6561

;)

6562

Just chiming in to say I agree with @schurem . It’s too easy nowadays to be overly negative without realizing what a nasty effect that can have on ourselves and society at large, and that line blurs even more when one is passionate about a certain subject. ED is what it is, and you can acknowledge its wasted potential (in your own view) without dismissing other people’s tastes or intelligence or approach to life.

I get that, sometimes, complaining about stuff that’s in truth inconsequential in the long run will take your mind off of present things that are much harder to deal with. I get it. Just try to not pick on people who might have a different approach to dealing with things and life at large. Please be kind.

6563

Who’s dismissing other people’s tastes? If you’re still able to enjoy the game, that’s awesome. Some of us can’t anymore.

6564

I’m not saying someone did that in this thread, but it’s very common to see everywhere, and very easy to do without noticing. It was a “stream of thought” thing, not a reaction to anything in particular in this thread.

6565

I will chime in as somebody who likes Elite the way it is. Not to say it couldn’t be better, but I find it a calming way to pass time in between more plot-driven games. I find it fills a hole few other games do. Maybe the trucking games, but then those aren’t in space.

6566

Speaking of which: Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator just had a big update that adds, among other things, random road events! No interdictions though. At least I hope not.

6567

Aw man, if cops can pull you over now that would be kind of awesome. And also kind of a bummer.

6568

OMG I’ll have to try that! Been meaning to get back into Euro Truck Sim 2.

Now if Elite had the business aspect of ETS2, for example, it’d be AMAAAAAAZING.

6569

I think ATS already had those, it’s just adding them to ETS 2. The ATS update mainly adds the route through Yosemite.

6570

I agree with @schurem as well. Even Brian admits in this thread that the time when you start playing to when you finally get enough money that you can get any ship is not trivial, it’s not zero. And during that time, the game provides a great time. @Rod_Humble had a great time exploring. I tried out mining for a while, and thought it was appropriately repetitive and tough. Combat and doing bounties is a lot of fun. And we’ve seen some great stories in this thread of people crossing the galaxy to do long epic trading runs taking some rare resources from one place to another to sell them for a great payoff.

Now, the incentive to do those things might go away once you have enough money, but that shouldn’t negate the enjoyment of getting there. But I all I hear from @BrianRubin and others in various other threads now is “Elite? Pfft, not worth it, that game is terrible. Stay away”. As if the only gameplay that matters is the gameplay after you become rich enough in this universe to feel the lack of options at the endgame. The satisfying simulation and combat no longer matter, the exploration of new star systems no longer matter, the long trade runs and the nose-to-the-grindstone mining no longer matter even to the new player who is thinking of buying Elite because eventually they might play it long enough that they’ll get to the endgame and be dissatisfied and realize they hadn’t been having fun this whole time after all.

6571

My interest in this game was seriously re-ignited with VR. Talk about immersive. I was having a great time just doing passenger missions and enjoying the sight-seeing tours. But even that becomes stale after a while. You’ve seen one lava geyser, you’ve seen them all. I’m anticipating the planetary visual improvements later this year, and I hope Frontier adds more variety to the passenger missions. Maybe add some interesting alien wrecks to the mix.

6572

That fun in the early days was mostly, and sadly, an illusion, I feel. We had something to chase. A bigger ship. A bigger bank account. But…ultimately you realize, that’s it. Sure, it’s fun to get there, but I’ll tell ya, the crushing disappointment I felt upon reaching a place in the grind of the game where in I completely lost the desire to play because there’s literally NOTHING ELSE was heartbreaking, and emotionally negated all the fun that had come before it.

I played Jumpgate more than any other game. THOUSANDS of hours. And I enjoyed EVERY MOMENT because there was something to move toward. Helping a station produce more nukes to help with flux spawns. Leveling up to get a better ship and engine, and having to find where that equipment was because it wasn’t in infinite supply as in Elite.

So it’s not that just the mid and end-game of Elite is lacking, it’s that, once the veil is lifted, it made the hours I’d spent getting to that point seem like a waste of time, and I’m not sure that’s something I can ever get over. I just don’t want others to get to that point.

6573

thats just like your opinion man. i dont feel any minute in elite is more or less wasted or valuable than those spent in witcher3, dcs or freecell. and thats just another opinion.

6574

I mean clearly Brian is expressing an opinion here. He needs a goal to work towards - I get that, it’s how I play Diablo. But some games it can be fun just to exist, and I think some of us find Elite serves that purpose.

