Elite: Dangerous Standard Beta (Starting Jul 29th - $75)

flyinpiranha said:
Oh, interesting. Where did you see that? I'll be ramping up my playtime come the 22nd if that is true.
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I've been looking for official word on this all morning. Every forum post about it in the google cache has since been deleted. Most press articles that talk about gamma mention that the final wipe is on the 22nd, so I'm not sure where it originally came from.

If it's true, this changes things considerably for me.
 
flyinpiranha said:
Oh, interesting. Where did you see that? I'll be ramping up my playtime come the 22nd if that is true.
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I am pretty sure that I heard it on a podcast but I do not remember if it was Lave radio or StarfleetComms. I may be wrong though.

It was also heard/read from a couple of guys in my ArmA3 group who are following the game pretty fanatically.
 
GeoGonzo said:
Okay, I wasn't expecting much but that was... nothing.
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Yeah, surprisingly little information. Barely mentioned gamma phase at all, I think people really wanted some more clarification and info. I'm taking this meager newsletter as an indication that the game as it is now is mostly how it will release on the 16th of December, I don't think there will be too many more changes between now and then.



On another note however, that 25% off insurance for LIFE actually has me contemplating buying into the beta now. That will really add up over time. And getting access to play one week from now is just icing on the cake, I'm very anxious to play this damn game finally. I just might bite the beta bullet, even this late in the beta phase....
 
Mengy said:
On another note however, that 25% off insurance for LIFE actually has me contemplating buying into the beta now. That will really add up over time. And getting access to play one week from now is just icing on the cake, I'm very anxious to play this damn game finally. I just might bite the beta bullet, even this late in the beta phase....
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That's tempting me as well but I don't want the 'access to Sol' benefit being a beta backer gives you. I want to have to work for that pass to Sol.

It's starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth, all this endless pushing of beta in our faces. "Buy beta, it's all about beta, you get so many more benefits with beta". Sounds like they're desperate for the extra cash.
 
"There is an even greater temporary emphasis on such tasks at the moment, to get the game ‘shippable’ with countless fixes, polish and tweaking and fewer features"

Maybe I'm interpreting that wrong. Not sure how else to take that.
 
DrBo42 said:
"There is an even greater temporary emphasis on such tasks at the moment, to get the game ‘shippable’ with countless fixes, polish and tweaking and fewer features"

Maybe I'm interpreting that wrong. Not sure how else to take that.
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That just means no more feature creep, it's time to squash bugs and ship this game. Not really a bad thing, but I think many people wanted a little more fleshing out of certain game systems before release.


Ronnie said:
That's tempting me as well but I don't want the 'access to Sol' benefit being a beta backer gives you. I want to have to work for that pass to Sol..
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I could care less about Sol. I'll visit it once on my way towards the edges of the galaxy as I explore the unknown.
 
Mengy said:
That just means no more feature creep, it's time to squash bugs and ship this game. Not really a bad thing, but I think many people wanted a little more fleshing out of certain game systems before release.




I could care less about Sol. I'll visit it once on my way towards the edges of the galaxy as I explore the unknown.
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Think that's nearly everyone, no? Mining and exploration especially. Alliances aren't even in the game yet and they really really need to be.
 
Woah, WOAH, so in the newsletter David alludes to no true offline mode for Elite even though it was promised back at the kickstarter. I assumed it was just a gray area thing, but now this:

Michael Brookes said:
As David said in the newsletter the game has changed quite a bit since the kickstarter. There is a much greater reliance on the server components for the galaxy, economy and activities in the game. This makes an offline mode impractical.

Michael
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There WILL NOT be a truly offline mode for Elite Dangerous. Solo play still needs to connect to the server for galaxy information. So if they ever shut down the Elite servers then the game is useless. I'm not sure I like that, AT ALL.

Hmm, will Star Citizen have a totally offline mode?
 
Mengy said:
Woah, WOAH, so in the newsletter David alludes to no true offline mode for Elite even though it was promised back at the kickstarter. I assumed it was just a gray area thing, but now this:



There WILL NOT be a truly offline mode for Elite Dangerous. Solo play still needs to connect to the server for galaxy information. So if they ever shut down the Elite servers then the game is useless. I'm not sure I like that, AT ALL.

Hmm, will Star Citizen have a totally offline mode?
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Star Citizen will have Squadron 42 or whatever that module is called which I imagine will be completely offline accessible as it's more of a story experience.
 
Mengy said:
Woah, WOAH, so in the newsletter David alludes to no true offline mode for Elite even though it was promised back at the kickstarter. I assumed it was just a gray area thing, but now this:



There WILL NOT be a truly offline mode for Elite Dangerous. Solo play still needs to connect to the server for galaxy information. So if they ever shut down the Elite servers then the game is useless. I'm not sure I like that, AT ALL.

