Elite : Dangerous .... Space is big

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SnowGhost[/url]":2016dupp]You can own multiple ships, but you can’t fly more than one. The others sit in a hangar costing you money for storage.
...
Elite has an online persistent universe that will expand with time and will react to player actions.
You can chose to play either multiplayer, or on your own in this universe.

So how are they handling PVP? My biggest concern with Star Citizen is the idea that I can actually lose the stuff that I've accumulated unless I pay protection insurance. All under the guise of "realism". There's far too much potential for that kind of money sink to become a time sink (or worse, real money sink) in order to make sure I have enough money to cover the insurance costs.

So far the elements that you've described that are geared toward realism sound good to me. If they have unmanaged PVP and don't guarantee that I won't lose my ship/equipment I may have to pass on this one as well.

 

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SnowGhost[/url]":3kylswlh]
Same as Star Citizen. Insurance. Which only covers Ship & extras. Not Cargo.

:/ Guess it's relegated to a 'check out when it's $10' game then.

 

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Camp Freddie[/url]":2afcglbx]Insurance is a also balancing issue. I hope the dev forum isn't full of the e-peen stroking griefers that like high punishments in PvP MMO games.
I usually die often in space sims. Simply because it is fun to take on some above-my-level mission with a slim chance of success.
Since there's no reload button in multiplayer, punishment gets tricky to balance. On the other hand, maybe it'll make trading interesting if there is some risk. Too often, trading is a boring-but-safe grind to earn cash for a better ship.

This is part of my concern. That and ganking. Ganking will happen because of the First Law of MMOs: If Griefers can exist; Griefers will exist.

If I were working on the design I'd probably follow some form of cool-down design. If your ship gets blown up then you'll get it back in X amount of real-time. During which you can use any of your other backup ships, buy a new one or rent a ship. Leave pre-purchased insurance specifically for cargoes.

The other possible way of doing it is with a "buy-back" program. If your ship gets destroyed then you can (at any time) repurchase the exact ship (with upgrades and everything) for a percentage of its total value. Provides a similar level of financial hit as insurance without the recurring cost. Perhaps make it so that if you get destroyed multiple times within a certain time-frame (say 48 Sol3 hours) the buy-back cost increases. The flip-side would be a buy-back could be free if you don't get destroyed for a different amount of time (say one Sol3 week).

 

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Anvilfang[/url]":2u7ctjut]

Lurking Lawyer[/url]":2u7ctjut]Shame I can't afford a decent gaming rig :/

Aren't you a lawyer?

Lawyers that Lurk don't often get paid.

 

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Lurking Lawyer[/url]":268cqvwm]
Don't believe the stereotypes!

Clearly you're doing it wrong.

Need moar Class Action lawsuits (or the UK equivalent) and patent battles in your repertoire. :devious:

 

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SnowGhost[/url]":qzb9b1sg]Hand holding isn't a part of the history of the game.

I'd argue that educating the new player as to what is possible in the game (and how to do it) is not hand-holding. In fact it's the sort of thing that's very easily done and fairly easy to make optional for experienced players to skip and should be considered mandatory. There's nothing worse than being handed the reins of a game, being told "you can do anything you want" and have No Idea how. Tends to put potential players off (see: the X series and its inscrutable learning curve).

 

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daFunkyUnit[/url]":39c41s8j]

Matrices[/url]":39c41s8j]Played extensively over the past few days. I can't emphasize how well they have absolutely 'nailed it' when it comes to the feel of the game. One big part of that is sound design. Almost no one really cares about sound design in the industry. DICE is one exception, and these guys are another. Granted, it seems like it's lifted from Star Wars at times, but that's hardly a bad thing.

I find it mildly annoying how a lot of space sim forum warriors always argue that "There is no sound in space. Therefore, having sound in the game is unrealistic, and so this game sucks." This forces the developer to come up with some silly hand-wavey explanation on how the sound is "recreated by the space ship's internal speakers, in order to help increase the pilot's situational awareness." Puh-leeze. The game would not be fun if it was played on mute. Simple as that.

