Elite: Dangerous

[apocrypha]

Good. Glad they understand the value being connected to Steam brings to their customers.

They didn't, as with many things they've had to be dragged kicking & screaming by players kicking up a fuss on the forums for weeks. Braben absolutely, categorically insisted that they wouldn't release it on Steam at all.

[tazelbain]

How close are you guys to be able to set up shop in a quiet corner of the galaxy? That and steam could probably get me to buy.

[Falconeer]

Apocrypha, your resentment towards this project is clouding your comments. First you loved it to the point of making a webshow about it when it was clearly too early for that. Then all of a sudden you burned out and started talking crap about it. While Elite Dangerous is not yet what lots of people (me and you) dream about, it's an extremely functional project, with serious and respected deadlines, an unheard of level of polish for these days, and no aggressive microtransactions or stupid business models. And it's going ahead full steam. The fact that they ARE giving out the Steam keys is a good thing, a bonus that costs them time and resources while giving the players NOTHING (since Steam will just launch the external client) and a thing that at this point they could have not delivered at all considering it was just the outcry of some spoiled brats who had already shelled out the cash anyway. So let's just rejoice for them doing one additional sensible thing in an industry that makes an art of doing the opposite.

Tazelbain: don't buy now. Wait for the release of Powerplay Patch in June.

[Viin]

How close are you guys to be able to set up shop in a quiet corner of the galaxy? That and steam could probably get me to buy.

Since I mostly play in solo mode (because Open mode gets laggy!) I'm effectively in a quiet corner. But, whatever you do in solo mode translates to open play too - so you could move your ship to some god forsaken corner of some god forsaken galactic arm in solo mode and then play it in Open. Though there'd be no one there, so might as well stay in Solo mode!

I'd like to play in Open mode (because I like the idea of a more randomness than the NPCs can provide), but it gets real laggy in super cruise mode for me. No problems in solo play.

[apocrypha]

Apocrypha, your resentment towards this project is clouding your comments.

Maybe, yes. However it's still a game I have an interest in and therefore follow it's progress. And it seems clear to me that it's still plagued by the same major problem that's dogged it from the start - Braben, his 'vision' and the dogmatic adulation that he commands from a sizable portion of the fan base.

The cult of personality surrounding him & the relative paucity of his vision (recreate the only really successful thing he's ever done) has resulted in a mediocre product when the promise was of so much more.

The Steam thing is a good example. Braben decided, for no good reason other than he didn't like the idea of giving Steam a cut, that he would distribute E:D alone. I don't know why he finally relented and talked to Valve but at that point there was really no question that it should be made available on Steam to everyone who'd bought it at any point. The ensuing (and predictable) battle on the forums between those who had their heads firmly up his arse and those who wanted Steam keys created completely unnecessary conflict and contributed further to the toxicity of the game's community.

Honestly I think this game could really start to flourish if Braben retired and his legion of lapdog, unquestioning fans all shut up.

[Lantyssa]

Someone probably convinced him that Steam would give him a slightly larger following.

[Falconeer]

And it does. I mean, at this point whoever says they are against Steam are either uninformed, or lying, or buying time. I don't think I am wrong when I say there are ZERO reasons not to go on Steam unless you are already incredibly succesful on your own. Steam takes 30% of all your transactions, so you don't make the move until you know the biggest part of your in-house sales is gone and/or unless you need a big boost in popularity. Even stupid MechWarrior is going on Steam in September, 3 years after launch, and they've always been very protective of their own money.

So, I am confident Braben spoke against Steam in the past because he was clueless, or he simply lied: if he ever admitted Elite was going to get on Steam at some point in the future lots of people would have just waited to get it on Steam stripping him of 30% of the profits.

[WayAbvPar]

Steam is so much better for word of mouth games too. If your game is good, people will talk about it with their friends. And their friends will first look for it on Steam.

[Big Gulp]

Steam is so much better for word of mouth games too. If your game is good, people will talk about it with their friends. And their friends will first look for it on Steam.

The problem is that the game isn't good.  There are good aspects to it; namely the flight model, but it's an incredibly shallow, sterile experience.  It's just chasing a buck to upgrade to the next ship.  There's no real substance to the universe, no meaningful player interaction, and no real reason to play.  I enjoyed the treadmill for two weeks or so until I recognized the shallowness of the game.  Haven't been back since.

