Elite: Dangerous

[Wraith]

Full release is next week, but if you bought into early access, they're already done with the wipes. I've been hitting it pretty hard the past couple days.

This is the best flight system in a space sim I've ever seen. I only really started playing two days ago, but I can see myself playing this game for a long time. It's easy to say the game has 300 billion star systems, but actually seeing them is staggering. The living universe and the way players can actually affect the universe is pretty damn cool too. I'm not sure I believe all the claims made about just how deep the simulation is though - the amount of power that would be required to run a simulation of that detail on 300 billion systems would be immense.

The game can be a bit slow paced, similar to the X series, so I can't recommend it for everyone, but if that's your kind of thing, this is the best space sim since X3. If they manage to meet their development goals, it should only keep getting better over time too.

Anyone else in?

[Wraith]

[Steely Glint]

Have you played any of the previous Elite titles, if so how does it compare gameplay wise?

[Khendraja'aro]

It has more possibilities than the original(s). Also, the flight model is different - it gets some inspiration from Newtonian physics (you can decouple orientation and heading) but still has a speed limit, for example.

It's a bit daunting at first due to the amount of different keys you have to use.

[Khendraja'aro]

Still a bit buggy, though. The game kind of locks up when I try to access the system map.

[Wraith]

The recent 2.02 gamma patch seemed to add a bit of instability - I didn't have any crashes prior to that. They're still pretty rare for me though. Never had one going into the system view.

Bought my first Cobra today. I'm at the border of Fed and Empire space now, planning to join up with the Empire soon.

[Khendraja'aro]

I just jumped to another station and the game wouldn't let me dock. Docking request was granted, landing gear is down and I am at the right spot. But every time I actually touch down, I only get the sound of metal crashing on metal instead of docking.

[Wraith]

You're probably facing the wrong direction. Your nose needs to be pointing away from you. I did that a few times before I figured it out. Maybe I should have not skipped all the tutorials.

For later: the control tower/office thing with the dish is always on the side of the pad you need to be facing.

[Khendraja'aro]

That's a shit thing to do if they don't explain that anywhere or even indicate that.

[Wraith]

They may have explained it in one of the docking tutorials. There were two, I think. Official documentation is a bit sparse in the game though, AFAIK.

[Khendraja'aro]

The logic behind that one eludes me, considering the fact that you're already positioned on a turnstyle docking bay (as you can see when you enter the hangar).

[Khendraja'aro]

And now I can't turn in the mission. Great.

[Timbuk2]

Yes will likely buy.

Not experienced the Elite games before, but am aware of their dedicated fanatical fans.

Big fan of the X series, the slow pace and open type of game.

Is this along the same lines?
Exploration and trade?
Dynamic economy?
Ability to buy different ships and fly them?
Capital ships?
Manufacturing?
Factory Chains?
Factions & inter-faction combat?
Alien shit?
What else?

Will await the release itself mid-week.

[Khendraja'aro]

No capital ships, no factories.

[Wraith]

Yes will likely buy.

Not experienced the Elite games before, but am aware of their dedicated fanatical fans.

Big fan of the X series, the slow pace and open type of game.

Is this along the same lines?

Yes, very similar. This is my first Elite game as well, which is why I couldn't answer Steely. Answering the rest of these Lewk-style.

Exploration and trade? Lots of both. 300 billion star systems to explore.

Dynamic economy? Yes, and the last patch made it more transparent too, so you can have a better idea of how you're changing the landscape with your actions. A lot of the other factors that go into this are still fairly opaque, though.

Ability to buy different ships and fly them? 15 flyable at launch, they're planning/promising a regular stream of new ships over time.

Capital ships? Yes, but not currently human flyable. That's a planned future feature, but it'll probably be in a paid expansion.

Manufacturing? Factory Chains? NPC only currently.

Factions & inter-faction combat? 3 major factions at launch, several million minor factions. Most inhabited systems seem to have 3-5 specific to them.

Alien shit? Artifacts only currently, aliens coming in the future.

What else? The mission and reputation system seems better than the X series.

The game is online only, though there's a hermit mode that you can use to avoid running into other players. You'll all still live in the same galaxy though. It's running on Amazon's servers, so it should be pretty stable and able to handle any load. They're using the Guild Wars 1 model, so there's no subscription fees for the game but they're planning on releasing frequent expansions to fund the servers and continued development. They haven't shared they're roadmap with us, but they claim to have plans out to 2018. Planetary landings are supposed to be coming soon in one of these expansions.

Compared to X3, there's currently less to do on the economic side of things, X3 easily wins on comparison. The exploration portion is leagues better in Elite. Combat & flying feels better too.

It's got fantastic peripheral support. If you have a decent throttle and stick, you can play the whole game using that without touching the keyboard and mouse if you were so inclined, though I find the mouse to still be better at navigating the station menus and galaxy map. With my X52, I switched the roll and yaw axes but the controls were otherwise already perfect for me. I know it probably doesn't apply to anyone here, but it's supposed to be the best thing ever to use with an Oculus Rift too.

It's got some deficiencies, but for you I think it'd be a worthwhile buy right now. It might not be a terrible idea to wait see how they handle post-launch, though - if they don't fuck it up, the games value should only increase over time.

edit: Last thing, there's supposed to be a storyline going on, but that doesn't start until the official launch on the 16th, so I don't know how that'll go. They're saying that the story will be heavily influenced by player actions, so it could go either way.

[Wraith]

http://www.mediafire.com/download/5j...l.Tutorial.pdf

That's a fairly decent guide to the game, although parts of it are old and obsolete. It's useful if you're on the fence about the game too, as it gives a good idea of how it all works.

