Elite Dangerous - Yay or Nay?

[ADL]

Greetings Commanders,

Elite Dangerous is a game close to my heart.

It’s no secret that Odyssey’s launch was less than ideal, including the need to split the PC/console player base to focus on a PC-only launch. Since Odyssey’s release in May 2021, we have worked tirelessly to improve the Odyssey experience on PC, and whilst we have made great progress there is still more to be done. We have been supporting the pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey codebases since.

Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward, and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development. We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this we need to focus on a single codebase. Elite Dangerous will continue on console as it is now together with critical updates, but we will focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase.

We appreciate this news is not what our console community were hoping for. This was not an easy decision to make, but it was made with the long-term future of Elite Dangerous in mind.

With regards to what is coming next in Elite Dangerous, we look forward to sharing further news in due course.

David Braben
https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/odyssey-console-development-update

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Greetings Commanders,

Elite Dangerous is a game close to my heart.

It’s no secret that Odyssey’s launch was less than ideal, including the need to split the PC/console player base to focus on a PC-only launch. Since Odyssey’s release in May 2021, we have worked tirelessly to improve the Odyssey experience on PC, and whilst we have made great progress there is still more to be done. We have been supporting the pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey codebases since.

Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward, and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development. We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this we need to focus on a single codebase. Elite Dangerous will continue on console as it is now together with critical updates, but we will focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase.

We appreciate this news is not what our console community were hoping for. This was not an easy decision to make, but it was made with the long-term future of Elite Dangerous in mind.

With regards to what is coming next in Elite Dangerous, we look forward to sharing further news in due course.

David Braben
https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/odyssey-console-development-update

On the one hand, haha fuck you console babies.

On the other this is not a good sign. Anyone thinking this will lead to a greater focus on the PC version is delusional. This is Frontier testing the waters to see if they can get away with shutting down the game outright. Or at least stopping further development.

At least for once the ED dads are having none of it. Maybe they're realising blindly supporting a mediocre game with shit devs would only ever lead to the current situation.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

At least for once the ED dads are having none of it.

ED meant erectile dysfunction long before Elite Dangerous' release. This is one of the few places where both acronyms work.

 

[Fedora Master]

The community deserves to have their precious non-game taken away.

 

[potatojohn]

Can this even be played offline? If they shut down the MMO servers does this game exist at all?

 

[Fedora Master]

Can this even be played offline? If they shut down the MMO servers does this game exist at all?

It takes an entire server farm just to run the Excel Spreadsheets super-advanced world simulation.

 

[Lutte]

The only thing that could be more hilarious than this announcement is the day Star Citizen runs out of funding and development gets dropped. David Braben should get a gay marriage with Chris Robert, there is no better power faggot couple out there in the industry.

 

[Fedora Master]

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/fleet-carriers-are-a-mess.603931/

Lmao

 

[Curratum]

Anyone who put money and invested hopes in either SC or ED, both massive non-game pyramid scams, deserves everything that's going to happen to both "projects".

 

[Junmarko]

"The Fuel Rats" were the subject of a 15 minute mini-doc by PC Gamer recently.

 

[Fedora Master]

Telling that there's 50k people too stupid to manage their fuel reserves.

 

[Junmarko]

At first I thought this dude who set the record for being stuck was some kind of troll, then they say "It took 600 hours in supercruise to get there" - new record for biggest spastic.

 

[J_C]

Telling that there's 50k people too stupid to manage their fuel reserves.

People run out of gas in ther real world cars, why do you think the same wouldn't happen in a videogame?

 

[Fedora Master]

Telling that there's 50k people too stupid to manage their fuel reserves.

People run out of gas in ther real world cars, why do you think the same wouldn't happen in a videogame?

Because Ed let's you refuel for free nearly any time you jump anywhere.

 

[Perkel]

At first I thought this dude who set the record for being stuck was some kind of troll, then they say "It took 600 hours in supercruise to get there" - new record for biggest spastic.

pretty much standard ED experience. Staring at supercruise fake warps which is as fun as staring at wall. Main reason why i dropped game as most of gameplay was about that or cruise speed.

 

[Junmarko]

pretty much standard ED experience. Staring at supercruise fake warps which is as fun as staring at wall. Main reason why i dropped game as most of gameplay was about that or cruise speed.

