PUSHING IT TO THE LIMIT

Literally TIE Fighter and Freespace, also old Flight Sims.

You should hang around the Space Threads more often.

it's just fucking boring. it's really unironically good if you like space trucking or exploring, but if you're looking for literally anything else you're going to be bored, bored, bored. it does a lot of little sim things that make me happy - if you want to be a bounty hunter you can go full autism and install frame shift interdictors to pull people out of sorta-hyperspace so you can kill them, can install scanners to scan frame shift signatures ("exit wounds" where people have jumped out of the area) to chase people through goddamn hyperspace, can install kill warrant scanners to scan "innocents" in the spacelanes and determine if they have a bounty anywhere nearby, etc. that's cool. but 90% of the time you're going to be flying around doing nothing (and some systems require you to fly from end to end of the solar system to get to a shipyard or something which can take up to like fifteen real minutes), trying to get to somewhere else where you'll do a little bit of something, then repeating the cycle

I think the devs actually hate fun. Like for real, honest to god hate it. Almost every mechanic in the game is designed to blueball you in some way and stop you from being able to do anything that isn't grind for credits (which people find exploits to bypass anyhow). Any fun you extract from the game will be done in spite of the developers vision for the game.

nothing as long as you like a truck simulator in space, otherwise you're looking at a boring grind for credits to buy a better ship then rinse and repeat

Parts of that sound like the perfect "Cowboy Bebop Simulator". Other parts just sound like video game aids. Is it possible to put your ship on autopilot for those end-to-end solar system journeys and just do something else interesting with your time?

Also, please explain this blueballrng you're talking about. It sounds like some Pay2NotGrind, but isn't it a full-priced game?

Poor Steel Battalion. Best mech game fucking ever, yet it's confined to eternal obscurity due to the crazy expensive controller.

yes and no. space in ED is basically done in three "layers", from smallest to largest
frame shift is where you're going to spend the majority of your time, and your speed is basically infinite, but you need time to spin up (and down) to ideal speed. when you've got a navigation coordinate selected you can push your throttle into a "sweet spot" where it'll automate speeding up/down, but you still need to be on station to drop from frame shift into local space at your chosen destination. during this time it's also possible that you could be interdicted, get too close to a star, whatever. so yes, you sort of can, but if you're reading a book or something while playing a game, why play it in the first place?

everything fun is locked behind a grind, whether it's credits or time. there are missions you can take to kill 10 pirates in sector, and it'll take you ten, maybe fifteen minutes to get there (assuming you have enough fuel to make it in one trip, which isn't always the case), then another ten or fifteen to scour the system in frame shift to find a signature that might, possibly, have pirates at it when you drop into local space. everything has a layer of fluff and bullshit attached to it where it makes you dig to find any fun. it feels genuinely realistic - space is really fucking big, so it stands to reason it'd take time to get anything done in it - but that doesn't mean fun

it's also worth mentioning that the ships are total fucking bullshit. it seems like a lot of cool fun when you see your first shipyard brimming with ships, but when you see behind the curtain and learn how the game works there's basically three "tracks" - combat, trade, exploration - and each ship is a straight up upgrade along that track. there is no reason to take a viper mk. III for combat if you can afford an anaconda, at all, and if you do you're stupid. the game is built around this, and it's just frustrating and fundamentally confusing - why build this great big universe that is legitimately huge and complex, then basically show us "this is what you're working towards" without letting us set our own goals or anything

Imagine a pay to not grind progression model. And then not even include the "pay to not" part. The game is to grind so that you can grind so that you can grind so that you can grind some more. Even the exploits people resort to to bypass the bulk of the grind is still a grind, albeit a significantly faster one. But then all you've done is bypassed the game and there's nothing left to do that's remotely interesting except grief people in open play which devolves into a literal turkey shoot with no reward beyond griefing itself.

