Comment by murat124 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by murat124 | Hacker News Reader

> The galaxy of New Eden is composed of nearly 8,000 star systems.

I loved Eve Online when I played it in the mid 2000s but its point and click mechanics as well as you'd have to wait days even weeks to acquire skills in some cases made me lose interest in the game. It has its addictive qualities too where you feel you could go on playing it forever while knowing you have got to stop playing it for your own good.

Years later I got introduced to Elite Dangerous and it's been a lot more fun than Eve. Elite gives players the opportunity to fly by binary stars, fly through neutron star jet cones to overcharge fsd drives, combats close to stars, land on planets and even more simulated activities. If you have a VR the game becomes a unique experience. The game's map is based on Milky Way galaxy and the systems are procedurally generated. I remember last year the devs announced approx 112000 individual systems were discovered and this is about 0.028% of the total. Anyway, a few months ago I solo traveled to Sag A* and returned later to the bubble (where Solar system and surrounding systems are). It took me 2 weeks to complete the trip and at times it was pretty boring. On the other hand it is the only game that let me experience the stress of flying near a black hole and I am grateful to the devs for making it possible.

I played Freelancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game) long ago. It had about 30 "star systems", each one is about 100KM~200KM in-game distance in diameter. It's a fascinating game back in the day, and cost me years of free time.

When I jump from that game to EVE, it's very obvious to me that EVE is not for explore. You can do that of course, but you will be bored fairly quickly even compare to games like Freelancer.

In Freelancer, every "star system" that I jump into gives me a feeling of mysterious, until I cruise through every inch of the map, and memorized every cruise path and hidden "Wormhole"s.

In EVE, every system feel like the same. Yes, they have different layout, NPC and background, but still, it feel like repeat.

I believe EVE is more of a game of politics. A game about ruling, conquer and team work. Explore? not so much.

I don't know, maybe because the map of EVE is too big to provide saliency. In Freelancer, every map is manually made to service the background story, so each one is different in their own ways. Also, because the map is so small, you can make them vibrant easily.

Ever since Star Citizen betrayed us by walking back their "third person Freelancer-style combat" promise there hasn't been much hope for anything that recaptures that spark. I can tell you that Everspace is the closest I've come. The lore and plot are skimpy and the star systems are procedural but it absolutely nails the combat.

Damn, I wrote a sibling comment to yours. Looks like Star Citizen fell short of Freelancer's legacy :/

Indeed. I'm not sure Chris Roberts has actually seen a jet fighter because the cockpits of all his space fighters look like those of World War 2 bombers with 60% of the field of view blocked by giant metal struts. My sedan offers better situational awareness than his starships.

I am quite amused by the idea that you think someone in a spacecraft of any kind would gain situational awareness by looking out a window using the Mk 1 eyeball.

Which begs the question, why have cockpit glass at all instead of immersing the "pilot" in a virtual environment with the most useful data available? Maybe something resembling, say, a chase cam?

If we were going for "hard sci fi", you'd need some kind of drone or something to provide the chase cam perspective which seems like it would be a massive liability in combat.

I agree a virtual environment would be preferable, although rather than representing the surroundings visually (which has a lot to distract from tactical decision-making), I'm picturing something like a higher-definition version of Elite Dangerous' IFF interface (with the little dots showing their relative angle to the ship).

If you were going for hard sci-fi you wouldn’t even have human pilots at all, the drone would be doing the flying.

Did you ever play Star Citizen? I bought into the kickstarter because it was a "spiritual successor" to Freelancer, but never actually got around to playing it. Also have no idea what happened to it, if the development tanked, etc.

Heh, Star Citizen's perpetual development is a popular and regular topic on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19807082

Absolutely second that Freelancer was an amazing game, I loved both the single player and (modded) MP with role playing. Tried Eve Online but it's just a completely different genre.

If you like ED and haven’t already you should check out No Mans Sky, the devs botched the launch but as of 2019 they’ve delivered nearly everything they did promise and some stuff they didn’t, next up is VR.

It feels like a living universe, planets are varied and wild, the creatures are inventive, as are the vehicles, you can build bases, Terra from areas, plant crops etc, it’s a really relaxing game.

starter playing recently, and it's been a lot of fun. it's what I was missing in Elite.

that said, of you love Elite for it's fantastic flight mechanics, you probably won't love No Man's Sky, at least not for the same reasons anyway.

