Hacker News Reader

Comment by rozab | Hacker News Reader

I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun.

It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is a bit wonky. The FPS gameplay looks supremely uninteresting, I think they should have focused more on the roleplay and exploration aspect.

On the whole it's a really great game, but no game will ever really play like a personal movie or novel.

View on HN

EVE, Elite, and Star Citizen have all done the walking around + ships and it's all been pretty meh (with the first never really going live except for an apartment). It's a cursed feature apparently.

Don't forget No Mans Sky

It can work, but not in a procedurally generated / sandbox game; you need to add a campaign, a story, custom designed environments, etc.

One example where things do / can work is Space Engineers, where players can build and program maps in the sandbox for others to play.

Walking around in ships sounds like those cool things for one or two times and after that they become chores... It really becomes the part of it in gameplay loop. Are you making FP or TP game where environment is critical part of experience, or is some other thing the most important part?

It's hard enough to achieve that in any game unless you put the player on rails. Even games the size of a city tend to have massive immersion breaking compromises (look at any Bathesda game, Cyberpunk, etc.) Now try scaling that to a whole non-procgen universe!

> make tradeoffs between realism and fun

Isn't part of goal for SC to be far more realistic because that's only way to be immersive?

I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I've read that there's a planet that has player spawn in one area, with space port where their space ship is being in other area, and you need to get to train station, wait for the train, ride the train to space port to get to your ship, entire process taking 10 minutes to complete?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com