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Elite Dangerous: Horizons |OT| Just scratching the surface
- Thread starter Anton Sugar
- Start date
Nah, just garbage at managing an engaging schedule and reacting to player feedback. 100+ people on the project. Maybe they have engine issues with new content like Destiny.
RadioactiveLobster
Member
So which will have Atmospheric Landings first?
Beyond Good & Evil 2 (which is probably 2019 at the earliest)
Or Elite: Dangerous?
Beyond Good & Evil 2 (which is probably 2019 at the earliest)
Or Elite: Dangerous?
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
The community is in a downward spiral, but it's almost all due to Frontier keeping them at arm's length and in the dark, constantly dangling vague carrots over their head but never letting them get any carrots at all. The community is hungry and starving, and soon they will either starve to death or go hunting carrots elsewhere.
Frontier's sad E3 this year is completely indicative of their problem, and the really sad thing is that I don't think the devs even still realize what their problem actually is. If they did they'd be talking by now.
Of course, one possibility is that they honestly have nothing to say, and that very little is really in active development for the game. In that case their silence would be a defense tactic while the devs work on Planet Coaster and the mystery Hollywood IP.
Perhaps cause for a little hope?
http://www.gamerevolution.com/featu...gameplay-elite-dangerous-v2-4-e3-2017-preview
And a juicy tidbit
http://www.gamerevolution.com/featu...gameplay-elite-dangerous-v2-4-e3-2017-preview
And a juicy tidbit
Reckheim
Member
Caves, the most exciting things about 2.4 for me.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Here is another article, and interview with the lead designer of Elite, Sandro Samarco:
http://www.gamerevolution.com/featu...e3-2017-including-atmospheric-planet-landings
My main takeaway points from it are:
- 1. Frontier has a big book on Thargoids
- 2. No work has been done yet on atmospheric worlds
- 3. Exploration will someday see some love, and 2.4 will have Thargoid bases to drive around
- 4. No work has been done yet on S3 or anything post 2.4
- 5. Console and PC versions will have complete parity
None of this really surprises me. The way Sandro keeps talking about atmospheric worlds seems completely in line with this, it's years away yet and has not been started. And the team is focused right now on 2.4 and the Thargoid war content, so yeah S3 is just a twinkle in their eyes for now. This is why I'm pretty sure we aren't seeing any S3 core improvements until well into 2018, especially given how 2.4 will be released end of Q3 and will have a gradual content release. Frontier will still be actively working on 2.4 well after 2.4 releases. S3 is still a long ways off. And console parity with the PC version only makes sense, seeing how they all share a code base together.
And as for exploration content, well it's nice to at least hear some acknowledgement by Sandro that it needs development. That may be the first time I've ever heard him say that out loud, so that's progress I guess. And now we know we are getting some Thargoid hives or bases to see in 2.4, but I expect it to work very similar to how the alien ruins do now; meaning you fly into a system, honk the horn, and the location marker pops up on your nav panel and you simply fly down to it. And then we drive around it and sightsee. I don't expect anything more compelling than that from 2.4 for ”explorers".
It is kind of sad though that Frontier is willing to talk to the press in more detail than they are willing to talk to the players.
Anton Sugar
Member
I was just about to post that, Mengy.
There's still something...unsettling?...about the way they discuss atmospheric landings, like it's just a possibility but not something they are committed to. I think that may just be typical Sandro "not going to throw anyone a bone" speak, though.
Beyond the extremely disappointing Frontier E3, E3 this year in general was just kinda ho-hum for me. Not that there weren't any great games shown, but it just felt lukewarm all around.
There's still something...unsettling?...about the way they discuss atmospheric landings, like it's just a possibility but not something they are committed to. I think that may just be typical Sandro "not going to throw anyone a bone" speak, though.
Beyond the extremely disappointing Frontier E3, E3 this year in general was just kinda ho-hum for me. Not that there weren't any great games shown, but it just felt lukewarm all around.
