At the Last Second, Elite: Dangerous Drops Offline Mode

Okay then. To counteract the negativity of this article, I'll just post this cute gif of a raccoon.

Ambition is Kickstarter/Early Accesses biggest issue.

Not cool.

So does the game crash if you unplug your internet, or does it mean you don't get any dynamic events? Pretty much the only question that requires answering instead of this conjecture on all sides.

From what I understand the game simply is not playable offline, like Diablo 3 on PC or an MMO.

Also...the game has cosmetic microtransaction now. Yay.

Can't wait for the backlash.

While I agree this is indeed bad news, I can't empathise with the people affected because ALL Kickstarters are just buying a pig in a poke. You are backing an idea, not a locked-down product.

This is incredibly disappointing. The Kickstarter FAQ was pretty clear on that the game would be DRM free, and online authentication would only be necessary for optional multiplayer and patches.

Will the game be DRM-free?

Yes, the game code will not include DRM (Digital Rights Management), but there will be server authentication when you connect for multiplayer and/or updates and to synchronise with the server.

How will single player work? Will I need to connect to a server to play?

The galaxy for Elite: Dangerous is a shared universe maintained by a central server. All of the meta data for the galaxy is shared between players. This includes the galaxy itself as well as transient information like economies. The aim here is that a player's actions will influence the development of the galaxy, without necessarily having to play multiplayer.

The other important aspect for us is that we can seed the galaxy with events, often these events will be triggered by player actions. With a living breathing galaxy players can discover new and interesting things long after they have started playing.

Update! The above is the intended single player experience. However it will be possible to have a single player game without connecting to the galaxy server. You won't get the features of the evolving galaxy (although we will investigate minimising those differences) and you probably won't be able to sync between server and non-server (again we'll investigate).

I get that online can enhance the game in some ways, but that should be an opt-in thing, like how the Souls games are enhanced by their optional online mode.

The whole reason this game was funded 20 years after the last game is that people can still revisit and enjoy the old ones. Had that not been possible, Elite would probably have gone the way of the early online games like Legends of Future Past, which are essentially lost to history today. If this doesn't meet the sales projections this may very well end up unplayable in 5-10 years, like MAG and countless MMO's, and that wasn't what any of us signed up for when we wanted a new entry to the Elite series.

Apart from that, maybe they should've taken notice of the fact that not even big publishers like EA, Activision/Blizzard, Sony or Ubisoft manage to get their always online games working under the first few weeks after launch, and they have near infinite resources to throw at the problem, whereas Frontier Developments is a self-publishing indie studio that barely had enough money to sustain their own operations until ED was kickstarted.

EDIT: They even directly took pledges on DRM-free physical copies of the game, about 2000 of the 25000 backers in total went for those tiers:

Pledge £60 or more

374 backers

Physical DRM-free boxed edition of "Elite: Dangerous" plus all rewards above (please note: the disc in the pack is simply an alternative way to install the game - it will have the same online account code whether installed off disc or downloaded digitally).

Estimated delivery: Mar 2014

Ships anywhere in the world

Pledge £90 or more

1339 backers

Physical DRM-free collector's premium boxed edition of "Elite: Dangerous". This includes all the rewards above, except a premium boxed edition is in place of the standard boxed addition, which includes a T shirt with "I backed Elite: Dangerous" on the back, and a paperback copy of the official sequel to "The Dark Wheel".

Estimated delivery: Mar 2014

Ships anywhere in the world

well i feel sorry for people with bad internet once again they get shit on. while people who have great internet claim its not a issue.also micro transactions come on really dont mind dlc but paying for crappy boosts and skins what is this ac unity

BLUH

I have kinda spotty internet and not being able to play offline pretty much killed any interest I had in this game.

@patrickklepek said:

I started to take a look at the thread you linked and thought "well, the responses seem very measured and calm so far..." and then I saw:

425 pages of comments. 425 PAGES of comments!!!!!

I don't have a problem with them doing that, as long as they refund everyone who bought it for offline play.

I always intended to play this with friends so the online only part is ok for me in that respect, but all games should be playable completely offline to future proof them, someone decades from now might want to play this as a historical piece and that needs to be possible.

I'm sure it won't be an issue for most of the folks who backed the kickstarter but this is still a huge bummer.

I know it's the nature of the beast to promise the world in order to generate interest/funds on kickstarter but when I see features, that were promised, dropped from a game I still feel a little intentionally mislead.

Kickstarter promises are not guarantee of the final product blah, blah, blah, I get that but it still sucks.

My main issue with the idea of a shared universe in this style of game is that I cannot enjoy the game with this economy system.

With a live, demand driven economy, with supply and demand fulfilled to an extent by players, there is a very good chance that the economy will be totally inaccessible to anyone who doesn't play nearly full time.

