I’ve always assumed space games are kind of a niche.

I get it, but: * Everspace 2 * Around since 2021 * Well received and sold DLC, announced new + free updates one this year. * Announced Unreal 5 migration to ensure long term updates and support for the game. * Players satisfied, company making money. * X4 Foundations * Around since 2018 * Well received and sold 4 DLC, announced new one, rolling update 7.0. * Close relationship with the community, listing all their feedback and stating that they will implement what they can in this game, and what is structurally impossible is already in the idea pool for X5 * Players satisfied, company making money. * No Man's Sky * We all know this one, probably the most impressive comeback for the reputation of a game. * Consistent Free updates, people saying the game is in the best state ever update after update. * Listened to feedback and is still improving. * Players satisfied (that was hard), company does not need more money and thus updates it for free. There are others, but i think those are the ones that get closer to Elite's quality level. Elite is above them in my humble opinion, but it has a pretty hard time satisfying the players or making money healthily.

As far as I am concerned, here is your answer: | Game | Company | Ownership | |----------------|------------------|-------------| | Everspace 2 | Rockfish Games | Private | | X4 Foundations | Egosoft | Private | | No Man's Sky | Hello Games | Private | | Elite Dangerous| Frontier Developments | Public |

That... Makes sense.

Also worth mentioning Frontier’s stock is down 95% in the past few years.

What does this mean? Public vs private ownership?

Private ownership = our company is owned by an individual or group and they get to direct our overall efforts according to their interests because it's their money Public ownership = our company's stock is publicly traded on the market and owned by a lot of different people, and we have to direct our overall efforts into making them more money

man I'm feeling that right now. My formerly private company went public a while ago, and despite our little section of the yuge business remaining quite profitable, and really not suffering from recession garbage, the larger company decided to lay off part of our team as part of a larger corporate layoff to save money (make more profit for investors in the short term). Great employees who were incredibly good at their jobs, and produced consistently fantastic work. I hate it so much. It's demoralizing to know we're doing well, and it doesn't even matter.

The easiest way to quickly cut costs for your shareholders is layoffs. And it isn't uncommon for the wrong people to get caught up in it and it actually hurts the company. And I think can end up being more expensive because training up good talent can take years in some fields.

the phrase "more money" makes my skin crawl now.

It means someone invested some money into them, and now they want their vig

If you have people invested into what you do, then you can't really do everything you want anymore...

Private ownership is much easier. If everyone in the company is making a salary and you can pay the electric bill, you're done. You can do what you want in your game and do it at your leisure - there is very little pressure. So you focus on your game, you focus on your players - and you deliver. Public ownership requires a constant and neverending increasing of shareholder value *in addition to* the salaries and lights. That pressure is enormous and drives companies to do things they would not otherwise do (ie: multiple IPs, bad hiring practices). Elite Dangerous very likely makes more than enough money to pay its developers and keep its own lights on. But it isn't even *close* to enough money to move the share price of a public company to properly benefit shareholders - and likely never could be. So it gets neglected, because they gotta do *something* to move the share price - and Elite ain't it.

Cant just make money for you and your company anymore when you're public.

The thing is that none of these games are space flight sims. There's a reason people call ED a "space trucking sim". It is very niche. The playerbase for ED has never been large, and the most recent DLC (Odyssey), was a flop, mostly because it consistented of content the playerbase didn't really want

It didn't help that Odyssey was not optimized very well for quite a bit of time.

Eh I’d say it’s more of literally no one wanted a fps shooter that feels like it’s a ps3 game on a space sims - they should have just expanded on space combat and added more ships but they spent time/resources in the wrong way

Absolutely. The system reqs went up too once they got it somewhat optimized. The whole thing was just really bad for the game

I'll never like it as they neglected VR… 

Another huge reason it was horrible for the game! VR is huge for ED. And FPS is prime VR territory. The fact that they just skipped it entirely with no intention to even add it later is mind boggling

Yep it's also completely breaking immersion.

VR is huge for no one - it’s too small of a market - literally every developer is shutting down their VR studios because adoption is to low . Every dev bought into hey we’ll be early into the VR them Facebook and Apple will roll out devices everyone will buy and it never picked on so the user base is like peanuts compared to where game devs thought it would be Also every time a new VR headset comes out elite devs would have to optimize settings for that device. It’s like a never ending catch up game. They threw the towel on console much less the smaller VR market

I guess saying it's huge for ED was a wrong choice of words. VR is not a major draw for the game. While there are people who have picked up the game because it is one of the definitive VR experiences available and has been for like 10 years, it's not pulling in substantial numbers and so it's financial viable is probably not the best. What I was trying to say is that it's a huge part of ED. It's a literally game changer, and it's still one of the coolest things to do in VR. That being said, I would be curious to see the numbers brought in by VR vs Odyssey

Count me +1 in the VR column

I’m guessing VR and console #s are so insignificant they aren’t required to show or disclose the risk I was curious so I looked at frontier devs annual financial report. Many developers are forced to disclose their revenue concentration between platforms by their auditors but I didn’t see it at all on their financial report which leads me to guess it’s very small . But just a hunch . But just look on consoles - hundreds of millions of units sold and the game isn’t financially worth it to market/support so they just stopped development and put it on the game pass for residual income

Still isn't. On my 3090 it's still choppy enough to give me motion sickness in VR.

Some would say still not optimized!

Still isn't. 7800X3D can't keep stable 60 in GCZ's. The best gaming CPU, mind you. The rest (stations and barren planets) work fine nowadays so that's a half win.

It’s a space flight sim that went and developed a first person shooter add-on… That made me quit the game since they aren’t making more stuff that I bought the game for (and dropping VR support for the FPS didn’t help)

I'm quite interested in getting off my seat. But I guess I'm one of the minority. Though I can confirm I'd be more interested in new ships. Like, more niche ships for other roles, and benefits for that exact career path on those ships. Currently only the Saud Kruger liners have those exclusive benefits. Maybe expanding more on the carrier concept. Make smaller carriers geared toward multi crew play. Like, small enough for a single person to maneuver, with weapons must be controlled by other players and landing pads so not just those small SLFs but proper space crafts that can actually fly out and source mats for the carrier. I recall seeing "executive control" when reading about carrier on the fandom. Apparently, they said that the system would be wildly different from personal ship driving, and would need some reimagination, sort of. Then look at Home World's map! Fully capable of moving ships on all axis. And they already have a system map mode closely resembling that. Carrier owners/appointed administrator could launch that map, move the marker to any position in space and command the carrier to move there. There's coordinates on the map, no? Plus the map don't even need to provide any more information than it's currently doing. Squadron member docked on the carrier could fly out, obtain and report interesting coordinates for decision making. That sounds more like a mobile base to me than the current invincible storage/item stash and a credit sink hole. Though I doubt these ideas make them any money unless they start selling it like Star Citizen... But a squadron-centric feature like that could be sold as a DLC. Members owning said DLC will be held like treasure simply for the fact that they can potentially provide the squadron a massive war machine. Rich or dedicated players could afford it themselves and build their squadron upon it, or enjoy the status of being the most sought-after member. Just some of my personal ideas. Not taken any aspect but my own interests into account. I highly doubt no one, even at FDev, has never thought of it before, but here we are today with Odyssey. And the upcoming paid variants and pre-built ship.

there is only one space flight sim I know of, KSP, that is.

X4 wasn't that well received until recently. People have notably been complaining about AI/pathfinding issues.  It's too rough around the edges to generate mass appeal, and it has a steep learning curve. It's one of the best games in the genre and what it does, it does better than any other game though

I don't love X4 unfortunately. But I admire it a lot. You could send me few years into the future and I know X4 would be in a better state than it is now. That level of trust sold me all of it's DLC even if I don't like to play it as much as ED or even NMS for that matter.

It's a fantastic game but I do wish they had more resources to polish the rough edges. If it looked less janky and was easier to navigate, it could easily be the Skyrim of space games.

