And I Beta’d in at the time of the capsule. So we’re not talking a bunch of Johnny-come-latelys here
No, if you were Johnny-come-latelys you might have something new to say. Instead it’s the same old circle jerk of the same old complaints, anytime this thread gets bumped.
Come on now. Three messages up KevinC just gave an excellent analysis followed by positive suggestions.
Frontier should set up a dartboard with Star Citizen’s feature list laid out on it. Every couple of months, they can throw a dart at the board and implement a minimally viable version of whatever feature they hit.
All the Elite games have been open-ended sandboxes with undirected gameplay, and no explicit goals apart from the ones players set for themselves. Once you’re bored with the available activites, it’s time to stop playing. If anything, ED offers much more to do than any version of Elite before it. I’m surprised that this was a surprise to you.
Yes, it was clearly well thought out and written, I don’t have a problem with the content, nor with complaints themselves. But Elite is in kind of a unique position in that content is still being periodically released and this being the thread for the game, I and others rely on it for good information. And the inevitability of these same complaints arising like clockwork drags down the signal to noise ratio considerably. The game isn’t exactly what you want to to be. There are changes that could be made to get the game in line with what you’d like it to be. OK, got it.
I know what a sandbox is. The issue is that the available activities beyond “shoot spaceship” are poorly-implemented and poorly- balanced.
You know what I don’t hear on this thread? All of the "you know, this game is just fine so quit complaining " folks actually justifying why the game is “fine”. I mean, nobody is stepping up to defend the:
- Broken, grindy PP system
- Broken, grindy Engineers system
- Broken, half-implemented wingman system
- An “MMO” that has problems getting more than a few players in the same instance
- Broken RNG-encounter system of everything in the game; e.g. no local persistence AT ALL
- Broken or pointless everything beyond “shoot other spaceship” – mining is pointless, exploration doesn’t turn up anything neat, just endless textured spheres
- Bizarre focus on a metagame that proceeds at a glacial pace and is focused on the top 1% players.
But, you know, the game is fine, and you should just stop complaining already!
I’ll stop complaining when they fire the hacks they have over game design at Frontier and alleviate my blue balls with people who know how games work.
By all means, complain away. And be sure and let us know when all those hacks get fired, would you?
KevinC
6589
I think what you’re seeing in the “noise” you mention is the fact that they’re yet another content update for Elite that doesn’t address it’s deficiencies. That’s why the cycle begins anew, because while Elite has all the pieces to be a great game, for a lot of us they just haven’t put it together.
You know why there’s not people in this thread raving about engineers, Thargoids, proposed Power Play changes, or other content drops? Because those systems tend to be beset by the same problems. And then @scharmers gets reminded of his blue balls and I get all angsty on message forums while I wait for my project to compile because I would really like a reason to enjoy more of the excellent spaceship stuff.
I mostly wrote my lengthy spiel because @schurem said:
That was my idea of what would make it good (for me).
You know, I’d almost be vaguely happier if FD ditched every retarded game play system they’ve come up with since the Beta. Shoot PP, Engineers, gunners, and planetary landings in the head, since FD did such a piss-poor job on all of them. Go back to pure 84 Elite zeitgeist: shoot things, steal their stuff, and sell it on the market.
Man, everything was so bright in the Capsule beta. It’s astonishing to me how badly FD has consistently fucked up since then. There hasn’t been one goddamn system they’ve crapped out since then that has worked as advertised.
I don’t even really disagree with any of your points, I just don’t see where this hamster wheel of complaints is getting us. At this point it seems fairly clear that Braben and Frontier don’t prioritize the same things a lot of you do. It’s been what, three and a half years since release, do you see this changing?
KevinC
6592
Probably not. :) But where else will I get a chance to explore a galaxy with some friends? Star Citizen?
sobs quietly
That’s what ends up frustrating me. If the game were just total garbage I would have forgotten about it ages ago. But it’s so tantalizingly close to being something amazing, especially in VR. So when news of a content drop comes out, there’s that brief flicker of hope…
It wasn’t always made of complaints. When we started on the wheel, it was one of joy. Of discovery. And we hungered for more.
For a while, what we were fed was sufficient.
Then, we got fat, and the food they were giving us eventually didn’t suffice anymore, so we began to starve. To weaken. To slow down. Eventually, we just stopped because we couldn’t push the wheel any further.
Then, they throw something at us. It looks like a new food pellet!
It ends up being a piece of poop.
So we shake the wheel and complain about the poop, because the food sucks.
Would you want to eat the pellet of food every day?
Hey man, I know that pain. As a Mass Effect fanboy, I grieved when Bioware cut their losses with the series and killed any ongoing support and DLC for Andromeda. Where else do I get to play Kirk, explore strange worlds and sex up aliens?
You can accuse me of settling for less, but my yardstick is whether I’d be happier if the game were never made. In the case of Andromeda and E:D, my answer is decidedly no, despite both being flawed and incomplete. They scratched an itch I’m finding it harder and harder to even reach.
No JRPGs please. I got burned by Rogue Galaxy, never again.
Well, then you’d better hope Anthem is really, really good. ;)
Well I do, but my deep down truest wish for awesome space games are Beyond Good and Evil 2, and Starfield. And of one of those I haven’t even seen any gameplay, and the other may not even exist. Desperate times.
Most of these features are from the Horizons expansion. I don’t own that on either platform. On both PC and Xbox, I only have the base game, so I basically only have what was there at launch. Those Horizons features never got good word of mouth here, so it didn’t sound like it was worth getting.
Which reminds me, I also own this on Xbox, I need to try that out. Seems like it might be a good fit as long as the controls don’t suck.
