Elite Dangerous - Yay or Nay?

[DraQ]

Fleet Carriers in ED can't even fight each other.

And that's why we mostly talk something else in the ED thread.

 

[Silly Germans]

How does flight and fighting feel in X4 ? Is combat enjoyable or rather dull ?
I have played X3 for a while but focused on trading and mining and barely
remember how combat felt.

 

[anvi]

I read combat is better than X3 and fun, nothing incredible but still good and an improvement. Large ship combat is even better. The highlight is the empire building, it is meant to be really good.

 

[thesheeep]

How does flight and fighting feel in X4 ? Is combat enjoyable or rather dull ?

I read combat is better than X3 and fun, nothing incredible but still good and an improvement. Large ship combat is even better. The highlight is the empire building, it is meant to be really good.

The economic simulation in X4 works pretty good in a "macro" sense.
That means, single traders are dumb af and incapable of finding good deals - but a whole universe full of them still manages to work quite well.
If you build a station that needs certain wares, then some trader somewhere will sooner or later see that your station needs those wares and sell them to you at a profit.
If you want to cripple an enemy, you can indeed go behind enemy lines, and sabotage their production and you will soon see the results.

It is indeed fun to watch your empire grow. I was so proud when my burger factory was finally online and raking in (fairly little, but I just wanted a meat factory lol ) profit.

Even if years after release it is still absolutely incredibly how dumb AI traders, miners, etc. are.
If you are bothered by people "working" for you being practically braindead, you'll have to micromanage every single ship - I'll leave it up to everyone to decide if that is fun for them


But whoever told you that combat in X4 is fun is just blatantly lying or talking only about small or medium vehicles.
Especially compared to the smoothness that is combat in ED.

What it does better than ED is scope:
Battles in ED are fairly small, X4 can get you much closer to that Starlancer/Freelancer feeling of being inside large battles with various sizes of ships at once (and dozens or hundreds of them at once, too, though that WILL lag a bit).
The feeling of being in a large space battle is fairly cool. For one time, until all the below stuff happens...
Space is also a lot "smaller" in X4 than in ED, which certainly helps with that.

But there are so many problems with combat in X4.
And the worst thing is that all of them are so... dumb, and would be so easy to fix. But they just won't fix their damn game.
Two years after release (and not early access release, FULL release) there are still so many things wrong that it becomes close to impossible to derive any enjoyment from the experience.
Just have this small list (which is not nearly everything I COULD list):

• All turrets except laser beams suck against small or medium craft. They just cannot hit anything, it's ridiculous. And yes, that includes turrets ON small or medium craft.
• Turrets set to "attack my target" will really only attack your target, they won't even fire at others if they cannot see your target - making the entire mode pretty useless.
• Pilot AI is braindead, let me give an example:
  Larger craft - besides obv. carrying bigger guns - also serve as carriers for small ships. "Cool!", you might think. Well - uhh... Every single pilot in X4 has a death wish. They will not attempt to escape if badly damaged. They will not attempt to return to your ship when damaged. They fight until the bitter end, because... ??????
  Oh, and even small ships outfitted with just medium quality equipment cost millions. Let's say you do a mission to destroy a station with your big ship and 40 small ships. The mission would rack in a lot, say 26 million. You do the mission, but due to the absolutely incapable AI, half of your ships got wrecked. That's a loss of at least 20 million and you earn just 6. You can earn more with a good trade run - and also won't have to wait for aeons until you have replaced your lost ships (ship production takes a looong time if you order many at once).
• Your small ships will not stay inside your big one to come out in case of danger and then dock again after combat. There are some super awkward workarounds for this involving lots of manual commands. Yay.
  Of course, defence drones (which basically do the exact same job as small ships, but are weaker) can do exactly that without any problem so why small ships with human pilots can not... ??????
• This is what broke the camel's back for me and caused me to uninstall the game and probably never look at it again:
  It is impossible to fight with allies.
  Let's say an allies trade station is attacked by a common enemy. You want to help them, both to maintain stability in a sector and to rake in some cash (you get some nice cash for helping others, especially with a mod).
  As soon as two attacks in "close" succession hit an allied vehicle or structure by accident (unavoidable as soon as projectiles start flying), all allies in the vicinity will turn hostile towards you. In theory, you could still leave and come back and they will relax, but...
  As soon as the ally turns hostile, your turrets and small wing ships will start targeting them on purpose (of course, because they are hostile now). Now you actually kill your allies ships and that leads to permanent reputation loss.
  Within minutes of trying to help an ally, you have accidentally declared war on them.
  For some godforsaken reason, the developers have failed to put a simple friendly fire check logic into the game.