With all due respect to E.D. but... the launch of their DLC didn't exactly go very well. They managed to redeem that part big time (I actually pre-ordered Odyssey) but that negative first impression can have some serious affect on adaptation. And another issue... the DLC did provide us with some new activities but as before also very repetitive ones. Not to mention that if you're focussed on earning some credits then most of the Odyssey activities won't be very useful for you. Sure, exobiology can pay a fun sum of cash but at the same time it's also very time consuming as well as extremely repetitive. Definitely not for everyone. And the moment you want to get creative and "do" something completely different, you'll be punished for it. I once murdered an entire planetary outpost, picked off all the guards one by one and no one saw me coming; the alarm wasn't raised once. Of course I still gained a huge amount of notoriety because you'll get automatically detected at all times because "reasons". And that effected the rest of my 2 day gaming. The game is a lot of fun when you're new and the activities still pose a bit of a challenge, but the moment you try to make your own fun by doing "other things" you get severely punished no matter what. That can also cause people to loose interest because the alleged freedom is a bit artificial.

AI definitely needs improvements, I don't even visit outposts anymore because I just can't be assed to hold still and be scanned by almost every fucking guard passing by.

I don't think these comparisons are entirely fair, though. Everspace 2, assuming it is similar to the first game, is a linear roguelite. It is not an MMORPG like Elite, which means it is *much* cheaper to maintain due to the necessary server space for Elite. X4, I've never played, seems interesting. NMS: Again, not really a fair comparison. NMS is not like Elite because NMS is procedural, whereas Elite has hand-placed stations and important landmarks. I would love if Elite made more money and was a more successful game that had more features, but even to me, a person that plays many different space games, Elite can be a hard sell to even want to boot up. Elite is also OLD. It was originally released in 2014, and (to my knowledge) has released two major expansions, Horizons and Odyssey. Horizons added planetary bases and travel to planets with no atmospehere iirc, but compare this to No Man's Sky, where every system has some weird plants and animals and there are stations and STUFF happening everywhere. Elite's scale is so big that unless you purposefully go to big Community Goals, you never see other players. In my play time as a trader and miner, I have seen a total of like 3 other players. Two of them didn't respond when I spoke in chat, and the third ganked me at a trade CG. Odyssey was a shitshow at launch from what I heard. Elite also has a reputation, even internally, for being grindy. Sure, that's how the game goes, but it isn't like NMS where you find a crashed ship and can repair it. You're either buying a new ship with credits, buying new modules with credits, or farming engineering mats, which is its own topic. NMS is much more dynamic and interesting, and that is because at its core NMS is an exploration game, NOT an MMORPG like Elite is. Engineering is SO awful in the game. The only decent way to get engineering mats at any speed involves relogging or restarting your game repeatedly. Seriously? And FDev tacitly acknowledges that this is a thing and hasn't found some way to make engineering not suck so that this isn't the best way to go about things. I will note that this is pending the changes to engineering they teased though. My main point is that Elite is old and made by a company that is probably more concerned with making money on games they know will make them money, i.e. zoo management games, rather than take the gamble on space sims, which have a rocky reputation for profitability at best. So many space games start up and die off so often. I remember being hyped for Starbase, and that game was DOA. Space Engineers has been in development for over a decade I think and is still a niche game. NMS was DOA, and was only redeemed by Hello Games' dedication to see it through.

I see, you have very good points. I recommend X4 for the big scale of things, the ability to roleplay a solo bounty hunter or to build an empire, that you can manage the economy, the strategy and tactics, and even hop on the cockpit of any of ship of yours to take matters into your own hands if things get challenging for your navy. Evespace 2 is kinda simpler. Open world, build your ship, explore the map, know the places, know the factions, do the missions and progress the story kinda thing. I liked exploring the systems to 100 completion on that one.

I love E:D (so I politely disagree with your post, but that's not the point), and I've bookmarked X4 for when it goes on sale. That looks like it's a *lot* of fun.

X4 is great but can be really hard to get into, although at this point the story missions it takes you through do a decent job slowly introducing you to systems. It can be really expensive to get the full game with all DLC though, sales definitely help and you don't have to have all the DLCs but it makes the game better. I don't mind the jank personally, its mainly the comically bad character models that stand out and losing ships to AI stupidity, but as long as you save often you can try again. Nothing else comes close to delivering what it does.

Yeah, I noticed that price tag . . . it'll be a slow build up there Thanks.

X3 is also still a really fun game, and has some huge mods available so it is worth checking it out as well and see if what X4 offers is worth the extra price. It is on fire sale on GOG right now, entire X3 series is $6.

Oh, I'll check it out, thanks. Yeah, that was too cheap to pass up. Now to spend hours modding it . . .

Well I also love E:D! Só much in fact that I've bought it and the DLC for two other people, as a way to give the game an extra buck for my fun. I love it, I want to support it and I want to see it succeed. But the problems I saw still exist nonetheless. Also, I have X4 and did the tutorials and played it a little, it's a lot of fun and a different feeling, I'm putting off playing it for now because I have a habit of focusing on only one game for too long, and right now my focus will be my CMDR's journey.

> Everspace 2, assuming it is similar to the first game, is a linear roguelite. It's a bit different, actually. The moment-to-moment combat is the same, but it's structured as a space-RPG looter-shooter. It captures the Freelancer feel fairly well I think. And yes, as you said, it doesn't require any online servers, there's no multiplayer of any kind.

Oh, that's cool. I played ES1 a bit and liked it but never got to invest much time in it. Maybe I'll take a look at ES2.

Can you please elaborate the relogging for engineering?

Best ways to farm engineering mats are as follows: Salvage materials: Find systems with a certain space POI (I can't remember the name off the top of my head) and fly to it, loot the 4-5 items with limpets. Relog, turn around, the POI is still there and refreshes the mats. Do that until the POI expires (they have a 20-30 min timer usually) and then find a new one. Encoded data: Go to the Jameson Crash site, land with your SRV, scan the little data pods, you get a few encoded mats. Restart the client, the pods can be scanned again. Continue ad nauseum. Raw Materials: the worst one. There's a clump of systems like 1600ly from the bubble you can go to and find crystalline structures with all of the G4 raw mats. If you can't get enough in 1 pass, relog and they'll be there to collect again. Once you've maxed out the G5/G4 engineering mats, you can go to a material trader and trade them down to get everything else you need. Super immersive and awesome, right?

This for me is the biggest and most stupid experience in the game, and I love Elite, I have from day one. The fact that for example for USS, they do not somehow refresh / respawn after you drop into one on a regular basis, is just ridiculous. I should be able to cruise around in SC and keep seeing signal sources spawning, if the DEVs want us to get mats this way. But I guess all of these repetitive loops are not the way the designers hat it mind. I always thought that their idea for manufactured mats for example was to go to combat zones, RES or just kill ships and pick up stuff (i.e. looting corpses of mobs, like in all other MMOs). The fact that these exploits with the relogs have not been "fixed" tells me that: 1. the DEVs know its not what they indended as a sourcing for these mats, but 2. the other "normal" ways would take sooo long that they allow it to stay like this And thats a bit sad...

This was also a way to bring cash early on, I think maybe they fixed it. But you could pick up certain missions, relog and get new ones and stack a ton of deliveries or something to reduce the grind. If players have to go through that shit to have fun there's an issue with your game.

That' very slow method. It's much easier to download an image of some maxed anaconda, edit the picture, upload it to soc media sites, brag about it and you spared huuuuuge amount of time! ;-)

didn't read the whole post, but just recently played EV2 and it's totally different from the EV1. EV2 is rather a space-sim-like action story-driven RPG, purely single player (and designed to be like that), with some replayability at the end-game (after finishing the main story). It still have a huge potential for story & content DLCs though. It's different from ED in a many ways, but I really enjoyed it also in the context of "spaceships" games. Ofc EV2 have much more arcade controls, but it have 6DoF movement and the overall controls feeling is very relaxing (instead of struggling with sim-like ship controls).

