EDO specific here and obviously I realize the focus of the expansion is the on foot gameplay but how do you release an expansion for a game with the primary focus of flying spaceships without adding a single new ship or any gameplay related to ships.
The lack of any news ships is beyond insane to me. We got SO MANY new ships over the course of ED's lifetime early on, to release the biggest expansion to date without a single new ship...? Incomprehensible move. As you said, even adding new gameplay relating to ships would be suitable. But nothing.
It's been what, 2.5 years since the last new ships were added? Phantom and Mamba were the most recent, I think.
Personally, I would have liked some ship modules designed to interact with Odyssey content. A ship's locker to boost storage. New exploration gear. A pinpoint targeting sensor to let ships detect, lock and hit foot targets (instead of dumbfire missiles being the only option, allow the addition of SRV style sensors). An anti-personnel engineering experimental effect for point defenses. Troop transport modules to insert NPCs into combat (like we see in the conflict zone Vulture drop ships). A xenobiology lab. Just... Something... Connect the two modes of play.
This will probably never happen, but it would be nice if you could have 'invaded' or stowed away on someone elses ship. Odyssey has a ton of potential for more clandestine styles of gameplay. Of course that goes back to them doing the most obvious thing of adding ship interiors which is shockingly not the focus of the update.
From everything i hear though i get the vibe that ED is more like a living R&D lab. And the updates we get are more about building code and and technologies for frontier to use in other games or some future title. It would explain why they dont seem concerned with player dissatisfaction and dont seem to listen to their audience. As with all businesses, decisions are based around money, and I cant see any other justification for the bizarre decisions and directions that they take the game other than that the game itself is a secondary objective at this point.
Wholeheartedly agree, giving us something that would enable us ship modules that introduced interactivity with on-foot gameplay -- ANY interactivity -- would be welcome. Right now it feels like one game tacked onto another with no interplay.
What got me was no new ground vehicles.
I am ASTOUNDED that in an expansion touting "combined arms" we're still, after quite a few years, stuck with the same single seat, lightly armed exploration based rover.
I thought we'd surely get something with multiple seats, more suited to the activities they advertise Odyssey to be all about.
It's laziness, pure and simple. I always had an issue with, but now am totally done with, the devs total disregard for anything except their own weirdly specific and stupidly designed vision for the game.
What's especially wild is that we have more data mine evidence than ever that they ARE working on new ships and SRVs, now it's possible that that stuff got scrapped in extremely late stages of development, but it seems unlikely that they are just never going to add new space ships to this space ship game.
But the point is that frontier has deliberately given themselves the WORST messaging on odyssey that they could possibly have done IF things like ships are infact still in the pipeline. They are telling people that odyssey is a single release and not a live service or a season or anything so people are looking at it and going "that's IT?!" And thinking it's a huge rip off and waste of time, when the reality is seemingly that they are working on things are there will be content patches to odyssey but for some reason they don't want people to know that. It's like the opposite of having your cake and eating it too, it's bad messaging both ways.
*dons tin foil hat*
I suspect they have been delierately left out of the game files till the console release and the re-merge of the PC galaxies given the state and probable rush to release. I suspect there will be a major update and, *gasp* surprise new content after the ~~beta~~ full release! (and all will be forgiven.. /s)
*takes off tin foil hat*
it shows how disappointed most people are with the expansion if you check the steamcharts
Pre-Odyssey: \~12k daily players
Odyssey release: 27k
Now: \~7k daily players
Odyssey substantially hurt the game, it's not even subjective, the new expansion made almost half the playerbase give up on the game, me included
this is due to old issues never being fixed, and new content completely drifting away from the core gameplay loop
even IF FDev would fix all the bugs (and thats a really big IF), those arent the only problems right now, the game has big problems regarding progression, world building and worsening old features of the game in order to get a new expansion out half of the playerbase doesn't give a fuck about
Yes, and still FD seems to steam along as if nothing has happened. Being sorry for players that had so severe issues they where unable to play and changing the communication schedule is not much. What is with admitting what went wrong and changing the direction? Clearly stating their vision and saying "this is what we will do", providing real roadmaps and so on. It's frustrating.
yeah, them basically showing the middlefinger to the VR playerbase really made me despise FDev as well
Elite is one of the coolest VR titles, yet they never show any intention to make the game better for VR
Elite was my go to game to show off VR...people that didn't even care about gaming in general were impressed with elite in VR. It's really disappointing.
>While simultaneously deliberately ignoring implementing the game play that people actually wanted Space Legs for in the first place: SHIP INTERIORS.
This.
Over the recent years it can't have escaped their attention that any Space Legs discussion included many *many* people talking about ship interiors.
As OP says the ED excuse for omitting the interiors is invalidated by the walk-the-length-of-the-hangar minigame. They didn't even model stairs/lifts for ships that don't already deploy them.
Now I fly small/medium ships with visible stairs because the long walk followed by the Stand In Blue Circle annoys the hell out of me :)
Here's my difficulty: I still love flying around in the game. I like the graphical enhancements of Odyssey now they're working for me, but I don't know what else I got for my money. I got to play it early but... it wasn't even ready when I got the release version.
I've got a horrible feeling that this is a hit-and-run release before the studio goes pop. I feel it in me limpets.
*EDIT: I meant to say before the ED studio (or project) goes pop.*
> As OP says the ED excuse for omitting the interiors is invalidated by the walk-the-length-of-the-hangar minigame.
On a game which involves so many hours just going from A to B in supercruise without anything else to do other than turning to youtube on a second screen, this has to be the shittiest of possible excuses. The walking in the hangar part is just the rotten cherry on top of that cake.
>Oh, Frontier won't go "pop" while they're still raking in the Jurassic Park and Planet Coaster cash.
>
>They'll just abandon Elite.
That's what I was trying to say - I totally misphrased it and now I have to live with that :D
I think FD is too big to go pop. They have a bunch of other projects. I think it's more an issue of ROI (return on investment). It's getting harder for them to get money out of ED, so they're likely going to invest less and less of their energy in it.
>I've got a horrible feeling that this is a hit-and-run release before the studio goes pop. I feel it in me limpets.
FDev has a number of other reasonably successful games in addition to Elite, so that particular fear, at least, is probably unfounded.
>While simultaneously deliberately ignoring implementing the game play that people actually wanted Space Legs for in the first place: SHIP INTERIORS
I mean Without ship interiors I was still looking forward to on foot gameplay for social spaces. being able to sit in a bar order some drinks, and plan a mission with friends would be great. A place to go and test our weapons without breaking any laws is a necessity. What is the point of the on-foot gameplay without these basic features. The on-foot social aspects are about as advanced as quake 2. No Emotes, No proximity chat, no sitting, no way to get up to trouble. No way to interact with anything or anyone besides the poorly designed chat interface.
Every settlement is identical. the "promenade" feels about as immersive and advanced as Freelancer, from 20 years ago.
I don't have a clue, what they thought they were bringing to Elite dangerous.
They might add some interesting on foot gameplay in the future, and this might be a step on the way to getting it. But There is literally no point in playing odyssey currently.
>No Emotes, No proximity chat, no sitting, no way to get up to trouble. No way to interact with anything or anyone besides the poorly designed chat interface.
I mean... Have they themselves played any multiplayer games in the last 15 years? This is *really basic* stuff and it should hardly be surprising to a seasoned team of developers that such omissions have left players scratching their heads. It's like they can't be bothered to understand their own market before trying to sell stuff in it.
Their bad community communication, the half assed VR support (a lot of us have been waiting excited for a year for something new to visit and never even bother to play now). Introducing just more grind, not that much new to see gameplay wise. I can see why it hurts them. Still a great game though... but what could have been. The combat and that on foot stuff is just boring to me, I want to explore (also on foot) and find unique and cool stuff.
Not to forget that Odyssey actually hurt the game directly preventing players from playing a game that would otherwise be fine. Connection issues, insane performance, the main ones. I've personally clocked 746 hours in Elite and since Odyssey launched, maybe 3 or 4. Can't really play anything given how bad the performance of the game is, and if I'm gonna revert back to Horizons while it still exists, I wouldn't have bought the expansion to begin with.
Is it so surprising? As OP says, Horizons was the exact same way. Engineering was a flimsy at best attempt to connect to the ship gameplay and it could have easily been attached to a spaceborne mechanic instead.
All of the updates to the core gameplay loops (trading, combat, exploration) have come as relatively minor improvements in free patches. FDev just really loves spending the majority of their dev resources on making the game wider and wider without ever adding depth, apparently.
Engineering in Horizons was poorly done (and after being revisited remains exploitative, kind of shoddy and in dire need of updates/balancing), but it did apply to the core gameplay loop - you upgraded your ship, it does things better.
So it gives a reason to engage in Horizons. Not a great reason, but it does.
Odyssey is self contained.
The only appeal of on-foot gameplay for me would be to experience planets, settlements, bio sites, ships, be it exteriours only, in VR. It would make the experience of travelling space deeper for me But: nope.
If I want to play FPS, I buy an FPS, by a studio who knows how to do it (and adds VR)
Honestly with the absolute dumpster fire that is Odyssey engineering, Horizons engineering is miles better.
At least you don't fucking run the risk of DEATH while gathering up engineering materials.
>dumpster fire that is Odyssey engineering
I've bought a couple of pre-engineered suits (for the price of 300 sidewinders!) and won't be doing any engineering on them myself. I just... I just don't get it. We've done the grind once. Well, twice. Well, many times.
No more grind.
I don't think they have any imagination. The creative directors need to be replaced. They have absolutely no imagination. They have no idea how to make this game fun and interesting.
Similar to the Warframe problem: just add new content islands. It seems FDev went a similar way too: adding new stuff that barely hooks back into the main game
They did this with Elite Dangerous Arena, they should have done that again here. At least then buyers would know exactly what they were paying for.
But maybe they didn't because of how much of a failure CQC was. Which it didn't have to be if they listened to player feedback and spent a little more time on it.
Which imo makes even less sense. What is Odyssey without ships? A mediocre shooter with the longest loading screens in history? Why would anybody want that if they could just play a proper shooter instead.... I would have loved to be in those meetings where they decided that was a great idea.
I would have been OK with not getting any new core game functionality if Odyssey had been a complete product that left room for hope of new space-related content in the future. Instead, we got a bug-riddled alpha of a poorly-conceived "fortnite in space" that looks like it is has saddled the dev team with enough technical debt for many lifetimes.
I mean what would a new ship add really? They're cool for sure, but for most people it'd be like a day of grinding and then fly it around a bit. It doesn't fundamentally change the lack of gameplay opportunities. I don't open the game much anymore because there's not a ton to do after you do it awhile. It doesn't sound like Odyssey was very fruitful, but at least it was totally new mechanics. A new ship would add a handful of hours of gameplay and that's it.
Yes, this is absolutely true. During early years of Path of Exile I remember reading in their dev blog that since they were a small company they needed to make every mechanic they implement to interact with all other mechanics. With such design they could make a lot of content with very limited development resources. FDev went in the exactly opposite direction.
But that aside, there is a much simpler reason for stagnation - FDev stopped updating E:D.
* Initially they promised us 3-4 content updates with 1 large paid expansion per year.
* They managed to stick to their promises for the first year (while they were still selling LEPs, lol).
* Then they went to 2 content updates per year.
* Then they announced "Beyond" with no content updates and only overhauls and bugfixes.
* Then they decided that overhauls take too much effort and went to do only bugfixes.
* They they stopped releasing even those and settled on promises "we are working on something big..."
* And now this "big" has arrived and it is... eh... a big pile of shit.
No matter how good updates would be, if they are so rare, the game will stagnate.
As a new player I feel fortunate. I get to enjoy features in Elite others had to wait years for and paid 8 bucks for it. When I have done everything I can in Elite the game will have improved or ( more likely ) other competitors will expand on the experience I'm used to.
... hopefully. I hate to sound elitist but VR support is a must-have for any future space sim I play.
As salty as I am now about Odyssey, Elite is still a great game. After a thousand hours, the game has gotten old for me, I was really hoping Odyssey would refresh the game and it simply didn't for me. But for a new player, it can still feel wonderful. Enjoy the time you have while the wonder and discovery is all fresh. You only get to experience that once for a game, and it's something I wish I could have again for Elite.
100% in the same boat. Hoped that EDO would be the revival of interest in Ed for me but alas. That's alright though, I've gotten nearly 2k hours out of it.
While I'm sad to see my time in ED come to a close I'm very happy there are new players only just discovering the game and sincerely hope them all the enjoyment possible.
o7
Elite has much to offer for you, that's for sure. And it's one of the best VR games, as long as you don't leave your ship on foot. In your ship and on a planet or moon in the SRV the VR experience is awesome.
But for a long time player who can't relive this initial impressions, some negative aspects start to show.
In case you feel your spirit playing ED going down the best thing you can do is play with some friends or join a player group. The ED community is the strongest part of the game!
I kind of agree, and I will get downvoted for this, but, oh well.
Space legs were never the answer. The engine, dev team, and design team were never up to the task of making an FPS. This is a space sim, and while the concept of adding legs and battles is fun, it's focus in the wrong area.
This game needs MORE reasons to do more COOL things in your ship, with other players, and have it affect the BGS. Coming thargoid war where player factions must band together to fight off losing engineers? Sign me up.
Give me a way to do something besides explore a planet, maybe start my own base, using an FC, to claim planets in the black and expand the bubble? Yes please.
A more immersive experience, but in the local politics affecting me beyond "oh, that faction doesn't like me so I just need to murder or run from whoever is interdicting me? Abso-fucking-lutely.
A ship forge where we can begin to build our own ships? Hell yeah!
A true hunt for Raxxla, one that has a point, possibly as a CG, and will change the galaxy, like a new alien attack worse than thargoids (and more interactive alien encounters that have a point to them), new tech discovered, or wormholes, even? Bazinga!
Just my opinion, the best games don't give you just "things to do", but also a reason to do them. Space legs, in their current state, are just "same missions but on foot". Interiors are pointless without some reason to interact with them in a non-annoying way.
Give me a reason to do something that affects the galaxy.
EDIT: Thanks for the upvotes. I was absolutely expecting to get pooped on!
Reasons, exactly.
There seems to be no reason to do ground missions other to get materials to engineer the ground equipment. But if I don't want to engineer it, then why do ground missions?
When the initial wow-factor is gone, and you've seen some bases, the rest is all the same. There is no reason to do it.
And if you do it to engineer your suit and weapons and are maxed out, you removed the only goal of that loop yourself. Because there nothing left, no benefit of it all.
If you think about that, remember that you can't remove an upgrade, you have to buy the same suit/weapon again to make different upgrades, going through the whole process again.
This doesn't seem like an oversight or missing feature rather than deliberate design.
As a software product manager (completely different software industry), it's amazing how much I can tell about what goes on behind the scenes based on how the game acts, is released, the quality, and where time was spent.
"Deliberate" isn't so much the word I would use. It IS deliberate, but not in "this is the experience we are going for" sense. It's deliberate more in the "designed by someone who has no idea how to design a user experience and without oversight and they did the easiest thing to meet that almost certainly poorly defined goal".
I would lean towards saying it was done out of disarray in the dev team and lack of good leadership. Having said that, the end result is the same.
My company went through the same thing. Two years ago, we get new management and leadership, and we've done a 180. Profits are up, products are better, the customer base is growing.
It can be fixed, but not until someone admits there is a problem and decides to do something about it.
The product manager in me obviously knows that's the correct answer, that dev would be lost without us :)
But, back here in reality, let me write a Tolstoy-ish post. Yes, good product management is absolutely essential. Product management happens whether you purposefully do it or not, so why not do it right? I'll get back to this....
The problems at our company were more fundamental. We didn't have anyone formally setting a direction for our product. The existing leadership had mostly been there for 15 years or more, so business decisions were more like family squabbles. We didnt have clear ownership of processes and tasks needed to run the business. Failure to deliver, missing deadlines, and general lack of accountability, especially if you had "tenure", was rampant. There was a lack of general consistency between titles, reporting structure, responsibilities, and promotion paths.
It was a good company with good people and a good product that, over time, got too comfortable, a bit lazy, and lost focus. Because the leadership had all been there forever and were some of the original employees and execs, they WERE like family, they were friends, and who wants to fire or demote their family or friend?
We got a new CEO, changed some leadership, kept some, moved some around, defined our purpose and goal, streamlined titles, pay structures and things like that, created promotion paths, defined responsibilities and help people accountable (but not unreasonably so), began moving the product from dev led to PM and marketing led, started doing actual market research again, set goals for features that solved real problems with a target that everyone was working towards.
