Quick Look: Elite: Dangerous

Is this first person Freelancer?

... I'm pretty sure Freelancer had a first person cockpit mode too? Either way, Freelancer (and it's predecessors in the Wing Commander: Privateer series) were pretty heavily inspired by the Elite games, which were first released in 1984.

This looks and sounds amazing. I love the ambient sound and the music, and the visuals are beautiful. Not sure if it's something I will pick up though - I'd probably binge on it for a while but it doesn't look like it would be engaging in the long term.

Sadly, this Quick Look was too late for me.

Here is the thing - they promise you that you can be just about any thing you want in this world - bounty hunter, trader, smuggler, naval hotshot, etc. But then if you do anything besides hang out at nav points and fight wanted pilots, people tell you you're playing the game "wrong".

I don't mind the manual docking, that was cool. But the tedium of just flying from point to point was horrible, the controls aren't really interesting or fun, and after about 12 hours or so I couldn't upgrade my spaceship.

Not to mention (unless they have fixed it in the last couple weeks) that if you want to dock at any of the smaller stations, you have to wait for a landing pad to become available. The game doesn't tell you that, and the odds are about 5/6 that the pad is actually occupied by an AI pilot. That's right - on a time-sensitive cargo run you might get hosed because a freaking AI pilot can't/won't un-parallel park his spaceship and make some room.

No....thanks....There is erring on the side of simulation and then there is just flat out tedium. I know people enjoy it and that is really cool - I myself liked Destiny even though it was terrible in many ways. I just don't understand what there is to do in this game besides fly incredibly generic ships through endless swathes of empty space and then listen to a female robot tell me "DOCKING REQUEST DENIED" for up to (and I am not kidding) 10 minutes.

Glad I wasn't the only one that got the space taxi reference :D

Jeff: *yawns* "Couldn't we theoretically just go this speed and get there eventually?"

Drew: "I would get there in one year. That's what that means."

Jeff: "...of real life time?"

Drew: "Yes."

Jeff: "...Alright, well, I'll just take my shoes off here."

brb, reinstalling Freelancer...

You have to retract the landing gear in space in this game because they're weighing you down? Sounds a bit silly for a space flight game that elaborate that modelled the entire milky way....

I'm not sure why you worry about what other randomers think of how you're playing the game. Just because a certain group of people you were talking to hang around waiting for a bounty to fall into their laps, doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. Try out the other ways of making money and see what you think, and then make up your own mind. That's what they promised and delivered, regardless of what some kids say on a forum somewhere.

I don't mind the manual docking, that was cool. But the tedium of just flying from point to point was horrible, the controls aren't really interesting or fun, and after about 12 hours or so I couldn't upgrade my spaceship.

What do you mean, couldn't upgrade? Why not? Did you have the biggest ship you could get, with the top rated weapons and fittings? I find that pretty hard to believe after 12 hours of play. Did you travel to Imperial space to try and buy one of their ships? An Imperial Clipper or something perhaps? I can't see how you could have attained the required rank and finance to do that in 12 hours though...

Not to mention (unless they have fixed it in the last couple weeks) that if you want to dock at any of the smaller stations, you have to wait for a landing pad to become available. The game doesn't tell you that, and the odds are about 5/6 that the pad is actually occupied by an AI pilot. That's right - on a time-sensitive cargo run you might get hosed because a freaking AI pilot can't/won't un-parallel park his spaceship and make some room.

Sounds like it doesn't need to be fixed. If a space station only has 3 landing pads and it's in a busy system, there's a good chance it will be full. that's why there are traffic reports in the news bulletins. Check them out before taking on a mission that's so tight on time that you can't wait for a landing pad. If a system has dozens or hundreds of ships passing through it's going to be busy. But travel a bit further out from the starting systems and you'll never have to wait for a landing pad, even on the smallest outpost. Not all missions are viable and it's part of the game to judge whether the risk of non completion is worth it.

No....thanks....There is erring on the side of simulation and then there is just flat out tedium. I know people enjoy it and that is really cool - I myself liked Destiny even though it was terrible in many ways. I just don't understand what there is to do in this game besides fly incredibly generic ships through endless swathes of empty space and then listen to a female robot tell me "DOCKING REQUEST DENIED" for up to (and I am not kidding) 10 minutes.

I do think that a queue system would be a good idea for situations like this so you don't have to keep requesting until you happen to request before someone else does, but other than that, go find yourself a slightly quieter area. It's not that hard in such a huge galaxy...

@drewbert One reason to enter the hangar is when your canopy is compromised and you're running out of O2 supply, then you can go inside and not suffocate :) Useful when landing on the small stations!

Reaaaaally amazing sound and graphic design... goddamn I want this!!!!!!!

This makes me very excited for the future of VR

I really like the aesthetic, but gameplay wise I'm not seeing anything here that Evochron Mercenary hasn't done already.

@daedalus2097:

Here's the deal -

It's not that I care what people think about how I'm playing the game. It's that making money through trade is the absolute most boring thing I've done in a long time. I would love to be a space trader. But the amount of time required is immense. When you go onto various forums, 95% of the threads (I never posted one myself, I'm far from the only person who feels that Elite is a little...sparce) tell you that the way to make money is to go to nav points and skin bounties.