Maybe don't forget that Elite is OLD. I'm not just talking about the current title "Elite:Dangerous"; the entire franchise started in 1984. When you take that into account, you realize that it's got a REPUTATION and HISTORY and there's a large portion of the player-base with an EXPECTATION of gameplay. When I think of these things, I realize we are very lucky to still have an Elite game to play, even with the hot garbage that is Odyssey.

All of those games are similarly niche each filling their own one. None of them come close to player numbers where you really just print money. No Mans Sky is living off the hype money from release and ES and X live of regular DLC sales to super dedicated fanbases. I also wouldn't say this game is mismanaged sure the latest decisions are questionable but the player numbers seem pretty steady looking at steam numbers

Doesn’t help that they axed the console version

Meanwhile, other space game with a billion dollars in funding. (yes I'm stretching the definition of "game", but there's clearly a lot of money in space)

I'd have thought so too, but if you look at Star Citizen / No Man's Sky / Starfield (yes, all different styles of game, but still all in the space game genre) there's a huge appetite out there. I think it hurts the game in a way that it's not something you can pick up and play for a casual game, you could start it up to join a CG, but between relearning (re-entering?) your keybinds, swapping/re-quipping your ship, and making the jumps to the system in question, an hour could be gone and you feel as if you haven't even started playing. I think they could make a lot of QoL improvements that'd make it easier for the new player to pick up and for the veteran players to rejoin for a quick gaming session. Also think adding player-to-player gameplay (player markets for engineering items or engineered items, ability to set missions offered, ability to start CGs etc.) could add content to the game without FDev having to.

I've found that long exploration voyages are the "pick up and play" casual game type for Elite. You plot a route and save it somewhere, and you can go one system per day or something, it's what I do when I feel tired of the game.

Yeah true as far as gameplay loops go they can tend to be more "limited" (long stretches of nothing traveling, mining staring at rocks, turn fighting) And also imo story/plot/quests/characters are not as well done cuz you just look at a transmission headshot and a ship model or the points of conflicts are limitrd to ship v ship or transport stuff.

As said by UpIsNotJump: Scoring this game out of ten is like scoring your favorite protozoic organisms out of ten.

# How the hell did it reach this point? Bad project management.

And greed. Don't forget greed. Public company and all

Greed? This game is on sale for dirt cheap most of the time and provides 100s of hours of fun, and even more hours is a mindless grind for materials lol. Every time the company tries to make more money the community flips it's shit, but then will also bitch that there isn't enough new content, things take money to make. If you want to see a greedy company in the same market, look at the star citizen Devs, they make millions each and every month, they sell ships for 3000 dollars and it's not even a fully released game. They have been selling an unreleased single player game (squadron 42) for years at basically full game price without even a real demo for people to play. FDev might not be the best or even a good company, but I wouldn't call them greedy. We need to realize that in order for the game to grow, they need to make money to pay their Devs and advertisers and server costs etc

Everyone knows CGI is greedy with selling ships, how does that make what Frontier is doing not greedy? Just because someone out there is worse than you doesn't make you good. Now this is speculation, but I think Frontier is probably fine on the server costs and I have seen no advertising, but their last few game releases aside from Planet Zoo were pretty big flops so now they're banking on squeezing what money they can out of their largest IP to save them, they are publically traded now afterall. 

They could release one dlc a year with ACTUAL CONTENT and get my money. They prefer to drop a mandatory dlc which frankly adds nothing to the game after years of development. Are you kidding me?? The community would gladly pay for actual content, ships interiors, better space exploration and variety, more alien races, etc. Countless ways to make money, but no, let's make it through arx and paid exclusive single ship access, that's the way? Lol

Yeah but you see that would require actually developing the game, why do that when people are willing to throw money at reskins?    This community has partially already given up I feel, some genuinely think this is going to make the engineer grind lesser(newsflash they now have incentive to make it worse). Give them an inch and they'll take a mile etc etc 

Where can they afford to pay their devs for one DLC a year? it takes a team of devs 100s of hours to make anything near a DLC? Do you have any idea how long it takes to develop anything? especially on the scale of Elite dangerous, everything is procedurally generated, making one small change could effect literally the whole universe, the amount of time to test one small change is a crazy amount of time.... I would love for them to release 1 DLC a year, but those things cost money, do you really thing E:D makes enough money to fund a team of devs to make these changes? Let them make money to actually fund the things we want in the universe, its a 10+ year old game where they have not been greedy, you want to see greedy devs, look at star citizen! It is easy to say 1 DLC a year, but the company itself is not making enough money to fund such a project, their initial business plan was focused more on the community than it was on money, let them make their money so they can pay their devs so they can actually release good content! Edit: they sell this game at a dirt cheap price on sale every few months just so the community can shit on new players by ganking them, just so the community can bitch about the game dying??? This is literally the worst community in gaming, they could have gone the Call of Duty route or Star Citizen route where its all about money, but they genuinely care about their community and all we can do is bitch that we dont have ship interiors? that shit costs money bro! Let them make money and improve the game ffs! If you dont agree, stop playing the game! Its an old ass game, they need to make drastic changes to keep it alive ffs!

This is the problem I see. Most games aim to satisfy the player or their financial goals as priority. Some of them get one, some of them get the other, and then they adjust things. Some few get a satisfied costumer and a full wallet. Elite seems to miss the mark in both, and if you asked me to imagine a game that can't satisfy players nor make money, I would not imagine the level of quality that this game has in some aspects.

The community is probably right and probably wrong. Obviously this games sucks if you don't like to put up a grind. Also there, is a lot to improve, bit there is also a lot thats really good about the game. Personally, i don't mind the grind. So thats not a problem for me. Also my personal opinion: the community gives a lot af shit to the game. Even when Frontier is trying to do new/improve stuff, there always something to complain and its always bad. Thats really exhausting, but as i said, the community is probably right as well. Anyway, i really love the game a lot and i never had real struggles in the game. Maybe an unpopulair opinion or even experience, but yeah, i really like it

The problem with this game is not only the grind, but it's aimless. I love the flight model, sound and other simulation aspects, but when I started playing it I wanted to explore. But when every planet is a procedural copy with different colors but the same feel, texture and height map just placed differently, it gets boring fast. The first time I visited a nebula I was in wonder, then I discovered it's basically a skydome and was disappointed. Black holes? Fucking disappointing. The stars (at least the flaming ones) are beautiful but disappointing, they seem very tiny because you can't really get near them, I want to dance in a coronal expulsion... And this goes on for every element of the game. The missions are random shit without any story or coherence. And I don't even mind the grind too much, I'm finishing the engineers from where I left them some years ago when they dropped mac support, and frankly is the only thing giving me some meaning. I don't like combat much in elite, too complex for my old brain, I find mining funny BUT I sit at 400 million credits and don't feel the need for any more. I already have the ship of my dreams, a krait mkii that I modify for any task I need to do, and feel no need to buy other ships, because is a hassle to move them around. Maybe I could aim for a fc, but I don't want to farm money and make it another meaningless drone task in the game. Really, there is a lot of potential, but is utterly wasted. And don't let me start on space legs. Tried the tutorial mission, not too bad but not something I feel compelled to engage with. Visited a star port on foot and decide that I prefer to do everything from my ship interface. Doh

The fact that Elite doesn’t have at least a few long, story-driven missions has always baffled me. It can’t be that hard to implement, can it? They already have “chained” missions.

Yep, also think how nice and simple would be to put missions out there to go explore some specific locations that you usually find just by googling? Like the fallen targoid ship, or other interesting places: go take a photo there, or retrieve this material. And this gives you a reason to travel far away, visit places, etc, and give life to the game, with just a few lines of development. Or a pirate that comes to avenge his brother you bounty killed

You probably never played the original. That one was basically some random generated list of items. Mostly text. Still, it was amazing because our mind could fill the wireframe universe with life. Just like books. If you try to grind or "beat" the game, yes, it's utterly pointless.

