Elite Dangerous - Yay or Nay?

[Jools]

Also a lot of us got the game during massive discounts. I only spent 15$ total on the entire game, which was a massive bargain considering the number of hours I could kill with it (300 or so). it's like buying a rubber ball that you keep throwing against the wall whenever you're bored. no point but rewarding all the same.

Same, I got it, and 2 or 3 useless DLCs, with a discount a few days ago (when I posted the OP), for about 15 buckzoids.

 

[Burning Bridges]

If you haven't, try mining bro. it is real fun.

Spoiler

The trick is to go to a very advanced planet and get allied with one or several factions that have constant demands in minerals and then to stack mining contracts. At least that was the way when I last played a year ago. I believe it has changed somewhat though and it is not the major money maker. I used to do ~20 million per mining trip but it required constant, grindy work. A bit like harvesting very expensive tomatoes, it does not seem lucrative at first but over time, money builds up to a nice profit. Especially if you find ways to find the biggest tomatoes quickly

 

[praetor]

Burning Bridges didn't mining change substantially with the last Beyond update, with which they increased the mechanical complexity (haven't tried it, though it looks like a massive improvement from videos and impressions by other folk) and a nice increase in profits with the new minerals/metals (i've seen some worth hundreds of thousands. void opals are 1.5mil/ton iirc)

 

[Burning Bridges]

I believe yes. haven't played in a long time tbh. mining was always fun to me. if they have improved it it might be better still.

 

[Jools]

I don't quite like mining, not in the other spess Sims, not in any game.

So far I've been exploring semi-randomly and chasing around the materials needed to unlock the first two engineers.

I went as far as 160 jumps from my original location, and when I sold the map data, it got me nearly 2mil. It's quite lucrative apparently.

I've bought a new ship (Viper MK4), and upgraded it's outfitting at every given chance. Still quite lacking in weaponry.

Btw the in-game database for materials, ships and outfitting, sucks. Because there's none, quite surprisingly. Or, I haven't found it...

As soon as I can upgrade my weapons, I wanna do some bounty hunting. Combat is ok but reasonably fun, from what I've seen.

 

[Fedora Master]

Burning Bridges didn't mining change substantially with the last Beyond update, with which they increased the mechanical complexity (haven't tried it, though it looks like a massive improvement from videos and impressions by other folk) and a nice increase in profits with the new minerals/metals (i've seen some worth hundreds of thousands. void opals are 1.5mil/ton iirc)

They upped the monetary rewards for Exploration and Mining in general, although both systems still come down to "Scan thing, press buttan, receive money"

 

[Horton]

nay.. this game is not optimized for virtual reality.

 

[J_C]

nay.. this game is not optimized for virtual reality.

Have you tried it?

 

[Burning Bridges]

I don't quite like mining, not in the other spess Sims, not in any game.

So far I've been exploring semi-randomly and chasing around the materials needed to unlock the first two engineers.

Ah ok, shows how different people can be. I personally did not touch the engineer crap in 300 hours, not even once. going 1000 lighyears to unlock 10% better transistors seems like Tetris in 11D to me.

When I went mining I saw myself like Sig Hansen on the helm of the Northwestern, prattling how to grind more millions
before limpet drones run out, and writing numbers on a notepad full of cigarette ash. which Í find very rewarding, as in Hah, last haul was 15 million this time I already have 22.5

 

[Jools]

I don't quite like mining, not in the other spess Sims, not in any game.

So far I've been exploring semi-randomly and chasing around the materials needed to unlock the first two engineers.

Ah ok, shows how different people can be. I personally did not touch the engineer crap in 300 hours, not even once. going 1000 lighyears to unlock 10% better transistors seems like Tetris in 11D to me.

When I went mining I saw myself like Sig Hansen on the helm of the Northwestern, prattling how to grind more millions
before limpet drones run out, and writing numbers on a notepad full of cigarette ash. which Í find very rewarding, as in Hah, last haul was 15 million this time I already have 22.5

Trying to get some combat done, but my ship setup sucks and I can't find an area with opponents crap enough for me to take on. Btw does every player start somewhere random?

And, I see some systems are marked as "beginner area" or something like that... Should I visit those?

 

[J_C]

And, I see some systems are marked as "beginner area" or something like that... Should I visit those?

I think those were introduced in the latest update. I guess they are some easy areas with some tutorial missions. It's up to you if you want to go there, but I think if you are a bit experienced, you don't need to waste time there.

 

[DDZ]

I am a sucker for SPACE and that's why I love Elite Dangerous.

Indeed people are luckily not in favour of most QoL ideas that people have, and dumb narative driven space doll shit they want. Fuck em, go play Mass Effect.

If you are looking for a story or some other faggy shit Burning Bridges looks for, suck some dicks instead.

