Scientists have hypothesized that there are in fact an infinite number of ways to improve E:D, and that FDevs ability to continually avoid them breaks all statistical models, both real and theoretical. A team was deployed to observe the studio and take readings for further study, however an unfortunate breach in protocol resulted in them being absorbed and becoming Community Managers.
Your point about grind is well made - I always hold up Deep Rock Galactic as a perfect example of ‘grind’ happening in the background while a team of friends are enjoying playing together. There’s a feeling of “I don’t need to worry about unlocking X thing because it will happen organically as I play”.
Pretty sure there’s a skeleton crew of developers working on ED while everyone else is either working on a different game unrelated to the series, or a new game in the series. Especially with the narrative and the gameplay tied to it (thargoid war) seemingly becoming a permanent thing to keep the games content on life support.
You don't need an engineered ship for standard NPC combat. Just don't expect to successfully attack a wing of Corvettes in your starter sidewinder. Instead go to a resource extraction site where the system security can help you attack wanted ships. And be realistic at what you target even then.
a few points - Unbalanced PvP: the balance works fine between engineered ships. pretty much every medium or large ship can be made effective in 1v1 and organic situations with the right build. The far greater issue is that engineering is a hard requirement for open PvP, which wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't such a high time investment just to unlock all the engineers and grind a fully engineered ship. It took me 3 days of playing to fully engineer an alt from scratch, and that was relying on other players to transfer me money with carriers and using every possible shortcut and exploit to speed up the mat gathering and engineer unlocking process. Even if a new player specifically decided to focus on grinding engineering as their first priority it would take weeks or months to complete the process. Compare that to PvP in star citizen, where the only entry requirement is either owning a combat-oriented ship or hopping in a friend's ship as a turret gunner. Unsurprisingly star citizen has a far higher proportion of the playerbase that is both able and willing to engage with PvP elements, while also having more chance of surviving unwanted PvP. - Time-to-disable vs Time-to-kill: Adding ship disabling mechanics wouldn't change the outcome of PvP interactions. All it means is that other players would have spend a couple of extra seconds damaging you further while disabled to fully ensure a kill. It's a fun idea for PvE and exploration repair gameplay, but there's better things the devs could work on. - PvP bounty missions: This is something that was datamined late 2022. The devs were working on it, but there's still no indication of any progress. Whilst it would help to bring more PvP interactions to the game, the underlying issues of clogging, shitty netcode, blocking, and the engineered vs unengineered imbalance would undermine any effort that PvP bounty missions would make to reduce griefing. Good luck trying to kill a griefer without fully engineering a ship first, and good luck trying to kill a griefer when they could simply block you to prevent you ever instancing with them, or simply clog with no consequences as FDEV almost never take action against cloggers. - Engineers defending their own bases from griefing: Revoking engineering access to griefers won't fundamentally make a difference when said griefers can easily use Colonia engineers with the remote workshop feature as an alternative. And locking access to stations doesn't make much difference when players can park their own fleet carriers in orbit or the closest nearby system. Ultimately I doubt FDEV will ever try to improve the community and player interaction side of the game. The best time to have done that was years ago. The current playerbase is far too accustomed to playing the game as a near-singleplayer experience to care about interacting with other players, and FDEV are far too invested in pumping out as many cosmetics as possible and fixing their broken Odyssey engine to add any worthwhile content. How can they ever add features that will help the game reach its fullest potential when their one recent piece of actual content - the thargoid Titan mothership - has taken them more than a year to develop (based on datamines) and is still only being released drip by drip. How does it take that much development time just to add a modified lagrange cloud with a new thargoid model in the centre? How many more months will it take for them to release the actual boss fight?
@@bloodgulchpatrick if you actually look through the blueprints and experimentals, about 40-50% of engineering blueprints/experimentals have good use cases in PvP either as a damage tool or for various kinds of utility, and pretty much every weapon (including powerplay modules), aside from pure AX weapons, has a viable use case in PvP. Sure, there are some consistent underperformers (focused/sturdy mods, and the generic oversized/flowcontrol/etc experimentals) but as a whole you could point me to any weapon, module, or medium/large ship and I could find multiple builds for it that would work well in 1v1's, organic PvP, or both.
I don't agree with the issue of COOP being a problem in Elite Dangerous. Wings/Teams get already benefits for hyperjumps & dropping out of supercruise, and players get additional rewards in credits. Players use COOP to have fun with friends or other like minded players. Adding additional ways to earn ingame currency with "contracts for escort in COOP" won't change any SOLO players mind. Some just don't want to do COOP, an most players switch between SOLO / COOP / OPEN depending on the things they want to do. Also Credits are not a scare ressource... sharing a single 50 million credit mission with a wing/team mate brings massive reward for all players in the wing/teram, even those who didn't contribute.
The game was even more of a grind when it first came out. Example, it could take the average player a year to get an anaconda. The game was built as a grind loop. It will never change.
ED's playing field encompasses the entire Milky Way. But it's gameplay is as shallow as a sidewalk puddle. Play it a few times and its limitations are apparent. FDev apparently doesn't subscribe to the Drake equation for intelligent life in the Milky Way. It seems the devs either don't listen to the player base, lack the funding to add depth and a decentralized interconnected gameplay storyline or deliberately shy away from the abundance of life notion. It's plants, Thargoids and malevolent humans. Rinse and repeat. There's still time to utilize Drake's equation and A.I. to iterate, procedurally evolve and sprinkle simple and intelligent alien life throughout the Milky Way. Giving us something more with which to interact.
I wander if the current Thargoid War is adding or detracting from player enjoyment. I have zero interest in thargoids and everything they add (normally requiring more grind) makes my interest decline further. I actually engineered a surface site thargoid combat Anaconda, then couldn't be bothered to try to use it. It was just too much effort for someone not in the immediate know, to find out where it was best to go and "help out". Thargoids, Increasingly aggressive and deadly, are now just something that might interfere in me going about my business. I have a Sqn of 25 active members and only one of them is doing the current Thargoid related CG. Inara currently shows 403 players engaged in one and 263 engaged in the other.
those numbers also include the people who sign up feeling optimistic and then “nope” out as soon as they see what is entailed with the effort the actual engagement numbers are probably much lower
this is a very well stated assessment of the problems facing the software and its user base but none of these problems are going to be solved while the developers spend most of their work hours trolling the forums and subreddits instead of working on the software
@@jaynecobb5774 wtf? Atmo planets are new content, planetside CZs were new content, maelstroms and everything inside of them is new content,... But oh well, if Elite doesn't interest you anymore its ofc fine, just don't use VR as an excuse, jeez.
I play on PC with an X Box controller while sat on the sofa. They added the Copy System button. Magic. Then they didn't think to add a Past button on the insert system line in the galaxy map. Tragic. So I still have to leap up and down off the sofa to past the copied system, say to the internal Commodities compare prices facility. That it doesn't default to the preselected station in the Galaxy map when I have set it as my destination (if data is available) is itself bad. That the jump computer doesn't automatically recalculate when you buy cargo, is also very sad. That is just one thing.
Issue 3 is a matter of design and that ED has always struggled to straddle the Open / Solo divide. For example, if engineers had been more like tech brokers in scope as well as distribution you'd not have bottlenecks like Shin Dhez (and that *some* pre - engineered stuff mitigates Felicity if only new players knew about it). Secondly station blockades: for some features (such as Powerplay) you could eliminate a great deal of pad blocking by using hidden trader like mechanics. The problem is ED has not (as you point out) been adjusted / tweaked enough to keep the many interlocking systems in step with each other and on top of issues- too many systems are now so archaic their problems have overlapped other dysfunctional systems.
I personally think they make a mistake to turn away from VR. Yes i know the the VR player base is a niche within an already niche game but its by far the most epic VR simulator experience out there.
I've never played Elite dangerous on a monitor, I've been playing in VR ever since I purchased the game in 2015. And I 100% agree it's an incredible experience in VR and for the life of me I don't understand why they don't give us on-foot VR. I still play seated with a hotas so there is no need for motion controllers but it would be nice to step out of my ship and still be in VR and able to use the UI.
The grind is nothing like it use to be. I was in beta and at the beginning. Money is extremely easy to get now. A mission now that will pay you 50k credits use to be 3k.
The main problem of Elite Dangerous are the generic missions. They are not bad, but Elite lacks some story missions akin to the Odyssey training mission with unique voice acting & story. Such missons could have been used for gaining engineer access (instead of the mindless grind like "collect 25 items of cat media") or to tell the ongoing story. Frontier made a small effort with the Ram Tah mission to the Guardian ruins but abandoned that kind of mission afterwards.
