Then the next season will be coming out and your logic will demand to wait another year for that expansion to be $10…
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Many warned Elite that all that real estate with nothing to do doesn’t exactly create a lot of content; now they are charging for more content? Gamers also warned CCP that making DUST exclusively Playstation was a bad idea and that it was basically stabbing paying PC subscribers in the back; now EVE is stuck at 2007 player levels. And now CIG is trying to use an engine that wasn’t designed for Space flight let alone support a hundred players in a system. Sometimes common sense just doesn’t apply to game developers. Hopefully I-Novae will be able to look into the future with a little more clarity.
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From all space engines out there I-Novae is the most advanced (by far). I was so used to the planetary landing videos of I:B. Today in E:D I landed on 5-6 different planets/moons without atmosphere and I have to admit: they need to improve it by a lot. Nevertheless it was so much fun to experience the real scale (looking at your ship from outside is just amazing…)
I share the feeling that there is not much motivation to play E:D 30 hours straight without interruption (a REALLY good game does that, e.g. I played Dark Souls 29 hours straight without interruption). I hope that with the upcoming season systems like crafting add much more depth to the game.
PS: I want big caves on planets. And clouds. I love clouds. <3
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Fixed it for you, you’re welcome. That was quite the bloodbath back then -_-’
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You’ve caught on to me plan! 
I will patiently wait. Why? Because I can judge the expansion for what they have developed not for what they say they will.
Not only that, I have no rush to jump in because nothing I can do as a player makes an impact. If I could start supporting tiny outposts and influence them to become larger cities/stations(planet side or no) this would influence my decision a bit more.
As it stands, why pay full price for “early access” amount of content when I can wait and get the “full game” for cheaper, especially when there is no ingame consequences for doing so.
I love flying spaceships more than anything, but elite just doesn’t capture my imagination. It lacks the attention grabber with deep gameplay where I can interact with the sandbox instead of just walking around on the beach. It feels dead…the solutions listed above in the persistence link would go along way to solving these problems and would definitely influence my opinion.
I could just be spoiled with Eves level of openness and creativity and expect it everywhere, but that’s the way it is. My bar for sandboxes have been set. Its not frontiers fault, but I won’t go crazy about their game until they reach that bar.
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I played horizons a few hours today.
The planetary graphics really still need a lot of work, having played the IB prototype, they were kinda dissappointing.
They aren’t really comparable, the graphical difference is somewhat like far cry to far cry 4.
Maybe some people have played Rodina (great little indie game with full scale planets): Imagine Rodinas planet graphics with a little more detail and realism, and better shaders.
If you are one the fence about buying the expansion I recommend that you don’t do it, if it cost 10 euro maybe then the price would be reasonable.
The entry into the planet is unfortunatly also not without stand-still instance transitions, there is a huge pause (probably depends on server load and connection) while switching instances.
As soon as you are fully entered the ships speed is limited like usual, this makes surface near travel almost impossible because the ships are painfully slow. The handling of the rovers is bad, I watched videos before and the handling looked intuitive and fun, unfortunatly it isn’t IMO - very clunky.
The landscapes look molten, closeup there are only smooth features. On the surface are little rock models if you are close enough, they don’t cast shadows and have basic lighting, this makes them look very unnatural and out of place. They performance with maximum graphics settings is about the same as IB with medium settings the last time I played it, obviously with IB looking much much better.
Overall 2/10, would not recommend.
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Aside from the ridiculous speed cap, those are mostly just graphical issues and that I can deal with. Even the slow transitions are fine because I understand software limitations. My largest gripe is just gameplay because that should be what a game is about. If I wanted to look at pretty pictures of space I’d look at NASA’s collection of Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, etc. I play games to play the game.
That sounded a bit more standoffish than I intended so please don’t take it that way, I’m just ranting/venting my woes on elites waste of potential(in my opinion, I know some disagree which is Ok)
I had literally months of online time in station spinner online because while the gfx weren’t the prettiest(at the time), I had so many avenues to express creativity with which to entertain myself.
I was definitely an asshole but the game provided the tools for me to do this and others to get their retribution. I shouldn’t be comparing the two but I feel that I can since they are both portrayed as an mmo sandbox with thousands of systems. Eve was a sub simulator and elite is a flight simulator both set in space, that’s OK but only one gives the player a true sandbox. I want to embargo a system and send it into anarchy. I did the same in eve and extorted money out of players to leave them in peace. Let me create an industrial empire. Let me destroy an industrial empire. That’s a damn sandbox.