It's not even the devs, honestly. It's their shitty forums, where burnt out boomers and retired old farts who do nothing but play E:D cry about how "it was like this in 1984 in the first elite, it has to be just like this right the fuck now".

I've heard this argument countless times before but I've always felt that it was putting the cart before the horse. They didn't morph the game into what it is today, it was like this from the absolutely conceptual level and the forum dads are merely the only people who could possibly stick with it. The problem is that Braben himself has drank too much of his own koolaid of his "vision" for what he wants the game to be. Its no coincidence that the Frontier project he didn't direct, Planet Coaster, is a legitimately good game.

I mean, you're probably right. But I've always felt like the forum fags were the biggest whales, and everyone else attempting to push the game more towards fun was ignored to appease said whales. Fuck, it took them more than three years to even consider trying to un-fuck the fundamentals of their game.

I won't discount that they do have an appreciable effect on the game's development, just that I wouldn't call them the primary reason for the games issues when everything about it down to its very netcode (instanced p2p what the hell?) is just wrong. And while I'm sure there are probably a handful of whales that buy all the retarded cosmetic stuff there is (like dashboard bobleheads) I feel that if their income was as whale based as you think it is that they'd have way more heavy handed ways of extracting cash from them in the game already.

What I do like about E:D is this whole meta of power/heat management you can get into and how you could basically turn off your life support and other ancillary shit temporarily to eek out a little additional performance. MWO plays with the concepts but doesn't delve as deep as E:D does from what I remember.

I want the game to explicitly tell me I'm doing something crazy that I shouldn't be doing as I'm winning. It's a very satisfying feeling.

If you want to go WAY back to the N64 games Star Wars pod racer had a boost mechanic that let you push your engines to the absolute limit before you had to disable the boost. Failing to do so would cause a burnout and fuck you over pretty hard. I need to look into some more racing games that feature such mechanics.

Earth Defense Force plays with this somewhat with the weapons but it isn't touched on too often.

Luftrausers is pretty fun and it makes you feel like you're pushing things to the limit without obfuscating your HUD with a bunch of flashing lights. Very good sound/music work really drives the tension of the combat. Refining your balance of attack, retreat, and recovery is some of the most fun gameplay I've had in a while despite it being fairly simple in nature.

I don't want to sing Starsector's praises too much but it allows for some interesting customization. Too bad the devs don't like muh nazi mod. I would pirate it if you want to play it unless you're okay with supporting a cucked agenda.

Those are some of the games that play with the balance of power vs fucking yourself pretty well and I recommend everyone give them a look if you like that particular dynamic in your gameplay.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption had a pretty cool system. Your PED Suit allowed you to expend an Energy Tank to enter Hypermode, which converted your weapons into powerful Phazon weapons. Every weapon you use will drain your Hypermode gauge, and if you stay in Hypermode for more than 10 seconds, you will become Corrupted. Being Corrupted will cause your Hypermode gauge to rise, extending your Hypermode duration and giving you near infinite usage of Phazon weapons, but if the gauge fills all the way, the Phazon will completely corrupt you and cause a gameover. If you balance your Phazon usage during Hypermode, then you can use it for a full 30 seconds, in which case the emergency shutoff system in your PED Suit will vent all the Phazon out of your suit. During your Corrupted state, a warning message will flash across the screen, and Phazon will creep along the edges of your visor, obscuring your vision the closer your gauge gets to maxing out.

In F-Zero GX your energy meter was shared between your shields and your boosts.
You could get crazy speeds by spamming boosts but without energy the slightest tap would explode your machine.
Of course snaking would get you going even faster but that's a whole nother thing.

I thought the art fag was the only bitch on their team. I don't go digging through post history though.
Also how finished was your mod if you don't mind me getting slightly off topic.

My favorite part about that game was despite the final boss being a massive let down you did get to go into it at full power. And it wasn't like over games where its like
Each of you shot massive beams at each other and it felt super satisfying.

Armored Core has you covered.

