If you go and start an EVE Online thread, I’ll start ranting there and WILL NOT STOP.
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That’s what I’m afraid of!
I fear quite a few of us have a number of gripes with CCP and eve…
Perhaps they should all be placed in one thread under ‘Other Games’. Saves time trying to thread the topic needle as it were; besides, they are all related and interconnected. What’s more, Elite, EVE and Star Citizen get enough PR as it stands.
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Some pretty pictures from Horizons.
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Yes, everyone loves pretty but pretty won’t keep players - meaningful, challenging gameplay will.
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[Taken from the SC thread]
You’re assuming that making 400billion star systems took more work than it would have to make 1000.
It didn’t.
Besides which, Elite was designed to be a primarily single-player experience with the occasional bit of multiplayer drop-in. Frontier also wanted entire community to be able to change the galaxy over time as a way of keeping things fresh and interesting. With that sort of model, if they’d have pulled it off in the way they were hoping to, having a map that’s pretty much infinite would have been great.
Imagine a core group of systems that, due to player intervention, were totally different from the rest of the galaxy. As you move further away from those core systems you’d start running into different sorts of NPCs and missions, a lot more traffic, different stations with different equipment, different fees and fines and laws. The contrast for heading off into the unknown would only have gotten greater over time.
Doesn’t that sound great on paper? Pity it didn’t work and pity the groundwork to get it to work isn’t all that useful for adding multiplayer-focused content they’re trying to fill in for it with…
Huh, I went on a bit of a rambling tangent here. Point was; if the game held to its original vision then the galaxy size would have been swell and even with what they have now it didn’t take any extra time or resources to make the ~400billion-ish system galaxy vs something in the region of 500-1000.
Hmmm…you really think that creating a few hundred stars and planets would be equal to making a few billion planets based on the milky way, with all its computation? Even Procedural has limitations, not to mention bugs to contend with, especially something that big.
Also the fact they designed Elite to be primarily ‘single-player’ is exactly where they went wrong. Why the hell would you make 4 billion stars and planets for what is essentially a single player? ROFL! That has to be one of the biggest missteps in gaming history. Sorry but having a map that is ‘pretty much infinite’ is infinitely idiotic, especially for something that is primarily a single-player. Guess it kind of explains why not many play Elite.
That can be done with a thousand Stars - easily! In fact it would be infinitely better because there would be more players to populate systems and supply content. Sorry but it’s original vision was flawed from the very beginning, including their upgrade payment system.
It takes more work to hand-craft that many star systems as it does a procedural system to make as many as you feel like.
There’s no more computation involved, stuff gets generated for you client-side when you go to it, that’s why PG works so well.
Where they went wrong is that they didn’t want the cost of running vast networks of servers so went with a peer to peer multiplayer system that’s never going to be all that good at involved multiplayer content. Then they realized they’d coded themselves into a corner and needed centralized servers with an always online connection and all the costs involved in such a system anyway to keep a bunch of their game’s core features working as intended.
On the subject of map size… Because they could? Makes no real difference in terms of how they were making the game.
Not really. If you want to give players the chance to change things, 1000 systems would all be changed in a short time and remain mostly homogeneous with today’s player numbers on the elite servers, let alone what they had at launch.
The whole point of the large galaxy was (initially) to let people go out into ‘unspoiled’ space and see a genuine difference. Not all that much point speculating seeing as the system wasn’t fully implemented much beyond some flavor-text.
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Well, I can see we are going to have to agree to disagree.
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I could have put some snarky comment about how near infinite map size was the reason Minecraft did so poorly, but I decided to be classier about it. 
Onto something relevant; how do you feel about their plan to release year on year season passes with a small amount of starter content bundled with it for the price of a full retail game?
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Doesn’t interest me. Think they are struggling to find innovative ways to find revenue. Seems they thought it was all about size but it’s about content, and how you use it - that keeps players returning and motivated.
To be fair it seems like a lot of the content is there, it’s just hidden away behind various barriers to entry disguised as more content. 
Stolen or salvaged goods and the black-market system spring to mind. Has the nasty side-effect of justifying the lack of work on npc police too.
@Naiba: the reason Minecraft did so well is not due to the vastness of its map but rather because it’s a good sandbox, and more importantly, Mojang was always cool with users fiddling with the code as long as they didn’t sell it. This allowed a huge diversity in mods/plug-ins and thus a lot of content, some of which even ended up being included in the game itself.
As a side note, the map size was even a problem due to the poor optimization. Some plug-ins allowed a map limit, they were very popular for most multiplayer servers.
Speaking of sand-box games, this is the only example of game in which it is OK to hide contents, IMO. “Elite Dangerous” is far from being a sand box in its current state.
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aw come on tjafaas, he said he decided not to bring his snarky comment into conversation, cut him some slack.
However, feel free to elaborate, why you think that elite is far from being a sandbox game.
I wasn’t sure if @Naiba had a lengthy argument about why map size is important but went lazy, or if the sentence was sarcastic and meant exactly the opposite.
So I decided to respond as if it were a real argument.
Anyway, sorry if my digression seemed oppressive or arrogant.
As for why I don’t consider ED as sand box game? Well… as far as I see it, a game becomes truly a sandbox when there’s a API that allows mods and plug-ins, as long as they’re more extensive than simple skins. Before that, the only content that is released is by the dev team and unless it is a construction game or unless there’s really a lot of content, it’s hard to say the “unpredicted things by the dev team” would happen.
I haven’t bought Horizon yet, but I’m having trouble to see how this extension would bring that “unpredictability”.
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Eh, I guess I’ve always had a soft-spot for games with infinite map limits. I could probably build some lengthy argument to justify my preferences but, as usual when I start posting on this forum, it’s past 2AM and I’m dead tired and would much rather use my time to be facetious and sarcastic.
Forgiven, but now I can’t stop laughing at that sentence for some reason.
I really wish I had more time to devote to this forum than I do sometimes.
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A nice remake of the Elite II intro in Horizons.
Hehe, nice! I didn’t know you could have a “non-cockpit” view in ED. Still, the ship making the view must have been pretty hurt when hurling himself at the station entry ^^
Now there’s only to add some big round white clouds in “horizon” and the remake will be complete 
NPCs are getting a bit smarter in the 2.1 update.
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Now this gets interesting. Especially the end of the never-ending stationnary spinning 
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