Imagine playing, knowing that you need 10k gold coins (or whatever) for your dream ship. You're going well and have a hold full of valuable cargo. But then you need to go to bed, so you can go to work. And then your kid is sick. Or real life is busy and so you don't play for a fortnight.

And when you come back, your ship, character and inventory are the same, but the universe has moved on. That valuable cargo which a fortnight ago would have turned a huge profit, is now suffering from oversupply and you will take a significant loss anywhere you can find to unload it.

Maybe, just to add insult to injury, fuel prices in the universe have spiked - you'd been doing a super long range run with this cargo and the original price would have made fuel an insignificant expense. So now you're even deeper in the hole.

And the salt in the wounds is that inflationary pressures, or just the raw demand means that your dream ship is now nudging up to 12 thousand geegoogs to buy.

Of course, this may be an extreme example, but it's what can happen with live economies, even if your own universe is physically separate.

At least in a pure "off line" state, you know that the state of the universe isn't changing while you aren't playing.

Yup, as someone who on average spends about 20 minutes a day playing games, keeping up with a player based economy like that seems pretty unfeasable.

"which tries to spin the move as critical to maintaining the game's core focus on a connected online experience. Elite: Dangerous might very well benefit from an online-only experience [...]"

"Might"?

Go Play Solo-Mode. It's like the most boring, safe, carebear'ish experience one could get out of a game called "Dangerous". As far as i am concerned, they could... no, they should drop Solo-Mode too, it just advertises carebearing. The game is called "Elite: Dangerous" ffs, not "Elite: Safe Space Trade Simulator"...

Playing Elite, in its current form, without other players is like Battlefield MP without other players. You explore the Map, you try out the different vehicles. And after you've seen it all, you'll uninstall it and never ever touch it again.

I get the Server concerns, and its valid, but the majority of people crying right now about the lack of an offline mode are the same guys that did nothing but mine Veldspar in EVE until they could get their first T1 fitted Drake, to finally be able to do a Level 3 Mission, yay!

;)

It's almost as if some KickStarters attach the words "DRM free" to their pitch to get more backers rather than having any interest in examining the ideas behind what such a pledge means (ownership of the game being sold by the people buying it, or backing it in this case), discarding it at a moment's notice because they really only want to rent you time in their not-MMO, where any non-authorised use of "their" software is a ToS violation and DLC is the only "mod" you have a right to.

Hopefully I'm wrong, but it's never a good sign when someone gives up on DRM-free and decides people really want always-on DRM. Remember back when DRM was some rotten check when you installed a game and people said, "it's not that bad". Now we have to ask someone's permission (assuming they've still got their server on) every time we start a game, just to make sure we've still got authorisation to use what we apparently paid for. What. A. Mess.

Pretty funny that all of the relatively unknown Kickstarters I've backed have delivered high quality games and pretty much what they promised, while all of the 'celebs' have basically just taken the money and done whatever the fuck they liked.

Cool, no longer interested.

Ouch. That is a very surprising move. I don't see how including an offline mode would affect anything.

That's just a matter of whether the economy is done well or not though. If prices fluctuate constantly on bitcoin-levels it just means the developers created the market systems badly.

In EVE Online (the only game I cant think of with a similar economy) the prices of things stabilise pretty quick and stay roughly the same barring major changes (a patch suddenly making a certain ship/item way better etc.).

I think the wording is pretty important when it comes to that. There are plenty of "if we have the resources to do X .." and "we will look into Y", but when it comes to offline mode they specifically used wording like "it will be possible to have a single player game without connecting to the galaxy server" and "the game code will not include DRM", and they only used phrasing like "we will investigate" when it came to making the offline and online experiences feel similarly rich in content.

@bombaluigi: Why should a game cater to what you think it should be for everyone?

I requested a refund on Sunday, still waiting to hear back from them...

don't tip the waiter before you get your meal, friends. asking for a refund reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what kickstarter is. maybe you'll be refunded, but they're under no obligation to do so. just make a little headstone for those dollars and put it on your desk, and look at it every day.

I think that ;) implied some sarcasm.

@fisk0 said:

kind of, yes, but at the same time my honest opinion is that the game actually IS better as an online game, rather than offline... hauling valueable stuff arround while every other player arround you can kill/rob you is tense and fun... npc's in elite are not fun, they are absurdly stupid and exploitable... and therefore boring...

On a sidenote, i can't wait for the "omg it haz to be online allze time!!!" outcry(s) regarding no mans sky and star citizen...

";)"

Wont really care have never used offline play its kind of pointless because I spend all my time so far away from anyone else I never encounter another player. And since this game is gong to cover the entire galaxy.

Yeah it wont matter at all.

@patrickklepek

"online with your friends, or other 'Elite' pilots like yourself, or even alone."

