As an Xbox One Owner/bad PC owner, have owners of this game been using this to fulfill a similar promise to No Man's Sky? I know the accessibility to NMS has a significantly lower bar to ED's flying mechanics, but I'm just curious to get someone's impressions who maybe played the latter and has anticipated/played the former.

As someone who has played 5min of Elite and probably won't buy NMS unless it's on like a 75% sale on steam, I think they seem different enough. Elite is much more invested in spending time in the vacuum of space or space stations, mostly trading. While NMS wants to emulate a universe where you explore planets on the surface and scavenge for stuff. I also think the art and music in both games give off entirely different vibes.

For me nms scratches the itch ed failed to.

I didn't play much of elite and havent touched NMS but they seem pretty different. Elite is more a typical space sim, you do jobs like mining, bounty hunting, piracy etc. NMS is more about just exploring and discovering stuff while trying to gather resources. Two pretty different experience

@oursin_360: The advertising blurb for NMS also has the classic line "be a pirate, be an explorer or be a bounty hunter", so in that aspect I don't think they're all that different. They've mostly just gotten a different direction with the resource gathering/trading aspect, and made more resources important to the player as fuel for different systems instead of just an item to sell. I haven't played the Horizon update for Elite: Dangerous that introduced planetary landings, so I don't know how that aspect of E:D is, but that was certainly a part I felt was missing with E:D at launch, considering how big a part of the Elite: Frontier games that was.

At launch E:D felt like a pretty good remake of the original Elite, but a bit of a disappointment as a fan of the Frontier games, I'm kinda hoping NMS will scratch the Frontier itch better, though the survival mechanics of the latter certainly are a bit different from how those games used to work.

No, at least not for me. Elite is too much of a hardcore space sim for me, much like the X games. Luckily copies of Freelancer are still plentiful.

I have 99 hours on E:D and can tell you that after watching NMS, it makes me want to replace my broken joy stick and go back to playing E:D. It's pretty grindy, combat is fun at first, but sometimes there is BS or AI decides to not be smart all of a sudden. So far any planetary landings are just on dusty solid body planets with no atmosphere and you can only get out of your ship on a buggy, you can't actually walk on them. Mainly, you're going to be playing space trucking simulator (doing trade routes) going back and forth between systems that buy certain items high and that sell other items low to get a good profit. After you do that and buy a decent ship, you will probably decide whether you want to join federation or empire to get their faction only ships and grind out missions and combat zones to get good standing with either faction.

To me, the science behind the simulation in E:D is probably the most interesting thing. Frontier modeled the Milky Way galaxy by using a bit of procedural generation to bring out the fluff, but known constellations, stars, and nebulas are modeled by "hand". All orbits and rotations of planets and moons are accurately simulated too So if you're into astronomy at all, from that aspect I think E:D blows NMS out of the water.

Also with E:D there is probably going to be a big update coming out around this year that might introduce things like aliens, character customization, and multi crew ships.

Elite is more of a hardcore space sim, NMS has arcade controls and is trying to evoke 50s-60s sci fi.

@fisk0: Wait you can do that stuff in NMS? Every gameplay video i see and thread i read says nothing about bounties and piracy?

@oursin_360: well, you can shoot big freighters to get whatever it is they're carrying, so maybe that's the piracy.

The bounty hunting thing I'm not sure, though the space combat is so bad because of those unresponsive flight controls that I don't know who would want to seek that out.

While I'm not sure where NMS goes in the terms of meta after the first 5-10 hours, I can say that that area in E:D is stronger. The political system and economy is much more of a thing in E:D even if its a cold menu system for much of it, where as NMS seems to arbitrarily assign in demand goods and race owned systems without much rhyme or reason. Ship simulation is pretty alright too. It may not be Newtonian Physics driven, but the little things matter: where power is being diverted, detailed scanners, where your weapons are mounted and how they track, ect. means that space combat has a depth that clearly NMS was never aiming for.
All this being said, NMS scratches an itch that E:D doesn't and that's exploration. Don't get me wrong, some aspects of Elite's exploration system is a breath of fresh air. Going from system to system is much much easier than all of the gathering that needs to be done to make a Warp Cell. BUT very often I will see celestial bodies and wish I could just land there, even if it is to take in a sight of a valley which you can't do in a majority of Elite unless you want to rover around a dead moon.

@onarum: eh yeah i guess that does count lol. Maybe you get bounties after you solve languages or something?

Since starting this thread I grabbed ED on the Xbox One and am having a real blast with it, despite being a complete novice. I appreciate everyone who chimed in on this thread. I'm pretty glad I've taken a chance on it and am anxious to get deeper into it.

If anyone's on xbox one and wants to fly around with me in space, just throw me a PM and we can schedule a hot space date.

I have played quite a lot of Elite on the xbox, and I've been playing NMS since it came out. I'm just going to say I prefer Elite. I do like them both though. I like how NMS has animals and plants, I really like getting on a nice planet and running around and scanning stuff and just chilling. I prefer the controls in Elite, probably just because I got used to those, and it made me hate the controls in NMS at first. I'm getting used to them now though. They honestly offer different things. Elite is definitely more of a sim and that could turn people off. All in all, space is cool.

ED is like 1600s Atlantic Ocean. You have traders and pirates and people who hunt pirates. It's also very complex. NMS is like Star Trek, it is all about exploration and discovery. If your itch is to fly around space, then ED may scratch it but if you want wonder and discovering the unknown NMS is the best at at that.

I've just started playing Elite on the Vive with HOTAS setup which is also pretty cool (I dont recommend until you are competent on desktop version).

VR makes you wish all the UI stuff in the menus were cockpit style buttons/toggles you could just reach out and push, tho.