DrFrigoPorco
(no, you cannot have my stuff....my 100 untapped mega nodes, millions of sq. M of honeycomb materials...will all just sit there. NO ONE CAN HAVE IT! Mua ha ha hahaha!)
The "devblogs" were published little over a month ago..
My expectations
PVP will not see it's rework until maybe.. possible.. end of this year, early 2022
PVE.. well.. we'll get scripted events called asteroids mining
power/energy management is put on hold
There is no actual information on anything right now.. it's all deliberately vague and non descriptive. I still suspect that there is no certainty about the future of the company and at best I can see a 3-4 month budget while the powers that be try and work out to either do an investment deal or turn off the lights.. I doubt we will hear anything structural about he future of DU until after we hear anything on the future of the company.
Finally.. here's a good example of providing informative updates, focusing on what you _can do_ instead of putting the effort in excuses for what you are not doing .. ANNOUNCEMENT Elite Dangerous | Odyssey: Roadmap | Frontier Forums
le_souriceau and DrFrigoPorco
I think you are the first person to ever use the release of ED:Odyssey as a positive example.
It has been almost universally panned by the players, though.. (And I'm talking Saxa head office levels of salt, here, rather than just the occasional spoon of Woodwards gripe water.)
Odyssey is basically slated as a prime example of what happens when a company does NOT listen to its player base and goes ahead and creates a product that very few were interested in and releases it before it's even ready, without testing.
Here are some of the top few criticisms of the game.
1) The game as a whole had all but completely stalled for nearly 2 years with almost as little progress beyond platitudes and a few very poorly implemented bolt ons that still don't work properly. Ostensibly the 600 person company were all focussed on Odyssey. Moreover, no details of what Odyssey entailed other than being "a significant addition of the order of being a completely different game" To make matters worse Odyssey has literally broken the previously introduced landmark Fleet Carriers feature (arguably only really big feature released since 2019)... Nobody can move or navigate their Fleet Carriers AT ALL any more.
2) The players requested FDEV fix the current game before introducing new features. Did they? Did they fuck...
NONE of the top 10 glaring issues and "permanent placeholders" in the base game have even been touched in the last couple of years:
Power play: complete joke... Wings: a joke... Multiplayer: amazingly not compatible with Wings. i.e. a joke. Group play instancing: still almost impossible to get more than a handful of people in the same instance... a joke. Missions: same buggy logic and 10 lines of cheesy as fuck dialog since 2014. SRV (ground vehicle): same single shitty vehicle that supports a single mode of gameplay: i.e. shoot rocks, shoot ships, shoot buttons to activate. Nothing of any depth.
3) A majority of the players in a poll that was answered by over 3000 players (IIRC) a few years back said many would be happy if they could walk around the interiors of the ship and have interior customisation... VR allowed you to look around the bridge or cockpit of your ship and it was wonderful to get a sense of scale and familiarity with the craft that had been called home for years... Braben had talked at great length in the KS about future goals of repairing and upgrading to your ship by hand, say during a protracted battle... Or EVA to fix parts external parts of your ship...
Most weren't interested in a full blown "space legs" PVP implementation, believing that it would divert attention from the actual issues in the game (see point 1 above).
But FDEV's videos kept going on about "Armstrong Moments" where you could step out of your ship onto land for the first time... It sounded actually quite epic...
But What did they deliver? You press a button and (insert Pythonesque fart noise here) you immediately spawn outside your ship on the ground... THE ONE SINGLE MOST REQUESTED FEATURE was not delivered: i.e. ship interiors had NOT been included.
The game plays like a FPS from 2010 and worse:
4) Elite is famous for being one of the most grindy games in the world... FDEV mistook this as a compliment and the actual Odyssey gameplay itself is EVEN MORE GRIND CENTRIC than the original game. and significantly more so.
5) The new release is buggy beyond belief (I myself have still not managed to leave the starport I spawned in due to recurrent bugs meaning as soon as I try to equip my loadout the game dies) They had no beta at all and went straight to money grabbing full release that barely even works.
6) Arguably one of the only features of ED to receive maximum marks from everyone and anyone who tried it was its magnificent VR implementation since it was designed around VR from the ground up. It was considered one of, if not THE BEST VR implementations ever made.
But no more... This one truly unrivalled, world class feature was squandered: VR has been relegated to back seat status with no further thought or development in over 5 years. And to rub salt into the wounds, much of the new UI no longer functions properly in VR since no VR is done any more. They literally took the only feature of the game to be universally given a top score by those who tried it and said: meh, we don't need this.