Reckheim
Member
Yeh, definitely no huge surprises, feels like everyone is playing it safe.
MasterOfPastures
Banned
Star citizen, in 45 days. BGE2 is at least a 2020 game (if ALL the planets and ALL the star systems will be included, and IF they won't be cancelled once Vivendi acquires Ubi)
Anton Sugar
Member
Yeah, given how they're talking, I don't see atmospheric landings happening until end of 2018 at the earliest.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
It's kind of crazy, but Star Citizen might actually get atmospheric landings and rich exploration mechanics before Elite gets either of them. Even the very beginnings of Elite 3.0 won't be until Q2 2018 from the sound of it, and atmospheric landings for Elite won't be for years to come yet from the sound of it either.
Just crazy. What a waste of a huge lead start.
Just crazy. What a waste of a huge lead start.
You might want to follow Star Citicen more closely then.
While I doubt it will play out that way, the day that happens is a happy day. Because it's the day Frontier finally has pretty much directly comparable competition instead of a theory crafted 150$ Mio. phantom of a space game project. It might put a bit more heat on them... And we get to play another space game as opposed to a woeful alpha tech demo.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Yeah, Ive been following SC closely, or catching up with it really, for the past month or two. What Ive seen and read so far greatly impresses me. And holy shit do I wish Frontier had developer videos like CIG does, how fracking nice would that be? Even half of that level of communication would be a huge improvement. And yes SC isnt really a game yet but if they follow through on their plans it will be before we know it, and if they implement exploration into 3.0 like they state they want to then it sounds like they will have leapfrogged past Elite right from the start in that regard. I mean sure SC will not have a huge procedural galaxy to fly in, BUT does that really matter if it ends up being more engaging and interactive to explore SCs smaller world rather than Elites huge empty one?
I disregarded SC for years because I grew up with Elite and wanted to support them, but Im not ignoring SC anymore. In the end Ill only stick with one space sim to dump money into, and Ive already stopped spending money on Elite, waiting now to see which space sim I choose from here on out. Its up to the developers as to which one I select.
I see how closely you've caught up...
I'll put it this way: Frontier's primary problem in my eyes is definitely not their communication. It's their inability to competently design a game. Even if Frontier were employing CIG's level of eyewash... err, sorry, communication, their repeated and unwavering fucking up mechanics of a potentially great game into disrespectfully time wasting trainwrecks of shallow RNG fests would be just that and no more. They'd just never stop talking about how great it is.
And from what I gathered, in terms of taking player feedback into account, Frontier has been a hell of a lot more responsive than CIG (how many years until CIG came around the corner with measures to do something about the disputed flight model?).
On the other hand, if Frontier shut up entirely and never talked about their updates until they're right around the corner, but delivered competent stuff instead of an asinine table to explain your friends why they shouldn't multi crew with you and opt to play another game with you, providing a more competently designed coop experience not giving them the middle finger for not having played as long, I would be a happy camper.
Communication has nothing to do with producing competent game design. Edit: Or actually releasing a game and consequtive updates.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Truth in this here post.
Don't get me started on this. That should have been priority number one. But no they had to work the the engineers...
I always expected Frontier to lead on the PG stuff.
Mr. Luchador
Member
I've been playing for a year now, and I'm still none the wiser about the whole Engineer things. It seems entirely pointless and offers little to the actual game, outside of a thin reason to at least go and do some stuff over here, or over here and get this and that please.
But I was already doing this, as I was trading and exploring.
But I was already doing this, as I was trading and exploring.
Dreams-Visions
Member
I see we're all having fun in here yay
Mr. Luchador
Member
Flying to Jacques to ensure I'm one of the last people alive after the Thargoids kill all you fools in the bubble, Mia and Pleiades system!
Camp Freddie
Member
There is some potential good to engineers, since it encourages people to see things they didn't know about. However, spending hours waiting for the pure RNG of the higher tier USS-only drops shows that the core gameplay is seriously lacking.
