Elite 4 on Kickstarter

[Starglider]

Now called 'Elite : Dangerous', Frontier Developments is trying to raise 1.25M GBP, which frankly seems rather low compared to the budget for their past Elite 4 attempts or for games of this standard in general.







It's supposed to have all the stuff you got in Frontier but modern / HD : massive universe, trading, procedural content, also customisable ships, interiors, online multiplayer. No word on whether there's supposed to be any sort of plot or characters. Target release date is March 2014 which is absurdly optimistic considering that the goal is to 'squeeze the last drop of performance from modern computers in the way “Elite” and “Frontier” did in their days'.

Much as I'd like to see this game made, I am not going to give them a penny as long as David Braben is the producer. After all the previous failed attempts to make some sort of Elite 4 I have no faith in his ability to complete the project (and certainly not in 15 months). Sure let him develop code for the game but get someone who understands schedules and priorities to produce.

[Covenant]

Can people stop giving me high-poly HD environments? I'm sick of them. I think this is a fad and it has to end. Just be done with it.

Know what I want? I want it to look like the concept art. That concept art is badass. Make it look like that. That little ship in the top two pic's is like 20 polygons and looks better than every fucking one of the high-poly nightmares I've seen coming out of games recently. I like detailed ships in the Star Wars vein but that's honestly something you can do quite satisfactorily with low-polygons as well.

So quit it, please! Developers making space-ship games, for the love of Zod, just make them look nice and stop going nuts for polycounts and don't "Squeeze the last drop of performance" out. I'd like a drop or two left over. Plus, I won't give a shit what the fuck your polycount is if it doesn't look nice, and I'm really rather fed up of massive high-poly metal boxes and could totally go for something a little more interesting.

[Starglider]

Sorry, forgot to include a link in the OP.

Can people stop giving me high-poly HD environments? I'm sick of them. I think this is a fad and it has to end. Just be done with it.

With modern engines & content pipeliens hi-poly spaceships are just a case of turning the 'tesselation' slider up. Modellers always produce million-tri models in Blender and then tone it down for the game, that's not the issue. On modern cards you can tesselate down to sub-pixel triangles and it will render just fine as long as the shaders are simple.

No, what I expect to kill the schedule and blow the budget is trying to render realistic planetary surfaces. Braben talks about going 'way beyond the procedural content of Frontier & First Encounters' and as 'Project Infinity : Quest For Earth' showed, you can sink an indefinite amount of time and money into that goal.

[Stark]

Is this another 'nerds pay for name' thing? Because Elite has a pretty poor history. The original Elite was notable only due to the primitive nature of gaming at the time. Frontier was better in a lot of ways, but First Encounters literally never worked.

Sure, full 3D Space Rangers sounds like a cool game. Elite? Elite to me means awful combat, reams of fluff and no context. And in that market, X already exists!

Oh man planetary surfaces! Like that stuff in FE that never worked and was game irrelevant! Braben still clueless about game design etc etc.

[Covenant]

Okay, add "worthlessly and entirely meaningless planetary surface modeling" to the list of shit I want them to stop doing. Put it at the top because at least polygons on my ship are somewhat beneficial to me because they're on my ship, but polygons on a planet serves no purpose and for the fucking fuck of fuck I don't want to fly close enough to a planet to have to see the stupid polygons used to render its surface. I want to play a space game to be in space and play a game about space, not to land my space ship on a planet. There's lots of games on planets.

Does he want to let me land on the planet? Isn't that the sort of thing that could be very easily handled by a graphical transition? Does he seriously want me to sit through the entire affair of my ship landing on planetary surface? Why would I want to do that anyway? And more importantly, why bother? Who cares? Nobody cares, that's who. Nobody asked to do that. Graphics whores who make up a small portion of the population care slightly, but these people clearly aren't playing a game JUST for graphics, and their demographic is smaller than the people who'll be obsoleted out of playing the game by this idiotic fascination with porrygron crount.

[Covenant]

The main reason I am so hot-button about this is because Spaceship Games are one of my absolute favorite genre, but everything from X to Eve and a whole host of non-starter titles have attempted to move the game into next-gen with ugly, blocky, stupid looking spaceshipss, ugly, dull, boring looking backgrounds, and ugly, moronic, clumsy looking combat. If they'd just get off their fucking high-horses about how they want to handle their stupid HD clusterfucks and focus on the big-picture emotional impact that their game should be evoking they'd stop farting out tech demos and get something that feels like a game.

