News Elite: Dangerous drops offline mode

More false promises from developers... Same old, same old. I'll continue to wait for games to officially release and then decide if they are worth investing in. It's hard enough these days to find a genuinely good game, let alone buy in to the promises only to see them dwindle and fail.

 

I did wonder initially how they would be able to integrate such a large and somewhat dynamic space across both online and offline: Turns out the answer was they couldn't.

I can imagine there are people with poor or unreliable internet that donated to the kickstarter on the basis that it would be capable of offline play.

It's not like dropping a feature that makes the game worse or more limited for everyone. It means certain people simply won't be able to play it.

I think when it come to crowd funding, fundamental claims about the funders potential ability to use of the product upon release should be one of the few things that need to be set in stone from the outset.

 

Seems rather odd to drop it only a month before release.
Have they been trying to get offline play working all this time and found they couldn't (if so that's a lot of wasted dev time), or have they known all this time that there would be no offline play ? (if so that seems a bit disingenuous)

 

I think that Frontier's plans for Elite Dangerous have always been highly ambitious. A twitch-game based MMO in an arena with 4 billion locations? Never been done before, and with good reason. I'm surprised that they got this far. I'm also a bit surprised that people thought that Braben's vision was going to be realisable at all without a hitch.

[OLD MAN]That's the problem with many gamers these days --they don't have any idea how computers and code actually work. The 8-bit era games started with us painstakingly typing in reams of BASIC code printed in a computer magazine --and then finding that it didn't run because of typos. Which meant that you then had to debug it. This process taught us a lot about code and how it behaves.[/OLD MAN]

 

Sim City Promised same item, They got slaughtered for the feature missing.

 

I think an offline mode would cater for a player like myself, someone who hardly gets any time to game and wants to pick up where they left off.

A real time dynamic world is all well and good for players who invest lots of time on a regular basis, but I just know I'm going to log in one day and find myself parked at some derelict station in a dead part of space where the economy fell of a cliff half a year ago.

 

If you are in a dead part of space, chances are they'll have some pretty high prices on some rare metals, which you'll be able to bring to the core worlds for plenty of wonga!

 

Well, so much for grinding the low tier ships in lone space before venturing out into pirate land. Being a new player is going to suck balls, it's the one game play issue that could kill this game.

 

this is going to end up like eve where new players are forced to spend years sat in high sec not having much fun for fear of losing their ships to players that devote the most time to the game.

 

Cue image of hauler perched on four crates.

Not so. You can also play Solo (just you and NPCs, you never encounter another player) or Group (just you and some mates against NPCs).

 

What does it get from online when you are playing solo? I don't really understand how any of this works. I was planning on maybe waiting for the Oculus Rift before I bought this game so I'm curious if I would get a different experience compared to playing it new (in solo mode).

The online mode would excite me if it wasn't for the fact that beta people probably have all kinds of advantages at this point, having practised for months and know what's what and where.

 

The dynamics (changes) to the universe are calculated on Frontier's servers, for the targeted 4 billion star systems an enormous data set is required. When you are playing solo you only have NPCs populating the universe, so you won't have the issues of higher skilled or tooled up players raping the newbies in the starting systems. But, the economies will be the same as the multiplayer (online) mode. So, from a new player point of view solo is the way to go, then when you have a comfortable cushion of credits for the ship insurance and a good load out you can go fully online without the universe changing except for the players (you would now be interacting with human players as well as NPCs).

 

True, but I think (could be very wrong of course) the whole dynamics of the economics and discovery are too complex or impracticle to do on a standalone desktop. For instance, I was under the impression that as new star systems are 'discovered' they would then have a development cycle for stations and economy. If you are the only player it would put a big crimp on the game if you were the only one exploring. Bear in mind the beta is generated to test various aspects of the game and the full back end isn't live yet.

 

The other problem is that people have been complaining on the ED forums that the galaxy as it is feels rather empty, boring, repetitive and lifeless. This may have reinforced the impression with Frontier that an offline version of the game, without gamer and economy dynamics and evolving galaxy and injected events, would not be well received.

Sure, posters say that they would accept that compromise for offline play, but people have a way of moving their goal posts. Soon you'd get annoyed posts of: "Hey, online has this feature. Why can't we have that feature in the offline version?" Or "Hey, why is the online version getting preferable treatment to the offline version?"...

 

Elite II did nearly-complete procedural generation though. My understanding is that with Elite: Dangerous they're using a lot of real stars, and that takes storing data. The GSC-II star catalogue contains only 1 billion stars, and is 200 GB.

 

If it was that simple, they would never have promised offline mode in the first place.

 

That's exactly what I thought when I read the new info. I didn't know people had complained about that already, I just know from Elite 1/2 that the world needed a lot more to be suitable as a modern game and I've always been sceptical they would get enough in to this game. Especially December. Releasing without visitable planets was a big warning sign to me too. That seemed a pretty big corner to cut, I had to wonder what else was cut.

I still know very little about the game, haven't read much about it or seen it for myself, but at this point I'm assuming it is just a very basic space trading game with some basic pew pew combat and the popularity is mostly because people are attracted by the graphics and presentation. I hope that's not true but it's enough for me to pre order yet. Waiting for reviews. Hoping at least one of them will tell it like it is.

 

While true nexxo it's a way to stop piracy that works diablo3 has suffered virtually 0 because of it and that's basically a solo player game with co op added on.