Sometimes, I wish the developer can tell these arm-chair game designers to just STFU. But unfortunately, the aforementioned arm-chair game designers are also the financial backers of the game.

No need to create silly explanations. The components vibrate and you're hearing the vibrations, transfered through the ship, in your cockpit. Which has air. Fin.

 

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Wudan Master[/url]":34aofnck]Call me crazy, but does anything else think it's too big, I mean every star in the Milky Way is able to be visited..

Nah. Most of them will be like an Elder Scrolls dungeon: yep, seen it before.

 

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PapagenoF[/url]":lhjd64qg]
But I thought the hyperdrive could get you anywhere at all in two shakes of a lamb's tail?

From what I've seen, yes, hyperdrive will get you there. Once there you've got to do something. Otherwise, what's the point? If there are 70,000 habitable planets then spending 1 second at each would take you 20 hours (so about two days in total if it only takes you 1 second to jump between them as well).

If you wanted to spend an hour on each planet it would take you 2,916 days or 7.9 years. With that in mind it would be possible (within the reasonable lifetime of the game) for a single person to visit and spend one hour on each habitable planet. 16+ years to visit and spend an hour on the 150,000 "hand-touched" planets (not sure how there are that many without them spending an equivalent amount of man-years working on it).

 

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SnowGhost[/url]":1u7put96]

krimhorn[/url]":1u7put96][16+ years to visit and spend an hour on the 150,000 "hand-touched" planets (not sure how there are that many without them spending an equivalent amount of man-years working on it).

They would have been created by importing data from the various star catalogues and then tweaking them to make sure it works in game, adding planets, etc.

Procedural Generation is used heavily throughout the game, and quite obviously they can P.G. some aspects of systems and then hand touch them up to be correct.

It was specifically the "hand-touched" portion of the comment that I was confused about. If they're simply adjusting a column in a spreadsheet that the procedural system uses then I guess that counts as hand touched and is do-able. I figured "hand-touched" meant they were individually tweaking around 150,000 planets. Which, even if only an hour were spent on each, would take the aforementioned 16 man-years to do.

 

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Mmmm. Playing touchy-feely with planets. :eyebrow:


Wait,


:devious:

 

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SnowGhost[/url]":1o7u5aa2]Frontier have posted a time lapse video of a solar flare, from in game. It looks an aweful lot like the videos NASA puts out of the real thing. The only thing missing is rotational details, which I don't believe Frontier are currently planning to simulate.

Frontier solar flare : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGupxOG853I

So are they simulating the magnetic field effects that give rise to solar flares (thus making flares emergent and possible unknown hazards) or is it "merely" a canned solar flare looking particle effect?

Either way: purty.

 

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tim1_2[/url]":26at5n63]Does anyone know of a good review or write-up on it? I'd like to get more of a feel for it before I plunge in.

Lee wrote a piece back in June.

 

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PapagenoF[/url]":jr4y75op]
Oh, man, that Saitek X-52 setup looks super-sweet, but it's spendy.

Think that's spendy? Take a look at the Thrustmaster Warthog. IIRC it's an updated version of the venerable Cougar.

 

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Mortus[/url]":37c7cage]A nice writeup on piracy using the barebones systems we currently have in place.

http://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/ ... iracy_101/

Reading that prompts a question: what's the ratio of NPCs to players? Is it somewhat feasible when entering a lawless system to duck and run while an NPC is getting shot at for their stuff?

I have to say that single points (or limited) of entry into a system (at least that's what it sounds like) in an MMO isn't the brightest design strategy. There's a full sphere of places where pilots should be able to jump in from which would make pirates have to work harder to get your stuff. At the very least they'd have to have a fast enough ship to get to you from an arbitrary point before you can get to the station. As it is it sounds like pirates can camp in a few places and everyone who enters the system has to go right through them.

 

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Anvilfang[/url]":1uau6l2h]What is the current open beta release date?
What is the current full version release date?

Currently in open beta*. Full version later "this year".

*For definitions of "open" that includes paying $75 to pre-order the game and get access to the beta. AFAIK there are no plans to release a free beta.