[Falconeer]

Always depends on what you are looking for.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is one of the highest rated (and grossing) games EVER on Steam. 98% positive reviews, 32362 positve out of 32858 and stable in the top 20 of the most played Steam games three years after launch. You can do infinitely less of what you can do in Elite Dangerous. Is that a good game?

Anyway, supposedly the upcoming patch is gonna fix some of those complains. Here's hoping, nothing more.

[Samprimary]

I am having plenty of fun with it, but I have to agree that it is largely lacking a lot of necessary substance. The flight model's amazing, the sound design is incredible, but space is exhaustingly empty and featureless and there's so little to do. You can hop on Freelancer and have ten times more to do, which is incredible, because freelancer.

[Khaldun]

Well, now that I can handle docking and a few other things, I'll have a look around. But I think it's easy to explain why folks expect there to be "something" out there to do--it's both the legacy of something like Freelancer and the fact that the entire galaxy is a bigger imaginative space than "driving across Europe in a truck" and thus much more loaded with expectations.

[Big Gulp]

I am having plenty of fun with it, but I have to agree that it is largely lacking a lot of necessary substance. The flight model's amazing, the sound design is incredible, but space is exhaustingly empty and featureless and there's so little to do. You can hop on Freelancer and have ten times more to do, which is incredible, because freelancer.

Yeah.  If you're going to have an empty universe lacking a lot of content then you'd damn well better make sure that players can shape the world and provide their own content for each other.  Unfortunately Braben's vision is stuck in 1984 and the game suffers because of it.  The game could have been fantastic and instead will just become a footnote.

[Falconeer]

Look, I can't say what it's going to be like in a year, but why does everyone keep pretending this isn't getting lots of big updates every two months and the biggest one is arriving in a couple of weeks?

He could have pulled a Roberts and launch the thing in 2017. Maybe it would have been better, but who was going to fund that?

[Malakili]

I'd honestly rather have a "footnote" like Elite that has a focused scope and does what it is trying to do than a project like Star Citizen that is jumping out into that "imaginative space" and getting totally lost.  Is it one of the greatest games of all time? No.  Is it a solid space sim with good combat and enough to do to keep me occupied the amount I want to play it?  Absolutely. Maybe it's just because I didn't have high expectations for this game, but I feel like it has been a perfectly fine game that easily justified its purchase cost.

And as Falconeer said, it's getting better all the time anyway.

[Big Gulp]

I'd honestly rather have a "footnote" like Elite that has a focused scope and does what it is trying to do than a project like Star Citizen that is jumping out into that "imaginative space" and getting totally lost.  Is it one of the greatest games of all time? No.  Is it a solid space sim with good combat and enough to do to keep me occupied the amount I want to play it?  Absolutely. Maybe it's just because I didn't have high expectations for this game, but I feel like it has been a perfectly fine game that easily justified its purchase cost.

And as Falconeer said, it's getting better all the time anyway.

I guess I just see wasted potential with this game.  Yeah, it's fine for what it is.  Could it have been a whole lot more without an insane amount of resources thrown at it?  FUCK YES.  Star Ponzi is one really crazy end of the spectrum.  Let's not pretend like it either has to be this or that.

Most of what's crippling the game could have been remedied with some modest design changes.  Yeah, it's great that you modeled the entire Milky Way.  Was that a prudent choice as far as gameplay was concerned?  Probably not.  And then there was the decision to keep the game single player (but without content), and to add in really lackluster multiplayer just to tick a box.  Make a choice, either make a compelling single player experience with content that goes beyond "randomly generated pirate attacks you again" or make a for real multiplayer experience where players can impact the world.  This "some of this, some of that" shit is the worst of both worlds.

[Khaldun]

You can have huge amounts of procedurally-generated space that is still populated by some kind of procedurally-generated surprises and threats. I don't feel that's a challenge that takes you into the ridonkulousness of Star Citizen.

[DraconianOne]

When you see it...

[apocrypha]

Is that an actual person in that seat? Finally! 

[Samprimary]

I wrote out a short copy you can c/p anyone to if they are trying to up ranks to get ships

Currently, the faction rank system is very broken and confusing and it is easy to get stuck not knowing how to progress. If you want to gain ranks, here's your guide:

Get allied with as many minor allegiant factions as possible. You have to become allied with a whole host of minor factions that are allied with the MAJOR faction you are trying to get ranks with. For instance, if you want naval ranks in the Empire, you need to move among many different Empire systems and gain the Allied status with minor factions that pledge allegiance to the Empire.