 

[Burning Bridges]

DDZ write a let's play. I want to see how you embroider the database NPCs with life to justify the 1000s of hours you spent in EDs inhumane "universe". I'm sure there a great many wondrous tales to tell about your adventures.

 

[Jools]

Lol I'm actually loving it. Exploring is fun, I love being out there, thousands of LYs from civilization, scanning planets from my little ship. No humans, no enemies, just me and the black vastness of space. It's a great feeling and it reminds me a lot of the original Elite, and of parts of X2/3/3AP. Still feels a bit "too dead", sometimes, but I'm pretending it adds to the realism.

The always online thing is retarded especially since I play solo, but I guess they need it to keep track of discoveries and shit.

I'm literally wasting entire days hopping& scanning. It pays ok (not as good as hauling or fighting), I realize it'd be boring AF to most human beings, but I frikkin lurrrrv it.

It's a great game, although unpolished,f the discounted price.

 

[J_C]

Lol I'm actually loving it. Exploring is fun, I love being out there, thousands of LYs from civilization, scanning planets from my little ship. No humans, no enemies, just me and the black vastness of space. It's a great feeling and it reminds me a lot of the original Elite, and of parts of X2/3/3AP. Still feels a bit "too dead", sometimes, but I'm pretending it adds to the realism.

The always online thing is retarded especially since I play solo, but I guess they need it to keep track of discoveries and shit.

I'm literally wasting entire days hopping& scanning. It pays ok (not as good as hauling or fighting), I realize it'd be boring AF to most human beings, but I frikkin lurrrrv it.

It's a great game, although unpolished,f the discounted price.

Of course you are loving it, it's great. It's just some people want it to be something other than what it actually is. :D

 

[Fedora Master]

Lol I'm actually loving it. Exploring is fun, I love being out there, thousands of LYs from civilization, scanning planets from my little ship. No humans, no enemies, just me and the black vastness of space. It's a great feeling and it reminds me a lot of the original Elite, and of parts of X2/3/3AP. Still feels a bit "too dead", sometimes, but I'm pretending it adds to the realism.

The always online thing is retarded especially since I play solo, but I guess they need it to keep track of discoveries and shit.

I'm literally wasting entire days hopping& scanning. It pays ok (not as good as hauling or fighting), I realize it'd be boring AF to most human beings, but I frikkin lurrrrv it.

It's a great game, although unpolished,f the discounted price.

Of course you are loving it, it's great. It's just some people want it to be something other than what it actually is. :D

A game, for example.

 

[DDZ]

DDZ write a let's play. I want to see how you embroider the database NPCs with life to justify the 1000s of hours you spent in EDs inhumane "universe". I'm sure there a great many wondrous tales to tell about your adventures.

I don't write lezplays. And even if I did, I didn't embroider any database NPC's because this is where I have been in game recently;

Don't encounter much NPCs, did encounter lots of interesting stellar bodies and sights though.

 

[DDZ]

Lol I'm actually loving it. Exploring is fun, I love being out there, thousands of LYs from civilization, scanning planets from my little ship. No humans, no enemies, just me and the black vastness of space. It's a great feeling and it reminds me a lot of the original Elite, and of parts of X2/3/3AP. Still feels a bit "too dead", sometimes, but I'm pretending it adds to the realism.

The always online thing is retarded especially since I play solo, but I guess they need it to keep track of discoveries and shit.

I'm literally wasting entire days hopping& scanning. It pays ok (not as good as hauling or fighting), I realize it'd be boring AF to most human beings, but I frikkin lurrrrv it.

It's a great game, although unpolished,f the discounted price.

This is exactly how I feel.

Be sure to make an account on https://www.edsm.net and download EDDiscovery from https://github.com/EDDiscovery/EDDiscovery/wiki, because data is beautiful and it's nice to have it automatically keep track of what you've been doing in game.

 

[Morkar Left]

The base game was ok but everything they did afterwards was cringeworthy designwise. I'm speaking here of TES Oblivion levels of design school stupid.
9 out of 10 design decisions were just outright garbage aimed to please mmo players in a game barely designed for mmo gaming. Plus all design decisions are placed around restricting the player in what he can do in fear of messing up balance. Which is laughable since economies aren't really affected by players anyway and you barely will see other players online anyway (plus the option to choose if you want to meet them). Plus gamers exploited the shit out of the economy on day 1 already (as in every mmo game...). I hope the EVE retards are now happy with their new grippled mmo space game where they can finally sit in a cockpit and have direct combat control.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Go masturbate .

 

[what am i doing]

I hope the EVE retards are now happy with their new grippled mmo space game where they can finally sit in a cockpit and have direct combat control.

Unlikely since most of the game's retarded design decisions were made specifically to appease forumdads who insisted constantly that the game not be like EVE.

