Slashdot Mirror
David Braben Kickstarts an Elite Reboot
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC report that David Braben has launched a Kickstarter for a remake of Elite, the classic space trading game that he co-wrote in the 1980s. It has already received £122,000 in less than a day."
Look, I know the guy did the original and kudos to him for it (I was a huge fan myself of the C64 version, back in the day). But with modern games like X3 and even EVE Online, the genre has come a LONG way since the early 80's. It's not going to be enough just to re-skin the original. A modern project like that is a HUGE undertaking. I just hope this guy understands that going in. I would hate to see a remake that couldn't even live up to the many successors it inspired.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Without Ian Bell either on the team nor getting credit, count me as disinterested.
A modern project like that is a HUGE undertaking. I just hope this guy understands that going in.
His goal is 1.25 million (pounds!), so maybe he does...
No sig today...
> Braben has launched a Kickstarter for a remake of Elite
More of the masses funding elites, god damn it!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Due to a combination of bitterness from buying the unplayable First Encounters and their most recent output being part of Star Wars Kinect I wouldn't give him anything to be part of this beta test.
I don't have high hopes that Braben can repeat the success of Elite. He's been talking about it for years, with small hints here and there but nothing has come from it.
So I'm mildly anxious that this time it will be for real.
But OTOH I don't expect it to be a big succes. In the best case it will be something along the lines of the recent XCOM remake and I would be quite content with such a game.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
Yep. I'm praying this doesn't become another Duke Nuke'em Forever. Some things are better in a rose-tinted rearview mirror.
However, I will be following this with everything crosssed for a good outcome.
Here's a very interesting read (long but worth your time) about how the original was conceived: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/18/features.weekend
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
The problem with X3 and Eve are their learning curves. They're vertical cliffs.
What I would hope is that the new Elite game has is a reasonable learning curve so it introduces players in a reasonable manner that doesn't scare them off.
Ultimately Elite 2 was a massive improvement over Elite and Elite 3 was more a refinement of Elite 2. I'm holding back judgement because every Elite game thus far has been great.
He's not an idiot. Sounds like he was considering an MMO before WOW and EVE existed.
"I was very wary that we would be trailblazing and one of the ways we were planning to do it was to put a piece of hardware in every single phone exchange, so it was a much wider plan to achieve the very short ping times that you need to play the game we wanted to do. So we put that essentially on indefinite hold at that point because I knew it wasn't going to work well. And I'd rather not do it, than do something that didn't work well."
which is totally what she said
No comments on oolite yet?
http://www.oolite.org/
Its a popular genre... we could post different links to remakes for hours, probably.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The problem with X3 and Eve are their learning curves. They're vertical cliffs.
As was Elite.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Did you play Duke Nuke'em Forever?
What part of it was not Duke Nuke'em?
It was cheesy, it was simple and it felt like a Duke Nuke'em game. The only real problem it had was the long development cycle making everyone expect more. That and the limited weapons, but I believe they patched that.
I'm donating.
X3 is one of the most god-awful games in existence. So sterile. Voice acting in the campaign is TERRIBLE. It's full of bugs. It's annoying as hell to play. It's spectacularly craptastic in every conceivable way.
Would win, else just go Play EVE Online as that has the immersion only one universe populated with players can bring.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
That should read "The BBC reports "
The BBC is a singular noun'
Elite was a good game, but that was like nearly 30 years ago
I had it on the 64 , and the sequel on the Amiga. I was tempted to donate the sequel to that international health relief organisation
"Medicins sans Frontiers"
And I bet most of those who contributed are among those that whine, gripe, and complain when yet Hollywood defaults to yet another remake, sequel, or formulaic movie or TV show... while demonstrating in abundance why the entertainment industry repeatedly does so.
I played Elite on the BBC B back in the 80s and I loved it. Out of some misty eyed loyalty I will probably back this Kickstarter to some degree and look forward to a potential release. However I wonder how much of this money will be used as cashflow for Frontier Development Ltd and how much it is about Elite itself. The published accounts for last year don't make pretty reading. This might not of course tell the whole story but it might have some bearing on it - and they are certainly asking for a lot of money.
Having actually played both, I can assure you that there's a huge difference in the learning curve and complexity of Elite compared with that of X3.
You should also mention Vendetta Online, which I think is a lot closer to the original Elite series than EVE. It features twitch-based combat and is strongly (player) skill based. Its main problem seems to be its user base, which is very low for an MMORPG, and its economy, which is geared towards PvP and cheap death and does not really reward trading and mining so much.
I've not played X3, but it sounds interesting.
Is anything known about linux support? I think this kind of games has a relatively large user base among linux users, from what I've seen on Vendetta quite a number of the players there are linux based...
There's previous Kickstarter projects like this one that have failed to produce feasible support merely because of how it was presented. Even though it was evident they involved reputable people working at it, and to many people it'd appear that would be enough to garner it enough trust and reputation from the masses, but in reality it dropped because people were not given assurance just what they were putting money towards. With the DFA they kicked it off (no pun intended) with videos and other material providing solid evidence of what they wanted to accomplish and how. Planetary Annihilation was also exemplary at this, with an initial video that already demonstrated the art and gameplay direction they had for the game with a pre-rendered trailer of what they expect to create. Displays like this show an already existing dedication towards the goal before funding even comes in, which will encourage people to contribute towards it.
Elite may end up getting the funding it desires, but I wonder just how much more an impact they'll gain had they of started with an appropriate presentation. Unless it's a script for a movie, you don't go selling your project to any publisher with nothing more than a bunch of words and hype, and neither should you do the same to the public.
