Oolite Bulletins

PhantorGorth wrote:

As Cody pointed out [wiki]OXP_List[/wiki] is your friend but I suggest you take it steady and don't add too much at once. This way you should be able to tailor the list of OXPs you use to meet your vision of the game.

Phantor

Thanks for the welcome all - I am afraid I haven't taken your advice re what to add as I want everything . I have added a lot because the universe seems so much richer that way - kids are off to bed soon so time for a coffee and to get stuck in for the night. I have a couple of parcels to deliver and need some credits to pimp my ride asap and then I can think about some combat!

Damn your docking OXP I just got fined 5 cr for docking to slowly

G'day Alan.. welcome aboard!

AlanSlade wrote:

Damn your docking OXP I just got fined 5 cr for docking too slowly

That is a surprise most people complain about getting in to trouble for docking too fast

Hi All

My name's Alan M from London originally now of Barcelona.

I just found Oolite about a week ago and really I dropped in to say thanks to the people who developed it and those who have created all the addons. Great work, the care and attention lavished on these things really shows.

Having just finished a massively-hyped but utterly soulless game (Mass Effect on the PS3) it's easy to contrast such tripe with something like Oolite - modest but delivering so much more than it promises.

Having spent the last week in getting the balance right on OXPs to get playability and flavour on a low-end laptop (10 year old Toshiba), I can really say that I'm enjoying this experience a lot.

In fact I played FFE in 1994 and loved it then too.

My only gripe - the beginning is awful. I would have dropped it in about an hour if I hadn't found the Cheat OXP which saved me from complete boredom as the new player. I can understand that the early stage of any game can be difficult, but to make it tedious is inexcusable. Mucking about on a ship that lacks injector and ASC is just horrible. My heart fell when I realised it was going to take hours to get anywhere on the ship I was given and I was ready to pack it in, but Cheat saved the day.

So my suggestion would be to give the noob player an easier start (more money, a better ship and ideally a tutorial) to soften the harsh introduction to the most daunting sandbox ever. When I understand more about OXP authoring I'll have a go at that myself.

So in summary an A+ game of tremendous creativity which is unlikely to appeal to anyone who hasn't already played it. Yes, that is as paradoxical as it sounds.


So much for the game. Real Life stuff

Me - 47 years old. English by birth, Irish by blood and Catalan by adoption. Background colourful but I wouldn't want to live it again, I'd prefer a normal life next time. I speak English and Catalan, and Spanish when I have to. But I usually don't like to, not because I find the Spanish language difficult, but because I find most Spaniards themselves very difficult to relate to.

Passions - Writing, languages, martial arts, playing videogames and furthering the revolution.

Occupation - Pretty much anything from journalist and translator to political henchman and fixer. Doesn't pay that great but I meet some interesting folk.

Family - Wife of 15 years, a smart Catalan architect. Two kids, son Patrick 14 and daughter Kira 12.

Home - Barcelona. Catalonia generally. Nice country. Good food. Terrible system. Hopefully when we get out of Spain's greedy clutches we'll be able to claw our way back into the Developed World. If not, it's more likely that Barcelona will resemble Tijuana in about 5 years.

Alignment - Chaotic good, veering toward Chaotic Neutral in times of stress.

So nice to be here, I like the look of the forum already but I have to go now because thanks to a slipped TAB key I just had to write this whole damn thing out again and I'm exhausted.

Cheers

Belisarius wrote:

My only gripe - the beginning is awful. I would have dropped it in about an hour if I hadn't found the Cheat OXP which saved me from complete boredom as the new player. I can understand that the early stage of any game can be difficult, but to make it tedious is inexcusable. Mucking about on a ship that lacks injector and ASC is just horrible. My heart fell when I realised it was going to take hours to get anywhere on the ship I was given and I was ready to pack it in, but Cheat saved the day.

Yes its hard at the start, but so was Elite. I like to restart now and again for the fun of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if others on here feel the same way.

Belisarius wrote:

So my suggestion would be to give the noob player an easier start (more money, a better ship and ideally a tutorial) to soften the harsh introduction to the most daunting sandbox ever.

The [wiki]Lave Academy OXP[/wiki] is very useful if you want a tutorial!

Hi Jaz,

I wasn't really referring to the difficulty but the boredom. Flying in a ship without guidance or any way to pick up the pace is dull... dullsville... dullality.

Lave Academy is nice for practice at combat but that's not really the prob for me or most experienced gamers. The problem is referred to as "quicksand-box" over at tvtropes.com, that is you're dumped in a huge sandbox, you're lost, you're weak and everything is slow. That's very much like real life... rather too much so IMO.

Two words - injector and ASC. Once I cheated enough to pick them up, the opening of the game wasn't too boring any more. Otherwise I wouldn't be here enjoying the company at the forum and this fantastic immersive game.

Hehe, welcome to the club, Belisarius .-)

So to expand a little bit on the game opening experience, it went something like this.

What shall I do? Well, I can increase my standing and money by combat, let's try that. [Launches, seeks a fight]
...
[3 minutes and a quick spanking later] Obviously I'm too weak to attempt combat yet. What else? Mining... can't afford a mining laser. Passengers? Can't afford a berth. Packet deliveries? Yes, I can do that. Pays less than the cost of refuel but at least I can do it. Take the package. [Launches again, jumps to destination system]

Great, I'm at the destination. Those 17 credits are nearly mine! Now I just have to get to the station. Engage hyperspeed!... mass lock!... that's OK, I'll go this way and avoid them... mass lock!... there's some more over here... mass lock!

