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.
> 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.
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!
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...
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.
EVE has a cool universe, but the point and click flight mechanics are boring as hell in my opinion. I purchased a joystick a few months ago and tried out some space and flight sims. EVE was a huge disappointment.
which is totally what she said
Many nouns referring to a group of individuals are plural in English where they are singular in American, for example band names. English is always "BandOfYourChoice *are* playing at...", never "is".
"The BBC" is debatable, I think - is it the singular Corporation, or the collection of people who make it up? I'd tend towards the latter, in the same way I'd expect (in English) to see "Apple are launching the new iThing 47 next week". I'd only really expect it to be singular when it's the object of the sentence - "the BBC was formed by SomeActOfParliament in XXXX..."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Games are a lot cheaper if you don't hire Hollywood actors to record cut-scene dialogue that I just skip anyway.
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).
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...
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.
1) Flak turret 2km range. Length of craft: 4.5km. Defensive guns can't reach offending craft.
That's not a problem of size. It's a problem of scale.
2) Go through Ore Belt. Go on, dare you. On autopillock.
"Doctor, it hurts when I twist my body 60 degrees to the left and try to touch my heel."
"Then don't do that."
Anyhow, I'd say this is a good design choice. Smaller ships can hide in ore belts. You get something in return for being nimbler and smaller.
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?
TANSTAAFL should always apply.
4) MAM not fission so radiation either directed and no problem or not possible to move your craft
How do you get the power to accelerate the mass?
5) Your engines have to shift that mass. Why give everyone their own football stadium if doing so will slow you down?
Why have eighteen-wheelers on the highway?
You seem to want ships that's best at everything. Not giving you that is a good choice, IMO.
But in all English -- UK, US, NZ, Oz and elsewhere -- both uses are acceptable. The classic is the "sports team" example. "France is playing well against Spain" vs "The Spanish team are fighting among themselves". The difference is sometimes an individual choice of style, but other times it reflects a question of agency. The French team is succeeded by acting as a single entity. The Spanish team fighting among themselves is an example of not working as a single entity.
(I am an English teacher and I studied English language to degree level and got a distinction (first class honours). This topic was covered in the course to a reasonable level of detail.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.
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...
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.