User blog:Univero/Elite Dangerous Depth Meme

Adaris187 explains the myth of a mile and wide inch deep stereotype: some people in the community endlessly perpetuate the idea that Elite Dangerous is a shallow experience that hasn't changed at all since its release. They lament Odyssey's coming with phrases like, "Why couldn't they make space gameplay deeper first before adding this FPS nobody wants?" Worse of all is that old horse, the phrase "a mile wide and an inch deep," that's mentioned in the space sim and open world game community. Some people accept the misconception that "Elite Dangerous is shallow" as a fundamental truth without ever questioning or looking at the current version.

Comparison

Elite Dangerous was shallow in December 2014. Let's review what the game was like in 2014 so we get some perspective of what an actually shallow game looks like (courtesy of Adaris187):

Mining

Shoot asteroids with a mining laser and manually scoop whatever comes out and sell it. No way of telling what will. No way of aiding collection (no limpets). No asteroid scanning, prospecting, core mining, deposit blasting, etc. Your only tools are the mining laser and cargo scoop. Oh yeah and the only material worth mining is Painite, ever, in a pristine metallic ring...not that you have any way of figuring out where to find it beyond that.

Combat

You had no engineers and no ship customization outside basic outfitting. No module brokers, powerplay, or other special modules to unlock. No ship launched fighters. No Thargoids and the utterly different tactics and weapons they require. Ships didn't drop materials that can be scooped and recycled into upgrades. You just got a bounty voucher.

Exploration

Fly to a system and honk. That's it. Congratulations, you've discovered the whole system! No scanning down anything or flying down to planets; they were all just big colored spheres with zero interactivity. No bio/geo heatmaps like are coming in the expansion. No anomalies like Lagrange clouds or alien ruins or whatever. Just fly and honk and move on. For the record, when when Horizons came out and some ground sites were added, you had no way of finding them aside from randomly flying around a planet and hoping you spot something.

Missions

Missions? They had zero complexity or potential for "wrinkles" as they do now. No multiple stages like "scan the thing to find your target". No passenger missions. No wing missions because no wings. Basically you had three formulae: you could deliver something, source and return something, or find a named NPC in Supercruise to kill and return. It was almost always one of three ships too; a Cobra, a Federal Dropship, or a Conda...because we didn't have very many ships. The payout for missions was so pathetic they were never worth it in the first place.

Other features

That's not to mention all the player-agency and multiplayer stuff that ED 2014 didn't have like wings, squadrons, multicrew, fleet carriers, player-created NPC factions, Powerplay, etc. Some of these could admittedly use a lot of attention like Powerplay, but there are still player groups that invest a ton of time in them.

This list above doesn't even mention stuff like the fact that signal sources used to no longer be deterministic and persistent/scannable and would just pop up out of nowhere. You could idle at zero throttle in Supercruise and the space immediately around you would just fill with them after a few minutes for some reason.

Objectives

A main appeal of the game for many people (myself included) is, in fact, the point A to point B traveling. The game is a space simulator, not an action adventure game. The main point of the game is to actually simulate what space travel would be in reality which, looking at the state of Earth right now, would most likely be boring and corporate run. But just like Earth, under all the corporations and hopeless work schedules, beauty can present itself even in the smallest things. It's a very calming experience to fly from A to B, watching the stars blow past you, hearing space-Siri announce "fuel scooping complete," counting down the jumps, days, weeks, and months until you can upgrade to a bigger ship, only to repeat it all over again. That's why I play ED. While I understand it's not for everyone, I think even comparing it (or any simulation game) to single player adventure experiences is unfair, because they're just so different.

There are also various player driven activities such as find Raxxla, map specific regions, influence politics, rescue stranded players, powerplay, Galnet mysteries etc.

ED is really a create your own adventure type of game. Your goals and whatever meaning they have are whatever you want them to be. The meaning and context are totally up to the player. Beauty is in the journey, not the destination.

There's never going to be a 'you win ED!' screen because it isn't a "game" to win. ED isn't some arcade shootemup, and people won't be disappointed that the space ship game has spreadsheets shipping manifests and timetables without taking away things like winning a duel against a ship that way outclasses yours with a broken canopy, or seeing a twin sunrise over a ringed planet with moons. Like life, you get out of ED what you put into it. That is the point.

In Elite: Dangerous, you're not some big hero changing the fate of the galaxy. You're literally just a guy/gal with a spaceship, out of billions (lore-wise) of other pilots. You can influence factions via powerplay, but your single actions don't have any drastic effects beyond some local, small-scale changes.

Conclusion

The game was a shallow, bare bones framework of a space game in 2015. Afterward, Elite leaned hard on random chance and luck to find the content you did wanna do. Yet even so, new players still got overwhelmed by the learning curve of simply piloting a spaceship and docking. And now we have seven years of stuff layered on top of that. The list above isn't even exhaustive. There's a lot more we could add to it.

Maybe Elite in 2021 feels "shallow" because these people have quite literally invested thousands of hours into the game, and have mastered every single one of the above mechanics and gameplay loops and are looking for more to do. But what game doesn't feel shallow with thousands of hours of mastery, really? Maybe Eve Online? But most of Eve's "depth" is entirely player driven. The mechanics themselves are even more rudimentary than what we have here; it's how they create tension with other players that adds depth and context to them.

Elite could do a better job of tying various mechanics together and giving players more agency in the galaxy to create dynamic content/context. The "Beyond" era was one of my favorite times of Elite because additions like the FSS and DSS finally unified a bunch of totally disparate gameplay loops and mechanics together in such a way that it felt holistic and deterministic rather than random. The game needs more of that. And that would add a great deal of this "depth" people constantly wax about.

Odyssey lets you personally shoot someone in first person, and then flee halfway across a 1:1 representation of galaxy to start a new life as an asteroid miner in a distant frontier cluster of settlements, if you so choose. No other game can offer this set of experiences all together, in one package. It's far from perfect, but maybe instead of moaning about how you're bored with this "shallow" game you've nevertheless invested hundreds or thousands of hours of your time into, we can take a moment and reflect at how far we really have come since 2014, and how far we will undoubtedly go in the years to come.

And maybe "a mile wide and an inch deep," can finally begin to die the death it has deserved for half a decade now.

Gallery

ED Career Chart v.1