Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
How interactive, player wise is it?
rubydragon5
Member UncommonPosts: 693
How close to a mmorpg is it, can I interact with hundreds, or thousands of other players?
Will my decisions affect other players too, to any extent?
What type of features does it have, other then being a space sim?
Is there a complex player run economy?
mining?
trading?
crafting of some sort with blueprints or ?
Comments
See my answers in red above, from what I understood in the FAQ (one of the most popular ones anyway, here : http://elite-dangerous.
Beyond the answers above, what's important to remember is that this game is a work in progress, will include many more expansions in the future and has been designed from the ground up to support full-planet scale, FPS-style exploration and gameplay, atmospheric flight (including re-entry), full-blown economics and other MMO-esque social aspects.
All that in a 400 billion star system playground that will see a main storyline driven by player actions and choices.
In theory you can interact with everyone who isn't running in solo mode. In practice you run in 32 player instances with no system/galaxy/'public' chat function. This is in no way an mmo/rpg game as most people would define it.
If you're looking for something with the economic depth of eve you couldn't really be further from the game you want. Trading and mining serve no purpose beyond boosting your cash and changing some numbers in some npc database.
You can explore uncharted space within the gigantic universe and that's going to be a huge part of the game for a lot of people. Again though, don't expect any depth to it - and that uncharted system 10,000 light years over there is more or less a copy paste of any other system, including the same npc pirates waiting (for a very long time, presumably. 'Someone is bound to discover this system eventually...any century now') to drag you out of warp and try to steal that ton of coffee you picked up and forgot to sell.
The combat is fun. For a while. Once the game goes live you're almost certainly going to fight npcs more or less exclusively, however.
Contrary to what some people and FD would like to claim this is a single player game that you play online for DRM reasons.
FD will claim no no it is because shared economy and everyone has an effect on it bla bla......but then they say no wipe the 16 when thing go live because it doesn't matter if someone has 140 million credits due to exploiting bugs etc...thereby putting the lie to that claim.
I have played in "open play" only since betas and I think i have run into ONE other person. There will be wings (grouping) but being able to actually stay with the group will be a giant PITA due to them completely scrapping "drive slaving" which would have allowed groups to jump together.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
You're linking dots in an awkard fashion. No wipe and the need for an online connection to drive a dynamic universe and reduce cheating don't necessarily clash together.
Although not very expansive at the moment, there are very real, playable PvP and collaborative aspects to this game. I'm not sure why you're twisting and bending reason to try and convince people that there isn't.
E:D is a heavily instanceed multiplayer game, but not a MMO.
If you choose to, you can play 100% solo, without ever seeing another player by creating your own instance and blocking all other players from entering. This is the exact opposite of a MMO.
The scrapping of the offline-mode doesn't change anything in regards to playing solo, it's only been scrapped to have a hard to circumvent DRM-system.
The economy of E:D is meaningless. It's just NPC-goods being hauled around without any mentionable effect to other players.
Additionally... the ship-controls feel very bad, even with a proper Joystick like a X52.
Here's waiting for Star Citizen, but the controls in SC feel just as bad so far.
ED is very odd and really shows that the definition of an MMO is not set in stone. Personally I think of an MMO as having all players playing in a persistent game world, with the ability to interact with each other. ED falls into this category.
The game can be played in three ways.
Open Online: You will interact with other players around you, you can meet any other player also in Open Online. It is open PVP with consequences. Each player flies in an instance "bubble" of a possible 32 players, these bubbles come together and move apart as you con close to other players in the game.
Private Groups: You will only interact with other players that you have selected to be in your group. Game world is still effect by all players.
Solo Online: You will never meet another player. Game world still effected by all players.
You can jump from one mode or another, before you load your character.
So to answer your questions, yes you can interact with hundreds or thousands of players, but just like most MMO's you can't interact with that many at a single time.
Your decisions do affect other players. By changing the influence of the factions you are working for you can change the missions and the dynamics of the area, you can even start a civil war. By trading you can flat line markets and make them unprofitable for others. You can pirate and attack other players (or NPCs) in an area, you can also bounty hunt and attack player (or NPCs) pirates.
No player run economy, and no to crafting.
Edit: The multi-player interaction has not been flushed out, it is lacking in a number of ways that the Dev have stated will be implemented soon. The Dev have also stated that more co-op features are in the works to be added. So take that as you will, we have all been burned by Dev stating features will be added and then they are not, so if you are on the fence you can always wait and see.
What you all need to understand is this isn't really a persistent world, it has a persistent economy, factions etc so in that aspect you can call it a mmo BUT even in open play the game world is not "persistent", it is instanced with only so many people allowed per instance AND it will group you with people near your actual ISP region due to the peer2peer network etc.
Most pvp is really pve with few and far in between random encounters, the game is more like a single player game with some limited multiplayer pvp available.
My point is that when it suits them FD maximizes an aspect of the game but will minimize the very same aspect when it suits them.
As for the actual impact changing factions standing in a sector we still don't know yet what will happen thus the whole crimson state experiment which I have been watching closely baring the last day or two due to real life responsibilities.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Why so dishonest?
I posted this somewhere else but: ... anything passes for an MMO these days... It's kind of weird and I don't really understand. Basically diablo 3 is an MMO since the auction house links everyone together as well?
Besides that, cool video game.
Exactly. And I think the term "MMO" is really wide as it stands now. As long as something is a) online (interwebsable); b) multiplayer (people's gameplay impact individual gameplay); and c) massive (many thousands doing b)), then we have an MMO.
Maybe we should have sub-genre or classifications to help make sense of the level of interactions between said "multi-players" gameplay?
From what I've read, Elite Dangerous seems like a poor-man's Eve Online, with only a fraction of the things to do and low interactivity. If I am correct, I'm not sure I see the point of the game being even made in the first place as Eve is pretty polished.
Can someone who is a bit more informed than me tell me the reason to play this over joining Eve?
Thanks.
Immersion and it is not really like Eve at all. Eve is a spreadsheet management game and battles are over and decided before hand not to mention a big part of eve is scamming other players.
ED is more about exploration and dogfighting rather that spreadsheets, scamming other players and killing them for giggles is not really rewarded in this game.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
This is not an mmo and in my eyes has never been some.. I never backed it because I thought it would be a mmo or even for the multiplayer I backed it because it was Elite but with nice new graphics
If you played and enjoyed Elite then you will enjoy this its as simple as that.. if you are expecting a space opera then this si not for you.
The thing is, Elite was years ago, when anything that worked was almost acceptable. Shiny new graphics won't be enough, you can be sure of that. Gamers are very demanding these days as technology and needs have evolved - if there isn't a lot to do and there isn't a lot to interact with, except doing the same thing, missions, mining and trading, people will get bored easily as people need more. I'm not seeing any 'wow' factor (in the literal sense not the game sense) here.