There is a bug that prevents you from knowing which minor factions you are actually allied with, and you have to work around that fact. If you are allied with a major faction, ALL associated minor factions will show as allied, even if you are not actually allied with them. You have NO WAY to know which factions you are actually allied with (which won't give you any progress to your next naval ascension), and which you can actually use to gain progress to naval ascension. This is a majorly annoying bug. You have to hunt down very minor factions that are in systems you have never been to (since that way you can be reasonably sure that you're actually adding progress to your naval ascension) and do rep missions for them for a while until you stop seeing any "this faction does not trust you enough" missions from them in their stations. Once this happens, you can presume you are probably allied with them and move on to another minor faction someplace else you have never been.

It is best to use the galaxy map and hunt down tiny, system-specific factions in places you have never visited. If you are trying to gain Empire ranks, you have to have allied status with a lot of different minor groups that pledge allegiance to the Empire. These include the obvious ones like Empire League, Empire Pact, etc, but you can't really know which of these you have maxed out allegiance with. So try to find any local faction like the ones that are named after the system they are found in. These super-small system specific minor factions are perfect for naval ascension progress since you can presume you aren't actually allied with any from systems you have never spent time in. You can find these by hunting around the galaxy map and looking at the stations. Here is a perfect example, in the Kambo system:



As you can see here, the faction's name is "Defence Party of Kambo" and its allegiance is with the Empire. If you have never been in the Kambo system, you probably have no standing with the Defence Party of Kambo, and you could travel to this station and start doing reputation missions for them or bounty hunting in the system for cash.

Make sure you are only doing missions for factions allied with the major faction you are trying to gain ranks with. You can go to a system and look at the Status / System Status on your right hand screen, and it will show you all of the active factions in a system. The minor factions you want to impress will have the symbol for the major faction next to their name. The others are, as I understand it, irrelevant to your progress. So if I am in a system and the System Status shows these factions:



Here, if I am trying to gain naval ranks with the Empire, I want to do missions for the United Prydereti Front and the Nasaraudi Company, since the icons show they are Empire allied factions. Or if I was trying to gain naval ranks with the Federation, I would do Confederation of Nasaraudi. And the Nasaraudi Dominion and the Jet Mob are independent factions so they don't do anything for naval factions and their missions can be completely ignored.

Okay! So I found a little pissant corner of the universe with a minor faction I have never interacted with before, and landed in a station controlled by them. Now what? You have two options.

Do missions for the faction. It gets you influence faster but you don't get anything else out of it except for expenses.

- Always do charity missions. If you see missions come up that are asking for a donation of food, agri-medicines, weapons, slaves, etc, always take it, go find the requisite resource, and return it to them ASAP.

- Courier missions are also good, since all you have to do is drop off a message at another station and then return.

- If you can find them, Kill X Pirates missions are totally fine, since you can just hop off to an RES or nav beacon and farm for a while and get some returns on bounty while also earning faction points.

- Don't do stuff like assassination missions or anything else that wastes a lot of your time, since you don't want to have to abandon missions. If an assassination mission bugs out, you have to quit it and this loses you standing. Basically, don't do those terrible missions that you don't do anymore because they're obviously terrible and

Your second option is to hop around and bounty hunt pirates in systems with minor allied factions. I did this for a while and it seems to eventually get you allied standing with the minor noncriminal factions in a system, and you're farming cash in the meanwhile. I am not sure this works very well so if it turns out to be terrible advice after all, feel free to strike it from this list and brand me with the shame of my errors. If it does work, though, you should bounty hunt in a system until you don't see any "this faction does not trust you enough" missions in stations, then move on to the next pissant system to impress their quaint assemblage of backwater nothings with your trifle heroics.

Eventually, the naval ascension mission comes up. When it does, pull up your favorite elite dangerous trade guide and find the closest seller of the things they are looking for, or go hunt down the unidentified signal sources in the target system, or whatever. The missions themselves are usually super easy and conclude super fast. You'll see multiples show up a lot of the time but only one completion will count per rank.