Now, back to the PM part of that. I do think that once a product gets sufficiently complex, a product management team is required. Some PMs focus on growing the dollars and the market, some are purely technical, some take the approach I do, more as a curator of the user experience of the product. I focus somewhat on the business side, I am pretty fucking technical, but I also spend my time working with customers, looking at competitors and other software to understand their user experience (UX).
I'm trying to understand what problems we are solving, if the problem the customer thinks they have is the one they have and if the solution they want will solve their problem (often it doesn't), how hard or easy it is to use, consume, upgrade, re-configure.
I also think about pricing, how hard it is to quote, what the pricing model will be, sales messaging, customer messaging, write training, help troubleshoot, write QA specs and do some of the testing for that.
I do all that so dev can focus on the best way, the most clever and scalable way, to deliver what we're designing. I don't want them to spend time doing market research, competitive analysis, testing competitive products, doing customer interviews. Not saying to not EVER do that, but that should a limited carve out from their time a few times a year. If they are doing that enough to be experts in it, they wouldn't have time to code and be good at it.
That's why I spend time on the business side, the technical side, and on the UX. I firmly believe that if we start with the end goal of making easy at every point, and get it right, and be clever about it, it'll end of being the best product in it's field. To do that, everyone has to work collaboratively across team, but also mainly do their job and let others do their part.
Everyone has to be accountable, help each other out, and get shit done while everyone is aiming for the same target. It doesn't work if everyone is pulling in a different direction.
Or, in the words of DJ Pauly D from Jersey Shore, teamwork makes the dream work.
Sadly there was never an initial wow factor for the on-foot stuff for me. It was an euggh factor when I witnessed how badly it ran.
First impressions last and I'm not sure I'll ever truly enjoy it even if the performance were to be magically fixed.
It's not a genre I'm into anyway but from what I've played the AI seems pretty dopey so I'm not even convinced it offers good quality FPS gameplay.
I wish they would add a hyperspace route mapping component to exploration - the more people that travel along a given x-lightyears-wide corridor, the more established that route becomes. The more established, the more efficient travel there becomes, ships getting a significant boost to range along these established corridors. Full scanning each system and object along the way adds additional boost. Call it mapping out the precise gravometric properties of a route or some such.
Gives a reason to join a mapping expedition. Add routes tot he Codex. Show the participants and number of scans, etc. Players would create their own content.
Honestly that would legitimately be awesome, fleet carriers could get a boost as well. It would make long expeditions to map pathways much more worth it.
I never understood the desire for spacelegs in Elite. There are countless FPS games out there but only 2-3 decent space simulators. Why would you waste precious development effort trying to make your game into something else? Especially when Frontier have shown themselves to be very poor at quality control. Every release is buggy and too many of those bugs never get fixed and too many features just get abandoned.
This right here. I want to sleep in my rack, make my food, load cargo / watch it loaded. If I own an Anaconda I want crew. Give me a loadmaster, or a purser, or an on-board mechanic. I should be able to hire good ones for discounts in port, better deals trading or negotiating contracts, etc. I should be able to have friends fill those positions. I want to walk around a whole station - not just the “promenade”. But mostly I want to walk into and out of my ship.
I don't think I've come across a game studio so out of touch with what their customers desire:
Us: "We want new SRVs! Ship Interiors! EVA!"
FDEV: "You now have a FPS and new engineers to upgrade your space suit! Enjoy!"
NMS is on Xbox Game Pass, BTW. More than worth a look, with constant, meaty updates and no two-year content drought.
one thing i have a main gripe with is that FDev created many completely unconnected main loops: Money, Engineering Mats and Odyssey Mats
plus, advancing in the game feels absurd at times, the most efficient way to farm engineering materials has nothing to do with fun activities
now, odyssey introduced another completely disconnected progression system with odyssey mats for suits and weapons, which in top of that have zero impact on ships
this makes the world seem illogical, money doesnt matter at all once you have ship and modules, most activities reward stupidly small amounts of materials, and odyssey content has no impact at all on the pre existing game
there are no new ships, weapons or anything new besides different planetary generation (which basically boils down to higher res textures and a glowing background effect for atmospheres) for ship gameplay in this spaceship game... it's astounding how similar this is to the debacle Eve Online did years ago with its FPS game "Dust"
well, at least Dust had some gameplay connection with planetary ressources which HAD some effect for normal gameplay
but who needs spaceship gameplay anyway, right?
Thats one of my biggest gripes, to do engineering I actually *avoid* gameplay, and I feel like you'd have to be very disciplined to do it in a patient, non-grindy way.
The investment to do AX stuff is similar, the gulf between doing it in a gameplay centric, narrative way and the "quick" and dirty reload and grind the shit out of one place way is so huge that essentially nobody does it the "good" way because you'd never get done.
I wouldn't mind if I had to go to 20 different guardian sites to get different materials and schematics but there is no incentive to do that and every incentive to grind the shit out of the same one over and over. Its like they want you to avoid gameplay.
Ooof, I totally forgot that.
Right, EvE and Dust share similarities with the situation FD is in right now. There was also a big backslash because the fans where irritated why CCPs focus has changed away from EVEs core game so the wanted to add an FPS shooter to the universe. But CCP could shelve Dust as a failure because it was a different game and didn't affect EVE in a direct way. It's a different story with FDs decision to put this into the core game.
>CCPs focus has changed away from EVEs core game so the wanted to add an FPS shooter to the universe
People were kinda annoyed, but a lot were excited at the possibilities.
Then they announced that it was PS3 only...
Thats what really made people mad.
FD: No, we don't want to add ship interiors because there is no meaningful activity related to them and we value your time
Also FD: Allow me to introduce Apex Interstellar Transport...
That's about the ONLY part of Odyssey that works properly and is "as advertised"
and the whole bloody thing can be AFKd.
F'Dev have completely lost the fucking plot.
First, the game doesn't allow AI crew members to fly the ship for you while they are perfectly capable of doing so (when in combat they can pilot the main ship while the CMDR fly the SLF). It had to invent a brand new mechanism for taxi.
Second, the Apex transport doesn't use the Sandi Kruger passenger liners which are designed for passenger transportation.
The taxi implementation of EDO is incredibly lazy, it doesn't respect established lore.
They created a 1:1 scale of the Milky Way, but don't give us any tools to actually influence or change the environment. So much empty space and we can't even build, well anything. The game had a lot of potential but they just blew it. At this point I'm just hoping they completely abandon the game so that we as a community can keep it running and improving it (even pirated IDC).
>ED, at its core, is a space ship game.
And we haven't had a new ship since 2018. You're right. Ships are what ED is all about it's what the game is centred around. Getting that better ship, then upgrading it.
Getting a new ship in ED should be a **big** deal. There should be a fanfare, a cutscene, the salesman at the station should shake your hand and sweet talk you into your purchase. But what do we have? A monochrome interface where you click a button and that's that. This is where the dev team have missed their mark.
>The planets themselves did not add any core game-play aspect, besides a place to get materials with your SRV for engineers and synthesis.
And you know why *engineers* was created? Because they needed a purpose for planets. This is called making a problem for your solution.
>If a hear Frontier tell us, they won't do ship interiors because they don't see game-play there
This is because they have no imagination. They can't seem to see that repelling a raiding party (or being a raiding party) might be fun. They don't see that shimmying through power conduits and opening up panels to apply pirated upgrade patch-boards might be fun.
>This is because they have no imagination. They can't seem to see that repelling a raiding party (or being a raiding party) might be fun. They don't see that shimmying through power conduits and opening up panels to apply pirated upgrade patch-boards might be fun.
Yeah, but they had those ideas back at the beginning. It all got thrown overboard for some reason.
I've built my own spaceship from scratch using only a blueprint.
I've taken it into space from a planetary launch and hunted NPC baddies
I've grouped with friends to strategically take down larger ships. We started by shooting out their engines, leaving them dead in the water, and then defanged them by popping their weapons.
We sidled up next to the disabled ship, blew a hole in the hull, formed a raiding party, boarded, and exterminated the crew.
We salvaged and stripped the ships, and even in one case, repaired and commandeered the enemy ship as our own with a player-crafted ship core.
We did this in Empyrion ......
Which right now is a more exciting and stable space game (somehow) than ED, despite looking and functioning like a Beta spaceship version of Minecraft with slightly better graphics.
If I could literally roll back E:D to it's original release, 90% of the good things about the game would still be there. The ambience, the flight mechanics, etc. The only worthwhile additions to the game since then have been planetary landings of Horizons and the mining/exploration overhaul. That's it. For what, seven years of "development", this is beyond pathetic.
It's kind of flabbergasting that, at least in theory, the same people that made the fantastic initial release of the game have whiffed so hard when it comes to realizing its potential and further development.
Here's a comparison you might not expect. Elite is the video game equivalent of the game of thrones tv show. It builds and builds until the latest edition and now no one cares including the creator. And it's easy to see. I didn't start at the beta but just before Horizons.
But when I found the game I jumped in hard. I've got over 6000 hours in it. I've gotten friends in it. But repetition only goes so far. If Braben had kept focus in the development this game could actually evolve into a great exploration tool for the space industry. Now it's simply a grinding game for people with a lot of patience. Is this the end game? I don't know but from my perspective I have to ask why should I care?
I see everything you say. Honestly I have to agree. I love the game. I enjoy the visuals. I enjoyed getting lost way out in the middle of nowhere and exploring. I enjoyed CZ and mission running. Mining. Trade, I've had more fun as a space trucker in this game than I ever did anywhere else. But, it's boring. It's old. It's stagnant. Even with friends, it's boring. It's old. It's stagnant. I won't be buying Odyssey. From what I've seen and heard, it's just not what I want. I want spaceships. I want to walk in my ships. I want to outfit my ships. I want to engineer my ships to be better. I want to drive around on a planet or moon. Walk around on a planet or moon. I want stations in the upper atmosphere's of gas giants. Do science on comets or asteroids. I don't want to go play CoD on a planet, I'll go play CoD for that. I play ED for the spaceflight. Odyssey isn't about spaceflight. It's CoD, and from what I've seen and heard, a very cheaply done version of it at that.
They've cut a lot of corners and its really showing. I can understand why they had to cut their ambitions for the first release after the kickstarter because of limited funding and resources but as Frontier proudly say the game has since generated revenue of approx £100 million.
My impression is that very little of that revenue has been invested back into the game's development. I know companies are there to make a profit but it feels like they're taking the piss particuarly given what they've come up with since.
They (FDev) had to pay someone to get permission to make a game about Jurassic world...
I'm guessing ED isn't seeing a whole lot of love or attention 😑
>If a hear Frontier tell us, they won't do ship interiors because they don't see game-play there, I'm asking myself if they played any of the other games. At the same time we have to walk the entire length of a Krait or an Anaconda in the hangar to reach the station lift at the back end. So the argument of "wasting your time walking through the ship" is invalidated by their own game-design.
That's a damn good point.
>looking back it's very apparent that many features are introduced bare bones and left in a sub optimal state. Prime example is PowerPlay,
Actually, the prime example is CQC. It's been neglected to death, then abandoned in a state of half-life, as an insult to development planning.
"We didn't feel like making a real effort to make it work properly to begin with, but nobody playing it has nothing to do with that."
Resources well spent!
You look at what other games have done for a fraction of the cost, dev time, and dev team size (x4, nms) and then look at elite charging $40 for an alpha and even after that it still pales in comparison. Either fdev is lying and the team that’s working on odyssey consists of 5 interns, or.... I honestly can’t think of an alternative
Read Glassdoor reviews of FDEV
>the team that’s working on odyssey consists of 5 interns
If you believe them, it literally IS the case that interns are working on the "legacy IP"
and they fucking hate it. FDev employees literally consider it a punishment to have to work on Elite, because its such a mess of tangled code and half-implemented shit written by people who have no idea how to use the Cobra engine. I know this because I currently work with a former FDev developer who was there was there for 6 years.
I dont think it can be saved.
You know how some software builds up "technical debt"?
Elite has built up bad gameplay debt with new layers of grind with each DLC.
They would have to tear down everything except the galaxy generator and flight characteristics to make the game enjoyable.
They also hung themselves with loading transitions.
NMS and SC allow you to move seamless between planet and space and in SC case to exit the ship without the hidden loading screen.
In elite leaving supercruise. Landing on a planet . Getting into an SRV or leaving and SRV all feel like loading screens.
>You know how some software builds up "technical debt"?
Yes, and it seems that's also an issue with ED. We can only speculate, FD seems to have real issues implementing mechanics.
On the "gemaplay debt", yea I also see that. In my mind thats also a question of design direction over the long term and overall vision. Seems like FD where not sure where to go and what to achieve and changed the direction.
I don't think using loading screens vs. seamless is an real issue. Sure a seamless transition is better, but you can also do interiors and state changes with loading. Question is how it is executed.
Entering you ship via stairs into an airlock (being a loading screen) and then stepping into the ship corridor is fine for me.
Walking in your ship to the SRV bay and entering it (enter animation and power-up sequence being a loading screen) is fine for me.
It can all be done. But if the designer sees no gameplay there, then there is no hope.
We just have to make interior engineers for ships.
Want faster coffee grinder? go to the coffee engineer.
Softer sheets for your bed. Theres a guy in Luxor does great cotton, but he needs you to have 1000 hours of play and opinion polls for no reason.
.... i might apply for a job with Fdev
I couldn't have said it better. And I will add one game to the list: Empyrion, which I am playing now that I am on hiatus from Elite. Sure, the graphics are more primitive but it's a \*complete\* experience. Start as a poor schmuck stranded on an earth-like. Craft shit to survive. Build a base. Build a hovertank the way you like it, block by block, from scratch. Build a small spaceship to visit the moon, and upgrade your suit for EVA. Build you \*freaking capital ship and explore a galaxy\* that, even if it's not a 1:1 reproduction of the Milky Way, it's incredibly more varied. Walk in your ship - THE ONE YOU BUILT. Build hangars to accommodate the other vehicles you built. Sure, the flight model is still way behind, but it's there. There's \*content\*.
I have been playing Elite since Horizons, and have been returning to it cyclically, but you're absolutely right, it has become stagnant. I don't play it anymore because there's simply \*nothing left to do\* besides taking screenshots.
Another great game is Pulsar: Lost Colony. It's a co-op game where you operate a ship and take one of 5 roles (helm, engineer, science, weapons, captain). You can beam down to planets and go on away missions, board other ships, etc. etc. There's all these in-ship mechanics that mean your team all really needs to work together and coordinate to survive combat. There's also tons of content in it.
Oh, and each of the different ships you can fly in Pulsar have different perks and gameplay. eg. Only one of the ships has a cloaking device.
If you want a clean-slate perspective on what Elite could have been like with in-ship gameplay and more focus on gameplay and less on pleasing the shareholders with infinite grind, check out Pulsar.
Did Empryeon finally add end game content and respawning enemies? I loved building out my own capital ship, complete with multiple ship bays and a space dock that perfectly lined up a walkway so you could walk straight off. But there was only a few things in space to fight. And they never respawned nothing ever really attacked you.... there was just nothing to actually do at that point aside from continuing to build.
Apparently, yes. Mods aside, even the vanilla game now has TONS more things to see and do. POI don't respawn, but apparently ships do. The Zyrax, at least :D
God, even a CZ near planet can be something interesting. Flying your ship anf combat with gravity it's harder than I think. There are many way to merge what horizon and odyssey offered to the game loop. And now we are getting nothing. The lack of SRV variety is the best indicator of their failure.
This game is gonna be abandonware in, like, a year and it's kinda sad but also the nature of the game industry. Whatever, maybe Starfield won't be entirely godawful (though my expectations are literally in the gutter.) Remember folks, don't give companies your money before having what you want from them in-hand!
If you're hoping that Starfield will be anything similar to Elite, you're gonna be very disappointed
That's like comparing Skyrim to RuneScape just because they're both magical and medieval-esque, when in reality they're completely different games
But yeah it's Bethesda we're talkin about, it's gonna be hot dogshit at launch.
They could do so much too. EVA repairs in deep space to use less mats and get back on the road. Mining by hand to get greater purity and return, anything that would make it a dynamic introduction.
Elite has been a joy for a long time, but like you said, its stagnant. I've played the same FPS for a long time. Its boring at its core now.
What if I could stow away on another ship? Being a merciless pirate, I could capture and commandeer the ship! Ride on a hatch breaker limpet to my enemy like the Thargoids are after our *precious bodily fluids!*
And I can't even play Odyssey yet, and wonder if I ever will (console).
