Idk, maybe if they didn’t lock down their game to the point of always online with no mods and maybe if they reduced the grind to a point people with a job or a life could play the game and still progress the game at all, more people would play their space game.
It was borderline acceptable in 2015 when their game was the only one of it’s kind but that is no longer the case. It’s time to open things up or the game will die. Because as it stands, playing their old games + mods is a better choice than their new game with always online drm and no mods.
Nowadays it’s quite easy to make money, they did actually 10x the payouts on a lot of things at some point. However, always being online makes me a bit sketched to the point of considering making my own flight sim in space, considering what I enjoy most is the depth and complexity of actually operating a spaceship like that.
I miss being able to just swap to my Vulture and go hunt some people down in a CZ, now you gotta have a ship fully engineered or an Eagle will kick your ass.
No thanks, I don’t have the time for making this a part time job.
Around the time the game first came out you could make all your money just by bounty hunting in a sidewinder. It was great because it was the only actually fun way to progress the game by making money. They quickly nerfed the fuck out of that though and things quickly devolved to the point it takes 200 hours of trading just to afford anything.
I went off into the black to discover plants and it makes me more money than exploring ever has before.
My first run I went all the way to the core and then took my time back hitting first disc’ on dozens of neutrons and black holes. Almost a year out, made like 40 mil.
Scanned plants for a few weeks in tenebrae sector, made 1.5 billion.
That void opal exploit was fun while it lasted too. It came up pretty late, maybe 2017 or 2018. They tried to nerf it by making most traders not buy opal and the ones that did would only buy only 1 void opal at a time and for always less than the galactic market. Fortunately, this attempt was bugged and traders would buy an unlimited number, albeit for a reduce price that was still worth it. It took them at least a month to patch it to the point where traders would actually only buy 1 void opal.
Absolutely fuck frontier for their gameplay balance decisions. I still managed to barely scrape together an Anaconda just because I did drugs back then but still, fuck Frontier. Shame on me for playing that game anyway instead of finding better things to do although I never did any in game purchases.
I used to crack VO cores in Colonia back then! Fun times, for sure. Especially when the abrasion blasters could spawn more than one if you hit them with perfect timing.
It’s an MMO, you can’t just go out and mod that. You could mod it visually, but that would eat into their profits from the store so it makes sense to not allow that as long as the game gets updates.
Some people here are blaming paradox but honestly, I don't envy any game releasing in this period. We've had so many great (and expensive games) in the past few months but even if that weren't the case, personally I'm not willing to pay 50€ for something that looks like a blander XCOM game (or 65€ if you want the special additional character, bleugh).
Then again maybe I'm just not the diehard fan and their target audience, the only game of theirs I played was shadorun many years ago and I wasn't interested in battletech either. If I were in a mood for a turn based game I know I'd sooner pick up BG3 since their price is relatively close...
I may be wrong, but I think they completely discounted console updates (and probably will do so with PC too). Ellie in VR was something to behold though. Hours of fun.
Yeah, it was amazing. I still haven’t bought the expansion since I only play the game in VR and there was so much reason not to buy it for VR. They have fixed some of it, but even if the original game isn’t really ruined at all, it’s just tough to play now knowing the expansion is out there. So it kinda tainted the whole game even if technically nothing changed for me.
I still have no idea why they decided not to do VR for the on-foot stuff. I don’t know if it was just a cost cutting measure, or if there was some problem they couldn’t sort out. If it was for motion sickness reasons, like not being able to support teleport to move or something, they should probably know motion sickness susceptible people already couldn’t really play the rest of the game. There were some parts that worked ok, their VR demo was ok for most people, but alot of the actual game wasn’t. And even with all the motion sickness reduction options on, driving the SRV didn’t go well for any people I know with motion sickness issues. If it was motion controls they couldn’t support, we have plenty of games with face aim, sure it’s not ideal, but it’s still an upgrade from flat games.
The lack of VR support for in Odyssey, on top of numerous issues at launch, soured me on the whole thing. I know VR is a niche that did not take off so it likely did not make sense for them to prioritize it ; but Elite was the quintessential early killer app for VR, so it stings. Shame, I spent hundred of hours in Elite and would have liked to spend more.