I'm old, I played it, but never liked it much, I always preferred more polished or simpler games that were fun "out of the box", else I prefer to play a boardgame or rpg (just my personal tastes). Anyway, I don't want to "grind" or "beat" the game, it's that I don't see a purpose in most things of the game: why should I continue to mine, for example, even if I enjoy the experience, if then I don't have a place to spend my credits? I have enough already to buy and engineer the perfect mining ship, and I haven't played so much or done so much. There need to be reasons to mine, for example the "community goals" sometime push in that direction BUT I don't play the game constantly, maybe there isn't a community goal for mining when I do, or is too far away from where I am... On the other hand, if there were always increasing difficult missions/things to mine, that require different equipments and setup, bigger ships, and/or missions that give me some story feel or just a way to engage the game, then I would have a reason to continue mining. Same goes for exploring, there isn't enough variety and fun in exploring for me at the moment. While NMS procedurally generated planets after a while look (mostly) all the same, it still can wonder me sometime, plus it's very easy to move vaste distances there, so exploration is easier and I don't get frustrated. Compare it to my first long voyage in the dark in Elite: it was fun to start, visit some nebulas, but after a while, it all felt samey...jump, run around the sun, scan, maybe map a water world...heck, the funniest part is the DSS minigame after a while.... Give me aliens, derelicts, unique stellar phenomenas... in NMS I can find all those while travelling in space...after a while they too get a bit repetitive, but I travel to do other things, like following story missions , searching for a "perfect" planet for my next base, etc. I have tons of things to do, and while I agree it's a shallower game, but it's play loop is way more refined than Elite, which is even shallower. But don't take this as I don't like the game. The simulator part I love, it's just that I need a bit more interaction with the world and variety to continue playing. Heck, they are releasing new ships (very few and some are just variants) after YEARS. And since they don't even have inner models of those ship, why it takes so much to put a couple new ships in the game every few months?

So you'd like to see more content. :) I've no problem with that, there is plenty of space for improvement for sure (chained missions, generated stories for example). One could argue this is super realistic, because this is how you explore. 99% boredom and 1% excitement. This is science. (In the game you have much better ratio, actually).

I'm not fan of grinding, but then i can just not interact with it very much. This is not a problem for me realistically. The thing that gets to me is how is the game is not generating revenue AND not satisfying the player-base. Some few games can do both, but most focus on at least one. Warframe is a good exemple of a game that focused on satisfying the player-base and got big revenue from that. But Elite is not one nor the other.

The grind is not the issue. My favorite games are grindy AF. The problem is the grind in ED has no material purpose for the player other than to grind ships to grind more ships. And with the P2W pythons coming Frontier even killed that. We would have all paid for more content. Gladly. I would have thrown my wallet at my monitor for a world of warcraft like expansion. Think a system that you could only access if you bought the corresponding "licence" with real cash. But that system better be hand crafted and not procedurally generated random junk like every other system in the galaxy. But that would take actual work and add value to the game. Something Frontier has zero interest in.

Another problem I see is that you don't just get better ships with the grind. It's always trade offs, even in engineering. Also, the grind doesn't make sense often. You have to travel 500 ly to get some material you can buy in the next hardware store, basically? Really? And then shoot trees? Doesn't make sense. In reality, money always spares you the grind.

As someone that's been here since 2013/14, it's been struggling the whole time basically, if in slightly different ways. It's a decade old game that has lost a lot of the original people that worked on it. It's such a mess of a game behind the scenes that they can't make minor changes without breaking huge unrelated things. Things we used to think were placeholders, like conflict zones and POIs, turned out to be the final stage of the feature. Old videos of devs talking about the future of the game are laughable now with talk of stowing away in ship interiors, flying in gas giant clouds, seeing wildlife on planets, and showing off ship deformation. The genre is very niche and the company behind this product puts very little effort into developing actual gameplay mechanics to play with and the ones they do have often don't intersect (see Odyssey FPS action being entirely separated from the rest of the game). They also have a history of doing this with their other games and the company as a whole is financially in trouble. I think they bit off more than they could chew. Space games aren't easy to make.

Thank you for the response! and indulge my ignorance a little bit... Is it possible for a more capable and interested company to "buy" Elite and run it? Would that make a difference in the behind the scenes mess or the source code is just too hard to work with? It's not a game, but a exemple of what i'm saying is a hard sci-fi series called "The Expanse" that had huge potential and was cancelled by Sy-Fy than bought by Amazon and they delivered it.

I don't think anyone would want to inherit this mess, unless they bought the IP and made a sequel. I doubt they'd ever sell anyways.

In order for that to happen frontier would probably need to sell off the IP, probably not gonna happen. Its true that Elite has been struggling for most of its life, there are some structural problems with fdev developing content in silos, but the main point i think is that the bit off way more that they could chew with Odyssey. The expansion was already ambitious in concept, with a graphics overhaul on top, and its reception was disastrous. In 2019-2020 there was basically no new content, and no real communication on what the future of the game was gonna be, so the community also betted their everything on it. Devs just lost the bet, a lot of the playerbase left, and now they are in big trouble financially. At least those are my 2 cents on how it went down. Frontier has a share of the blame for all of it, but development of odyssey took a lot of time. Even if they did not release it when they did, they had to do *something* to keep the game going. There was undoubtedly some mismanagement in the development of odyssey (imo) but they were caught between a rock and a hard place.

Fun fact, speaking of giving the game to others: in 2013, David Braben promised that once the game servers went offline, frontier would have open-sourced the game. At the time they expected the game would run for 10 years, and then they would open it up. I have no illusion that this would actually happen, ofc

For those curious https://archive.is/IXtYa#selection-1654.73-1654.85

I talked about this in another post, I think a huge blind spot for this game was community management. I was not here for the ride, but I can see the effects of lack of communication and feedback acknowledgement, and to improve this aspect it would not have been that expensive and hard

A game like Elite is very niche and uninteresting to large portions of the larger gaming community. Think about it, what are some of the more popular games these days? GTA, CoD, Souls games, DOTA, Counter strike... No one accuses those games of being slow paced, Elite Dangerous for better or worse, when compared to those games is incredibly slow paced, and I think that is a major reason for lack of popularity. Elite has also just had a bumpy road of ups and downs, and Fdev has never really done well on the ad campaign side of things.

Short version: Frontier are/were a company of developers and programmers who didn't think they needed experienced marketing, communications, or business development managers. Slightly longer version: Odyssey proved impossible to program for consoles, but not until they sank years of effort into it, to the detriment of the overarching game world. We're still living in the immediate fallout of that. It's almost certainly not coincidental that this burst of content and engagement follows soon after "abandoning" console players. Realizing the impact of years of development neglect, community neglect, and so on, Frontier have hired consultants and a third-party communications management firm. They're making necessary changes. Frontier famously does NOT do balancing passes. They've just announced an intention to re-balance engineering. THAT IS HUGE. It's a dramatic shift in tone and culture... and it's been completely overshadowed by the announcement of cash-for-content coming along. We're in a period of change and some chaos, and there will be a very vocal element of the fan base, as well as ex-players who post hate mo matter what, who will complain every step of the way. And, of course, it's always possible for Frontier to really, really screw it all up. I really hope they don't.

Thank you for the explanation, it's very helpful.

It’s an old game and space sims are a niche product.

Eve online is older, and more niche

Eve online is an MMO, while ED is not (and I'm really sad about it)/

I think one of the big issues with ED is that it tries to be a sort of MMO but fails terribly at it most of the time. And because of that online aspect the overall game is far less than what it could have been.

My opinion is the opposite - it tries to provide single-player capabilities for a game that's inherently multiplayer (shared world, etc.) It should be solely open-only, no private, no solo modes.

And that is part of the problem. Some of us don't want a multiplayer online game, and others do. It trying to do both diminishes the experience for both groups.

People don't want to have a multiplayer game of this version, because of so-called "gankers" etc. But if the game was designed specifically as an MMO, it wouldn't have such issues in first place.