When you start from the question, "How can I evoke the feeling of a vast, amazing universe" rather than "How can I squeeze the most out of a modern graphics card" you end up with very different, often contradictory design goals. By the time they start to converge in the question of "Well, what now to do about combat," the graphics-whores have a billion metal boxes flying around with pew pew cannons and it looks like laser tag being conducted by cannon-fired pieces of aluminum foil on a black backdrop. IE, entirely fucking horrible.

[Starglider]

Is this another 'nerds pay for name' thing?

Mostly

The original Elite was notable only due to the primitive nature of gaming at the time.

All games are compared to their contemporaries. Elite was technically very impressive and had gameplay that was innovative for 1984.

Frontier was better in a lot of ways

The combat in Frontier was much less playable / fun than in Elite. It tried to be realistic and most people do not find realistic space combat fun.

but First Encounters literally never worked

Not during its original release history no but it has since been patched to a fairly decent state by fans.

Elite to me means awful combat, reams of fluff and no context.

I don't know what 'context' is supposed to mean.

And in that market, X already exists!

Why, do you think Firaxis will be remaking Xcom : Interceptor next?

Oh man planetary surfaces! Like that stuff in FE that never worked and was game irrelevant!

The planetary surfaces were in Frontier and worked fine (within the limitations of early 90s technology). What failed hard in FE was the plot missions, which were clearly tacked on at the end and never finnished.

Braben still clueless about game design etc etc.

He is more of a simulator programmer than a game designer. I am actually not that bothered by this if he was actually capable of completing a project.

Okay, add "worthlessly and entirely meaningless planetary surface modeling" to the list of shit I want them to stop doing.

No. Because modelling planets is not a problem on its own. Frontier & FE frankly had awful space combat, but immersion in a (relatively) realistic universe turned out to be a huge draw for many players. Things had realistic scales and the universe didn't just stop at low orbit the way other space games did. More expedient developers would chunk in a simple Mass Effect 1 style terrain renderer and call it a day, which would be fine. The problem with modelling planetary surfaces is the siren song it represents to OCD developers such as Braben, who will say 'the surface must look at least as good as Just Cause 2' and spend a year just writing the perfect procedural alien city generator... then wonder why the project failed.

I find it amusing that you want it to look like the concept art when that is ridiculously close range for any sort of even vaguely realistic combat. In Frontier & FE you spent most of your time shooting at tiny dots. I believe the Starkism for this is 'RADAR SIMULATOR LOL'.

I want to play a space game to be in space and play a game about space, not to land my space ship on a planet. There's lots of games on planets.

There are already plenty of space games you can play. There are about ten Elite 1 clones on Xbox Live Indie Games alone. If the goal here is to make a next-gen Frontier / First Encounters, then that's fine, because no one else is doing that. I can appreciate immersion and exploration and flying around a well-realised virtual space, hardly any games give you that any more so I can forgive poor gameplay. I just don't think this project is likely to actually release a next-gen Frontier, certainly not on schedule.

If the goal is to make a next-gen Elite 1, then that's more of a problem, because Elite 1 has been cloned hundreds of times and the bar has been raised a great deal since Braben last released anything. An Elite 1 style game does hang on gameplay and as Stark said there doesn't seem to be anyone on the team qualified to design it, certainly not when graphics get the focus in the pitch.

Does he seriously want me to sit through the entire affair of my ship landing on planetary surface? Why would I want to do that anyway?

Ok, you don't care, go play Privateer instead. I'm sure you don't want to fly a 747 from New York to London in real time either, but a surprising amount of people pay good money for that.
Although that said planetary/atmospheric missions/objectives can actually add a lot to even a combat-focused arcadey game. Starglider II and Epic (contemporary with Frontier) both illustrated this, but again I don't trust Frontier Developments ability to design compelling missions. The closest they got in Frontier was 'shoot a missile at a dot on the planet'.

P.S. The backer rewards on this project are horrible and demonstrate that Braben does not understand the concept of Kickstarter at all. You have to pay 75 GBP just to access the 'backer forums'. The only rewards other than the game itself are 'get a horribly buggy beta/alpha copy a little earlier and be an unpaid tester for us' and 'get your name entered into our procedural generator somewhere'.

[Covenant]

I was about to come back with a scathing rebuttal on why they really are a terrible bunch to focus so much on pipe-dreams of such insane things as planetary surfaces, but I figured I should at least google it first to make sure it was the same game I was thinking of, and I realize I was entirely thinking of the wrong series. Given how Elite apparently has a long history of actually rendering the surfaces (kinda interesting to look at honestly, I thought they just wanted to overly-exaggerate the detail on my orbital view of a planet surface) I can see why they want to make this a goal.