Again, all of this happened in the game since it was released two years ago.
Stuff that every tester will notice by doing anything a single time.
Stuff that would take a few days to fix at max.
And yet, that's the state of the game. They know about all of it as many people are constantly reporting it, and they just won't fix it. There is no hope that it will ever not be a crappy bugfest.

Stay far away from X4 if you want to do anything except use it as a trading simulation game where you can fly around with a ship.
You can also decide to only ever fly around in S or M sized ships and do small missions - but why would you? That's something ED is just straight better at.

In theory, X4 should be better than ED. For sure.
In practice, that will never happen.

 

[Silly Germans]

How does flight and fighting feel in X4 ? Is combat enjoyable or rather dull ?

I read combat is better than X3 and fun, nothing incredible but still good and an improvement. Large ship combat is even better. The highlight is the empire building, it is meant to be really good.

The economic simulation in X4 works pretty good in a "macro" sense.
That means, single traders are dumb af and incapable of finding good deals - but a whole universe full of them still manages to work quite well.
If you build a station that needs certain wares, then some trader somewhere will sooner or later see that your station needs those wares and sell them to you at a profit.
If you want to cripple an enemy, you can indeed go behind enemy lines, and sabotage their production and you will soon see the results.

It is indeed fun to watch your empire grow. I was so proud when my burger factory was finally online and raking in (fairly little, but I just wanted a meat factory lol ) profit.

Even if years after release it is still absolutely incredibly how dumb AI traders, miners, etc. are.
If you are bothered by people "working" for you being practically braindead, you'll have to micromanage every single ship - I'll leave it up to everyone to decide if that is fun for them


But whoever told you that combat in X4 is fun is just blatantly lying or talking only about small or medium vehicles.
Especially compared to the smoothness that is combat in ED.

What it does better than ED is scope:
Battles in ED are fairly small, X4 can get you much closer to that Starlancer/Freelancer feeling of being inside large battles with various sizes of ships at once (and dozens or hundreds of them at once, too, though that WILL lag a bit).
The feeling of being in a large space battle is fairly cool. For one time, until all the below stuff happens...
Space is also a lot "smaller" in X4 than in ED, which certainly helps with that.

But there are so many problems with combat in X4.
And the worst thing is that all of them are so... dumb, and would be so easy to fix. But they just won't fix their damn game.
Two years after release (and not early access release, FULL release) there are still so many things wrong that it becomes close to impossible to derive any enjoyment from the experience.
Just have this small list (which is not nearly everything I COULD list):

• All turrets except laser beams suck against small or medium craft. They just cannot hit anything, it's ridiculous. And yes, that includes turrets ON small or medium craft.
• Turrets set to "attack my target" will really only attack your target, they won't even fire at others if they cannot see your target - making the entire mode pretty useless.
• Pilot AI is braindead, let me give an example:
  Larger craft - besides obv. carrying bigger guns - also serve as carriers for small ships. "Cool!", you might think. Well - uhh... Every single pilot in X4 has a death wish. They will not attempt to escape if badly damaged. They will not attempt to return to your ship when damaged. They fight until the bitter end, because... ??????
  Oh, and even small ships outfitted with just medium quality equipment cost millions. Let's say you do a mission to destroy a station with your big ship and 40 small ships. The mission would rack in a lot, say 26 million. You do the mission, but due to the absolutely incapable AI, half of your ships got wrecked. That's a loss of at least 20 million and you earn just 6. You can earn more with a good trade run - and also won't have to wait for aeons until you have replaced your lost ships (ship production takes a looong time if you order many at once).
• Your small ships will not stay inside your big one to come out in case of danger and then dock again after combat. There are some super awkward workarounds for this involving lots of manual commands. Yay.
  Of course, defence drones (which basically do the exact same job as small ships, but are weaker) can do exactly that without any problem so why small ships with human pilots can not... ??????
• This is what broke the camel's back for me and caused me to uninstall the game and probably never look at it again:
  It is impossible to fight with allies.
  Let's say an allies trade station is attacked by a common enemy. You want to help them, both to maintain stability in a sector and to rake in some cash (you get some nice cash for helping others, especially with a mod).
  As soon as two attacks in "close" succession hit an allied vehicle or structure by accident (unavoidable as soon as projectiles start flying), all allies in the vicinity will turn hostile towards you. In theory, you could still leave and come back and they will relax, but...
  As soon as the ally turns hostile, your turrets and small wing ships will start targeting them on purpose (of course, because they are hostile now). Now you actually kill your allies ships and that leads to permanent reputation loss.
  Within minutes of trying to help an ally, you have accidentally declared war on them.
  For some godforsaken reason, the developers have failed to put a simple friendly fire check logic into the game.