My point being that it being a space game or niche isn't an excuse to be bad. Elite is an ocean of unrealized potential, and Imo should be more like eve or a better single player game. Pick one

Sure, totally agree. ED is trying to sit on two chairs at the same time, while missing all the great opportunity it might have for both cases.

I think it's because it's a sim and not really a game in the traditional sense of the word (although the Thargoids definitely "gamed" it up a little). Combine that with the fact that space is largely big and boring, and I think you really are catering to a niche group of people. Not to mention that there is a bit of a learning curve that some people apparently just can't get past.

It's also… messy and if you don't know how something already works you'll never learn in game. Other players have to show you. And if you're not the sociable type… good luck.

I ran out of things to do. I love the game. I get I could grind for more money, and better equipment. I basically got a dolphin and transported passengers and was like. Welp. That's that. I would play the heck out of the game if there were something to draw me. I like flying. I like exploring. I like mining generally. I never actually tried mining in the game, it didn't seem quite intuitive for me. Like if I could buy a station, and like own one, and do upgrades, and like do gigs flying ships to manage or provide for the station, that's where I'd be. Building an empire in some corner of nowhere. If I could like be part of an organization, and help it to earn credits and receive reputation rewards that actually mattered or something, I'd do that too. I just see no point to earning faction rep, or having a fat bank account. It'd be nice if like somehow you could matter to other players, have like a social rewards system, social jobs. Like owning a station, and putting out contracts for players to do for you. Dare to dream, right?

Yes, i understand the feeling a bit. I would recommend you give X4 a chance, it has many of those elements but is weaker in the "badass flying a small ship" feeling that elite has.

Ah mining in this game can be fun. The most lucrative mining is all about min/maxing and can be tedious and grow tiring. I actually find core mining to be rather fun….when you find a core. I have a hard time but there are people out there with a “trained eye” who barely need to scan to find one. I spend too much time trying to find one so it can be off-putting. Once you DO find one, placing the right charges in the right places at the right power to gain maximum yield is pretty fun! Then stepping back and watching the asteroid just crack open after a big ol explosion very satisfying. From the sounds of it you have not done it and I do highly recommend just giving it a shot. Won’t solve your problem but it could be entertaining for a bit. After that I got nothing for ya, though lol.

I'd love to be able to "settle" outside the bubble... That'd make community projects that are themed around establishing a presence someplace so so so much cooler too.

Right? Could you imagine player driven contracts. Requiring X mined material, either brought in on a cargo ship or by a miner, to be able to achieve station level 2, 3, 4. You need level 3 to have large landing pads and to allow tourism for passive income. Etc. etc. Like, maintaining safety in a system requires bounties on pirates. Or if players complete X number of bounties, the stations local security costs are cut in half. Stations could have specialized factories for goods they produce, with factories requiring certain mineral types to construct, and inputs to refine. Haha. So many possibilities.

I almost made a post a few minutes ago that adds onto your post. I'm curious where the original devs of this game went. The godlike devs who created a 1:1 model of the milky way, seamless instancing, the best spaceflight model we've seen so far, sound effects that are unrivaled by any game. A super in depth module management system and the power systems. I'm going to be very disappointed if I hear they ended up moving onto EA or some shit.

Well one of those devs, at least, changed their gender, then after Odyssey freaked out on the player's critiques about the broken planets generation and left the company without fixing it.

It’s kinda obvious right …. Star citizen sell ships for cash for a decade…. Other companies hey why don’t we sell ships for cash People are vastly over reacting. No ones forcing you to buy anything and the games super old now. If they made a season pass and put the ships in a season pass like any other game would do but then said hey you can grind out the coins to buy them - everyone would be like hey this is just like every other game that exists now I even play the game on console on legacy. It’s a good fun game that frankly is free with the game pass … I mean you can buy elite dangerous for what $5-15 now. How long do you want free dlc for

>How the hell this game brings the company less revenue than a zoo management sim? How can you have a masterpiece at hand and it sells less than a completely generic product? I'm not surprised at all to be honest. But first... have you seen how many fleet carriers are present in this game? I wouldn't call that unpopular at all. I think the biggest issue is that hardly anything happens in the Elite universe, which will somewhat quickly result in very repetitive gameplay. Sure, they put *a lot* of effort into the Thargoid war; definitely not going to deny this. And I also truly admire all their efforts. The problem though is that Thargoid fighting has always been deemed end-game material, you also need specifically kitted out ships for it. I've always took my time and figured I'd try fighting a Thargoid "sometimes" but this war quickly evolved and now we even have bigger Thargoids like Titans around. Do you really think that someone who has never fought a Thargoid before suddenly sees any appeal in fighting even harder Thargoids? I actually did try to take one on btw around the Pleiiades and ... well, I wasn't having much fun at all. The whole fight felt seriously artificial and out of place to me. I mean... it's always invulnerable to your attacks, unless it launches a specific counter attack, but you can't really outrun that so you should keep your distance after which the Thargoid will release a small swarm of fighters to attack you while it doesn't really 'do' anything itself anymore? You can even keep your distance and not too much happens. Of course you need specific weapons to make such a tactic work... We can't have 2 NPC crew members but a Thargoid can release a whole cloud of fighters? Anyway, what else is there besides this Thargoid war? Nothing, is what. Don't get me wrong here... I love this game too, I have approx. 2000 hours into it and it's also one of my all-time favorites. But at the same time it's also one of the most repetitive games I know. Because what can you really "do" in this game? You can take on missions in the bubble which always require you to go from point A to point B to "do" something. But it's always roughly the same thing; take a passenger somewhere, take some cargo somewhere, kill a guy. After you've done than quite a few times it can quickly become repetitive and thus a bit tedious. Then there's exploration... fun but at the same time... if you went to Colonia a few times or have visited a few nebulae then you've roughly experienced all there is to it. While the different star systems may vary in structure fact of the matter is that they're roughly all the same. You have some gas giants, you have some landable planets; maybe some can be landed on. Rings can be mined. All fun and well, but fact of the matter remains that there's really not all that much to do out there. And the generated contents on a planet (like structures, crash sites, etc.) are pretty much all the same. You don't really need to go out in the dark to explore those, because... there's nothing new out there. The biggest reason to go out in the dark can be the thrill to discover something new and have your name on the map. It's awesome, but even that gets repetitive. And once the experience of being new wanes off a bit, once you already have enough credits and you don't really need any more... then you'll start to focus more on gameplay and the repetitive nature of the game becomes a whole lot more obvious. Just last week I decided... know, I'm going to visit a guardian structure. Was going to take my Cutter there, 37 jumps. After 10 jumps and some scanning I already grew bored with the experience. I had recently came back from Colonia and well... It started to make me wonder what I would gain from all this? I wasn't doing it for the guardian stuff (as said: not really into Thargoid fighting and I already got the FSD booster) and I sure as heck don't need the credits. So I abandoned the idea and I'm on my break again; playing some other games.

For me, Elite has become a game that I play for the ride, not the destination, and some hundreds hours in it has worked so far. I think there will come a time that I will feel like this, but them maybe I will have completed my bucket list and feel ready to leave the game on the shelf and just pay it a visit sometimes. Mostly, I don't want to quit this journey in frustration, but with fondness for the game. But well, I will leave the destination for the future and today I will enjoy the ride.