Seriously, many of the the top tier materials are gained ONLY by sitting in deep space until they randomly drop for you. And they drop in an empty instance for you to pick them up at your leisure, not a high level combat encounter or any other skill challenge.
However, everyone should engineer a high range FSD. It's a massive quality of life boost. Getting 50 ly on my AspE and DbX and about 30 on my Clipper is great.
I just hope the Thargoids bring some gameplay and not just a powerplay grind to move materials around and maybe make a battlefront border move a bit.
Mr. Luchador
Member
Yeah, I think you explain my issue with it with greater clarity. I like Elite, as I've managed to find a nice RP Fleet to play with, and the Colonia Network is a good fleet too, so I'm getting what I want out of it. However, outside of making your own fun and story the game doesn't provide much.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Engineers was a great idea that was poorly implemented. The mods should never have been gambling Russian Roulette style. Pure crafting with gathered mats for fixed bonuses would have been a better, more rewarding, and easier to balance game design. Now it's just an unrewarding mess that has caused a boat load of problems. Just like Frontier's game design often does, they developed mechanics with the purpose of wasting the gamer's time and efforts.
Frontier has some incredible artists, modelers, and sound people, but their game mechanic designers consistently do poor work, and whoever is calling the overall management shots has scheduled things with the wrong priorities in mind. Soon they will finally start doing what they should have been focusing on for the past two and a half years: developing the game's core mechanics. But SC has used that time wisely and it may be too late for Elite to course correct at this point, because if SC launches within the next year in the state they say they are going to, well it's going to hurt Elite's player count harshly.
Elite had a great opportunity but poor management has squandered most of that now, despite some really great people at Frontier doing fantastic work.
Not only is BGNE2 trying to do this thing, but it looks like Ubisoft's Toys-To-Life game StarLink is doing something somewhat similar. It's not clear yet the range of terrestrial space you'll be able to explore, but E3 gameplay videos confirm it will have seamless atmospheric transitions. Seven planets, one solar system.
Haven't touched Elite in a while (never upgraded past the base game) but this is the feeling I got when I looked at all the latest updates focusing on things like crews and different kinds of ships. I thought they'd found something popular with the player base and just decided to develop it further.
Personally, I think Frontier should start out atmospheric landings by just moving up to large, lifeless atmospheric planets so they don't have to figure out how to procedural generate alien lifeforms. Just big planets with clouds and land (I don't know if Elite has planets with oceans but no life). That combined with what's already there would open up probably almost every rocky planet in the game.
Anyway, I'll just be over here continuing to mess around in Space Engine. I still think that has the most impressive procedural generation of all these space games being made.
Haven't touched Elite in a while (never upgraded past the base game) but this is the feeling I got when I looked at all the latest updates focusing on things like crews and different kinds of ships. I thought they'd found something popular with the player base and just decided to develop it further.
Personally, I think Frontier should start out atmospheric landings by just moving up to large, lifeless atmospheric planets so they don't have to figure out how to procedural generate alien lifeforms. Just big planets with clouds and land (I don't know if Elite has planets with oceans but no life). That combined with what's already there would open up probably almost every rocky planet in the game.
Anyway, I'll just be over here continuing to mess around in Space Engine. I still think that has the most impressive procedural generation of all these space games being made.
Camp Freddie
Member
Agreed on lifeless atmospheric planets. Most atmospheric planets are lifeless, and few will have 'macro' scale life.
Plus the lore is full of stories about early colonisation causing environmental disasters and wiping out indigenous life.
So, there's​ a lore-related reason for saying that landing on inhabited planets is forbidden.
I hope the core gameplay improvements mean making interesting missions and having these be major route to engineering upgrades.
Getting the FSD range boost for doing a 'sightseeing mission gone bad' is better than getting if from just sitting outside a station or a famine distribution point, scanning FSD wakes for an hour or two with no actual gameplay beyond selecting targets from a menu and holding down a button.
Plus the lore is full of stories about early colonisation causing environmental disasters and wiping out indigenous life.
