Even though it's a tiny game with simpler mechanics to it, that's what makes Privateer work to this day. Clear progression route, plus a story campaign to follow if you feel like it, otherwise you can do all the things you'd want to in a game like this. Be a pirate, merc, smuggler, trader, (even explorer, to a tiny extent)... all working as intended, with fast paced gameplay, in a world that feels alive.
I did do smuggling in ED for a while, it was the only thing that wasnt absolutely boring and required a tiny bit of skill. Or so I thought...
For one, it's never worth it, you can gain the same in simple legal cargo runs. Secondly, while I thought that going fully dark and trying to hit the dock entrance and land before life support runs out or you overheat would be fun and meaningful, I later found out that none of that roleplay was actually necessary. None of it makes any difference, you can just slide past the scanners with a bit of boost for the same result... But, I gotta say it was a unique aspect to this game, and something I enjoyed for quiet a long time. SC should learn from this!
Combat? Nah, more like nope-bat. It's just bad on every single level ever. The manouvers, the weapons, shields, the nonexistent damage model that randomly messes up your ship... it's pathetic. You either have a ship that steamrolls everything or it's a long session of suffering for nothing. There is no in-between, there is no skill involved, there is nothing there. The most barebones combat system ever.
With Privateers progression, you don't need to hit up 7 guides and read 34 pages of forum posts and spend 3 days just travelling from A to B for that +0.00005% boost to your ships performance. ED has dropped the ball massively on the progression aspect, and they never even tried to fix it... Quite the opposite, with them adding in new things like the "engineering" and a more sensible reputation system with rewards, instead of making it part of progression they did it so you have to waste another 1000 hours AT LEAST before you can gain something that's a laughable small advantage over what you already have. Everything they added was for the 10 guys playing 16 hours every day since launch, they did nothing for those in the mid-game grind, which already felt pointless. They pushed out seemingly unreachable goals even farther, and even those goals were unclear and didn't seem worth it in the first place.
It's already a niche game that mostly older ppl play because it's slow and tedious. Ppl who don't have all day for this shit. Yet they did the worst thing possible, disrespected my time even more!
That's what made me quit for good really, the way they just seemingly don't give a flying fuck about anybody who isn't already a mindless zombie.
They act like this is a game with 2 million concurrent players in an MMO that needs a new raid tier, new crafting recipes and nodes and so on to keep em busy until the next big expansion come out, thus making everything a huge timesink. But it clearly never was that kind of game!
Privateer is of a manageable size. If you sit down to play for an hour you can actually accomplish not just something, but a ton. Once you know what your doing the grind pays off not in 2 years time, but in 22 minutes. You can learn it, memorize it, you can use your knowledge of trade routes and how to exploit multiple patrol missions and so on... The systems have different enemies and stations and commodities just like in ED, but as it's all in such a compacted space that it feels living and you can keep track of it. It's an important lesson for Star Citizen as well, and I think they are learning from it, looking at the way they keep populating the empty planets with points of interest, and trying to keep them all different. What I'm kinda afraid of is that they are going way overboard on this aspect. We don't need 2000 POIs on every moon, it will be the same as having none. They will all become the same meaningless dots on a map.
Privateer has exploration, you can learn of or find secret bases and jump points, and they are worth finding.
In ED there a million star systems based on irl data, with a billion planets and moons yet there is no point to any of them existing apart from like 30. The rest are just pointless, again just dots on a map. The game leaned very heavily on promoting exploration as an important part of gameplay.
There is nothing to discover.
I spent days flying around in "fresh" star systems, in case I'd find something special. But we know now that there really is nothing out there and never was. The devs never even thought of putting something out there, there are no secret routes or bases or artifacts or ancient alien sites or anything of the sort. Literally nothing.
Yeah I know the aliens came with some patch some years ago, I got back in to check it out, but that's such a bs "endgame" content type of thing where you need to have spent 4 years playing straight to be able to take part. Another huge miss on their part, as 99% of returning players were locked out of the sole reason to get back into the game, and ofc all new players were just completely locked out. It was already confusing trying to get going in that game, that just added another level of get fucked.
At least the space legs were accessible to everyone who bought into it, too bad the gameplay itself was like a demo version of an alpha version of a proof of concept levels of lame. They supposedly improved this somewhat over the year, but I feel like if they go as far as doing it, they should have done it right the first time, as in at least lemme walk around my ship and walk into the cockpit. X4 did that years before them (I think), and after the fidelity of SC it's just a bad joke.
Anyways, I ran out of power to continue ranting.
I still think ED is a good game, it's just too empty and barebones to hold me for longer than 5 minutes, and I wish it could cos I do like some aspects of it and want to go back to those simpler times when I could spend the 16 hours a day just playing a video game.