Hmm, will Star Citizen have a totally offline mode?
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Well fuck, guess I'm out :<
Honestly this is super disappointing.
 
No offline mode is a massive letdown. I hope they reconsider.
Also more cheat codes for alpha/beta backers and not all ships will be at there at launch?

Fuck this...
 
LeBart said:
No offline mode is a massive letdown. I hope they reconsider.
Also more cheat codes for alpha/beta backers and not all ships will be at there at launch?

Fuck this...
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It's not only a letdown, it was PROMISED from the very beginning at the kickstarter, by multiple people within Frontier including David himself. Many, many people backed the game on that feature alone. It's honestly important enough to me (as a longevity feature) that I'm actually reconsidering buying the game. I mean I plan on playing in online mode anyway, but someday the servers will be shut down and I don't want to have spent all of that money on something that will be useless to me when that happens.

I sincerely hope they reconsider this decision. If they have truly decided to not include an offline mode then that change should have been communicated LONG ago, not a month before release.
 
They also promised space wouldn't be blue like in Frontier, although I'm probably the only one really annoyed by that.
Hopefully the backlash is enough for them to change their mind on the offline mode. We'll see.
 
Uber Entertainment tried this offline bullshit with Planetary Annihilation as well. It was only until the complaints reached a crescendo, and their next Kickstarter project Human Resources floundered, that they finally committed to a release date for the promised feature.
 
Mengy said:
Hmm, will Star Citizen have a totally offline mode?
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About 70-80h campaign with story branching when all Squadron 42 episodes will be released.
This can be played in coop too. And private multiplayer servers with modding functionality.
Still, thats at least one year away from 1st episode of Squadron 42 :)

Personally i dont consider lack of SP in Elite a big deal, the world is just to big too be anything other than a coop game.
 
You're misunderstanding, KKRT00. They're asking about whether or not the game can be played offline as in, if you unplugged your network card could you still play the game. They're not talking about whether or not you can play single-player without other human players showing up in your game. And Elite does have SP, you can set it to solo play which will let you play without encountering other players.


I'd be surprised if Squadron 42 didn't require you to be online as well.
 
KKRT00 said:
About 70-80h campaign with story branching when all Squadron 42 episodes will be released.
This can be played in coop too. And private multiplayer servers with modding functionality.
Still, thats at least one year away from 1st episode of Squadron 42 :)

Personally i dont consider lack of SP in Elite a big deal, the world is just to big to be anything other than coop game.
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The Elite games have always been single player in the past. I don't think the expansiveness of the world is the issue. Though it is cool they want people from all over the world flying around in the same universe there needs to be an offline single player mode for the eventual server take downs that occur when the popularity has gone down.
 
Yea there is absolutely no guarantee that this game is going to be successful enough to maintain the servers for long, Frontier has already committed financial suicide by deciding to keep the game off of steam so an offline mode is going to be necessary much sooner then later.
 
Any idea why they're keeping this game off of Steam? Seems a crazy decision.

Mengy said:
I'm actually reconsidering buying the game. I mean I plan on playing in online mode anyway, but someday the servers will be shut down and I don't want to have spent all of that money on something that will be useless to me when that happens.
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Thankfully you'll have those (touch wood) years of fun playing the game by the time that happens.
 
Sinatar said:
Yea there is absolutely no guarantee that this game is going to be successful enough to maintain the servers for long, Frontier has already committed financial suicide by deciding to keep the game off of steam so an offline mode is going to be necessary much sooner then later.
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I imagine if the servers eventually do come down they'll patch in an offline mode.
 
Starviper said:
I imagine if the servers eventually do come down they'll patch in an offline mode.
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If the servers come down it's because it isn't financially viable to maintain them, committing further development resources for an offline mode is pretty unlikely in that scenario.
 
Some more clarification from Michael Brookes at Frontier:


Michael Brookes said:
At the moment it's whenever you need to conduct a server moderated transaction like trading. (game talking to online servers)

....

The problem is that the galaxy mechanics all sit on the online servers. The data set and processes are huge and not something that would translate offline without considerable compromise to the vision. Trust me we didn't sit down and think what would annoy people the most! It's a choice we've had to make and so we've taken it.

Michael
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So you can play in solo mode but the game is essentially always online, it needs to constantly communicate with the servers in order to run because galaxy data is stored online.

So yeah, no offline play at all, they decided some time ago not to bother with it.
 
Mengy said:
Some more clarification from Michael Brookes at Frontier:





So you can play in solo mode but the game is essentially always online, it needs to constantly communicate with the servers in order to run because galaxy data is stored online.

So yeah, no offline play at all, they decided some time ago not to bother with it.
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This REALLY sucks. I was really counting on an offline mode. *Sigh*
 
Anyone who actually thought this game would ever be totally offline was delusional. Far too many moving parts going on to pull that off, plus your freaking save is in the cloud with no option to save locally.