So, there's​ a lore-related reason for saying that landing on inhabited planets is forbidden.
I hope the core gameplay improvements mean making interesting missions and having these be major route to engineering upgrades.
Getting the FSD range boost for doing a 'sightseeing mission gone bad' is better than getting if from just sitting outside a station or a famine distribution point, scanning FSD wakes for an hour or two with no actual gameplay beyond selecting targets from a menu and holding down a button.
Fixed bonuses with RNG for the special effects would have been ideal for me, because I do enjoy a bit of a gamble.
There may be some hope on that in the vein of the new weapons and things we'll be getting with the Thargoids. Improved jump range with stolen Thargoid technology is a possibility, though I'm sure the official forums will hate that idea.
What's the chance they'll ever get over their hubris that let's them consider watching endless amounts of loading screens and die of boredom in the far too drawn out supercruise (where are the fucking micro jumps already?) to be a good way to convey the "enormity of space" or some such bullshit? And what's the chance the immersion idiot brigade they've raised and schooled to lap this bullshit up and do any mental gymnastics to defend it to the blood as immersive, realistic simulation, consistent with in universe rules etc. yadda, yadda to not whine them into submission and change it for the worse whenever they threaten to do changes that might take into account the reality where actual working people with social lives and very limited evening game time due to that being of minor priority could enjoy the actual "Elite Dangerous" (not the disjoint arena PvP mode nobody wants to play) without having to watch 25 minutes of bloody non interactive loading screens in their evening time? Just to meet up with a friend ingame. That's before actually playing the bloody thing
Just about nil, I guess. Unless they promote the people responsible for their game design up till now away into positions where they never threaten to make an actual game design decision again. And have both, the people with sense to undo the damage to their game design trainwreck to replace them and the resources to let them refactor about three years of poor decisions (+the initial 2 of development pre-vanilla release) for anything that doesn't concern immediate ship control. If not zero, then pretty bloody close to it.
I wish I had Mengy's starry eyed faith that it'll go down better for Star Citizen, but from where I stand, that looks to be a trainwreck that makes Elite as a project look like a beacon of competence, only really let down by the fact that it sports C-tier game design. I'll of course mix a fantasy star citizen civil flight space man drink in "THE MIXMASTER" (or so), if I turn out to be wrong about Star Citizen. But I guess their civil flight implementation to make the MFS-X blush will have to wait until they've shown every other space game out there how to do procgen planets and reinvented networking.
I was actually talking about the micro jump thing last night with a friend and we both realized that if they added micro jumps then it would basically remove the possibility of getting interdicted. If micro jumps were a thing then you'd never want to fly to a station so the chance to get interdicted would be gone. I used to think that I wanted small jumps so that I didn't have to fly to the far away stations but once I realized that they'd take interdictions away I don't want them anymore.
On an unrelated note, does anyone know where is a good place to do massacre missions right now? I know that it used to be quince but they are no longer in a war.
On an unrelated note, does anyone know where is a good place to do massacre missions right now? I know that it used to be quince but they are no longer in a war.
I've always thought of micro-jumps as being able to jump to other stars in a system, not planets or stations. And I'm sure they would put in some sort of minimum distance.. that the star must be at least 50K light-seconds away or something.
It would be silly to be able to jump 12ls directly to a station.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
Yeah, I think the way the FSD drive currently works is that your ship is decelerated by the mass of the star. So a micro-jump would essentially be from main star in-system to distant 50k+ ls in-system stars. You'd still have to supercruise from those stars to the local planets/stations, so interdictions would still exist.
Fuck interdictions, imho. They're nothing but a useless distraction.
If there are multiple stars in a system that are far way sure, but the majority of the time that people have to travel far for a station there isn't another star in that system and the station is near a planet so you would just have them jump to the planet since that's the object with the most mass near the station.
I can't remember the station name, but one of the big proponents of people wanting to do short jumps is a station in the bubble that is something like 150kls away from the only star in the system. It's one of the first stations most new players go to because of its location in the bubble but its a pretty long trip. There isn't another star in the system but there are planets that you could theoretically jump to, but again it would make interdictions a lot more difficult.