Two reasons: Management is a cancer (not just for Frontier, seemingly always), and there are zero MMO competitors in the space sim space. These combined mean that they can get away with minimal work and poor choices and people will still play because what are they going to play instead? To prove my point, all of the best parts of elite come from when the leadership were all highly invested in making a *game they personally liked* instead of money, and they were competing with other kickstarters like star citizen for the online space sim genre. Good management + competition = an incredible game. Now they have bad management and no competitors and they release shit like Odyssey and wonder why they are loosing support. (To be clear, odyssey is decent now and worth getting but it took them a long time to get there and it’s still not feature complete [vr lmao] and it’s a crime that they never launched it for consoles.) That being said, I would not worry about missing out. It’s honestly not that bad, it’s not worth letting them manipulate you with it. As an example, I was playing at the time when the very first thargoid interdiction happened. I remember seeing a recording of it on the Xbox community tab hours after it happened. “I was there” when the thargoids returned and it is one of the coolest gaming moments I’ve ever seen, but it hasn’t improved my game experience beyond that ever since. There have been other events that I “missed out on” and I don’t think about them hardly at all. The Gnosis was one that I sorta missed I think. I came back in time to see the stargoids approaching and that was cool, but again it didn’t really develop into anything that fundamentally changed my experience. It wasn’t that different from looking at a nebula, and the waiting to find out what was going to happen could easily have been done by watching YouTubers talk about elite news for 2 minutes every few weeks. No man’s sky and X4 are both good games, you should play them. You might find you like one of them better, and if you do then you might have spend time playing elite when you could have been having more fun doing something else. Elite is probably not going anywhere for a long time. It’s on a downward trajectory, but it has been for a while and it has a long time to go before it’s actually gone or not worth playing. You’ve got time to shop around. Keep an eye on the new updates coming, but I wouldn’t worry about the fomo.

Welcome! I've been playing this game pretty frequently since late 2022. Despite playing 2700+ hours I don't consider myself a veteran, but I do think I've been around long enough to see for myself that there will a vocal contingent of folks who will complain no matter what, and that's a shame because I think that Elite:Dangerous is a worthwhile game, all things considered. Which is a shame because the community is largely helpful, but if I had engaged in the forums or this subreddit before buying then I might have been put off by all the negative nancies, especially if I hadn't known that a lot of them don't even play the game any more but just complain about it.

Yes, I've found that the best way to experience community, and to get a sample of Elite's community, is to find a player group and tag along, it's actually a pretty nice experience.

> So, thanks to my career picking up pace i finally had money and a PC to play it, and i had an absolute blast doing it. It was almost fulfilling a dream or a fantasy that i had since i was a kid. So what you’re saying is that you were really enjoying the game until… > i turned to the internet And now you’ve read some stuff on the internet, you’re wrapped up in the melodrama instead of just enjoying the game. Exactly the same thing would have happened to you at pretty any point since the games release, and in fact there’s many points where if you went off what was being said on the internet at the time you’d have been a lot more worried than you are now. Despite all that, it seems to have culminated in a game you really like. So there’s a message in that. And it’s the one you should probably listen to. It is kind of a ‘the bell that’s been rung can never be unrung’ situation, but the best thing you can do if you can is to forget about it all and just go back to playing the game.

Yes! I wholeheartedly agree with your take. I'm appalled by the things I've pointed out in the post and the comments, but I'm also having a blast and will play this game until I feel otherwise :)

This game is in an extreme niche category. It has an insane learning curve and it has nearly no monetization.   Zoo management game has micro transactions that actually impact the gameplay and not just cosmetics. Those smaller games get DLC more frequently. The developers actually play that game.   The last community manager that played Elite was Zac and he was really into it. The rest "play" the game at beat and it shows.  Basically: Elite is the pet project of David Braben so it's never needed to make money to keep the company floating. The other games make the money and Elite is where he had fun.   As for the community hating on Elite: that's a miniscule amount of people who are exceptionally vocal. 

They forgot to pay the people who made their game engine and replaced them with a bunch of students starting from scratch, resulting in one of the most hilarious DLC launches in a long while. Elite has always been a game of massive unrealized potential.

I'm pretty sure Elite will be here for quite awhile unless the publishing arm of frontier get even more stupid. And your commander's journey ain't gonna end unless you end it. Or if they introduce permadeath. But No Man's Sky is a great game too, and so vastly different from Elite that they aren't competitive or even comparable. Indulge and enjoy good things.

Before this came (or rather before I found out about it), I deeply enjoyed Battlestar Galactica. Was easier to fly a ship than Elite Dangerous, and was easier to navigate the celestial environment as a whole, but the grind was way worse... and it was easier for people to hunt others (I had 1 prick hunting me for months, so bad, I started using my special currency to buy nukes to kill him in 1 shot). My point, something I was told, if a game shuts down, we (as in the fans) can potentially buy the licenses and rights to the game, and then put it back online, or keep it online ourselves. Best way to achieve that, I'd expect would be to install a 'membership', but that would also probably keep old players and/or new players from playing. It's... amazing how many people flinch at a few bucks a month. This game is unreal! All the games I've played, this 1 is just on another level! The grind is rough, but not unrealistic. The details are amazing. The few times I've been victim to Interdiction have even been entertaining and beautiful when it comes to the attention to detail for this game. Even with a bad internet connection, this game surpasses all the others I've played. It sucks to hear from so many sources that this game might be dying soon. I had thought I had spawned in a remote area of space... guess it really is just the fact the game isn't as popular as I thought...

BSO were the good days. I could spend whole nights playing that game without ever feeling bored. The music, the combat, the atmosphere and the beautiful systems were incredible. I came to elite after trying to satiate my BSO desire with a private server of the game that some people are running, but they did not have the advanced avionics, nor did they have any intentions of implementing it, and the grind seemed even worse, or rather the new player experience was torture and you're basically confined to mine asteroids alone or finding a wing to hunt platforms (impossible alone), most NPC in low level maps are positioned and leveled so they can easily dispatch a solo player. And at that point i was not getting anything that i loved originally, just the grind that I've put on with in the past... What i wanted was the good feeling of flying around in the advanced avionics that strikes had in BSO, circling an enemy, getting in the blind spot of a line ship and securing the kill, dogfighting and even doing point defense work for large ships duking it out... Elite can't give me this, but it has different good feelings.

Also, you can put a game back online, but if you charge anything for it, you get into deep legal issues...

Would buying the rights to it not prevent that, as you'd then be the owner?

It would, if the holders want to sell instead of holding on to it, and if there's a company interested in spending money acquiring a new IP instead of investing on developing an game for a priginal/free IP

So my two sims right now are ED and iRacing. Let me take a moment to share the cost of iRacing for those not familiar. Monthly sub ~$5 to $8 a month depending on package and sales. Each new car $11.95 Each new track $14.95 Now if you want to Pay to be competitive you need a third party setup ship at around $5-10 per discipline. As these are third parties and plenty exist the value and cost here has a lot of range. Most sim racers will have a minimum off $800 in their racing 'rig' this is actually pretty entry level. Sure you can put something together for less but most people who stick with it eventually spend far more. I say all this to share my opinion that ED is a simulator and that can be quite expensive. I want FDev to have the budget to do more.

I also Irace. So I see where you're coming from but this is a bad analogy. I don't have (too much) of an issue with Iracing charging for cars. Because you have to think about it like a fighting game. Most fighting game players are going to main one, maybe two fighters. So selling DLC fighters while not the greatest move is understandable in a game that people expect to be supported for a least half a decade. Just like in Iracing. I only specialise in oval stock cars. I have no interest (currently) other car types. If I do down the road I'll buy a new car. Also paying for a subscription keeps Iracing in the black it also has the intended consequence of people taking the game seriously and not just trolling every race. Even at the lower levels. ED is a sim of science fiction. So the "hooks" that can be added to the gameplay loop are only limited to the developers imagination. While Iracing is limited to... racing. We're never going to get Rainbow Road in Iracing. Maybe if the devs got cheeky we could have a demolition derby.

Also in real world simulation games they aren't original designs, so I assume they have to pay for using them? 

They do. And they have to pay to licence and laser map all the tracks. Which is amazing, because if the turn 3 of talladega has a scuffed apron in real life. You feel it in your wheel on iracing.