The age of offline is almost over, and I have to believe the number of people affected by this is so marginal that it doesn't even blip on their radar.
 
"Yea there is absolutely no guarantee that this game is going to be successful enough to maintain the servers for long, Frontier has already committed financial suicide by deciding to keep the game off of steam so an offline mode is going to be necessary much sooner then later."


So far as I recall, Elite is mostly P2P when it comes to the multiplayer side of things. The servers they have up are for matchmaking, keeping track of the global economy, etc. etc.

If that's the case, keeping the servers up shouldn't be so costly that they'll have to consider taking the servers down at some point unless the company completely bites the dust. It's not like MMOs where every thing is run server side, thus needing multiple giant data centers to support the game.
 
Wreav said:
Anyone who actually thought this game would ever be totally offline was delusional. Far too many moving parts going on to pull that off, plus your freaking save is in the cloud with no option to save locally.

The age of offline is almost over, and I have to believe the number of people affected by this is so marginal that it doesn't even blip on their radar.
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Everyone thought it would have an offline mode. It was one of the defining promised features in the kickstarter. The old Elite games had an arguably more immersive universe in terms of mechanics and features (not graphics of course) and they were all 100% offline. So when David promised it again most Elite fans assumed he meant it, and that we would be getting a new Elite game that could be played for decades just like the old ones. Now that is not the case. If Frontier ever pulls the plug or if they ever have server problems then Elite Dangerous becomes unplayable.

I think you underestimate just how important the offline mode was to the fans of Elite....
 
When people compare a game that shipped on floppies and looked like this

BBC_Micro_Elite_screenshot.png


to what we have with Elite: Dangerous, I have to laugh. ED is so much more than a line graphics game, and the assumed "oh they can just do it all offline" is baffling to me. Especially with what they're doing with the dynamic economies and such.

If you were truly expecting offline, sorry, that really sucks. As far as I'm concerned, I couldn't care less. I won't be playing this game 10 years from now.
 
Disable the dynamic economy and evolving faction stuff when offline and allow me to have a seperate save where I can just explore the galaxy.

I would be happy with an offline mode that is just Space Engine with ships.
 
LeBart said:
Disable the dynamic economy and evolving faction when offline stuff and allow me to have a seperate save where I can just explore the galaxy.

I would be happy with an offline mode that is just Space Engine with ships.
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I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the astronomical data of various systems also streams from the servers. 300 Billion systems is a lot, without taking into account the various objects in a system and how they orbit in relation to one another. Keeping that data locally on a user's system would inflate the disk usage quite a bit. So the online-only mode may be more integral to the games experience than some people think.

At least it isn't a stuttering mess like Ass Creed Unity
 
WGMBY said:
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the astronomical data of various systems also streams from the servers. 300 Billion systems is a lot, without taking into account the various objects in a system and how they orbit in relation to one another. Keeping that data locally on a user's system would inflate the disk usage quite a bit. So the online-only mode may be more integral to the games experience than some people think.

At least it isn't a stuttering mess like Ass Creed Unity
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Pretty sure that's correct, in addition to the calculation of planetary/system movement within the galaxy.
 
WGMBY said:
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the astronomical data of various systems also streams from the servers. 300 Billion systems is a lot, without taking into account the various objects in a system and how they orbit in relation to one another. Keeping that data locally on a user's system would inflate the disk usage quite a bit. So the online-only mode may be more integral to the games experience than some people think.

At least it isn't a stuttering mess like Ass Creed Unity
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The billions of systems aren't really stored anywhere, that's not how procedural generation works as far as I'm aware. Space Engine has billions of galaxies, not just one, and it's a 1GB download.

Also, if they built the game to require online from the start, that would mean they blatantly lied when they promised an offline mode in the kickstarter (and I think later in the design forums? I could be wrong).
 
LeBart said:
The billions of systems aren't really stored anywhere, that's not how procedural generation works as far as I'm aware. Space Engine has billions of galaxies, not just one, and it's a 1GB download.

Also, if they built the game to require online from the start, that would mean they blatantly lied when they promised an offline mode in the kickstarter (and I think later in the design forums? I could be wrong).
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Yeah there's 160k known systems which aren't procedural but they shouldn't take up a huge amount of space given the little information known about distant systems, maybe 1GB or so being generous. I don't have the game but I doubt that it requires any server data to browse the galaxy map, as it would cause a lot of unnecessary strain on their servers.
 
cheststrongwell said:
They are not releasing this on Steam? That's a real dumb move.
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Yeah, I'm not sure of the reason why they aren't, but I think it's a very dumb move too.


