A couple of days ago, Frontier Developments revealed that its space sim game, Elite Dangerous, would no longer be played via an offline mode. Naturally, this decision upset a lot of PC gamers and today, Frontier Developments founder David Braben claimed that this decision was made for the good of the game, whatever that means.
As PCGamer reported, right after releasing the game’s Alpha and Beta builds, Frontier came to the conclusion that the work needed ‘to deliver a rich online nature of the game diverged from the requirements of a fully offline game.’
“As features were implemented, for the best results we chose to prioritize delivery of the online single and multiplayer experiences, with a view to providing the offline version later in development” said Braben and continued:
“We had to make a decision for the good of the game, and that is what we did.”
It will be interesting to see whether the exclusion of an offline mode will have any impact on Elite Dangerous.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
More like Eve Online then, though Eve Online is ruthless.
yeah drm in disquise.
Dont you love where the industry is heading.
The sp and mp collide so at some point in the future you want to play that game….and you cant because it no longer has servers.
I knew David Base-Content-DLC Braben would do something like this, I’m glad I didn’t support this.
Not cool.
No need for a single player campaign to have to connect to a server , ever.
It will be funny to see those who demonized EA with Sim City’s lies defend this…
Sim City? Try Diablo 3.
I’ve seen a tech site where a forum moderator started a thread talking about how Diablo 3’s always online DRM is the worse thing ever. The thread garnered a lot of heated responses and the moderator did his finest to get his point to everyone.
A year later D3 was released and the same moderator was defending it fiercely, saying that the DRM didn’t bother him. He said he was to engrossed with the game to notice or care about the problems others encountered during launch.
It was ugly.
lost my interest, really disappointed
If I cant play it when I want, where I want then im not buying. There is no reason anyone cant download an update whenever they want, we have been doing it for decades now.
Once again paying customers are penalised in an attempt to stop piracy, and thats what this is. Convert paying customers into pirates is what DRM does, not the other way around.
This decision was a deal breaker for me . But I can see their point , playing this game online is the way to go . Still it could’ve been great for people to play it offline to test it before joining PU . Seems like Squadron 42 will be getting all the love from me .
If it weren’t DRM they could name the feature that actually requires a connection to their servers. Did they?
Well, screw that game for now.
Like I posted on the PCG site.
If you search for the word OFFLINE, you won’t find it anywhere on their KS page.
You will find a subsection where it is mentioned that they will try to do a single player without needing to connect to a server but it will greatly reduce the overall game experience, still isn’t OFFLINE.
And that still is not a promise. What they said after the KS or on their website doesn’t matter to me. I am only speaking about their original KS campaign.
I think the percentage of actual offline players is quite low, but as with all things internet, that number is suddenly the majority.