Dubbedinenglish
Banned
Re: planets
IMO gas giants would be easier to implement IMO. No landings and terrain and they view doesn't have to be that deep. Coupf make it into a scooping mechanic that you can only skim the planet for so long depending on toxicity.
IMO gas giants would be easier to implement IMO. No landings and terrain and they view doesn't have to be that deep. Coupf make it into a scooping mechanic that you can only skim the planet for so long depending on toxicity.
Would be my first move into atmospheric bodies. Nice alternative and possibly riskier way of scooping.
So is 2.4 the end all be all for most of the regulars in the thread? I realize it's supposed to be the "content" patch that hopefully helps solve the mile wide and inch deep problem that Elite has. I know that most of us have the credits and ships we want but we don't have things to do. Yes, there are always going to be underlying problems with the game as there are with every game, but as long as 2.4 brings new things to actually do I'll continue to play.
It's their chance to finally show what they can do with actual narrative gameplay. With that comes the consequence of if they fuck up people will bail.
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
No matter what they show, the official forums will light up like a Christmas tree, with bitter old fogeys crying about how Elite Dangerous should be dangerous and not have cinematic story gameplay, and that FDev is pandering to the ADHD-riddled, low attention-span, COD-playing console generation, and that things were so much better in 1984...
It will be a shit show... but it will be a delicious one
No offense to you, but that's actually the kind of bullshit I would like their designers to get away from. "But, bu, but... we can't change X, because then Y wouldn't work anymore."
What the fuck is X and Y? X is the mechanic that let's you literally point your ship at something and wait a very drawn out time to arrive there. I'm okay with that being between the sun and a station some 1000ls away, but with their shitty drawn out approach deacceleration that's already some 2-5 minutes of doing nothing but waiting to deaccelerate at the right time to initiate a loading transition. Y is the mechanic, that's the more annoying Elite equivalent of JRPG random combat encounters with a horribly drawn out clumsy "point at spastically moving circle" mechanic to increase a counter, where neither of both parties has much control over anything, that breaks far too often and is employed by their bloody RNG design to harrass you out of your wits as means of adding "risk" to certain scenarios.
"We cannot possibly make the poor X mechanic better, because that would impede on the poor Y mechanic?" Bloody hell! That's along the lines od David Braben's "Hutton orbital truckers wouldn't exist if there were micro jumps." No shit! A group relishing in a glaring hole of your game design that literally has you point your ship at something and alt-tab out for the next hour wouldn't exist, if your game design hadn't more holes than a swiss cheese? Frontier's suggested implementation being jumping between two stars in a system or directly targeting a specific star when hyperjumping there in the first place. Which leaves ample scenarios to interdiction-harrass players out of their wits on approach to the target, if only Frontier's game designers got over the moronic idea, that nearly all missions should require you to at least do one hyperjump before you can do anything worthwhile other than watching loading screens or playing the supercruise pretend space trucker game, which even Euro Truck Simulator beats out, seeing as that has more complexity than literally "point and wait", which is what supercruising in Elite amounts to. Minus the entirely reasonable option of an autopilot, which today's bloody planes possess for these types of travel.
TL;DR: It makes me sad seeing poor game design crutches being argument fodder as poor man's excuse to support other game design crutches. Take one bloody crutch away after the other and expose the whole card house of game design bullshit!
To the game's and Frontier's credit, I couldn't come up with another game that makes watching thousands of loading screens so enticing. If you can get into it, there's a lot of glimpses of utter brilliance in between all the garbage. Enough to provide you from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred hours of entertainment. But that's despite the game's design, not because of it. Much of that is literally waiting for loading screens, waiting for scanning doughnuts, googling for ways to get something in order to not literally waste hours of your life not finding it in the game, and relishing in the game's and its world's potential more than in what you actually do on a meta level ("Go, look for 12 tons of tea and bring them to us!" "Where can..." "Just google it because the game will not give you that information.").