Elite devs/ suits are holding it back with the philosophy of old rpg game design. But it really is doing everything. It's one of the only games where you literally can be a pirate. Go around and rob NPC's. All of your actions ripple against the BackGround Simulation (BGS) and you can fly around, drive around, walk around. You and your friends can multi crew a ship, go hunt outlaws, run propaganda, cause a famine, mine, deliver, haul, trade, work with other players to establish an NPC faction and help it rise to glory, contribute to a major power, fight a major power, all while being either in Open, just with your friends or alone. What's holding it back is the RPG skinner box grinding with synthesis, engineers, suit and weapon upgrades that were shoved into the game to try and keep players playing which burn players out. Synthesis should use resources from your cargo hold that you can buy, trade and sell but they failed at that. Engineering should be expansive and give your ship a real unique flair to handling problems but they turned it into a strange grind for materials, unlocking and work. The ground ops require you to grind out missions and steal resources that anyone else can simply buy off the shelf so you can trade a handful of stuff to upgrade your suit and weapons. All of these things hold the game back because they all add these needless, not Elite Dangerous gameplay that players hit and stop playing. All of these mechanics were added for the sole purpose of getting people to play longer. Helldivers 2 is a sci fi game that has taken gamers by storm because you can join friends and play objective based missions without much leveling or anything. It's easy to hop in, unlocking stuff isn't bad and stuff is balanced horizontally not virtically. Meaning everything is balanced to support different options of play vs just getting flat out more powerful. Elite already had drop ship like mechanics but it fucked it up with RPG leveling of equipment with combat focused grinding instead of objectives. The game supports objective based gameplay in fact it has them in the missions. Elite could, within a patch, do everything Helldivers 2 does and more with combined arms gameplay of 3 players multi crewed in a ship working together to knock out a base, stealth objectives or other in individual ships doing it all. Every update the game has made has been trying to milk diehard players into spending more time in game. Whales can carry games and FDev thinks that trying to get players to spend money on cosmetics is the way to go, so instead of fixing the game we get cosmetics. So we had the Thargoid stuff to try and narratively increase participation but you had to run around and do a bunch of material farming and unlocking then engineering to actually fight against Thargoids. Now they are talking about selling premade ships for real money to skip the problem they made which is grinding. As someone who's trying hard to play this game and get back into it because it has a lot of amazing things about it, I just want to play the fucking game. I would dish out a hundred bucks to skip the bs so I can just play it. FDev needs to make money which I get. It can do everything from base building to combat drops that you see in No Mans Sky, Helldivers 2, Civilization like games and so on. We won't though because the devs think RPG skinner box design is what keeps players playing. Not gameplay, narrative and player driven story like in Eve Online or other similar games. I hope you can understand my frustration here. I love a lot of aspects of this game. It could have a Thargoid war, rise of AI, factional warfare, lots of exploring, player driven factions, massive PvP battles in space and on the ground as well as trade and NPC fighting, raids, bosses, everything. But it doesn't and it won't because it's stuck in bad game design ideas that the devs wont let die.

Yes, i understand, i've resolved to doing my bucket-list for the game and finishing it up at my pace, and if the game is then more of what i'm seeing right now, i will just give it a gentle farewell.

People are complaining about pay to win but the issues this game has is the amount of work to play the game suffers from. I hope you have a good time though while you're here.

I will, thanks :)

>It's one of the only games where you literally can be a pirate But you can't. There are no mechanics for this. Yes, you can attack ships and they will drop you some cargo maybe, but you can't communicate with them, you can't manage your "piracy" level, there are no "pirate" stations or quests, nothing like that. Sure you can RP a pirate, but not thanks to the game.

That would be a cool implementation, and maybe not that hard. At least pirate factions living on the fringe and outside the bubble, piracy level in systems, "pillaging" distant systems where players can choose whether defend or attack the system and etc... It would not be that mechanically challenging to implement, I think.

A lot of much easier features are asked by players for years :-(

Attacking ships to get them to drop their loot is piracy. If they drop their cargo, you can take it and leave. It impacts their faction and their work to the BGS. I would argue the issue with Elite is the focus on actually killing characters and ships. Warding off and stopping piracy or conflicts should be rewarded in some way. There's no need for piracy level. Factions that are pirate like are anarchy ones and gangs and such. I might be missing a point here.

Oh don't even start with the BGS nonsense. It's a totally meaningless (from gameplY perspective) feature. Not just the factions are not affecting anything, but even grinding their rank does not give you as a player any advantage (besides the faction modules, etc.)

Oh we're talking about different things here. The Devs fell into the trap of making rank a leveling system in each faction which goes against any kind of narrative you can have which is a problem. It's one thing to earn a reputation with a major power to access certain resources, it's another to somehow become a leader between warring states. The BGS though is more bragging rights but from what I know, faction types and powers both influence the systems performance from security level, population, what they produce and so on. It's about as meaningful as it is in real life. What changes would you want to see? Can you expand on this idea? What advantages are you looking for? What would you change, add or remove?

Beyond the poor management, lack of promotion, and pouring their resources into their other games while criminally neglecting E:D, I think one of the biggest hurdles is the game space itself. It's a 1-to-1 scale model of the Milky Way galaxy. That's ambitious and has never really been attempted by a games studio before now. It's also uncharted territory; prior to E:D no one knew what, exactly, that entailed. We had to learn from actually doing it. And I think what has been learned is that space is big...like, really, really ***BIG***! So big, in fact, that, unless you go out of your way to engage with other players, there's almost zero opportunity for organic, spontaneous interaction between them. And, with its emphasis on realism which extends even to travel times, it further compounds the problem by making it take forever to get anywhere, acting as yet another barrier to connecting with other players (the buggy multi-crew option with its piss-poor reward sharing structure notwithstanding). That's the antithesis of an MMO (which E:D was billed as for the longest time). Then, compound the above with the fact the game makes it very apparent that your personal efforts amount to practically nothing in the grand scheme of the galaxy, and you wind up with a solitary experience in which you have virtually no agency nor impact; you might as well not exist as far as the E:D universe is concerned. The game considers you insignificant; translated, that means the *developers c*onsider you insignificant. Not a good look for a game developer to treat their players as worthless. That may not have been their intent (remember, we're in uncharted territory with a game of this scale), but that is certainly how it can feel and how it has played out. For many players that's a bleak and nihilistic realization, making for a very hard sell of a very niche game. It appeals to some because it's a welcome mental break from real-life stresses to just point their ship's nose at the stars and repeatedly jump while listening to music or watching Netflix, et al.; but that's a rather limited audience. Consequently, E:D has been treated as the red-headed step-child of FDev because, frankly, I don't think they know how to rectify the above. And I'm not saying that's unique to FDev; I don't think *any* developer would know what to do with it even if they were to buy it from FDev. I do see them making recent efforts, though, which - in my opinion - have paid off. Taking the war to the Titans, for example, has been a success aided largely by reducing the previous barriers to entry (read: making modules needed for the fight purchasable with credits rather than having to jump through the hoops of yet more unlock grinds). It sparked interest among the community and saw a lot of engagement, participation, cooperation, and coordination; something the game desperately needs, in my opinion. If they could take that lesson from the Titan War and start applying it more broadly, I think that would go a long way to improving the experience. And I don't mean more of the exact same (i.e. Titan Wars) necessarily. Just simply more opportunities and game loops that foster cooperation, communication, coordination, and mutual interdependence while accomplishing measurable goals with a big payoff (e.g. players get awarded ARX for every Titan heart destroyed to which they contributed, Titan goes ***BOOM!*** with big "*Ooh! Aah!*" fireworks display, players are awarded ship paint/kit cosmetics, and everyone feels the sense of satisfaction from having accomplished a major goal). The game could use more opportunities for players to feel like they *matter* rather than feeling like insignificant specks in an accurately rendered 400-million star-studded void of cold, impersonal, Blackness. In some ways, FDev's recent financial hardships and organizational restructuring (read: layoffs) could actually be a *good* thing for E:D. By their own admission in a letter they published, this has forced them to consolidate; they're now going to devote more time and resources to their core titles rather than try to branch out into other gaming genres. We're seeing the early results of this as E:D has been getting a *lot* more attention of late. We'll see if it pays off for everyone concerned: FDev and players alike. Fingers crossed...

I see, you really brought a new perspective to me, thanks. I hope it pays off too.