I have to really think of whether or not I am buying this now. I mean I really, really want to, but the fear that it may not sell well and then we lose the game completely due to it being always online bothers me, usually I'd pass on a game with that caveat unless it was cheap. The loss of the promised offline mode is making me hesitate on my purchase... :(
 
Not a problem a no offline mode, for me at least.
I'm very happy for the 5 more ship and 25% insurance for life, that's is really a lot!
 
I dont know how anyone got the assumption that the single player would be 100% offline? You still need a client and account verification, along with storing your character on the cloud. You're still totally out of PVP in solo mode but actually gain the dynamic universe stuffs that will be affected by the online players. A bit like Dark souls' online content in single player. Not to mention how it will make hacking the game difficult. If you let the single player be 100% offline, i think you would have to stop them from ever going online with that character. Personally, i much prefer being able to switch solo to online whenever i want with the same character depending on how i feel like playing on a given day.

Soo.... outside of wanting to play the game somewhere in the woods without an online connection, whats the problem here? PC games in the past that had their P2P servers shut down typically distributed the server client so that peoples could continue to run it as they wanted.
 
Buggy Loop said:
PC games in the past that had their P2P servers shut down typically distributed the server client so that peoples could continue to run it as they wanted.
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I think the fear is that they are legitimately running some pretty damn intensive serverside calculations and that running it on a regular desktop is untenable if the servers go offline.

From reading the official thread about this on FD's forums, it would appear a large subset of players live in North Korea.
 
Buggy Loop said:
I dont know how anyone got the assumption that the single player would be 100% offline? You still need a client and account verification, along with storing your character on the cloud. You're still totally out of PVP in solo mode but actually gain the dynamic universe stuffs that will be affected by the online players. A bit like Dark souls' online content in single player. Not to mention how it will make hacking the game difficult. If you let the single player be 100% offline, i think you would have to stop them from ever going online with that character. Personally, i much prefer being able to switch solo to online whenever i want with the same character depending on how i feel like playing on a given day.
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It wasn't an assumption, it was a promise from the kickstarter that they are suddenly walking back a month before release.

And if they can distribute the server client when shutting down the servers, they can distribute it with the game client and let me run the server on the same machine as the client.

This is disappointing news and there are plenty of times when playing offline can be useful, for instance long distance train rides have spotty WiFi and cell service along the route and it's not realistic for me to play an online only game while taking an 8 hour train home for the holidays.

Edit: one of the kick starter reward tiers was a physical DRM free version! How is an online only game "DRM free"? This is a weird trend for kick starters to claim DRM free and then create an online only game, planetary annihilation pulled the same thing.
 
LeBart said:
Because they said so?
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I certainly dont overwatch all single posts the devs make on the forums to take that as a hard fact. But you're right actually, that initially it was online single player in the kickstarter and then they updated it, mentioning that they would work on a offline one, but that they would not allow players to re-enter the online adventure, that they would look into it.

Personally, this goes 1 Ly over my head because i simply dont care, what i find fascinating is how suddently its a big issue. SC, even with squadron 42, wont let you 100% offline, you can bet on that. This is an argument i feel was discussed 7 years ago with Valve's orange box.
 
Buggy Loop said:
I dont know how anyone got the assumption that the single player would be 100% offline?
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It wasn't an assumption, it was a feature. Until today that is, when they disclosed that piece of information in a not so clear sentence of a newsletter that later needed to be clarified.

Buggy Loop said:
Soo.... outside of wanting to play the game somewhere in the woods without an online connection, whats the problem here? PC games in the past that had their P2P servers shut down typically distributed the server client so that peoples could continue to run it as they wanted.
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I think one of the major negatives is that there is now the possibility that Elite Dangerous will die and become uplayable in the event that Frontier goes under and the servers get turned off. With the promised offline mode you would always be able to play the game you purchased, just like all of the previous Elite's.

Now, if you lose your internet connection, you can't play. If the servers go down, you can't play. If Frontier goes under and dies, you can't play. For many of the kickstarters that is not the game they paid money for.
 
Mengy said:
I have to really think of whether or not I am buying this now. I mean I really, really want to, but the fear that it may not sell well and then we lose the game completely due to it being always online bothers me, usually I'd pass on a game with that caveat unless it was cheap. The loss of the promised offline mode is making me hesitate on my purchase... :(
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Oh come on, no need to be so dramatic. Just buy the game, enjoy it for years and if the servers do go down far into the future, you'll have the happy memory of all that great gameplay. Not to mention the potential for them to downgrade the game if they're about to go under.

It really isn't that big a deal.
 
Mengy said:
Now, if you lose your internet connection, you can't play. If the servers go down, you can't play. If Frontier goes under and dies, you can't play. For many of the kickstarters that is not the game they paid money for.
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Just like the majority of other games we play. Not the end of the world.
 
Is the data wipe on the 22nd a full wipe, or just a lump sum credit dump?
Because if it's the former, I'll just use my 2 mil so far and outkit a cobra and kill kill kill.
 
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