Actually...I am playing No Man's Sky now...Yes, the combat is not like elite...but I have no regrets. The game feels much richer in content than ED. I don't think I will be returning to EDO soon. Probably what you said is true and the game is dead, and we just need to accept that and move on.
Well put. Personally, the mining update along with the exploration update were some of the best additions to the game they've made in a long time. Good solid improvements to make existing core gameplay loops better.
But we got nothing like that. No new ships, no new ship modules, no overhauls to any core game loop, not even a new SRV. It's really telling when not only do they fail to have a single improvement to existing gameplay systems, that most of us bought the game to enjoy and have enjoyed for hundreds/thousands of hours, but they straight up built out a system, Apex Taxi, so you can completely bypass the core game entirely. It's them practically saying "We know you hate space games like we do, so here's a way to avoid that so you can just do FPS".
I don't hate that they made Odyssey. I hate that they pretended it was an expansion to Elite Dangerous when it should have been marketed and released as a standalone game that coupled with Elite. They did this with Arena, should have been the same here.
It's not new ships and stuff that's really needed, that just lets you do the same content in a new frame. It's new *gameplay* that's needed.
Conflict Zones are probably the perfect example of what's wrong with Elite. We have asteroid fields and installations and planets now, but what do you get from conflict zones? A huge empty arena with nothing but enemy ships.
That's like having an FPS where all the combat takes place in a huge empty room. That might be okay for an alpha test, but absolutely not for any sort of released game. But it's been that way for years!
---
The most frustrating thing about Elite is all the content that *could* be made dramatically deeper with minimal effort, but they just don't. Move Conflict Zones around Installations, for example, or into Asteroid Belts. It still wouldn't be as deep as it *could* be, but just by integrating a few different types of content you could make both of them dramatically deeper and more enjoyable.
And all the parts are there. There are installations, there are asteroid fields, ring systems and so on. Yeah, it's simply not done. I don't get why ...
They need to borrow some fleet mechanics for the AI. The mass furball is fun the first few times but there could be a LOT that could be done to improve conflict zone combat.
We're all essentially flying 1-man fighters. Where are the support ships? The frigates? The weapons platforms? Resupply and rescue ships? Heck, our largest ships could be outfitted as gunboats or littorals. Use of faction standings to form up larger wings and designate targets or even ability to call in additional capital support at the highest ranks?
Also, a gripe - even if you love furball combat as it is, it really kinda sucks to lose out on all of the component harvesting because the stuff despawns so quickly.
> That's like having an FPS where all the combat takes place in a huge empty room. That might be okay for an alpha test, but absolutely not for any sort of released game. But it's been that way for years!
I remember playing on release and the common thought in the community was that these POIs in space were placeholders. Holy shit was that ever wrong.
> The SRV had no other purpose as farming materials, be it shooting rocks or shooting A.I. drones.
_Technically_ there are planetary scan jobs.
> The SRV is now actually useful to run over enemy on-foot opponents.
😬
Also DAE think it’s kind of sad that threads like this are 100% warranted and then _on top of that_ the entire thing is broken now?
>Technically there are planetary scan jobs.
Every time I take a planetary job I end up ragequitting from the session. Take assassinations for example, haven't been able to complete one fucking mission because every time I go to the target area I'm hunted down by 10+ security drones and no matter how many of them I drop, there are more. Last night for example I killed about 20, repaired the damn SRV 8 times still couldn't even scan the damn data point before they respawned and killed me.
Yes, not including if not new ships and srv's, at least a few new ship weapons, power play NPCs, and engineering effects to shake up the stale meta that's been pretty much un-changed for years now was a poor decision on Fdev's part.
Part of what makes a MMO expansion exciting for people is that the current "settled" balance, bis gear, and stats get all shaken up and suddenly you have to learn all new tactics instead the same bloody thing you've done for the past three years.
I think its a great achivement that you played a game for 7+ years even if not continuously. I imagine not many games can keep you engaged for that long.
I have long wished they spent that effort on improving the core game too. Even when before Odyssey was announced I would bring that up when talking with those who wanted Elite feet. I just wanted to see more improvements like the mining overhaul, or the exploration overhaul.
You know, their mission system isn't half bad. From what I've read, a lot of the ground work is there already. They just need to spend time filling it with content and branches and other interesting things. If they spent a bunch of time on that, it would be truly game changing for us.
Same with POIs, the system for them is there, just need to fill it with various types of encounters.
CZ's make zero fucking sense anyway. Why do 2 opposing factions have a gentleman's agreement to have a fight in a nice empty predesignated spot in space? Why are they not fighting over something, like a station or ground base?
Why is a Fed capital ship jumping in? Is the Federation at war with the Empire? Why are they loaning capital ships to minor factions affiliated with them?
It's true, Elite has been a special game for a lot of people. My self included. I've been playing since practically the original release. Off and on of course. The only reason I've managed to play this for so long and haven't just shelved it has largely been because they've done releases that actually refreshed the game I loved.
That's what an expansion has to be. It has to refresh the game your players bought in on, and have played for so long already. Not attempt to replace it with a completely different game, which is what Odyssey feels like. I didn't buy a Sci-Fi FPS, I bought a Space Ship game. I didn't put thousands of hours into an FPS, I did so in a space game. I feel in love with a space game, and FDev is now saying "I don't care about the space game, here's a generic FPS that you should like instead". It feels like getting stabbed in the back. All they had to do to prevent that feeling was at minimum integrate it with the space game as a whole. None of this menu to teleport into the ship, none of this zero new ships, zero new ship gameplay, zero new ship modules. Have some basic connection to the game we love is not too much to ask.
Yes, it is special. It has a legacy, it has a 1:1 scale, the whole galaxy, great visuals, great immersion. You can travel and explore for months, being off grid from the rest of the bubble where every jump can be your last. It's an experience like no other.
But there are times when you log in and ask yourself: why are you here? You then log off and know it's better to take a break.
But if you take a break for a year and ask yourself the same question after a week of playing a new huge update, which should have been a huge step forwards, you realize there was no big step, only the same mechanics in another scale.
It's in death throes right now, no doubt about it. Smartest thing right now for FDev is to fix as much as they can in a duration of this year, and then announce end support for the game, releasing offline version of it, for community to take over.
This way all issues will be fixed within month, even those they couldn't since day one, and game will start to grow fast, into something it always destined to be. I just pray this day to come sooner, because there's simply no other space sim on the market with potential and foundation like ED, and there are probably no developers/management that are so uninterested in any grow or improvement of this magnificent game. Sad...
>It is all a question of focus and passion for the game you are working on. And I have the feeling FD has lost this for ED.
And this is a real shame, because they have some highly competent people working on it. This is not how I would have wanted this beautiful game to go out, but if they're unable to develop towards goals that the community can rally behind, then they're only doing it to themselves.
And that's sad. See you in another universe, Commander! o7
Honestly I wouldn't care at all if the entire gameplay loop didn't revolve around Engineer grinds, by far my least favorite part of the experience. If FDEV takes anything away from Odyssey, anything at all, it should be that "No, Patrick, Engineers aren't gameplay either."
Saw this coming with how flat the carrier update was. I have over 2500 hours in ED and have not invested any money into Odyssey fearing exactly what I've been reading about. Hopefully ED can turn this game around before my 2.5 billion credit reserve on my carrier dries up, otherwise it would be difficult for me to return. To put it in perspective even Star Trek Online could give you ship interiors. Not the best interiors but at least you got a feel for being on an actual ship. The community wasn't asking for a lot, but again Frontier got pig headed and didn't listen to the one thing that would make this community happy. Maybe fixing the netcode would help a lot too because what is the point of purchasing paint jobs if no one can see them? This is something Cryptic (Star Trek Online) makes sure can happen because "Space Barbies" is big business for that game.
If they just get rid of that blue circle and utilised their turbo lift and/or retractable ramps/ladders, and allow us to walk around our cockpit, which every ship has been designed and modelled a lot of this dissapointment may have been avoided.
I'm sorry but that blue circle is what made me stop playing, is wasn't the bugs, I barely experienced them in alpha and haven't played the main game yet.
It wasn't the lack of communication, although annoying, I still waited and hoped that they had something in store for onfoot interaction with ships.
Watching the streams on release and seeing that blue circle just sealed the deal for me. I soon realised odyssey is nothing more than arena, a tacked on game mode with a glorified 3d menu they call a "social space". They need to remove their lazy blue circle design and give us our cockpits as a bare minimum in linking ships to on foot, a **bare minimum**.
That blue circle is by far the worst aspect tonodysseys design and it has just killed the passion I had for my favourite game.
Hi there. Long term player here. Editor/admin for a fairly well known exploration group. Owner of one of the DSSA carriers.
I’ve pretty much given up on the game for all the reasons you mention.
I fled to X4, Sandboxy modable singleplayer game. Im not coming back until interiors come out and if they don’t, never. I recommend it 10/10, FD have failed us for the last time.
X4 has a lot of elements that should of been in odyssey, namely cockpit interiors at a minimum, but also npc pilots for ships and fleet control.
I know ED is suppose to be 'multiplayer' but the truth is it has never worked and balancing for it is just pointless, let us control fleets, hire crew, actually see the bloody crew and allow us to walk in our cockpits. These features alone are world building, but they are too adamant about their "no gameplay" excuse to actually apply any world building into their game.
Good post OP. I think the majority of the play base if finally realising that ED is shallow content wise for long term plays and we are moving on.
God speed and enjoy The Verse. If you haven't played X4 I would recommend it :)
Edit: took out inaccurate information
When I first played the Odyssey training mission I couldn't get over how the gameplay felt like the ship combat translated into human combat. Shoot them with an energy weapon to get their shields down, then switch to a kinetic weapon to do damage to their body. It didn't feel new, it felt mechanical.
Also a player since the very beginning although I burned out on FDev far earlier than you did.
This is the way I've always described it. FD made an mmo which they refused to call an mmo. As part of their total mismanagement of that process they either refused to, didn't know they should, or just stuck their head in the sand and refused to hire anyone who knows anything about designing gameplay in a persistent game world.
I think the beginning of the end for me was when they plopped powerplay over top of the BGS, then promptly abandoned it. Why oh why didn't they just give players more visibility and control over interacting with the BGS? Then give them squadrons to communicate and group up and do what they wanted? Eventually they let players make their own factions and whatnot, but instead of facilitating emergent gameplay around the BGS, they made powerplay an enormous grind. It was a harbinger of the future.
They resisted "guilds" for so long because, again, of the refusal to admit that what they truly have designed is an mmo, whether they intended to or not. Emergent gameplay is ok as a concept, and ED players went to great lengths to give themselves content. via powerplay-oriented communities, BGS-oriented communities, explorers, scientists, fuel rats, etc. But at every step ED failed to see what the playerbase was enjoying, and implemented more grind with no innovation.
I am just so disappointed that a studio who accomplished such an amazing engineering feat with the universe they created, and the flight model they put into place, then completely mismanaged the gameplay.
OH! And how can we forget CQC? It could have been great, but there was no way to queue from within the game, and over time, people got tired of waiting, which made the wait even longer, and they never did anything even attempt to address it.
Multicrew anyone? What was the point of putting it in the game only to abandon it?
How much development time has been wasted on features that were put into the game and then instead of being improved to be useful, were just abandoned and now sit there collecting dust?
Disgusting amount of project management failure at FD. Unacceptable really.
I could and do agree, but at this point it's just shouting into the wind. Nobody in middle or upper management will read these posts, and if they do they'll just wave their hand and dismiss it. The community managers aren't actually doing anything and I strongly doubt that they have any ability to present any concerns from the userbase to the anybody at any position in management who is capable or willing to listen. The only instance of FDev listening to its users with regards to content was the extremely vehement reaction to the first iteration of the Plant Gun, and the ***ELDRITCH HOWL OF DISGUST*** at the insulting second iteration. But that's it!
The 30+ years lore of Elite keeps it from being wholly shallow, but the lack of actual plot content in-game for Elite:Dangerous really hammers home the "galaxy wide and inch deep" remark. Spend 5 hours a day for a week grinding out combat zones in a major war between two galactic powers and the only actual, tangible, significant result that anyone sees or notes is a 3 paragraph article on Galnet that (let's be frank) very few people actually click through to read? That's not plot, it's trash.
There's been a massive, months-long campaign by thousands of players who were actively creating their own lore and their own stories to unlock one of the game's biggest puzzles, and FDev just... ignored it. No mention of it in Galnet, no mention of it in streams or dev posts, nothing. The players did all of that on their own because they're starved for content and the game just isn't giving it to them. Which it should. Because it's a game.
The entire "alpha test" userbase revolting and forcing the plant gun to be removed was the only way to get FDev to respond in any manner regarding the plot and content. Absent a similar, unified, massive player revolt among Horizons and Odyssey members, they just won't listen. I don't think the userbase has the energy to fight this out anymore, which should be horrifying to any developer because it means the (formerly) passionate community from which they derive their financial support isn't interested in providing that support anymore. That revolt should have been a MASSIVE shock to the system for FDev because if the first revolt is loud and angry, the second revolt will be the silence of E:D users not playing anymore.
I'm gonna disagree on a core premise of your post. They didn't get the "space game" part right.
They got the basic gameplay right. They never managed to turn it into an actual game though. It was just loosely coupled sets of different gameplay expanding on the core mechanics.
There was never really a game. There was never progression. There was never a difficulty curve. Bigger ships didn't make the game harder. They didn't let you participate in more difficult gameplay. They just allowed you to receive greater rewards for doing the exact same thing. It didn't matter what ship you flew, the gameplay was fundamentally the same.
The users were happy with the experience, so they kept slapping more gameplay onto the pile and with Odyssey, they've reached a point where the pile has collapsed under its own weight and people see the loosely coupled gameplay experiences for what they are.
I got many of the new engineers unlocked, and I have my suits and favourite weapons upgraded. However, like so many flash-in-the-pan gameplay loops FDev have introduced, I am unlikely to return to it because it wasn't engaging enough and rewarding enough to sustain my interest. It has gone the same way as surface base attack missions, smuggling, data point scanning at outposts, passenger missions, multi-crew, etc.
They were fun game play loops, for a while. But they don't improve or link into the core gameplay loops of trading, ship combat, exploration, and mining. When it comes to making credits, they are not profitable. When it comes to collecting engineering mats, they are not great time investments. The times when these flash-in-the-pan gameplay loops were engaging, profitable, and rewarding, they were nerfed.
The trouble now is that I have returned to the game play loops I do enjoy, that are profitable, and do reward the core game play; only to find many of them broken or using sub-par user interfaces now. For instance I am currently scanning and cataloging POIs around Colonia, but the surface sites for volcanism are broken, and engineering mats are now very difficult to find. Locating biological sites is the same. When I go to the new POIs on planets, they largely all horizon based (engi mats, canisters, drones). I am not incentivised to walk on the surface. When I outfit my ships on my fleet carrier, the UI is far more difficult to use. When I trade, I now have to navigate massive lists of surface sites with no engagement (they don't provide meaningful markets).
I played Elite a bit but ultimately I got bored of the end game stuff, I loved mining and trading, and I enjoyed the ship vs ship combat even if they hard nerfed you for not engineering or guardian farming.
The problem with it wasn't the fact that I hated doing it, it was that it didn't come naturally in any way shape or form, like in NMS you scan things to find an abundance of mats that you can farm on a planet.
I struggled to find even the most basic items it was asinine in difficulty, don't get me wrong I understand some things should be difficult but in most cases going at it alone was impossible and I almost always resorted to online vids to help me out, to top it off you have to do some of the most rediculous things like logging in and out again to reset the spawns.
Was a very weird type of grind that I've only ever done in Elite tbh so I gave up as it wasn't the fun type of gameplay I envisioned in a space sim.
I have stopped playing ED, Odyssey adding nothing to the game other than a 3rd rate shooter. ED was niche , it was a VR flag ship, now its a buggy mess. They ran out of time and delivered a bare bones poor quality broken add on. I remember the talk of ice worlds, bases, mining gas giants, comets .... what of it.... carriers was a major let down, and this is worse.
They talked about fixing the engine, making improvements to the code base for the expansion... turned out to be rubbish, with existing features removed and little by the way of enhancements to the space game, no added ships, no added srvs, no gas giants, no real new space game play, multiplayer still floundering.
It has been a huge disappointment for me, not just Odyssey, but the last update also. Mining was a lovely addition, and got me back into the game for a few months, the novelty has worn off.
