Elite: Dangerous

[MadMaxHellfire]

i hate joypads, but with the crab control scheme i've had very few issues playing elite.

 

[Fedora Master]

I have like 100+ hours in ED and still don't like it much.

You like it, you are just lying to yourself. Either that, or you have some mental disorder and like playing games which you don't enjoy.

Well, I also played DA:I despite not liking it. I may have brain problems, yes.

That said I spent most of my time in ED doing exploration which eats up time like nothing. In the very fundamentals the game does excell - It's the best space ship canopy simulator you will ever see. Then you play it for a month or two, expecting interesting things to happen or new patches or community events aaaaand... nothing. In fact, exploration hasn't changed one goddamn bit since launch when you disregard the planetary landing stuff/pay2grind from the season pack.

The community being lead by a vocal group of literal 40+ year old British dad gamers who see any and all modern QoL features as some sort of heresy against "their" Elite doesn't help either.

 

[J_C]

who see any and all modern QoL features as some sort of heresy

Now where did I see that mentality before? I'm sure it was on a forum which was about RPGs.

 

[Burning Bridges]

The decline began when the "40+ year old dad" gamers where superseded by a new generation that was too lazy to read manuals and wanted games to play automatically once you popped in the disc.

I also think that anyone commenting on Elite who has not experienced it's magic on a 38K RAM system is basically just embarassing himself. Even though some things are looking primitive today, it was packing an entire universe when pacman was considered a high end game.

 

[Fedora Master]

who see any and all modern QoL features as some sort of heresy

Now where did I see that mentality before? I'm sure it was on a forum which was about RPGs.

I haven't been here long enough to judge just how bad the Codex is about such things. The ED dad gamers were against such things as ship transfer being quick, hotjoining turret seats for Multicrew and I believe having "too much information" about trade commodities in stations.
They also hate any and all features that other games such as EvE have implemented successfully in the past simply because they're from other games. Oh and open world PvP.

 

[praetor]

The decline began when the "40+ year old dad" gamers where superseded by a new generation that was too lazy to read manuals and wanted games to play automatically once you popped in the disc.

funny you should say that... about 90% of the horrendous features that are in the game are there because of the "40+ year old dad" gamers, the so called "forumdads". it's because of them that we can't have nice things (well, them and the incompetent lead designers who only know how to design simple, shallow and repetitive, i.e. grindy)

 

[Stokowski]

I'm still amazed at the design geniuses who thought that "spacecraft braking, the game" was anything other than tedious busywork.

(And that camera views lead to evil PvP exploitation. WTF?)

 

[Burning Bridges]

Impatience is in many ways the root of the problem. If 2 minutes travel time to a planet is already too much for you, you should ask yourself if you are playing the right game.

 

[Fedora Master]

Impatience is in many ways the root of the problem. If 2 minutes travel time to a planet is already too much for you, you should ask yourself if you are playing the right game.

I bumbled around in systems with the next station from the star being 100.000 AU or whatever away. Tell me about "2 minute travel time".

 

[J_C]

Impatience is in many ways the root of the problem. If 2 minutes travel time to a planet is already too much for you, you should ask yourself if you are playing the right game.

I bumbled around in systems with the next station from the star being 100.000 AU or whatever away. Tell me about "2 minute travel time".

Well, space is pretty big. Go figure.

 

[dbx]

As much as i like ED, it is boring as hell most of the time. Whenever i "play" ED i find myself spendimg most of the time on the second monitor browsing the codex than actually playing the game...
They should have spent more time redesigning missions or adding more unique features to the ED universe than wasting it on useless gimmicks like holome or multicrew.

 

[Fedora Master]

Impatience is in many ways the root of the problem. If 2 minutes travel time to a planet is already too much for you, you should ask yourself if you are playing the right game.

I bumbled around in systems with the next station from the star being 100.000 AU or whatever away. Tell me about "2 minute travel time".

Well, space is pretty big. Go figure.

It's realistic but not exactly good for gameplay since it just made me abandon/ignore missions to those particular systems. It's just not worth trucking that distance for a 100k or whatever payout.

As much as i like ED, it is boring as hell most of the time. Whenever i "play" ED i find myself spendimg most of the time on the second monitor browsing the codex than actually playing the game...
They should have spent more time redesigning missions or adding more unique features to the ED universe than wasting it on useless gimmicks like holome or multicrew.

Me too. And then I eventually fly straight into a star because I didn't pay attention.

 

[Volrath]

Probably one of the worst games of all time.

 

[Morkar Left]

Watching E:D unfold since release I came to the conclusion that the lead designers are just completely incompetent regarding gameplay. E:D was actually best on release day. Then it was a new modern version of the original Elite (which unfortunately went "multiplayer").

