7 ms·

Elite video game reboot hits funding target

65 points by SeanDav 14y ago

WhaleBiologist 14y ago
Geez, it's been almost a decade since the last good space sim, Freelancer. I wonder why no one has made a mainstream space sim game since (X3 is a notable exception, though the learning curve is quite steep). Between this and Star Citizen, there seems to be legions of space nerds like myself, ready to throw money at even the possibility of a good game.
- jheriko 14y ago
  How do we know they haven't already been trying to make this game for the last 10 years... ;)
- outworlder 14y ago
  There you go: 'legions of space nerds' is probably still a fraction of the total market - and the studios are not aiming for that. That should not prevent smaller operations from succeeding. The 'space' theme is still used (see SPAZ, FTL even if they are indies). I think that the 'simulation' genre is not as popular as before, flight simulators (combat or otherwise) have become rarer.
  - talmand 14y ago
    Actually this is a common problem caused by the large publishers. They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back. The other genres are essentially ignored until the selling genre is played out. Then we get the small projects again to repeat the process. It's an old argument: publishers say "we won't make that game because it won't sell" and the market says "we can't buy that game because you won't make it". But it's understandable, most of these companies have to show quarterly profits so they are adverse to risk. Creating a game that will cost millions of dollars and years to make for a genre that has stagnated, for whatever reason, is a huge risk. The small developers are the key to filling this niche. Things like the recent indie resurgence and Kickstarter have made this more evident. The problem is often the large publishers buy these small developers and then proceed to destroy what made them special. A few space sims, so to speak since SPAZ and FTL aren't quite the same, are out now and there are a few with big names attached in development by independents. If these have decent returns, on small developer terms at least, then I expect the large publishers to follow along spamming the genre. But only if they can figure out how to get them to be fun on consoles. Which is another side of the problem of stagnating genres but that's a different discussion.
    - teamonkey 14y ago
      > They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back. Actually they do a massive amount of market research. It's not that they're ignorant of what the market wants, it's that the type of game you want is unprofitably niche. By "unprofitable" I mean it's a matter of where to invest their money. It's not that niche titles would be unprofitable, it's that other options will always have a better risk-reward balance.
      - megrimlock 14y ago
        Right -- big publishers' size and distribution model requires them to focus on outsized wins. Their overhead is too high to take on the many smaller projects they would require to feed their cost structure. Smaller traditional publishers face similar problems, having to make few and careful bets and so often having to sell out to survive. Valve provides an interesting contrast here: with Steam/GreenLight they run a scaleable distribution channel for large numbers of small indies, taking a percentage without making particular and huge bets. It's like an index fund vs. managed fund, where the latter does intense research into specific options. Often that research in anchored in comparative analysis where someone has proven a juicy market exists (ex: Guitar Hero having a million clones in its wake).
        teamonkey 14y ago
        It's easier for publishers to produce multiple, smaller titles. Economies of scale apply to some extent. And they do! But mainly as part of a broad portfolio. Valve are not typical developer/publishers. They are the gatekeeper, like Apple, Microsoft or Sony. Everything they do is to bring customers in to their walled garden. Their games have effectively infinite budget and can be seen as loss leaders. Greenlight isn't amazingly helpful for small indies because it requires your game to hit a critical mass of popularity like kickstarter. Unlike kickstarter you need to have already developed the game and have it float about on greenlight for 6mnths+ before you see any return (after Valve's XX% cut of sales).
      - 14y ago
- randallsquared 14y ago
  Aren't they all playing MMOs like Eve or Vendetta? Maybe that soaked up the demand.
  - SeanDav 14y ago
    Eve is a great game but you cannot play effectively solo - you have to join Mega Corp X to be effective and really who needs a boss telling them what to do while playing a game...
    - mfringel 14y ago
      Indeed. I stopped playing EVE when the web of obligation felt too much like an uncompensated and slightly boring job.
    - outworlder 14y ago
      Depends on what you mean by 'effective'. If you have no greater ambitions than the average MMO gamer, you can do well solo. And if you are smart about it, you can amass quite a lot of wealth. If you want to own territory or have fleets, then you do have to join a big corp.
- DanBC 14y ago
  What about Kerbal Space Program? (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD603D8234AE51EF0 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD603D8234AE51EF0)
- ucee054 14y ago
  Have you tried Parkan 2 or The Precursors ? Have you tried Vendetta Online ?
macavity23 14y ago