It may be kinda dumb to focus on it so much, but honestly, I wouldn't advocate ripping a feature out. If they're going to remake the thing, remake it right.

It's an interesting idea. I'm a bit more intrigued about this now, seeing as these games have a surprisingly larger amount of scope than I had ever really heard of in the past. I thought this was one of the contemplative space-trader games, but it has a much heavier emphasis on action. I really liked the Hoth and Death Star missions in Star Wars games, and getting a chance to do some atmospheric missions in Sci-Fi games was a lot of fun, especially in traditionally space-bound action games.

I'll retract my criticism on that point, though I really could go for something like those concept arts. It looks contemplative, mysterious, open-ended and fun. I could go for some of that. I always loved those times in something like Freelancer where I found an interesting environment and poke around it for a while.

[Stark]

It's game useless, though. The stuff you actually do in the games are really boring and inflexible, and the ship stuff and combat etc were all terrible. To be good, it's have to eject heaps of baggage and take heaps of ideas from modern games, neither of which I imagine will happen. Odds are it'll just be Elite, Again, which might have been interesting in 1991 (until you worked out there was nothing to actually do anyway) but its not interesting now.

[Starglider]

It's game useless, though.

I guess the ultimate Stark Kryptonite is Orbiter, which accurately simulates every switch and display in the Space Shuttle, and every bit of that detail is game-useless. Again, plenty of people bought 'Microsoft Train Simulator' despite it having nothing recognisable as 'gameplay', and that isn't a bad thing. Deliberately having non-game parts isn't a problem, because there are other ways to make an experience compelling outside of standard twitch-game blow things up gratification, and in Frontier those parts were so compelling they made up for the bad gameplay (for many people). Failure will happen if they try to hang the game on space pew pew and then screw it up, which is what I suspect will happen if they are aiming more for 'next gen Elite' instead of 'next gen Frontier' (if they complete it at all).

[Stark]

Yeah, but sinking money and dev time into planets is pretty frivolous when it doesn't add anything. Maybe try to get good combat, decent economy, maybe even emergent event driven shit instead? Braben always WANTED those things, even if he could never deliver.

If you think combat in a space game is 'twitch game blow things up', what do you want from Elite? A spaceship rotation matching minigame? EVE only broken by Braben? Another sterile, empty world where you repeat the same faction grinding for hours for the ultimate goal of nothing?

[Starglider]

Yeah, but sinking money and dev time into planets is pretty frivolous when it doesn't add anything. Maybe try to get good combat, decent economy, maybe even emergent event driven shit instead?

I'd say that planets adds more than a 'realistic economy'. I like the idea of zooming about over assorted alien landscapes and accidentally destroying my ship because I overcooked the re-entry trying to dash through the SAM range of a base I have been hired to destroy. I don't get to do that in other games. 'Realistic economy' is looking at spreadsheets and wikis to win the trading game completely separated from the space part, if I wanted to do that I'd play Eve or MOO3 or hell just play with a practice account on E*TRADE. As I said, the problem with planets is that an 'Ace Combat 4' level of landscape detail is quite sufficient to be immersive, but Braben will probably try to render the whole Milky Way down to Just Cause 3 detail level (like the Project Infinity guy).

Braben always WANTED those things, even if he could never deliver.

Everyone (well ok, other than movie-scriptwriter-wannabe writers) would like 'emergent even driven shit' i.e. fully dynamic storylines. It would improve Skyrim, GTA, any sort of open world game really. No one has the technology to do it yet. This game doesn't need that to be successful, just having the Skyrim setup of a branching main quest and lots of chained sidequests would be a uge improvement over FE's handful of mostly disconnected missions (the 'main quest' was three chained missions that were bugged to hell). Frontier/FE already had a faction/reputation system of warring superpowers that worked ok for handing out generic missions. 1.25M GBP is nowhere near enough to turn out that sort of content though, not while paying for development of a modern 3D game. Then again they may be thinking 'we need 3M GBP to do this project, let's pitch it low and hope we massively overshoot like the high-profile nerd goldmine gaming Kickstarters we just heard about'.

If you think combat in a space game is 'twitch game blow things up', what do you want from Elite? A spaceship rotation matching minigame?