You forget to mention the most time stealing issue - insane in-system travel times, including ridiculously tooo slooooow acceleration from planet too planet. There could be also number of QoL changes to super-cruise flight as well, like resolving USS-es without need to fly towards them (especially, Disstress calls, and build-in disstress resolving equipment in every ship).
no shit.. the graphics were never the problem. Except for the few months after Odyssey where they very obviously released a Un-optimized BETA build. Forgiven and forgotten. The problem with ED is that its gaming's largest Sandbox.. and theres nothing in it but fucking sand. Its like No Mans Sky, if you took away 75% of the ships, most of the explorable planets, removed 90% of EVERYTHING on the planets that are leftm, several alien species and about dozen different galaxies.. and introduced mechanics that then heavily penalize you for not properly landing your your ship on a dime like a Marine pilot in a Harrier.
Fantastic video, all wonderful points. To me, ship interiors would be a huge waste of time and resources. Improving on the actual gameplay as you’ve suggested would accomplish far more to make the experience better for us. Unfortunately, it seems that the only thing that could truly revitalize the game at this point is a sequel. The goose is already cooked and we’ve been dining on leftovers for years now. The most they can do at this time is target retention, which means new content. Hence the goid stuff. I’d venture to guess that they will maintain that model for some time, just trying to add new toys to play with to keep the whales playing and spending while keeping production costs at a minimum. Improvements would make things better for us, but for those who have left, they’ll just shrug and say “I’ve done everything I want to do already, so why come back to do it again but slightly better?” People want something new. I think many have migrated to X4, NMS, SC, etc depending on their tastes. No matter how terrible those games may have been, they do have momentum at least. I hope I’m wrong.
It's BORING? Stuff to do? Yeah, same thing, different planet/system. The number of times you have to do the SAME thing over and over again vs. the amount of leveling up you get from doing it, and money isn't balanced... at all.
Asking more than the legendary Elite dangerous has given us over the years, is like asking Aaron Rodgers to play like he did when he was a rookie! Even the greatest eventually start to slow down but with elite dangerous remember it’s a video game and it still remains the largest Truest space MMO out there. You are not confined to one star system in a fishbowl environment limited to tactical FPS combat crap, etc.. in this game I can take a group of players with some ships fleet carriers and fly 60,000 light years to any point on the map pick out a lifeless ice moon somewhere and establish our own player colony short term or long term log off and come back in five years and our shit will still be there, and then we can move on to role-play or come up with all sorts of scenarios like this. Key to getting the most out of a game like elite dangerous odyssey is to play the map, get out of your comfort zone with game loops around the bubble and really squeeze the enjoyment that you can out of this game😊 Think positive certain aspects of the grind will actually help you improve in your actual real life in terms of sticking to complex tasks and seeing things through❤
There's a few issues that plaque it that are hardcoded into the very foundation itself. Namely Fdev and it's proprietary engine. Fact of the matter is Fdev, unlike for Hello Games and CIG, has a portfolio of games under its roof that it needs to devote resources and funding to and can't put 100% of their effort into making ED better like other studios can with their space games. It's also an old game running on proprietary software which means most of the developers who built the game have likely moved on and recruiting new devs to build on it is also an investment since they're coming from backgrounds unfamiliar with Cobra engine and need to be trained. With all that said, the foundations to the game itself are solid. Space flight is great. Stellar Forge procedural generation is fantastic and hopefully the Odyssey transition to using procedural tiling means that the library can be updated in the future to include more diverse geography and geology. Even the bgs is great, though they desperately need to incorporate the third party tools and websites that without, make the game borderline unplayable. The easy stuff would be expanding on what they already have: -Removing the artificially placed grind. It's a universally panned problem that everybody knows of and even they themselves recognized. -Throwing us a bone and adding a new ship every once in awhile. The game is 9 years old and the last ship to come out was 5 years ago. In a spaceship game. The Odyssey fps sucks. I understand that ED isn't a fps game, but if they're going to incorporate fps into the game it needs to be modernized and fun. Even the og Halo from two decades ago felt better. A lot of this I feel can be improved simply by adjusting values and removing certain mechanics. Beyond this there should be more to the fps than just combat zones and expanding on on foot exploration would be a huge help. Beyond these updates, which are pretty mild, are ones they can take from other games. Just ignoring ship interiors here because it's redundant and I don't think it'll ever happen under the current engine and team anyways. In No Mans Sky for example you can put down a marker anywhere on a planet and build an outpost there. It doesn't need to be as comprehensive but some kind of limited base building mechanic could be huge. As would eva ship salvage, missions boarding capital class ships (carriers and megaships already have interiors, just make them derelicts to get data recovery or pirates or whatever). The Thargoid war is cool, don't get me wrong. But it's purely narrative and doesn't really add much to the game in terms of quality of life, new mechanics, items, gameplay, etc... The best possible outcome I think would be for them to burn the bubble down, start a galactic diaspora tied in Powerplay to a colonization initiative and introduce bas building and farming new materials unique to the different sections of the galaxy. Allowing players to trade materials only with other players at their outposts could encourage community and getting rid of the grind by diversifying the methods to collect them (salvage, missions, farming, piracy, etc...) just like commodities could be it. I know, it's a long winded post but it's something that's been on my mind for years and I'll never stop wanting this game to be better.
This a great essay. I'd suggest something like this as an open letter to FDev, as your thoughts on this should definitely reach the developers. Well done.
So many things that could improve QoL but one feature I'd love is just a move all button for modules, or move by type. Anything to reduce tediousness is good. Speaking of tediousness, I wouldn't complain if FSDs were buffed across the board. Allow us to jump to secondary stars, reduce travel times. I feel like QoL stuff shouldn't be hard to implement if they wanted.
You said something about modules not wearing out…. your frameshift drive if you ever used it going across the galaxy will absolutely wear out and go down in percentage of strength
@@robl6291 No that’s not true I’ve done huge trips jumping conventionally 700-800 jumps and by the time I got back my FSD had gone down to something like 75%
@@robl6291 Yeah absolutely and since you made the point it’s absolutely true that just doing things like that or hull reduction due to mishaps it’s going to damage internal modules so they’re all at risk kind of contrary to the point that the original post was making
This is an excellent commentary, well articulated, touching on the essential sources of play frustrations, and offering what I see as really great ideas to remediate these issues. Do you have, or are able to foster, a means of advising the developers (in a way that stands out from the sea of complaints and uselessly generalized advice that comes from the masses)?
Very well thought analysis on Elite issues and possible solutions. I would love to see your ideas implemented. I am wondering if Frontier would ever want to sell the game that it does not want to invest to another company that wants to enhance the game.
As a disabled gamer Ive hit a big wall when it comes to grind and Elite, things like scooping materials and finding mats on planets is really hard for me. It feels like I have to do something I can't actually handle.
I kinda feel like what elite needs is what we are going to get this year from bethesda. LOTS to do. intersting NPCs, base building, custom ship building. ELite if you go into open the primary way for players to interact are just shooting each other. sure you can join a group but then people just shoot at your group and what does your group do? it does exactly what you do while playing solo.
IMHO the best way to improve PVP would be to use an instant action mode that lets players to select an active space conflict zone in the open to spawn there with a combat ship. Ship loadouts could be a set of fixed presets that players can unlock by earning ranks (using CQC mode as example). No travel time, no engineering, and a 100% chance to meet other players.
No they need to make system authority far more powerful than any engineered ship so if a ganker decided to interdict a player any control system then the system authority would show up immediately and either detain, fine or destroy the ganker. That would allow players to freely roam the bubble without the threat of being killed but if you travel to an anarchy system then you're on your own. The journey from the bubble to Colonia could be very dangerous. Which it should
ED needs to create a marketplace where players can trade all kinds of things with other players. That one thing would address so many of the problems in the game. They could charge some actual money to participate in the market and thereby fund additional investment in the game. I add that last point because the lack of things like bug fix, new ships, and addressing some of these core problems implies to me that there is a problem with money to fund FDev. I still think ED is the best game in the world, but it has so much undeveloped potential.
By the way for those who think that making money is too hard, go play the exobiology loops, go on a simple 50 to 100 jump trip somewhere and just literally scan one bio signal in every system that you come to that has one, you don’t have to grind five or more bio signals on a any single planet if you don’t want to, and just casually do this while planet surveying at the same time by the time you come back you have a few billion in your bank account😊come on part of the gamesmanship of elite dangerous is figuring things out like this
My solution to grind materials would be that you use materials to unlock the engineers as is now, but once you unlock them, you engineer your ship by paying with credits. This is a way to make money useful even to seasoned players with billions of credits. And no, having to pay money per week to keep a fleet carrier does not make money useful, it makes fleet carriers badly designed.