 

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tim1_2[/url]":9ui5la55]
To be fair, with DayZ, the cost is lower to get in at the alpha phase than it will be when the game is fully released. Bohemia did the same thing with ARMA 3...$30 to get in at alpha, $40 for beta, and $50 or $60 for the retail release. That pricing structure makes sense to me. $30 is a far cry from $75 for Elite.

That said, they are obviously free to charge whatever they like. People pay it, so why not.

The distinction is that one is funded by the studio themselves and the other is crowdfunded. The standard that crowdfunded projects have taken up is releasing the early access version at the same price they asked for backers to pay (or slightly higher) for the alpha/beta access. The full game will then sell for 1.5-2x the backer price.

For DEV/publisher funded the lower cost early access -> higher cost full game model is reasonable. They don't have people they'd be screwing over that made the game possible by asking less than retail and they're benefiting those who buy in early with a lower cost game for doing some work for them. For the crowdfunded games they have to balance the non-backer access price against the backer access price.

For me it's irrelevant. I simply don't buy games until I'm certain that they're games that I will want to play. That means in most cases I will only buy after release and reviews. In the case of E I will probably preorder as soon as they announce a firm release date since the word so far is incredibly positive.

 

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PapagenoF[/url]":19drzg7u]A lot of kids (myself included) wanted to be astronauts at some point

Hell, that was true even for my generation (born in 1980). I remember during the late 80's and early 90's Space Camp ads being shown hourly some days. I begged my parents so much to let me go but they never did . Space colonies, cheap and common space travel was still a promise that would happen within a decade or so up until the mid-80's. It wouldn't really be until then that it became apparent that the "promise"* of the Shuttle program wouldn't work out the way it was expected to.


*Reusable shuttles was supposed to lower the cost and increase the frequency (which would in turn lower the cost further) of going into space. Obviously that never happened.

 

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notoriousKTR[/url]":1kgoaxqf]

Mortus[/url]":1kgoaxqf]Latest newsletter is out, and it's outlining outposts. They're open-air parking only, limited space, and can potentially be taken over by pirates. So if you decide to park at one and someone wants your spot...pew pew.

That smuggling video was amazing. I want this game so bad, but months away from putting together a new rig. :/

Needed a Clive Owen voice over instead of the text.

 

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notoriousKTR[/url]":yn668qd5]Mortus's #yolo approach to docking is quite comical.

The win was the final shot as the other ship just kept on going in like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

 

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I need to avoid this thread until the game's fully released. Otherwise I'll be likely to buy it, an X55 and an OR Devkit 2 right now.

 

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notoriousKTR[/url]":1bxyv3z9]Thinking about it, an Android tablet would make an excellent remote controller (sending keyboard press over wifi).

Except for the whole 'can't use it without looking at it' thing.

Give me physical switches, dials and levers or give me...well, no, just give me physical switches, dials and levers.

 

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Don't you see the name of the captain of the ship in the HUD? If so, wouldn't all the "Mal Reynolds", "Han Solo"s and "XxXExtremeGamerSpaceshipCaptain_20xx_XxX" give away the humanness of the pilot?

 

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notoriousKTR[/url]":vw075b8o]Another newsletter: http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=dcb ... 18c3f518f3

Cobra's are currently 50% off, and you get 100% trade-in value of your current ship!

Testing/balancing combat/PVP in the lead-up to Beta 2?

 

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Evil_Merlin[/url]":tktp9vgw]

notoriousKTR[/url]":tktp9vgw]IN YOUR FACE CHRIS ROBERTS. THIS IS HOW YOU MEET DEADLINES.

What deadlines has Chris Roberts set and didn't hit?

All of them*?

Including the crowdfunding end date.


*Which, really, is to be expected. Even E is six months (at least) behind the originally stated release schedule goal.

