Elite: Dangerous

[bonescraper]

I don't remember Elite, Frontier or FFE being MMOs...

I don't remember Warcraft 1, 2 or 3 being MMOs...

Also, elite's universe is procedural, or do you really expect them to have the entire galaxy "on the cloud"...
And by the way this -> http://en.spaceengine.org/ has 400 bilion GALAXIES, each one with bilions stars, and most stars with 5-10 planets, and each planets has moons, asteroids, rings. And there's also comets, black holes etc. And you can land on every single one of them. All in roughly 800Mb.

Cool. That's not a game.

But here's something you might find interesting, it's quite similar. More detailed, but smaller in scope. Have fun.
https://www.google.com/earth/

 

[dbx]

No, it's not DRM. This game was built around online based economy and persistent universe. In order to make a 100% offline singleplayer game you'd either have to compromise and deliver a dull, static game world, or you'd have to add entirely new mechanics, exclusively for the offline singleplayer mode.

Come on, as far as i can tell from the countless hours i've poured in beta2 and beta3 the only MMOs feature are PvP and a useless "dynamic" economy...

This is not X2/X3 where you can build/setup multiple stations, trade routes and let tens of your AI ships trade around so that you can actually change the economy, all you can do is grind money with one of your ships at a time for a few credits. And with such a vast game universe, the only places dynamic economy mean something will be the few more visited core systems.

From a purely technical/engineering standpoint the only compromise you would have to make in offline mode would be the aforementioned dynamic economy.

 

[bonescraper]

You played the beta and it wasn't feature complete? Wow, tell me all about it.

But listen, if by 16th december i won't get anything else than PvP and dynamic economy, i'll be pissed. I just don't get pissed prematurely.

 

[Duellist_D]

Features will come, they will come, because Braben told so, and companies never lie or Change their direction after getting moniez (and especially not FE, they didn't!), hear me, i tell you!

 

[Turisas]

No, it's not DRM. This game was built around online based economy and persistent universe. In order to make a 100% offline singleplayer game you'd either have to compromise and deliver a dull, static game world, or you'd have to add entirely new mechanics, exclusively for the offline singleplayer mode.

Yes it's DRM, look up the definition. And they made a promise, if it means a dull, static world, then do that, not go back on those promises entirely.

 

[J_C]

And by the way this -> http://en.spaceengine.org/ has 400 bilion GALAXIES, each one with bilions stars, and most stars with 5-10 planets, and each planets has moons, asteroids, rings. And there's also comets, black holes etc. And you can land on every single one of them. All in roughly 800Mb.

And that is all you can do. Land on a planet and look around. It is for showcase, there is nothing under it.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...cry-over-elite-dangerous-ditched-offline-mode

In a follow-up interview with Eurogamer, Braben said the decision to cancel the offline mode was only made recently - "and was not made lightly as we have been looking for ways to satisfy everyone".

"We announced shortly after we reached the conclusion that it wasn't possible to create an offline mode without unacceptably compromising the game," he said.

"Some people have thought this means there wouldn't be a single-player mode - to be clear, the single-player game is there, but it requires an online connection.

"Back during the Kickstarter, we were clear about the vision, to make a phenomenal new sequel to Elite in an online world, which we believe we are about to deliver. At the time we believed we could also offer a good single-player experience, and base an acceptable offline-only experience off that. As development has progressed, it has become clear that this last assumption is not the case."

Despite this, Braben admitted that Frontier should have told the Elite community that it was struggling with the offline version of the game during the process.

"As we have developed the game and released Alpha and Beta versions, the work needed to deliver a rich online nature of the game diverged from the requirements of a fully offline game," he said.

"In retrospect we should have shared the fact that we were struggling with this aspect with the community, but we were still trying to find a solution. As features were implemented, for the best results we chose to prioritise delivery of the online single and multiplayer experiences, with a view to providing the offline version later in development. We had to make a decision for the good of the game, and that is what we did.

"We have developed a multiplayer game with an unfolding story involving the players, and groups collaborating with specific objectives and taking account of all players' behaviour. This is what the game is about. Without this it would not be the rich gaming experience that we will deliver, and would be a great disappointment to all players.