I remember playing Elite back in the DOS years, that made me go buy a PS4 and try NMS. After a disappointed start I phased it out. I know thaat now the games is miles ahead of what it set out to be on the original launch, but that shit has sailed for me. Now I got a PS4 collecting dust because of that (not much of a gamer anyway). If I read that NMS drops some major-mega-big-update I may start it deom scratch.

Me and the kids played for hours, but there were some parts that were far too frustrating. I often ran out of those stupid red crystals and couldn't find any on the planet. So I'd be stuck there for hours and hours just dying and looking for them. Also, the story/UI were confusing as hell, I could never remember what was going on, who I was friends with, where I was going next. Overall, a confusing and boring game.

>you can build bases, Terra from areas, plant crops etc

This reminds me of the same confusion I had with Starbound: why do I have all these features that require me to settle down in one place to get the most from them when the game wants me to explore the far reaches of space? These things seem to pull in opposite directions.

Starbound at least lets you put a teleporter in your base so you can always return quickly no matter where in the universe you are.

In NMS, you can teleport to your base(s) from any starbase, and teleport back again. You can also purchase a freighter and use it as a customizable mobile base.

There's no requirement to have a base of any sort. If you want to be purely nomadic with just a small ship, you can. But, bases are fun to build and design. Provides a solid income if you want it. From a psychological point of view, it's also nice to have a place to call home in the midst of a vast and nearly infinite universe.

Indeed and you use the portals to jump to planets with resources that you need frequently (or in my case to a planet I named Boneyard that seems to have an absurd amount of ancient bones and blind sentinels).

It's a very flexible play structure.

As a counterpoint, as a long-time Eve player, Elite Dangerous has that "a mile wide, but an inch deep" feeling. Those billions of procedurally generated systems begin to blend together. Likewise, the procedurally generated minor factions are nearly indistinguishable from one another.

The heart and soul of Eve is based on its "single shard" system, where there is no opt-out. As a result, actions have consequences; decisions matter. Players who don't leave "empire space" are relatively safe, but if they're transporting something particularly valuable, other players will weigh that against losing their own ships to the empire police. Players drive the "Background Sim" in Eve: prices of commodities and manufactured items are set by the players who sell and buy them, they depend on the ebb and flow of non-stop warfare, affecting even players that never leave "empire space".

In ED, you can join with a few friends and team up to do stuff like mining, hunting other ships, transporting goods. In Eve, you can do that, too. Or join with a few thousand friends and deal with the politics, espionage, specialization, and sometimes bureaucracy that goes along with any thousand+ person organization. There are lots of characters that never even pilot ships, instead specializing in industry, for example. Well organized teams tend to succeed (for whatever definition of success they choose). The tools used to manage such organizations is impressive, and can mirror those in "real world" orgs of that size, covering not only tings like wikis and forums, but Slack integrations, videoconferencing systems, bespoke ERP systems for industry, and HR systems for managing people. Eve's developer (CCP) encourages this by providing an API[1] that lets external services interact with the game.

I would love a hybrid Eve/ED system- it would be very cool to pilot small ships in the Eve universe. I'd love for Eve to be able to expand beyond the 8000 star systems.

[1] https://developers.eveonline.com/

I remember playing the Eve beta more than 15 years ago. It's an incredible game and a fascinating accomplishment technically and in building a community in an entirely separate world that feels real, but that realism comes with downsides like you mentioned. Long training times, slow missions, spreadsheet calculations, etc. are all necessary to pursue serious success in Eve.

It's a trade-off and clearly most people prefer the faster and simpler gameplay mechanics of other MMOGs, although we also have the neverending Star Citizen that seems to be chasing the realism angle even harder and has gained quite a following. I wonder what everything is going to be like once we have real capable VR.

Here's my journey of exploration in Elite Dangerous:

https://i.imgur.com/iteL09L.png

That took about 2 months of real time, playing 1 or 2 hours a day. It was pretty epic, I loved being able to discover these completely new systems, placing my name on them for as long as the game lasts (which I hope is a long time).

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