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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream, what with the new expansion.

I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun.

It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is a bit wonky. The FPS gameplay looks supremely uninteresting, I think they should have focused more on the roleplay and exploration aspect.

On the whole it's a really great game, but no game will ever really play like a personal movie or novel.

EVE, Elite, and Star Citizen have all done the walking around + ships and it's all been pretty meh (with the first never really going live except for an apartment). It's a cursed feature apparently.

Don't forget No Mans Sky

It can work, but not in a procedurally generated / sandbox game; you need to add a campaign, a story, custom designed environments, etc.

One example where things do / can work is Space Engineers, where players can build and program maps in the sandbox for others to play.

Walking around in ships sounds like those cool things for one or two times and after that they become chores... It really becomes the part of it in gameplay loop. Are you making FP or TP game where environment is critical part of experience, or is some other thing the most important part?

It's hard enough to achieve that in any game unless you put the player on rails. Even games the size of a city tend to have massive immersion breaking compromises (look at any Bathesda game, Cyberpunk, etc.) Now try scaling that to a whole non-procgen universe!

> make tradeoffs between realism and fun

Isn't part of goal for SC to be far more realistic because that's only way to be immersive?

I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I've read that there's a planet that has player spawn in one area, with space port where their space ship is being in other area, and you need to get to train station, wait for the train, ride the train to space port to get to your ship, entire process taking 10 minutes to complete?

that game leaves a lot to be desired imo. there are a ton of things to do, but each "thing" is a pretty shallow loop. important components/ships are locked behind lengthy grinds, and you need them to be viable in pvp (which is itself mostly confined to combat zones and random interdictions). it feels more like a bunch of mini-games glued together than a single cohesive game. they did a good job with the basic "fly around in space" thing, I'll give them that.

imo, eve is the best current implementation of "be a real person in space". much less in-your-face grinding, since skill training happens offline. a few noobs in cheap ships can be a serious threat to an experienced player in something expensive. player actions can have serious consequences in-universe. although the last time I played, there were some issues with capital ship spamming in alliance wars. not sure whether they've done anything about that; it's been a while since I played.

They’re dropping VR support in the new expansion. That sucks. If there’s any game perfect for VR, it’s space sims - as the prior release of E:D showed.

What, Elite: Dangerous? VR would be the only reason for me to go back to it, and me playing it in VR at the time was one of the best VR experienced I've had.

Is that all because they can't make walking in space work in VR? I mean they could say "you need to play normally" when switching to space legs.

I'm a regular Elite VR player, and a more careful wording of the state of VR support would be that there is no VR support for the core feature added by the latest expansion: on-foot gameplay. The existing VR support (in the ship and in the SRV) remains and is currently one of the focus areas for fixes, but when you disembark your ship or SRV you're presented with a floating virtual screen.

There's a vocal minority of the Elite playerbase that want on-foot VR over pretty much every other feature request, but I think they're underestimating how much effort first class on-foot VR support would be to implement and how few of the already small VR playerbase would find fast-paced FPS combat comfortable to play in VR.

A word of caution that the newest expansion is still pretty buggy for a lot of people.

The console release is in the early fall, and that's when most of the community expects the PC version to reach a more acceptable level of stability.

More than being buggy, the expansion is bleeding players because the on-foot gameplay loops are super grindy (even for Elite) and not very fun in the first place. The xpac has absolutely zero new ship-based content, so people are just going off to play other FPS games that don’t suck. The PC community is already more or less dead just a month after it’s release; Steam player counts are lower than they’ve been in years. Dropping VR support was the final nail in the coffin.

Yeah given what the core player base seemed to be enjoying about this game (space exploration) I always kind of wondered "who is asking for this?" when they announced they were basically adding a B-tier FPS to Elite..

I suspect internally someone pitched the "FPS is more mass appeal and will draw in new players!" idea and it just went ahead uncontested?

I've also read rumours (but enough from different places that they're likely somewhat valid) that Frontier as a company has had a lot of engineering turnover in the last 2 years, which no doubt has an effect on extending and maintaining an in-house engine and product like Elite.

To be fair, on-foot gameplay (née "space legs") has been on the promised roadmap since the original kickstarter campaign, and it's a natural extension of the landable planets and SRV gameplay added in Horizons.

Frontier definitely tried to appeal to the typical FPS crowd with the on-foot conflict zones, which was a huge misstep: it was never going to be good enough as just a small part of a much larger game, and a lot of the existing players are much more interested in the space stuff.

If you ignore the shooty bit of the on-foot gameplay, though, it really does (or at least has the potential to) add to the core gameplay. Being able to walk around station hangers and concourses, prison ships, planetary installations and the planet surface itself is definitely increasing my enjoyment of the game.

The general hope is that they're leaving a bunch of the content releases - hints of new ships, SRVs and new thargoid-related gameplay - until the console releases for Odyssey in the autumn so that a large chunk of the playerbase isn't left behind. Sadly that means that us PC players are currently beta testing Odyssey, but after the recent patches it's just about performant and stable enough to enjoy.

I actually think this release is different. Killing off VR is a big one; while it was used by a small percentage of the player base, they were the ones who were really into the game and kept the community alive.

And more than most games, Elite basically requires you to use third-party tools built by the community to do the more complex stuff like long-distance navigation or trading. Many are already long in the tooth, and Odyssey is rapidly pushing away the most dedicated part of the community.

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