Not surprising as there were MMO games already up and running in the UK in the 80s as long as massive includes "a few dozen" and you don't mind the fact they were text only. It was an obvious step to include graphics but the bandwidth simply didn't exist
The guy is over 10 years late considering some crazy icelanders decided to make an elite mmo.
The biggest misconception that people have about Eve Online is that it is a game. It is not a game; It is a second job.
Once you've made it above Frigate-class ships (Rifter FTW!), you need to spend an exponential amount of time learning skills and making money, and a lot of the skills for serious money-making (industrial skills like mining, research, and production) are not combat-based. Sure, you can make money as a pirate, or hire out your pilot skills as a mercenary or fleet escort, but it's dangerous work. The stress is, IMHO, equivalent to any full time job.
Personally, I like games to be fun. Eve is rewarding, but that's not the same.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm thinking it's generous to even label EVE Online as being a game. Needs reclassified as something like sci-fi online job simulator.
Fear is the mind killer.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
you can play the original mon the beebdroid emulator on android phones. it is a full bbc model b emulator
I remember playing that. Was an awesome game back then.. Dam i'm old...
lolwut? £1.25m ($2m) is nothing for modern AAA game development. The average single platform AAA game costs $10m to make. $2m is predicated on the procedural stuff working, and as Braben admits in the pitch, they've already had some "false starts" on this project. You can bet your ass those false starts revolved around making procedural stuff that doesn't suck. This is an R&D project wrapped up in sheep's clothing. If he makes £1.25m, he's going to blow it. Ask yourself why, with 20 years and a 235-strong development staff, he can't either fund this himself, or get a publisher to do so. The most likely answer is that he's already blown all his opportunities there, by failing at this in the past, and KS is his last resort (and it is - if he blows this, he's never going to get a future Elite funded anywhere).
Spend your KS money on projects that are likely to succeed on their own merits, not on a hope that Braben can somehow pull a fantastic Elite sequel out of his ass for 1/5 of the typical budget for a AAA game when he's already spent 20 years failing to do so.
X3 and EVE have nothing on frontier when it comes to vastness, yet frontier fitted on a floppy.
freelancer is in the same boat with x3 and eve - and eve itself is in different boat, being more like trade wars than elite really.
flying into planets. full planets. in real size. that's what frontier was - that's what procedural generation gets you.
if you want a bag of full blown crazy mod check this out http://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Hires/hiresffe.html
frontier first encounters in d3d with updated models.
how he'll combine flying, time compression etc into multiplayer though.. that's going to be interesting.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm donating, and I want linux support.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
No I didn't. I played Duke Nuke'em 3D to death. After the terrible reception that Forever got, I didn't want to spoil my good memories of the game. I've spoiled too many old favorites by revisiting them in emulators or playing half-hearted remakes.
Elite on the Amiga consumed around 18 months of my life. I spent every waking hour outside of work playing the games. I want this game to be great but I doubt it can live up to that level of nostalgia.
The goal of £1250000 is for the minimum game, the trend (yeah, only first day and all that) is for it to end over £5600000 at the moment, which definitely puts it if not in AAA territory so at least close. And they say in the blurb that they already have some of the critical parts "already in place".
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
For me it would be enough to be just "I'm David Braben, please give me your money"
But, like X3 et al, they were fixed in patches.
Patches that also gave you a bit of bonus content.
Where they've fooked up (apart from the eternal auto-pillock exacerbated by you losing reputation because some barnturd using a gopher on a stick to find out when to turn slams into your ship) is in the "balancing" of the ships.
TLs can no longer hold TS ships. So your new complex out in the sticks has to have a sheperding of TSs to fill the damn thing. Why was that removed from X2? Because they found your elephant with 14 TSs held more than your Mamoth with 5. So, rather than *balance* it by making the Elephant carry fewer ships, they nerf it. Frigging brilliant.
M6 slowdown (extreme compared to M1/2) and, worse, the removal of the M5 that made the M6 the best player ship. Why? Because they didn't want a "best ship". Wel, why the FECK did you make the M6 more expensive than the M3 if it wasn't going to be worth more, fatheads????
They also screwed the pooch, though I figure a lot of this is the blame of others, including the otherwise wonderful community who all bought into that Star Wars bollocks of "Capital ships should be 20 miles long!!!". BSG (the original) was a battlestar and only about 350m long. Teladi Phoenix is just a destroyer (no carry capacity) THREE MILES LONG. WHY??? Think about it, if you had to walk from the engine room to command, that would be an hours brisk walk. What on earth are they putting in there?
Along with autopillock going right up to the paintwork before going "Oh, look, there's something there!" and stopping and turning, this means your ship not only catches traders like bugs on the windscreen, you have NO CHANCE of getting through, for example, Cloudbase SW because every time your autopillock starts moving, it finds a rock in the damn way.
Really.
TLs given they hold entire stations (though what are they doing in there? There's a lot of space in those that doesn't seem to have any need to be there) may be the right size at about a mile long. Though the teladi needs to be the most capacious at nearly two and a half miles long and the boron at two miles not far behind. Or make the smaller TLs SMALLER.
M6 should be about half the size. 80-120m long.
M7 about 200-250m long.
M2 about 350-450m long
M1 about 400-800m long.
But they put the Phoenix and Albert Ross at two of the biggest ships in space but give them either the slowest (what? Didn't use that space for ENGINES?) or among the smallest cargo spaces.
But look at the scale between the Boron M1 (Shark) and the M4 Buster You could easily fit a few thousand of the M4 in it. WHY SO FREAKING HUGE?
I already have a procedurally generated space exploration game on my wish list, Starbound
I played Elite as a child... though 8 galaxies and back again.
I played X3 and EVE as an adult and made it a few systems before giving up.
Personally, not only are they vertical cliffs of learning they're also dotted with underhangs of incomprehensibility.
