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Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Single-Player
Robotron23 writes: The developers behind the sequel to legendary video game Elite have, to the anger and dismay of fans, dropped the offline single-player mode originally promised. The game is due for full release in under a month. With the title having raised about $1.5 million from Kickstarter, and millions more in subsequent campaigns that advertised the feature, gamers are livid. A complaints thread on the official Elite forums has swelled to 450+ pages in only three days, while refunds are being lodged in the thousands. It is down to the discretion of Frontier, the game's developer, whether to process refund requests of original backers.
It's definitely for the backers' own good that the experience be the same for all players... so just one month before release we tell them that we didn't bother to implement the single player offline component.
/s
It took a while for me to decode all that marketing speak to figure out that they were canning single player. It was a deliberate design decision they must have made months ago, and just conveniently "forgot" to tell the backers.
Elite Dangerous is a shower.
I'm one of the backers of the Kickstarter. I am absolutely TIRED of being asked for more money for every damn thing they do.
The number of paid Alpha's, premium content, several Beta's (Beta Premium!) is unbelievable and they seem to want to make me wait until the very day of release before I get anything out of my backing unless I pay more money.
Sure, I get a "reserved Commander name" and a couple of bits of digital content but I have seen nothing of the actual game in all that time except for the occasional screenshot. They have probably made more from the Beta's than they have from the Kickstarter, and every damn newsletter is "just another $15 will get you this...".
I've totally lost any interest and regret backing but, unlike some, I'm true to my word so have written off the money I've given them so far. I've truly not expected to see the game because every preview/screenshot/update still without any access by myself but with begging all the way through it just disappoints me further. If they are milking it that early, what the hell is going to happen in-game when they want to form the economies?
I'm honestly fatigued by the requests for money, which they are still putting in every newsletter. It makes me worry that any final game is going to die from budgetary shortages the second it's release because the begging is so intense.
Meanwhile, all I have to show for backing it is a cart with one item "bought" that I can't touch for another month or so and that's all I ever had.
Honestly? I'm sick of it already. And I haven't even got to play it. Given that it was one of the largest and most successful Kickstarter projects there was, I'm a bit disgusted by how much more they seem to want in order to let me see how it plays, even in a tiny demo.
It's gonna be an over-hyped flop, isn't it? Or crash and burn in the first few months when the servers can't be kept running due to lack of budgeting. And to leave it until NOW to tell people about the lack of single-player, while you're still pasting in 4K screenshots and plugs for various books written in the Elite:Dangerous universe (that doesn't exist yet as far as I'm concerned)? I just don't care any more.
The one Kickstarter project that I really regret backing.
Another disappointed backer from the kickstarter in late 2012.
I have wasted over $500 on this game with the PROMISE that it will be offline.
Now a few days before its official launch, they drop this bombshell, and are not even responding to refund requests.
Absoulutely shattered.
Frontier, hang your heads in shame. I will NEVER purchase anything from you again.
There's already a single player mode, for days when you don't feel like interacting with other players, and a 'friends only' mode where you only interact with people on your friends list.
Your ships and money are shared between modes. If they added an off-line mode too, then they'd face complaints like "I've just spent 60 hours in off-line mode working my way up to an Asp, and now you're telling me that I can't use it when I play with my friends??!? W.T.H. You guys suck!"
You're still obliged, in law, to deliver what you promised you would.
No, you are absolutely not in this case. Kickstarter is microfunding investments in a project/company, not a purchase of a product with a specific guarantee or warranty. The fine print says as much. Sure, if they absconded with your money for a vacation you could try to sue them. But in this case they tried in good faith to deliver what they could and ran out of cash before implementing all features (not only common but almost universal in the games industry - if you haven't seen this a dozen times you are not a gamer).
t's not easy, but it's no different to any other payment.
This is ABSOLUTELY incorrect. It's not a payment at all, you are NOT buying a product. You are investing in one, and you get a reward if it succeeds. Luckily the majority do, but if they declare bankruptcy and don't product anything because of mismanagement or just bad luck, you get to line up as an investor to collect/sue for any capital invested, which means you are 99.9% shit outta luck.
"Just X amount of money more and you could see how it plays!"
Welcome to the world of "venture capital." Just luckily for the investors it's $50 at a time and not $50M.
Yeah, as it turns out, "from time to time" means (in the dev's words): "At the moment it's whenever you need to conduct a server moderated transaction like trading." and "The servers handle more than just the data, they handle all the key processes for interaction in the game, so trading, mission generation and background simulation to name a few." Anecdotally, in the beta at least, the client apparently lasts between 2 and 5 seconds if you pull your 'Net connection. The enormous rage-thread about this on Frontier's forum is hither: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/... (is at nearly 500 pages now). Another useful thread to check out is this one: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/... which just has stuff the company has had to say since the whole thing blew up (although they haven't posted since Saturday).
-- It sucks to be a pilot in the bonus wave.
Kickstarter is best described as a donation.
Even donations come with obligations though. If I donate to a charity to support science education in country A and they use the money instead to purchase needles for drug addicts in country B then you could sue them to get you money back since they are using it for a significantly different purpose even though both might be considered good causes.
Whether the a single player game is sufficiently different from the delivered MMO game is something for the courts to decide if it ever gets that far. However what is very shabby about this whole thing is that the announcement has come only 1 month before the release. Given their description of how essential the online servers are to the game it seems highly likely than they have known about this for a very long time and have only just come clean.
It's also a real shame. Part of the beauty of the previous games was that they made such a detailed, massive open sandbox which you could explore and admire the intelligence that went into crafting the procedural generation. Now you are going to be sharing the galaxy with immature, adolescent school kids and any unusual features you will ascribe to a human moderator putting them there. It's going to have more similarity to Eve Online than Elite.
According to Kickstarter's TOS:
When a creator posts a project on Kickstarter, theyâ(TM)re inviting other people to form a contract with them. Anyone who backs a project is accepting the creatorâ(TM)s offer, and forming that contract. ...
If theyâ(TM)re unable to satisfy the terms of this agreement, they may be subject to legal action by backers.
So Kickstarter is saying that backers need to sue the project creator for breech of contract if they fail to deliver what was promised. The contract Kickstarter creates between the backer and creator is legally binding, and creators have a responsibility to fulfil it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And when grown-ups invest in a company/fund/whatever they normally make sure that the information is available before they put any money into it.
but the information was available - it said there would be an offline mode.
Now they just changed their minds, but its ok, they said there would be offline mode when you invested so obviously that makes it ok not to have offline mode now?
Imagine I buy into an ethical investment fund, and later they decide "well, by ethical we meant drugs, tobacco and defence".. investors would be a bit miffed. We have regulators for this in investments, I think its obvious we need the same with Kickstarter - either privately or socially (ie sue them until they change their practices!)
no, it is a contract - under UK law (and FD are in the UK) once money has changed hands you have some form of implicit contract, though you may have difficulty in court getting your cash back, or it'll cost you more to claim than most backed even in small claims court (£25 filed online)
Plus, the Kickstarter TOS explicitly say that it is a contract between the backer and the producer.
Actually, his example was fine, your understanding of the market is, well, broken.
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