"Any offline experience would be fundamentally empty. We could write a separate mission system to allow a limited series of fixed missions, but that would still not be a compelling game, and is only the first step in the mountain of work required.

"We do plan to take regular archives of the game and the servers, to preserve the game for the future."

The decision, Braben said, was "fundamentally a creative one". "The offline experience we could deliver now is unacceptable to us. To make this acceptable would be close to a whole new game development, so with heavy hearts we have made this decision."

Some with potty internet connections have expressed concern about their potential experience with the game given it is always online. Braben responded to that concern by insisting Elite: Dangerous can work with limited speeds - when it comes to single-player.

"The existing single-player game does not require a fast internet connection, and is not time critical in the same way as the multi-player," he said.

"I have played single-player on a tethered connection on a train and various other places too, and we will continue to optimise to make the game as robust for 'spotty' connections as we can."

And there are, as you'd expect, valid concerns over the launch of the game. Given the high-profile problems other always-online games have suffered recently, including EA's SimCity and Blizzard's Diablo 3, some are worried Elite: Dangerous could be unplayable when it comes out.

"We believe that always-online entertainment is already a reality for the majority. We are delivering a truly huge game, and there are a great many moving parts, so there is always an element of the unknown," Braben responded.

"We are taking it very seriously. We have gone through an almost year-long external development process with builds released to an increasing number of people who have been playing the game for a long time.

"Our servers are the same ones that Amazon uses, and can (and have) scaled up quickly to deal with demand when needed.

"If problems do arise we will do our best to address them as quickly as we can - as hopefully people have already seen we have continued to do at each stage of the Alpha and Beta process."

Thoughts now turn to the possibility of an offline version of Elite: Dangerous and whether such an experience could be added to the main game at some point in the future.

Braben poured cold water on the idea, however. "There is of course scope for a separate traditional offline story-based game set in the world of Elite, but it would be a different game to the one we have been making, and it is not something we plan to do."

Looking further ahead, we're faced with the possibility that Elite: Dangerous will become unplayable if Frontier ever stops supporting the game and shuts down the servers.

"If it were ever to happen, we would be able to release an archived version of the game, including the servers, but of course this would not evolve any further," Braben said.

And finally, what if someone who has already bought Elite: Dangerous now wants a refund in light of the news that there won't be an offline mode?

"Refund requests are evaluated on an individual basis against the applicable terms and conditions of sale."

 

[dbx]

And by the way this -> http://en.spaceengine.org/ has 400 bilion GALAXIES, each one with bilions stars, and most stars with 5-10 planets, and each planets has moons, asteroids, rings. And there's also comets, black holes etc. And you can land on every single one of them. All in roughly 800Mb.

And that is all you can do. Land on a planet and look around. It is for showcase, there is nothing under it.

Yeah, but it's the software infrastructure that matters. Once you can generate star systems you can generate space stations, and AIs. Once you have space stations it doesn't take a genius to generate missions and a fake dynamic like economy.
Incidentally all things Frontier did 20 years ago on a single floppy disk.
Go figures.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...cry-over-elite-dangerous-ditched-offline-mode

The dissonance is funny. It's too hard to make the game single player, yet solo mode it's still there and it doesn't need neither a fast connection nor a constant one (which obviously means the vast majority of the workload is still done on the client)...

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

I can sympathise with the people who cannot get a stable enough internet connection to play the game online and sure, there should be an offline mode for those people... however, I cannot see any god-damned reason why you wouldn't want to play this game online all of the time if you've got proper internet. None what so ever.

But then again, I'm one of those newfags born in 1988, so I don't even know what I don't know.

 

[J_C]

I can sympathise with the people who cannot get a stable enough internet connection

I can never understand this. I live in a fucking post communist country, and our internet connection is rock solid. I get it if your internet is not super fast, or it disconnects sometimes, but it is hard to believe that the connection is lost so frequently that you cannot play a game like this. Or maybe they live in Etiopia I don't know.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

Well... There are people who work on boats who play games on their off time, they can't get a decent connection. Then there are those shitty island communities which lacks anything more advanced than a phone connection. From what I heard, the minority of people complaining suffer from those two situations whilst the majority of those who are complaining are simply doing so because they're introverts/pvp-phobia sufferers who are so fucking scared of player interaction that they'd shoot themselves in the foot like that to avoid it.