The sound effects in the video clip attached to that article make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up! The level of coding chops in the original game is hard to comprehend by modern standards. It had a (wireframe) 3d engine, eight galaxies each with hundreds of worlds, a dozen or so ship types and lots of different equipment and engines - and an awesome surprise endgame where after scores of hours trading and battling pirates, suddenly out of nowhere (with no warning in the early game or manual) the galactic navy appeared and sent you on a series of missions. The RAM footprint of this game? 22KB. KILOBYTES. All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler! Something to think about next time you're tempted to brag about your coding l33tness :-) I'm enormously glad that this game has hit its target, and very, very excited that David B will have the opportunity to make the game he wants without a publisher exerting pressure on him (which was what ruined Elite II). This game and Obsidian's Project Eternity (also on KS) are being eagerly watched by many people. If they succeed, this will be a massive turning point in the games industry, just as the original Elite was.
- Direct 14y ago
  > All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler! Can you clarify? I don't know much about the history of this game or the BBC Micro. But do you mean to say this was written byte by byte by hand? I'm imagining someone typing each individual byte of an opcode here. If so, that's pretty amazing.
  - amalcon 14y ago
    That was normally done with a hex editor, but yes, that's pretty much how it worked if you didn't have an assembler.
    - dasmoth 14y ago
      The BBC BASIC interpreter (present in ROM on all these machines) included a pretty good assembler. There may have been issues putting together a 22kb program with it -- probably had to be assembled in several chunks -- but no need to use a hex editor.
Yuioup 14y ago
Here's David Braben talking about the Raspberry Pi at the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13292450 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13292450
moneypenny 14y ago
stunned may have to eat socks (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748382)
- dexter313 14y ago
  I was always wondering how do you do that in real life?
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog_Eats_His_Shoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog_Eats_His_Shoe
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    We had a dog that would do this with some regularity. ER trips for dogs add up.
zandor 14y ago
Make sure to check out this great post mortem of Elite from GDC 2011: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem
guard-of-terra 14y ago
That's interesting, but what about a nice turn-based (or otherwise think-bound) strategy or at least an RPG? It seems to me that all the modern gaming is about running around with guns. Boring and no food for thoughts. I've switched to Roguelikes, but still mourn for a good strategy.
- qznc 14y ago
  What do you consider a good (old) strategy game? Imho single-player strategy is usually just a puzzle game.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    Master of Magic. Alpha Centauri. Civilization & Colonization. Master of Orion. In that order. What makes MoM special? It's PvE. It's so much more replayable than anything else. What makes Alpha Centauri special? There are no things about Alpha Centauri that aren't special. Also, to the lesser extent, Heroes of Might and Magic series. Hex grid wargames (Battle Isle, Fantasy General, Battle for Wesnoth) are nice too but, having no economy, aren't so interesting. I don't know what do you mean by puzzle games and why is that a bad thing.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
I really hope they succeed, but sadly, I'm seeing all the typical signals of games that fail to launch, due to gigantic scope and feature creep. When you focus so much on technology and your answers about the game are all "we plan to support that", that's a bad signal. You start a game with rock solid game design - throwing procedural generation, multiplayer code, and other cool features together gives you a tech demo, not a game. The smallest changes in game mechanics deeply affect things like networking code. Mix this with a crowdfunded project (where everyone who pledged is a stakeholder and wants a different thing) that's a recipe for disaster.
- outworlder 14y ago
  Yes, but only if they want to do everything on launch day. The part about the galaxy changes reminds me a lot of the 'real ecology' from Ultima Online, which had to be scrapped since there's no way ecology can work with players as predators.
- chris_j 14y ago
  I think it's been quite encouraging that, while they are talking about a whole load of features that they'd like to include in the future, they're being pretty clear about the things that they won't support in the first release (landing on planets and so on) and that the pledgers will only influence the game, rather than dictate that any feature must be done a particular way. The things that I worry about are things that were not a part of previous Elite games like networking, the multiplayer element and, above all else, making the economics and politics work. If other massively multiplayer games are anything to go by, a few large alliances will figure out how to game the rules so as to be able to dominate the game and I bet that the developers will always be playing catch up to that.