Disagree with the graphics complaints. Was around when Pong on the Atari was being played. The graphics are still sic when I play Horizons on PS4 pro (have Odyssey on PC) on big screen but agree about grinding by picking flowers for engineering stuff or whatever is not fun. It's just to give us something to do instead of interesting missions.
Also a huge problem off the game is implementing new stuff into it and then completely forgetting about it, like multicrew or AMD FSR. Why didnt they update to FSR 2.X because it works so much better than 1.0. The graphics of the game are fine indeed but the anti ailiasing problem should be fixed.
Even then Cobra Engine used by Odyssey doesn't support Direct X 12, and that is AFIAK needed to make FSR 2.0 work. The Cobra Engine used by Frontier in games like Jurassic Park Evolution 2 supports DX 12 and all kinds of nVIDEA & AMD enhancements.
With the graphics, it's not that they are dated itself is an issue, it's the abysmal perfomance and associated rig you need to run said dated graphics smoothly. They are a major issue to some. Optimization is objectively fudged. Remember how the game was running decently even on somewhat dated configs in the original release and Horizons era? I have an i5-7600k and a 1060 6 Gb, my CPU is getting 100%-ed all the time when I play Elite. Sometimes I get drops up to 40 FPS in combat. Space legs FPS is about 20-30 or less in on-foot Confict Zones. Ridiculous for what the game offers in graphics / gameplay department. I mean, I can play the ship part of the game alright, but to think of folks who were running older rigs with 970Ti and corresponding CPU... oof. Yes, you can build a new PC and run the game... mostly smoothly, but this itself is already an issue. Which also got us console versions cancelled.
@@rayfighter kinda any? Yeah, it doesn't have the tech of "the whole planetary surface", but Horizons was running perfectly fine... the graphics didn't get *massively* better. But why is my FPS dropping in space, when planets aren't even near, such as near starports? It'd run fine, it's just that the optimization is BONKED. It has improved since Odyssey's launch, but nowhere near where our expectations should be.
it doesnt need better graphics, NMS is an example that character in design doesn't need to be hyper realistic but optimization helps go a good way. we need new ships, like... desperately. we need new ways to explore that aren't barred by another type of loop. im a lover of ed but it does need some more love
I have legitimately never seen anything in Elite as to much of a grind engineering included. That being said I'm a player who has done a little of everything outside PvP which will never be attempted if given the choice. It was very easy to get everything I wanted.
I played ED all the time for years, especially with VR, voice attack, x52 and I even built a chair for it with bass shakers etc. simply amazing experience. Then they released Odyssey with the 2D panel when on foot and killed the game for me. Iv only now just picked it back up after years.
If you truly want to master elite dangerous and get everything you can out of it you need to buy yourself a fleet carrier it will change your space life
Issue 1 is on point. Thing is, ED is probably the worst example of this 'strategy' I have ever encountered. I want to like it, because the IP is awesome, but the game is so disrespectful of the players time.
But one thing that is for sure elite dangerous is not for everybody there are players who do things the hard way or never truly figure out how to do things efficiently and succinctly and complain about it and then there are players that solve and tackle all of the issues to come up with space life as presented by elite dangerous and thrive and excel with it
Graphic were never an issue, engineers are the root of many complaints. This prolonged exposer to balancing issues made the core game empty by dropping solo/community lobbies would fix the population. Rebalancing is a must.
Overall many brilliant ideas. But, they wont do it. I lost hope since some time now. Your suggestions about COOP + Player missions is something that have been talked and never implemented. It would also be fun to hire an NPC crew of ships to form a wing. So if the players do not respond to the player mission then he could fall back to NPC.
I got disillusioned once I was done with my shipyard. I was going to get ready with all these specialized, highly engineered ships for every task that mattered to me... only to realize there was really _nothing to do_ with them outside of "making my own fun". So _that_ is what I really feel needs to change: This game needs to have some genuine, _inherently_ replayable content and redoable goals - it needs to get away from this misguided mantra of "make your own fun".
That first site seeing to Sirius A I will never forget. I played Xbox ed for years. Not giving plug cuz well, we know how TIGHT this community is. Built a PC and i'm waiting for a steam sale. 07
I really dont have too many problems with ED except for a story/campaign, and maybe base building single player type of experience but thats not what ED is. IMO if they want to make it more than Star Citizen light they should add some type of crypto token system so it can actually be a literal "make a living in the 3000" space sim. Everyone would say thats pay to win but not really when everyone could do it and most of the generated income would be going back to the player that provides the service. Similar to how crypto or any economic system would work..
The balancing issue starts with ships like the medium size Python outclassing other, bigger ships and some ships being just useless. It was a problem from the start, and Frontier ignored it or try to fixed it with "new" ships like the Imperial Eagle or Viper MK IV. I doubt that Frontier will ever even try to improve basic balance of ship sizes & roles.
There is a long list of things they can do better that one video can’t cover. But biggest grip here is lack of care for their fans. The separation of console from everything was not right.
Odyssey is the problem. Instead spending 2 years of trying to a shoe-horn an FPS into Elite and in doing so completely alienating the entire console community; they could have focused on what we had. Develope the story, work on the economy, work on the multi player aspects that don't work so well, add a couple ships and SRVs, maybe throw in gas giant interactivity and we would have had a great game going. All with no need to shove the VR and console communities aside.
Awesome video and perfectly accurate description of the issues with great suggestions for improvements and completely free of horseshit excuses and far-fetched explanations how the "problem is in the players". If you were in charge of Elite right now and took action in accordance to your views, the playerbase would grow 300 percent at least. Too bad the developers of this game suck too much ass to at least realize those issues, let alone do anything to fix them.
I agree up until you tried to compare Elite to Fortnite. The player audiences are vastly different and play for different reasons. Fortnite is a cash cow for the lowest common denominator. Elite is a space opera MMO for space nerds. We’re a much smaller demographic.
@@Keloot most of that, most of that isnt gameplay, but is timesink, fdev admitted that themselves, which is why they said they would re look at it, bro :0)
Since the very recent update ... my character has been deleted by Elite ... that's a huge issue with me .... I more suspect population figures might well drop through the floor ....
Still look fine to me (horizon client), graphics is clearly not the issue, and yes it look incredible in VR. Perhaps one of my issues is the connection of progress between private and public gameplay, which makes things even more unfair for the one that dare to play in public. in my opinion there should be a public gameplay multiplier (yes that could be exploited, but should be).
Passive wear is a bad idea for exploration, Distant Worlds 2 tooks months to complete and used more than enough materials to keep the FSD maintained from neutron jumping.
The problem with Elite's graphics isn't that they're dated. It's that they're broken. Odyssey looks worse than Horizons 3.8 did because it barely works. In total agreement with the rest of the video, particularly in regards to incentivizing positive player interactions/cooperation.
The problem is the lack of vision of devs and Frontier is a really closed Company, that dont have the resources for such a big game that is ED. Its a Shame, this game have great potencial, but Fdev cant afford this.
They just need to start working on a new game at this point. The problem is that they may not have the resources to pull off the kind of polish they would want. Elite Dangerous before odyssey was perfectly fine, but it was adding a poorly implemented fps element on top that showed me they wouldn’t be able to do it in this engine. The animations stink: they just do. A good fps is not one that doesn’t any of the issues you suggested (I know you’re talking about the game as a whole, but let me explain), a good fps is a game where is feels good to shoot in first person. Seriously. Call of duty modern warfare is the most satifsfying game in the world, and it has nothing to do with balance or gameplay. It just feels good to shoot. In elite, it feels good to fly in your ship. It’s perfect and they shouldn’t change anything. But if they want to have the fps work, being in first person alone needs to be it’s own draw, and to do that you need a few things: one, perfectly immersive animations; two, good feedback when hitting targets (rag dolls, injury animations, etc; and three, good sounds (which they can, no doubt, do.
