Nothing says assurances like concept art!
OR screenshots. Or video. Or something for the eyes besides text.
I’m interested in this. Not enough to throw money at the kickstarter yet but to be fair my bar for kickstarter is pretty high maybe unreasonably so. My main concern is that even though its Elite and Braben what makes it different? Multiplayer is a definate plus but that seems to be a feature that is going to be expected now. Freelancer did it a while ago. The hurdle they’re really going to need to overcome is in offering some new gameplay mechanic and give us something more then nostalgia.
I don’t want to get down on the game. I really want to remain optimistic. Any space game in development now, see Roberts, is going to need to offer some new gameplay to really stand out. At least when Star Citizen premiered there seemed to be some real ambition there. I just want to hear from both Braben and Roberts what innovation their designs bring to the table.
Tom M
To be blunt, if you’re treating anything other than a playable demo or long (and obviously not scripted) videos as assurances then you’re doing it wrong. God only knows that previews of almost completed games can be seriously misleading, let alone ones early in production.
Pretty much all of these kickstarters involve a large amount of trust and hope. Don’t go kidding yourself otherwise.
Edit
Tom - I can’t speak for all the other backers, but “a remade Elite for modern PCs with multiplayer” is in itself hugely exciting.
Plus it’s a kickstarter. There are no assurances.
I know that JM, and I have a lot of both trust and hope in spacey game developers, but honestly, as much as I love Elite, it’s been nearly 20 years since the last game in the series, and it was something of a buggy mess (compared to Roberts’ last entry especially), it’s hard to go on simply hope and faith in this one. I need to see something.
I really do wish the best for this. Because, multiplayer Elite is an exciting idea. But my contention is that we’ve kind of gotten this with Freelancer servers and EVE. Elite’s strength is that the galaxy was huge. Freelancer was big but not Elite big, pretty much no game was. But the point of multiplayer is to do something with others. If you get too far apart you might as well be playing single player; which is fine, that’s how I usually play anyway.
My big problem is that by now we’ve had a lot of Elite clones of varying qualities. What is to stop this game from becoming another clone of its predecessor? That’s where I am hoping we’ll see the spark of innovation. Like I said I want to be optimistic, so when I hear about something new and exciting it will be very good for my imagination.
Tom M
What could they possibly put on that page to reassure you that it won’t be another buggy mess? The answer is “absolutely nothing”.
Sounds to me like you’re looking at Kickstarters all wrong. Star Citizen has a lot of flashy stuff on the page, but none of that is worth a damn - it could still be a complete piece of shit.
Kickstarter is not a preordering system.
We already have as close to an Elite Online as we’re gonna get with Jumpgate. Not as vast as Frontier, but it hit every other right note in this regard. If this game can be as good as Jumpgate at the very least, I’ll be very happy.
Actually, we haven’t. There’s Oolite, which is an Elite clone that works really well, has had a ton of development and some really cool new features added via its funky plugin system.
I’d have Kickstarted a multiplayer Oolite (I said as much yesterday before I knew about this one!), simply because all the other games that got tagged as being “Elite clones” were really nothing of the sort. Freelancer? The X Series? They diverged from the Elite formula quite a bit.
I know, what I hope it is is a way to show other devs and publishers, “Hey, there’s an interest in this genre, maybe we should be making more games in this vein.”
Ultimately I think this and Star Citizen just show the power of old-school names and classic games. If it wasn’t Braben, and if it wasn’t Roberts, then both projects would struggle.
Not necessarily true. There have been quite a few successful campaigns from smaller devs, such as FTL, StarDrive, M.O.R.E., Kinetic Void and others who don’t have old-school names or classic games. These campaigns had reasonable goals, strong pitches and constant updates, which helped assure backers like me. Sure, several campaigns such as Nexus 2, Squad Wars and so on failed, but there were other reasons they failed (goals too lofty, too few updates, confusing tiers, lack of focus in their pitch, etc).
I’d prefer this one to be the former rather than the latter.
“That’s just like… Your opinion man.” ;)
Just kidding there but on a serious note I don’t see a whole lot of difference in the gameplay flow between Elite, Freelancer, and X. I’ll even throw in Privateer, but what those later games have to varying degrees is a central story and more fleshed out universe. To me though the gameplay is similar: trade, run missions, get a better ranking.
Tom M
FTL got less in a month than Elite earned in a day. I’m talking about struggling to meet the goals both Elite and Star Citizen have put up, not comparing to low-expectation Kickstarters.
Freelancer and X both had much smaller “worlds”. There just isn’t the same sense of exploration. Yes, the central themes are similar. X diverges a long way though - lots of slow motion gameplay, automation, small scale systems to go with their big and complicated trading engine. It’s an awful lot of cruft that Elite just never had.
Yeah, Elite began its own little genre, but lots of folks have tweaked the formula of the original to varying degrees of success.
Regardless, it’s always about striving to meet expectations, and with smaller projects this is easier. With larger projects like the ones you mentioned, a lot of work needs to go into keeping those expectations positive and reasonable. Star Citizen, I think, has done a very good job of this, despite the initial shakiness. Elite: Dangerous so far is doing a horrible job of it, in my opinion.
That since of exploration is a very critical idea. Now when elite came out it offered a very large galaxy by virtue of the seed it had to unpack and generate the parts you explored in. But… One red giant starts to look an awful lot like the red giant you passed a little while ago. When the graphics got better and the worlds tighter the designers could make the different areas feel more unique. So my argument is that in terms of that feeling of exploration didn’t really diminish.
Tom M
That’s fine, although you are being a little bit excessive over the first day of a Kickstarter that’s absolutely rolling in cash. However it doesn’t address my point at all, which is that Star Citizen would be getting nowhere near its current level of funding without the big name behind it.
Without a doubt both of the games are getting alot of funding due to the names behind them. They are designers with at least one success so its not unreasonable to expect more from them. Can they offer something new after so long in retirement? That is the part that I worry about.
Tom M