The original Elite was such a great space game for it's day, I played it on the C64 when I was in my twenties. The game used a unique copy protection, a clear plastic prism-like lens that you had to hold up to the screen at just the right distance, which made the obscured code understandable to be typed in to start the game loading. What a huge pita it was to use! I lost the lens and drove to the company's New Jersey office, walked right into the second floor offices (there was no need yet for security in the 80's), where about 20 smiling, happy people were using actual modern IBM computers in a very pleasant office enviornment. I explained to the manager why I was there, was given a little tour of the place, and he reaches into an open cardboard box that had hundreds of those precious decoder lenses, and gave me two of them, in case I lost another. I hope they can live up to the original when they do this remake, but please, lose the "lens based" copy protection!
Ultimately Elite 2 was a massive improvement over Elite and Elite 3 was more a refinement of Elite 2.
I take issue with that - they were dreadfully dull.
I spent many more hours playing the 8-bit, black and white (Electron version, less capable than the full BBC version), original Elite than I did both Frontier and First Encounters put together.
== Combat ==
Strict Newtonian mechanics does not make for an entertaining game. Even Braben acknowledges this on the Kickstarter page. Neither do laser weapons in a dogfight. In both games the combat boiled down to two ships desperately trying not to crash into each other while jousting like two marbles on the end of a rubber band.
Elite got away with this because you had to dogfight to bring your weapons to bear on your target ; even so, most of my fights in Elite were won at long range, picking off my targets when they were still a cluster of four pixels. Only groups of four or more ships were a challenge because it took the first three to overheat your laser, allowing the remainder to close on you. In a game with no dogfighting possible, hitscan weapons with a long range reduce the combat to exploding a pixel in the distance all the time.
Whichever ship had the most mass usually won, because they were tougher. Only the ships with enough mass for shields were viable combat vessels, because systems damage was only repairable in dock - and you could get systems damage from any hull damage. Systems damage was very bad - because the fly-by-wire couldn't compensate for thruster damage, and neither could the autopilot (if it wasn't damaged anyway). If your atmospheric shields were destroyed and your only option for refuelling was planetside - tough luck, you're dead.
The lack of in-flight repair made most of the fighter class vessels lousy for combat, because they had light hulls and no space for shields. What they were great for was evasion, because their high-G drive meant they could outrun anything with a slower drive. So until you built up enough capital the only viable way to play the game was to chicken out from as many fights as possible. Because you had no cargo space to speak of, you just ended up being a courier. Like the real world, the open world of Frontier was mostly closed by your opportunities, until you were very rich.
== Navigation ==
The autopilot was terrible ; it used the puny front engine for deceleration, which makes sense if you wanted fuel economy, but not for best speed, where you want to be accelerating and decelerating all the way to your target at the most Gs you can pull. The autopilot was also great at crashing you into things and dreadful at piloting ships near planets, especially ones with strong gravity - you had to ascend on manual thrusters if you didn't want to be a smear on the runway. But it was all but essential to navigate anywhere. It was also trivially easy to destroy... and weighed a whole tonne, occupying a vast quantity of valuable hull space in the smaller ships, even though it should just have been a program for the onboard computer, given the ships were fly-by-wire anyway.
Having to budget your reaction mass was an interesting problem for some of the ships ; you ended up flying in on manual and using the autopilot for the final approach in the larger systems where the transit would drain your propellant reserves very rapidly otherwise.
The multiple-G acceleration available on most of the ships engines was totally outside the human experience and is something that requires extensive training for elite astronaut pilots to get used to, which was a problem for manual navigation and also the combat (above).
EVE definitely has a steep learning curve if you try to learn it in isolation, but for the love of all things spacey please don't do that!
There are numerous excellent organisations in game whose whole purpose is to teach newbies how to have fun in the game, with courses from basic piloting to some fairly advanced PVP doctrines and economics. Agony Unleashed, EVE University and to a lesser extent Red vs Blue are all good places to start, then look for a corp or alliance that is interested in the same kind of things you are.
People that try to play EVE in "single player mode" will find it very hard and very disappointing; people that interact with other players will discover that as big as the game of EVE is, it's nothing compared to the player-created metagame around it.
The part where Duke hides to regenerate his shield, I mean ego?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen
The guy who gave us Wing Commander and Privateer is working on a new game that provides off-line single-player space combat, as well as online campaigns, a persistent universe and Eve Online-like trading/economy.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Unless he gives me a reason to believe he has a particularly interesting spin or the ability to create the most polished space sim experience yet, why should l I care?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
True, but an updated Elite on smartphones and tablets would be pretty cool. The existing mobile games in the genre are a bit too limited, and something like X3 with a very complex economy is probably too resource intensive.
On the other hand, X3 on a tablet would be awesome, if someone could pull it off.
amen!
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands. Friedrich Nietzsche
Elite II and Elite Frontier were buggy as hell. I loved Elite on my BBC Micro (and lost almost a year playing it) but I never got on with the sequels and when I did they would bomb out. I hope what ever he produces now will be of better quality.
Personally I think a PC is the wrong target. As others have said there is already games like Eve on line and its ilk. Why not a hand held multi-user?
His plan is to replace time compression with "local hyperspace" to speed up travel in order for multiplayer to work.
If we're going to remake a space trading game, I'd much rather it was M.U.L.E. ...ok, different type of trading, but still...
A modern project like that is a HUGE undertaking.
But this is David Braben. He's the undisputed master of making huge things small. Original Elite put thousands of unique planets in 32K. Frontier put the entire galaxy on a floppy disk. The Raspberry Pi gave us a USB-stick sized general purpose computer for $35. If anyone can make something huge manageable, it's him.