 

[Raapys]

I can sympathise with the people who cannot get a stable enough internet connection to play the game online and sure, there should be an offline mode for those people... however, I cannot see any god-damned reason why you wouldn't want to play this game online all of the time if you've got proper internet. None what so ever.

But then again, I'm one of those newfags born in 1988, so I don't even know what I don't know.

Well, there are several reasons.

First, we all know those servers will be down for some percentage of the time. The percentage might not be big, but the timing is often really annoying; after a long day, when you finally have a few free hours to play, you find out you can't. This is not fun and has happened to me several times in many different online games.

Second, you won't have internet access everywhere you go. For those of you who spend all your time at home with a constant connection that no one else uses to stream shit, great. Not everyone is so lucky, for a variety of reasons; work, travel, laggy dorm net, others in the household, etc.

Third, always online excludes any kind of modding or hope thereof. If you look at Freelancer, part of the reason it became so popular is because modders hacked together some decent mods that people enjoyed. No such possibility here.

Fourth, mandatory updates. Should the team ever make changes you strongly disagree with, you won't be able to opt out of those changes. You'll have to take everything they throw at you, no matter how much you dislike it.

 

[bonescraper]

And i'd like to be able to play ED on my mobile phone, while i'm shitting in the woods in the most remote place in Alaska.

If it was up to me, i'd line up and shoot every god damn son of a bitch that plays high-end PC games on a god damn laptop.

And Freelancer is to Elite what Skyrim is to Ultima 7. Of course it requires modding to be enjoyable.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

I'd be willing to argue that modding in Freelancer was / is a tad easier than modding Elite ever will be but I still get your point, it's a freedom worth having.

I'm just hoping that they'll get around to it eventually, but... eh, it's not really a priority for me. Personal opinion and all that, so no offence intended.

 

[Executr]

More reasons:
Longevity. One day the servers will go down. Can be in 10 years, can be in 2 years, should the game sells pretty bad and/or FD goes down or gets sold. I want to be able to play in 30 years from now, like the other Elite games.

Sudden downed connection. Imagine being full cargo en route to sell it and realise you can't and may loose it.

Price fluctuation change. Imagine you found a trade route, but for some reason you have to quit. Due to player dinamic market, when you comeback those comodities might loose their value.

Griefing. I don't have much time to play games nowadays and can't grind like other hardcore players, that'll have better ships/equipment. Or when you have to quit but you can't because someone is fighting you. If you quit, you'll loose your ship and/or cargo.

Pausing. You can't, see above example.

Offline training, sandbox experience. Can't train dogfighting without the risk of losing ship. Can't, for example, see how many police vipers I can take before dying/gaining bounty.

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

Well... There are people who work on boats who play games on their off time, they can't get a decent connection. Then there are those shitty island communities which lacks anything more advanced than a phone connection. From what I heard, the minority of people complaining suffer from those two situations whilst the majority of those who are complaining are simply doing so because they're introverts/pvp-phobia sufferers who are so fucking scared of player interaction that they'd shoot themselves in the foot like that to avoid it.

There is a quality and tranquility to Elite 2 that a multiplayer version of it would never have. You'll remember the first time you fly by a station at half the speed of light, hours away from your last savegame, because you're out of fuel and newtonian physics will make sure you will drift into space for all eternity.

I hope this effort provides Braben with a heap of cash and I'm glad to see him making a game again in a genre he all but created instead of making shit games. We can only hope there is even enough to fork the whole thing and make a proper singleplayer sequel sometime down the road.

But if you saw a kickstarter for a sequel to the best game you've ever played, 20 years after it's release with the original creater himself at the helm and it turned out to be an MMO.. you'd no doubt understand that wanting single player has nothing to do with social anxiety.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

As I said: I see it as an improvement, but I'm my own person and so are those people. Having said that, I do hope that they add the ability to play the game offline later.