There are positives. Like this:



Also, Guardian Ruins and Thargoid Crypts were pretty neat to explore. Shame there was never a Career Mode or something to incentivise seeing any of it for most people.

 

[Perkel]

I mean there is one amazing positive about it. VR mode is spectacular and imho the best out there.

 

[Junmarko]

...the absolute state of this game. So much potential, wasted.

FDEV are fucking clowns.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Junmarko the only real incentive is to get parts for building cool ship modules. The locations are so rare and so far away that the only way to get them is to look them up online, get yourself a purpose-built long-range ship, and fly way out there, get your stuff, and then fly back. Once you can build the modules you wanted, there's no real reason to go back out there. Except for the Guardian Frame Shift Drive Booster, everything else is crap. It's only useful for fighting Thargoids, which is fine if that's what you want to do. It's just too bad that an anti-xeno ship is so much harder to build, and it sucks at regular combat.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Okay so I'm really trying to like this (not very successfully so far) because just for flying around and doing mindless NPC quests is all I am looking for right now. ED is janky and doesn't always look that impressive, but at least I can figure out how to get around without having a PHD in rocket science.
I didn't play this before Odyssey so I'm kinda liking the space legs since I simply don't know better times before this patch apparently broke things.
Also, it's still a rock solid game by comparison to my Star Citizen experience.. Make of this what you will.

And finally, I'm not sure what's currently a better option? I didn't try a lot, yet. There's NMS that I got for a dolla some time, but I didn't like that one at all. It seems too casual, like babby spaec game, like the space exploration spinoff game of Spore, but more bland somehow.
So what'd be better just for "space trucking", this or SC? Or hidden third option?

 

[Junmarko]

Okay so I'm really trying to like this (not very successfully so far) because just for flying around and doing mindless NPC quests is all I am looking for right now. ED is janky and doesn't always look that impressive, but at least I can figure out how to get around without having a PHD in rocket science.
I didn't play this before Odyssey so I'm kinda liking the space legs since I simply don't know better times before this patch apparently broke things.
Also, it's still a rock solid game by comparison to my Star Citizen experience.. Make of this what you will.

And finally, I'm not sure what's currently a better option? I didn't try a lot, yet. There's NMS that I got for a dolla some time, but I didn't like that one at all. It seems too casual, like babby spaec game, like the space exploration spinoff game of Spore, but more bland somehow.
So what'd be better just for "space trucking", this or SC? Or hidden third option?

I bought Elite on a Steam sale for $20 two years ago, this included the Horizons expansion and the game was already 5 years old at the time. So, I went in with zero expectations and was pleasantly surprised. But, I always did enjoy space sims growing up (Frontier, Privateer, Escape Velocity etc). You'll prbably get 25-50 hours of enjoyment out of it, depends how much you love those sorts of games.

Elite Dangerous does everything your favourite space sim did back in the day, problem is, that's all it does. It's just a 90s space sim with physics and a new coat of paint. All the mechanics that look new on the surface, like factional warfare, planetary exploration etc - is cut and paste at best and at worst smoke and mirrors. It starts to feel like there are really solid placeholders everywhere, for an epic game that they just haven't got around to finishing. It's a shame, becuase at the moment it is second to none in the space sim genre. Everything else I've tried is complete kack in comparison. Star Citizen is a skeleton, Everspace 2 is like a mobile game you could play with one hand tied behind your back and No Man's Sky is just Minecraft in space, garbage.

What has killed it for me in the end is the Always Online bs. I put in about 60 hours and I must have been in Open Play for 90% of that. Think I ran into other people maybe twice, no joke. It was a complete mis-fire on their part to make it this way, there was no need and just puts an early expiry date on the game without a doubt. Noticed it a lot when I moved house recently, didn't get the internet up and running well for a few months, so you notice lag spikes in what is essentially a game you're playing by yourself 99.999% of the time.