6575

Don’t mind schurem. He thinks that any game that supports VR is awesome.

:p

E:D is a dog. Beautiful engineering marred by pathetic, lethargic, and straight-up clueless game design.

6576

Don’t worry dude, Anthem is going to have all the kickass gameplay you’ll ever want.

6577

Bro, I will Internet fight you.

6578

I few things as maybe a response to @schurem and @Rock8man

1.) I dont hate the game at all. It is one of my favourite games of all time.
2.) I am complaining about them removing features here. So if anyone is of the “just accept the things the way things are” its me, in this case. :)
3.) I very much doubt @BrianRubin or myself have turned away any players, actually it is the opposite. I have directly brought 4 of my friends and family into the game this year alone. God knows how many Brian has brought in over the years. I suspect a few dozen at least.
4.) Nobody has been rude or abusive to the developers here. None of us would ever do that. Besides I actually KNOW some of the developers at Frontier, they are amazingly talented. If I got out of line they would sort me out with a quick PM or email I assure you.
5.) Armchair game design is something fans of games get to do. I am a fan (as in, I am overly emotionally invested due to Elite’s impact on my childhood and life) so for this ONE game I get to be irrational, I dont apologise for it :)
6.) Have I mentioned I have 11 planetary Neubula’s with my name on them? Thats a Humble brag :)

6579

All I want is some player agency and some sanity checking around a lot of the numbers in the game.

Take a system that is under a Famine state. You can maybe make marginally more there for shipping food supplies but it’s so negligible to not be worth your time. It affects what missions are available, but completing those missions doesn’t have any appreciable effect. The Famine goes away, but no one cares that it was there originally and no one cares that it was resolved. Nothing ever really changes.

I’d like to see the background simulation actually do something. If a system experiencing a long-term famine, I want to see the population of that system go down. The simulation tracks system population already, it’s just that it doesn’t really do anything noticeable (which is a microcosm of the whole game). If the famine continues, it would be cool if the government started to break down and become an Anarchy system.

Of course, that would mean that you would care if there was an Anarchy system to begin with. Yes, there are tools to pirate in the game. You can get cargo scanners and all that stuff! But then you realize there’s absolutely no reason to ever pirate anything ever. The value of the cargo is a minuscule fraction of the bounty you can earn from blowing up any petty criminal in the galaxy. Which begs the question of why all these NPCs are being pirates anyway. I mean, they’re going to murder a miner for his 4,600CR worth of bauxite? Really? Yet somehow this very same pirate has a bounty of 63,000CR. Makes you wonder why he doesn’t just turn his guns on other pirates.

And those Resource Extraction Sites, man. You drop out of supercruise and there’s no one there. You have to wait for them to start spawning. Eventually, you have a site filled with dozens of miners mining worthless ore, flocks of security ships, and the occasional pirate who is practically an endangered species trying to scratch out a living by stealing two tons of worthless Indite in his 20,000,000+ Imperial Cipper. Makes you wonder how he even affords to ammo and fuel to run the thing, let alone purchasing the actual ship.

But if some dumb cop flies straight into your beam lasers and suddenly all 36 security vessels forget the mass murderers pirating at the site so they can pulverize you for the 200cr fine you accrued by scratching their shields? You jump to supercruise, immediately drop out… and now the extraction site is completely empty. No cops. No robbers. No miners. Nope, empty space where you wait for ships to start spawning again. I guess it would be too much to ask for this basic data to be serialized and cached on the client machine so that if you head back quickly the state is remembered.

I want to find systems with rich resources to mine. I want to mine there and make a profit, not wonder why I’m not just shooting the endless supply of pirates that are worth hours worth of mining the resources they’re inexplicably trying to steal. If pirates get out of control in a system, I want to see resources start to become more scarce and more valuable locally. I want to see this on the map and decide “Hmmm, if I can survive in there with my mining ship and wingman, we could make a killing. The refinery station in this cluster would pay a fortune for this resource they’re having a shortage on”.

This kind of stuff isn’t asking too much. Playing Pirates! on my Commodore 64 provided more in terms of gameplay-affecting background simulation than Elite does.

6580

This is the only game I have ever bought a lifetime license for. I’m quite emotionally invested in it. I WANT it to do well and improve, why is why it’s so maddening to see it flounder. And it is floundering.