Elite doesn't need a new graphics engine per-se, it need a sequel, a re-boot. The preverbal cat has been let out of the bag, and the barn door has been left open. Engineering fundamentally broke the game, Too many gold rush's have occurred making credit's meaningless thus invalidating long term ship progression and invalidating small ships. Security states pretty much have no bearing in Eltie, and in order to incentivize a healthy community of new players and those with more non-violent career paths, not only should ganking should have more severe and lasting consequences, but there should me more in-depth gameplay loops or veteran players, because "ganking" is basicly what happens when long time players become bored with the content. It's no different than GTA online. The major part is actual gameplay... the vast majority of Elite Dangerous is about two things, taking off and landing and ship combat. that's it. Outside of mining and exploration, the latter FDev refuse to expand upon. I won't offer any of my possible solutions to these issues because it's all just pissing in the wind, just like the one's in this video. FDev over the course of all these years have shown they don't have either the skill, resources or will to both fix Elties short comings or develop it to live up to it's potential. Elite is what it is (not all bad) and Frontier will take the path of least resistance.
Hello Cmdr. nice video. I would add titles to your chapters instead of writing just Issue X - would give a better overview. On grinding -I would say that HORIZONS ship engineering is barrable after all changes FD made over the time like giving every material you pick x3 and implementing material traders made out live much easier- but still sometimes its easier to LOGIN LOGOUT respawn locations to gether materials wich is sad - EDO is especially grindy on engineering weapons and suites -the amount of mats you need is huge and some are very rare - but this could be solved very easy in 1 day - simply by enabling the bartender to trade every material or data that is needed (and not restricting it). In EDO getting lots of material is easy - getting the correct ones is the real time eater and VERY FRUSTRATING!
ED have many bad designed features, annoying datails, and many things bad or nerfed on puprose (for example, PvE piracy). I'd say, ED need normal software developer. Frontier development made for game all good they could, and now they, actually, destroying it, since EDO or even EDH Fleet carriers update. The best, that Frontier could do for ED, is stop their awful game development and release server part, as they promised to backers. So community modders could finally fix ED.
Stopped playing ED several years ago after I got interdictied whilst refueling at a star i was a newb and got destroyed, my brain just went how did that work in physics how did the ship that fired the gravity gun not get destroyed as it fired its so close to a star. The game in my mind was not as good to real life dynamics as it proposed to be. I had been playing the game for a few weeks and just never went back.
The game sucks because all the stuff you want to do is locked behind loading times (supercruise) supercruise is the most monotonous function of the game. But if you want to go more superficial, more ships even if they fill similar roles as others (people buy lambos for gods sake theyll buy a better or dumber looking version of the FDL or type 9). Players suck, griefers are only doing it for catharsis which leaves a sour taste in my mouth (punsih not those who exist but those who exist to punish) Not enough secrets in the game lately, everything is too on the nose and the implications of the things that could be in the far reaches are just that, implications. (Altough drip feeding secrets in a video game is prob good because some people love doing all of them and then rubbing it in)
Some good points, however... adding a passive degrade system would 100% kill the game for me. You are deliberately making exploring more tedious and require more modules, increasing the barrier to entry. I do exploring to chill out and relax, not to have to keep worrying I am not doing enough with the time I have. If it was tied to using an optional game mechanic, like how jet cone boosting causes damage to the FSD, that makes sense. Because you are accepting damage in exchange for the added boost. Taking damage just by EXISTING is not fun or interesting. Degrade systems are the bane of my gaming experience and I cannot think of ANY examples where it actually was a good, fun mechanic. They add nothing.
Elite Dangerous delivers a profound, unyielding grind and the clip used in this video is a prime example of a loading screen, SSD's could help with the loading, the grindy gameplay can't just be written out, I played all day on Sunday and experienced nothing new at all on the grand scale of things. The gameplay involved travelling backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards and back....you get the picture.
The problem with ED is fundamental. The game is a long grind because you dont lose your ship when you die. If the game would be a full loot pvp setup with actual industry, it would make ships a lot cheaper, and allow for building ships for your group, fleeting up, etc. It would be amazing.
Man I been here a while aand it seems like they hate the player./ i remember when we could make good credits at med 4 and mining and 50 mil credit hauling and they nerfed it? so DEPPRESSING.I DONT KNOW. Loved this game ! maybe open it up to Modders 2 save it. help us some1.
Give me Goddam proper VR support for the game you sold me as built from the ground up for VR David Braben. Frontier Developments just continue to nosedive in my opinion. Previously they were my favourite developer and Braben was my favourite programmer, no longer! I was getting really interested in the Zoo game that they have but I'm not buying anymore stuff from them until they start treating their customers with a modicum of respect and gratitude. I may not care about F1 driving games but when I hear that you abandon support for a game that people are playing only 2 months after release then I know to avoid you in the future!
I can't disagree. The only one problem with videos like this is it's casting pearls before swine. And I'm not even talking about the players who don't see where real issues with the game are and complain about graphics. I'm talking FDev. They don't care, they have zero regard for players time and they even outright spit in players faces with some stupid engineer unlock requirements. The only one thing they are good at are sound, visuals and overall atmosphere. The rest is either some accidental crap spewed out by some random numbers generator implemented in rush and never looked at again to refine or a few paragrapsh of inconsequential text fed to a text to speach software to act as "content" ( probably produced by some intern).
Its the game balance for me tbh. Being basically locked into pulse+multi for CZs and PA+rail for pvp is just aggravatingly boring. Theres so many weapon types that are completely useless, because theyre just worse versions of pulse/multis (like cannons and dumbfires) or just require atrocious amounts of maintenance (shock cannons e.g.) its downright criminal. Ships are poorly balanced, too. So many ships that have no conceivable reason to exist. Theres just one de facto ship for every role, everything else is just making life harder on yourself for minor stylepoints. Chieftain was the first real combat ship i bought years ago. By now I'm so sick and tired of seeing that thing, that i'd rather gimp myself and fly worse ships, even deliberately avoiding it for AX. Hows that a good thing?
Abandoned after 300 hours (odyssey) -too much grind for anything. -if you need something, there is nothing ingame that tells you where to look (not even approximately), you have to rely on external sites. -does the community want something? perfect, Frontier don't care. This game could have been perfect when it came out, but they made it obsolete by not taking into consideration what the users really wanted. And then, users migrated to Star Citizen and No Man's Sky.
![Finally I Am Giving Elite Dangerous A Try | The Beginning Of An Adventure [4k/60fps]](/img/n.gif)
What ED really needs is developers who care about the users .... or rather managers who allow the developers to care about the users.
I feel like FDev could have sold Elite to a dev who wanted to actually evolve the game beyond the decade of languishing issues you mentioned.
@@spartanleonidus238 They can never sell it as it runs on a proprietary engine that they don't license out
@@deathbunny8322 Good to know! Maybe that is also why the game's evolution was so lethargic?
FDev re launch with ship interiors, less grind, new ships etc focuss on mostly space
We really need a billionaire fanboy to just buy the IP, remake it from the ground up with one codebase, and dump the time sinks.
Scientists have hypothesized that there are in fact an infinite number of ways to improve E:D, and that FDevs ability to continually avoid them breaks all statistical models, both real and theoretical. A team was deployed to observe the studio and take readings for further study, however an unfortunate breach in protocol resulted in them being absorbed and becoming Community Managers.
Your point about grind is well made - I always hold up Deep Rock Galactic as a perfect example of ‘grind’ happening in the background while a team of friends are enjoying playing together. There’s a feeling of “I don’t need to worry about unlocking X thing because it will happen organically as I play”.
Alot of it is just peoples attitude. I love this game and am having a great time!
Pretty sure there’s a skeleton crew of developers working on ED while everyone else is either working on a different game unrelated to the series, or a new game in the series. Especially with the narrative and the gameplay tied to it (thargoid war) seemingly becoming a permanent thing to keep the games content on life support.
My #1 issue with the game is how hard combat is. I shouldn’t need an engineered ship to do damage to NPCs
You don't need an engineered ship for standard NPC combat. Just don't expect to successfully attack a wing of Corvettes in your starter sidewinder. Instead go to a resource extraction site where the system security can help you attack wanted ships. And be realistic at what you target even then.
Engineering is part of the progression. It is the endgame. It's like going for BiS equipment in MMORPGs.
Antialiasing is so bad you still see jagged lines at supersampling 1.5x 💀
Yeah I don't know why that can't fix their pipeline.
I reinstalled the game and was disapointed to see that it only had FSR 1.0 as upscaling. FSR 2 and DLSS would get rid of the aliasing.
a few points
- Unbalanced PvP: the balance works fine between engineered ships. pretty much every medium or large ship can be made effective in 1v1 and organic situations with the right build. The far greater issue is that engineering is a hard requirement for open PvP, which wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't such a high time investment just to unlock all the engineers and grind a fully engineered ship. It took me 3 days of playing to fully engineer an alt from scratch, and that was relying on other players to transfer me money with carriers and using every possible shortcut and exploit to speed up the mat gathering and engineer unlocking process. Even if a new player specifically decided to focus on grinding engineering as their first priority it would take weeks or months to complete the process. Compare that to PvP in star citizen, where the only entry requirement is either owning a combat-oriented ship or hopping in a friend's ship as a turret gunner. Unsurprisingly star citizen has a far higher proportion of the playerbase that is both able and willing to engage with PvP elements, while also having more chance of surviving unwanted PvP.