It's not my mod, I was just being facetious with the "muh".

I don't remember the details verbatim but essentially the mod had fascistic elements to the faction it represented. AFAIK there weren't any swastikas or 1488 mobile gas chamber ships. The faction was fascist and you can't have that in a multi-star system spanning universe because (((reasons))).

I didn't even care about it either way until I found out they wouldn't allow the mod on their forums. I pretty much stopped playing the game after that. That, and the game gets buggy and the load times are shit when you put a lotta mods on it which I tended to do.

I'm sure I could better appreciate the beauty of it if knew what was happening. That's too chaotic at a glance. I'd have to play it to properly enjoy that kind of crazy.

I'd like to see this used in a physical sense. Like sacrificing a limb for a move to grant you an advantage or something along those lines.
Maybe if your character was a cyborg like Raiden.

An actual full-length fight might better help illustrate things.

Elite sounds good on paper, but unfortunately it ends up being a massive chore.

Just kill yourself my man

Subnautica lets you overheat your submarine engines, which can cause fires to break out in the engine room. Lots of alarms, smoke, firefighting music plays, you have to go back there and put it out yourself with a fire extinguisher.

Once they shitcanned the single player my desire to play it proportionally decreased.

how about Ring Runner? Fighters are the quickest ship class to heat up, so they get weapons that simultaneously cool and attack. Expending heat as a plasma trail and such.
Not so good in the HUD department

I bought it on the steam sale and man grinding so much does suck. Also everything takes fucking shitloads of time for no reason.
Example: Transfer ship or modules costs money but also you have to wait at least 5 mins, i did like 4 jumps and that time went up to 11 minutes, what the fuck.

Also can't kill 90% of ships without risking near death on this shitty CObra MK III because every NPC carries a weapon that blows shields in 3 shots.

I also hate how SRV missions are pretty much suicide missions. although depending on your ship and some luck you can make a run to it and board it and escape while a fucking ship almost guaranteed to be bigger than yours shoots at you like a sitting duck.

SO far it's good as a space truck simulator and some other stuff pleases my autism but it's not really the Epic Space game i thought it was gonna be first

How about Rogue System? It's basically DCS in space, developed by one massive autist.

...

Topically, I was more impressed by being able to play while seeing nothing in ED, rather than an overloaded screen
Glad I didn't get interdicted. Fuck space.

Smooth flying commander. Lotta rookies will give up and call it quits when something like that happens. You got the right stuff.

The only fun thing they added in ED as ayys to purge, but sadly you need friends or a heavily modified big ship to even stand a chance.

I'm full on exploration minded. I'm still 50 or 60k light years away from the populated bubble. I got to see Sag-A though.

The shit that goes on at 2:54 gets my dick hard, especially with sirens that BLARE like that. Its like the machine is screaming at you.

Man i fucking wish the super robot series would be ported to PC

Speaking of Armored core, is V worth my time if I can only play offline? I am going to be moving soon and I am in no hurry to establish an internet connection since I have my media server and my backlog of vidya and books.

For me, the reason I refunded it immediately after finishing the tutorial was because I realized it takes "aeroplanes in space" to a whole new level. Your maneuverability depends on your speed. There's a certain sweet spot speed (the blue line to the right of the circle in the bottom center) that you have to stay at to get maximum turn rate. You also can only turn with pitch. You rotate at approximately zero degrees per second. This pissed me off to no end, and when I looked more into this I saw a post by the devs saying they wanted the game to be a dogfighting game like with planes, and that was the moment I refunded. There's loads of other shit I see anons complaining about, but I didn't play long enough to experience any of those.

The Cobra is a pretty solid ship properly outfitted, what grade modules are you using? Namely power plant, shields, if you're using shield boosts, and armor class.
Early game combat like that, you really have to pick and choose your fights either way.
here's some info sheets if you need help
They're overhauling some shit later this year, hopefully they don't fuck it up.

