what is the gameplay loop here?

[MΛƬΉΣΛƧ]

the game looks cool, but im having trouble understanding whats the point exactly? is the endgame goal owning the bigest ship? what keeps you guys playing?

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

The game is like a parallel life in the future. You have a space ship and a Galaxy to fly in. The game will not tell you what to do. It's an open world sandbox game. You can do whatever you want: missions, exploration, hunting pirates, mining...

[Kepano_808HI]

Originally posted by Lord_Matheas:

the game looks cool, but im having trouble understanding whats the point exactly? is the endgame goal owning the bigest ship? what keeps you guys playing?

Here's what these guys aren't telling you:

The goal of this game is too collect money. You are a space trucker. You can mine asteroids, ferry people to others places, carry cargo to a station or planet, run data courier packets to a station or planet.

The loop is: Make money, buy a ship, make money to upgrade that ship. Make money to buy a bigger ship, make money to upgrade that bigger ship.

The game is one giant grind fest. I have a love/hate with this game. I like how it looks, but its boring like watching paint dry.
Mining is highly profitable, but boring as dirt.

All the planets you can land on and explore with your srv look EXACTLY the same, color may be a bit different, but all rocky moons...I mean you can't even land on the Earth's moon, which is absurd.

If you can get the game on sale cheap, then its worth sinking some time into.

But to quote someone in my group, "the most non boring thing to do is land and take off"

Also, AI pirates cheat. I had quit playing due to AI cheating with allowing AI 3 levels over me to attack me. Master AI, and I would die in about 10 seconds and my full decked out anaconda and engineered ship would be destroyed. 10mil to recover said ship. Which isn't much once you learn to make money, but once again...boring

Sure there are some sort of alien ruins for blueprints you can do out in BFE space, which I did all of them....then there are the aliens that might attack you. I've randomly come across the Thargoids once...

The game is a universe sandbox, huge, but its about an 1" in depth of stuff to do. All this is, is a slow grind to make money, to buy a ship, to make money to buy another ship.

Then you have some space stations that take over an hour in real time to get too..like Hutton Orbital....absolutely ABSURD. Cuz yeah, sitting looking at your screen and you supercruise for over and hour is REALLY fun...this is the idea of fun FDEV has...

I will say, and the fanbois will get mad.....No Man's Sky has a better setup of stuff to do. I mean you can have a capital ship and go explore the galaxy as a movable base.
Granted NMS looks crappy, even on epic settings with an rtx card. But it has more depth, lore and aliens.
However, it is the same as ED in the respect of a giant universe sandbox, with not much depth.
It gets boring as well.

Sadly, games like these...instead of making them fun and want to play. They make them a grind fest and drag it all out to try to get you to play. This month they are giving away free ARX in game currency daily just to log in. TO try to get people to play.

The grind fest is similar to the Warframe grind idea.

[Ratt]

If you're looking for a game, E:D is not right for you. Don't waste your money.

E:D is a space screenshot generator and roleplaying platform. Its target audience is retirees who liked the original Elite (it was a nostalgia Kickstarter, even), have hours of time to fill, will never (by ability or intent) learn how to play complex or difficult games, and can be impressed over and over by pretty scenes of space ships and celestial bodies.

The gameplay loop, such as it is, is to earn money to buy bigger ships and better equipment for them. With a mind for efficiency, this can be done (i.e. the biggest ship and all the best equipment for it can be bought) in less than a day from account creation, including time spent learning controls and researching methods and assuming no live advice or in-game help from other players.

[Tag]

I want to start playing this game again, but i find no reason to continue. I bought new oled tv and the game looks nice on it, but there is really nothing to do. I already have anaconda and best weapons. I spent 300h tedious hours of repeating same stuff to get it. It felt like doing real world work. In retrospect, it made no sense to do this. 300 hours of work could have earned lot of money in real life.

[Imagination]

Originally posted by Ratt:

With a mind for efficiency, this can be done (i.e. the biggest ship and all the best equipment for it can be bought) in less than a day from account creation, even accounting for time spent learning controls and researching methods.

When I get the game, I'll have to see if this is so.

[Bannor]

This game requires you to find your own story, and then pursue it. If you're unable to do this, then perhaps this game (or any other similar game) is not for you.

[Dark Phoenix]

Originally posted by Ratt:

If you're looking for a game, E:D is not right for you. Don't waste your money.

E:D is a space screenshot generator and roleplaying platform. Its target audience is retirees who liked the original Elite (it was a nostalgia Kickstarter, even), have hours of time to fill, will never (by ability or intent) learn how to play complex or difficult games, and can be impressed over and over by pretty scenes of space ships and celestial bodies.

The gameplay loop, such as it is, is to earn money to buy bigger ships and better equipment for them. With a mind for efficiency, this can be done (i.e. the biggest ship and all the best equipment for it can be bought) in less than a day from account creation, including time spent learning controls and researching methods and assuming no live advice or in-game help from other players.

Wait, what do you consider a complex and difficult game?

Sooo, i enjoy elite, i am not a retiree, i didnt play the originals, i dont have hours of time to fill. I played it at a time before void opals and painite, and i enjoy it as a space trucker/ mining game.

Elite has its loop, though generally it's about finding a ship you like for a role you enjoy, then enjoying the aspects of the game you want to play. There is no hardline story to guide you, it boots you out into a world and tells you to enjoy what there is to play.