In which case "the BBC report" would be correct. There's only ONE report. A report. The report. Written and produced by the BBC.
The BBC documentary on...
Dear gaming world;
You cannot recapture your youth and the fun you had on ancient games simply by re-making an old classic for new technology.
It's never the same and it's always ends as a big disappointment. Why? Because gaming isn't the same as it was and neither are you.
Leave it as a happy memory, for pity sake, and move on.
Actually, if he really wants to stand out, maybe he should do a console version. In the PC realm, he would be competing against a number of established titles. But if he could make Elite into a console MMO (or even single player), he would basically have the playing field all to himself. AFAIK, there isn't a single space trading game on a console. The only challenge would be the interface. And with built-in voice chat and 16 buttons on a modern controller (with any number combos possible in addition to that), I think it could be done.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I disagree. I thought the Newtonian mechanics in Frontier were awesome. I spent ages simply orbiting planets at max speed. I'm sad to hear that that aspect isn't going to be in the new Elite.
Newtonian physics also made fights a lot more challenging (at least in First Encounters, where speeds weren't homogenized at the start of the battle), but with how easy combat was in Elite, I consider that a good thing.
Back in the late 90s I played an online Elite-like game that was completely web-driven. I think the client was an applet or some kind of browser application. As I recall, it was also MMO. Does anyone remember this game?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
He has made and surpassed his goal....I wouldn't be surprised that star citizen doesn't get 4M by the time its done.
If you think it makes sense to pay someone to write Yet Another proprietary engine, instead of hiring artists and mission writers to fill in, say, Naev or Vega Strike, that's your business.
But you'll sure look dumb, if anyone finds out you did it. So don't tell anyone.
Kickstarter is a neat idea but this type of game doesn't need any kickstarting; there are already projects which you can contribute to. You can even fork 'em, if for some weird reason, you hate their current maintainers.
Elite was brought to us by David Braben and Ian Bell.
Braben on his own (well, with assistance from others, but without Bell) brought us Frontier and Frontier 2 as continuations of the Elite story - ok games in their own right, but more "realistic" and mathematical simulations than Elite, which was an entertaining game which sacrificed realism in favour of gameplay.
So if David Braben is looking to retool Elite without Ian Bell, I would expect either a reskinning of the old Elite game (which will probably be a nice walk down nostalgia lane, but with no long-term appeal), or a new version of Frontier (which imo was not as good a game as Elite).
The main problem for me in the original X : Beyond the Frontier was a lack of patience.
Elite included the device that let your ship skip boring bits by default.
In X, you have to buy it, so you have to sit through an interminable amount of waiting before you can buy this thing... which then puts you back to square one because it just consumed all your capital.
I found the combat in X terrible as well - it really needed decent ship handling, but didn't have it.
Braben made the same mistake with Frontier as well - the combat was no fun, because of the insistence on Newtonian mechanics.
The combat in EVE is of course, boring point-and-clickery.
Wing Commander was all about great dogfighting, which is why I have hopes for Star Citizen - if Roberts can include the same living economic systems as X3 or EVE, but keep the combat intense, enjoyable, and above all, based on your own skill rather than that of your character sheet, well, that's the game that gets my vote. It already sounds like he's going for the i-War kind of level of pseudo-realistic flight, so here's hoping...
I'm sure David Braben wouldn't want any pesky used copies floating around:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-19-braben-used-sales-are-killing-single-player-games
Given those remarks I don't think he's the kind of person who would think to kill off the used market with zero DRM and low prices...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Games are a lot cheaper if you don't hire Hollywood actors to record cut-scene dialogue that I just skip anyway.
It's called Freelancer / X3 (delete as appropriate to your preference in steepness of learning curve)
Ask yourself why, with 20 years and a 235-strong development staff, he can't either fund this himself, or get a publisher to do so.
A developer of Braben's esteem could get publisher funding (as they have done for many other games), but he probably wants to retain creative freedom, which he can do with KS. When you have a publisher funding your project, they call the shots. If they want you to add more blood, explosions, zombies or whatever they think they'd like - it's their call and the studio must do what they're told. If they want it shipping 6 months before it's ready - it's their call. You want to add an innovative, but potentially risky feature? If the publisher isn't convinced, forget it! With KS, I'd say there's much more chance of Frontier shipping a quality game that pushes the boundaries, and won't be ruined by the type of dumbing down that dominates so much of the current crop of publisher-funded games.
Sent from my Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2).
Now, you gotta take the Nostalgia out of it. That's simply not fair for any game. You're applying some weird brand of "impress me now with more as much as you impressed me then with less because I knew that there simply wasn't anything better back in the day".
We old timers knew that for some 30 years computing sukked, but we liked the feel of progress happening. Easy example - a hysterical 3rd rate dev for the C64 called Keypunch Software. Every minute you played any of your titles you secretly laughed at the execrable non-quality. (Ascii characters for Player Characters?! Really?!) But it was cheap so it became "Oh, for $6 at the game store, I'll play it for a week, why not." I'm sure my lawn-owning betters would have killed for drawn backgrounds and all that. But that stuff only lived in a certain place and time when deeply subconsciously we knew that we were just too many years early, so we just self-mindwiped ourselves to like it.
My fun example of Nostalgia is Ataxx. Cute little Anti-Othello game from about 1992, well into Abandonware by this point (though watch out for the Copyright Brigade!), and I still can't beat the top two levels, and the third level ("Mushman") still scores 50-50 on me.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Let's see:
1. Maps on rails. In DK3D, you often had to search around for where you needed to go. There were secrets all over the place. Forever? In comparison the maps are a straight line. You never really wonder where to go.
2. Limited weapon selection - I think they increased it to 4, but I'd since moved on. Also lacks the shear variety of weapons present in the original.
