15
votes
Elite Dangerous players feel misled after developers interfere with big expedition to unexplored space
Link information
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- Authors
- Nathan Grayson
- Published
- Sep 6 2018
- Word count
- 995 words
Huh, that's interesting. It kind of sounds like a DM problem to me, players suddenly deciding to head somewhere you're absolutely not ready for them to go, but as a good DM you don't want to just say no. The difference between a tabletop game and a video game is that a tabletop DM can improvise easily, take what scraps of preparation you have and run with it, delay the characters until the end of the session if you must so that you have time to get ready for next time. Game devs don't really have that luxury, they can't hurriedly piece together a whole new area in a matter of days or weeks, so honestly what they did do sounds like the next best thing. This attack is a once in a lifetime experience for those players that were there, like the fall of Dalamud or the plague in WoW. This is something special, even if it's not quite what some were hoping for.
Yeah, that's not the first time I've heard it described like that, and I agree. However, I feel that despite it being a "one time experience," Frontier dropped the ball in their initial agreement to sign off on a "scientific exploratory" mission into an unknown area of the game, since it boiled down to a combat experience (which was initially bugged due to the area being a no-fire zone).
I'm a bit divided on the subject, because I do agree that at least they tried, but it's surprising that they were able to fuck it up so much.
Talk about a disconnect between developers and their community! And the fact that they published a news article about the mission failure eight hours before it actually happened in game is just the icing on the cake.
FWIW I've been getting messages from friends on steam absolutely exstatic over this. It's a bit frustrating, i get that, but it's an amazing interaction nonetheless. I've only actually seen people being salty about it on forums, but when i talk to people on discord and steam, it's almost an entirely different story.
It's not really an insult to players to give them a bit of a bait and switch IMO, especially when they've been given things in the past like colonia or whatever.
Also kind of irrelevant; but I've got a friend that is a huge star citizen nerd and got grumpy over the colonia thing, but after this ambush he's realizing that he might have pre-ordered the wrong horse and just got E:D and all the dlc. I get that this is only anecdotal, but I'd be remiss if I didn't just throw this out here since I'm actually confused where the outrage is coming from
The devs have always been pretty bad at listening to player feedback.
What really did it for me was when people were screaming about the slow and terrible flight model early on, and the devs refused to listen.
I'd be willing to bet the player counts would be much much higher if the actual act of flying were fun. Instead we get school bus simulator in space.
I'd have like a bajillion hours into that game if the flight model were something like Everspace.
Wow, weak. Weak that they intended to do that from the start, weak that they lead the players on, and weaker still that they leaked the article early, before the players kicked the event off. It would have been a huge opportunity to buy goodwill with their playerbase, but they decided that they'd much rather flip them the finger and hope they'd be happy with aliens.
From reddit, a player linked this No Man's Sky event that took place at the same time.
Obviously releasing the article 8 hours in advanced is a huge faux pas. I don't know how much time the developers would have had, but if "the cone" was an area that players were never meant to reach then it could have taken far longer for them to create something interesting than the time they had available. Creating a squadron of aliens is a lot easier and at least shows some attempt to play along with the community.
Granted, maybe they didn't set the players' expectations correctly. Players should have been told that nothing was out there, that they could try but they were likely not to succeed. I'm sure people would have still gone through with it and seen that the devs were honest.
What I don't understand is why the cone absolutely needs to be off limits. Why not just drop a random star system in there (or even better a hand designed actually interesting one) and then just have some other star system 'appear' on some commanders sensors when the story content is ready?