime pass will actually hurt them and is hurting them right now. And chunking down features and things into expansions also is a bad idea. The business model here is very flawed, and that’s what makes Elite’s future not very positive in my opinion.

At this point a 6-months obligatory subscription fee that over the year matches the price of one expansion would be a more coherent plan. Pay $25 and you get to play for 6 months with all features included. But then not even this might be successful since there’s quite a number of players who actually don’t actively play, and so will just “wait” and avoid the subscription for a while.

4705

Not sure I’m seeing an issue here. They announced way back at the kickstarter that they’d be doing paid expansions, and there they are. We can debate whether the price is too high, I suppose. I don’t think it is. It boils down to adding new features to the game and then building on those features for another year. I’ve got hundreds of hours of fun out of my original 70 bucks. My calculator says it comes out to about 23 cents an hour. Not sure where I’m going to find a better value for my gaming time.

(That said, I wish I had sprung for the original lifetime deal. Grrrrr…)

Yeah, “Season Pass” is sort of a loaded term thanks to other games, but it seems pretty applicable here and I like the model. Lots of minor/medium updates and then a big new feature set once a year or so. Yes, please. They said they’d continue supporting the game with new features, and they appear to be doing a pretty good job of delivering on those promised features. I like the cut of their jib.

And it’s impossible to gauge any reasonable reaction using the Elite forums, because those forums are the worst. THE WORST.

But, maybe ED is not for those people who think the price is outrageous, or can’t find the fun in the game in the first place. “Where’s the content in the Horizon expansion?,” they say. “Just landing on a moon? What’s the point?”

To which I say, "I get to fly my ship to a system at the edge of the galaxy that’s never been seen before, fly my goddamned Cobra down to a goddamned true-scale planet while enjoying Elite’s amazing sound, visuals and flight model, and then I get to open up my cargo hold, jump into a goddamned moon buggy, and head off in any direction I damn well please under the cold light of a brown dwarf sunrise? Hell fucking yeah, says I.

There’s lots of other games. ED seems to be pretty successful for Frontier, so I imagine they are doing something right. There’s a silent majority out there just cruising the galaxy and appreciative of the level of verisimilitude, fun and challenge it delivers.

4706

@schurem
Is the Cobra Mk IV going to be free like the Freagle was, or just unlocked for purchase with in-game credits only to owners of “OG” ED? I thought it was the latter.

4707

The fact they put at top priority the Xbox/deathmatch version, while justifying it by saying they needed the cash, pretty much disproves your point that they are doing so well just catering to the super-happy hardcore fans.

So unless you want next expansion to be priced at $200 you might want to keep even the rest of the players relatively satisfied.

4708

Wow, I’m glad we have Hrose here to tell us what’s what. Those sure are some truth bombs you’re dropping, son.

eyeroll

4709

I half agree with you that the visuals will be amazing and exploring a 1:1 scale moon will be fun the first time… but after the 10th moon I have a feeling the shiny newness would start to dull unless Frontier manage to come up with some actual gameplay that keeps it fresh. I.E. discoveries/rewards that make exploring moons worthwhile.

They should have already been populating the space side of things with something interesting and unique to keep people interested, but unless you’re crazy about star gazing then there really isnt’ anything from a gameplay perspective to keep most people interested in the long term. I have a feeling this may also be the case for planetary landings. I really hope I’m wrong but they’ve had a year to make things more interesting so far and all we have is Wings, Powerplay and a few extra ships. Perhaps they can inject some character into the game but for now it feels barren and empty still.

Yes, before someone says so. I know space is supposed to be barren and empty, but come on it’s also suppose to be a game not just a galaxy simulator.

4710

It’s a bit steep price but I’m not surprised. When you have a game directed to a hardcore audience and not a lot of competition in the market (and no piracy), putting a higher price than average is right choice.
The right choice for the business, not for the consumers, of course.

4711

The funny thing is, as a long time nay sayer of ED, i’m finally starting to come around now that i can see we are approaching the level of game content we had in the previous two games. During the Kickstarter i understood there was a long dev plan for the game, all that was laid up front, so the lifetime expansion was the obvious entry point for me IF i wanted the same feature set in ED as i already had in Frontier and FFE, as all that would come via the expansions.

I don’t see the issue as Hrose does, i know for sure if ED was purely subscription based i would not have backed it as i hate that kind of MMO model (not keen on MMO’s in general), but am completely happy with paid expansions. In effect it is just the words used that are different, ‘subscription’ vs ‘paid expansion’ as they both mean paying more money for the game over the lifetime of the game.

The biggest issue i feel ED has is that they really have not been good at creating a fully finished/polished base product, and the hope/concern is if they will ever do that? With all the distractions of Xbox One, ‘seasons’ etc, how much time and effort and clarity of the issues will the dev team have? The knock on effect of that is anyone that has already been playing the game for ages and has kept submitting bug reports/improvement suggestions with no feedback and little evidence that the devs are going to address those, well those guys now feel a little short-changed by the payment structure offered for the Horizons expansion season.

So much so, many people have stated they are not going to give Frontier any more money until the outstanding issues in the base game are fixed, and that might gain more traction than Frontiers business plan has taken into account, there are a lot of long time players that have been grinding away and honestly trying to help improve the game that feel ‘unloved’ to one degree or another, and the way Horizons has been announced to roll out is not salve for their battle wounds, more like salt!

But that sort of has been a consistent theme during the dev of ED, Frontier have shown time and again how bad they are at communicating AND listening to their players, if anything is going to cost them in the long term it is probably that over if they go Seasons or Subscription imho.

4712

See, you say you disagree with me, but in the end you do agree.

I’ll show you: as you recognize in that last line I quoted, the difference between their model and a subscription model is small. It’s essentially a yearly subscription.

Then you say:

So much so, many people have stated they are not going to give Frontier any more money until the outstanding issues in the base game are fixed, and that might gain more traction than Frontiers business plan has taken into account, there are a lot of long time players that have been grinding away and honestly trying to help improve the game that feel ‘unloved’ to one degree or another, and the way Horizons has been announced to roll out is not salve for their battle wounds, more like salt!

This is exactly the reason why a real subscription model works better in their case.

With an expansion they are FORCED to find discrete features to put in the expansion itself. That means they need to focus on those foreign features that do not apply to the “core” game. Yet, as you say, most players out there are concerned specifically about the core game not being up where it should be.

So that’s the problem: expansion content forces them to focus on the fringe features when most of everyone thinks it’s the core game that should be higher priority. With a subscription they wouldn’t need to divide the game into foreign parts to put behind a paywall, they could work on the game as a single thing, and so putting their work where it’s needed the most.

4713

mimimi. i like it. i pay for it. whatevs. beer is far more expensive than internet spaceships. so stfu and gtfo with your raingod attitude.

4714

Not star citizen ships!

4715

lol star citizen. keep slugging the kool-aid dudes! wonder what our buddy HRose has to say about that… but if you do, do it in their thread lol.

4716

giggle I’m actually selling three of my Star Citizen ships to buy the lifetime pass.

Yes, I’m crazy.

4717

Hey schurem, did you see my question up there about the Cobra Mk IV (whether it’s just unlocked or whether it’s actually free for current first year ED owners)?

4718

No, not crazy. Clever.

4719

Hah, welp it happened, sold my Hornet, which almost entirely covered the cost of the lifetime pass. Now onto sell my Constellation and 325A! YAY!

4720

Three? those must be very cheap ships…