 

[Ulminati]

I can sympathise with the people who cannot get a stable enough internet connection to play the game online and sure, there should be an offline mode for those people... however, I cannot see any god-damned reason why you wouldn't want to play this game online all of the time if you've got proper internet. None what so ever.

But then again, I'm one of those newfags born in 1988, so I don't even know what I don't know.

Well, there are several reasons.

First, we all know those servers will be down for some percentage of the time. The percentage might not be big, but the timing is often really annoying; after a long day, when you finally have a few free hours to play, you find out you can't. This is not fun and has happened to me several times in many different online games.

For what it's worth, the ONLY time the servers have been down for me during beta was around the times they upgraded to a new major version. There's been no "scheduled maintenence" that I know of. Maybe it'll change once they go live and more people play, but so far they've gone for months without it.

Internet connection is not a problem for me, because I don't live in thirdworldia. I can't conceive of anyone wanting to play Elite on the go anyway, unless they're planning to drag a joystick with them. That complaint falls into the "sucks to be poor I guess" category for me.

I'll grant you the modding is a bit of a shame. But on the flipside, I can count on one hand the number of games where I felt I needed mods to enjoy them. Maybe that's just me, but I don't feel mods are critical to my enjoyment.

More reasons:
Longevity. One day the servers will go down. Can be in 10 years, can be in 2 years, should the game sells pretty bad and/or FD goes down or gets sold. I want to be able to play in 30 years from now, like the other Elite games.

I think it's a fair bet we'll have a server emulator or single-player patch by then though. As long as people complain (to FD, where they can hear it. Not incessantly whining on the dex) they'll get around to adding it. for the first couple of months it's a very effective form of DRM though.

Sudden downed connection. Imagine being full cargo en route to sell it and realise you can't and may loose it.

Then the cargo is there when you get back. I've gotten disconnected before. When you log back in, you'll be in normalspace wherever you were when you DC'ed (in case of supercruise). Your cargo is intact since it was saved on the server when you acquired it.

Price fluctuation change. Imagine you found a trade route, but for some reason you have to quit. Due to player dinamic market, when you comeback those comodities might loose their value.

Is a feature and one of the things people really wanted. A player-influenced economy means your commodities may not be as valuable as you thought they'd be.

Griefing. I don't have much time to play games nowadays and can't grind like other hardcore players, that'll have better ships/equipment. Or when you have to quit but you can't because someone is fighting you. If you quit, you'll loose your ship and/or cargo.

Then you can play in a solo/private universe like all the other carebears.

Pausing. You can't, see above example.

Unless you're in combat you can usually find somewhere quiet to idle.

Offline training, sandbox experience. Can't train dogfighting without the risk of losing ship. Can't, for example, see how many police vipers I can take before dying/gaining bounty.

There are offline training missions for just that.


In conclusion: You're a monumental retard who hasn't even made the slightest effort to check what's already there before complaining.

But if you saw a kickstarter for a sequel to the best game you've ever played, 20 years after it's release with the original creater himself at the helm and it turned out to be an MMO.. you'd no doubt understand that wanting single player has nothing to do with social anxiety.

It really isn't an mmo. As soon as you leave the core systems, your chances of encountering other players are very small. If you switch to solo, which you still can, you won't meet any other players period. The single player game is still there, it just requires you to be online.

 

[Shadowfang]

Wow what a dick move! I am glad i didn't just dive in and kept it on my watch-list instead. Elite: Dangerous
The fallacious arguments in defense of Frontier Developments are pretty entertaining though. Keep it all up.

 

[Ulminati]

If people insist on whining, how about we whine about some of the things that are actually there in the game instead of speculation?

For instance, the current exploration with the discovery scanner could use an overhaul. The discovery scanner basically finds everythig within a certain radios depending on its rating (the biggest one automatically discovers everything in the system). If you don't have the biggest scanner, you're in for a tedious game of where's Wally whenever you hit a binary star system, since you're going to be hunting for that one speck of light that parallaxes slightly when you supercruise to locate the other star and whatever's around it. It would've been a lot nicer if various objects could be discovered at different distances the way the actual scanning currently works. you can start scanning stars once discovered from 500-or-so Ls away, whereas planets can be as low as 10 Ls to start scanning for small moons. Having large planets and stars being easier to discover with the scanner would make exploration less tedious. It'd also be nice if surface scanning a planet required more than just having a module on board when you're pointed at it for 10 seconds.