[Falconeer]

Powerplay Beta is up.
If you are curious about how it works... here's a 9 pages instructions pdf for you.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=147543&p=2277714#post2277714

[DraconianOne]

Beta Change Log (some of it):

New Content/Features:

- Powerplay added
- Power map views added to galaxy map
- Added power information and action screens
- Power specific ship modules added
- Power specific ambient traffic added
- Spawn AI to hunt player if they defect
- Power specific goods and actions added
- Playable ship Imperial Courier added
- Playable ship Diamondback added
- Cargo/Mining chunk collection drones added
- Fuel transfer drones added
- Prospector drones added
- Mission system overhaul
- Inbox integration for branching missions
- Missions scaling up based on rank
- Missions scaling up based on reputation with mission giver
- Mission targets can be generated in supercruise rather than USSs
- Spawned AI difficulty determined by mission (if spawned by mission)
- Missions requiring only mineable materials added
- Revamped military progression missions
- Added Founders and Elite ranked missions
- More mission variants added
- Chatter tables updated
- Updated bounty system
- Bounties cannot be paid off (Pilot's Fed contact is gone!), but expire after 7 days.
- Major factions don't record crimes anymore, only minor factions. (You may have major faction stuff in your saves left over from the previous system).
- Fines now take 7 days to expire, but never coexist with bounties (bounties absorb fines and dormant bounties with the same faction).
- Expiry only actually happens when you login, hyperspace or resurrect. (This stops cases of "I attacked a wanted ship that had no bounty a few seconds ago")
- Friendly fire values relaxed
- Add select nav target functionality to system map
- Add mining bonus for mining operations within extraction sites
- Added Painite as a minable commodity
- Added osmium as a minable commodity
- Added low and high intensity resource extraction site scenarios
- Loan ceiling scales based on player's highest Elite rank
- Founder decal now gold
- Added crimes for reckless flying (collisions) within starport no fire zones:
- Shields only collisions above speed limit is a fine
- Hull damage only above speed limit is a larger fine
- Ship destruction within short window after collision above speed limit is a bounty
- Respects 'Report crimes against me' setting
- Allow any general purpose slot on any ship to contain a fuel tank module
- Show progress to next PF rank
- NPC chatter works in supercruise
- Added rank up messages and animations to inbox

[Samprimary]

- Bounties cannot be paid off (Pilot's Fed contact is gone!), but expire after 7 days.

So if I accidentally nick a defense force ship while bounty hunting I'm just boned for seven days?

[DraconianOne]

Pretty sure they fixed that months ago -  you don't get a bounty for a accidentally hitting another ship, only if you cause sustained shield or hull damage.

Edit:

Patch 1.1 Notes (10th Feb)

- When the player accidentally hits an AI ship damage is accumulated. If a threshold is exceeded (by multiple hits or a powerful weapon like a rail-run), the ship turns hostile. The AI ship will "forget" the damage before it turns hostile:
1) if the AI ship recharges its shield to 100%.
2) if a (currently 30 sec) timer runs out.

From the 1.1 Beta notes

When you shoot and hit a vessel you may be able to avoid committing a crime based on the following criteria:
· The ship was *NOT* targeted by you – targeted ships cannot benefit from these rules
· The ship was shielded – if you cause hull damage you will not benefit from these rules
· The damage was minor – powerful weapons cannot benefit from these rules.
· The damage is infrequent – repeated attacks cannot benefit from these rules.
If you have allied reputation with an NPC ship’s affiliated minor faction, the damage thresholds for turning a ship hostile are increased and the “must be shielded criteria” is removed.
If you are in a conflict zone the damage thresholds for turning allied ships hostile are significantly increased, and the “must be shielded” criteria is removed.

So if you're getting a bounty for hitting defence ships, you're either encountering a bug or need to go easy on the trigger.   

[Ironwood]

When he said 'Accidentally Nick', I'm fairly sure he was talking about Global Thermonuclear War.

Would you like to play a game ?

[DraconianOne]

According to this thread, it is now possible to generate a Steam key for existing accounts.

BUT...

Doing so means that you associate your ED account with your Steam account and Valve will take their cut of any purchases you make, whether it's through Steam or through the ED store. IE Frontier don't get 100% of ship skin purchases etc. (This needs further clarification but it's strongly indicated by Dev response further down that thread).