- Time-to-disable vs Time-to-kill: Adding ship disabling mechanics wouldn't change the outcome of PvP interactions. All it means is that other players would have spend a couple of extra seconds damaging you further while disabled to fully ensure a kill. It's a fun idea for PvE and exploration repair gameplay, but there's better things the devs could work on.
- PvP bounty missions: This is something that was datamined late 2022. The devs were working on it, but there's still no indication of any progress. Whilst it would help to bring more PvP interactions to the game, the underlying issues of clogging, shitty netcode, blocking, and the engineered vs unengineered imbalance would undermine any effort that PvP bounty missions would make to reduce griefing. Good luck trying to kill a griefer without fully engineering a ship first, and good luck trying to kill a griefer when they could simply block you to prevent you ever instancing with them, or simply clog with no consequences as FDEV almost never take action against cloggers.
- Engineers defending their own bases from griefing: Revoking engineering access to griefers won't fundamentally make a difference when said griefers can easily use Colonia engineers with the remote workshop feature as an alternative. And locking access to stations doesn't make much difference when players can park their own fleet carriers in orbit or the closest nearby system.
Ultimately I doubt FDEV will ever try to improve the community and player interaction side of the game. The best time to have done that was years ago. The current playerbase is far too accustomed to playing the game as a near-singleplayer experience to care about interacting with other players, and FDEV are far too invested in pumping out as many cosmetics as possible and fixing their broken Odyssey engine to add any worthwhile content. How can they ever add features that will help the game reach its fullest potential when their one recent piece of actual content - the thargoid Titan mothership - has taken them more than a year to develop (based on datamines) and is still only being released drip by drip. How does it take that much development time just to add a modified lagrange cloud with a new thargoid model in the centre? How many more months will it take for them to release the actual boss fight?
Still the balance between some blueprints is trashed, and some weapons are still massively outclassed by others
@@bloodgulchpatrick if you actually look through the blueprints and experimentals, about 40-50% of engineering blueprints/experimentals have good use cases in PvP either as a damage tool or for various kinds of utility, and pretty much every weapon (including powerplay modules), aside from pure AX weapons, has a viable use case in PvP.
Sure, there are some consistent underperformers (focused/sturdy mods, and the generic oversized/flowcontrol/etc experimentals) but as a whole you could point me to any weapon, module, or medium/large ship and I could find multiple builds for it that would work well in 1v1's, organic PvP, or both.
I don't agree with the issue of COOP being a problem in Elite Dangerous. Wings/Teams get already benefits for hyperjumps & dropping out of supercruise, and players get additional rewards in credits. Players use COOP to have fun with friends or other like minded players. Adding additional ways to earn ingame currency with "contracts for escort in COOP" won't change any SOLO players mind. Some just don't want to do COOP, an most players switch between SOLO / COOP / OPEN depending on the things they want to do. Also Credits are not a scare ressource... sharing a single 50 million credit mission with a wing/team mate brings massive reward for all players in the wing/teram, even those who didn't contribute.
The game was even more of a grind when it first came out. Example, it could take the average player a year to get an anaconda. The game was built as a grind loop. It will never change.
A decade of time to evolve their game proves you are correct.
Took me 14 months
Took me less than six months.
Been playing a year and I'm a multi billionare.
@@yummyzerg lol I got an anaconda in 2 days by doing exobiology
And funny now it takes 2 hours to get One and A rate it .
ED's playing field encompasses the entire Milky Way. But it's gameplay is as shallow as a sidewalk puddle. Play it a few times and its limitations are apparent. FDev apparently doesn't subscribe to the Drake equation for intelligent life in the Milky Way. It seems the devs either don't listen to the player base, lack the funding to add depth and a decentralized interconnected gameplay storyline or deliberately shy away from the abundance of life notion. It's plants, Thargoids and malevolent humans. Rinse and repeat.
There's still time to utilize Drake's equation and A.I. to iterate, procedurally evolve and sprinkle simple and intelligent alien life throughout the Milky Way. Giving us something more with which to interact.
I wander if the current Thargoid War is adding or detracting from player enjoyment. I have zero interest in thargoids and everything they add (normally requiring more grind) makes my interest decline further. I actually engineered a surface site thargoid combat Anaconda, then couldn't be bothered to try to use it. It was just too much effort for someone not in the immediate know, to find out where it was best to go and "help out". Thargoids, Increasingly aggressive and deadly, are now just something that might interfere in me going about my business. I have a Sqn of 25 active members and only one of them is doing the current Thargoid related CG. Inara currently shows 403 players engaged in one and 263 engaged in the other.
those numbers also include the people who sign up feeling optimistic and then “nope” out as soon as they see what is entailed with the effort
the actual engagement numbers are probably much lower
this is a very well stated assessment of the problems facing the software and its user base
but none of these problems are going to be solved while the developers spend most of their work hours trolling the forums and subreddits instead of working on the software
have not played after they abandoned VR... LOVED it in VR
Well, good news, they didn't abandon VR and you can still play it just like you used to if you wanted 🎉 Getting kinda tired of this lie ngl
@@cmdrHeliaxx Yeah, but I dont get to play ANY of the new content. Come on man. Sure if I stay in my corner its all fine.
@@jaynecobb5774 wtf? Atmo planets are new content, planetside CZs were new content, maelstroms and everything inside of them is new content,... But oh well, if Elite doesn't interest you anymore its ofc fine, just don't use VR as an excuse, jeez.
@@cmdrHeliaxxtrue . I think this like came about when youtubers realidade they could make money shit talking the game
I just didn't buy odyssey because it didn't have VR. You don't have to abandon the game altogether? VR is still in the game.
Its 10 years old, the cobra engine is dead, they can't get any programmers that want to work with it. ED is dying a slow death.
I play on PC with an X Box controller while sat on the sofa. They added the Copy System button. Magic. Then they didn't think to add a Past button on the insert system line in the galaxy map. Tragic. So I still have to leap up and down off the sofa to past the copied system, say to the internal Commodities compare prices facility. That it doesn't default to the preselected station in the Galaxy map when I have set it as my destination (if data is available) is itself bad. That the jump computer doesn't automatically recalculate when you buy cargo, is also very sad. That is just one thing.
Issue 3 is a matter of design and that ED has always struggled to straddle the Open / Solo divide. For example, if engineers had been more like tech brokers in scope as well as distribution you'd not have bottlenecks like Shin Dhez (and that *some* pre - engineered stuff mitigates Felicity if only new players knew about it). Secondly station blockades: for some features (such as Powerplay) you could eliminate a great deal of pad blocking by using hidden trader like mechanics. The problem is ED has not (as you point out) been adjusted / tweaked enough to keep the many interlocking systems in step with each other and on top of issues- too many systems are now so archaic their problems have overlapped other dysfunctional systems.
I personally think they make a mistake to turn away from VR.
Yes i know the the VR player base is a niche within an already niche game but its by far the most epic VR simulator experience out there.
I've never played Elite dangerous on a monitor, I've been playing in VR ever since I purchased the game in 2015. And I 100% agree it's an incredible experience in VR and for the life of me I don't understand why they don't give us on-foot VR. I still play seated with a hotas so there is no need for motion controllers but it would be nice to step out of my ship and still be in VR and able to use the UI.
VR still works on the game stop lying Lil bro
imagine if they really honed in on VR and made it the main selling point of the game
@@Keloot no on foot VR with UI, you can use the camera suite but it's not useful for any interactions
The grind is nothing like it use to be. I was in beta and at the beginning. Money is extremely easy to get now. A mission now that will pay you 50k credits use to be 3k.
The main problem of Elite Dangerous are the generic missions. They are not bad, but Elite lacks some story missions akin to the Odyssey training mission with unique voice acting & story. Such missons could have been used for gaining engineer access (instead of the mindless grind like "collect 25 items of cat media") or to tell the ongoing story. Frontier made a small effort with the Ram Tah mission to the Guardian ruins but abandoned that kind of mission afterwards.
You don't need story missions, you can do anything you like and you do effect systems etc.
The ONLY comments that actually males sence in this channel . I agree 100%
You forget to mention the most time stealing issue - insane in-system travel times, including ridiculously tooo slooooow acceleration from planet too planet.