Ok /endrant sorry guys
I just feel its a damn shame in its current state. I know they say they have plans to fix it, but it took CCP years to begin fixing their game and it’s still ongoing. Im not holding my breath and once I get my hands on the prototype my spaceship flying urges will be sated by physics and gameplay that I enjoy and I see even less of a reason to log onto a elite twice a year.
I just hope Inovae doesn’t fall into the same traps and can learn from space Sim gaming history. Finding and avoiding the mistakes of other games will play a large part in defining how successful they can be.
Edit: To add to this last point, from what I’ve seen and read the team has the right ideas I think and I’m super excited to watch how they proceed and the game(s) move forward.
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fanboois? Is that what you call paying subscribers who wanted DUST on PC and paid for it? ok? You seem to be confused about fanboys. Fanboys inevitably sign onto whatever developers do and vehemently attack others for not agreeing. For example, if Flavien and his team decided to add pay to win element to Battlescape or begin building spaceships with open cockpits and wheels, fanboys would joyfully sign on and hunt down anyone who didn’t. Lets hope fanboys don’t ruin Battlescape like they did a myriad other games by mindlessly agreeing to anything and everything.
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Agree with everything you said. But I-Novae should be careful not to sacrifice content over pretty graphics because that will get old really really fast. If they can get the right balance between content and visuals they will come out on top…
That’s exactly how I feel, maybe I miswrote something(I was on mobile). That is one of the traps I meant when talking about Inovae learning from the failures(in my opinion) of others which would be Frontier in this case.
Other notable space genre games have the financial and community backing to screw up a few times. Inovae unfortunately doesn’t have the chance. We have 1 shot to get this right or we will fall pretty hard. I do, however, believe they are taking the right direction which is reassuring and keeps me optimistic.
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Couldn’t agree more but am a little more cautious as to I-Novae’s future. They are making a wise decision to start off with a few planets instead of numerous systems. Build a foundation first then expand. But they ought to be careful because if they don’t tune into how gaming is evolving, they will end up struggling just to survive. They also require more active PR.
Agree, slow and steady growth is fantastic once they have a worthy product to sell.
I disagree with this. The KS was successful. The only people who really care about the game right now are us fanatics. Yes we could get a few more early adopters and beta/alpha tiers, but I think it’s better to keep the game under wraps until they are ready to release it and then go wild with PR. Why? So that it doesn’t fall into the trap of E:D and SC. They both had massive amounts of PR and while initially successful, this thread is an obvious example of how the success financially didn’t equate to the success of a fun game. Disclaimer for SC, since I haven’t played it nor can I judge it’s gameplay. Looks pretty though, but we’ve seen how much drama and controversy there has been with SC that isn’t even about gameplay. PR is just another trap right now.
We should be patient and only ramp up PR once we have a truly fantastic product to sale. They have to be very careful because of the vapour ware tag hanging over their heads. It’s just the way it is. Doing it this way also allows us to keep the community smaller, making it easier to assist the game to evolve on track and not get into something out of control and alien to the original idea.
I think PR will be necessary, but not immediately and not right now. The time for PR has come and gone, it’s time to stay silent and stun the gaming community with a game when they are ready.
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Yeah PR has probably never been our strongest point, we devote most of our time to working on the game. Next month production will ramp up as ppl begin quitting their jobs and PR should pick up accordingly =).
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Interesting take. And as one who supported SC from the beginning and played it, I can certainly confirm your assessment; what’s more, their PR is a roaring success - their product less so. But lets not forget that Battlescape barely succeeded making its most basic fund raising goal and this is owing to it’s under the radar, ignore the public methodology. Moreover, we shouldn’t equate all PR with the bloated, over hyped, under performing circus that is now Star Citizen. PR shouldn’t be an either/or proposition but a balance between promoting enthusiasm on one hand yet keeping promises on the other.
So I would have to disagree, I-Novae needs to up their PR or at the very least get the community more energized and engaged. And that can only happen when the community, no matter how small, is getting regular updates with upbeat positive presentations. And although I don’t agree with how it is being implemented - I still think I-Novae has a lot to be upbeat and positive about. They just need to start translating it into visible, consistent information that will translate into an energized community. Of course, as Keith has noted above, PR has never been their strong point but as he said, once they quit their jobs and begin ramping up production things should change, especially once the engine becomes available.
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I guess I was sort of ambiguous to what extent PR should happen and that’s my fault. I didn’t at all mean no PR no awareness raising until the game is finished. I just meant that we should be careful with how much we advertise and slowly grow it. I would love to hit the stretch goals still possible and that can only happen with more advertising. Having said that I think that if tomorrow suddenly battlescape became a huge hit and had millions flowing in within days, this could hurt the scope and potential of the game. With millions of dollars comes thousands of mouths asking for their ideas to be heard and implemented. What happens then is you get left with a bunch of things you could do with very little depth, a familiar problem.