Originally posted by Kepano_808HI:

Then you have some space stations that take over an hour in real time to get too..like Hutton Orbital....absolutely ABSURD. Cuz yeah, sitting looking at your screen and you supercruise for over and hour is REALLY fun...this is the idea of fun FDEV has...

I will say, and the fanbois will get mad.....No Man's Sky has a better setup of stuff to do. I mean you can have a capital ship and go explore the galaxy as a movable base.
Granted NMS looks crappy, even on epic settings with an rtx card. But it has more depth, lore and aliens.
However, it is the same as ED in the respect of a giant universe sandbox, with not much depth.
It gets boring as well.

Soooo, dont go to those space stations, the game does warn you on the missions how far the target is.


So, comparing NMS to elite is kinda...meh really.

NMS is a good solid experiance. The planet stuff is great, the building systems are solid, the survival aspects can be a bit grindy, what with needing certain types of fuel for each thing, but whatever, its a good game all in all.

However, the flight model sucks. Mainly because its not a space sim, its designed primeraly for console or controller play, and lacks a lot of the finesse that any sim will have.

Elite's controls of the ship feel better than NMS. But thats not really surprising. The game is built around having a solid flight model compared to the more arcady flight of NMS.

The closest you could probably get to a game like elite would be star citizen. But even then, its not really fair to compare elite to sc, as elite's features have been built upon for the past 5 years, whereas sc is still building their core features, and havnt really had the chance to iterate upon them with the game in the public eye.

[Stelar Seven]

Money is easy to make, but not to the degree some have suggested above.

What there is to do is buy space ships, and fly them and do things you can do with spaceships.

Haul stuff, blow things up, explore.

There are factions and political systems you can get into or ignore.

That's true of nearly every other mechanic.

If, do stuff in space, is your bag, this game is great.

If you want character and plot and still want some space pick up The Outer Worlds, it's also great.

[Beetroot]

I wouldn't listen to people saying this isn't the game for you.

You can play a different game every time you log in. I do mining which is cool as hell, then next time I do pirate hunting or bounty hunting, or running salvage missions, or maybe just landing on planets and rallying my little car around in low-G.

Join a squadron and do things as a group, explore the galaxy and discover astronomical objects no player has ever found or scanned before (that particular body, I mean).

Go to the ancient guardian ruins and find tech to build into special weapons and tech.

Go to the Thargoid space and blast aliens, or look at the weird ♥♥♥♥ they put on the ground.

Go to high-pop space and blast players PVP style.

Get an interdictor and hatch limpets and be a pirate, stealing cargo.

Customize your ship, tune it, rebuild it for different roles.

Save up for a capital ship, coming soon.

Seriously, the list goes on.

[TrufflePigg]

i like to buy stuff. i also like to shoot stuff ED provides plenty of both.

[Don Samen]

This game is more then just a game. It's a simulator, it is social, it is hard to master but easy to play (well, just learn the basics of flying first).

To me it's the social aspect of power play. It's the exploring aspect when I just want to discover a system not visited by anyone. Then it is just me and the stars. My friends are still there, just a chat away. It is so big, when you start integrating the game with a site like inara.cz. That site holds a track on everything you do, and everything that happens in the galaxy.

I read somewhere that so far all players have discovered only 4-5 % of the galaxy. There is a story in the game to be discovered. The guardians and the Thargoids, Jamesons ship.

To me it is the social aspect. After joining a Power we work together, we recruit more members, we take care of and help our recruits. I've been playing in wing with one from Australia, and one from France at the same time. There is a lot of grinding from time to time, but often we do it as a community. Then we run into each other, we wing up, share experience, report on enemies, react to push enemies back etc. You can make the game a pure adrenaline rush, or you can sit down, relax and watch the stars pass by as you explore. Your choise, your experience. Yes both will give you experience, one in combat, the other in exploring. With the ranks comes better missions.

By the way, there is no loop in this game unless you want it do be. After a cycle of 7 days the universe changes, borders are moved, some powers loose systems, some struggle with turmoil. Then the community has to respond to whatever is happening. Or you can take part in that community and work to minimize the impact on the changes that is pushed for in the galaxy. It can be fun, frustrating, sometimes boring, sometimes stressfull. Much like life itself, thats the point of the game. You take part in a universe that is in constant change, and you have to learn how to live in it, and you do it your way.

[ExtremelyMift69]

No endgame. New content is added ever so often (two to three times a year), not that there isn't an awful lot to do anyway. It's a true adventure in that you explore the game content & build your experience all the while building your bank account and bettering your ships. The Devs have a long term plan for this game so expect it to continue for a few years more yet. For the price it can give thousands of hours of enjoyment if approached in the right way. Try everything the game has to offer & don't get fixated on just the combat aspect or wanting to buy the biggest ship because this can give a complete misreading of what the game is all about. Try to approach the three aspects of the game, combat, trade & exploration in a balanced way and you'll totally enjoy the ride. Fly safe & have fun Cmdr. o7

[Hobo Misanthropus]

Make money and buy bigger ships, and upgrade those ships into superweapons, in the hopes that the next major content dump of Elite isn't totally crap.

Or, if you have a particular fascination with either Space or Procedural generation, to explore simply to see what kind of errata and exotica you can find out in the galaxy.

[Tag]

The problem with this game is that the world is static. Everything is static. It's not sandbox game, it's static openworld game. I'd love to build bases, develop weapons, dig tunnels on moons. Change the game universe.

But this game was developed with server efficiency in mind, and it cannot be reversed.

[MΛƬΉΣΛƧ]

yes, i see now that this game is not for me, even eve online seems more apealing