Cody wrote:Perhaps cim, or one of the other players, would have a better insight into how the AI is performing - after all, I am only a dumb pilot!
In terms of immediate combat tactics, reasonably good, more so on the rare occasions you get a group of them, but 1-on-1 not a serious threat. A few bugs here and there but nothing unexpected from having implemented similar-looking bugs myself.
Broader strategy ... not great, and aggressive groups are too rare to be a big deal; I've not died to NPCs yet (nor players, once I'd left the busy starting area), and I've generally only had to run away a few times, all due to mistakes on my part.
Feeling like reasonable sentient beings? No, not at all, though that's mostly not an AI problem as such
- supercruise persistence to normalspace is virtually non-existent. You can see an AI drop out on the station just a few seconds ahead of you; no sign of it when you drop out yourself. Similarly if you see an AI exit normalspace to supercruise it won't be there later
- for some reason, initial system population when you enter or exit supercruise isn't done - so you drop into supercruise and you're always the only one there [1], for a few seconds, and then ships start appearing at the entry point, and around stations ; you drop out of supercruise at a station and there's no-one about but the defense ships, who are all bunched up at one end and then start spreading out on patrol ; you drop in to a mining zone and only then do the miners, police and horribly outnumbered and irretrievably stupid pirates drop in.
- even in the more dangerous systems NPC attacks in supercruise are rare (on the one hand, somewhat reasonable since a well-armed Cobra probably isn't worth the effort required to extract its relatively low cargo capacity; on the other hand, the various comments on Oolite 1.80 show that a bit of pirate desperation is needed) so you don't see a lot of the pirate side of the ecosystem, you rarely see an NPC bounty hunter actually hunting at all, unless you get very lucky, and with no masslocking in supercruise if you aren't into piracy yourself you never really interact with the traders either.
It feels like there's a lot of good games (plural) in Elite: Dangerous - but the joins between them are too obvious, so it never really feels integrated. And it
almost works but then doesn't quite, over and over again.
- Combat is fun - but only if you seek it out; if it seeks out you it probably will be more irritating than challenging
- Exploration works very well but I think the way it works makes a lot of ship-to-ship interaction outside of exploration very difficult (and while in gameplay terms it's very useful to encourage beginners, the number of unexplored systems in "core" space - even ones controlled by major powers! - is a bit implausible);
- Trading is the typical Elite model of "lots of varied and interesting commodities, about ten percent of which if that are actually useful once you've got a small bit of cash" (and has the usual FE2/FFE problem that profit scales linearly as you increase ship size, while all other occupations scale sub-linearly, which they probably could do something about but not easily).
- Bulletin board is okay in terms of variety, but pays like the beginner contracts in Oolite and never gets better, and is always to the local cluster reachable in 1-ish jump. And you get weird missions like a Federal faction paying you to destroy police ships which are owned by the neighbouring system's Federal faction.
- The game has the FE2/FFE mistake of making jump ranges far too variable - your basic Sidewinder will do about 7 LY; the right ship optimised for range will do around 35 LY. Inhabited space is roughly 150LY in radius, so in a fast ship it takes fewer jumps to cross from one edge to the other than it does to cross an Oolite galaxy (which is hardly an epic journey itself); combined with the full-3D galaxy being a major challenge for the map tool, it makes it feel at once far too big and far too small (and with a few exceptions most careers you've no incentive to leave the local group or even sometimes the current system, so the vast scale just means that you never meet anyone obnoxious ... a good thing, of course).
- Piracy - and illegality in general - is nowhere near profitable enough to make it believable that anyone does it (that's always been a problem with Elite-like games, but multiplayer makes it more of an issue).
- The graphics are highly detailed and (the occasional asteroid aside!) very well done ... but this has its own costs: every single station Coriolis or bigger regardless of external type has one of two docking bay plans [2], so far as I can tell to the exact position of the palm trees; greater variety would require huge amounts of work, but it does make you wonder whether the Interstellar Convention on Shipping Crate Stacking was only signed across inhabited space so that a bunch of diplomats could say "see, we can agree on something".
Some of this is an unavoidable consequence of the decisions to make it "realistic scale" and "multiplayer"; some of it is probably fixable in later patches; some of it could be fixed in theory but might need an Elite Dangerous II to do it in because it wouldn't work to make the change with an existing player population
(Lest that all seem too negative; it is still a fun game and they have a lot of scope for further improvements - I think definitely an improvement on the three previous ones, though I doubt I'll play it as much in total as I played FFE or Oolite)
[1] Unless another player is hanging around in the system and has kindly let the simulation run a few minutes for you.
[2] One of those is rare enough that I've only found three so far, all in at least semi-handcrafted systems, so maybe doesn't even count.