Even worse: They have removed VR from the actual walking about bit... As soon as you leave your cockpit, the game reverts to pancake mode! THEY REMOVED VR from the one part of the game that would make it most spectacular!
Odyssey is really quite a poor example in nearly every regard.
Zeddrick and Shulace
CoyoteNZ
But is a good example of what happens when you don't communicate or listen to your fan base. Also a good example of what happens when you move the status of the game based on finical decisions rather than is it ready.
Bazzy_505
ED's problems both are old and new should not come as big surprise. Most of the core problems of elite as whole are deeply rooted in its design. If you strip ED to its core it's literaly the same game as it was in 1993. Dave Braben, as a designer, peaked in early 90's and everything he's done since than is redoing exactly the same thing but with better graphics, If you would fire up ED with all textures removed, reduced poly count by factor of 10 and fire up Elite Frontier (Not suggesting 1995's First Encounters, due insanely buggy release that not even worth trying in dosbox) next to it, you'd see it's the same game, all the way down to ship designs, loadouts, turrets even job market. Even space stations are of same basic layout.
As far as Oddysey expansion goes, in 37 years D.Braben he's been in the business, he's never done action game ( or shown much inclination to such), much less as a FPS, asides from one verticall scroller for sega almost 30 years ago. It could not have ended any other way, Oddysey can pretty much shake hands with it's equally out of touch brother froma different mother called dust 514.
2 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:
Erm... Not sure why you started with "BUT" when you basically just paraphrased literally what I said. 🤷‍♂️
I guess you just scrolled to the end and read the last line before replying.
Sabretooth
12 hours ago, FrigoPorco said:
I can "watch over" the nodes for you and see to it that no other being will mine them
7 hours ago, GraXXoR said:
I'm not .. you missed the point entirely.
17 hours ago, blazemonger said:
Likely at some point (or points, probably waves) NQ was sneakly scaled down, now it feels like Deckard with just several other people trying to do at least something in complete agony.
Nothing is ever priority (what is?). Even introducing XL atmo -- pretty mundane task of qualified 3d and textures artists, probably 2 days worth of work, positioned like unsourmountable task in next eternity. Where is everyone I always whant to ask.
It certainly feels like the number of people actively working on the development of DU has come down quite a bit. The public list of employees is getting shorter and several entries seem out of date and the person in question no longer with NQ. Also the list is rather "management heavy".
I have no reason to doubt the people we "see" do what they can and possibly some extra. It is the people we do not see and especially the ones I feel we should see, or have heard of by now, which I have my concerns about.
Zeddrick
Unlimited territory ownership with no upkeep, such a good idea!
I think your meganodes might get obsoleted, destroyed or otherwise rendered useless when things move to automatic clash-of-clans style mining units anyway as the amount of ore in the ground doesn't seem to be related to the rate at which the mining units generate it. I don't even know if we will be able to mine tiles on planets the old way once these are in the game?
GLHF though.
There's absolutely no PvE...and a non living world. NO PVE??? In an MMO? (nope nope, we'll leave it up to the players..), there's no NPC's...nothing. Just the players. This, was an idiotic idea. DO BETTER.
why do you want PvE in this game so much? By automatically assuming that every MMO needs PvE, you are putting a really restricting mindset on yourself. This isn't WoW. This is space engineers, but massive and on one server. I do agree we could have passive NPC's like space cows or something, but definitely nothing that fights back, it simply doesn't work on this scale and on this type of game. It might appease a certain playerbase, sure, but at the same time it would damage PvP'ers , haulers and the selling point of the game.
36 minutes ago, Shaman said:
To be fair, even Space Engineers has PvE with Wolves, Spiders and Pirate Ships.
1 hour ago, Shaman said:
why do you want PvE in this game so much? By automatically assuming that every MMO needs PvE, you are putting a really restricting mindset on yourself.
Actually no. In true MMO style games, PVE plays a vital role in several ways. For one it feeds into game mechanics that produce and create where PVP is the counter to that in that it removes and destroys. PVE is also a massive feeding ground for PVP in a direct sense and drives a _lot_ of it. Not expecting or considering PVE is actually the restrictive mindset which in fact creates limits and boundaries to what can be achieved.