3. Regenerating Health, IE 'Ego'. This is stolen from Halo mechanics.
I don't read AC A human right
X3 (and I think X2) you get the time accelerator from the start.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Sorry I have to call bullshit on that.
In Newtonian mechanics the absolute speed is IRRELEVANT, some users might get confused by the absolute speed-o-meter, but it has absolutely no impact on the dog-fight. You can subtract the common speed shared between the crafts and just pretend to be operating at low speeds, because this is how Newtonian mechanics work. Everything works the same no matter the absolute speed, and thus the absolute speed is irrelevant and having a unlimited absolute speed does not change ANYTHING in dog fights (though it does make it the occurance of it slightly more unrealistic than it already is, but that is a necessary plot-hole of the genre like suicide bandits in Fallout).
If you have trouble imagining this, then imagine a cmmon dog-fight happening in the skies of earth while the earth is moving at an incredible speed around the sun, does that high speed affect the dog-fight, no? Well no common shared speed affects anything in Newtonian mechanics.
Strict Newtonian mechanics does not make for an entertaining game. Even Braben acknowledges this on the Kickstarter page. Neither do laser weapons in a dogfight. In both games the combat boiled down to two ships desperately trying not to crash into each other while jousting like two marbles on the end of a rubber band.
I beg to differ.
When I played IWar2, I modded the hell out of it. One of the tweaks was to make it even easier to ignore the "maximum" throttle position, meaning you got exactly what you described above. Coupled with some tweaks to the armoring systems - a single lucky shot could cripple you (every hull strike did damage to internals, so if you got unlucky that shot might (temporarily) offline your thrusters) ... and I loved it.. Graphics and sound are very important for this though. Play it on mute with crap graphics and it quickly loses it's appeal. It's the missile proximity alarms, hull impacts etc...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
X3 and freespace are both space-themed aquarium simulators, you jump between small transparant limited boxes that are obviously filled with water since you for some reason have a top-speed...
There hasn't been an Elite like game since.. well Elite and possible the first of the Privateer games.
Thanks for the link.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
absolutely right on the money.
Elite was a huge achievement for the time, of which Braben can be justly proud.
He's spent the years since heading up a development studio who seem to have cranked out years of bargain bin pish, and is now seeking some sort of relevance again.
Nothing about his track record suggest this has a high probability of even being average...
I thought DNF was fine. It wasn't as good as DN3D, but like you say, it was a Duke Nukem game. The only real gripe I had was the weapon carry limit.
In the case of Star Citizen, Chris Roberts has venture capital waiting in the wings as well ; the main point of the crowdfunding was to raise enough to prove that his game has a market.
It may be the same with Frontier as well, but Braben is also emphasising procedural generation. It remains to be seen how successful this will be - the environments in Elite 2 ranged from samey to insane - but that could take a huge chunk off the art and content development budget. Engine developers just need to be locked in a box and fed Pizza and Jolt, as we all know.
EvE is exactly why I think we need products like this. CCP has kinda rested on having no real competition within its particular niche and I think it is really showing. Such a project would obviously start from a significant disadvantage since so much of such a game's appeal is the player base.. but it would still be nice to see some companies at least trying.
"But with modern games like X3 [wikipedia.org] and even EVE Online [wikipedia.org], the genre has come a LONG way since the early 80's."
The genre also made a huge leap backwards: it omits Newtonian physics (realistic gravity) and replaced it with arcade style physics that's intuitive to Earth-dwellers (ie having to keep up thrust in order to maintain speed, which is just stupid in space).
Nowadays people say Newtonian/n-body physics on that scale is impossible on home PCs - and yet Elite did exactly that sufficiently realistic that it was an major component of the gameplay.
Well, fun is relative ^_^
Personally my complaint against EvE was it was too combat focused and industrial players were always kinda treated as second class players by the devs.
*smirk* that was something that always drives me crazy about EvE.. it feels like a submarine simulation rather then a space one.
1) Flak turret 2km range. Length of craft: 4.5km. Defensive guns can't reach offending craft.
2) Go through Ore Belt. Go on, dare you. On autopillock.
3) You have to pay for each ton of material you build. Why give everyone their own olympic sized swimming pool just because space is big, real big?
4) MAM not fission so radiation either directed and no problem or not possible to move your craft
5) Your engines have to shift that mass. Why give everyone their own football stadium if doing so will slow you down?
It's not a high budget for an AAA game, but do we really expect an Elite game to be developed in AAA style?
Obsidian asked for $1,100,000 for Project Eternity - I'd expect that to be a higher-budget game given that the all the content and artwork must be manually created.
Sure, there are many challenges to procedurally generated content, but these must be solved by ingenuity on part of the programmer, not by a large development team.
The successful lower-budget kickstarter titles seem to use their resources smartly and focus on content instead of the art budget quagmire that the AAA titles have gotten stuck in.
I think the point is that the banking and turning of atmospheric dogfighting is a heck of a lot easier to deal with for the average game player than having to deal with all the physics of accelerating and decelerating in multiple directions in order to change the direction of motion.
It doesn't matter that I've never flown a real plane -- it applies the same physics in a full 3-dimensions as you experience on a road or bicycle on a road in constrained three dimensions.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The dog fight in the skies of Earth is less alien to us because it occurs in a viscous medium with a fixed frame of reference. As humans, we are used to air, and water, and gravity. Vacuum is strange and unintuitive to us. We are used to things having a limited delta-V compared to each other - as your speed increases relative to your viscous medium, drag increases dramatically, which prevents you from travelling at a velocity vastly different to other bodies in the same medium.