 

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PapagenoF[/url]":26iapfws]

QuadDamaged[/url]":26iapfws]Game is broken for me. "Client is too old"

So I tried the tutorial... Well, the first one didn't set off to a good start. As soon as I undocked, my weapons automatically started firing against the station's wall

Hmmm. First--did you download and install the new launcher? If you fire up the old one and log in, and click on "Beta 2 released" (or similar), it presents a "save file as" dialog for "Client_installer.exe" (or similar). The filename is the same as the file you downloaded before, but is in fact newer. I downloaded that, double-clicked on it, and once it was installed, started it up, logged in and got the "Upgrade" button. When that was done I could play.

I'm going to go with: and this is the reason that I only buy games off of Steam.

Do they have plans to make it available through Steam after launch?

 

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Mortus[/url]":26w4758c]
That's right. That Saitek will never complain about being cold. That Rift will never complain about being neglected.

So long as you don't buy the flawed Sirius Cybernetics upgrade a couple years down the line anyway.

 

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PapagenoF[/url]":1cu2prhs]
As to the refunds, I think I read somewhere that they've re-opened the cases of some that had been summarily refused and taking a more nuanced approach than "you played an hour of one of the alphas/betas so NO."

Honestly, they got as much out of the beta time as the players did so, IMO, they really should suck it up and provide a refund to those that hung their purchase on the true offline mode. They've already got a lot of good word of mouth and I cannot imagine that the number of people wanting a refund would really cut into their profitability long term. At worst they make a (relatively) few customers less disgruntled than they would otherwise be (and who might pick up the game down the line if their circumstances/opinion on the call-home nature of the game change).

 

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skazz[/url]":27thosj6]I think it's a valid concern whether or not the ED Sandbox offers enough flavor and uniqueness to actually hold one's attention after the initial wow phase.

I think the guiding principle here is looking back at the first Elites. I can't recall how many times people have said they went back to Elite over the years and always found something new or some new way of interacting with the game. If E has systems that are similar to those games then the kinds of emergent fun that those games provided may crop up here too.

As opposed to Star Citizen which seems like it's trying (probably too hard) to provide coverage for every single avenue of fun that could possibly exist within a universe. It's Disneyland and Six Flags and laser tag and a zoo and a shopping mall and a coliseum and ... and ... and ...

 

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Pokrface[/url]":20y7428e]The annoying side effect of this is that on occasion, you'd need to target a destination system that was occluded by a planet or sun or something. In that case, you'd just get a "Target obscured" error and you'd have to swing your head over, bring up your nav panel, unlock your destination, turn on frameshift drive, fly until your destination was unocculuded, re-lock your destination, and then jump. It was annoying as hell because of the added steps needed to unlock and relock the destination—steps that weren't necessary with two different buttons.

Wouldn't you need to do all that anyway? I mean flying right into a star, or bouncing too close to a supernova, would end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?

 

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Pokrface is that you?

Now this is what I'd want to play it on.

 

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Well, now we know Mortus doesn't click links

 

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TheGnome[/url]":2tg6ksp8]

Wudan Master[/url]":2tg6ksp8]From what I can gather you can't.

I can't imagine that drive slaving is an insurmountable technical problem, but it sounds like the current Gamma is feature complete, so if they do implement this, it won't be until after the release.

It may actually be more difficult than you might expect. Sending a signal across the network to tell all linked ships to engage hyperdrive to a certain set of coordinates (and the obverse: sending the signal to tell all linked ships to drop out of hyperspace) is pretty easy. The hard part is what happens on the instancing side of things. They have to have a way to force the instancer into sending all linked ships into the same instance. If they didn't build it with that capability then they'd have to develop a separate logic path just for linked ships.

 

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skazz[/url]":2o37rjx9]Just a comment on your autopilot wish: I think the whole point of interdictions and of the need to slow down a bit as you approach the locked target to avoid overshoot is to force constant attention. Otherwise you'd just set autopilot and go grab a cup of tea or whatever, especially on the larger distance supercruises.

But...but...you should be able to set autopilot and go into the back to watch the crazy old wizard teach his protégé how to swing a lasersword around while your walking carpet co-pilot plays holochess with some droids.

How am I going to live my Han Solo fantasy without autopilot!!!1!1one1!eleven

 

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mordbane[/url]":2pl0v294]Buying system data from the cartographers should help you locate the closest one.