I keep making the 'Elite' vs 'Frontier' distinction because it's important; they're very different games to play. Elite is short range X-Wing style dogfighting with a spreadsheet trading minigame in between the shooting sections. There is exactly one flyable ship and not much in the way of upgrades for it, all space stations look the same, all planets are just coloured circles that blow you up if you get too close. Frontier is a space travel simulator that gives you a sense of actually flying to distant stars, you can hover over domed cities on the moon, take off from London, land on Mars, see giant freighters docking at various kinds of space city. However it frequently asks you to shoot death rays at hostile grey dots, usually while spinning wildly and after many frustrating minutes of failing to match velocities. The spreadsheet minigame is still there but at least you can try out lots of ships that fly differently and try to minimax their equipment loadouts.

I would actually like to see someone make a genuine stab at beyond-visual-range space combat, because I think if you set aside all the graphical and mechanical preconceptions and asked 'ok, how do we make radar simulator interesting and fun' you could see something really interesting. Might still fail horribly but at least it would be innovative. The 3D spaceship design stuff has potential, if it was well executed, but with a 15 month dev schedule it's bound to be unbalanced/broken/unfinished.

To go back to my example from earlier, I like the idea of having to plan a mercenary strike on an isolated military base the way you used to have to plan missions in F-19 Stealth Fighter; map the defenses, make a flightplan and weapons load out, sneak as far as you could then evade/destroy defenses to get to the target. One thing we can do now is much smarter dynamic time acceleration, so it can take hours of simulated time without having to feel slow to play. From the image of the shattered hulk in the concept art, the stereotypical thing to do would be to come upon that and then get ambushed by 30 little pirate fighters, who throw themselves suicidally into your mega death beams until the last one is dead. What would be more interesting is to trace the pirates back to their base, which is too well armed for you to take on, but you can report to the police, which they ignore, then you are contacted by space-email by someone with evidence that the pirates are bribing the police, so you go to cripple and capture a planetary VIP's ship at the next meeting, but it's a setup and you have to escape the trap etc etc. Later in the game you might get a similar scenario but you can just BDZ the pirate base with your gold-plated star destroyer.

Another sterile, empty world where you repeat the same faction grinding for hours for the ultimate goal of nothing?

I am ok with 'grinding' i.e. doing repetitive mission if there is enough procedural variety and mechanical complexity in the missions to make them fun. To take an extreme example my wife has spent well over 100 hours on the Wii Endless Ocean games, which seem to involve nothing more than floating around a low-poly seabed taking pictures of fish (ok, there is a dolphin training minigame). This is a case of a compelling virtual environment with no recognisable gameplay. I would be happy enough to get ten hours of interesting experiences out of a game never mind 100. The problem with Braben is that while he was able to deliver a compelling virtual universe in Frontier, he was only able to do so because of technical limitations of the time. Being limited to the 100 triangles or so on screen you could get out of an Amiga 500 restricted how detailed things could be, and being limited to 1 megabyte of memory restricted the scope. Without those restrictions he just seems to have indefinite feature creep. Even that could work actually if he went for the Notch endless beta / early, frequent releases model, but no Frontier Developments seem completely locked into the 1998 model of game development.

[Stark]

That's my point. Gonzo shit like OMG NEAR PLANET add less than 'world changes and thus remains interesting longer'.

[Zinegata]

Starglider->

Which are the better of the new Elite clones, out of curiosity?

[Tolya]

Devs with brains take their kickstarter statistics and show them to serious investors, saying "look, we got this much from random ppl on the internet, wanna chime in and make an easy buck?" Apparently thats what Obsidian did with Project Eternity, they showed how much support they have and now the production budget is around 40 million usd.

So while 1,25m is spare change for a project like this, it's, perhaps more importantly, good leverage, because it shows that there is a market out there for whatever you want to make.

[Starglider]

That's my point. Gonzo shit like OMG NEAR PLANET add less than 'world changes and thus remains interesting longer'.

Well sure but how many developers actually implement that? Volition probably went further than anyone else recently and they were still just "can remodel some buildings and change gang spawns" (like GTA, like Mercenaries 2, like Red Faction 3). Yes it would be great if they coded an interstellar war (cold or hot) that actually felt like a real conflict that you could make a difference in (without being OMG ONLY YOU CAN SAVE US COMMANDER JAMESON), e.g. like the Star Control 2 background events but dynamic and massive updated. No, no one is going to work on that these days, not when they could be coding transpecular ray-spline shaders to make the greeblies on the ships look 10% cooler and their screenshots look more sparkly than Eve.

I agree it's a missed opportunity in that Kickstarter is one of the few places where you could say 'dynamic universe, warring superpowers, reacts to your events' and it would make a real difference to how much money you can bring in. As I've said Braben is a poor project manager, has written a poorly articulated Kickstarter pitch (it didn't even have any art or a video when first posted!) and probably isn't the right choice to code a dynamic universe.