Edit: One more thing, now that cross play seems to get pushed hard by MS (see Minecraft, Rocket League), what are the chances that Frontier introduces actual cross play between the XBox and the PC version? That might make the console version as couch option a lot more attractive for PC gamers.
All I'm going to say in response to another one of your soapboxes is this. If you hate the designers of Elite so much and think that they are so awful then why bother with sticking around at all?
Can you think of another published game that targets the same kind of player?
That wasn't about anyone else other than Burny because of the content of 99% of his posts in this thread. He acts like he hates FDev and this game and talks about it with such vitriol that it seems like he only stays around so that he can hate on the game.
The only other game that is on the scale of Elite is Star Citizen but who knows what's going to happen with it. There are other games like ED and SC, but they aren't nearly as ambitious as they are which is what drives people toward them. If a well established dev that doesn't need to crowd fund to get a space game like these built comes along, you can pretty much say goodbye to ED and SC. No Man's Sky tried and failed, but they weren't a big dev either. Elite is our glimpse into a large scale space game and how magical they can be, but unfortunately right now it's not where most people would like it to be.
Because Elite for me is the greatest contemporary sim-ish direct control space game around. I absolutely love the feel of the ships's controls, the game's most valuable asset imo, its sights and its sounds.
But it's paired with some of the poorest, most amateurish game design I've seen in all of the games I've played for any length of time. While I'd attribute much of that to Frontier not being in the lucky position of working with "AAA" budgets, it's undeniable that's partly due to the incapacity of their game designers and / or management.
I'm very ambivalent towards the game, but when I want to gush over how great it feels to zip around in an SLF, I'll just play the game instead of posting in a forum about it. The longer I've played it though and the longer I've followed its development and the design decisions that went into it, the more demotivating it becomes.
Greatest contemporary sim-ish direct control space game around then. And a really, really poor game. No alternatives to scratch the same itch. No, I don't consider being glued to Roberts' lips and keeping buying non-playable 500$ fantasy space ship concepts in hopes of their broken Cryengine tech demo sporting maybe 1% of all promised features suddenly turning into the "Best Damn Space Sim Ever" an alternative after 5 years since the kickstarter and an alleged 150$ Mio. aggregated dev budget.
Edit: If I bother you too much though with all my negativism, don't worry. You won't have to suffer through it for too long, as I too grow tired of it after having vented off enough. I'm already looking around for decent flight sims to put the HOTAS and pedals to good use. Funny enough, actual sims don't seem to bother with the pretentious inventory management transfer delay bullshit or with making you watch 30 loading screens to get into a game with a friend.
No it isn't, not in its current state. There's barely an embryo of what Elite is. Maybe in the future, whenever that is.
Honestly I can't really blame Burny. I end up in that same mindset an increasing amount of time when it comes to Elite. It's hard to avoid when you're passionate about the game and any discussion to improve it on the forum or to discuss running back moves made in a strange direction are met with hostility on the FD forums. Or silence from the designers. Then another bizarre decision is made.
I still hold out some hope for the game simply because the flight model and sound are so good but it's hard to have faith in who's actually calling the shots. The recent sobering "Uh...we're going to work on the core again after 2.4" is probably the best news we've had in a year.
The difference between how the both of you approach your criticism of the game can be seen right here in these posts and illustrates my point perfectly. There's nothing wrong with criticism like Bo's. Bo can be pretty negative about the game at times and with how things are I don't see a problem with that. Burny on the other hand turns his negativity into just straight bashing the devs. There are people who jump on anyone who provide criticism in the forums because of their weird devotion to the game (it happens with any game) and those people are in the wrong as well.
My issue lies in the fact that Burny calls the devs incompetent when it's clear that they are not. If they were then we all wouldn't have played the game as much as we have and love things about it as much as we do. You can't get a game with systems like that from incompetent devs. They make bad decisions at times and listen to weird segments of the community which causes problems, but at the end of the day they did develop the "best contemporary space sim". I'd rather just see criticism that steers clear of calling developers incompetent and addresses the actual issues someone has instead. It doesn't need to devolve into petty insults.