Today with all the new "features" it just became more bloated without adding one additional iota of fun. The best improvements for me are the graphical overhaul of the stations, pictures for your employers and some radio speech when approaching a station. Everything else I basically would be happy if it wasn't implemented at all instead of such a shitty way it actually is. That's why Oolite with all the mods is more fun for me besides the shitty graphics and combat.

Quite pathetic if I think about it. But mostly sad. Because it's only some lead designers who suck I'm sure. Nevermind, I stopped playing some months ago by now and will not return. The most interesting thing I got out of the game was the star citizen thread there (which I still check out once in a while).

 

[Stokowski]

Impatience is in many ways the root of the problem. If 2 minutes travel time to a planet is already too much for you, you should ask yourself if you are playing the right game.

Long travel times are fine. Manual braking is insane.

 

[Burning Bridges]

It is no more insane than manually accelerating at totally ridiculous rates. As long as you plan ahead your maneuvre there is nothing wrong with it, I hardly ever overshoot.

The problem is little kids who immeditately push the accelerator as far as they can because they want to get there as fast as possible, and then do loop after loop because they only start to brake when they already see they visually miss the target. If this was a motorway everyone would go 250 km/h and miss the exit by 500m. Children ..

 

[Morkar Left]

It is no more insane than manually accelerating at totally ridiculous rates. As long as you plan ahead your maneuvre there is nothing wrong with it, I hardly ever overshoot.

The problem is little kids who immeditately push the accelerator as far as they can because they want to get there as fast as possible, and then do loop after loop because they only start to brake when they already see they visually miss the target. If this was a motorway everyone would go 250 km/h and miss the exit by 500m. Children ..

Nah, you basically can't overshoot when reducing speed to 70% when in the green zone. "Mastering" the mechanic isn't more complicated than "Press E to pay respects". Except you have to do it every single time and you have to stare at your left side of your display at the distance meter all the time to not missing the time frame you have to "Press E to pay respects". And that's just annoying as fuck.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

actually, because of the idiocy of the max speed relative to the distance to the nearest object, you could just set speed at 50% and never being able to overshoot anymore, even on purpose.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Irc I would always keep time of arrival around 10 seconds and never had any problems. Once you got to 5 sec you were not able to make it without overshooting.

The whole topic is completely overrated as it's just like in a racing game. Learn to use the throttle or you pay.

 

[Stokowski]

What purpose does a racing game mechanic serve in a non-racing game?

From a design perspective, why would you gate the actual gameplay behind a completely foreign and annoying mechanic? That's what's insane about it. Imagine if you had to undertake a racing-game mechanic whenever you travelled in, say, Skyrim.

 

[Burning Bridges]

 

[Fedora Master]

With a bit of finesse you can overshoot slightly and bleed off the excess speed by doing a turn and arriving within warp-to range anyway. That's all academic though because a) all stations are the same and b) nothing you do at any of them matters.

 

[DraQ]

Impatience is in many ways the root of the problem. If 2 minutes travel time to a planet is already too much for you, you should ask yourself if you are playing the right game.

I bumbled around in systems with the next station from the star being 100.000 AU or whatever away. Tell me about "2 minute travel time".

Well, space is pretty big. Go figure.

That's a moot point in a game with FTL and butchered Newtonian mechanics.

I also think that anyone commenting on Elite who has not experienced it's magic on a 38K RAM system is basically just embarassing himself. Even though some things are looking primitive today, it was packing an entire universe when pacman was considered a high end game.

And that might have learned it its place in history, but doesn't necessarily make it relevant today.
Good games generally stay good and age well, but some games, especially seminal ones, can and do become obsolete because they almost necessarily tap previously untapped concept shallowly and randomly, giving them too little of unique value to not be rendered obsolete by their immediate successors.

And yes, Elite is such a seminal game, so is, for example, Wolf 3D.
So would be Frontier, for that matter if anyone grown a pair of balls and turned it into a beginning of a proper genre.

Then again, I've only experienced the magic of Elite on a 64K system, so I am not sure if I count.

 

[Stokowski]

Then again, I've only experienced the magic of Elite on a 64K system, so I am not sure if I count.

The Commodore 64 had 64k RAM, but sometimes people think it was 38k because that's all the was usually available to the user in general usage. The system could only address 64k in total and needed to map its 20k ROM (containing the kernel, the BASIC interpreter, etc) into RAM to function. There were other system components that consumed another few k.

So if you played Elite on a C64, you played it on a "38k" system.

But, if you player Elite on a BBC Model B+ or some other device you clearly experienced no magic at all.

/pedant

 

[Burning Bridges]

Do you guys seriously want to begin a discussion if the C64 had 64 or 38 K RAM? You can't be serious

This seems to be the discussion culture at the Codex lately. Get triggered by the direction of a certain poster, pick out an unimportant half sentence and then start a long diatribe without saying anything.

Spoiler

I had a C128 by the way