Elite: Dangerous was always a weird place, for me. They had this online infrastructure and made it an online game, but were afraid of letting players be able to impact the game world. It made things feel very rigid and sterile to me, like nothing I did mattered.
At the same time, the actual MP experience was crippled and unfun. You couldn’t even play the game as a group at first. They eventually added Wings in an update, but it was clunky and had a lot of issues. You couldn’t run any missions together, for example, because missions weren’t tracked on the server but instead were instanced on the client. So you had no way to tackle some hard Assassination missions or something like that. This also meant that there really wasn’t a way to provide multiplayer content… in an online game. I mean, there were those projects that could be worked on as a server as a whole, but that was about it.
So you have the single player experience hampered by the fact it’s multiplayer (can’t allow players to affect game state too much or it might negatively impact other players), but multiplayer hampered by the fact that it’s not multiplayer friendly at all either. I felt like they made all these compromises which detracted from the experience for both camps, but didn’t gain much at all for those compromises. They just hamstrung themselves.
You can follow similar patterns with almost every update they made. They always had an idea that was cool in theory, but in practice they sucked, often due to failures in their implementation. And rather than iterate and refine this content after release and getting feedback (which should be the strength of a “game as a service”) they would just say “Huh, it’s not that popular so we’re not going to invest any more time in it”. I mean look at what they released prior to Horizons:
- Community Goals: These were okay, and probably their best release of 1.0.
- Wings: As described above, it was now better than nothing, but still very limited and awkward.
- Powerplay: An attempt to allow players to affect the “world” in some way. But they were afraid of really letting that happen, so they wanted to make sure the system could be entirely ignored. Which is exactly what everyone did.
- CQC: Who asked for a standalone arena mode? Apparently not many, because it was nearly DOA.
- Updated missions system: That still didn’t work when playing with others.
I started losing interest and stopped playing much around here, although I dabbled in Horizons/engineers for the planetary landing experience. Looking at their update notes, it looks like they did eventually get Wing Missions into the game sometime after 2018. Four years after the game launched, I think? Anyway, I did try out the Multicrew thing briefly, but they panicked that people might find that too enjoyable/rewarding so right as it launched they made sure that crew only earned 25% of bounty value, insuring interest in the system died and it was yet another DOA feature that they didn’t build on and refine.
So when Odyssey launched and VR was the casualty, I can’t say I was surprised. It’s par for the course with these guys. Lets add a tangential feature to the game that doesn’t improve the core experience for a lot of people, and sacrifice components that people do value along the way.
This will go down as one of the most frustrating games for me, because it was so close. The feel of flying a spaceship around a galaxy was unmatched. The audio design is superb. They had done the work to have multiplayer infrastructure which is a big deal for me personally, because it’s not something you often see in this genre! Despite having all the pieces right there in their hands, they (in my opinion) failed over and over and over to put it together. It kept me hanging on, watching updates, hoping that maybe this time they’ll nail it. Only to be disappointed again and again.
Sigh.