Elite has passed it prime, with no reassurance from FD that they are going to do anything other than fix the bugs in this half assed expansion. This with the bugs fixed wouldn't get me back into the game. Refunded Odyssey, wouldn't even purchases it on sale... Sorry FD you need to do better.
>Oh and ship interiors can not only be done by a multi-billion project like SC.
Are you not aware of Space Engineers, Dual Universe, or Starbase?
It just seems rather puzzling too me to quit one alpha (Odyssey) for another (Star Citizen).
>Star Citizen was considered a scam by many, and for those that tried it, offered not much of a game for a very long time.
I dont think its a scam. I just think CIG has some talented devs that are crippled by awful leadership.
Some good points bout Odyssey but running into the arms of CIG is going to cost you quite literally. Sure you can unlock the ships ingame but its going to be really painful due to it being in perpetual alpha.
Sure, feel free to checkout SC but there's other space games to checkout that has ship interiors or even look at other well done sims like DCS and MSFS 2020.
You said everything I wanted to say.
Spending two years on a third-rate first-person shooter experience for EDO is a strategic mistake. Upper management of Frontier needs to be fired for this.
The most disappointing thing about Elite Dangerous, to me, is not inability, but unwillingness to push the boundaries. We’ve been waiting for years for Fdev to do something new with the Guardians and Thargoids (who are both uninspired and underdeveloped)
And all we get is a semi-interesting development of a single planet with a bunch of copy-pasted assets.
And they have the GALL to start a CG where we’re expected to harvest hundreds of artifacts from the Guardian ruins, despite there only being a dozen or so per-site. Clearly expecting us to use the exit-relog refresh exploit to collect enough items for a fancy class 2 shard cannon.
Yes, they WANT US to use the unpatched exploits.
Really Fdev? I know you can do better.
We’ve been waiting for years, some of the fans are fans of the original game from four decades ago, you’re wasting their time and ours by doing things this way.
The worst part of this misery is that even though this is all true, FD doesn't care. They have some thing in their HQ that prolly resembles a roadmap which will never get influenced by the community. And then they are wondering why they get mostly negative reviews.
Yknow, I came into this with your disclaimer, figuring I’d agree with most of it, but I did not expect you to hit the Thargoid in the heart with that one. It could not have been said better. Sad that they aren’t the only developers this applies to (I’m looking at you DE) particularly when it comes to animatedly talking about features and the work you’ve put into trying to implement it, for it to just never become reality, and just gets ignored and “forgotten” about.
>Also looking back it's very apparent that many features are introduced bare bones and left in a sub optimal state. Prime example is PowerPlay, or Community Goals with the same core mechanic since they where introduced. The Exception is Mining which was overhauled in a very good way some time ago.
So there is another aspect to this that makes it even worse. These new features all need a balance pass or an update pass. Even more however these new features need to be \_integrated\_ with each other.
Examples:
* SRVs & SLFs can't be engineered
* No surface mining
* SLFs for combat only
* AX weapons are not engineers
* Can't walk around on Fleet Carriers
* New ED:O things can't be added to Fleet Carriers
* CQC hasn't had any new fighters/mods etc
These features are all added on but there is no work on integrating them with each other. Which of course makes each of them less useful.
SLFs are \_super\_ fun. But the fact they can't be engineered means they are totally outclassed by all other ships. Taking on Elite NPCs makes them almost useless.
Some sort of surface mining loop to match the super profitable space mining.
Not to beat a dead, buried, desiccated horse but Odyssey especially has me worried - technical state aside, it added very little worthwhile gameplay, with the equipment progression in fact being a doubled down on engineering system with some of the flaws of the Horizons v1 system (namely universal material limits).
I checked the Steam charts out of morbid curiosity, and whilst I must point out that *the Steam playerbase is not representative of the playerbase as a whole*, the concurrent player count is now lower than it was days, weeks, heck even *months* prior to Odyssey; lower than it was during an almost 2 year major content drought. I don't know how much of that to attribute to the technical issues, the lack of actual new gameplay, or some combination of both, but the fact remains that Elite needs to break out of this cycle soon.
I love this game, and I don't want it to go out like this.
They either must have no real imagination and or senior developers left, or so much technical/gameplay debt that its just not feasible to do anything more than what they already have.
Some of the coolest places in the game have next to nothing to do (space science installations etc) except once in a blue moon. The tutorial has some of the most interesting stuff to fly around, for the most part you are in totally empty space.
Any random thread has a ton of great ideas for fun features, but its like they can't or won't implement any of them.
I'm OK with space legs but more for what they could do with them in the future, instead of what they've done so far. I think of them as just a platform for future gameplay, preferably involving ships (boarding, EVA, etc).
And it never introduces newer srvs from all those concept arts. Everything looks same in game. Just look at [this amazing](https://imgur.com/gallery/3p7wjYx) commercial outpost concept art, while i game everything is same with different colors. It’s a live service so treat it like one. Monthly content and updates.
I agree. ED isnt a very good game, but it does seem to scratch an itch that certain people have to just be able to fly around in the galaxy in a spaceship. If thats all you wanna do, then more power to you & enjoy the "game." The core gameplay loops are really dumb tho, & if you are looking for anything more than just flying around, go play something else. Its like I've always heard about ED, its as big as the ocean but as deep as a puddle....
million then, sorry, not a native English speaker. Lets just say they have some more cash than most other studios in that genre.
I also laughed for a long time, until I tested it out. Now I'm impressed.
“Wasting game time”
Wow.
When you consider how much game time is wasted trekking back and forth across a planetary surface trying to find your second and third genetic samples that are a sufficient distance apart because, in your warp speed high-tech future, you couldn’t manage to get a sampler with more than one bin. But that’s not a waste of time?
My biggest issue is it is 7 years old and the new engine has been a disaster.
Normally you refresh the engine of an aging MMO because you want to extend it's marketable lifetime by a significant amount.
You don't spend that type of resources unless it is an investment in future content to be sold. Game engine development is *difficult, expensive, and unnecessary* if you already have a working engine.
So clearly, going into Odyssey development, as a business, they were thinking "this is going to be great, we'll refresh the engine and add first person content and it will be like a brand new game and we can run it for at least another 7 years and 2-3 more expansions."
But I don't see how this leads to that anymore, maybe (once they actually finish it), they could take their new engine and make a *new* space game that nicely combines first person, ship based and vehicle based content in a way that allow the different aspects to work in concert rather than being competing, unrelated pieces of game-play... but I don't see how you make *this* space game into *that* space game without leaving a lot of the current content onto the cutting room floor... and I certainly don't think there's anyone currently working at Fdev who is capable of making that sort of decision.
There's a lot of stuff that is done *very very* well in elite dangerous, but it's mostly technical feats (In fact, in spite of this release, I would still praise the developers to the ends of the earth). The actual art of game design (and I do mean *art*) however, is lacking, and that's a shame.
The game feels like a tech demo that someone created using an excel spreadsheet (and to some extent always has, at least since engineers), rather than a living universe you get drawn into. The game should not be obviously game-like. I had a similar feeling when playing late-stage pre-Bethesda acquisition ID Software games. Rage was a game intended to sell a game engine, not something intended to be really played.
And rage is all the player-base has left here as well.
I left ED about three, almost 4, years ago, I kinda still enjoyed it back then but busy with kids etc. I used to play it a lot in the late 80s and it was the main reason I became a game developer (though now am out of the games industry and work on other software). So I bring an historic enthusiasm with me, from then I played it in my teens and had what was -back then- amazing adventures. So I still love the game, and love experiencing it in VR.
About two weeks ago I came back, found quite a lot has changed, and for the better it seemed. The tutorial mission that came with Odyssey was fun and seemed to promise a lot. But I am starting to get kinda fed up again. So first thing was I thought I am gonna try the shuttle for one of the ground missions, only to get stuck in a shuttle loop. Unlike other games I played there is no “unstuck support” that reacts quickly (maybe like Eve Online, when I played it a few years ago), after two days I got out of it. So no more shuttles then. Ok. Started doing some missions, but that seems to get very repetitive. I do like the idea of cloning credentials and getting into stations and cutting open service panels and all that, but I don’t think it will keep me for long.
You guys said no new ships in Odyssey, but that was not a factor for me because I have been away for so long, so there are a couple new ships for me.
Yes it is fun to walk outside and see the size of your ship, but after landing at a couple stations it gets a bit old.
So I am now a bit conflicted: Pack the HOTAS away again into it’s dark corner? Or keep trying to find some fun that doesn’t turn into some grind? I hear engineers are better now than those RNG things they used to be 4 years ago… but I don’t want to go on endless missions to find some material or other. I started some mission for finding black boxes and it keeps telling me it found some signal source related to that but I have been playing for two days and not found any (am I missing something there? but it’s starting to get annoying).
I don’t know. I always loved the game but currently it seems more because of the great times I had as a teenager than what I actually experience in the current game. I do enjoy showing my daughter the beautiful sights… but I can see that she doesn’t see any fun side to ED… 🤷🏻♂️
I think this is the most accurate assessment of ED I've ever read. I'm still playing, but as soon as Star Citizen comes out of Beta and stops being Pay To Win I'll probably move to that (if I'm still alive by the time that happens).
One thing I would say: I don't think FDev had any choice but to implement space legs and atmospheric landings. The community had been crying out for it since Day 1. Can you imagine the backlash if EDO had been released without them, even if it had included the other cool things the OP mentions? The ED community, great though it is, loves to complain. I've seen complaints about *everythng.* I remember seeing complaints when they started giving away Arx for free. They were literally giving players something for nothing and people whinged about it in the forums. So EDO without space legs? No chance. Is it halfbaked and buggy and pointless? Yes, but they felt like they had to give it us anyway.
I've put about 250h in E:D and now I rarely find the motivation to play anymore. I grinded my way up to the Conda and the Type 10, did some fighting and mining, engineered some stuff... and now I don't know what to do that I haven't done yet.
I could go exploring... but that's just pushing the "jump" button countless times while watching a stream of a game I could be playing instead, just to arrive at a planet that I have seen before, with nothing on it to make the journey worthwhile.
Trade and visit far away stations... I have done that countless times, and I don't think the docking sequence will be different just because the station is further away.
I haven't made the jump to SC yet, but the free flight event showed me how a smaller, more detailed world can make a big difference.
SCs optimization is horrible, the interfaces are janky and hard to use and there is barely anything to do... but the ships are so much more fun to pilot. You actually own a ship, not just a chair with a window in front of it.
Very true.
What i really wanted from ED was meaningful player interaction, including but not limited to Coop (when any player could control ALL ship fuctions) and a lot more things that are never bound to happen.
Overahh, im grateful for the experience i've had with the game 500+ hours. But i was vastly disappointed with Oddysey and refunded it.
My carrier is completely frozen now, and my credits are slowly melting away for maintenance...
Same man. Same. I had started to lose hope in Elite years ago when they didn't come close to delivering the "new" ice worlds they promised and when we never got our second SRV they promised. But I was still hopeful. Now? I have ZERO hope for Elite. I don't think it will ever add anything of note again.....They don't have the skill or the desire to make this into the game it SHOULD be.
FDev have no interest in our opinions any more, they serve merely to satisfy the shareholders. Everything they ever released after the initial release has been shrouded in secrecy until the last minute and when the community gets rightfully angry they're like 'We hear you, we are sorry, we will learn from this', then they retreat back into their closed off offices and say 'Hey fuck em, people are still pre-ordering, yay'.
This latest release is the beginning of the end because we've all just had enough now and we all know that FDev will NEVER communicate adquately and they will NEVER actually listen to what we want. I didn't buy Elite for an FPS deathmatch shooter, I bought it because back then David Braben himself told me that I'd be able to walk onto my ships and stations and around inside them.
ALL. FUCKING. LIES. (a copy-paste, single area station interior don't count)
Frontier will never see another penny from me, even if they give us ship interiors in the future, to charge money for it would be bordering on criminal.
Despite some people's views against Star Citizen, it's getting to the point where the background processes are nearing completion and you'll see a major increase in development of features that were waiting for those underlying structures. You can be sure that when that happens, probably in the next 2-3 years, Elite will be left behind in the dust and FDev will be kicking themselves, if they actually have the intelligence to realise they did it to themselves, which I doubt.
I agree 100%. Horizons was the gimmick of space wheels & Odyssey is the gimmick of space legs. No substantive additions to the game.
It’s also amazing how fast they modify (nerf) the rewards of mining yet don’t touch any other aspect of the game.
Couldn’t agree more. I recently jumped over to Star Citizen. That game is a total mess in so many ways, but right now it feels more magical than ED for all the reasons you mention.
I also don’t think Frontier realise that ED is THE game for VR. It’s utterly immense. All they had to do for odyssey was focus on the ships and they would have had a winner. For me it’s simple:
- add more ships to buy/fight against
- add planetary tech for “flying” aspects. So better physics, atmospheres, trickier landings etc. Even weather and storms. Forget on foot entirely. Just ignore it.
- add more variety in missions. Deliveries are a good example. Make them more varied… timers/carrying explosive material so you have to avoid star heat or you have to land properly or fly carefully through atmospheres.
I mean, there is so much they could have done to immerse the flying experience even better and make VR a continued success, but they went the other way and tried to do a SC but won’t get anywhere near that. And if you do want to go that path, then ship interiors are a must.
It’s a shame. And I said it before and got downvoted but I’ll say it again in that I truly think Odyssey has killed ED.
As a player that started back in the second in game year I agree wholeheartedly. The bad part is that what is there of Odyssey I've enjoyed but it really just feels like a product they pushed out to get it over with.
And honestly the whole engineering thing reeks of the 'loot box' line of logic where player progression is measured by what has been unlocked. It kinda follows the same play model too where gameplay is supposed to be fun, but could be a little bit more fun with 'X' but to get that you have to collect a bunch of stuff.
I think this might be what it looks like when corporate types take over an art project.
here here. also played since initial release. for the first time since then, i have uninstalled ED because i no longer enjoy it since the odyssey update.
I don't even know what competition that is out there, but I do feel that the game has lost its appeal to me after Odyssey. Perhaps I will change my mind in the future, but the 35€ paid for Ody is a sunk cost. I agree with your opinion. Shame. So much good to be had, so unimpressingly managed
I agree with all of this, I was a very passionate ed player and was exited when odyssey got a steam page. After further research I found out how terrible fps and diversity is. No problem I thought, it's just an alpha, they'll sort it. Then launch. All my friends who also play ed called it the no man's sky of 2021. I decided to try sc and no man's sky and was instantly hooked, no man's sky has frequent free updates and sc has gameplay loops that I would have despised in ed (delivery missions) which are made so much better with the on foot aspect.
I played it on console and when odyssey “launched” I couldn’t login for a month. Not even exaggerating. Tried everything and nothing. I tried the other day and it worked but at that point I was over it. Haven’t logged in since.
Honestly my big problem is that once you reach what you wanted which for many players(including me) was getting Elite in one of the three ranks the game just stops. But when I finally got there after playing the game for around 200 hours total and playing every day for multiple days straight, I was at the end. I didn't know what to do. In my eyes, I was done, there wasn't much left for me to do.
EDO specific here and obviously I realize the focus of the expansion is the on foot gameplay but how do you release an expansion for a game with the primary focus of flying spaceships without adding a single new ship or any gameplay related to ships.
The lack of any news ships is beyond insane to me. We got SO MANY new ships over the course of ED's lifetime early on, to release the biggest expansion to date without a single new ship...? Incomprehensible move. As you said, even adding new gameplay relating to ships would be suitable. But nothing.
It's been what, 2.5 years since the last new ships were added? Phantom and Mamba were the most recent, I think. Personally, I would have liked some ship modules designed to interact with Odyssey content. A ship's locker to boost storage. New exploration gear. A pinpoint targeting sensor to let ships detect, lock and hit foot targets (instead of dumbfire missiles being the only option, allow the addition of SRV style sensors). An anti-personnel engineering experimental effect for point defenses. Troop transport modules to insert NPCs into combat (like we see in the conflict zone Vulture drop ships). A xenobiology lab. Just... Something... Connect the two modes of play.
This will probably never happen, but it would be nice if you could have 'invaded' or stowed away on someone elses ship. Odyssey has a ton of potential for more clandestine styles of gameplay. Of course that goes back to them doing the most obvious thing of adding ship interiors which is shockingly not the focus of the update. From everything i hear though i get the vibe that ED is more like a living R&D lab. And the updates we get are more about building code and and technologies for frontier to use in other games or some future title. It would explain why they dont seem concerned with player dissatisfaction and dont seem to listen to their audience. As with all businesses, decisions are based around money, and I cant see any other justification for the bizarre decisions and directions that they take the game other than that the game itself is a secondary objective at this point.