The closest thing I can remember to an "overload"/"overdrive" mechanic in that game was the Missile Boat's Sub-Light Acceleration Motor, which drained your (single) laser cannon for an engine boost.

which really didn't make all that much difference when I was playing, as I tended to redirect power from weapons to engines/shields and dump from shields to weapons whenever I needed to SLAM

The biggest problem with ED is, that it is unfinished. Trucking is good though. You can load everything ever. Mining is also OK. Combat at that state is very risky though. Perps in Cobras are usually my main prey whenever I get into my Viper MK IV. Cobras aren't even listed in the Bounty Ship progression chart. I suggest ASPerger as next realistic aim.

Try sticking everything into engines on a bomber. The results were rather interesting.

SRV missions are a mixed bag but from my memories of grinding skimmer strike missions and planetary scans your success generally depends on how you decide to approach and weather or not there is an enemy ship present at the base.

If you want to be a cheeky fuck you can just fly down and bomb skimmers from the sky using fixed missiles, but you can also use the (shitty) SRV radio to hunt down rogue skimmers away from the main base if a ship is just sitting there waiting to fuck your SRV in the ass.

There are ways of making money fast like doing Passenger runs for the local space jews but the grind is pretty horrible but more doubled by the fact that the game is so hands off about everything in combination with how long it can take to do simple tasks.

I think that this post sums up things pretty well it's an issue with content and the fact that the various gameplay loops don't really intersect enough to make things interesting or profitable.

Yeah i pretty much became really gud at striking bases, but missile runs aren't as successful as putting an SRV on the ground because i ve been successfully exploiting the fact that you can just drive under some structures and big ships can't hit you in there, so i play a small game of cat and mouse and shoot everything dead while i steal data or have fun doing shenanigans around bases, like rocket jumping into places i shouldn't be able to travel or skipping these red energy gates

Also piloting the SRV with a keyboard sucks but i became really good at it, it's just that at high speed if you slightly steer left or right the whole thing turns 180 degrees.

The game was better in the beta, honestly. They could have taken it many directions but the direction they did take it ended up being horribly not fun and gets worse every patch.

Nowadays there's a lot of tedium, especially in travelling, but I think the biggest problem with the game is that they made the game a linear grind progression for stronger ships which lead to amplified rewards and some truly massive amounts of cash (and costs for very expensive ships) and then give you nothing to do with your huge stacks of money.

I hope I'm making sense here because I want to compare their progression to another MMO that did it in a very smart way keeping the game fresh while still having incentives to grind, that game being Guild Wars. Now in Guild Wars you could get to a max level character (20) in a relatively short period of time. You had further progression by acquiring new skills, but this was mostly horizontal progression and just gave you more variety of playstyles. (A large reason they were able to keep the game pretty balanced was that they used virtual servers so they could push out updates rapidly without taking the servers down, unlike Frontier who can only update ED a few times a year and so ED is an unbalanced mess). The other progression was in elite armour, but this was purely cosmetic and didn't provide a gameplay advantage. Some elite armour was extremely expensive and existed largely for prestige. You could also sink cash on expensive dyes. But these didn't raise your earning ability. If you grinded or traded a ton you could get something rare and fancy like Obsidian Armour which looked cool and made you stand out in a crowd and got people envious, but it didn't let you gain money any faster and accordingly it didn't reduce the value of any other reward you were aiming for, whereas in ED once you get the fancy expensive ship you can now get all the other shit pretty easily because that ship lets you grind faster and accordingly all the stuff you can get in the game becomes too easily attainable and worth so much less.

So to recap the ED progression:

If ED had progression the way GW does:

body too long, contd

And I personally feel that'd be a better way to handle the game. I'm sure some people would disagree. But I don't think making a series of tiers of ships that just scale up the values you're grinding for and the rates you're doing it at are real progression, and they stop Frontier from being able to add stable consistent expenses or logical mission values or even a working economy. How do you balance mission rewards when the values of ships are all skewed up? Yeah maybe heavier ships should cost somewhat more but it should be more like "small: 100k, medium: 200k, large: 500k" not "small: 100k, medium: 50m, large: 150m". And the bigger ships, similarly, should not be more capable in combat than the smaller ones, just have different strengths and weaknesses. Which they do have now, just not to enough of an extent.