Well I'll just have to sail through the traffic. Here we go

[15 uneventful minutes later] Gotta go to the peepee place. Pause it? Nah.. if I leave it running I might arrive some time today. Make some toast and a coffee while I'm gone, since nothing is happening here.

[Returns] Dead... press space commander. Wonder what happened? Never mind start again.

[Restart] Rinse and repeat. More crawling through crowded traffic. Quickly losing interest... Someone comes flying into me without warning and I die. And I just spent 28 minutes arriving there.

[Lightbulb] CHEAT! If I cheat I can enjoy myself. But I feel bad if I cheat. But I feel worse if I'm bored. Search for cheat addon. Bless you Thargoid.

[Cheat spamming for 10 minutes] Now I'm ready. I can travel without falling asleep, I can get some idea of what's around, I can get some info on the map. I'm now at what would be considered the start of most games, but which has taken me two hours of trial, error and cheating to achieve.

From this point onwards everything was fandabidosie and groovtastic. But I think that games in general shouldn't front-load the difficulty so that the beginner level is overwhelming and should avoid putting the player through tedium as an obligatory introduction to the playing experience.

That is almost pardonable for a fan-based game like Oolite where a lot of enthusiasts and veterans are the main base, but as I've discovered that some of you plan to make a commercial version of Elite in the near future, please heed my warnings, Elite 4 developers. If you structure the game in any way like the present version, it will fail dismally on the marketplace and get the worst reviews ever.

Players today aren't like the BBC and Speccy crowd of old. They crave excitement, not ridiculously difficult challenge resembling the RL frustration of being unable to progress because you don't have the resources to progress, while you don't have resources because you can't progress. They feel they have the right to understand what's happening from the start. And they hate being cast as a schlub without any distinction, just a joe schmo trawling the space lanes. They need to *be somebody* from the start. Cruising through empty space trying to avoid traffic is gameplay death.

I imagine the E:D developers are thinking seriously about these issues, and recently I've been studying the structure of narrative-gameplay following my experience in the poor dynamic of Mass Effect 3, a game which has simultaneously alienated its fan base while at the same time offering nothing but bewilderment to new players. Researching what made it fail so badly despite its promising aspects, I came across some interesting articles out there about "ludonarrative" as they call it now. I'll be happy to reference them to anyone who's interested.

What I'm saying really is that the world of gameplaying has moved on quite a lot in recent years, propelled mainly by the masterwork of Rockstar Games and its seamless fusion of gameplay and character/story. Mass Effect 3 (to name one example) failed to keep up with that and was disastrous in all respects. Elite: Dangerous 4 could go the same way if it remains too Old School.

All remarks made in the spirit of constructive criticism. Please remember I love playing this, just I fear it will go the way of - say- Lucas Arts Games if it doesn't keep up with the market's preference for crafted play dynamic, characterisation and immersive worlds.

'Elite: Dangerous is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Elite!'

Welcome aboard, Belisarius!

Cody wrote:

'Elite: Dangerous is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Elite!'

I most sincerely hope so.

Cheers muchly for warm welcome fella

It's undoubtedly very, very hard on beginners. It's almost worth recommending that you trade down from a Cobra III to a Cobra I, to which you can then fit some kit. I've tried that beginning myself: it's more fun in many ways than getting creamed by just about every pirate you meet. It takes time to earn enough to upgrade again, and you have to make sure you leave yourself enough fuel to inject out of masslocks, but at least you get to fly a ship that can do a few things.

Belisarius wrote:

The problem is referred to as "quicksand-box" over at tvtropes.com, that is you're dumped in a huge sandbox, you're lost, you're weak and everything is slow.

Ironically, Elite/Oolite is missing among the examples on the page.

Commander McLane wrote:

Belisarius wrote:

The problem is referred to as "quicksand-box" over at tvtropes.com, that is you're dumped in a huge sandbox, you're lost, you're weak and everything is slow.

Ironically, Elite/Oolite is missing among the examples on the page.

But it is listed in the trope WideOpenSandbox which means the Quicksand aspect hasn't been applied to Oolite (yet).

Hi Belisarius, and welcome.
There's not much I can add to the welcomes you've already had (we are a friendly lot as you will have noticed ) but you will find this forum a font of good advice and help - don't be afraid to ask if you have any questions.

PhantorGorth wrote:

But it is listed in the trope WideOpenSandbox which means the Quicksand aspect hasn't been applied to Oolite (yet).

Now you mention it, that's the page that brought me to download it. The game description intrigued me, and I had a dim but pleasant memory of FFE. Interestingly the tvtropes analysis suggests the "noob-killer" is the docking process as mentioned so many times on the Oolite page as such a difficult feat. Having played a fair amount of Orbiter Space Sim I am well used to docking under realistic Newtonian mechanics, and as expected the docking process in Oolite is nothing like as hard as that. Probably is difficult for a lot of people though.

No, for me the real "noob-killer" in the game is the enforced crawling around in a blind and substandard ship which is not learning but just bringing the gameplay dynamic to a crashing halt just to make the player feel truly insignificant. Wonder how many prospective players who really wanted to like the game felt that the game didn't want them to like it?

EDIT: Thanks to Smivs, love the ship textures and tweaks.