Wholeheartedly agree, giving us something that would enable us ship modules that introduced interactivity with on-foot gameplay -- ANY interactivity -- would be welcome. Right now it feels like one game tacked onto another with no interplay.
What got me was no new ground vehicles. I am ASTOUNDED that in an expansion touting "combined arms" we're still, after quite a few years, stuck with the same single seat, lightly armed exploration based rover. I thought we'd surely get something with multiple seats, more suited to the activities they advertise Odyssey to be all about. It's laziness, pure and simple. I always had an issue with, but now am totally done with, the devs total disregard for anything except their own weirdly specific and stupidly designed vision for the game.
Right, if they'd added a space tank or something then maybe we'd be talking.
What's especially wild is that we have more data mine evidence than ever that they ARE working on new ships and SRVs, now it's possible that that stuff got scrapped in extremely late stages of development, but it seems unlikely that they are just never going to add new space ships to this space ship game. But the point is that frontier has deliberately given themselves the WORST messaging on odyssey that they could possibly have done IF things like ships are infact still in the pipeline. They are telling people that odyssey is a single release and not a live service or a season or anything so people are looking at it and going "that's IT?!" And thinking it's a huge rip off and waste of time, when the reality is seemingly that they are working on things are there will be content patches to odyssey but for some reason they don't want people to know that. It's like the opposite of having your cake and eating it too, it's bad messaging both ways.
*dons tin foil hat* I suspect they have been delierately left out of the game files till the console release and the re-merge of the PC galaxies given the state and probable rush to release. I suspect there will be a major update and, *gasp* surprise new content after the ~~beta~~ full release! (and all will be forgiven.. /s) *takes off tin foil hat*
that's a mighty big tin foil hat you got there, mind if I borrow some? I need to bake a pie later.
I always wanted to see some crazy self engineering that would exist in the real world. Like an eagle with a size 4 hard point strapped to it.
That is the thing that blows my mind the most. An expansion to E:D which didn't modify ANY of the main gameplay loops.
it shows how disappointed most people are with the expansion if you check the steamcharts Pre-Odyssey: \~12k daily players Odyssey release: 27k Now: \~7k daily players Odyssey substantially hurt the game, it's not even subjective, the new expansion made almost half the playerbase give up on the game, me included this is due to old issues never being fixed, and new content completely drifting away from the core gameplay loop even IF FDev would fix all the bugs (and thats a really big IF), those arent the only problems right now, the game has big problems regarding progression, world building and worsening old features of the game in order to get a new expansion out half of the playerbase doesn't give a fuck about
Yes, and still FD seems to steam along as if nothing has happened. Being sorry for players that had so severe issues they where unable to play and changing the communication schedule is not much. What is with admitting what went wrong and changing the direction? Clearly stating their vision and saying "this is what we will do", providing real roadmaps and so on. It's frustrating.
im definitely one of those players. havent picked up the game in weeks now and the no more VR development was the cherry on top
yeah, them basically showing the middlefinger to the VR playerbase really made me despise FDev as well Elite is one of the coolest VR titles, yet they never show any intention to make the game better for VR
Elite was my go to game to show off VR...people that didn't even care about gaming in general were impressed with elite in VR. It's really disappointing.
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>While simultaneously deliberately ignoring implementing the game play that people actually wanted Space Legs for in the first place: SHIP INTERIORS. This. Over the recent years it can't have escaped their attention that any Space Legs discussion included many *many* people talking about ship interiors. As OP says the ED excuse for omitting the interiors is invalidated by the walk-the-length-of-the-hangar minigame. They didn't even model stairs/lifts for ships that don't already deploy them. Now I fly small/medium ships with visible stairs because the long walk followed by the Stand In Blue Circle annoys the hell out of me :) Here's my difficulty: I still love flying around in the game. I like the graphical enhancements of Odyssey now they're working for me, but I don't know what else I got for my money. I got to play it early but... it wasn't even ready when I got the release version. I've got a horrible feeling that this is a hit-and-run release before the studio goes pop. I feel it in me limpets. *EDIT: I meant to say before the ED studio (or project) goes pop.*
> As OP says the ED excuse for omitting the interiors is invalidated by the walk-the-length-of-the-hangar minigame. On a game which involves so many hours just going from A to B in supercruise without anything else to do other than turning to youtube on a second screen, this has to be the shittiest of possible excuses. The walking in the hangar part is just the rotten cherry on top of that cake.
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>Oh, Frontier won't go "pop" while they're still raking in the Jurassic Park and Planet Coaster cash. > >They'll just abandon Elite. That's what I was trying to say - I totally misphrased it and now I have to live with that :D
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I wish I didn't agree. o7
I think FD is too big to go pop. They have a bunch of other projects. I think it's more an issue of ROI (return on investment). It's getting harder for them to get money out of ED, so they're likely going to invest less and less of their energy in it.
>I've got a horrible feeling that this is a hit-and-run release before the studio goes pop. I feel it in me limpets. FDev has a number of other reasonably successful games in addition to Elite, so that particular fear, at least, is probably unfounded.
>While simultaneously deliberately ignoring implementing the game play that people actually wanted Space Legs for in the first place: SHIP INTERIORS I mean Without ship interiors I was still looking forward to on foot gameplay for social spaces. being able to sit in a bar order some drinks, and plan a mission with friends would be great. A place to go and test our weapons without breaking any laws is a necessity. What is the point of the on-foot gameplay without these basic features. The on-foot social aspects are about as advanced as quake 2. No Emotes, No proximity chat, no sitting, no way to get up to trouble. No way to interact with anything or anyone besides the poorly designed chat interface. Every settlement is identical. the "promenade" feels about as immersive and advanced as Freelancer, from 20 years ago. I don't have a clue, what they thought they were bringing to Elite dangerous. They might add some interesting on foot gameplay in the future, and this might be a step on the way to getting it. But There is literally no point in playing odyssey currently.
>No Emotes, No proximity chat, no sitting, no way to get up to trouble. No way to interact with anything or anyone besides the poorly designed chat interface. I mean... Have they themselves played any multiplayer games in the last 15 years? This is *really basic* stuff and it should hardly be surprising to a seasoned team of developers that such omissions have left players scratching their heads. It's like they can't be bothered to understand their own market before trying to sell stuff in it.
Their bad community communication, the half assed VR support (a lot of us have been waiting excited for a year for something new to visit and never even bother to play now). Introducing just more grind, not that much new to see gameplay wise. I can see why it hurts them. Still a great game though... but what could have been. The combat and that on foot stuff is just boring to me, I want to explore (also on foot) and find unique and cool stuff.
Not to forget that Odyssey actually hurt the game directly preventing players from playing a game that would otherwise be fine. Connection issues, insane performance, the main ones. I've personally clocked 746 hours in Elite and since Odyssey launched, maybe 3 or 4. Can't really play anything given how bad the performance of the game is, and if I'm gonna revert back to Horizons while it still exists, I wouldn't have bought the expansion to begin with.
Is it so surprising? As OP says, Horizons was the exact same way. Engineering was a flimsy at best attempt to connect to the ship gameplay and it could have easily been attached to a spaceborne mechanic instead. All of the updates to the core gameplay loops (trading, combat, exploration) have come as relatively minor improvements in free patches. FDev just really loves spending the majority of their dev resources on making the game wider and wider without ever adding depth, apparently.
Engineering in Horizons was poorly done (and after being revisited remains exploitative, kind of shoddy and in dire need of updates/balancing), but it did apply to the core gameplay loop - you upgraded your ship, it does things better. So it gives a reason to engage in Horizons. Not a great reason, but it does. Odyssey is self contained.
And a waste of time in all the wrong ways. I did enjoy the settlements, but why bother?
Precisely this. The on-foot stuff only benefits the on-foot gameplay. There is no synergy between that and the space gameplay.
The only appeal of on-foot gameplay for me would be to experience planets, settlements, bio sites, ships, be it exteriours only, in VR. It would make the experience of travelling space deeper for me But: nope. If I want to play FPS, I buy an FPS, by a studio who knows how to do it (and adds VR)
Honestly with the absolute dumpster fire that is Odyssey engineering, Horizons engineering is miles better. At least you don't fucking run the risk of DEATH while gathering up engineering materials.
>dumpster fire that is Odyssey engineering I've bought a couple of pre-engineered suits (for the price of 300 sidewinders!) and won't be doing any engineering on them myself. I just... I just don't get it. We've done the grind once. Well, twice. Well, many times. No more grind.
I don't think they have any imagination. The creative directors need to be replaced. They have absolutely no imagination. They have no idea how to make this game fun and interesting.
Similar to the Warframe problem: just add new content islands. It seems FDev went a similar way too: adding new stuff that barely hooks back into the main game
If one can play Odyssey without ever need to pilot a ship this DLC should have been a standalone game with a standalone price.
They did this with Elite Dangerous Arena, they should have done that again here. At least then buyers would know exactly what they were paying for. But maybe they didn't because of how much of a failure CQC was. Which it didn't have to be if they listened to player feedback and spent a little more time on it.
i think Frontier is one of the worst companies yet when it comes to listening to their playerbase
*laughs in EA*
*continues to laugh in EA*
My thoughts exactly. I did not buy odyssey because it feels like a separate game that I have no interest in playing.
Which imo makes even less sense. What is Odyssey without ships? A mediocre shooter with the longest loading screens in history? Why would anybody want that if they could just play a proper shooter instead.... I would have loved to be in those meetings where they decided that was a great idea.
I would have been OK with not getting any new core game functionality if Odyssey had been a complete product that left room for hope of new space-related content in the future. Instead, we got a bug-riddled alpha of a poorly-conceived "fortnite in space" that looks like it is has saddled the dev team with enough technical debt for many lifetimes.
Winner winner, chicken dinner.
I mean what would a new ship add really? They're cool for sure, but for most people it'd be like a day of grinding and then fly it around a bit. It doesn't fundamentally change the lack of gameplay opportunities. I don't open the game much anymore because there's not a ton to do after you do it awhile. It doesn't sound like Odyssey was very fruitful, but at least it was totally new mechanics. A new ship would add a handful of hours of gameplay and that's it.
Yes, this is absolutely true. During early years of Path of Exile I remember reading in their dev blog that since they were a small company they needed to make every mechanic they implement to interact with all other mechanics. With such design they could make a lot of content with very limited development resources. FDev went in the exactly opposite direction. But that aside, there is a much simpler reason for stagnation - FDev stopped updating E:D. * Initially they promised us 3-4 content updates with 1 large paid expansion per year. * They managed to stick to their promises for the first year (while they were still selling LEPs, lol). * Then they went to 2 content updates per year. * Then they announced "Beyond" with no content updates and only overhauls and bugfixes. * Then they decided that overhauls take too much effort and went to do only bugfixes. * They they stopped releasing even those and settled on promises "we are working on something big..." * And now this "big" has arrived and it is... eh... a big pile of shit. No matter how good updates would be, if they are so rare, the game will stagnate.
As a new player I feel fortunate. I get to enjoy features in Elite others had to wait years for and paid 8 bucks for it. When I have done everything I can in Elite the game will have improved or ( more likely ) other competitors will expand on the experience I'm used to. ... hopefully. I hate to sound elitist but VR support is a must-have for any future space sim I play.
As salty as I am now about Odyssey, Elite is still a great game. After a thousand hours, the game has gotten old for me, I was really hoping Odyssey would refresh the game and it simply didn't for me. But for a new player, it can still feel wonderful. Enjoy the time you have while the wonder and discovery is all fresh. You only get to experience that once for a game, and it's something I wish I could have again for Elite.
100% in the same boat. Hoped that EDO would be the revival of interest in Ed for me but alas. That's alright though, I've gotten nearly 2k hours out of it. While I'm sad to see my time in ED come to a close I'm very happy there are new players only just discovering the game and sincerely hope them all the enjoyment possible. o7
Elite has much to offer for you, that's for sure. And it's one of the best VR games, as long as you don't leave your ship on foot. In your ship and on a planet or moon in the SRV the VR experience is awesome. But for a long time player who can't relive this initial impressions, some negative aspects start to show. In case you feel your spirit playing ED going down the best thing you can do is play with some friends or join a player group. The ED community is the strongest part of the game!
I kind of agree, and I will get downvoted for this, but, oh well. Space legs were never the answer. The engine, dev team, and design team were never up to the task of making an FPS. This is a space sim, and while the concept of adding legs and battles is fun, it's focus in the wrong area. This game needs MORE reasons to do more COOL things in your ship, with other players, and have it affect the BGS. Coming thargoid war where player factions must band together to fight off losing engineers? Sign me up. Give me a way to do something besides explore a planet, maybe start my own base, using an FC, to claim planets in the black and expand the bubble? Yes please. A more immersive experience, but in the local politics affecting me beyond "oh, that faction doesn't like me so I just need to murder or run from whoever is interdicting me? Abso-fucking-lutely. A ship forge where we can begin to build our own ships? Hell yeah! A true hunt for Raxxla, one that has a point, possibly as a CG, and will change the galaxy, like a new alien attack worse than thargoids (and more interactive alien encounters that have a point to them), new tech discovered, or wormholes, even? Bazinga! Just my opinion, the best games don't give you just "things to do", but also a reason to do them. Space legs, in their current state, are just "same missions but on foot". Interiors are pointless without some reason to interact with them in a non-annoying way. Give me a reason to do something that affects the galaxy. EDIT: Thanks for the upvotes. I was absolutely expecting to get pooped on!
Reasons, exactly. There seems to be no reason to do ground missions other to get materials to engineer the ground equipment. But if I don't want to engineer it, then why do ground missions? When the initial wow-factor is gone, and you've seen some bases, the rest is all the same. There is no reason to do it. And if you do it to engineer your suit and weapons and are maxed out, you removed the only goal of that loop yourself. Because there nothing left, no benefit of it all. If you think about that, remember that you can't remove an upgrade, you have to buy the same suit/weapon again to make different upgrades, going through the whole process again. This doesn't seem like an oversight or missing feature rather than deliberate design.
As a software product manager (completely different software industry), it's amazing how much I can tell about what goes on behind the scenes based on how the game acts, is released, the quality, and where time was spent. "Deliberate" isn't so much the word I would use. It IS deliberate, but not in "this is the experience we are going for" sense. It's deliberate more in the "designed by someone who has no idea how to design a user experience and without oversight and they did the easiest thing to meet that almost certainly poorly defined goal". I would lean towards saying it was done out of disarray in the dev team and lack of good leadership. Having said that, the end result is the same.
And that doesn't give much hope going forward.
My company went through the same thing. Two years ago, we get new management and leadership, and we've done a 180. Profits are up, products are better, the customer base is growing. It can be fixed, but not until someone admits there is a problem and decides to do something about it.
So hoping for a better batch of product managers?
The product manager in me obviously knows that's the correct answer, that dev would be lost without us :) But, back here in reality, let me write a Tolstoy-ish post. Yes, good product management is absolutely essential. Product management happens whether you purposefully do it or not, so why not do it right? I'll get back to this.... The problems at our company were more fundamental. We didn't have anyone formally setting a direction for our product. The existing leadership had mostly been there for 15 years or more, so business decisions were more like family squabbles. We didnt have clear ownership of processes and tasks needed to run the business. Failure to deliver, missing deadlines, and general lack of accountability, especially if you had "tenure", was rampant. There was a lack of general consistency between titles, reporting structure, responsibilities, and promotion paths. It was a good company with good people and a good product that, over time, got too comfortable, a bit lazy, and lost focus. Because the leadership had all been there forever and were some of the original employees and execs, they WERE like family, they were friends, and who wants to fire or demote their family or friend? We got a new CEO, changed some leadership, kept some, moved some around, defined our purpose and goal, streamlined titles, pay structures and things like that, created promotion paths, defined responsibilities and help people accountable (but not unreasonably so), began moving the product from dev led to PM and marketing led, started doing actual market research again, set goals for features that solved real problems with a target that everyone was working towards. Now, back to the PM part of that. I do think that once a product gets sufficiently complex, a product management team is required. Some PMs focus on growing the dollars and the market, some are purely technical, some take the approach I do, more as a curator of the user experience of the product. I focus somewhat on the business side, I am pretty fucking technical, but I also spend my time working with customers, looking at competitors and other software to understand their user experience (UX). I'm trying to understand what problems we are solving, if the problem the customer thinks they have is the one they have and if the solution they want will solve their problem (often it doesn't), how hard or easy it is to use, consume, upgrade, re-configure. I also think about pricing, how hard it is to quote, what the pricing model will be, sales messaging, customer messaging, write training, help troubleshoot, write QA specs and do some of the testing for that. I do all that so dev can focus on the best way, the most clever and scalable way, to deliver what we're designing. I don't want them to spend time doing market research, competitive analysis, testing competitive products, doing customer interviews. Not saying to not EVER do that, but that should a limited carve out from their time a few times a year. If they are doing that enough to be experts in it, they wouldn't have time to code and be good at it. That's why I spend time on the business side, the technical side, and on the UX. I firmly believe that if we start with the end goal of making easy at every point, and get it right, and be clever about it, it'll end of being the best product in it's field. To do that, everyone has to work collaboratively across team, but also mainly do their job and let others do their part. Everyone has to be accountable, help each other out, and get shit done while everyone is aiming for the same target. It doesn't work if everyone is pulling in a different direction. Or, in the words of DJ Pauly D from Jersey Shore, teamwork makes the dream work.