But when you're a pack of retards who have to pull your servers offline for eight hours to patch because you're too stupid to learn from the devs who came before, you're going to be unable to even attempt to balance the game because the only testing you can do is in your little shitty betas and you can't put changes on, watch them for a few days, and tweak the game accordingly and roll out a new patch, your players would bitch at the constant downtime, so instead of trying to make all the ships fairly balanced and capable you just tier them out into different value categories and say to hell with balance.

I think this way of tiering ship costs and earning abilities so steeply is the root cause for all ED's grinding shittiness and retarded economy. You can't balance a game when different players, depending on the tier of ship they prefer, are dealing with completely different credit incomes and expenses. How do you decide how much a mission pays out when for one player that mission is giving him ten times what the ship he's flying is worth and for the other player it's not even paying a tenth of his rebuy? I know some people will say, well, that's up to players what ship they want to fly and how much they want to have at stake, but that's not the problem. The problem is that for one player the mission feels like it's paying off a shitton and for the other the player feels like it's barely paying anything, so now how do you decide if missions are paying too much or too little? Clearly you don't which is why Frontier keeps flip-flopping on mission rewards, because they have a lot of players insisting the missions pay out way too much and also a lot of players insisting the missions pay out way too little. That's not even getting into issues like balancing different career choices like trading vs bounty hunting because how the fuck do you determine how to balance them when the value and size and power of a particular ship doing the activity massively changes how much that activity pays out? There is no standard credits per hour for, say, trading, because it depends entirely on how much the vessel doing the trading can haul. Is it a cobra, or an icutter? Changes it completely.

I'm butthurt about this because they have such a gorgeous game with so much potential and it's being squandered because they don't know shit about game design and their designers clearly are out of the loop on MMOs, clearly don't play them, haven't learned any lessons from other developers, and it's hurting the game.

tl;dr having such massive differences in ship prices and earning capabilities makes it impossible to balance the game, impossible to sort out the economy, and reduces the game into a Drug Lord style progression where you just grind up to be able to grind faster so you can get the more expensive grinding upgrade that lets you grind even faster for the even more expensive grinding upgrade.

Elite Dangerous' interface makes me hard as diamonds

Then you go look at the interface for Star Citizen which has 1000 times the budget and it looks straight out of Wing Commander

They added ayys? Stopped paying attention around that one expansion, the one where ya can land on planets.
reading the posts here, I assume the game is tedious.

It's definitely a game that is built around making your own fun. In a world of theme park MMOs and "content rich" environments a game that's built on interpersonal interactions and role playing certain aspects of a space-faring community is going to make some people lose interest immediately.That's before you even address the mechanical problems under the hood related to progression and "muh aeroplane space combat".

If you're wanting to explore space and see what kind of interesting space anomalies the games system generator can make then you can get some pretty interesting screenshots. Especially if you have horizons and can land on planets.

As far as PVP goes, I wouldn't bother touching it until you get a halfway decent ship with all manner of engineered stuff on it because otherwise, you'll probably get curb stomped. If you want PVP without actually fighting other players what you can do is influence markets for space stations and crash their economy with no survivors and put someone who wants to work with your faction/corp in power. You do this by completing all manner of missions and turning in exploration data. This will probably turn into actual Player vs Player PVP after a while once you start encroaching on someone else's territory. Hopefully by the time that happens the aforementioned economic warfare you've been waging will have buffed up your wallet as well as your ship.

There are a lot of PvP groups that regularly host PvP battles with certain restrictions like unmodded ships, eagles/type 9's only and all other kinds of events like that. but yea like you said if you want to have some fun you will have to make it yourself, the ED community usually makes their own fun by making events and other shit if you can handle being social.