There could be also number of QoL changes to super-cruise flight as well, like resolving USS-es without need to fly towards them (especially, Disstress calls, and build-in disstress resolving equipment in every ship).
Yo. I hear ya, robot Apex pilot would be nice.
no shit.. the graphics were never the problem. Except for the few months after Odyssey where they very obviously released a Un-optimized BETA build. Forgiven and forgotten. The problem with ED is that its gaming's largest Sandbox.. and theres nothing in it but fucking sand. Its like No Mans Sky, if you took away 75% of the ships, most of the explorable planets, removed 90% of EVERYTHING on the planets that are leftm, several alien species and about dozen different galaxies.. and introduced mechanics that then heavily penalize you for not properly landing your your ship on a dime like a Marine pilot in a Harrier.
Fantastic video, all wonderful points. To me, ship interiors would be a huge waste of time and resources. Improving on the actual gameplay as you’ve suggested would accomplish far more to make the experience better for us. Unfortunately, it seems that the only thing that could truly revitalize the game at this point is a sequel. The goose is already cooked and we’ve been dining on leftovers for years now. The most they can do at this time is target retention, which means new content. Hence the goid stuff. I’d venture to guess that they will maintain that model for some time, just trying to add new toys to play with to keep the whales playing and spending while keeping production costs at a minimum. Improvements would make things better for us, but for those who have left, they’ll just shrug and say “I’ve done everything I want to do already, so why come back to do it again but slightly better?”
People want something new. I think many have migrated to X4, NMS, SC, etc depending on their tastes. No matter how terrible those games may have been, they do have momentum at least.
I hope I’m wrong.
It's BORING?
Stuff to do? Yeah, same thing, different planet/system. The number of times you have to do the SAME thing over and over again vs. the amount of leveling up you get from doing it, and money isn't balanced... at all.
Asking more than the legendary Elite dangerous has given us over the years, is like asking Aaron Rodgers to play like he did when he was a rookie! Even the greatest eventually start to slow down but with elite dangerous remember it’s a video game and it still remains the largest Truest space MMO out there. You are not confined to one star system in a fishbowl environment limited to tactical FPS combat crap, etc.. in this game I can take a group of players with some ships fleet carriers and fly 60,000 light years to any point on the map pick out a lifeless ice moon somewhere and establish our own player colony short term or long term log off and come back in five years and our shit will still be there, and then we can move on to role-play or come up with all sorts of scenarios like this. Key to getting the most out of a game like elite dangerous odyssey is to play the map, get out of your comfort zone with game loops around the bubble and really squeeze the enjoyment that you can out of this game😊 Think positive certain aspects of the grind will actually help you improve in your actual real life in terms of sticking to complex tasks and seeing things through❤
There's a few issues that plaque it that are hardcoded into the very foundation itself. Namely Fdev and it's proprietary engine. Fact of the matter is Fdev, unlike for Hello Games and CIG, has a portfolio of games under its roof that it needs to devote resources and funding to and can't put 100% of their effort into making ED better like other studios can with their space games. It's also an old game running on proprietary software which means most of the developers who built the game have likely moved on and recruiting new devs to build on it is also an investment since they're coming from backgrounds unfamiliar with Cobra engine and need to be trained.
With all that said, the foundations to the game itself are solid. Space flight is great. Stellar Forge procedural generation is fantastic and hopefully the Odyssey transition to using procedural tiling means that the library can be updated in the future to include more diverse geography and geology. Even the bgs is great, though they desperately need to incorporate the third party tools and websites that without, make the game borderline unplayable.
The easy stuff would be expanding on what they already have:
-Removing the artificially placed grind. It's a universally panned problem that everybody knows of and even they themselves recognized.
-Throwing us a bone and adding a new ship every once in awhile. The game is 9 years old and the last ship to come out was 5 years ago. In a spaceship game.
The Odyssey fps sucks. I understand that ED isn't a fps game, but if they're going to incorporate fps into the game it needs to be modernized and fun. Even the og Halo from two decades ago felt better. A lot of this I feel can be improved simply by adjusting values and removing certain mechanics. Beyond this there should be more to the fps than just combat zones and expanding on on foot exploration would be a huge help.
Beyond these updates, which are pretty mild, are ones they can take from other games. Just ignoring ship interiors here because it's redundant and I don't think it'll ever happen under the current engine and team anyways. In No Mans Sky for example you can put down a marker anywhere on a planet and build an outpost there. It doesn't need to be as comprehensive but some kind of limited base building mechanic could be huge. As would eva ship salvage, missions boarding capital class ships (carriers and megaships already have interiors, just make them derelicts to get data recovery or pirates or whatever).
The Thargoid war is cool, don't get me wrong. But it's purely narrative and doesn't really add much to the game in terms of quality of life, new mechanics, items, gameplay, etc...
The best possible outcome I think would be for them to burn the bubble down, start a galactic diaspora tied in Powerplay to a colonization initiative and introduce bas building and farming new materials unique to the different sections of the galaxy. Allowing players to trade materials only with other players at their outposts could encourage community and getting rid of the grind by diversifying the methods to collect them (salvage, missions, farming, piracy, etc...) just like commodities could be it.
I know, it's a long winded post but it's something that's been on my mind for years and I'll never stop wanting this game to be better.
QOL and grind. Can’t agree more! Graphics don’t even enter into my complaints when I think of Elite.
This a great essay. I'd suggest something like this as an open letter to FDev, as your thoughts on this should definitely reach the developers. Well done.
So many things that could improve QoL but one feature I'd love is just a move all button for modules, or move by type. Anything to reduce tediousness is good. Speaking of tediousness, I wouldn't complain if FSDs were buffed across the board. Allow us to jump to secondary stars, reduce travel times. I feel like QoL stuff shouldn't be hard to implement if they wanted.
You said something about modules not wearing out…. your frameshift drive if you ever used it going across the galaxy will absolutely wear out and go down in percentage of strength
Only if you neutron jump, which is a choice to save time and you can keep the FSD happy even if neutron jumping with the AFMU.
@@robl6291
No that’s not true I’ve done huge trips jumping conventionally 700-800 jumps and by the time I got back my FSD had gone down to something like 75%
@@saleseng emergency drops out of SC will also damage the FSD. I've never heard of regular jumps causing wear.
@@robl6291
Yeah absolutely and since you made the point it’s absolutely true that just doing things like that or hull reduction due to mishaps it’s going to damage internal modules so they’re all at risk kind of contrary to the point that the original post was making
This is an excellent commentary, well articulated, touching on the essential sources of play frustrations, and offering what I see as really great ideas to remediate these issues. Do you have, or are able to foster, a means of advising the developers (in a way that stands out from the sea of complaints and uselessly generalized advice that comes from the masses)?
No, it would be nice if I did. All I can do is drive towards a larger audience and hope a dev eventually finds my channel.
I would definitely enjoy a video on your thoughts about ideal features.
Very well thought analysis on Elite issues and possible solutions. I would love to see your ideas implemented. I am wondering if Frontier would ever want to sell the game that it does not want to invest to another company that wants to enhance the game.
Star Wars Galaxies had harvesters that the players used to get materials for crafting things to sell to others.
As a disabled gamer Ive hit a big wall when it comes to grind and Elite, things like scooping materials and finding mats on planets is really hard for me. It feels like I have to do something I can't actually handle.
I kinda feel like what elite needs is what we are going to get this year from bethesda. LOTS to do. intersting NPCs, base building, custom ship building. ELite if you go into open the primary way for players to interact are just shooting each other. sure you can join a group but then people just shoot at your group and what does your group do? it does exactly what you do while playing solo.
How long was that hyperspace jump?!
It a cycled 6 second video
IMHO the best way to improve PVP would be to use an instant action mode that lets players to select an active space conflict zone in the open to spawn there with a combat ship. Ship loadouts could be a set of fixed presets that players can unlock by earning ranks (using CQC mode as example). No travel time, no engineering, and a 100% chance to meet other players.
No they need to make system authority far more powerful than any engineered ship so if a ganker decided to interdict a player any control system then the system authority would show up immediately and either detain, fine or destroy the ganker. That would allow players to freely roam the bubble without the threat of being killed but if you travel to an anarchy system then you're on your own. The journey from the bubble to Colonia could be very dangerous. Which it should
Só you want CQC . No One in the Pvp community Cares for balances PvP lmao stop pretending CQC existes and pvpers are ousays in this game.