Again, all of this happened in the game since it was released two years ago.
Stuff that every tester will notice by doing anything a single time.
Stuff that would take a few days to fix at max.
And yet, that's the state of the game. They know about all of it as many people are constantly reporting it, and they just won't fix it. There is no hope that it will ever not be a crappy bugfest.

Stay far away from X4 if you want to do anything except use it as a trading simulation game where you can fly around with a ship.
You can also decide to only ever fly around in S or M sized ships and do small missions - but why would you? That's something ED is just straight better at.

In theory, X4 should be better than ED. For sure.
In practice, that will never happen.

Is there any reason, besides graphics, to play X4 instead of X3 ?

 

[thesheeep]

No idea, really, I haven't played X3.

From what I read, it is a lot more focused and mission-guided without a true economy simulation, while X4 is a pure sandbox with a true economy simulation.
So if you are in it for the empire building/economy simulation, X4 is probably better.

 

[Fedora Master]

Space Legs! Another step in an entirely wrong direction!

 

[Fishy]

Space Legs! Another step in an entirely wrong direction!

Dunno. My favourite thing in ED is wasting my time looking for pretty vistas. So walking around will add a sense of ship scale that is kinda missing (although SRVs were pretty much there already) and the trailer shows a planet with atmosphere, so a bit more variety in the skybox. Pretty much a slam dunk for my derping around. Planetary landings from Horizons are still the only game update that was game-changing for me, even though they never did anything with surfaces. I just love flying down there and taking in the massive scale.

That said, both trailer and description on the forums look meh otherwise. FPS gameplay and more engineering stuff are just a big yawn for me. All I want is to walk around my ship and in stations. Well, and inside the ship, but I'd be shocked if they also added ship interiors.

 

[Fedora Master]

Remember how tedious those realistic distances were in the SRV? Now imagine WALKING to a POI.

 

[Fishy]

Remember how tedious those realistic distances were in the SRV? Now imagine WALKING to a POI.

Agreed. As I said, I have zero expectations for gameplay which likely will be variations of shooting at stuff. I just like getting out of my ship in SRV and moving around to better appreciate the scale of the ship, the buildings/wrecks and landscape features. Being on foot is part of that, so I'm happy with it. And I hope that it means I can walk around the landing pad in stations as SRVs aren't allowed there.

I already paid for the expansion a long time ago (lifetime thingy), so as far as I'm concerned, it'll just be a patch that will add stuff I'll enjoy. Everything else might be shitty but as long as I get a bit more options for sightseeing, that's a net positive.

Also, I will enjoy reading about the exploits of the obligatory no-lifer that will make a point to be the first player to *walk* all around an entire planet. :D

 

[ADL]

I'm looking forward to my arguments for Star Citizen's 10+ year development versus the Elite Dangerous "just launch it and patch it in later" approach playing out.

 

[Fedora Master]

I'm looking forward to my arguments for Star Citizen's 10+ year development versus the Elite Dangerous "just launch it and patch it in later" approach playing out.

So far neither have achieved any sense of gameplay or player agency, soooo...

 

[anvi]

Star Citizen is already the better game by a mile.

 

[J_C]

Star Citizen is already the better game by a mile.

How is that exactly?

 

[DraQ]

Has decency to not have been released?

 

[Morkar Left]

Star Citizen is already the better game by a mile.

How is that exactly?

Star Citizen would be the better game if it would run almoste bugfree. Space combat would be lacking behind Elite and the universe is way smaller but everything else is better, more detailed and thought through. But yeah bugs make it unplayable.

 

[anvi]

Better to be a buggy unfinished game with decent features, than a slick boring and shallow let down.

 

[Fedora Master]

Better to be a buggy unfinished game with decent features, than a slick boring and shallow let down.

But both games are both.

 

[anvi]

I think Star Citizen has potential to be decent. Just taking ages.

 

[Metro]

Space Legs! Another step in an entirely wrong direction!

Explore endless sand dunes in glorious 4K HD!

 

[Fedora Master]

I actually don't mind the barren planets, because 99% of bodies in space are just that. Plus the simulation is decent enough in the way it forms geography. There IS something awesome about flying through rifts orders of magnitude bigger than the Grand Canyon. However, APART from that there is nothing to do on planets and they won't come up with mechanics that aren't tedious or boring because that's exactly what their core audience seems to want.

 

[Metro]

I don't question the realism. I question whether, given that realism, this was a useful expenditure of time/money to add to the game. But I guess if that's what people buying this game want then so be it.

 

[anvi]

They did it to pretend like the game isn't shallow and boring as fuck.

 

[Morkar Left]

I don't question the realism. I question whether, given that realism, this was a useful expenditure of time/money to add to the game. But I guess if that's what people buying this game want then so be it.

What else would there be left to do?

 

[Metro]

Flesh out the empty game that is already there?