I suppose PC VR can be said to have not really taken off, but there are over 50 million VR headset sales in general so far, that’s pretty good. VR in general is taking off just fine. And PC VR is mostly only suffering from the technical barrier of wireless streaming. Which is clearing up bit by bit, but could be solved with a wireless dongle instead of needing the user to properly configure their router. But newer routers are more and more being able to support VR streaming with their default settings.
While PCVR was mostly abandoned by the big gaming companies, there is still a ton of support from community modders. In the flat2VR community they are up to about 60% of all games working in VR now, about 30% with full motion controls too. So having a VR headset is still getting more and more popular, and being able to use it for PCVR is still getting more and more possible and popular, at some point it’ll come back to the focus of the actual gaming studios too. But for now they don’t have to cuz modders will just do it for free for them if they don’t.
It certainly sucked when VR switched to prioritizing stand alone over PCVR, but I think long-term it will get us to PCVR being mainstream sooner than we would have got there without a focus on the easy stuff first.
The early times of this wave of VR (which really started with the commercial launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) were very exciting. Lots of “experiences” back then: sometimes mindblowing, often half-baked, always interesting. After a couple of years people realized there was no money in it and lots of them moved on.
7 years in, I’m pretty much over early access promising prototypes and flat screen games being modded to support VR. I want VR-native games-ass games of the caliber of Half-Life: Alyx, or Moss. I want VR support to be a standard feature of any new cockpit-based driving or flying game, not an afterthought. We are not getting the former, and slowly maybe getting there for the latter.
Elite Dangerous is the perfect illustration of this cycle: Frontier started supporting VR very early. My first VR experience was Elite Dangerous on a loaned Oculus DK1. It was mind-blowing ! It was also very very puke-inducing ! Then proper hardware came with the Rift and Vive, Elite had full VR support, and it was fucking great. And now, well VR support is still there, but it’s no longer first class, and slowly decaying.
I obviously don’t have a deep insight into FDev’s finances. But they have pretty openly said that Elite is a foundation of the company.
And yet, they have done everything they can to kill that. Cutting back on social media spending to more or less make every single Influencer say the game is dying. Turn updates into a trickle of “You know that thing that was added two years ago? They finally added enemy NPCs around it”. And even actively screw over the people who were dumb enough to buy the ten year pass by not even providing steam keys for the pre-ordered expansion (currently on two of ten or so?) to let people take advantage of Valve’s CDN.
It is genuinely baffling. Other devs are, if anything, focusing too much on keeping the bread and butter live game “live”. Whereas FDev seem to have decided that they can do whatever to E:D and the money will keep flowing… which might be true but…
Also, should be obvious but: Lapsed E:D fan who bought the lifetime pass like an idiot.
Just to elaborate on the community streams more. Most live games have their community managers (sometimes devs) do a weekly or monthly stream where they play the game, talk about what is coming, interact with the playerbase, etc. They are almost all puff pieces, but whatever. FDev reduced the frequency of those (I forget if by half or straight to quarterly) which was IMMEDIATELY fuel for “Frontier is sunsetting Elite”. And it isn’t like they fired the community managers. They just… do less streams.
Like 99% of people, I had 0 knowledge of this game before the flop announcement. It’s a shame because it looks up my alley…but if there’s annoying stuff like locked characters, it looks like I dodged a bullet.
The good news for me is that when I mentioned the situation to my friend, he said “oh it’s like XCOM” - so now I have a new game to play. I haven’t played XCOM because I thought it was Artemis, a spaceship bridge simulator.
Why would you rush out and buy a single player game on release these days? You’d have to be an idiot of the highest order. This isn’t 1996 where we had a handful of game releases a year.
Can we talk about Rock Paper Shotgun’s horrible dark pattern with cookies? It took me a couple of minutes to work out how to reject all cookies, and even then I’m not sure I did it correctly.
I thought there were laws about the number of clicks required to reject cookies?
It’s like these gaming companies have NO Q&A people at all. Build a lab with a bunch of varying levels of machines and see if the game is playable. It’s not really that difficult is it?
rockpapershotgun.com
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