 

[Fishy]

Ah ED...

It's potentially the best game I won't ever recommend to anyone. I have a personal love and hate relationship with it. I've been into those open space trading games for a while now, starting with Frontier Elite 2, then Privateer, and both sequels (FFE, it's amazing new graphics and its even more amazing bugs, and Privateer 2, of which the least said, the better). ED, when announced, was half-way to the dream. I wanted a modern FE2/FFE. Something with realistic systems, distances, and newtonian flight. I wanted time compression too so that even though you compress the actual cruise, in-game time blazes through, reinforcing the message that it's a very very big place you're moving through. Of course, ED was only part of that, with the modern tech ticked, but not the rest, since it was seemingly all about multiplayer, and therefore a stupid constant deathmatch and ridiculous travel times due to the impossibility of time compression in a multiplayer setting. There was one bright hope though: Braben promised a full offline mode, with the caveat that people playing with it wouldn't get to "enjoy" the wonders of a dynamic galaxy shaped by gamers. If that was a downside, I'm the Pope. And offline mode meant mods, whether Frontier liked it or not. There was a chance there that anyone could actually turn ED into the game they wanted. Of course, the story was predictable enough, and a few weeks before release, the offline mode got canned. That pissed me off so much I didn't even bother creating a character at launch. Thikn it took me 3 to 6 months before finding the motivation to visit the game...

Anyhow, the game is very much more of an Elite 1 than anything. Flight, both in normal space and in 'hypercruise' obeys to gamey physics (speed limits in space, gimped yaw axis to make combats 'more interesting', magic throttle zone that makes you turn faster, etc), and the game loop is the same: trade/kill and make credits. Rinse and repeat. And you do that with an incredibly boring navigation system: there's pretty much nothing to do. 99.9999% of the mechanical 'challenge' if you can call it that is taking off and landing in stations. The rest is watching paint dry as timers count down to jump away, leave hypercruise or enter hypercruise.

In terms of environment, it does that stuff rather well though. The game is absolutely gorgeous, and with planet surfaces and a deployable buggy, it's very much a dream come true, as that sense of scale is on point. Game-wise, it's absolutely pointless apart from shooting random rocks for semi-random materials for semi-random upgrades. But honestly, I could have lived with absolutely useless surfaces, so their stupid gamification doesn't impact me much, apart from the fact that they felt they had to add a shitload of stupid random pointless small bases with hostile drones. Meh.

The soundscape is ok, although a bit awkward. Now that's not general opinion: the consensus seems to be that the soundscape is amazing. I'm just the weirdo here. First there shouldn't be any medium for sound to travel in space. So they came up with the idea that the computer simulates it for your own awareness. Cool, that makes complete sense, and I'd be delighted with that actually if it was well implemented. However this is only an excuse, as the game simply has sound in space. Take something you can't see on sensors, and their sound will still echo through your ship. Ooops. Then they made a point that when your canopy breaks (because of course, in an age of cameras and sensors, ships still fly with a giant glass window at the front), there is no more sound. Allegedly this is because there is no more air in your cabin to convey the sound. I guess there's no air anymore either in your flight suit then. And that headphone technology is a mysterious forgotten tech... It may not sound like much, but this is the template for the entire game design. Everything is ad hoc and gamey, with an afterthought excuse afterwards to explain in technobabble why it's totally realistic. And it never checks out. Thing is, FE2/FFE, with all their gamey aspects and limitations, have spoiled me with the Elite franchise, and I was expecting them to go more towards semi-realistic exploration of the space age, not to regress towards arcade with pretty excuses.

Still, it's enjoyable as a game. The arcade combat has a good variety of equipment, and the 6-DoF controls make for some interesting flight patterns. Of course, the point of combat, apart from making credits, is dubious. Like, every system has a 'Nav Beacon' around the surrounding star. Unless you're totally flying in the dark with no system map and no sensors, there are absolutely no reason to get out of hypercruise to normal space around that beacon. Yet, if you do so, you'll encounter lots of trading ships, police ships, and outlaws of different factions. All are there just so that you can find them and shoot them. They have no reason at all to be there apart from being shooting gallery targets. Same goes with mining rings, illegal stations, etc. There is almost no reason whatsoever for all those outlaws and traders to just normal cruise there, but then you wouldn't have anything to pew pew, so they're here, like idiots.