Anyway, the simulation stuff in Elite Dangerous is awesome, and where it's at. Play with some good headphones and make sure you have "DTS:HEADPHONE X" Enabled in Audio settings. The audio in Elite Dangerous is incredible

So, set yourself some goals:

• Fly to I Sola Prospect, Brestla, bookmark it and use it as your home base for a while. Has every ship + module in one place, 20% mark up, however the time you will save makes up for this.
• Try out mining, get a cobra mkIII or python and kit it out with limpets and mining lasers.
• Do a ridiculously long cargo run where you'll encounter hostiles and earn a stupid amount of credits.
• Buy a decent fighter ship and try out some combat (or kit out your Sidewinder with the most expensive modules and use it - this is good fun!)
• Try and buy all the ships you want, see how they all fly.
• Visit some of the cool locations (asteroid bases, guardian ruins, thargoid barnicle hive, generation ships)
• Drew Wagar's Elite Tour videos on YouTube are a cool watch, he highlights some nice easter egg locations.
• Try and get the Permit into Sol, go fly passed earth, mars, voyager satellite etc.
• Try and get Elite rank in one area and get the Permit for Jameson Memorial
• Go hunt some Thargoids.

Don't pollute your brain with factions and sub-faction nonsense, it goes nowhere and is nothing more than flavour text. And fuck off Odyssey all together, just play using Horizons. The content in Odyssey isn't even worth a free download, it's sub-par trash that feels stapled on to the core game. They also altered the UI when you're docked in Odyssey, for no good reason and it is actually WORSE than it was before.

 

[spectre]

So what'd be better just for "space trucking", this or SC? Or hidden third option?

If I were to reduce the two games to a one-line zinger, it would be this:

Elite Dangulugu - all the flaws of a MMO, none of the advantages.

Star Citizen - no other game out there will PROMISE you more.

Elaboration: I never gotten Odyssey for ED, not sure if I'll ever will because I feel done with this game, and I've also been looking for that hidden, magical third option to no avail.
I got quite a few hours of solid space trucking out of it, but I would say that all the best parts were padded with loads and loads of bullshit. Yeah, there's quite a few nice mechanics,
but it's all buried under MMO bullshit grinding. I'm looking specifically at you, engineering. Junmarko gives you a bunch of great suggestions. Also watch some videos
to get some idea about what can be done in the game and how to optimize your path of getting there. There's no point in discovering shit on your own, you'll quickly burn out on the game
doing pointless shit, hopping around samey locations with very little things to do.

When it comes to Star Citizen, wait for a fly-for-free event and see for yourself. The game is a horrible mess, but some folks enjoy that messy state and are kept around by sunken costs
and that lingering promise that it's going to be good, any month now. In some ways it feels more fleshed out compared to ED (the planets and the ships),
in many other ways, its still struggling getting the basic functions implemented (elevators still sometimes glitch out and throw people into space, I think it's a meme at this point).
Yes. Even after all these years and despite all the money people keep throwing at it.
So, whatever you do, don't buy it on impulse, especially not based on the promo videos (especially those made by shills claiming it's finally passed some milestone and it's a good time to play it)
and if you do, don't throw more than absolutely necessary (still, forking out 45 dorra with tax is a bit much). If you do, keep your expectations low.
While the game does a decent first impression, you will quickly notice how much of this crap is for decoration.

All in all, calling this game unoptimized is an understatement, so you may also ponder the potential expenses on gear upgrades.
The worse your PC, the more glitches you'll get and not sure if I want to know what sort of a monster PC it needs to run it on max details
(whereas ED would run mostly flawlessly on a GTX970 and can also look pretty darned good at times).
It also loves having you waste your time doing "immersive" shit, like taking a train to the spaceport after you die, clicking each end every button along the way,
waiting for the next train to arrive if you happen to miss it this time...cool for the first few times, but not when you keep dying to glitches.
And you'll be dying quite a bit as you're figuring things out.

If there's one thing I can commend Star Citizen for is that it sorta forces other developers to keep up with its pipe dream.
Not sure if ED would ever get the whole space legs and fps gameplay business if it hadn't been for SC.

So yeah, as far as those hidden third options are concerned, I don't have an answer myself. Maybe you can get some mileage out of X4, Empyreon or No Man's Sky, or wait for that Starfield thing from Bethesda.
Personally, ED still does a decent impression of being a space sim, and you should be able to get a solid 100hrs out of it before you ultimately concede,
that you'd like something more fleshed out, something that respects your time more. Depends if you can get it on a discount.

 

[spectre]

A small update, because I was genuinely interested if the space trucking in Star Citizen is actually any good.
I saw some promos showing off a spiffy spaceport terminal with container handling and shit, made me wonder if any of it is in there.