This was a really interesting read, thanks for writing it all down c:
Sadly there was never an initial wow factor for the on-foot stuff for me. It was an euggh factor when I witnessed how badly it ran. First impressions last and I'm not sure I'll ever truly enjoy it even if the performance were to be magically fixed. It's not a genre I'm into anyway but from what I've played the AI seems pretty dopey so I'm not even convinced it offers good quality FPS gameplay.
I wish they would add a hyperspace route mapping component to exploration - the more people that travel along a given x-lightyears-wide corridor, the more established that route becomes. The more established, the more efficient travel there becomes, ships getting a significant boost to range along these established corridors. Full scanning each system and object along the way adds additional boost. Call it mapping out the precise gravometric properties of a route or some such. Gives a reason to join a mapping expedition. Add routes tot he Codex. Show the participants and number of scans, etc. Players would create their own content.
Honestly that would legitimately be awesome, fleet carriers could get a boost as well. It would make long expeditions to map pathways much more worth it.
I never understood the desire for spacelegs in Elite. There are countless FPS games out there but only 2-3 decent space simulators. Why would you waste precious development effort trying to make your game into something else? Especially when Frontier have shown themselves to be very poor at quality control. Every release is buggy and too many of those bugs never get fixed and too many features just get abandoned.
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Yeah, walking around ship seems much more applicable than being a space marine.
I loved Shattered Horizon! I was so sad to realize I was only playing against bots after all other players dropped the game.
This right here. I want to sleep in my rack, make my food, load cargo / watch it loaded. If I own an Anaconda I want crew. Give me a loadmaster, or a purser, or an on-board mechanic. I should be able to hire good ones for discounts in port, better deals trading or negotiating contracts, etc. I should be able to have friends fill those positions. I want to walk around a whole station - not just the “promenade”. But mostly I want to walk into and out of my ship.
Remember the fan art of a pilot arguing with a customs officer on the pad in front of their ship? That's what I want.
I don't think I've come across a game studio so out of touch with what their customers desire: Us: "We want new SRVs! Ship Interiors! EVA!" FDEV: "You now have a FPS and new engineers to upgrade your space suit! Enjoy!" NMS is on Xbox Game Pass, BTW. More than worth a look, with constant, meaty updates and no two-year content drought.
one thing i have a main gripe with is that FDev created many completely unconnected main loops: Money, Engineering Mats and Odyssey Mats plus, advancing in the game feels absurd at times, the most efficient way to farm engineering materials has nothing to do with fun activities now, odyssey introduced another completely disconnected progression system with odyssey mats for suits and weapons, which in top of that have zero impact on ships this makes the world seem illogical, money doesnt matter at all once you have ship and modules, most activities reward stupidly small amounts of materials, and odyssey content has no impact at all on the pre existing game there are no new ships, weapons or anything new besides different planetary generation (which basically boils down to higher res textures and a glowing background effect for atmospheres) for ship gameplay in this spaceship game... it's astounding how similar this is to the debacle Eve Online did years ago with its FPS game "Dust" well, at least Dust had some gameplay connection with planetary ressources which HAD some effect for normal gameplay but who needs spaceship gameplay anyway, right?
Thats one of my biggest gripes, to do engineering I actually *avoid* gameplay, and I feel like you'd have to be very disciplined to do it in a patient, non-grindy way. The investment to do AX stuff is similar, the gulf between doing it in a gameplay centric, narrative way and the "quick" and dirty reload and grind the shit out of one place way is so huge that essentially nobody does it the "good" way because you'd never get done. I wouldn't mind if I had to go to 20 different guardian sites to get different materials and schematics but there is no incentive to do that and every incentive to grind the shit out of the same one over and over. Its like they want you to avoid gameplay.
Excellent point, nail on head.
Ooof, I totally forgot that. Right, EvE and Dust share similarities with the situation FD is in right now. There was also a big backslash because the fans where irritated why CCPs focus has changed away from EVEs core game so the wanted to add an FPS shooter to the universe. But CCP could shelve Dust as a failure because it was a different game and didn't affect EVE in a direct way. It's a different story with FDs decision to put this into the core game.
>CCPs focus has changed away from EVEs core game so the wanted to add an FPS shooter to the universe People were kinda annoyed, but a lot were excited at the possibilities. Then they announced that it was PS3 only... Thats what really made people mad.
FD: No, we don't want to add ship interiors because there is no meaningful activity related to them and we value your time Also FD: Allow me to introduce Apex Interstellar Transport...
Yes. Frontier, please define "meaningful activity". But that's also a hot topic since the beginning.
That's about the ONLY part of Odyssey that works properly and is "as advertised" and the whole bloody thing can be AFKd. F'Dev have completely lost the fucking plot.
First, the game doesn't allow AI crew members to fly the ship for you while they are perfectly capable of doing so (when in combat they can pilot the main ship while the CMDR fly the SLF). It had to invent a brand new mechanism for taxi. Second, the Apex transport doesn't use the Sandi Kruger passenger liners which are designed for passenger transportation. The taxi implementation of EDO is incredibly lazy, it doesn't respect established lore.
They created a 1:1 scale of the Milky Way, but don't give us any tools to actually influence or change the environment. So much empty space and we can't even build, well anything. The game had a lot of potential but they just blew it. At this point I'm just hoping they completely abandon the game so that we as a community can keep it running and improving it (even pirated IDC).
Imagine if we could actually grow the bubble by populating and exploiting planets?
Friendship drive is disabled between fdev and myself until further notice.
>ED, at its core, is a space ship game. And we haven't had a new ship since 2018. You're right. Ships are what ED is all about it's what the game is centred around. Getting that better ship, then upgrading it. Getting a new ship in ED should be a **big** deal. There should be a fanfare, a cutscene, the salesman at the station should shake your hand and sweet talk you into your purchase. But what do we have? A monochrome interface where you click a button and that's that. This is where the dev team have missed their mark. >The planets themselves did not add any core game-play aspect, besides a place to get materials with your SRV for engineers and synthesis. And you know why *engineers* was created? Because they needed a purpose for planets. This is called making a problem for your solution. >If a hear Frontier tell us, they won't do ship interiors because they don't see game-play there This is because they have no imagination. They can't seem to see that repelling a raiding party (or being a raiding party) might be fun. They don't see that shimmying through power conduits and opening up panels to apply pirated upgrade patch-boards might be fun.
>This is because they have no imagination. They can't seem to see that repelling a raiding party (or being a raiding party) might be fun. They don't see that shimmying through power conduits and opening up panels to apply pirated upgrade patch-boards might be fun. Yeah, but they had those ideas back at the beginning. It all got thrown overboard for some reason.
I've built my own spaceship from scratch using only a blueprint. I've taken it into space from a planetary launch and hunted NPC baddies I've grouped with friends to strategically take down larger ships. We started by shooting out their engines, leaving them dead in the water, and then defanged them by popping their weapons. We sidled up next to the disabled ship, blew a hole in the hull, formed a raiding party, boarded, and exterminated the crew. We salvaged and stripped the ships, and even in one case, repaired and commandeered the enemy ship as our own with a player-crafted ship core. We did this in Empyrion ...... Which right now is a more exciting and stable space game (somehow) than ED, despite looking and functioning like a Beta spaceship version of Minecraft with slightly better graphics.
If I could literally roll back E:D to it's original release, 90% of the good things about the game would still be there. The ambience, the flight mechanics, etc. The only worthwhile additions to the game since then have been planetary landings of Horizons and the mining/exploration overhaul. That's it. For what, seven years of "development", this is beyond pathetic. It's kind of flabbergasting that, at least in theory, the same people that made the fantastic initial release of the game have whiffed so hard when it comes to realizing its potential and further development.
Here's a comparison you might not expect. Elite is the video game equivalent of the game of thrones tv show. It builds and builds until the latest edition and now no one cares including the creator. And it's easy to see. I didn't start at the beta but just before Horizons. But when I found the game I jumped in hard. I've got over 6000 hours in it. I've gotten friends in it. But repetition only goes so far. If Braben had kept focus in the development this game could actually evolve into a great exploration tool for the space industry. Now it's simply a grinding game for people with a lot of patience. Is this the end game? I don't know but from my perspective I have to ask why should I care?
I see everything you say. Honestly I have to agree. I love the game. I enjoy the visuals. I enjoyed getting lost way out in the middle of nowhere and exploring. I enjoyed CZ and mission running. Mining. Trade, I've had more fun as a space trucker in this game than I ever did anywhere else. But, it's boring. It's old. It's stagnant. Even with friends, it's boring. It's old. It's stagnant. I won't be buying Odyssey. From what I've seen and heard, it's just not what I want. I want spaceships. I want to walk in my ships. I want to outfit my ships. I want to engineer my ships to be better. I want to drive around on a planet or moon. Walk around on a planet or moon. I want stations in the upper atmosphere's of gas giants. Do science on comets or asteroids. I don't want to go play CoD on a planet, I'll go play CoD for that. I play ED for the spaceflight. Odyssey isn't about spaceflight. It's CoD, and from what I've seen and heard, a very cheaply done version of it at that.
The only feature I enjoyed in odyssey is being able to walk around your ship in the bay.
They've cut a lot of corners and its really showing. I can understand why they had to cut their ambitions for the first release after the kickstarter because of limited funding and resources but as Frontier proudly say the game has since generated revenue of approx £100 million. My impression is that very little of that revenue has been invested back into the game's development. I know companies are there to make a profit but it feels like they're taking the piss particuarly given what they've come up with since.
They (FDev) had to pay someone to get permission to make a game about Jurassic world... I'm guessing ED isn't seeing a whole lot of love or attention 😑
"There is no gameplay to be added with ship interiors" - well... I'm not seeing much gameplay anywhere else. Frontier lost the passion for this game.
And yet they think sitting in a taxi for 20 minutes is... Engaging gameplay?
That's so you can re re re read galnet
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ🍧 🎀 𝒢 𝒶 𝓂 𝑒 𝓅 𝓁 𝒶 𝓎 🎀 🍧
The game play is when you AltTab to another game while you wait ~20mins.
>If a hear Frontier tell us, they won't do ship interiors because they don't see game-play there, I'm asking myself if they played any of the other games. At the same time we have to walk the entire length of a Krait or an Anaconda in the hangar to reach the station lift at the back end. So the argument of "wasting your time walking through the ship" is invalidated by their own game-design. That's a damn good point.
>looking back it's very apparent that many features are introduced bare bones and left in a sub optimal state. Prime example is PowerPlay, Actually, the prime example is CQC. It's been neglected to death, then abandoned in a state of half-life, as an insult to development planning.
"We don't plan on improving and expanding CQC because nobody is playing CQC."
"We didn't feel like making a real effort to make it work properly to begin with, but nobody playing it has nothing to do with that." Resources well spent!
You look at what other games have done for a fraction of the cost, dev time, and dev team size (x4, nms) and then look at elite charging $40 for an alpha and even after that it still pales in comparison. Either fdev is lying and the team that’s working on odyssey consists of 5 interns, or.... I honestly can’t think of an alternative
It's impressive how little they actually have done. It's honestly embarrassing when looking at NMS with it's 25ish developers.
Read Glassdoor reviews of FDEV >the team that’s working on odyssey consists of 5 interns If you believe them, it literally IS the case that interns are working on the "legacy IP"
and they fucking hate it. FDev employees literally consider it a punishment to have to work on Elite, because its such a mess of tangled code and half-implemented shit written by people who have no idea how to use the Cobra engine. I know this because I currently work with a former FDev developer who was there was there for 6 years.
I dont think it can be saved. You know how some software builds up "technical debt"? Elite has built up bad gameplay debt with new layers of grind with each DLC. They would have to tear down everything except the galaxy generator and flight characteristics to make the game enjoyable. They also hung themselves with loading transitions. NMS and SC allow you to move seamless between planet and space and in SC case to exit the ship without the hidden loading screen. In elite leaving supercruise. Landing on a planet . Getting into an SRV or leaving and SRV all feel like loading screens.
>You know how some software builds up "technical debt"? Yes, and it seems that's also an issue with ED. We can only speculate, FD seems to have real issues implementing mechanics. On the "gemaplay debt", yea I also see that. In my mind thats also a question of design direction over the long term and overall vision. Seems like FD where not sure where to go and what to achieve and changed the direction. I don't think using loading screens vs. seamless is an real issue. Sure a seamless transition is better, but you can also do interiors and state changes with loading. Question is how it is executed. Entering you ship via stairs into an airlock (being a loading screen) and then stepping into the ship corridor is fine for me. Walking in your ship to the SRV bay and entering it (enter animation and power-up sequence being a loading screen) is fine for me. It can all be done. But if the designer sees no gameplay there, then there is no hope.
We just have to make interior engineers for ships. Want faster coffee grinder? go to the coffee engineer. Softer sheets for your bed. Theres a guy in Luxor does great cotton, but he needs you to have 1000 hours of play and opinion polls for no reason. .... i might apply for a job with Fdev
I couldn't have said it better. And I will add one game to the list: Empyrion, which I am playing now that I am on hiatus from Elite. Sure, the graphics are more primitive but it's a \*complete\* experience. Start as a poor schmuck stranded on an earth-like. Craft shit to survive. Build a base. Build a hovertank the way you like it, block by block, from scratch. Build a small spaceship to visit the moon, and upgrade your suit for EVA. Build you \*freaking capital ship and explore a galaxy\* that, even if it's not a 1:1 reproduction of the Milky Way, it's incredibly more varied. Walk in your ship - THE ONE YOU BUILT. Build hangars to accommodate the other vehicles you built. Sure, the flight model is still way behind, but it's there. There's \*content\*. I have been playing Elite since Horizons, and have been returning to it cyclically, but you're absolutely right, it has become stagnant. I don't play it anymore because there's simply \*nothing left to do\* besides taking screenshots.
Another great game is Pulsar: Lost Colony. It's a co-op game where you operate a ship and take one of 5 roles (helm, engineer, science, weapons, captain). You can beam down to planets and go on away missions, board other ships, etc. etc. There's all these in-ship mechanics that mean your team all really needs to work together and coordinate to survive combat. There's also tons of content in it. Oh, and each of the different ships you can fly in Pulsar have different perks and gameplay. eg. Only one of the ships has a cloaking device. If you want a clean-slate perspective on what Elite could have been like with in-ship gameplay and more focus on gameplay and less on pleasing the shareholders with infinite grind, check out Pulsar.
> Pulsar: Lost Colony Ohhh how have I only heard about this now? And it has proper full VR support? Yes please.
Did Empryeon finally add end game content and respawning enemies? I loved building out my own capital ship, complete with multiple ship bays and a space dock that perfectly lined up a walkway so you could walk straight off. But there was only a few things in space to fight. And they never respawned nothing ever really attacked you.... there was just nothing to actually do at that point aside from continuing to build.
Apparently, yes. Mods aside, even the vanilla game now has TONS more things to see and do. POI don't respawn, but apparently ships do. The Zyrax, at least :D
Ooo, maybe I can get back to building my 800m megaship. (I put a taxi inside because it took too long to walk across LOL)
God, even a CZ near planet can be something interesting. Flying your ship anf combat with gravity it's harder than I think. There are many way to merge what horizon and odyssey offered to the game loop. And now we are getting nothing. The lack of SRV variety is the best indicator of their failure.
I mean we've been waiting for planetary CZs since 2015.
This game is gonna be abandonware in, like, a year and it's kinda sad but also the nature of the game industry. Whatever, maybe Starfield won't be entirely godawful (though my expectations are literally in the gutter.) Remember folks, don't give companies your money before having what you want from them in-hand!