Mining could also use a lot of love. It currently suffers from several issues. Chief among them is that it's really not profitable unless you've found a palladium/gold deposit. Running regular trade missions from bulletin boards will net you way more credits per minute. Mining is also somewhat tedious and currently requires no paticular skill. You fly to an asteroid and hold down fire to laz0r it with the mining laz0r until chunks stop falling off, then you scoop them up. Having the asteroid give better yields if you found and shot specific locations would make it a lot more interesting. Especially if they also reduced the overall number of chunks that break off and subsequent scooping. Speaking of scooping, the refinery module is also in need of QoL changes. you currently have to assign minerals to a hopper manually. If you're at 80% for a coltan chunk and scoop up a 22% coltan fragment, you have to manually assign the last 2% to start the next coltan chunk. You'd think the damn thing could figure out to auto-fill empty hoppers and only require your input if all hoppers are full as to which one to vent to make room for a new mineral.

Mission types. Some bulletin boards have no missions at all. That's fine and dandy for small outposts, but we're talking major starports in systems a bit away from the core systems that have none. I hope it's a glitch, but enh. There's also been an issue floating around where the system will generate missions you can't complete. Such as transport jobs with 2 minutes t complete them (takes about 10-12 mins to leave a starport, jump to another system, supercruise to the destination and dock if you're good). Or even worse, missions that look completable but send you off to pirate stations that refuse to let you dock. Then hit you with a giant fine (the first 600k of my 1.5 million bounty is from that kind of fines) because you didn't complete the mission. Finally, the promised "espionage" missions Braben talked about have yet to materialize. On the whole we could use more mission types for variety. Maybe even multistep stuff like go to x, pick up cargo, bring to y. Or Go to X, kill guy, bring their stuff to Y. Some missions (like the assassination missions) could also use some hints as to where you'd go and look for the target in case of systems with 20+ planetary bodies.

The galaxy map is pretty clunky as well, especially for trade routes. It'd be fucking nice if the system view gave you more info on what a station imports (palladium, gold, silver for every high tech economy is bullshit and there's plenty of stuff they'll pay better prices for). You could also really do with an option to search for systems where they sell good X when you have a mission to procure it. I'd be fine with (I'd actually prefer) it to only list stations you've been to yourself and scanned their commodities listing. We had it for beta2 with Slopey's BPC tool, but FD asked them to discontinue it because the scraper was fucking with the code.

Navigation - and now we're veering into pet peeve territory - could also benefit from multiple waypoints. That is, if wherever you need to go os more than one jump away, it would ne nice if you could queue up multiple jumps and have the next step in your route get autoselected after a jump. When you're deep in unexplored territory, the only way to stop yourself from having to check the galaxy map after every jump is to write down everything on a piece of paper. It would also be nice if the god damn map could show legal jumps properly. In beta 2 it worked fine. But the different loadouts and frameshift drives in beta3 makes the map incapable of showing all the legal jumps I could make.


See? Plenty of stuff to whine about that's actually in there for you to see right now instead of speculation that the game will be unplayable in 10 years. It seems to me most of the whining is because people:
a) Wanted to pirate the game, but now they can't
b) Wanted to cheat, savescum or otherwise get powerful quick and now they can't
c) Jumped to conclusions without even finding out what's already in the game (eg: people whining about not wanting to get killed by other players, even though there's a perfectly fine solo mode in the game)

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

a) Wanted to pirate the game, but now they can't
b) Wanted to cheat, savescum or otherwise get powerful quick and now they can't
c) Jumped to conclusions without even finding out what's already in the game (eg: people whining about not wanting to get killed by other players, even though there's a perfectly fine solo mode in the game)

 

[Raapys]

...