ED needs to create a marketplace where players can trade all kinds of things with other players. That one thing would address so many of the problems in the game. They could charge some actual money to participate in the market and thereby fund additional investment in the game. I add that last point because the lack of things like bug fix, new ships, and addressing some of these core problems implies to me that there is a problem with money to fund FDev. I still think ED is the best game in the world, but it has so much undeveloped potential.
By the way for those who think that making money is too hard, go play the exobiology loops, go on a simple 50 to 100 jump trip somewhere and just literally scan one bio signal in every system that you come to that has one, you don’t have to grind five or more bio signals on a any single planet if you don’t want to, and just casually do this while planet surveying at the same time by the time you come back you have a few billion in your bank account😊come on part of the gamesmanship of elite dangerous is figuring things out like this
My solution to grind materials would be that you use materials to unlock the engineers as is now, but once you unlock them, you engineer your ship by paying with credits. This is a way to make money useful even to seasoned players with billions of credits. And no, having to pay money per week to keep a fleet carrier does not make money useful, it makes fleet carriers badly designed.
No thank you on the ship degrading thing. I would immediately stop playing.
i have to agree there are a myriad of "fixable" things graphics are not on the list.. great video fly safe o7
Disagree with the graphics complaints. Was around when Pong on the Atari was being played. The graphics are still sic when I play Horizons on PS4 pro (have Odyssey on PC) on big screen but agree about grinding by picking flowers for engineering stuff or whatever is not fun. It's just to give us something to do instead of interesting missions.
Also a huge problem off the game is implementing new stuff into it and then completely forgetting about it, like multicrew or AMD FSR. Why didnt they update to FSR 2.X because it works so much better than 1.0. The graphics of the game are fine indeed but the anti ailiasing problem should be fixed.
Even then Cobra Engine used by Odyssey doesn't support Direct X 12, and that is AFIAK needed to make FSR 2.0 work. The Cobra Engine used by Frontier in games like Jurassic Park Evolution 2 supports DX 12 and all kinds of nVIDEA & AMD enhancements.
Whats wrong with muito crew? It works for me
With the graphics, it's not that they are dated itself is an issue, it's the abysmal perfomance and associated rig you need to run said dated graphics smoothly. They are a major issue to some. Optimization is objectively fudged.
Remember how the game was running decently even on somewhat dated configs in the original release and Horizons era? I have an i5-7600k and a 1060 6 Gb, my CPU is getting 100%-ed all the time when I play Elite. Sometimes I get drops up to 40 FPS in combat. Space legs FPS is about 20-30 or less in on-foot Confict Zones. Ridiculous for what the game offers in graphics / gameplay department. I mean, I can play the ship part of the game alright, but to think of folks who were running older rigs with 970Ti and corresponding CPU... oof. Yes, you can build a new PC and run the game... mostly smoothly, but this itself is already an issue. Which also got us console versions cancelled.
which game you can run with better FPS yet still looks wastly better?
@@rayfighter kinda any? Yeah, it doesn't have the tech of "the whole planetary surface", but Horizons was running perfectly fine... the graphics didn't get *massively* better.
But why is my FPS dropping in space, when planets aren't even near, such as near starports?
It'd run fine, it's just that the optimization is BONKED. It has improved since Odyssey's launch, but nowhere near where our expectations should be.
@@bloodgulchpatrick"kinda any" no no you cant . Run star citzen . Better yet when starfield releass Run ir with tose specs
Why not use in game earned credits to buy the stuff you need? I don't mean Arks, just use the otherwise useless credits you get in game.
it doesnt need better graphics, NMS is an example that character in design doesn't need to be hyper realistic but optimization helps go a good way.
we need new ships, like... desperately. we need new ways to explore that aren't barred by another type of loop. im a lover of ed but it does need some more love
I have legitimately never seen anything in Elite as to much of a grind engineering included. That being said I'm a player who has done a little of everything outside PvP which will never be attempted if given the choice. It was very easy to get everything I wanted.
There are also many things they could do to make the carriers much more useable and enjoyable.
I played ED all the time for years, especially with VR, voice attack, x52 and I even built a chair for it with bass shakers etc. simply amazing experience. Then they released Odyssey with the 2D panel when on foot and killed the game for me. Iv only now just picked it back up after years.
we should be able to trade raw materials in the FC
Agreed, or sell it, it would create a gameplay indeed
If you truly want to master elite dangerous and get everything you can out of it you need to buy yourself a fleet carrier it will change your space life
Agreed.
How
Much are fleet carriers?
Issue 1 is on point. Thing is, ED is probably the worst example of this 'strategy' I have ever encountered. I want to like it, because the IP is awesome, but the game is so disrespectful of the players time.
But one thing that is for sure elite dangerous is not for everybody there are players who do things the hard way or never truly figure out how to do things efficiently and succinctly and complain about it and then there are players that solve and tackle all of the issues to come up with space life as presented by elite dangerous and thrive and excel with it
Graphic were never an issue, engineers are the root of many complaints. This prolonged exposer to balancing issues made the core game empty by dropping solo/community lobbies would fix the population. Rebalancing is a must.
Overall many brilliant ideas. But, they wont do it. I lost hope since some time now. Your suggestions about COOP + Player missions is something that have been talked and never implemented. It would also be fun to hire an NPC crew of ships to form a wing. So if the players do not respond to the player mission then he could fall back to NPC.
I got disillusioned once I was done with my shipyard. I was going to get ready with all these specialized, highly engineered ships for every task that mattered to me... only to realize there was really _nothing to do_ with them outside of "making my own fun". So _that_ is what I really feel needs to change: This game needs to have some genuine, _inherently_ replayable content and redoable goals - it needs to get away from this misguided mantra of "make your own fun".
That first site seeing to Sirius A I will never forget. I played Xbox ed for years. Not giving plug cuz well, we know how TIGHT this community is. Built a PC and i'm waiting for a steam sale. 07
I really dont have too many problems with ED except for a story/campaign, and maybe base building single player type of experience but thats not what ED is. IMO if they want to make it more than Star Citizen light they should add some type of crypto token system so it can actually be a literal "make a living in the 3000" space sim. Everyone would say thats pay to win but not really when everyone could do it and most of the generated income would be going back to the player that provides the service. Similar to how crypto or any economic system would work..
The balancing issue starts with ships like the medium size Python outclassing other, bigger ships and some ships being just useless. It was a problem from the start, and Frontier ignored it or try to fixed it with "new" ships like the Imperial Eagle or Viper MK IV. I doubt that Frontier will ever even try to improve basic balance of ship sizes & roles.
There is a long list of things they can do better that one video can’t cover. But biggest grip here is lack of care for their fans. The separation of console from everything was not right.
Odyssey is the problem. Instead spending 2 years of trying to a shoe-horn an FPS into Elite and in doing so completely alienating the entire console community; they could have focused on what we had.
Develope the story, work on the economy, work on the multi player aspects that don't work so well, add a couple ships and SRVs, maybe throw in gas giant interactivity and we would have had a great game going. All with no need to shove the VR and console communities aside.
I like odessey your point os mute
Awesome video and perfectly accurate description of the issues with great suggestions for improvements and completely free of horseshit excuses and far-fetched explanations how the "problem is in the players". If you were in charge of Elite right now and took action in accordance to your views, the playerbase would grow 300 percent at least.
Too bad the developers of this game suck too much ass to at least realize those issues, let alone do anything to fix them.
I agree up until you tried to compare Elite to Fortnite. The player audiences are vastly different and play for different reasons. Fortnite is a cash cow for the lowest common denominator. Elite is a space opera MMO for space nerds. We’re a much smaller demographic.
careful criticizing grind an such, ur gonna attract simps telling you its just you
It is him tho . Define grind by your own .what is grindy ? Credits ship engeneering on foot engeneering rank unlocks? Define it lol bro
@@Keloot most of that, most of that isnt gameplay, but is timesink, fdev admitted that themselves, which is why they said they would re look at it, bro :0)
Since the very recent update ... my character has been deleted by Elite ... that's a huge issue with me .... I more suspect population figures might well drop through the floor ....
Well said, great points.
Still look fine to me (horizon client), graphics is clearly not the issue, and yes it look incredible in VR.
Perhaps one of my issues is the connection of progress between private and public gameplay, which makes things even more unfair for the one that dare to play in public. in my opinion there should be a public gameplay multiplier (yes that could be exploited, but should be).
FDev developers should just all be required to play the game for a couple of hundred hours then we would start to see some changes.
Passive wear is a bad idea for exploration, Distant Worlds 2 tooks months to complete and used more than enough materials to keep the FSD maintained from neutron jumping.