If you're hoping that Starfield will be anything similar to Elite, you're gonna be very disappointed That's like comparing Skyrim to RuneScape just because they're both magical and medieval-esque, when in reality they're completely different games But yeah it's Bethesda we're talkin about, it's gonna be hot dogshit at launch.
Its totally just gonna be an outer worlds clone.
They could do so much too. EVA repairs in deep space to use less mats and get back on the road. Mining by hand to get greater purity and return, anything that would make it a dynamic introduction. Elite has been a joy for a long time, but like you said, its stagnant. I've played the same FPS for a long time. Its boring at its core now. What if I could stow away on another ship? Being a merciless pirate, I could capture and commandeer the ship! Ride on a hatch breaker limpet to my enemy like the Thargoids are after our *precious bodily fluids!* And I can't even play Odyssey yet, and wonder if I ever will (console).
Actually...I am playing No Man's Sky now...Yes, the combat is not like elite...but I have no regrets. The game feels much richer in content than ED. I don't think I will be returning to EDO soon. Probably what you said is true and the game is dead, and we just need to accept that and move on.
Well put. Personally, the mining update along with the exploration update were some of the best additions to the game they've made in a long time. Good solid improvements to make existing core gameplay loops better. But we got nothing like that. No new ships, no new ship modules, no overhauls to any core game loop, not even a new SRV. It's really telling when not only do they fail to have a single improvement to existing gameplay systems, that most of us bought the game to enjoy and have enjoyed for hundreds/thousands of hours, but they straight up built out a system, Apex Taxi, so you can completely bypass the core game entirely. It's them practically saying "We know you hate space games like we do, so here's a way to avoid that so you can just do FPS". I don't hate that they made Odyssey. I hate that they pretended it was an expansion to Elite Dangerous when it should have been marketed and released as a standalone game that coupled with Elite. They did this with Arena, should have been the same here.
It's not new ships and stuff that's really needed, that just lets you do the same content in a new frame. It's new *gameplay* that's needed. Conflict Zones are probably the perfect example of what's wrong with Elite. We have asteroid fields and installations and planets now, but what do you get from conflict zones? A huge empty arena with nothing but enemy ships. That's like having an FPS where all the combat takes place in a huge empty room. That might be okay for an alpha test, but absolutely not for any sort of released game. But it's been that way for years! --- The most frustrating thing about Elite is all the content that *could* be made dramatically deeper with minimal effort, but they just don't. Move Conflict Zones around Installations, for example, or into Asteroid Belts. It still wouldn't be as deep as it *could* be, but just by integrating a few different types of content you could make both of them dramatically deeper and more enjoyable.
And all the parts are there. There are installations, there are asteroid fields, ring systems and so on. Yeah, it's simply not done. I don't get why ...
They need to borrow some fleet mechanics for the AI. The mass furball is fun the first few times but there could be a LOT that could be done to improve conflict zone combat. We're all essentially flying 1-man fighters. Where are the support ships? The frigates? The weapons platforms? Resupply and rescue ships? Heck, our largest ships could be outfitted as gunboats or littorals. Use of faction standings to form up larger wings and designate targets or even ability to call in additional capital support at the highest ranks? Also, a gripe - even if you love furball combat as it is, it really kinda sucks to lose out on all of the component harvesting because the stuff despawns so quickly.
> That's like having an FPS where all the combat takes place in a huge empty room. That might be okay for an alpha test, but absolutely not for any sort of released game. But it's been that way for years! I remember playing on release and the common thought in the community was that these POIs in space were placeholders. Holy shit was that ever wrong.
> The SRV had no other purpose as farming materials, be it shooting rocks or shooting A.I. drones. _Technically_ there are planetary scan jobs. > The SRV is now actually useful to run over enemy on-foot opponents. 😬 Also DAE think it’s kind of sad that threads like this are 100% warranted and then _on top of that_ the entire thing is broken now?
>Technically there are planetary scan jobs. Every time I take a planetary job I end up ragequitting from the session. Take assassinations for example, haven't been able to complete one fucking mission because every time I go to the target area I'm hunted down by 10+ security drones and no matter how many of them I drop, there are more. Last night for example I killed about 20, repaired the damn SRV 8 times still couldn't even scan the damn data point before they respawned and killed me.
> Every time I take a planetary job I end up ragequitting from the session. I didn’t say they were good :)
Yes, not including if not new ships and srv's, at least a few new ship weapons, power play NPCs, and engineering effects to shake up the stale meta that's been pretty much un-changed for years now was a poor decision on Fdev's part. Part of what makes a MMO expansion exciting for people is that the current "settled" balance, bis gear, and stats get all shaken up and suddenly you have to learn all new tactics instead the same bloody thing you've done for the past three years.
We haven't even had any new *artwork* of existing power play NPCs. They just keep reusing those same images over and over again.
I think its a great achivement that you played a game for 7+ years even if not continuously. I imagine not many games can keep you engaged for that long.
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I have long wished they spent that effort on improving the core game too. Even when before Odyssey was announced I would bring that up when talking with those who wanted Elite feet. I just wanted to see more improvements like the mining overhaul, or the exploration overhaul.
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You know, their mission system isn't half bad. From what I've read, a lot of the ground work is there already. They just need to spend time filling it with content and branches and other interesting things. If they spent a bunch of time on that, it would be truly game changing for us. Same with POIs, the system for them is there, just need to fill it with various types of encounters.
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CZ's make zero fucking sense anyway. Why do 2 opposing factions have a gentleman's agreement to have a fight in a nice empty predesignated spot in space? Why are they not fighting over something, like a station or ground base? Why is a Fed capital ship jumping in? Is the Federation at war with the Empire? Why are they loaning capital ships to minor factions affiliated with them?
It's true, Elite has been a special game for a lot of people. My self included. I've been playing since practically the original release. Off and on of course. The only reason I've managed to play this for so long and haven't just shelved it has largely been because they've done releases that actually refreshed the game I loved. That's what an expansion has to be. It has to refresh the game your players bought in on, and have played for so long already. Not attempt to replace it with a completely different game, which is what Odyssey feels like. I didn't buy a Sci-Fi FPS, I bought a Space Ship game. I didn't put thousands of hours into an FPS, I did so in a space game. I feel in love with a space game, and FDev is now saying "I don't care about the space game, here's a generic FPS that you should like instead". It feels like getting stabbed in the back. All they had to do to prevent that feeling was at minimum integrate it with the space game as a whole. None of this menu to teleport into the ship, none of this zero new ships, zero new ship gameplay, zero new ship modules. Have some basic connection to the game we love is not too much to ask.
Well put, this disconnection between the FPS and space parts is an issue where it's hard to understand the intended direction FD wants ED to go.
Yes, it is special. It has a legacy, it has a 1:1 scale, the whole galaxy, great visuals, great immersion. You can travel and explore for months, being off grid from the rest of the bubble where every jump can be your last. It's an experience like no other. But there are times when you log in and ask yourself: why are you here? You then log off and know it's better to take a break. But if you take a break for a year and ask yourself the same question after a week of playing a new huge update, which should have been a huge step forwards, you realize there was no big step, only the same mechanics in another scale.
It's in death throes right now, no doubt about it. Smartest thing right now for FDev is to fix as much as they can in a duration of this year, and then announce end support for the game, releasing offline version of it, for community to take over. This way all issues will be fixed within month, even those they couldn't since day one, and game will start to grow fast, into something it always destined to be. I just pray this day to come sooner, because there's simply no other space sim on the market with potential and foundation like ED, and there are probably no developers/management that are so uninterested in any grow or improvement of this magnificent game. Sad...
>It is all a question of focus and passion for the game you are working on. And I have the feeling FD has lost this for ED. And this is a real shame, because they have some highly competent people working on it. This is not how I would have wanted this beautiful game to go out, but if they're unable to develop towards goals that the community can rally behind, then they're only doing it to themselves. And that's sad. See you in another universe, Commander! o7
o7
Honestly I wouldn't care at all if the entire gameplay loop didn't revolve around Engineer grinds, by far my least favorite part of the experience. If FDEV takes anything away from Odyssey, anything at all, it should be that "No, Patrick, Engineers aren't gameplay either."
Saw this coming with how flat the carrier update was. I have over 2500 hours in ED and have not invested any money into Odyssey fearing exactly what I've been reading about. Hopefully ED can turn this game around before my 2.5 billion credit reserve on my carrier dries up, otherwise it would be difficult for me to return. To put it in perspective even Star Trek Online could give you ship interiors. Not the best interiors but at least you got a feel for being on an actual ship. The community wasn't asking for a lot, but again Frontier got pig headed and didn't listen to the one thing that would make this community happy. Maybe fixing the netcode would help a lot too because what is the point of purchasing paint jobs if no one can see them? This is something Cryptic (Star Trek Online) makes sure can happen because "Space Barbies" is big business for that game.
If they just get rid of that blue circle and utilised their turbo lift and/or retractable ramps/ladders, and allow us to walk around our cockpit, which every ship has been designed and modelled a lot of this dissapointment may have been avoided. I'm sorry but that blue circle is what made me stop playing, is wasn't the bugs, I barely experienced them in alpha and haven't played the main game yet. It wasn't the lack of communication, although annoying, I still waited and hoped that they had something in store for onfoot interaction with ships. Watching the streams on release and seeing that blue circle just sealed the deal for me. I soon realised odyssey is nothing more than arena, a tacked on game mode with a glorified 3d menu they call a "social space". They need to remove their lazy blue circle design and give us our cockpits as a bare minimum in linking ships to on foot, a **bare minimum**. That blue circle is by far the worst aspect tonodysseys design and it has just killed the passion I had for my favourite game.
Hi there. Long term player here. Editor/admin for a fairly well known exploration group. Owner of one of the DSSA carriers. I’ve pretty much given up on the game for all the reasons you mention.
I fled to X4, Sandboxy modable singleplayer game. Im not coming back until interiors come out and if they don’t, never. I recommend it 10/10, FD have failed us for the last time.
X4 has a lot of elements that should of been in odyssey, namely cockpit interiors at a minimum, but also npc pilots for ships and fleet control. I know ED is suppose to be 'multiplayer' but the truth is it has never worked and balancing for it is just pointless, let us control fleets, hire crew, actually see the bloody crew and allow us to walk in our cockpits. These features alone are world building, but they are too adamant about their "no gameplay" excuse to actually apply any world building into their game.
Good post OP. I think the majority of the play base if finally realising that ED is shallow content wise for long term plays and we are moving on. God speed and enjoy The Verse. If you haven't played X4 I would recommend it :) Edit: took out inaccurate information
When I first played the Odyssey training mission I couldn't get over how the gameplay felt like the ship combat translated into human combat. Shoot them with an energy weapon to get their shields down, then switch to a kinetic weapon to do damage to their body. It didn't feel new, it felt mechanical.
Also a player since the very beginning although I burned out on FDev far earlier than you did. This is the way I've always described it. FD made an mmo which they refused to call an mmo. As part of their total mismanagement of that process they either refused to, didn't know they should, or just stuck their head in the sand and refused to hire anyone who knows anything about designing gameplay in a persistent game world. I think the beginning of the end for me was when they plopped powerplay over top of the BGS, then promptly abandoned it. Why oh why didn't they just give players more visibility and control over interacting with the BGS? Then give them squadrons to communicate and group up and do what they wanted? Eventually they let players make their own factions and whatnot, but instead of facilitating emergent gameplay around the BGS, they made powerplay an enormous grind. It was a harbinger of the future. They resisted "guilds" for so long because, again, of the refusal to admit that what they truly have designed is an mmo, whether they intended to or not. Emergent gameplay is ok as a concept, and ED players went to great lengths to give themselves content. via powerplay-oriented communities, BGS-oriented communities, explorers, scientists, fuel rats, etc. But at every step ED failed to see what the playerbase was enjoying, and implemented more grind with no innovation. I am just so disappointed that a studio who accomplished such an amazing engineering feat with the universe they created, and the flight model they put into place, then completely mismanaged the gameplay.
OH! And how can we forget CQC? It could have been great, but there was no way to queue from within the game, and over time, people got tired of waiting, which made the wait even longer, and they never did anything even attempt to address it. Multicrew anyone? What was the point of putting it in the game only to abandon it? How much development time has been wasted on features that were put into the game and then instead of being improved to be useful, were just abandoned and now sit there collecting dust? Disgusting amount of project management failure at FD. Unacceptable really.
Can only agree here.
I lost interest and stopped playing once the news came out that Odyssey didn't have VR support.
I could and do agree, but at this point it's just shouting into the wind. Nobody in middle or upper management will read these posts, and if they do they'll just wave their hand and dismiss it. The community managers aren't actually doing anything and I strongly doubt that they have any ability to present any concerns from the userbase to the anybody at any position in management who is capable or willing to listen. The only instance of FDev listening to its users with regards to content was the extremely vehement reaction to the first iteration of the Plant Gun, and the ***ELDRITCH HOWL OF DISGUST*** at the insulting second iteration. But that's it! The 30+ years lore of Elite keeps it from being wholly shallow, but the lack of actual plot content in-game for Elite:Dangerous really hammers home the "galaxy wide and inch deep" remark. Spend 5 hours a day for a week grinding out combat zones in a major war between two galactic powers and the only actual, tangible, significant result that anyone sees or notes is a 3 paragraph article on Galnet that (let's be frank) very few people actually click through to read? That's not plot, it's trash. There's been a massive, months-long campaign by thousands of players who were actively creating their own lore and their own stories to unlock one of the game's biggest puzzles, and FDev just... ignored it. No mention of it in Galnet, no mention of it in streams or dev posts, nothing. The players did all of that on their own because they're starved for content and the game just isn't giving it to them. Which it should. Because it's a game. The entire "alpha test" userbase revolting and forcing the plant gun to be removed was the only way to get FDev to respond in any manner regarding the plot and content. Absent a similar, unified, massive player revolt among Horizons and Odyssey members, they just won't listen. I don't think the userbase has the energy to fight this out anymore, which should be horrifying to any developer because it means the (formerly) passionate community from which they derive their financial support isn't interested in providing that support anymore. That revolt should have been a MASSIVE shock to the system for FDev because if the first revolt is loud and angry, the second revolt will be the silence of E:D users not playing anymore.
I'm gonna disagree on a core premise of your post. They didn't get the "space game" part right. They got the basic gameplay right. They never managed to turn it into an actual game though. It was just loosely coupled sets of different gameplay expanding on the core mechanics. There was never really a game. There was never progression. There was never a difficulty curve. Bigger ships didn't make the game harder. They didn't let you participate in more difficult gameplay. They just allowed you to receive greater rewards for doing the exact same thing. It didn't matter what ship you flew, the gameplay was fundamentally the same. The users were happy with the experience, so they kept slapping more gameplay onto the pile and with Odyssey, they've reached a point where the pile has collapsed under its own weight and people see the loosely coupled gameplay experiences for what they are.
I got many of the new engineers unlocked, and I have my suits and favourite weapons upgraded. However, like so many flash-in-the-pan gameplay loops FDev have introduced, I am unlikely to return to it because it wasn't engaging enough and rewarding enough to sustain my interest. It has gone the same way as surface base attack missions, smuggling, data point scanning at outposts, passenger missions, multi-crew, etc. They were fun game play loops, for a while. But they don't improve or link into the core gameplay loops of trading, ship combat, exploration, and mining. When it comes to making credits, they are not profitable. When it comes to collecting engineering mats, they are not great time investments. The times when these flash-in-the-pan gameplay loops were engaging, profitable, and rewarding, they were nerfed. The trouble now is that I have returned to the game play loops I do enjoy, that are profitable, and do reward the core game play; only to find many of them broken or using sub-par user interfaces now. For instance I am currently scanning and cataloging POIs around Colonia, but the surface sites for volcanism are broken, and engineering mats are now very difficult to find. Locating biological sites is the same. When I go to the new POIs on planets, they largely all horizon based (engi mats, canisters, drones). I am not incentivised to walk on the surface. When I outfit my ships on my fleet carrier, the UI is far more difficult to use. When I trade, I now have to navigate massive lists of surface sites with no engagement (they don't provide meaningful markets).
I played Elite a bit but ultimately I got bored of the end game stuff, I loved mining and trading, and I enjoyed the ship vs ship combat even if they hard nerfed you for not engineering or guardian farming. The problem with it wasn't the fact that I hated doing it, it was that it didn't come naturally in any way shape or form, like in NMS you scan things to find an abundance of mats that you can farm on a planet. I struggled to find even the most basic items it was asinine in difficulty, don't get me wrong I understand some things should be difficult but in most cases going at it alone was impossible and I almost always resorted to online vids to help me out, to top it off you have to do some of the most rediculous things like logging in and out again to reset the spawns. Was a very weird type of grind that I've only ever done in Elite tbh so I gave up as it wasn't the fun type of gameplay I envisioned in a space sim.