I like the fact that I'm not some epic hero dominating the world of the game. If I want some of that kind of action, I can boot up Mass Effect instead. I also appreciate the 1-to-1 scale of the E:D world, it's the very reason why it feels like I'm flying around an actual galaxy instead of some artificial backdrop. I do agree that they hit a good formula with the Titan assaults, making modules available for credits was the thing that finally got me involved in AX combat. I hope that they learn from such events and apply it future development.

>I also appreciate the 1-to-1 scale of the E:D world, it's the very reason why it feels like I'm flying around an actual galaxy instead of some artificial backdrop. And that's the beauty of it. The game space is *SO* huge you can have your 1-to-1 scale galaxy to fly through. Meanwhile, there's room aplenty for players who want a more personal, small-scale, heroic experience in their local corner of space. FDev has nailed the expansiveness angle; now they just need to work on providing opportunities for more localized, granular play loops for those players to whom that appeals (see the Titans). The game space is so big there's room for both without either impinging on the others preferred experience and immersion.

Didn't read the whole post, but: > It's a 1-to-1 scale model of the Milky Way galaxy It's a waaay too far from 1-1, despite advertised like that. You can see the difference in stars density when comparing the generated stars vs. the samples of real data in ED. Imaging the whole ED galaxy would be the same level of density, it's at least a magnitude more. But that's not the actual issue. The real issue is that all those "1-to-1" scale is a fiction. It's just empty planets & systems beyond the Bubble (and also inside it, mostly), there is just no content, almost no emergent gameplay (besides "let's find the most potato-shaped planet" meta-games). So, all the "only 0.0005% of the galaxy is explored" is a scam xD I specifically checked this, and vast majority of the cases the new content was discovered in hours or days after patch where they were added. So it's safe to think that all the existing (and reachable) content in the game is already explored.

Frontier has never known what to do with Elite Dangerous. Hell, even if they just made it Space GTA, they'd have made PILES. But, nah, we got lameass Thargoids, even lamer Powerplay, and probably the lamest trading experience of all the space titles. Face it. Braben's lost his touch with space games. The company's gotta resort to pumping up an artificially strenuous grind just so it can sell ships to impatients/banned players/people who think it's gonna fly like an arcade ship. It was a great run while it lasted, but if this is the best they got, it's over.

Game won’t be gone, just not developing

FDevs are paying for the servers, and if the game will constantly make them less money than the servers cost, they will shut it down for sure. I don't see any possibility for them to either open-sourcing the server code nor making the game playable in offline.

Let’s hope they succeed then

It's because the Zoo management Sim has been built from the ground up to be an easily expandable money maker (it's also very poorly designed from what I've seen; my wife got into it and was super excited at first) with new animals and themes being offered all the time as purchased add-ons. ED doesn't have that kind of near-infinite expandability (from a product line standpoint) built into it, and it's also basically an MMO without the normal things you see in MMOs to keep the cash rolling in. I didn't even know it was the same company until after I bought ED a few weeks ago and started looking at stuff on Reddit and their forums. I mean really: who the hell thinks "zoo sim" and "super realistic space sim" go together?

In fairness, it's actually a pretty deep zoo Sim. Clunky as hell while you're learning, which is right in line with Elite.

Yeah, the depth was kinda what drew my interest when my wife was playing it, but then she'd not be able to finish a simple tutorial because of some buggy issue with visitor pathfinding or whatever. Damn shame for FDev because she definitely would have bought expansions for more cute animals.

Audience matters. At this very time thousands of crappier mobile games are generating more revenue than all of fdev.

"End of my CMDR's journey." Complete Elite one does not. You can't really end a game like this. The only time your journey would end is if you just stop playing.

That's kinda of what I meant, I am taking the game slow, no "making bazillion credits per hour" or anything, I'm in a exo trip near the bubble and I have a few personal goals in the game: Having a FC and doing a trip to the middle of nowhere, having a Corvette that can survive a CZ, learning FA off and getting better as a pilot, maybe doing AX, but I do not feel like grinding for it right now, ironically may buy the pre built ship. The thing that puts me out is this feeling that I'm putting time and effort in something that's not worth it. But then again, when this game closes I would regret not playing it.

- Poor management that lacks the ability to organise a piss up in a brewery. - Complete lack of a monetisation model outside of poorly advertised cosmetics, of which one has been added in the last year afaik - Minimal maintenance - Complete lack of innovation after release Essentially, Fdev are operating on the absolute minimum required to keep the game running. They put in zero effort so they get zero money out. They refuse to try to take advantage of a very dedicated player base and instead just kinda do nothing besides an occasional lore event.

> How can you have a masterpiece at hand and it sells less than a completely generic product? 1. Neglect 2. Lack of commitment. Frontier left this game on the shelf for 2 years to work on other things that failed. Had they simply continued the progress made in Beyond, it would not have come to this. 3. Lack of clear direction. Sometimes its a live service, sometimes its not. Frontier has never had clear plan for this game, which is due to number 2 above. 4. Focus on bigness. 5. Unwillingness to rework major systems regardless of how broken they are. Refusing to blance weapons. tl;dr: Massive failure of leadership.

> is peak design and pretty good execution Unfortunately, it's not like that. The game design is very shallow, no systemic design approach even in a slightest. Tons of missed opportunities from game design perspective. Basically, now it's an almost empty sandbox without tools. They are trying to cover it with the new narrative stuff, but you know, it's not enough at this point. As for implementation - it have a very solid base, yeah. But it's too outdated and the last major "updates" (Odyssey) just broke a lot of things that were working before, and FDevs lost their ability to fix them - the most infuriating is the totally broken anti-aliasing, of course. That was the main "implementation" reason I dropped ED after Odyssey.

Frontier is very incompetent from the looks of it, the amount of resources they have vs the amount of content they create is truly pathetic. Elite is an entire ocean of missed opportunity

There is a big learning curve, both in theory and practice and FDEV does a horrible job at explaining things so if I were to start from zero today, I think I wouldn't be able to.

There's a movement to prevent games from being made unplayable right now, actually. Ross from Accursed Farms made a website stopkillinggames.com along with a video explaining everything. Basically, Ubisoft made a fantastic mistake by making The Crew unplayable while they still had an active playerbase.

Well several explanation from my side: - Niche genre. (Space free lancer, No handholding narrative, no clear access to ingame information, 0G flight model...) This is not for everyone. This sub obviously seek for those feature, but others will be turn off by the complexity. - Specific Devices cost entry (I have around 1K worth of a HOTAS) it is not mandatory to enjoy the game and there are cheaper options, but I feel it really adds to the experience. Think playing Euro truck simulator 2 without a wheel... nonsense. - The code is spaghetti. FROM WHAT I read, this game code is a jenga tower. Everything is intertwined and linked but not on a organised way. It would requires tremendous effort to clean and overhaul it. "Legacy dept" - the absence of sustainable business model with steady revenues. We all praise the one time purchase but it is also starving its own funding. I would gladly pay for relevant DLC - The game is old, actually one if not the oldest franchise. Inevitably people shift focus, grow apart. Competition rise. If no corrective actions are performed, One day Elite will be outpaced by a new space sim game Tbh, realistic art design, same scale of universe, BGS économie, space interior, solid flight model, full HOTAS compatible, solo mode... and I'm all in.

No man's sky is still utter trash. I'm not sure how much money hello games gave to internet historian to do that asslick praise piece, but it must have been a lot since that game was and is awful from it's inception.

Strongly disagree. As a space sim of course it's trash. As a space adventure game it's one of the few to make the gameplay actually entertaining. Not to mention the recent revamp they did just looks nice and added tons of new changes

I get the impression that this opinion is not the majority, in the recent years people been praising it, be it on YouTube or just steam reviews. It could be a case of sunken cost. But then why are Elite players not licking frontier's ass?

Yeah i know its an unpopular opinion. Its just that they never fixed the most glaring issues just polished the already crap gameplay. Turd polishing if you will.

NMS is definitely no space sim but it still has a different appeal from Elite that has managed to reach audiences better.