- Joined
- Mar 4, 2019
The gameplay loop is too short. Other than exploring, which takes ages, you can do any mission in a very short space of time. It's generated an addictive sort of player experience, where the only real reward is watching the numbers get bigger. There's little incentive to cross the galaxy other than to explore, or to get enough mats to get the next engineer so you can make your shields spicier, which is just more of the same stuff over and over again.
There's also not much in the way of management for your ship, which makes sense for the smaller, single-crew vessels, but anything that looks like it would require more than two crew still handles like a single-pilot ship. Elite 2 and 3 both required you to hire crew for larger ships.
Everything looks the same, everywhere you go. This isn't surprising in one sense; the galaxy is going to start looking repetitive simply because it's so huge, but the sameness is enhanced by the way the game tends to normalise the scale of things. Go to betelgeuse, and for all you might tell yourself that it's an enormous star, it doesn't look that different to any other red star, because you never get close enough to any star to fully appreciate how huge they are. It gets more impressive when you're close to a planet, but there's not any reason to go to those planets, other than to get screenshots of how big the star looks from the surface and convince yourself that you're impressed.
There's no way to craft a narrative for your (essentially non-existent) character within the game world. There's no real sense of distance or time, no clear reason to visit all the myriad worlds (other than to say "I went there"). There's just the big meta-narrative within the game, and then there's you, pootling around and having only the vaguest impact if you help the right faction deliver enough commodities. There's very little interaction with the world. Somehow, Frontier developments managed to make space both tiny and incredibly boring.
Elite 2 and 3 had many of the same issues, but felt a little more compelling. You had to actually manage your resources a little, including crew for larger ships. There were missions that actually took you out of your local group of systems, particularly passenger transport missions, which could sometimes send you half way across populated space and make you visit areas you'd never seen. There was a grindy gameplay loop, but it wasn't so overwhelming and repetitive across every aspect of the game. Elite dangerous only understands grindy, shallow gameplay loops and has nothing else to draw you into the game, other than making the numbers go up. Even a simple crew mechanic would vastly improve the game, in my opinion.
If I were to fix Elite Dangerous, I'd do three things: Make larger ships require a crew to fly, have passenger missions be longer than 5 minute sight-seeing tours, and introduce instanced narrative locations - that is, places where you interact with characters and locations, and perform missions to drive a contained narrative to get a reward. Something you could repeat, like a dungeon in any other MMO, that isn't just "go to system X and kill n bad guys". Simple stories could be procedurally generated, with a bunch of longer, bespoke stories added in every now and then to keep things interesting. Surely the prospect of new, actually interactive content would keep players coming back?
I suggested things like this to the devs or to other elite players in the past, but it's never been particularly well received. I guess they just like their endless grind.
Good christ, this post was far longer than I planned...