65 points by SeanDav 14y ago

Geez, it's been almost a decade since the last good space sim, Freelancer. I wonder why no one has made a mainstream space sim game since (X3 is a notable exception, though the learning curve is quite steep). Between this and Star Citizen, there seems to be legions of space nerds like myself, ready to throw money at even the possibility of a good game.

jheriko 14y ago
How do we know they haven't already been trying to make this game for the last 10 years... ;)
outworlder 14y ago
There you go: 'legions of space nerds' is probably still a fraction of the total market - and the studios are not aiming for that. That should not prevent smaller operations from succeeding. The 'space' theme is still used (see SPAZ, FTL even if they are indies). I think that the 'simulation' genre is not as popular as before, flight simulators (combat or otherwise) have become rarer.
- talmand 14y ago
  Actually this is a common problem caused by the large publishers. They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back. The other genres are essentially ignored until the selling genre is played out. Then we get the small projects again to repeat the process. It's an old argument: publishers say "we won't make that game because it won't sell" and the market says "we can't buy that game because you won't make it". But it's understandable, most of these companies have to show quarterly profits so they are adverse to risk. Creating a game that will cost millions of dollars and years to make for a genre that has stagnated, for whatever reason, is a huge risk. The small developers are the key to filling this niche. Things like the recent indie resurgence and Kickstarter have made this more evident. The problem is often the large publishers buy these small developers and then proceed to destroy what made them special. A few space sims, so to speak since SPAZ and FTL aren't quite the same, are out now and there are a few with big names attached in development by independents. If these have decent returns, on small developer terms at least, then I expect the large publishers to follow along spamming the genre. But only if they can figure out how to get them to be fun on consoles. Which is another side of the problem of stagnating genres but that's a different discussion.
  - teamonkey 14y ago
    > They don't seem to do much market research other than every once in a while they throw a bunch of small budget stuff out there and whatever genre sells decently gets spammed to hell and back. Actually they do a massive amount of market research. It's not that they're ignorant of what the market wants, it's that the type of game you want is unprofitably niche. By "unprofitable" I mean it's a matter of where to invest their money. It's not that niche titles would be unprofitable, it's that other options will always have a better risk-reward balance.
    - megrimlock 14y ago
      Right -- big publishers' size and distribution model requires them to focus on outsized wins. Their overhead is too high to take on the many smaller projects they would require to feed their cost structure. Smaller traditional publishers face similar problems, having to make few and careful bets and so often having to sell out to survive. Valve provides an interesting contrast here: with Steam/GreenLight they run a scaleable distribution channel for large numbers of small indies, taking a percentage without making particular and huge bets. It's like an index fund vs. managed fund, where the latter does intense research into specific options. Often that research in anchored in comparative analysis where someone has proven a juicy market exists (ex: Guitar Hero having a million clones in its wake).
      - teamonkey 14y ago
        It's easier for publishers to produce multiple, smaller titles. Economies of scale apply to some extent. And they do! But mainly as part of a broad portfolio. Valve are not typical developer/publishers. They are the gatekeeper, like Apple, Microsoft or Sony. Everything they do is to bring customers in to their walled garden. Their games have effectively infinite budget and can be seen as loss leaders. Greenlight isn't amazingly helpful for small indies because it requires your game to hit a critical mass of popularity like kickstarter. Unlike kickstarter you need to have already developed the game and have it float about on greenlight for 6mnths+ before you see any return (after Valve's XX% cut of sales).
    - 14y ago
randallsquared 14y ago
Aren't they all playing MMOs like Eve or Vendetta? Maybe that soaked up the demand.
- SeanDav 14y ago
  Eve is a great game but you cannot play effectively solo - you have to join Mega Corp X to be effective and really who needs a boss telling them what to do while playing a game...
  - mfringel 14y ago
    Indeed. I stopped playing EVE when the web of obligation felt too much like an uncompensated and slightly boring job.
  - outworlder 14y ago
    Depends on what you mean by 'effective'. If you have no greater ambitions than the average MMO gamer, you can do well solo. And if you are smart about it, you can amass quite a lot of wealth. If you want to own territory or have fleets, then you do have to join a big corp.
DanBC 14y ago
What about Kerbal Space Program? (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD603D8234AE51EF0 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD603D8234AE51EF0)
ucee054 14y ago
Have you tried Parkan 2 or The Precursors ? Have you tried Vendetta Online ?