By this are you referring to other players that have scanned a system and are selling data or are there NPCs that sell the data back to non-explorer players? I guess the real question is: is there a mechanic for information on player scanned systems to become generally available or do you have to buy directly from a player that's scanned the system?

 

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Miwa[/url]":2ekaa7ea]Plus space is really big, and you don't have scrams. E isn't much of a shoot-other-players game. (Which is good, because if I wanted that there's eve)

Except Eve isn't a "fly your ship to shoot other players" game. That said, everything that I've heard here about Elite makes it sound like the right balance between players and environment. I do want the choice to shoot other players but I don't want it to be a case of always watching my back for an asshole ganker. That's a balance that I'm not confident that Star Citizen is going to pull off. Everything they've demoed is geared toward the PVP side of things and we won't really know what the PVP/PVE balance is until they start releasing Persistent Universe betas.

 

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Miwa[/url]":1ttj5v27]How do you intend to do much shooting of other players in E, short of hanging out in some player-designated arena zone?

That's about what I figured it would end up being. A place (similar to other MMOs that have designated PVP zones) where people go in order to fight with other players. As opposed to a pure free-for-all universe (even one with a higher NPCC ratio like SC is supposedly going to have) where you would have to keep an eye on your back wherever you are.

As I understood it E was going to have "lawful" and "lawless" systems (similar to what has been described about SC) where the lawless systems are essentially the known PVP zones.

...you have to hope they're dumb enough to not know how to just run away, log off, log back in solo and finish what they were doing.

Which would be a possibility, but one that might be mitigated by zones that are set aside for PVP. You don't go to a PVP zone unless you want to fight other players.

 

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Pokrface[/url]":9lfeat26]

Mortus[/url]":9lfeat26]Well player interdictions are a thing, don't forget. I actually got interdicted in my last video by a player. He said it was a routine stop and let me on my way. It was pretty cool.

So player interactions are still quite viable and it is open universe pvp, so you're never really safe.

Yeah—which is why I'll be permanently sticking with solo

Anyone who pulled me out of hyperspace for a "routine check" would get me immediately opening fire on them because I'd be so damn angry.

"Yeah, and this is a 'routine' not-cop killing" :devious: (Yes, I did see where you said you weren't that good at combat ).

What KILLS me are the assholes on the official forum who are trying to be "honourable pirates, wot wot, cheerio!" and who say that they politely interdict, politely disable, and politely ask for cargo—and not even the whole cargo! Just one or two valuable nuggets! I would rather self-destruct, die, lose everything, and GIVE THEM NOTHING than let them have a single unit of scrap.

Sheeeeeeeeit. Nothing honorable about them. That's just obviously them trying to keep a dogpile from happening by all those of us who find the concept of piracy to be incredibly hostile to the experiences of the other players.

Though if a pirate were to say "wot, wot, cheerio!" to me over comms I might just give them my stuff out of sheer humor. :bigdumbgrin:

 

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Mortus[/url]":3t7thgnf]Drive slaving has apparently been removed from the cards. Instead they'll be adding a wingman function, where if someone you're with gets interdicted you'll get an alert and can drop out to help them. Not sure how I feel about this change.

If it's predominantly an issue for interdiction then it should be relatively simple to send the initial "you're being interdicted" signal to all ships in a wing with the same jump coordinates set only the ones not being interdicted are then "let go" from the interdiction as soon as they've dropped out. Allowing specific coordinates to be chosen at which to drop out of hyperspace at (with some wiggle built in so you're not dropping out right on top of one of your wingmen) should also not be too difficult. Lets them off the hook for a fixed drive slave "feature" while giving the basic benefits of doing so.

Honestly, though, it's starting to sound more and more like there's no real reason not to release a stand-alone universe server so that people can truly play offline. So what if you're not getting the "benefit" of a "dynamic" mercantile simulation? It sounds more and more like the heavy co-op/multiplayer experience is being walked back as time goes on as well.

 

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Do you mean to tell me that I can't slo-mo strut my way onto my ship!?

Dealbreaker.