This quote isn't great. There is still a singleplayer mode in the game, plus the ability to play privately with only friends. It's just it requires online connectivity to work (that quote never actually implies that the "alone" variant is offline). I'm not saying it didn't advertise offline (it did), but that isn't the right quote.

From the FAQ:

How will single player work? Will I need to connect to a server to play?

The galaxy for Elite: Dangerous is a shared universe maintained by a central server. All of the meta data for the galaxy is shared between players. This includes the galaxy itself as well as transient information like economies. The aim here is that a player's actions will influence the development of the galaxy, without necessarily having to play multiplayer.

The other important aspect for us is that we can seed the galaxy with events, often these events will be triggered by player actions. With a living breathing galaxy players can discover new and interesting things long after they have started playing.

Update! The above is the intended single player experience. However it will be possible to have a single player game without connecting to the galaxy server. You won't get the features of the evolving galaxy (although we will investigate minimising those differences) and you probably won't be able to sync between server and non-server (again we'll investigate).

But come on, Jeff and others at GiantBomb have stressed how people investing in Kickstarters shouldn't expect anything at all for their money. It should be treated as a donation with the hope of getting something cool at the end. At least here everyone is still getting a game (with more features than were promised, as well), so getting up in arms about it seems excessive.

@legion_ said:

Okay then. To counteract the negativity of this article, I'll just post this cute gif of a raccoon.

I've read both, but... IT DIDN'T WORK I STILL FEEL NEGATIVE!!!

Ahem. Really scummy move by the devs. Whatever hope I had for the project is gone.

@bombaluigi: OH NO! People might want a different game experience than you! That meathead 'PVP or nothing' attitude fucking sucks. Everything can't be EVE.

When it comes to No Man's Sky, it still seems nobody is sure what that game really is, and whatever the case, they haven't advertised it as an DRM free game with an offline mode the way Elite was. Star Citizen also promised offline modes for at least the campaign part of the game, and if they also fail to deliver that, I'm sure there'll be a reaction to that too.

I enjoyed, and still enjoy the original Elite and Frontier: Elite II with their NPC ships, as well as the many Elite inspired games made over the past decades, Privateer, Freelancer, the X series and the Evochron games which are also fully playable offline (Evochron did have optional multiplayer, which was great and which I spent many hours in, but in the end nowhere near as much as I spent enjoying it offline).

The aspects you seem enjoy about EVE were the most offputting about that game to me, and the way I've always enjoyed playing this genre seems to have little enhancement by being locked to an online mode.

I'm certainly not opposed to the promise from the Kickstarter campaign, where online players would get an evolving, rich universe. But cutting off the offline players entirely after promising there would be an option for them is sad.

@the_ruckus: My internet is relatively slow, I have a pretty poor ping at the best of times to the US, and I have a monthly usage quota - so despite kickstarting it I'm probably never going to bother playing. But honestly, I'm sure there are enough people in better situations for them to still make a nice profit.

Betting it's only a matter of time before they reverse the decision or announce a post-release patch or something though.

It is kinda funny how many of these Kickstarter projects were created with the creators saying how much they resent all the anti-consumer stuff like microtransactions, always online modes and expensive low quality DLC that publishers force them to put into the game, and asking their fans to fund their project so they could create them according to their pure vision, without all the publisher forced bullshit. Braben, Roberts, Molyneux, Schafer and almost all the other big names used phrasing like that in their pitch videos, and now when they have to deliver, many of them implemented all that shit by themselves.

I read it as if they couldn't get CPU/AI missions events and economy going by release so they're just going to do them as online "events" post release.

@bombaluigi: I agree. Solo Mode is extremely stale and I can't see that changing much when the game gets a full release.

Even with the Beta bugs - and today's was a doozy: I could only land on stations by turning my ship 180 to the proper orientation - I'm playing the game online (and I've never been much of an MMO guy) because there's a lot more going on.

That said, the announcement sucks for those with no internet. We'll need to see how it pans out in December and beyond but personally I'm fine with it.

EDIT - If cute animals aren't going to cheer people up, here's a screenie of where I landed today:

Not long ago it looked like there would be a renaissance of space games, but now I'm having serious doubts about the quality of any of them-

X:Rebirth was a massive disappointment in almost every possible way, especially as a fan of the previous games.

Elite looks very promising in some areas but they are so obviously rushing it out a year or more too early. They have less than a dozen ships in the beta (and to my knowledge not many more coming in the full release) and no mission content aside from "go here kill this" and "take this over there". I have no doubt that they will continue to work on the game after the release but what if they decide that now that the game is "done", new updates will be part of the already-planned paid expansions and dlc. I'm disappointed that there will be no offline, mostly because I wanted to have the opportunity to mod/hack/cheat. Also travel time is too long, especially if you're trying to be a trader where there isn't much excitement at the end of the journey.