As far as not being able to upgrade, saying I couldn't get a new ship would be more accurate, and all the upgrades that I COULD get for the starter ship were pointless - every single one was geared towards combat. Better guns, heat sinks, counter-measures, etc. Even just a bigger cargo hold would be cool, but I couldn't find one. Not sure why you felt the need to be so sarcastic there.

The parking thing, though, is the worst. Would it have been that hard to record "All docking stations are full. Please wait"? As a new player I figured I just didn't have the right faction rep and so I abandoned a bunch of missions when I took a break, came back, and found that they had timed out.

The parking thing is especially bad because for all the spectacle of jumping from system to system and dodging sun after sun, you then have this long section of what feels like impossibly slow flight followed by a super frustrating parking problem. It's still a game, and if they wanted to they could make small concessions towards "fun" or at least "function". It's the equivalent of circling a parking lot, waiting for a spot. It's not fun in real life, so I don't understand why you would want that in a game.

I don't think Elite is the worst thing in the universe, but I do think that it would benefit from some clear direction and help - for example -

Give it a real tutorial (you would LEARN how to fly a ship before you bought one, right? Isn't this a "sim"?) I played their "tutorials" and they were completely inadequate.

Give it more content

Make the space travel equally awe-inducing but less prone to lengthy sections where I slowly, slowly, slowly creep through a system towards a planet.

Make content, including other players, easier to discover

Solve the parking issues, or at least have a warning system - for God's sake, when I use Google maps in 2015 it can warn me about heavy traffic, surely we could do this in the distant future?

Nearly fell asleep watching this quick look.

@inspectorfowler:

Okay, so you didn't upgrade your ship at all? I see... Well, the first thing I did was save up for a better engine. Nothing to do with combat, and suddenly it opened up dozens of systems I couldn't previously reach which meant more lucrative trade routes, new missions and the possibility of making a lot of money from exploration. I didn't enter any combat whatsoever in the starting ship, nor did I feel there was a need to. If you wanted to fit more cargo you could have sold your shields for example, if you weren't planning on entering combat, but it is a pretty small ship so you're quite restricted. After 2 or 3 sessions (~5 hours of play) I had enough to buy a new ship which totally transformed the game again, because now I could haul ~20 tonnes of cargo and make quite a lot of money doing some smuggling of stolen goods, and I was able to defend myself which meant travelling to dodgy areas to sell stolen goods wasn't as risky. It also opened up a lot more missions which wouldn't not have been possible in the small starter ship.

Yes, it is a bit sparse - as you said, it is a sim and space is pretty empty. They could probably add more content but I don't feel the game is lacking content-wise really.

Parking could do with a queue system, but again, why not go somewhere that has less traffic? When you go to any system and dock at a starport, big or small, you can get the traffic reports for that system and that should have given you some idea (like your Google Maps comment) that the system you're in is very busy and you might have problems. Again, go 2 or 3 jumps away and you find much quieter systems that always have landing pads available.

This is all true to the previous 3 Elite games, so perhaps you didn't play them either and didn't know what to expect, but for me it's pretty much inline with my expectations. The only things I could add would be a queue system for docking and planetary landings. One of them is in the works, perhaps the other will be in a future update too.

As for tutorials - you completed all the training missions, right? Because they do exactly what you're talking about - teaches you how to fly your new ship, teaches you basic combat, docking, undocking, using the maps...

This makes me want to immediately go out and buy a Oculus Rift. Must... resist....

this is definatly not a game for me, yet i really wanna play this but then i would have to buy a hotas, track IR and voiceAttack to get the experience i want. and thats a big investment for something that really is not my thing normally

Sad that you didn't do a little research into the product before buying.

This game is definitely Elite, which is primarily a space-trading game/sim and the devs have done a fantastic job so far. It's not a combat shooter mmo and if that's what you were after then I am not surprised you didn't like it.

Give it some time, the Frontier guys have tons of stuff they are working on adding to the game. Come back to it after a while and see how you get on with the Wings update and planetary landings etc. etc.

Kudos to Drew for taking out that Asp in his little default Sidewinder. A well-deserved bounty...

This is really interesting. I'd be more into it, though, if it were a combination of this and a game like Destiny. In other words, having planetary landing/take-off and the option to flip between essentially grinding in space or grinding on planets could potentially make both of those activities feel much less hollow, especially if there was a global economy where you can acquire loot, parts, cash, etc. either way to use in various ways like upgrading your ship or FPS weaponry. Perhaps this game will eventually be that, or maybe games like Star Citizen or No Man's Sky will be more in line with that vision, because a properly realized game featuring exploration/missions/combat in both space and on planets could be fucking incredible. Here's hoping someone pulls it off.

I think that might be Megameters instead of million meters, though funny enough, they would be the same.

People who know metric for computers seem to forget it very quickly for most other things.

This thing looks so fucking cool.

I'm using mouse+keyboard for now, and it is fine for getting around. The default keybindings are excellent. I did put in one or two clicks of mouse deadzone.

I'll HOTAS up if the game keeps holding my attention like it has been.

I upgraded to 16 ounces of RAM and a 4 quart CPU and never looked back. Makes it real easy to know how much cooling oil to pour inside the case.

"It would take me 1 year to get there"

"Of real life time?'

"yes"

"Well, i'll just take my shoes off here then"