Star Wars made it's fighters act like aircraft because it was intuitively satisfying to us, and the extended universe literature goes to great effort to back this contradiction of real physics up with "etheric rudders" and the like.
The old BSG followed the same trope. The new BSG does Newton, but distracts you from it's strangeness with a lot of clutter on the screen - smoke trails, lots of fighters and tracer rounds, shaky camera. And the fighter dogfights are dogfights, they tend to match velocities reasonably closely, and when they have a external reference - like asteroids - they behave as if that reference was static and their delta-V was limited compared to that reference.
Us space fiends all know that probably the best way to defeat a Cylon base star is to accelerate a cloud of gravel to a nasty fraction of lightspeed and arrange for it to park in it's path. The problem is that there isn't a lot of room for fighter-jock skills in there. Winning would be about having good sensors and lots of math. The game would be vast periods of waiting punctuated by sudden explosions as you win or lose instantly.
The fly-by-wire systems in i-War and the new one in Star Citizen are both mostly about taking the vacuum of space, and simulating that viscous medium with a static frame of reference so that the poor monkeys in the cockpit can keep up. Which makes for a game that is fun, hopefully, rather than realistic.
Frontier was too realistic (or the the fly-by-wire was too primitive) ; the ships could accelerate at absurd G counts (20G for the small fighters) which placed their movements way outside of the human response curve. The only way to get a kill in my experience was to reduce your delta-V WRT the enemy as much as possible at a range that was large but not outside your weapons range. This meant that they couldn't just fire their thruster and instantly defeat your turn rate. The struggle to match velocities was what lead to the rubber-band jousting.
I'm not sure it's praiseworthy to have had an idea first, but completely failed to deliver anything off that idea before someone else (and a game billing itself as a "spiritual successor" to your original hit, no less) gets there first and gets rich. That tells me he's a man with great ideas, and an inability to follow through.
Not a great selling point for someone on Kickstarter.
Only three games in my life ate enough life-time hours: Elite, Final Fantasy 7, and Skyrim.
The joy of EVE is the PvP, which derives its appeal essentially from the same place as gambling. You need to put in lots of work in order to get the best ships (or indeed real life money). Combat in EVE is "risk everything"- if you get blown up in combat, you lose all that hard work (or cash).
As someone who played for a good couple of years on and off, I can tell you that that's an addictive thrill. I still remember fondly the time I was transporting my best ship through hostile space, on a journey that would take about 30 minutes non-stop; being ambushed by enemy players, and fighting a 30 minute running battle through a dozen systems, engaging, fighting, getting the upper hand, forcing a retreat, the enemy regrouping and re-attacking, me hiding and trying to throw them off my trail, getting caught again. One of the most stand-out gaming experiences of my life.
I can't comment about Eve, but I played all of the X games all the way up to Terran Conflict and I have to say, Egosoft have one HUGE weakness: Writing a halfway decent story. I dare any of you to look up the X3 Reunion original intro cutscene on youtube. Who in their right mind would have an alien race named the Kh'aak and then have an announcer with a pseudo American accent pronounce it? The Kh'aak invasion is unstoppable! Yeah.
The trouble with space simulations is that there just aren't many of them, the genre never really took off the way FPS games or RTS games did. This means that while there are some good games out there, they all have their problems.
Braben doesn't have anything to worry about in terms of competition imo, he can blow them away.
Eve Online is a blatent ripoff of Elite. It startled me how similar they were in initial gameplay, and most of the same ideas of stargates between star systems, mining, trading, pirates and space stations orbiting planets had all been pioneered by Elite. That being said, the market for MMORPGs is nearly saturated and 1.25 million pound sterling is not going to go very far.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
It's only as stressful as you want to make it - many people "play" it like a screensaver.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This.
EVE is very rewarding, but an incredible amount of work. If you know what you are doing, and have enough friends and skills, you can literally build an empire out there where you essentially own part of the game, but you have to hold on to it. Holding on to it means attracting players and corporations to join your alliance. You have to set up supply lines, a battle fleet, patrols, build stations, etc. You actually need players who have the right skills to fly your capital ships, which is difficult because the skills are learned *in real time* and can take months, if not years to reach the level you need to fly the largest of them with any level of proficiency. Even the ships themselves could take months to build, and required a shipyard, which in turn required you to build one in your own section of space, which you claimed by building space stations in empty "Wild West" space and making sure that they remained fueled and defended against enemy fleets seeking to blow them up.
The largest ship I was ever able to fly was a freighter that was about the size you needed to haul enough materials to be useful for an Alliance, but it was huge, incredibly slow, completely unarmed, and it was a gigantic target because of the sheer amount of stuff I'd be carrying to even make it worth taking my freighter out. It cost me something like a billion ISK to buy, which I also achieved by mining and playing the commodities market constantly, so it was also a big investment.
Unfortunately, since a freighter's main money making proposition is to supply Alliances in no-security space (0.0), I was in constant danger to some degree when I took it out. Due to the danger, any time I was ferrying materials between high sec and our Alliance controlled space, I would need a squadron of battleships and heavy assault cruisers to escort me through every system and scout out every jump gate. Even inside our Allied space, you'd still have to be careful of raiders who managed to make it through and could make mincemeat of a ship like mine. While piracy was actually a rather difficult "job" in EVE, mostly because Alliances and corps knew how to protect their assets, pirates and pirate corps definitely were out there, so going out alone was tantamount to suicide.
All of that, just to ferry ammunition, unrefined ore, space station fuel, unowned ships and other materials between solar systems/stations. I enjoyed it, but it was in no way the same sort of fun as dogfighting or playing an FPS in full twitch mode. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, while I did have the skills to fly things like battleships and HACs and super fast interceptors, actual battle in EVE is like fighting a battle with Excel as your control interface, with maybe a little bit of wild pointing and clicking. You can get pretty good at it, but you get a lot less feel for the excitement you could be having in one of those ships as a pilot. That's probably the top reason that I couldn't justify the game any longer, the mindless fun aspect wasn't there to balance the effort.