[Falconeer]

Honestly, I don't feel bad cause I've already given them 120€ abd the in-game purchases are pretty underwhelming anyway. So, thanks for the link!

[Samprimary]

Anyone with a sufficiently powerful ship will blast straight through the threshold they put in the game in an instant if a system patrol ship flies between them and the pirate. This has happened to me twice in very short succession today while RES hunting. One interception of the twin heavy pulse lasers and that's it, you're a criminal bub

[Setanta]

IE Frontier don't get 100% of ship skin purchases etc.

I gave up on this game I'm afraid - it's on my "really must go back and give it another shot list" but why would I buy a skin for a ship that I can't actually see for 99% of the actual game.

I think EvE ruined me - I want to see my ship flying or station spinning rather than be locked to the cockpit :(

[Falconeer]

Not that it changes the gameplay, but they added aan external camera three months ago.

[Sir T]

This a good time to pick this up? I've paid off my depts so I have a little extra money for the moment till the next financial crises hits.

[Falconeer]

After Powerplay's launch, which should be in a couple of weeks (it's in public-ish beta right now).

But I am sad to say that my first impressions of Powerplay are that... not enough/much changed. As long as "solo play" will be available, there will never be enough life or interaction in what is an immense universe. Powerplay is grat on paper but so far (again, first impressions) it will play out as a glorified,entirely soloable, faction grind. Even the premises to craete a conflict between players are ruined by the afore-mentioned offline functionalities, and the progression, although improved, is too directionless to feel engaging. Even as a sandbox, there's too many missing things (crafting of any kind for example would help), and as an exploration game it doesn't provide any adventure or enough surprises.

Given how Powerplay, which was supposed to be a bit of a game-changer, does NOT change the game, I am starting to believe this will never really blossom. Great at what it does, and fantastic as an upgrade of the 1984 version one, it might be not enough for 2015-me especially because this still almost feels like a DOWNGRADE of the 1993 version.

[Malakili]

Well, the game was never meant to be an MMO.  It sounds like you want it to be.  As a co-op game I've been having a fine time with it.  It's not the last game I'll ever play or something, but this seems just to be a difference in expectation than anything. 

[Falconeer]

It's not just that. Even though they said multiple times "it's an MMO", Braben himself said it and they repeated it multiple times. But it's not just that. Yes I agree, it's a difference in expectations, as I still think it's a great product and piece of software.

Look, I've been telling Apocrypha this whole time right here "what were you expecting?". And now I am very close to join the ranks of those who were expecting "more" simply because while it's true that they keep adding a lot of things, what they add is directed grind instead of anything that makes you care other than getting the next big ship. Galnet news events are interesting but the implementation is still too cold and automatic. Powerplay so far is a perfect example of nice feature on paper that simply fails to be fun in practice. And that's the only reason why today for the first time I am a bit demoralized about Elite Dangerous. It really seems they nailed dow a lot great things, but have no ideas on where to *expand* instead of just *refine*.

The worst feeling is that the universe in the game is several million star systems, but they are all so similar to each other that it feels like there are nothing more than FIVE star systems. I can travel ten thousands light years, and there's never anything new or surprising that can happen. For example, they should have introduced NPCs a long time ago and help give some Personality to at least some of the stations. Instead, Powerplay is a glorified version of Community Goals that in theory gives people a reason to fight each other, while in practice allows everyone to carry out objective "offline" so no one really has to fight anyone else. And at the same time, all bases still look the same, all bulletin boards still look the same, all signal sources still look the same and pretty much all missions still look the same.

I am not giving up on this because I do believe they'll keep adding stuff and maybe at some point they'll finally add what motivates me to keep going instead of just loving it... without wanting to play more. But that makes me realize that maybe I didn't even have too high expectations for from Elite: Dangerous, as much as I had high expectations for the Powerplay patch. To me Elite Dangerous is a great game, without any longevity. They need to patch that in.

[Malakili]

I guess my question is what does "giving up on this" even mean?  You aren't paying a monthly fee to play.  I don't play this thing every day.  A couple times a week, I fire it up and get my space-sim on.  I think I paid 35 bucks for this game.  I've easily gotten that much out of it already.  It's not the game I think about when I'm not playing it, I don't eagerly fire it up the second I get home every day.  But when I play it, I'm having a good time.  I totally get what you're saying, it just doesn't drastically change the way I'm playing the game.