Which are the better of the new Elite clones, out of curiosity?

Ask Covenant, I'm sure he's played a lot more than me.

Apparently thats what Obsidian did with Project Eternity, they showed how much support they have and now the production budget is around 40 million usd.

Where did you hear that? I was expecting them to double the crowdsourced funding, which was about $3.2M after the KS cut (5% + 4% Amazon costs) and fulfillment costs. $40M is ridiculously high for a niche 2D title, that's roughly what Skyrim cost to make (excluding marketing budget) and about three times what Gears of War 2 (an AAA game) cost.

[Covenant]

Ask Covenant, I'm sure he's played a lot more than me.

Art thou mocking me!?

Regardless, I personally have always found Freelancer scratched the itch I had for free-roaming space combat better than any of the other games. To my memory it has the most varied space environments--obviously as far from realistic as you can get, with huge fields of gemstone-shaped obsidian, or dust, or some kind of organic soup, or specific zones like the dense accretion disc that formed around what I think was a very nearby White Dwarf. So in terms of generalized variety I found it to be pretty consistent.

It had Baby's First space combat too, which was actually a bit refreshing after combat had gotten increasingly more complex. And you could pretty reliably escape from people, at least if I recall correctly, and I liked blasting around space with my massive space whale freighter. I only switched over to a fighter craft at the end of the Privateer-esque story. These games are combat centered of course, so it's not like you can beat the final missions by dropping 500 metric tons of Foodstuffs into it or something.

One interesting thing was that your primary transport between areas took place in these acceleration tubes, and pirates could fuck with them so they'd drop you out. This happened a TON, and it eventually got more annoying than dangerous, but thankfully you could often just fly past that section of pipe and jump back out again no trouble. I did enjoy doing it to other people though.

But yeah, overall, I think Freelancer is a nice place to jump in. Pretty darn simple, but really pretty, and satisfying. I could go for a Space Ship Trading simulator, but to make that work I'd want my Han Solo smuggler protagonist to have "run and gun" segments with him on the ground. Starships and space travel are such complex affairs that I think any approach to simulation is either going to make it so hard that getting into space ONCE is, like, a major accomplishment... or it'll have to include so many automated features that I ask why bother at all. That's how Freelancer felt--they just said "meh, don't mind that stuff" and let me go explore the interesting environments. Not deep, but satisfying, and it had a pretty lengthy playthrough. I preferred it to some of the crunchier space exploration games, sadly. The original Privateer was okay but it would be a nightmare to play now.

Sadly, my tastes in this matter are pretty low-brow. I either want to have some grit-filled trader simulation that deals with some kind of Evil Corporation themes or something I can dig into, and not have much space combat, or a whiz-bang Flash Gordon adventure. I think I could be down for Starglider's "beyond visual range" combat elements if combat was pants-shittingly lethal and also incredibly rare. It would fit the "realistic space sim" model. If you make it include a lot of maneuver and counter-measures (ECM, interceptor missiles or lasers, flares, etc) then you could have an interesting visual display showing what is happening without even showing the enemy vessel.

You can also display the target in your ship's HUD as either a thermal blip, or a simulated image based on make-and-model and vector. For an unknown ship you'd get a "CRAFT UNKNOWN" screen. Spoooky.

[Stark]

BVR combat is just management anyway; it wouldn't have any of the stupid crap Frontier combat had around angling your inertia-sliding ship over the tiny dot. Space Harpoon, so really boring, but probably less frustrating and certainly much broader scope for things happening, since extending the field of engagement icnludes more terrain and possiblities.

Shit, you could make a half decent card game based BVR space combat game and still have it be interestingly not 'hard scifi' bullshit. But not if you're David Braben.

[Zaune]

It had better do a very large number of things that the already existing open-source remake doesn't, that's all I can say.

[Anacronian]

New gameplay vid Here this time without the standard rant about just how awesome procedural programming is.

[Starglider]

New gameplay vid Here this time without the standard rant about just how awesome procedural programming is.

Looks horrible. As in 'Blazing Angels 2 multiplayer endless turning dogfight with no skill or strategy' horrible (I like BA2, but the multiplayer was awful, particularly with top teir planes that basically never stalled). The Xbox Live Indie Game 'Devilsong' does space fighters in asteroids better than that video, and that was made on a budget of $0

[Anacronian]

Take it for what it is, A lot of gameplay elements haven't been implemented yet.

[Starglider]

Take it for what it is, A lot of gameplay elements haven't been implemented yet.

Frontier Developments have been trying to make Elite 4 since the late 90s, and that's the best gameplay video they could come up with?