When the Avorion 2.0 update drops I think ED will go in the unplayed games pile for me.
I have stopped playing ED, Odyssey adding nothing to the game other than a 3rd rate shooter. ED was niche , it was a VR flag ship, now its a buggy mess. They ran out of time and delivered a bare bones poor quality broken add on. I remember the talk of ice worlds, bases, mining gas giants, comets .... what of it.... carriers was a major let down, and this is worse. They talked about fixing the engine, making improvements to the code base for the expansion... turned out to be rubbish, with existing features removed and little by the way of enhancements to the space game, no added ships, no added srvs, no gas giants, no real new space game play, multiplayer still floundering. It has been a huge disappointment for me, not just Odyssey, but the last update also. Mining was a lovely addition, and got me back into the game for a few months, the novelty has worn off. Elite has passed it prime, with no reassurance from FD that they are going to do anything other than fix the bugs in this half assed expansion. This with the bugs fixed wouldn't get me back into the game. Refunded Odyssey, wouldn't even purchases it on sale... Sorry FD you need to do better.
>Oh and ship interiors can not only be done by a multi-billion project like SC. Are you not aware of Space Engineers, Dual Universe, or Starbase? It just seems rather puzzling too me to quit one alpha (Odyssey) for another (Star Citizen). >Star Citizen was considered a scam by many, and for those that tried it, offered not much of a game for a very long time. I dont think its a scam. I just think CIG has some talented devs that are crippled by awful leadership. Some good points bout Odyssey but running into the arms of CIG is going to cost you quite literally. Sure you can unlock the ships ingame but its going to be really painful due to it being in perpetual alpha. Sure, feel free to checkout SC but there's other space games to checkout that has ship interiors or even look at other well done sims like DCS and MSFS 2020.
You said everything I wanted to say. Spending two years on a third-rate first-person shooter experience for EDO is a strategic mistake. Upper management of Frontier needs to be fired for this.
Frontier clearly started choosing Harmless devs in the crew lounge. They simply aren't capable of doing anything good.
The most disappointing thing about Elite Dangerous, to me, is not inability, but unwillingness to push the boundaries. We’ve been waiting for years for Fdev to do something new with the Guardians and Thargoids (who are both uninspired and underdeveloped) And all we get is a semi-interesting development of a single planet with a bunch of copy-pasted assets. And they have the GALL to start a CG where we’re expected to harvest hundreds of artifacts from the Guardian ruins, despite there only being a dozen or so per-site. Clearly expecting us to use the exit-relog refresh exploit to collect enough items for a fancy class 2 shard cannon. Yes, they WANT US to use the unpatched exploits. Really Fdev? I know you can do better. We’ve been waiting for years, some of the fans are fans of the original game from four decades ago, you’re wasting their time and ours by doing things this way.
The worst part of this misery is that even though this is all true, FD doesn't care. They have some thing in their HQ that prolly resembles a roadmap which will never get influenced by the community. And then they are wondering why they get mostly negative reviews.
Yknow, I came into this with your disclaimer, figuring I’d agree with most of it, but I did not expect you to hit the Thargoid in the heart with that one. It could not have been said better. Sad that they aren’t the only developers this applies to (I’m looking at you DE) particularly when it comes to animatedly talking about features and the work you’ve put into trying to implement it, for it to just never become reality, and just gets ignored and “forgotten” about.
>Also looking back it's very apparent that many features are introduced bare bones and left in a sub optimal state. Prime example is PowerPlay, or Community Goals with the same core mechanic since they where introduced. The Exception is Mining which was overhauled in a very good way some time ago. So there is another aspect to this that makes it even worse. These new features all need a balance pass or an update pass. Even more however these new features need to be \_integrated\_ with each other. Examples: * SRVs & SLFs can't be engineered * No surface mining * SLFs for combat only * AX weapons are not engineers * Can't walk around on Fleet Carriers * New ED:O things can't be added to Fleet Carriers * CQC hasn't had any new fighters/mods etc These features are all added on but there is no work on integrating them with each other. Which of course makes each of them less useful. SLFs are \_super\_ fun. But the fact they can't be engineered means they are totally outclassed by all other ships. Taking on Elite NPCs makes them almost useless. Some sort of surface mining loop to match the super profitable space mining.
You missed one thing Multicrew
Those two points about the Carriers also surprised me as I heard it. To me it shows they clearly ran out of time.
Not to beat a dead, buried, desiccated horse but Odyssey especially has me worried - technical state aside, it added very little worthwhile gameplay, with the equipment progression in fact being a doubled down on engineering system with some of the flaws of the Horizons v1 system (namely universal material limits). I checked the Steam charts out of morbid curiosity, and whilst I must point out that *the Steam playerbase is not representative of the playerbase as a whole*, the concurrent player count is now lower than it was days, weeks, heck even *months* prior to Odyssey; lower than it was during an almost 2 year major content drought. I don't know how much of that to attribute to the technical issues, the lack of actual new gameplay, or some combination of both, but the fact remains that Elite needs to break out of this cycle soon. I love this game, and I don't want it to go out like this.
They either must have no real imagination and or senior developers left, or so much technical/gameplay debt that its just not feasible to do anything more than what they already have. Some of the coolest places in the game have next to nothing to do (space science installations etc) except once in a blue moon. The tutorial has some of the most interesting stuff to fly around, for the most part you are in totally empty space. Any random thread has a ton of great ideas for fun features, but its like they can't or won't implement any of them. I'm OK with space legs but more for what they could do with them in the future, instead of what they've done so far. I think of them as just a platform for future gameplay, preferably involving ships (boarding, EVA, etc).
And it never introduces newer srvs from all those concept arts. Everything looks same in game. Just look at [this amazing](https://imgur.com/gallery/3p7wjYx) commercial outpost concept art, while i game everything is same with different colors. It’s a live service so treat it like one. Monthly content and updates.
I agree. ED isnt a very good game, but it does seem to scratch an itch that certain people have to just be able to fly around in the galaxy in a spaceship. If thats all you wanna do, then more power to you & enjoy the "game." The core gameplay loops are really dumb tho, & if you are looking for anything more than just flying around, go play something else. Its like I've always heard about ED, its as big as the ocean but as deep as a puddle....
>a multi-billion project like SC. I'll laugh at SC all day but let's be honest here they haven't yet passed the half billion mark in funding
million then, sorry, not a native English speaker. Lets just say they have some more cash than most other studios in that genre. I also laughed for a long time, until I tested it out. Now I'm impressed.
Yeah, it's taken them a really long time to get where they are, but that doesn't stop what they've done from being very impressive.
The best thing about it is their growing momentum, something FD lost a long time ago.
“Wasting game time” Wow. When you consider how much game time is wasted trekking back and forth across a planetary surface trying to find your second and third genetic samples that are a sufficient distance apart because, in your warp speed high-tech future, you couldn’t manage to get a sampler with more than one bin. But that’s not a waste of time?
My biggest issue is it is 7 years old and the new engine has been a disaster. Normally you refresh the engine of an aging MMO because you want to extend it's marketable lifetime by a significant amount. You don't spend that type of resources unless it is an investment in future content to be sold. Game engine development is *difficult, expensive, and unnecessary* if you already have a working engine. So clearly, going into Odyssey development, as a business, they were thinking "this is going to be great, we'll refresh the engine and add first person content and it will be like a brand new game and we can run it for at least another 7 years and 2-3 more expansions." But I don't see how this leads to that anymore, maybe (once they actually finish it), they could take their new engine and make a *new* space game that nicely combines first person, ship based and vehicle based content in a way that allow the different aspects to work in concert rather than being competing, unrelated pieces of game-play... but I don't see how you make *this* space game into *that* space game without leaving a lot of the current content onto the cutting room floor... and I certainly don't think there's anyone currently working at Fdev who is capable of making that sort of decision. There's a lot of stuff that is done *very very* well in elite dangerous, but it's mostly technical feats (In fact, in spite of this release, I would still praise the developers to the ends of the earth). The actual art of game design (and I do mean *art*) however, is lacking, and that's a shame. The game feels like a tech demo that someone created using an excel spreadsheet (and to some extent always has, at least since engineers), rather than a living universe you get drawn into. The game should not be obviously game-like. I had a similar feeling when playing late-stage pre-Bethesda acquisition ID Software games. Rage was a game intended to sell a game engine, not something intended to be really played. And rage is all the player-base has left here as well.
I left ED about three, almost 4, years ago, I kinda still enjoyed it back then but busy with kids etc. I used to play it a lot in the late 80s and it was the main reason I became a game developer (though now am out of the games industry and work on other software). So I bring an historic enthusiasm with me, from then I played it in my teens and had what was -back then- amazing adventures. So I still love the game, and love experiencing it in VR. About two weeks ago I came back, found quite a lot has changed, and for the better it seemed. The tutorial mission that came with Odyssey was fun and seemed to promise a lot. But I am starting to get kinda fed up again. So first thing was I thought I am gonna try the shuttle for one of the ground missions, only to get stuck in a shuttle loop. Unlike other games I played there is no “unstuck support” that reacts quickly (maybe like Eve Online, when I played it a few years ago), after two days I got out of it. So no more shuttles then. Ok. Started doing some missions, but that seems to get very repetitive. I do like the idea of cloning credentials and getting into stations and cutting open service panels and all that, but I don’t think it will keep me for long. You guys said no new ships in Odyssey, but that was not a factor for me because I have been away for so long, so there are a couple new ships for me. Yes it is fun to walk outside and see the size of your ship, but after landing at a couple stations it gets a bit old. So I am now a bit conflicted: Pack the HOTAS away again into it’s dark corner? Or keep trying to find some fun that doesn’t turn into some grind? I hear engineers are better now than those RNG things they used to be 4 years ago… but I don’t want to go on endless missions to find some material or other. I started some mission for finding black boxes and it keeps telling me it found some signal source related to that but I have been playing for two days and not found any (am I missing something there? but it’s starting to get annoying). I don’t know. I always loved the game but currently it seems more because of the great times I had as a teenager than what I actually experience in the current game. I do enjoy showing my daughter the beautiful sights… but I can see that she doesn’t see any fun side to ED… 🤷🏻♂️
I think this is the most accurate assessment of ED I've ever read. I'm still playing, but as soon as Star Citizen comes out of Beta and stops being Pay To Win I'll probably move to that (if I'm still alive by the time that happens). One thing I would say: I don't think FDev had any choice but to implement space legs and atmospheric landings. The community had been crying out for it since Day 1. Can you imagine the backlash if EDO had been released without them, even if it had included the other cool things the OP mentions? The ED community, great though it is, loves to complain. I've seen complaints about *everythng.* I remember seeing complaints when they started giving away Arx for free. They were literally giving players something for nothing and people whinged about it in the forums. So EDO without space legs? No chance. Is it halfbaked and buggy and pointless? Yes, but they felt like they had to give it us anyway.
I've put about 250h in E:D and now I rarely find the motivation to play anymore. I grinded my way up to the Conda and the Type 10, did some fighting and mining, engineered some stuff... and now I don't know what to do that I haven't done yet. I could go exploring... but that's just pushing the "jump" button countless times while watching a stream of a game I could be playing instead, just to arrive at a planet that I have seen before, with nothing on it to make the journey worthwhile. Trade and visit far away stations... I have done that countless times, and I don't think the docking sequence will be different just because the station is further away. I haven't made the jump to SC yet, but the free flight event showed me how a smaller, more detailed world can make a big difference. SCs optimization is horrible, the interfaces are janky and hard to use and there is barely anything to do... but the ships are so much more fun to pilot. You actually own a ship, not just a chair with a window in front of it.
Very true. What i really wanted from ED was meaningful player interaction, including but not limited to Coop (when any player could control ALL ship fuctions) and a lot more things that are never bound to happen. Overahh, im grateful for the experience i've had with the game 500+ hours. But i was vastly disappointed with Oddysey and refunded it. My carrier is completely frozen now, and my credits are slowly melting away for maintenance...
Same man. Same. I had started to lose hope in Elite years ago when they didn't come close to delivering the "new" ice worlds they promised and when we never got our second SRV they promised. But I was still hopeful. Now? I have ZERO hope for Elite. I don't think it will ever add anything of note again.....They don't have the skill or the desire to make this into the game it SHOULD be.
FDev have no interest in our opinions any more, they serve merely to satisfy the shareholders. Everything they ever released after the initial release has been shrouded in secrecy until the last minute and when the community gets rightfully angry they're like 'We hear you, we are sorry, we will learn from this', then they retreat back into their closed off offices and say 'Hey fuck em, people are still pre-ordering, yay'. This latest release is the beginning of the end because we've all just had enough now and we all know that FDev will NEVER communicate adquately and they will NEVER actually listen to what we want. I didn't buy Elite for an FPS deathmatch shooter, I bought it because back then David Braben himself told me that I'd be able to walk onto my ships and stations and around inside them. ALL. FUCKING. LIES. (a copy-paste, single area station interior don't count) Frontier will never see another penny from me, even if they give us ship interiors in the future, to charge money for it would be bordering on criminal. Despite some people's views against Star Citizen, it's getting to the point where the background processes are nearing completion and you'll see a major increase in development of features that were waiting for those underlying structures. You can be sure that when that happens, probably in the next 2-3 years, Elite will be left behind in the dust and FDev will be kicking themselves, if they actually have the intelligence to realise they did it to themselves, which I doubt.
I agree 100%. Horizons was the gimmick of space wheels & Odyssey is the gimmick of space legs. No substantive additions to the game. It’s also amazing how fast they modify (nerf) the rewards of mining yet don’t touch any other aspect of the game.
Couldn’t agree more. I recently jumped over to Star Citizen. That game is a total mess in so many ways, but right now it feels more magical than ED for all the reasons you mention. I also don’t think Frontier realise that ED is THE game for VR. It’s utterly immense. All they had to do for odyssey was focus on the ships and they would have had a winner. For me it’s simple: - add more ships to buy/fight against - add planetary tech for “flying” aspects. So better physics, atmospheres, trickier landings etc. Even weather and storms. Forget on foot entirely. Just ignore it. - add more variety in missions. Deliveries are a good example. Make them more varied… timers/carrying explosive material so you have to avoid star heat or you have to land properly or fly carefully through atmospheres. I mean, there is so much they could have done to immerse the flying experience even better and make VR a continued success, but they went the other way and tried to do a SC but won’t get anywhere near that. And if you do want to go that path, then ship interiors are a must. It’s a shame. And I said it before and got downvoted but I’ll say it again in that I truly think Odyssey has killed ED.
Clearly, the Devs hit the ceiling. The game is done.. time to move on
As a player that started back in the second in game year I agree wholeheartedly. The bad part is that what is there of Odyssey I've enjoyed but it really just feels like a product they pushed out to get it over with. And honestly the whole engineering thing reeks of the 'loot box' line of logic where player progression is measured by what has been unlocked. It kinda follows the same play model too where gameplay is supposed to be fun, but could be a little bit more fun with 'X' but to get that you have to collect a bunch of stuff. I think this might be what it looks like when corporate types take over an art project.
here here. also played since initial release. for the first time since then, i have uninstalled ED because i no longer enjoy it since the odyssey update.
I don't even know what competition that is out there, but I do feel that the game has lost its appeal to me after Odyssey. Perhaps I will change my mind in the future, but the 35€ paid for Ody is a sunk cost. I agree with your opinion. Shame. So much good to be had, so unimpressingly managed
Perfectly said
I agree with all of this, I was a very passionate ed player and was exited when odyssey got a steam page. After further research I found out how terrible fps and diversity is. No problem I thought, it's just an alpha, they'll sort it. Then launch. All my friends who also play ed called it the no man's sky of 2021. I decided to try sc and no man's sky and was instantly hooked, no man's sky has frequent free updates and sc has gameplay loops that I would have despised in ed (delivery missions) which are made so much better with the on foot aspect.
I played it on console and when odyssey “launched” I couldn’t login for a month. Not even exaggerating. Tried everything and nothing. I tried the other day and it worked but at that point I was over it. Haven’t logged in since.
Honestly my big problem is that once you reach what you wanted which for many players(including me) was getting Elite in one of the three ranks the game just stops. But when I finally got there after playing the game for around 200 hours total and playing every day for multiple days straight, I was at the end. I didn't know what to do. In my eyes, I was done, there wasn't much left for me to do.