I don't even know what star citizen is anymore, it's impossible to see past the wall of hype/delusion/money that has formed around that game. Every fan of that game seems to make their own assumptions about what that game is and how it will work, and with like 5 youtube series and countless dev blogs and letters from Roberts coming out of the developers its impossible to find out what has actually been said about the game let alone how likely it is that such and such will actually be in the final product or be fun. The ships look beautiful but it still seems like a bill of goods carefully crafted to get as many people as possible to give them money.

The only one I haven't gone sour on is No Man's Sky, but there's so little information its hard to form an opinion other than "that trailer video looked awesome". Limit theory never had me excited for whatever reason, seems to lack character overall. None of these games are beyond redemption (well maybe excluding Rebirth) but I'm definitely not as excited as a year ago.

I really just want a better, prettier, version of X3, but maybe the market won't bear that. I just hope that these games don't disappoint too many people or else we'll just be back where we were a few years ago with the genre all but dead.

So this press release is filled with a bunch of nothing really. Will you be able to play the game in singleplayer or not? I don't mind some sort of Steam connectivity, that's fine. But I hate people and I prefer to play alone. If this just turned into some sort of MMO, I'm out.

I personally have no problems with always-online games, but in most cases I understand people who do. Totally sleazy move to deliver news about fundamental game changes to your backers a month before your game comes out. This kind of shady shit is what's going to eventually kill Kickstarter.

@zlimness: Yes you will. This is what Solo Mode is, but you'll need to be online to do it.

I agree with @ioftd's point about them rushing the game. It's got an awful long way to go and less than a month til release. All I want is a solid version of the core game at this point but I'm not exactly confident I'll get it in 2014.

@monkey523: no need to be upset... take a chill pill, play solo mode and have fun, everything's fine...

ENVIROMENT VS ENVIROMENT?

See what I did tharrr?

@dave_tacitus said:

@bombaluigi: I agree. Solo Mode is extremely stale and I can't see that changing much when the game gets a full release.

Even with the Beta bugs - and today's was a doozy: I could only land on stations by turning my ship 180 to the proper orientation - I'm playing the game online (and I've never been much of an MMO guy) because there's a lot more going on.

That said, the announcement sucks for those with no internet. We'll need to see how it pans out in December and beyond but personally I'm fine with it.

EDIT - If cute animals aren't going to cheer people up, here's a screenie of where I landed today:

Nice.

as long as I don't have to play with other people I am happy.

Sorry but this issue is nowhere near as clear cut as this article or some of the other commenters here make it sound - a key reason why this fracas has blown up in the way that it has. Offline play has always been discussed by the developers as a desired extra but an addon all the same (even the quote in the article from the Kickstarter page clearly shows that offline play was an afterthought at best, and no offline mode has ever existed in any of the playable builds during the last year). In truth Frontier really should have gripped this nettle much earlier than they have but on the flip-side backers who had placed their hopes in a feature that was never a certainty (and logic suggested would always be problematic given E:D's long term design goals as a highly connected game world) have affectively convinced themselves that the game would be something that it really isn't. It's one hell of an impasse for sure and is far from pretty to behold (currently the official forum's are a bloody mess). The last thing any developer wants is for their audience to devour itself on the eve of their games launch.

@weemadando: This is a very good point. I'm a big fan of big persistant online multiplayer universes and the gameplay that provides, but it's true that the singleplayer experience has a lot of value there.

@fisk0: The crazy thing is, from what I remember, they actually were looking to not hit the Kickstarter goal until they posted that update to the 2nd question.

So I can imagine some people who backed it not wanting to deal with their connected experience are pretty upset now.

@legion_ said:

Okay then. To counteract the negativity of this article, I'll just post this cute gif of a raccoon.

*Jumps up and down* Hi Raccoon! =D

@dave_tacitus said:

EDIT - If cute animals aren't going to cheer people up, here's a screenie of where I landed today:

God dammit, this is really making me laugh. I thought I was better than that!

I would really like to know what their plan is for that time 6 months to 3 years from now when the servers go down for good. Buying Elite: Dicey is not an acceptable answer.

@dave_tacitus said:

@bombaluigi: I agree. Solo Mode is extremely stale and I can't see that changing much when the game gets a full release.

Even with the Beta bugs - and today's was a doozy: I could only land on stations by turning my ship 180 to the proper orientation - I'm playing the game online (and I've never been much of an MMO guy) because there's a lot more going on.

That said, the announcement sucks for those with no internet. We'll need to see how it pans out in December and beyond but personally I'm fine with it.

EDIT - If cute animals aren't going to cheer people up, here's a screenie of where I landed today:

What's so funny about wankel? ;)