Pioneer hasn't had any serious updates in over a year. Maybe they should do a kickstarter so a few coders can take 3 months off their real jobs and finish the game up. If pioneer ever gets to a critical mass where players can contribute mods and expansions, then it will be an awesome game. As it stands right now though, it's a simple proof of concept and not a real game.
Sandbox. Land.On.Planets. Enough said.
Well he delivered the original Elite. One of the groundbreaking games that should appear in any history of the genre.
OK, he did it with Ian Bell. But Braben is definitely the business minded one of the two, and the one that's continued to ship commercial games since.
Why do so many idiots equate twitch games with being the only ones about player skills?
It's just a different skill set, and more about reflexes.
EVE requires piloting skills, but more along tactical lines, and thus more about cerebral skills. Where the fighter jock thinks about the next 10-20 seconds, the EVE ship captain has that in mind while ALSO keeping the next 10-20 MINUTES in mind.... And fleet commanders and corp/alliance leaders have the next 10-20 hours and 10-20 days in mind too.....
£1.25m ($2m) is nothing for modern AAA game development.
If you read the proposal it explains how: procedural generation. This is the same technique which allowed the original Elite game managed to pack 8 Galaxies each with 255 planets into a BBC Micro which had 32Kb of memory - it used the random number generator with seeds to create reproducible sequences of numbers. I understood that this was also why it took so long before Elite was ported to other platforms: they had to reverse engineer the Beeb's random number generator first!
Slightly off topic but interesting to Elite fans... Braben used the Fibonacci Sequence to create those "reproduciple sequence of numbers". (all the stars, locations, planet names, etc)
You stereotypers are all the same...
In regards to Vendetta Online being based on "player skill" means that there aren't any character stats that differentiate one player's character from another. There are no "attack stats", "commerce stats", or "powers". The quality of the gear you can buy is restricted by "level" but it doesn't take long to get to where everything is available, and you can scavenge equipment you can't buy from the wrecks of other player/npcs.
Mining is about knowing where the good asteroids are.
Commerce is largely about knowing how to plot an efficient course that avoids ion storms (and how to evade pirates).
Pirating is about knowing which wormholes to blockade and how to intercept a fleeing ship.
Combat is about maneuvering and aim.
EVE Online IS Elite in many ways, or at least what I imagined it to be like (if it were real), after reading the novella that came with the game when I bought it back in the day. Back then, though, you HAD to use your imagination more. Having said that, I wish him the best of luck, and hope he comes through BIG. Elite still ranks as one of the all time greats with me.
One question: Does Kickstarter accept ISK?
Tell you what I always wanted in a remake of Élite... nerd tools. An extension API, allowing scripts, GUIs/HUDs and possibly external connectivity. And the same facility to trade code and attachments that you see in something like Second Life.
Imagine....
- The universe really IS newtonian, but you can develop and trade control systems that make it appear otherwise and apply directed power to compensate for unwelcome inertia
- Bots, autopilots, combat aids
- Buy extra ships, develop swarm/formation flying control systems
What? Is this a desirable mash up? To me, it's the logical conclusion of real trading and real newtonian physics. Give the society the real ability to develop and create.
The challenge is to make sure that automated things don't dominate, and to create a playing society that can police the worst renegades. Rules are enforced by players, with bounties etc..
I often view the Frontier forums.
Braben just doesn't get it or is SOOOOO out of touch with what has already been done - It seems unnatural (or Deliberate!)
These things have been done WITHOUT Braben - As he hasn't even lifted a finger to aid the projects with official support.
We already have OOElite - Af far as I can tell, It's COMPLETE.
Pioneer (Frontier remake) - Is well on the way, And very impressive.
(I believe Ian Bell has been aiding the Pioneer project as well!)
So blow it out your arse Braben.
We (Fans) have been keeping an eye on you - And we are not impressed with your current direction (Kiddy Games Galore).
And any Serious projects by Frontier Studios seem to flounder & not even make it out the gate (aka Outsider).
Frontier studios & Braben just feel like an empty old husk with nothing of substance inside.
You would need and would have your computer computing your trajectory to intercept. Then you'd say "fire" when in range. And it works or doesn't.
Booring.
How you can "explain" non-newtonian is pretty easy in a squishy-Sci-Fi world.
You don't move by ejecting material out of your craft. RIDICULOUS! You'd never get anywhere because you'd have to shove 99% of your mass out the back to get anywhere! How you move around is by modifying the gravity field you're in. Effectively, create a local lagrange point under your ship and move that around and all you need to do is keep with it. VERY eneergy efficient, and what NASA use to get their payloads to the outer systems (when time is of no importance). But by creating and moving it yourself, you don't have to wait for the orbits to move you there.
However, your speed is based on how large you can make that zone. It depends on how quickly you can accelerate to keep in that zone. And it's relative to the major masses considered in the system that are effectively on daily timescales, static.
Since you have SciFi with artificial gravity "magic'd" in, the use of it for propulsion is fine.
I-War had LDS and, rather interestingly, used a decoherent version of the drive as a shield. Well considered!
This is using what you have there already (and want there even in a fighter to damp out your g limits) in environmental control as movement.
Newtonian physics isn't avoided in PC games because they're too hard to implement, they're avoided because they're bloody useless in a GAME.
FFS.
The problem with X3 and Eve are their learning curves. They're vertical cliffs.
That means they were poorly designed. Much like Battlecruiser 3000/Universal Combat.
lolwut? £1.25m ($2m) is nothing for modern AAA game development. The average single platform AAA game costs $10m to make.
