I don’t really even care if the mining is convoluted. The whole game kind of is, so no big deal to me, I’ll figure it out.
What bothers me is that the most lucrative thing in the extraction sites are the pirates preying on the miners. It’s a little silly when Eagles are flying around with 35,000cr bounties on their head, preying on miners extracting resources worth 1,000cr per refined ton.
Preach it, brother.
I think I will! *climbs on his soapbox*
It’s the same crap with piracy. Why on earth would I run afoul of law enforcement and bounty hunters alike to steal a few tons of cargo worth maybe a few thousand credits, when I can just blow up said pirates and earn tens or hundreds of thousands in bounty off them?
For the former, I need to equip cargo scanners, limpets to crack open their cargo hold, maybe even a FSD interdictor. For the latter, more lucrative, option… I just cram some lasers on my ship and do the shooty bits. At most I get a warrant scanner, but even without it’s still many times more lucrative than piracy. So why are all these NPCs being so piratey? Who the hell is affording these bounties? It’s surely not the Type-6 with a cargohold full of discount Cabbage Patch dolls.
Next up: The Book of Powerplay.
That gif is amazing.
There’s always the X3 games, if, you know, you want your space sims to make sense.
ED reminds me of the 1st Ed. AD&D DMG, which had a few pages (probably ripped off out of an old issue of Dragon magazine) dedicated to rolling up a random dungeon. ED is just that, a design that lives on 1d100 rolls in everything it does, but it doesn’t have a DM behind it fudging & tweaking it to make sense. NPCs exist around you because 1d100 says so, and, when you go away, they will cease to exist. Nobody pays the bounties, because nobody issues the bounties. They are just there. The pirates attack because they were rolled that way. There is a convoy dispersal site there because RNGesus deemed it must be so.
That shit worked in 1984, but it’s not even a curious artifact from the past, now. It’s that nasty old L-A-Z Boy recliner in the garage that desperately needs to be thrown the fuck out.
I actually had a lot of fun with X3: Terran Conflict. Sometimes despite the game, instead of because of it. It was pretty hard to get into and there’s a million and a half warts, but I had a lot of fun saving up for next new shiny ship and eventually building up a massive manufacturing complex in an uninhabited system. I had my own fleet of warships patrolling “my” space as well as several merchant captains making me money.
I can absolutely see how a lot of people wouldn’t like it, but I really enjoyed myself once I finally got into it (I think it took 3-4 solid attempts). Mods were also mandatory for my enjoyment of the game.
I think I would be a very happy man if X3’s feature list and consistency were to be implemented in the Elite: Dangerous engine.
X3 is just as flaky and janky as, say, ArmA, but its systems try to make sense. Cargo and ships are tracked from station to station. There is an actual (usually broken, but hey) economy in the game. There are calls and responses to what happens.
ED is just 1d100 rolls all the way down, with an under-baked (like everything else in the game) global and economic metagame sloppily tack-welded on top.
World class gifs here folks.
Carry on!
More fun than Elite: Dangerous.
Time will tell, but if what this Frontier employee says is true, maybe some of my complaints will be addressed.
The game is littered with interesting but half-baked features. Revisiting and fleshing out those existing ones (planetary landings, power play, mining, exploration, you name it) is exactly what this game needs.
That’s great, but without any sense of what they mean by that, it’s just fluff.