Crowd development is, for this reason, a terrible way to develop a game because this can happen if one isn’t careful. It can also be successful, and there are examples of this which is why I just want to stress that small incremental success and PR might be better than instant success, money, and PR tomorrow. I think we both agree on the idea, but disagree where we stand on the spectrum. That’s okay though 
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I agree. Don’t think we differ much. Steady, incremental success is always preferable to over promising and under-delivering. But a lot of great ideas come from the public and they should be heard - they can contribute a lot. What’s more we can gauge what the public wants as what they want is what they will pay for. But yeah, sometimes the public can be a big pain in the ass with their countless demands and over opinionated psychobabble - I should know being one of them. It’s tough, no question - finding the balance.
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I know we’re getting off topic now (and we should create a new thread for this because this is about E:D, not about the marketing setup of I:B) BUT:
In my imagination I:B should be competitive as Rocket League is right now. By providing real fun gameplay a game can get REALLY REALLY famous and never get old, while those hyped MMOs (no names here) are soaked out very quickly (because there is no BIG fun, once you’ve landed on a planet 3-4 times it gets old).
We as a community can spread the word and in 2017-2018 we can ask a friend: “Hey, wanna hang around in a 3-4 hours I:B session?” - “Sure. Haha, remember when I bombed these skanks away on the lava field? I hope to see them again today!”
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Fanbois was just the least offending term I could come up with. They aren’t fanboys in the traditional sense (as you pointed out), more like a mutation of it, hence the i instead of y.
Just as a note, there is a rant coming in that is offtopic, proceed with caution.
To make things clear: Eve subscribers did not pay for Dust to be on pc. They paid to be able to play Eve Online, which doesn’t make them entitled to play any other game CCP makes on their chosen platform.
CCP realized that they needed to introduce more people to the eve franchise, as the playerbase wasn’t the biggest to say the least (especially if you count in all the people who pay for multiple accounts). You can only milk people to a certain degree. Which means that those players probably can’t pay enough to keep Dust 514 afloat. Additionally Eve players already spend a huge amount of their free time playing eve online (again, especially those with multiple accounts). So those people can’t even properly populate a shooter, as they are too busy spending hours moving cargo through n sectors. Which means you need (a lot of) new people to introduce to the game. Problem is: The pc market is overrun with top notch f2p shooter. Given the design of Dust 514 that is off-putting to most players and that there are a lot of good f2p shooters to play instead, how could you ever begin to believe that the game would be succesful in any way, shape or form? Everyone who might’ve been interested in Dust would have had a better experience playing Planetside 2, which also has the playerbase needed to sustain the game.
On consoles (in this case the PS3) however, things look completely different. There was virtually no competition on consoles, Dust was the only f2p shooter on the ps3 at the time (and iirc still is), and was one of 3 f2p games in total.Now imagine. An installed userbase of around 50 to 60 million people (dust was released in 2013 and ps3 had a reported userbase of around 43 million at the end of 2010), who usually have to pay 50-60 bucks for a new game, suddenly get the opportunity to play a shooter for free for the first time. Way better starting point if you ask me.
That doesn’t mean that ccp didn’t make any mistakes. The biggest one probably was alienating their new found playerbase by allowing mouse and keyboard, something their fanbois, who paid hundreds of bucks to get a ps3 (because that makes more sense than accepting that they arent the target audience in an entry to the eve franchise) just to play dust 514. Suddenly the console players were pitted against players who had superior aiming paired with the shittiest attitude found in any console community: “Buy yourself a mouse and keyboard nub, that’s totally fair”, because it makes more sense to force tens of thousand players to adapt to a control scheme (if they want to stay competitive) that wasn’t made for their platform, rather than having probably less than 1000 guys learn the platforms control scheme.
But hey, Dust 514 is still alive, and recently (last year iirc, after the introduction of crates) even became profitable. Makes sense to cease active development of it and redevelop the game as a f2p shooter on pc. That’s totally not bound to end up more miserably than the hindenburg.
All in all CCP made the right choice to bring Dust to any other platform than the pc. They only fucked it up when they listened to the very vocal but also very minor group of fanbois who demanded pc controls on a console game which in turn made a lot of players ragequit the game.
/rant
David Braben does an end of year post https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=214169 mentioning Infinity: Battlescape 
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Wonder if Braben ever visited us, this would surely be a topic to scan…
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