The problem with Elite's graphics isn't that they're dated. It's that they're broken. Odyssey looks worse than Horizons 3.8 did because it barely works.
In total agreement with the rest of the video, particularly in regards to incentivizing positive player interactions/cooperation.
👍 Mostly (90%) agree.
Performance is the main issue with this game. You get more of star citizen for the same hardware.
The problem is the lack of vision of devs and Frontier is a really closed Company, that dont have the resources for such a big game that is ED. Its a Shame, this game have great potencial, but Fdev cant afford this.
They just need to start working on a new game at this point. The problem is that they may not have the resources to pull off the kind of polish they would want. Elite Dangerous before odyssey was perfectly fine, but it was adding a poorly implemented fps element on top that showed me they wouldn’t be able to do it in this engine.
The animations stink: they just do. A good fps is not one that doesn’t any of the issues you suggested (I know you’re talking about the game as a whole, but let me explain), a good fps is a game where is feels good to shoot in first person. Seriously. Call of duty modern warfare is the most satifsfying game in the world, and it has nothing to do with balance or gameplay. It just feels good to shoot.
In elite, it feels good to fly in your ship. It’s perfect and they shouldn’t change anything. But if they want to have the fps work, being in first person alone needs to be it’s own draw, and to do that you need a few things: one, perfectly immersive animations; two, good feedback when hitting targets (rag dolls, injury animations, etc; and three, good sounds (which they can, no doubt, do.
You're not wrong.
how long is your passion gonna stand when you know everything you said will fall onto deaf ears and are just wishful thinking at best
Elite doesn't need a new graphics engine per-se, it need a sequel, a re-boot. The preverbal cat has been let out of the bag, and the barn door has been left open. Engineering fundamentally broke the game, Too many gold rush's have occurred making credit's meaningless thus invalidating long term ship progression and invalidating small ships.
Security states pretty much have no bearing in Eltie, and in order to incentivize a healthy community of new players and those with more non-violent career paths, not only should ganking should have more severe and lasting consequences, but there should me more in-depth gameplay loops or veteran players, because "ganking" is basicly what happens when long time players become bored with the content. It's no different than GTA online.
The major part is actual gameplay... the vast majority of Elite Dangerous is about two things, taking off and landing and ship combat. that's it. Outside of mining and exploration, the latter FDev refuse to expand upon.
I won't offer any of my possible solutions to these issues because it's all just pissing in the wind, just like the one's in this video.
FDev over the course of all these years have shown they don't have either the skill, resources or will to both fix Elties short comings or develop it to live up to it's potential.
Elite is what it is (not all bad) and Frontier will take the path of least resistance.
Hello Cmdr. nice video. I would add titles to your chapters instead of writing just Issue X - would give a better overview.
On grinding -I would say that HORIZONS ship engineering is barrable after all changes FD made over the time like giving every material you pick x3 and implementing material traders made out live much easier- but still sometimes its easier to LOGIN LOGOUT respawn locations to gether materials wich is sad - EDO is especially grindy on engineering weapons and suites -the amount of mats you need is huge and some are very rare - but this could be solved very easy in 1 day - simply by enabling the bartender to trade every material or data that is needed (and not restricting it). In EDO getting lots of material is easy - getting the correct ones is the real time eater and VERY FRUSTRATING!
ED have many bad designed features, annoying datails, and many things bad or nerfed on puprose (for example, PvE piracy).
I'd say, ED need normal software developer. Frontier development made for game all good they could, and now they, actually, destroying it, since EDO or even EDH Fleet carriers update.
The best, that Frontier could do for ED, is stop their awful game development and release server part, as they promised to backers. So community modders could finally fix ED.
Great vid with excellent suggestions.
o7 cmdr.
Somewhat agree 51%.
Stopped playing ED several years ago after I got interdictied whilst refueling at a star i was a newb and got destroyed, my brain just went how did that work in physics how did the ship that fired the gravity gun not get destroyed as it fired its so close to a star. The game in my mind was not as good to real life dynamics as it proposed to be. I had been playing the game for a few weeks and just never went back.
Why are you here them ... Are you mentally ill or something
The game sucks because all the stuff you want to do is locked behind loading times (supercruise) supercruise is the most monotonous function of the game. But if you want to go more superficial, more ships even if they fill similar roles as others (people buy lambos for gods sake theyll buy a better or dumber looking version of the FDL or type 9).
Players suck, griefers are only doing it for catharsis which leaves a sour taste in my mouth (punsih not those who exist but those who exist to punish)
Not enough secrets in the game lately, everything is too on the nose and the implications of the things that could be in the far reaches are just that, implications. (Altough drip feeding secrets in a video game is prob good because some people love doing all of them and then rubbing it in)
Kinda glad i didnt pick this up since it just doesn't seem like a fun experience.
Some good points, however... adding a passive degrade system would 100% kill the game for me. You are deliberately making exploring more tedious and require more modules, increasing the barrier to entry. I do exploring to chill out and relax, not to have to keep worrying I am not doing enough with the time I have. If it was tied to using an optional game mechanic, like how jet cone boosting causes damage to the FSD, that makes sense. Because you are accepting damage in exchange for the added boost. Taking damage just by EXISTING is not fun or interesting.
Degrade systems are the bane of my gaming experience and I cannot think of ANY examples where it actually was a good, fun mechanic. They add nothing.
Put VR in the whole game.
Elite Dangerous delivers a profound, unyielding grind and the clip used in this video is a prime example of a loading screen, SSD's could help with the loading, the grindy gameplay can't just be written out, I played all day on Sunday and experienced nothing new at all on the grand scale of things. The gameplay involved travelling backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards and back....you get the picture.
It's an old game, it has some problems, devs are being devs... Just let it go. It has been played for a lot of time and it's time to let it go
The problem with ED is fundamental. The game is a long grind because you dont lose your ship when you die. If the game would be a full loot pvp setup with actual industry, it would make ships a lot cheaper, and allow for building ships for your group, fleeting up, etc. It would be amazing.
Man I been here a while aand it seems like they hate the player./ i remember when we could make good credits at med 4 and mining and 50 mil credit hauling and they nerfed it? so DEPPRESSING.I DONT KNOW. Loved this game ! maybe open it up to Modders 2 save it. help us some1.
Give me Goddam proper VR support for the game you sold me as built from the ground up for VR David Braben. Frontier Developments just continue to nosedive in my opinion. Previously they were my favourite developer and Braben was my favourite programmer, no longer! I was getting really interested in the Zoo game that they have but I'm not buying anymore stuff from them until they start treating their customers with a modicum of respect and gratitude. I may not care about F1 driving games but when I hear that you abandon support for a game that people are playing only 2 months after release then I know to avoid you in the future!
I can't disagree. The only one problem with videos like this is it's casting pearls before swine. And I'm not even talking about the players who don't see where real issues with the game are and complain about graphics. I'm talking FDev. They don't care, they have zero regard for players time and they even outright spit in players faces with some stupid engineer unlock requirements. The only one thing they are good at are sound, visuals and overall atmosphere. The rest is either some accidental crap spewed out by some random numbers generator implemented in rush and never looked at again to refine or a few paragrapsh of inconsequential text fed to a text to speach software to act as "content" ( probably produced by some intern).
Crime&Punishment ... LOL ... yeah.
That constant FSD sequence made me stop watching. Though I do find your video's interesting. A still would have been less of an issue.
im convinced my man is just stuck in witchspace
Man i ground out the python got lost in space ran out of gas and lost my ship kinda lost interest after that lol
Its the game balance for me tbh. Being basically locked into pulse+multi for CZs and PA+rail for pvp is just aggravatingly boring. Theres so many weapon types that are completely useless, because theyre just worse versions of pulse/multis (like cannons and dumbfires) or just require atrocious amounts of maintenance (shock cannons e.g.) its downright criminal.
Ships are poorly balanced, too. So many ships that have no conceivable reason to exist. Theres just one de facto ship for every role, everything else is just making life harder on yourself for minor stylepoints. Chieftain was the first real combat ship i bought years ago. By now I'm so sick and tired of seeing that thing, that i'd rather gimp myself and fly worse ships, even deliberately avoiding it for AX. Hows that a good thing?
Abandoned after 300 hours (odyssey)
-too much grind for anything.
-if you need something, there is nothing ingame that tells you where to look (not even approximately), you have to rely on external sites.
-does the community want something? perfect, Frontier don't care.
This game could have been perfect when it came out, but they made it obsolete by not taking into consideration what the users really wanted.
And then, users migrated to Star Citizen and No Man's Sky.