Did he die because of the Gforce or was it some sort of plot device that made his eyes explode?

G-force.

What? It didn't look like he was accelerating that fucking hard. And why didn't the other guy die then?

DCS is very nice for this, especially the CAS planes or helos.
You go in for a gunrun, but an enemy MANPAD hits your right engine, which explodes and takes off your right elevators, then some PIVADS takes off your nose with the SHKVAL sensor, and you lose hydraulic fluid and you try to get her home, but dropping your gear would empty your last remaining hydraulic fluid, so you keep your gear up and land her on her belly really carefully with only one engine and half of your plane gone.

I pray that Rouge System will be good.

Pretty sure that's the point.

I pretty much agree.
If a trader can make 20 million on a single 2-hour trade run, then combat pilots should be making 20 million for every 2 hours of ratting and explorers for every 2 hours of exploring.
The fact that I make peanuts just because I'm engaging with the activity I enjoy makes me feel punished for enjoying the less profitable thing, and thus I don't bother playing the game anymore. Haven't touched it in over a year.

Exactly, and that's why it pisses me off

This one time a guy playing the part of a pirate kept on harassing me along this trade route. Every time I'd try to skip out he'd blast me. His pirate spiel was "dump all your shit or I'll kill you".

having grown tired of charade I played the part of an absent-minded beaner

While he was trying to translate his pirate spiel into spanish I managed to combat log. I literally beanered my way out of losing a ship. My only regret was not saying "adios pendejo" before logging. Would have given away my ploy though.

If you're not going to fight to pirates, and you don't want to submit to pirates, then why not play in solo mode? I used go into online mode to harass people, but then go offline when I wanted to grind because I don't like catching, only pitching.

I thought there was a multiplier for playing in online vs offline?

that looks awesome but the game is currently 99% that cockpit. There's nothing else to do but press buttons, and I don't think it will ever support multiplayer unlike DCS, which is a good part of the fun.

Distance

The red Ghost X-9 is AI-piloted and its being hijacked by another rogue AI waifu (pic related). This incident caused production-models to be shackled to be little more than drones.
Don't have concrete figures for the YF-21 at hand, but the comparable YF-19 the other pilot was in, could go from runway to orbital altitude in 48 secs without even
pushing it to the limit. For comparison the NASA space shuttle takes 2 min 30 secs.
Also, I vaguely recall, in the OVA version, the YF-21 either got shot down or kamikazed into the Ghost instead.

>tfw my boss got me the theatrical version BluRay as souvenir while in Nipland rewatching it now

Did you suck his dick as a thank you?

this is cancer tbh. i suppose next your going to want every weapon in a game to be perfectly balanced, at that point there's no reason to choose one way or another it's just what you want the graphics to look like, the game becomes boring, and you quit.

Nah, I said thank you as a thank you. Sucking dick would be a tad difficult considering she's a fifty-year old lady

ps. If my id changed, it's cause my phone browser crashed

IIRC, Guld kamikaze charged the Ghost in the OVA as well; it's just that the movie went into more detail. I could probably check my R1 DVDs, but they're unfortunately buried under a mountain of other stuff.

I generally preferred the OVA's pacing over the theatrical version.

You're probably right, I only remembered that the scene was noticeably different between versions. I haven't seen my OVA bootleg copies in at least ten years, probably lost several house moves back.

Oh, I agree most definitely. But the movie does add my favourite Macross music (embed related). Speaking of:
>go to youtube to look for a certain ten twenty(!) year old AMV to post

Flightsims are best feel

Do you realize what you've become? You're the Fallout 3 fags bemoaning Age of Decadance.

If you want a more "modern" game, don't try to spoil the fun of other demographics, especially those that get practically none of the games they enjoy nowadays. Bankroll your own games, don't ruin old series.