macavity23 14y ago

The sound effects in the video clip attached to that article make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up! The level of coding chops in the original game is hard to comprehend by modern standards. It had a (wireframe) 3d engine, eight galaxies each with hundreds of worlds, a dozen or so ship types and lots of different equipment and engines - and an awesome surprise endgame where after scores of hours trading and battling pirates, suddenly out of nowhere (with no warning in the early game or manual) the galactic navy appeared and sent you on a series of missions. The RAM footprint of this game? 22KB. KILOBYTES. All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler! Something to think about next time you're tempted to brag about your coding l33tness :-) I'm enormously glad that this game has hit its target, and very, very excited that David B will have the opportunity to make the game he wants without a publisher exerting pressure on him (which was what ruined Elite II). This game and Obsidian's Project Eternity (also on KS) are being eagerly watched by many people. If they succeed, this will be a massive turning point in the games industry, just as the original Elite was.

Direct 14y ago
> All written in machine code: that's even lower-level than assembler! Can you clarify? I don't know much about the history of this game or the BBC Micro. But do you mean to say this was written byte by byte by hand? I'm imagining someone typing each individual byte of an opcode here. If so, that's pretty amazing.
- amalcon 14y ago
  That was normally done with a hex editor, but yes, that's pretty much how it worked if you didn't have an assembler.
  - dasmoth 14y ago
    The BBC BASIC interpreter (present in ROM on all these machines) included a pretty good assembler. There may have been issues putting together a 22kb program with it -- probably had to be assembled in several chunks -- but no need to use a hex editor.

Yuioup 14y ago

Here's David Braben talking about the Raspberry Pi at the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13292450 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13292450

moneypenny 14y ago

stunned may have to eat socks (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748382)

dexter313 14y ago
I was always wondering how do you do that in real life?
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog_Eats_His_Shoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog_Eats_His_Shoe
- jacquesm 14y ago
  We had a dog that would do this with some regularity. ER trips for dogs add up.

zandor 14y ago

Make sure to check out this great post mortem of Elite from GDC 2011: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014628/Classic-Game-Postmortem

guard-of-terra 14y ago

That's interesting, but what about a nice turn-based (or otherwise think-bound) strategy or at least an RPG? It seems to me that all the modern gaming is about running around with guns. Boring and no food for thoughts. I've switched to Roguelikes, but still mourn for a good strategy.

qznc 14y ago
What do you consider a good (old) strategy game? Imho single-player strategy is usually just a puzzle game.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Master of Magic. Alpha Centauri. Civilization & Colonization. Master of Orion. In that order. What makes MoM special? It's PvE. It's so much more replayable than anything else. What makes Alpha Centauri special? There are no things about Alpha Centauri that aren't special. Also, to the lesser extent, Heroes of Might and Magic series. Hex grid wargames (Battle Isle, Fantasy General, Battle for Wesnoth) are nice too but, having no economy, aren't so interesting. I don't know what do you mean by puzzle games and why is that a bad thing.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

I really hope they succeed, but sadly, I'm seeing all the typical signals of games that fail to launch, due to gigantic scope and feature creep. When you focus so much on technology and your answers about the game are all "we plan to support that", that's a bad signal. You start a game with rock solid game design - throwing procedural generation, multiplayer code, and other cool features together gives you a tech demo, not a game. The smallest changes in game mechanics deeply affect things like networking code. Mix this with a crowdfunded project (where everyone who pledged is a stakeholder and wants a different thing) that's a recipe for disaster.

outworlder 14y ago
Yes, but only if they want to do everything on launch day. The part about the galaxy changes reminds me a lot of the 'real ecology' from Ultima Online, which had to be scrapped since there's no way ecology can work with players as predators.
chris_j 14y ago
I think it's been quite encouraging that, while they are talking about a whole load of features that they'd like to include in the future, they're being pretty clear about the things that they won't support in the first release (landing on planets and so on) and that the pledgers will only influence the game, rather than dictate that any feature must be done a particular way. The things that I worry about are things that were not a part of previous Elite games like networking, the multiplayer element and, above all else, making the economics and politics work. If other massively multiplayer games are anything to go by, a few large alliances will figure out how to game the rules so as to be able to dominate the game and I bet that the developers will always be playing catch up to that.