So I asked around and here's some "war stories" I heard from a guy:

He picked up a contract to deploy a scanning drone for some institute or whatnot. Basically an entry-level fedex mission.
All started rather well, landed on a space station and picked the thing up. Had to carry it to the hangar by hand and drop it off at the ship's cargo bay.
Next was the trip to the deployment area, and here's where things got slightly fug'd, cause the drop off and drone activation was supposed to be in space,
but the game didn't let him leave the ship for a spacewalk. Not sure if it was a bug, or he was missing some equipment, or it's just a thing with his starter ship.

Next mission was supposed to be a cargo pickup from a downed craft. Nav marker has lead him to an ice-covered moon. Took a few minutes of flying
and the crash site was soon in sight. No hostiles around, time to go to work. After landing, the area turned out to be blasted by
a ball-freezing wind. Didn't have the gear rated for -100 degrees, so it was a race against time until hypothermia would incapacitate him.
The landing spot was some 100 m away and the wind made it rather challenging to approach the site, had to move slowly and wipe the ice and snow away from the visor to see anything.
He located the first crate of the cargo and went back to the craft, the return trip was much faster until he noticed his spacecraft... moving, blown away by the wind.
It whacked him on the head and hilariously cartwheeled towards the horizon.

I'm not making this shit up, you can google people reporting the same bugs for several months now.
Some argue if these are actually bugs, or features.
Others say, yeah, just don't do these missions. Go mining instead, it's more or less fleshed out.
But hey, I found a vid of a SC dev all proud of himself cause he's developed an algorithm that can realistically trace rivers along the planet's geography
and some yootube soy guy rubbing one off to the possibility of buying valuable real estate along such rivers.
Priorities, people.

So yeah, we are talking starter cargo missions being basically unplayable, but I guess that's not terribly surprising to everyone paying any sort of attention to the game's... uh... journey
(development seems to be too big a word to use). Also, this settles the case of SC as a space trucking game as far as I am concerned.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

If it's more tedious and frustrating than actual work, it more or less misses the mark, I'd say.
Hence why I can't understand why in SC they want the worst aspects of "life" so bad, like a boring train commute to the spaceport every day, or actually getting the character locked up in prison for extended amounts of time (but apparently you can smash rocks to get out quicker like an old timey chain gang, what is up with that?). I guess actually carrying the cargo crates to and from the ship counts too, let that be automated why dontyou, it's the future or whatever.
It's like I might be better off just playing EVE doing 217 jumps without autopilot or similar things.

 

[spectre]

Hence why I can't understand why in SC they want the worst aspects of "life" so bad, like a boring train commute to the spaceport every day, or actually getting the character locked up in prison for extended amounts of time (but apparently you can smash rocks to get out quicker like an old timey chain gang, what is up with that?). I guess actually carrying the cargo crates to and from the ship counts too, let that be automated why dontyou, it's the future or whatever.

Well, it sorta was SC's selling point since back when the whole scam began. It's also a super handy excuse to dismiss naysayers:
Perhaps residing in the stars is too much for you? Nudge, nudge. Seems like you don't have what it takes to be a Star Citizen(tm)

I imagine players are already developing a bunch of tricks over time to avoid the tedium. Setting your respawn point to literally anything else than that fucking train asap must be the number 1 beginner tip floating around.
The hilarious thing is after all these years, the train still goes tits up at least once or twice per session. Sometimes the stop doesn't spawn and you need to make another loop or risk getting sucked into space.
I once seen the door open on the wrong side, so noone could get out.

Anyways, there's a dedicated thread to give SC all the shit it deserves, I spammed enough about it here already.

Now, when it comes to carrying shit by hand, I could see it viable when handling sensitive cargo, smuggling shit, or when you're picking something off a wrecked ship.
That's when the personal touch feels justified. I'm sure there's a middle ground to be found here. Too much automation makes it uninvolved, which can also kill the experience.

Not sure how the space stations currently are in Erecto Dysfunctionalis, they promised to make them walkable and more interactive with Odyssey, but before it was mostly
clicking through the menus in an app-like interface. The fun was in plotting the journey, planning the buys so that the cargo bay doesn't fly empty and the most fun was in the docking procedure,
either leave it for the computer to kick back and listen to some Strauss, or do it on your own if you think you can save a few seconds without getting a fine for ramming into things.

They did try to spice it up a bit by making it seem like e.g. you're making some sort of a difference by delivering humanitarian aid,
or topple governments, one delivered explosive at a time. But that was larp, smoke and mirrors. In the end, that's still clicking arrows to load and unload.