4Game

Elite Dangerous: Horizons looks like it could be pretty cool. The expansion is adding multiple great features, such as landing on planets, loot, multi-crew, and more missions. However, despite this new content I'm still not feeling hyped for one simple reason: it doesn't look like it will be fixing many of the core issues of the game that have been present since the game was released, on which there has been seemingly little progress. These issues are many, and include (but are not limited to):

• Combat being a game of whoever has the most shield cells
• Essentially zero meaningful ways of progressing besides investing in ships
• Grinding only way to effectively progress
• Lack of depth
• Player interactions on the universe being invisible outside of stats
• Instancing allowing for easy hacking (also making it virtually impossible to have a reliable way to proactively ban cheaters) and preventing groups of players larger than around eight from directly interacting without massive framerate drops
• Missions (which I will talk about more later)

Those are also just the most obvious problems with the game – it also has many more subtle flaws that work against having fun.

• Little effective difference between different governments in systems
• Instancing preventing players from effectively blockading systems and making fighting community goal progress again a pure game of stats
• Everything about conflict zones
• Clearly "correct" powers for certain playstyles
• Federation and Alliance backers missing out on many perks present for Empire backers
• Everything about ranking up in the Federation and Empire and perk progression (I realize this is going to changed in Horizons, but seeing the results of the missions "overhaul" I don't have much confidence in this being much better)
• Little importance of smaller ships after getting larger ships
• Ship tier progression
• Players able to retreat from battles when things seem to be going in the opponent's favor

Now, no small amount of the points above are at least partially caused by the ridiculously boring missions system currently in place. Even after the missions update introduced in powerplay, the system feels empty and hollow and like virtually everything else in the game lacks depth. The player has the option to do the same ten or so things for various different groups, giving players perhaps a few credits and meagerly bumping a few stats (oh boy!) up and down a fraction of a percent, doing little else. It also feels annoyingly half-baked for a system that FDev seems to want to be critical to the game's play – the only other options to gain credits are to bounty hunt, trade, mine, explore, or pirate, all of which are frustratingly similar to mission gameplay anyway. There is very little to do outside of these systems, and any emergent gameplay opportunities are made exceedingly rare because a few assholes decide to murder anyone who comes into their instance and force anyone who doesn't want to fight to make credits into solo mode. Now, you might say that missions are going to be expanded in horizons with chained missions. While these could be cool, gameplay extensions larger than chained missions have come along and have done little but add a few more things for players to repeat endlessly. With everything that's happened, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see that chained missions are little more than existing gameplay elements with added flavor text that you just have to do in a specific order.

Planets are also being added in Horizons, to which I say what's the point? What will we get from them? Perhaps a landscape with gravity that we can use to deplete other player's supply of shield cell banks, but what else? I know, more unidentified signal sources! On planets! Cool. Perhaps we'll get a few weapons to sell while we continue to use the one loadout that works well for every situation thrown at it. Maybe we'll even get a few copy-pasted strongholds where we can battle mildly different groups of enemies that have slightly different stats. We'll also be able to raid these bases with a friend in the cockpit, to which I say "so what?" It's going to be perfectly balanced to add features that don't alienate lone wolves, making it effectively pointless to anyone who can open the menus to their left and right. The planets also seem like they will be relatively indistinguishable lumps of rock, and no amount of scientific accuracy is going to change that.

There's plenty more that I could delve into, but I think I've said enough. Now, I would love for what I've said above to be shown to be completely wrong when Horizons comes out. I would also love to see some rebuttal to what I've said – the above rant is my opinion, but limiting myself to just that would be counterproductive for everyone involved. If Horizons comes out and fixes even three of the things on the first list I'll be a happy camper and may purchase the expansion. However, with what's come out of the updates that have been released I've become tired of being burned to the point of barely caring. Flashy videos of planetary landings look and sound really damn good due to the astoundingly amazing work of FDev's art and sound team. However, the highest quality sound isn't going to be worth anything if it's just playing against mediocre, repetitive gameplay.

TL;DR: Horizons looks cool, but it doesn't look like FDev is going to fixing any of the issues that have been widely complained about ever since the game was released.