Remove all the corporate, management B.S. and overhead and get talented team members without the garbage that comes along with it from major studios and you just shed 1/2 - 3/5th's of the cost of development.
There are ZERO space trader/shooter games for the current generation of consoles.
I know... i've been looking for one.
Check out Space Rangers 2. It's amazing and the same genre of game. I've spent over 100 hours playing it.
I haven't played X3, but ditto for Eve. Elite is SIMPLE to pick up and get started with (it's a bit like wing commander with trading). Eve really does have a vertical learning curve.
You need an encyclopedia for the skills and how they complement each other. You need to sink massive amounts of time into it and join a player run corp to get anywhere.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Uh... no.
Elite is arcade game first, trading game second. There's no arcade element to Eve at all.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
OK, that's very true but it's also kind of a vague statement. Ignore the idiots in the comments below equating money-input with quality and for the moment, forget about the technical aspects (Graphic resolution, detail, 'AI', etc.) Braben made the original game 30 years ago so he needs to carry the game mechanics we loved so much, into a modern 2012 framework. That's to say, he can now fulfill the implied promises of Elite. But will he do so? Well for example; X, X2 and X3 are moronically simple buy-sell space games featuring muppets and Lucasfilm space-combat physics, and EVE Online is a ruthlessly capitalistic pan-stellar universe you play by clicking your cursor on things. (Seriously, why CAN'T I fly my Tristan like a Tie-Fighter??? I could fly a goddamn Tie-Fighter in 1996, with a joystick!) But neither of those games needed to be Kickstarted. And they've made healthy profits regardless. More relevantly; they've become gaming standards. It's more likely that a game like 'Elite' will be marketed as being like the 'X' series because contemporary gamers will never have played Elite. The technology exists for Braben to make Elite (2012?) into a game that fucking feels like you're piloting the Millenium Falcon. Force-Feedback joysticks, Track-IR, superighresolutionplasmascreenswith7-pointsurroundsoundohmygoditsanepiphany!!!!11!1 But can he make a GAME universe I would want to go to? If I could meet him I'd suggest he sits down with some science-fiction authors (Alastair Renolds or Ian M. Banks, for example) and build a cohesive and credible system we would want to be in. Making the plan is easy. Actually going on the journey..... I hope this works out.
Two words:
Oolite
multiplayer
Carry on.
Beg to differ on that. http://www.oolite.org/ is an open, modernized version of Elite, and has lots of 'old geezers' practically creaming their pants when they discover and play it for the fist time.
Just look at their bulletin boards for all the kudos being strewn around to the developers.
X3 : Start the game, wiggle your joystick, shoot stuff.
Elite : Start the game, go "wtf?" at the 'rotate or pitch' control scheme, then wiggle your joystick, shoot stuff.
X3 : Insane depth around the economy, the ship variety, the ability to fund, build and control an empire.
Elite : Save up and buy a docking computer before you go insane.
In other words, the extra complexity in X3 was around the stuff that just wasn't in Elite. If you play X3 as a simple "transport goods around while shooting pirates" game then it's no more complex than the original Elite.
lolwut? £1.25m ($2m) is nothing for modern AAA game development. The average single platform AAA game costs $10m to make.
Yes, but you get a finished game out of that $10m. This is just $2m from gullible, nostalgic geeks on kickstarter, who aren't going to get it back if the game is shit/non existent in a few years' time.
Agreed - Elite was an engineering masterpiece hidden inside an incredibly innovative and captivating game. Actually, the other week I started to wonder if I could construct a BBC Micro-esque machine on stripboard. There'd be no point doing it except to write the immortal "10 print "My sister smells"; 20 goto 10" sort of thing, and for playing Elite.
I wonder what big thing needs to be small these days though? Most phones aren't exactly small, much less their desktop counterparts. With network connectivity and "the cloud", size is much less a factor these days. Of course, size isn't everything, and he's got plenty of warped genes that probably look at the world in a completely different way to most, but I wonder what he's uniquely placed to do.
Either way, I wish him luck with it.
I was a fan of Elite on the C64, I tried Oolite, and it is indeed an excellent port of Elite. I also found it to be no fun at all: requiring time I don't have anymore and lacking the richness I'm used to find in games nowadays. The other game I loved on the C64 was paradroid, there is also an open source port (free Droid), same problem. My expectations and sense of fun have changed in 20 years.
The original game was not his only foray into the Elite "universe" - he also came out with Frontier, and IIRC Frontier: First Encounters, although I'm not a fan of Newtonian physics just to move your damn ship.
That said, I'd much rather give my money to Ian Bell (the other author of Elite) instead, no strings attached, no promise of a potential project required. As far as I know, Ian Bell hasn't threatened lawsuits over copyright (unlike David Braben).
As far as AAA game development goes, you could do worse right now than checking out Natural Selection 2 - created by a tiny team, who started it using the Source engine, but found it wasn't capable of what they wanted - so they wrote their own - from scratch, and it looks *beautiful*.
Why?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
EVE Online might be fun but has one massive flaw THEY DON'T LET YOU FLY THE SHIP.
Peace out.
why not just spend it on projects you'd like to support, it's not like you're getting the money back anyway no matter what. I'm all up for a revamped elite, a solo version of eve online, no subscription. If it fails he can still drop it open source i'm sure it will attract a community. I always wondered why no one ever did that. Because of Eve maybe
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I'm suspicious of Star Citizen because it's using at least two crowd-funding approaches: A homegrown website where you can pledge AND KickStarter. Knowing it has VC waiting in the wings as well just makes me even more suspicious. That and they are they are targetting "high end PC users", just makes me think - FU.