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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

There's Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, as well as Eve online depending on what you're looking for.

All have their faults, but there are obvious alternatives to StarCitizen out there that's not vaporware.

I think that of the two, Elite Dangerous is the only one that scratches a similar itch, especially in terms of the spaceship mechanics. But it too has suffered from severe mismanagement (pursuing features that got advertising hype over those that made the game fun, abandoning features and leaving them in a broken state, taking forever to fix bugs but being quick on exploits, poor communication and of course the general brokenness of the way they designed their multiplayer in the first place).

I suppose Elite's one saving grace is that it doesn't claim to be in alpha.

Elite is kind of tragic in that there are serious steps backwards in performance, VR, and visuals that they just don’t fix things.

A lot of great gameplay mechanics have been added over the years, but it hasn’t all been forward progress.

No Man’s Sky is the total opposite and I really want to come back to that at some point and get lost in it the way Elite was in VR.

Truly transported you elsewhere and gave you presence in an empty uncaring galaxy that made the tedium and grind still feel like something.

I think Elite's devs bit off way more than they realized they were willing to chew, especially with Odyssey, thus dropping consoles and VR.

On the other hand, over the years they've left so many things broken/unfinished or just in general avoided certain things, makes me wonder if maybe the foundation itself was unstable. Eg powerplay being ignored even when it wasn't working right, many years between the addition of new ships and the lack of creativity in terms of the ship's capabilities, similarly with SRVs, weapons bugs, completely failing to capitalize on the excellent PvP mechanics they have, the relative standstill of the Thargoid plot until people largely lost interest, the stagnation/disconnect of Colonia from everything else etc.

My biggest problem with Elite: Dangerous is the Engineering mechanic, which basically gives you strictly better ship components in exchange for very long and boring MMO-style grinds.

If you want to be seriously competitive in PvP, it's required to do Engineering.

Everything about Elite: Dangerous is a huge grind. You basically cannot play it casually, even in the completely offline and singleplayer session.

Yeah, I gave up on it ages ago. The only fun thing was docking/undocking.

It's funny, we've seen games released by the previous generations leading lights in game design and they're all disappointing so far. Relying on boring grinds, poor difficulty curves, etc.. Julian Gollop, David Braben, Chris Roberts, Peter Molyneux, etc.

It's like they can't adopt the new ideas from the next generation to make their games fun. Quite eye opening on how old age or perhaps success, not sure which, can make your thinking rigid.

Elite Dangerous is one of the worst. It's simply not fun. So pointlessly grindy for what is predominantly a single player game. I was so excited for the first 5-10 hours, and then so disappointed as it was obvious that every mechanic was just another massive progress bar that barely moved after hours of play.

No Man's Sky was much better, 40-50 hours fun play before the procedural nature of it became too obvious for me to enjoy it anymore. I played it 2-3 years after launch though, after all the updates. I'd probably play it again over a holiday weekend if I ever get the MS game pass again.

>Elite Dangerous is one of the worst. It's simply not fun. So pointlessly grindy for what is predominantly a single player game. I was so excited for the first 5-10 hours, and then so disappointed as it was obvious that every mechanic was just another massive progress bar that barely moved after hours of play.

Speak for yourself, I had a lot of fun for hundreds of hours and revisited the game multiple times over the years. I did space trucking and mining and combat at various times, and enjoyed never paying a monthly fee for an MMO.

Elite Dangerous was announced at the same time as Star Citizen, for comparison, and it's so old now that the main reason I don't play it anymore is because I did everything I could do in single player and the concept has finally lost its allure.

I have a friend who played thousands of hours because he was more social than I and wound up in a large player guild.

I love(d) Elite so much that I bought a VR headset and a joystick solely for it, and I don't regret these purchases.

I'm sure it's fun for a small minority of players. The kind that like truck simulators. Takes all sorts. Other than that, it has incredibly shallow game elements. With long grinds of those shallow game elements to get new ships.

Lots of E:D's own player base acknowledge this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/qk6kqs/why_...

> There's Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, as well as Eve online depending on what you're looking for.

None of those offer all the things as SC even at it's current state. Elite Dangerous is closest and even then they're just different games inherently.

> there are obvious alternatives to StarCitizen out there that's not vaporware.

You can download and play Star Citizen right now. It is, by definition, not vaporware.

I've tried NMS and Elite, Elite was on the right path but fell off hard.

Starcitizen is for better or worse unlike any other. Until another game comes where me and my friends can hop onto a capital ship and travel to planets etc seemlessly - ill switch. But nothing on the horizon yet.

Also love the ground vehicle gameplay too and its quite underrated.

Never played Star Citizen myself but follow the development closely. From my understanding it's the only one (of the ones you mentioned) that simulates actual planets, orbits and has seamless transitions from space down to the pavement of a city.

No Man’s Sky also does seamless transitions from space down to the planets’ surfaces, though I’m not aware of there being any cities on any of the planets, just ancient ruins at best. It’s an infinite universe, but a deserted one (besides various animals and whatnot), and the main questline is about finding out why.

You have to watch closely and find the situations, and yeah Elite has this limiting unrealistic physics, but you have orbital mechanics you can even watch given the right system and patience, and you also can seamlessly transition from space down to planet, just systems are always jumps.

Plus, afaik Star Citizen is the only other game out there that has an equivalent of the "flight assist off" model (that is, has the option of allowing a spaceship to be flown more like a spaceship than a plane).

That toggle adds so much depth and skill to combat in Elite, it's a shame it isn't a more common thing in space games (also a shame that Elite itself doesn't really take advantage of it).

Yes, that exists, but still I found the Elite flight model with its unrealistic max speed limit a real downer.. and the arguments about it being the only way space fights would be fun and everything else too complicated for the masses a real lame excuse, and if there is any foundation to that easily solvable with more flight assist systems (that you could toggle off if desired).

It was fun in the old first Elite games :)

Yeah the max speed limits are a downer. I never experienced the earlier Elite games unfortunately, but did get the experience of "true" spaceship control from KSP.

Many (I would have guessed most) Star Citizen players are long time players of these other games! What SC offers just isn't replicated by anyone yet, but you can be sure that players of this genre keep an eye on the horizon for what other projects might be offering, on a quite regular basis.

Given the development time and effort required to get SC to its current state, it’s hard to see another game getting close to it.

There is such a thing as developement hell. Meaning lots of effort, but not much progress when certain layers became a mess. The latest Duke Nukem game for example was developed for 10 years (I think) and then abandoned and never released.

And I follow SC just from the outside, but at least partially, I get that impression. So sure, shiny new ships are coming out. But the game itself does not seem to get much more stable and .. playable.

Whether the term "vaporware" applies to SC is kind of subjective IMO. The server meshing feature has been advertised for a long time and it still hasn't been shipped. Though they did add object persistence a few patches ago which really changed the game for salvaging.

I bought the game based on what I see people doing in it already, and it was fun enough for me. That definitely won't be the case for everyone and I recognize that. So to me it's not vaporware and there are lots of other people still enjoying the game today.

This is just the SC project, honestly. Lots of "we will have this" and "we will do this" that never pan out because the scope is in perpetual and constant creep, with shifting priorities.

It's a cool project though, and I do enjoy the game, I just find that their plans and announcements should always be taken with a liberal grain of salt.

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