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@mooseymcman: Great post! I went to PAX for the first time too, as a volunteer for Elite Dangerous. It was really gruelling but such an amazing atmosphere, so I would love to go again as an attendee! The only game I played other than Elite was Sentris, and unlike you I bought it when I got back... I think I even understand how it works :p! I chatted with Samantha and Dave Lang about Paxamania on Saturday night, which was really cool. Even though I'm 6'6" I STILL had to look up to Dave Lang... Hodor's about right ;).

We got into the Harmonix party on the Saturday night, which was a blast, but certainly didn't help for Sunday exhibiting

I'm just getting ready to head off to PAX now... Very exciting! I'm volunteering for Frontier Developments, so come and say hi :). I'm over the river from Boston, and we had even more snow last night (not a huge amount though). Expect trenches!

I backed the kickstarter on day 1, so you can tell I'm into the whole elite thing. Since I backed at the alpha level, I've been playing for over a year now, using a gamepad the whole time.

Major content expansions such as planetary landings are expected to be paid dlc, but there is a lot of free stuff in the works too. For example only 15 out of the promised 30 ships are in right now, so the remaining 15 will be free.

It's definitely not for everyone, by if it's your thing it will keep you hooked for a long time

@fisk0: yes I totally agree that they could have done with a few more months... I get the impression that the early release was strongly motivated by the investors. However they have chosen to do a subset of the planned features well, rather than cram as much stuff in as possible, broken as it is.

@Dave_Tacticus: I feel the type 6 pain, and I've only been at it a few hours. I was trying out high profit trading and got greedy, swapping my lovely jack of all trades cobra (combat, exploration, mining and 32 tons of cargo) for a cargo bus to make the most money. People who go for the most money tend to get burned out. As long as you remember to spend some time and credits just playing around without worrying about making profit (messing around can be expensive) then you should be fine.

I think the best chance of pvp is in those systems highlighted by GALNET as conflict zones.

@fisk0: They want to take the time to do planetary landing stuff properly, which is why it is coming later. The alternative was to do a rush job, and fix it later; FD thought that this was a bad approach.

The landings planets in Elite II were very bare-bones, and would not sit at all well with the rest of the Elite Dangerous experience

The emphasis in Elite games has always been in making your own story, and I don't play it unless I have a goal in mind... Right now I'm bumbling around the middle of nowhere trying our differen high supply/demand trade routes and nowhere near where the story stuff is happening.

There is plenty of more content to come... We have only 15 out of 30 promised ships so far, and the ability to form player wings is expected early this year. They also have planetary landings and movement around ships/stations planned in the longer term, and whole bunch of content that you can see in the design discussion archive of the official forum.

Having spent much of the last year testing elite through its alpha, beta and gamma stages, I'm trying out different games, but still am playing elite for a few hours per week

@mrcaptain: @pause422: while this game is officially released, it was always planned that the first release was going to be the core game with much more stuff to come. Most updates will be free (another 15 ships and the ability to group players properly should be coming early 2015 for example); however, major expansions such as walking around ships and stations, or planetary landings will cost extra.

This release is a good start, but I totally understand people wanting to wait a bit longer for it to be more fleshed out

@capum15: you don't NEED the fancier scanners if you are just buzzing unknown systems for a bit of extra pocket money... but if you want to go on a big expedition then they would be good to have.

Breaking it down, the basic / intermediate / advanced discovery scanners are active scanners that you assign to a fire group, to find all of the celestial bodies within a certain range (the advanced scanner gets everything in the system).

If you target each body in turn, you will automatically scan it so long as you are in range... It will go from unknown to the star's name and possibly composition. The detailed surface scanner gives you extra info at this stage, but is passive

I just bought an intermediate scanner and detailed surface scanner for ~750 k, and made about 50 k in one trip of ~150 ly just doing something I would have done anyway

Hi, solo mode takes very little data... Ctrl+b lets you monitor bandwidth, and it's usually 0 b/s, with up to 3 kb/s during transitions... I think npcs are spawned locally.

The total install is about 3.5 GB, and updates are incremental.

CEO David Braben has said that he is able to play on the train via his phone; someone else said that they used a total of about 300 k over 2 hours

I also heard someone say that they could only select solo mode rather than multiplayer because their connection wasn't fast enough, so that may be a restriction for you.

Hope that helps :)

Check out this video by Scott Manley, investigating the Slave rebellion mentioned on GalNet. The first bit is trady goodness, then a pretty impressive tour of the conflict area :)