In fact, it's the entire universe that makes zero sense. Crime makes no sense, since people apparently respawn in this universe. Well, the official excuse is that you're in an escape capsule with a special hyperdrive engine. Cool. You're at the other end of the galaxy and that escape capsule gets you back to Earth in a half-second. Why don't they fit escape capsule engines to ships then? Piracy makes even less sense, as the effort, time and criminal bounty involved in doing it are absolutely ridiculous and insanely tiny compared to what you could make in 5 minutes of hauling a cargo of shit (literally) from an industrial station to an agricultural one. Also, the pirating ship is probably worth 27364 times the stuff it's trying to steal. So, well, there's meaningful trade at least. Or is there? Well no. With the stupid multiplayer focus, there's zero meaningful trade. Check your in-game clock and travel between planets. It takes like 5 minutes to go from planet A to planet B 100LY away. Yet, somehow, there are constant planetary-level crisis such as famine or iron shortages. It's like my neighbour dying from hunger and offerring me €50000 if I could just drive or cycle to the corner store 2 minutes away to get him a box of cereals. The economy makes absolutely no sense. It's just like NPCs, it's only there so that players can abuse it.

So, I'm ranting a lot because I had big hopes for that game and a lot of them have been crushed by the stupid multiplayer focus (well of course, if the game wasn't online-only, they couldn't make cash selling ship skins, so...). But what's left? I still have something like 600h on record, so the game does something right. Well, to me, it's the immersion. The game does look absolutely magnificent, and the inside of stations and planetary landscapes are gorgeous. It means that in my own Mind Theatre (tm), I can rp myself as someone pretending to do stuff, and enjoy the surroundings in the meantime. I've also travelled to the centre of the galaxy early one, just because I was sick of the stupid pew pew that was the inhabited bubble, and it was cool, although lonely, to just jump from system to system and take in the sights. 'Exploration' is a bad word and 'Sightseeing' would be more accurate to what you do then, but it was cool and I enjoyed it for a few months. After a while, you've seen most of it, but still. If they added an option to walk around my ship and on stations, even as a meaningless feature devoid of their stupid minigame approach to content, I'd be in heaven.

Right now, I've been on an extended break. Fired up the game again last week after over a year of not touching it, flew to my old favourite Prison System (which of course has been turned into a liberal democracy by players now), did a passenger transport mission, and well, it's still as pretty as ever, and it was great to feel aboard my slug of a Dropship again. I have to give a go at the revamped mining to see what it's like. Ice mining used to be a favourite of mine before: nothing exciting, and mechanically naive, but the loneliness and pretty sights made it a zen activity. Couldn't care less about the payoffs since I've got hundreds of millions of credits I'll probably never use already, but ah, the experience was neat.

So, in conclusion, I'd say that on sale it's probably a very safe game to pick if you're into space trading games in the first place. You're likely to spend a good 15-30h just discovering everything that's there. From there, you'll have seen it all and it's just about doing the same things over and over. So you might be bored to tears and leave, but that should have made the sale price ok. Or you might be a bit awkward and ask for more, in which case, well, there's no sub fee, so you can dive in and out whenever you feel like it with no remorse. I'd absolutely pick up the Horizons expansion though, as it gates planetary landings, and they're a massive part of the atmosphere imho. Also, it gates 'Engineers' aka RNG-rolls-to-make-your-stuff-better-and-ensure-PvP-requires-a-massive-grind-before-you-can-compete.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Still, it's enjoyable as a game. The arcade combat has a good variety of equipment, and the 6-DoF controls make for some interesting flight patterns. Of course, the point of combat, apart from making credits, is dubious. Like, every system has a 'Nav Beacon' around the surrounding star. Unless you're totally flying in the dark with no system map and no sensors, there are absolutely no reason to get out of hypercruise to normal space around that beacon. Yet, if you do so, you'll encounter lots of trading ships, police ships, and outlaws of different factions. All are there just so that you can find them and shoot them. They have no reason at all to be there apart from being shooting gallery targets. Same goes with mining rings, illegal stations, etc. There is almost no reason whatsoever for all those outlaws and traders to just normal cruise there, but then you wouldn't have anything to pew pew, so they're here, like idiots.

This is what broke the game for me more than anything else.

I had taken dips into uninhahited, unmpapped systems and discovered new planets and rings with pristine resources. Mining those deserted places promised to be great fun and profit until I return with a mining ship to harvest from "my planet". I went to the extraction site (which is already paradoxical) and was greeted by the usual riff raff of pirates, shittalking over the radio as usual.

I posit that those people have no fucking clue what people plan to do in their game, and what just pisses them off. If Frontier would make a game about Amundsen reaching the South Pole, he would immediately be greeted by hostile pirates and receive 20$ bounties for killing them that are immediately added to his account.

 

[Stokowski]

In fact, it's the entire universe that makes zero sense.

Jeez, have you looked out a window recently?

 

[anvi]

Elite Dangerous is so shit and shallow, biggest let down ever. X4 is too early to buy, all the X games are so bad but they are hugely modable so you have to wait 5 years after release for patches and some mods. So get X3 now with lots of mods, or get X4 in a few years once it is ok. Space games disappoint me so much. Except for Space Rangers.