Without PVE, EVE online would be a massively boring game and it's economy would not be a thing at all. Seeing how DU takes many cues from EVE in it's top level mechanics but fails to implement or even consider the underlying ones, NQ pretty much shows this to be the case. Unfortunately, we have yet to see any signals NQ understand this and seems to be stuck in their utopian vision where they just provide the box and the sand while the player base will do the rest. That idea will only get a chance to work if the players get access to tools which allow them to build and script PVE content to start the loop as mentioned above. So far there are no tools in DU to accommodate any of this.
Not expecting or considering PVE is actually the restrictive mindset which in fact creates limits and boundaries to what can be achieved.
I beg to differ. Being forced to add PvE is what makes a game the same with every other MMO. In most MMO's , PvE uses the same gameplay loop:
Equip equipment (weapons+gear) to assist you
take a risk by overcoming a challenge (killing NPC's) using said equipment
get loot or a reward (drops)
get better equipment (better gear)
Are you saying that there are no alternatives with a similar loop? take NQ's idea of asteroid mining for example.
Equip equipment (radars etc) to assist you
take a risk by overcoming a challenge(finding+mining asteroid in time limit) using said equipment
get loot or a reward (ores)
get better equipment(better radars)
I could think of a million of these, honestly. Open your mind a little. Think outside the box.
Mordgier
On 6/4/2021 at 12:50 PM, blazemonger said:
It's sad to me that the unfinished release of Odyssey and the communication after can be used as an example for NQ to learn from.
JohnnyTazer
I honestly don't see what people are seeing in FDEV's "communication" that makes it such a shining example.
The forums are in meltdown mode: Hundreds of posts have been censored and the mods are working overtime to contain the salt and viscera that litter the battlefield. Nobody is actually talking about the game itself but rather how badly FDEV have handled the situation...
This is the result of hundreds if not thousands of complaints and their steam rating taking an absolute pummelling.
It's purely reactionary, a low energy attempt to absorb some criticism and complaints.
They just put a post on their forums promising upcoming patches with minor changes. It's going to be months before Odyssey is anywhere near where it should be.
I see very little difference in FDEV's post compared to a typical NQ "We're listening post" apart from the 3 minor weekly tweaks listed.
And if FDEV's track record is anything to go by, those tweaks will not actually fix the problems and the resultant bugs will still be here in 2026.
Elite Dangerous was only ever half a game... a mile wide and an inch deep, with shitty dialogue, missions and almost no interaction between players and placeholders for every single feature instead of fully fleshed out functions... The only fully fleshed out facet of the game is the 3D model of the pilot and ship micro transaction store which is almost flawless. Go figure.
Now they add odyssey a skim another $40 off of gullible gamers for a shell of an FPS with 2010 graphics and 2005 gameplay.
But yeah, a couple of messages on their forums and suddenly NQ need to follow suit... Not a very high bar to clear, for sure.
Here is one of the best analyses of the situation: Jump to 3:44 for the discussion of communication.
"We've heard your feedback and we'll be working on initiatives that will bring the community more in touch with the development progress."
The so called 'parents' of this game both rely heavily on PvE...as both minecraft and eve have excellent pve, which is needed, in any game. I know you really want JC's vision to work out, but it looks like it didn't...because players got fed up and left...and left a big empty world with invisible birds.
Hang on, I thought you left... 😉
We've seen a bit of activity in our DU crew this week, bit more than usual that is. Nothing like it was a few months ago when the .23 reckoning.
Not sure how long it will last, games are coming up this month. Might garner some attention over there....might flop out of the gate. Who knows.
CptLoRes, Shaman, Noddles and 2 others
I got back some inspiration this month. Meaning I am now able to do the daily 150K login, but that is where I draw the line.
As a solo builder and experimenter (mad scientist class if there was such a thing) the 0.23 just utterly destroyed the game for me.
Crumbs. I thought this was a necro thread reading these last few comments regarding 0.23.
Had to confirm.
yeah, I'm playing daily for about an hour. Don't want to risk too much time in DU since the chance of it shutting down and closing shop in the next couple of months is palpable.
NMS style redemption is the massive exception rather than the rule, so I don't hold out much hope.
pretty much don't see many player on line at all these days.
Hello games had millions in the bank and a small team of people willing to dig in and fix the game.
NQ has no money and is mostly managers and non dev staff holding out for a pay check
NQ will not be able to pull this one out of the fire unless they get funding, cut the fat and hunker down. Then, maybe, they can bring it back around.
That's the point. Mentioning 0.23 may now be considered necro, but NQ still hasn't even completed the first early version of the mission planner. And that is only the first of many steps needed to somewhat mitigate the damage 0.23 did.
Noddles and Lethys