To be fair I'll occasionally get a jab in on Sandro No Remark-o Sammarco of Haze fame.
You know that there are/were/are still allegedly some 100 devs on the project? And they're not one, indistinguishable mass of humans? And I do distinguish pretty consistently as much as can be distinguished from the outside between the visual team, sound designers, people who do the basic vehicle controls (most likely to have an intersection with the game designers) and those that think we should have an hour clock between us and using our ingame items?
As for incompetent, yes. Whoever of the devs or whatever it is in Frontier's day to day processes and interplay between devs and management that is responsible for introducing inventory management delays due to community whining after initially claiming it would be a better mechanic to have it instant, the original punishing vanilla engineer RNG with nice module downgrades for hours worth of material grind, making powerplay a completely disjoint part of the game, making Wing payouts fully symmetric while multicrew payouts preemptively are gimped for all but the helm while having been announced fully symmetric, reduced "exploration" to "watch a space doughnut turning"... It's not that there is just one "face palm worthy" issue. Depending on how severly you style to be even the greatest game's shortcomings, you have those in any game. It's that every single larger update for now nearly three years since vanilla release has these, while the base game as had its fair share already, which largely haven't been addressed either.
At some point it's a trend and I can't help but call that incompetent.
Which is a bit unfair, because it's all done with hindsight and the Frontier devs, at least those in the live streams, including David Braben all seem to be nice, humble people. That doesn't make waiting 15 minutes to use a bloody ingame item or spending half a fucking hour in loading screens to meet up to play with friends, even in the bubble, a better game. It's a load of devs, with some sound team to compete with the best out there and a great visual team combined with an enthralling fantasy space ship flight model, utterly and devastatingly led down by the whole game design that's been piled on top.
Which is a pity, because these people work very hard. Unlike some here, I actually find they're progressing comparatively rapitly, especially compared to "Star Citizen". Only, that's little use when three years worth of updates and maintenance brings about zero motiviation to get back into the game with the couple of friends I brought into it. Not for PvE players with comparatively limited play time that is.
Edit: "You can't get a game with systems like that from incompetent devs."
I don't subscribe to the notion that Elite has particularily intricate game mechanics beyond its basic vehicle controls. What's Elite's PvE coop experience like again?
Meet up at a hunting RES/CZ (anywhere between a couple of minutes to half an hour), form a Wing, play shooting galery. If it's a RES, reinstantiate the RNG spawn table until you get the one where the ships are worth a shit. Pre 2.2: get bloody gimped payouts across the board, because they're equally devided by player, as the same ships spawn at the same rate, dictating how much credits you can earn in the first place and you could practically do the whole thing alone with a bit of skill, increasing your payout. Coop play? Challenge reduced, payouts reduced, discouraged for anything else but the company. Taking missions as Wings? Not even supported.
Different genre, more simple game, but very, very competent dev(s) called Blizzard nearly exactly 17 years ago, which still happens to be a landmark dev in gaming today (Guess why? Hint: Their game designers didn't let the whole rest of their games down). Game called Diablo 2. Competent chat feature to meet people and form groups/get into games etc. etc.. But the kicker is in the coop experience: enemies grow tougher the larger the player group is and so payouts grow, while the relative level of challenge stays similar or even grows, despite higher player group DPS output, while the players' rewards scale with the challenge.
Abstracting both experiences to what challenges and scenarios the games offer for coop play and how the design works out, that makes Elite's coop experience look rather basic and clumsy, because it could benefit tremendously from even basic implementations of Diablo 2's enemy scaling and reward system. Two years after introducing wings, Frontier finally thought about giving Wings symmetrical payouts, which is imo good, but no less than a crutch to not overly discourage coop play in absence of systems like those in that 17 years old game, to support a good coop experience.