I think you, and a lot of other 'fans' here, have a rather strange take on all of this. Many people who funded this game were never interested in the multiplayer aspect of the game. They wanted a new space sim in the same vein as Elite/Frontier. A modern space sim with quasi-newtonian physics and great graphics to mess around in and have fun on their own terms. They were told this would be possible. And now, one month before release, they're being told it's not gonna happen; by a single line among hundreds in a long newsletter(at least until the net exploded with the news and FD were forced to respond more clearly).

I don't see how you could even argue against that rage. These people are now being forced to join in on a wannabe-mmo thing which could quickly end up playing by full MMO-rules; months of grinding to get the best ships, updates that mess up the game with poor developer decisions, no modding opportunities, server downtimes, etc. This just doesn't appeal to a lot of people. Alternatively they can (maybe) get a refund and go back to waiting another 20 years for a new Elite/Frontier.

 

[Shadowfang]

But Raapys , don't you see that everyone has an internet connection so it is okay?
And because, as already stated by many erudite codexians, multiplayer>singleplayer, so FD is actually doing those who wanted to play in singleplayer a favour, because with multiplayer they can have the better oficial experience. Who plays offline anyways. A bunch of losers, right? lol get a girlfriend guys, and play with her online!
Also according to Ulminati, most mods aren't worth it so that makes it okay.
I mean what are the chances of a decent mod comming up and improving the game's experience? Pretty slim i tell you!
Now let's all focus on the other issues the game has and forget this non-issue that only affects thirdworldians.
They are cheap bastards and probably didn't even backed the game.

Spoiler

 

[Ulminati]

Raapys - I think you and a lot of the other upset people here have a rather strange take on this. I've been playing this for a while and it feels like a modern space sim with quasi-newtonian physics and great graphics. I can mess around in it and have fun on my own terms, so long as I am connected to the internet. Which I always am and pretty much anyone I can think of on my friends list also have stable, permanent connections.

What, exactly is it that makes you unable to load the game, select "solo" and then pretend you'r eplaying a single player game? sure, if you stumble upon a really good trade route, it might get depleted because someone else finds it. That just encourages exploration.

I don't see how you could even argue against that rage.

As you may recall, I've encouraged people who are genuinely upset to ask for a refund and don't play the game.

These people are now being forced to join in on a wannabe-mmo thing which could quickly end up playing by full MMO-rules;

Solo mode and there's no MMO. That the game could be playing by MMO rules is speculation at best. Since FD is not getting monthly subscriptons they've no incentive to make the endgame a grindfest.

I should probably make this in nice coloured text so people who skim the posts notice it: If you play solo mode, there are no other players in your game. It is exactly the same as playing single player if you have an always-online connection. The bandwidth requirements for playing in solo mode are small enough that it will run on a crappy college dormitory network. Unless you're on a thirdworldian dialup, your argument is invalid.

months of grinding to get the best ships,

An anaconda takes about 2 weeks if you know what you're doing. That's the most expensive ship in the game.

updates that mess up the game with poor developer decisions

That's speculation again. If they do start fucking a lot of stuff up, we can agree it's bad. But so far their changes have consistently been for the better. Again, speaking from the experience I've had with patches in the betas.

no modding opportunities

I'll grant you that one. I can count the # of games I felt needed modding on one hand, but I can see why other people would want that.

server downtimes

There haven't been any for the entire beta period, save for 1-2 hours when they pushed out a major patch that added new star systems, ships, models and the like. Several months, no downtimes.

This just doesn't appeal to a lot of people. Alternatively they can (maybe) get a refund and go back to waiting another 20 years for a new Elite/Frontier.

If that doesn't appeal to people, they should totally go get a refund and stop crapping up the thread. But as you can see, several of your complaints are either speculation or completely disregarding what's actually going on in the beta.


At the end of the day, the people who've been actually playing the game all seem universally pleased with what they've gotten. You could put it down to us being invested in the game since we already paid. But maybe - just maybe - we're content because we're ahving fun and the game is actually good. Granted, to play the beta requires that you're ok with the online requirement, so most of us don't give a flying fuck about offline being axed. If a few thousand people decide they're so upset about it they aren't going to play, well, that just means it'll be fater for me to get a landing pad in Aulin Enterprise on the 22nd.