[Khendraja'aro]

They seemingly have still a massive amount of bugs to iron out.

They also need to rework the supercruise mechanic - it's not really fun to approach a station that's 12,000 lightseconds away. Having to spend 15 minutes of real time is a bit annoying.

[Wraith]

2.05 apparently introduced a couple new issues, but for the most part I think the game is in pretty solid shape with respect to bugs.

Supercruise is the worst part of the game. They put it together so that it requires just enough attention that you're stuck with the boredom of the travel time. I'd be okay with the times involved if I could just look away while it was happening.

They are planning on some sort of in-system warping for the long distance things. You should nope right out of those 12k LS trips though; I generally avoid going to any stations more than 500LS out from the primary.

[Khendraja'aro]

Well, the part where each and every patch they do actually breaks the game for a while is a bit worrisome.

Yesterday I has the spinning ship of death. After the small patch, I then was unable to exit hyperspace (as in: The animation played forever). Just now, the game told me that it had an unrecoverable error contacting the server and told me upon my try to login again that my commander data was unable to be found on the server.

Seriously, those are huge bugs and point to massive problems with either their netcode or server code (or both). I'm not optimistic towards tomorrow.

[Timbuk2]

£39.99

Shitty bloody idiot UK prices.

My finger hovered over the buy button as the release time came and went.

Have made too many hasty game purchases recently and regretted them so trying to teach myself reticence :P

Spent a couple of hours instead watching Elite vids and reading up on it.

Not made up my mind yet.

Then again, the other half is out late with work things over the next few nights. Hmmm

Need a free demo or similar.

Any idea how big the download is?

[earthJoker]

So should I still wait if I am interested? I have no problems in waiting anymore, too old to get exited about such stuff anymore.

[Wraith]

Download's about 6.5 GB in total.

The game's good for a solid 80-100 hours as is, but if you have doubts, there's no problem with waiting. It's following the Guild Wars 1 dev model, so the longer you wait the better it should be when you jump in. If you know what the game's roughly like and you're still on the fence, it might be a good idea to wait and figure out what their post-launch development pace is, which we won't be able to get a good idea of until end of January or so.

I do think they should release the single player combat training thing as a demo; the flight model in the game is the best I've ever seen in a space sim (superior to what I last saw from Star Citizen), and that should sell some people on it if they can play with it.

I'm easing off the game for now; supercruise just takes too long and requires too much attention for how boring it is in it's current state. I'll be back once they do something about that.

[earthJoker]

Well I played X1 so if it's anything similar I would like it.

[Khendraja'aro]

Okay, so if you go bounty hunting be prepared to spend quite a lot of time flying aimlessly around, hunting for USS (unidentified signal sources).

If you're hunting for pirates then this method comes in handy:
1) Jump to the right system
2) Fly to the nearest stellar object (not a sun, though) so that your supercruise speeds are capped to below 1 Mm/s
3) Fly around that object until a USS pops up
4) Engage the USS only to find that you've run across a Technology Trader / Funeral Procession / Wedding Procession / Waste Dump / ...
5) Rinse and repeat until you find some actual ships
6) Scan them and engage those with a "Wanted" tag. One of those may be one of your targets.
7) Goto 3

The reason why you want your speed capped? The USS appear randomly across your bow and the distance to a USS is determined by your current speed. Which means that if you're flying around in the interplanetary space, you'll be likely at multiple speeds of c, which in turn means that you have to go through the whole rigmarole of slowing down and whatever.
My method lets you simply aim at the USS (which is at most 5 Mm away) and since you're already below 1 Mm/s, you won't overshoot, won't have to brake down and it's way faster.
It's a difference of about 20 to 30 seconds.

Protip #1: If your first or second USS finds you across a ship offering you an alternate mission don't let yourself be confused by the now changed mission text. The original mission is still active and will change back as soon as you get your first pirate.
Protip #2: A single stray shot will turn any ship hostile and mark you as "Wanted".
Protip #3: You only get kill credit if you land the last shot.

[Wraith]

I ignore all USS unless I'm doing a mission that spawns in them, which I rarely do.

The best way I've found to bounty hunt is to park yourself at some location, either a nav beacon or a mining site, and look for people there. If you want more targets, grab a kill warrant scanner and head out to an anarchy system. Everyone will show up 'clean' there on the initial scan, but the kill warrant scanner can usually find a bounty in some jurisdiction that you can pick up. Since it's an anarchy system, there's no police to get in your way and it's not a crime to kill whoever you want.

I'm currently sitting on the border between Federation and Empire space so I can quickly collect bounties from both those factions. I have a quarter million in Alliance bounties also racked up, so I may head in that direction at some point to collect.

[Timbuk2]

When you guys are talking about killing people for bounty, are you talking about NPCs, or real players?

Do you encounter other players, either just as you're exploring, or PvP?

[Wraith]

NPCs. Since Khen is talking about USS's, he's probably talking about the same - players don't generally just sit in space for no reason. He's probably running assassination missions, which have a great payout but are a pain in the ass to locate your target.

For other players, there's an open world mode and a solo mode*. They both take place in the same universe, use the same databases and such, but you won't ever see another player in solo mode. I'm currently off in the backwaters of the galaxy, have been since before launch, so I don't see too many people. Just the occasional passerby. The core systems are reportedly pretty densely packed though.

If you want to bounty hunt against PCs, the best way to do that is to grab a frame shift drive interdictor and head to one of those core zones where players start off. You can either supercruise around scanning everyone looking for bounties, or park near one of the space stations busy enough that queues form and go dark. You can scan ships from there, and apparently there's a good chance that some griefer will show up looking for easy kills, and he's bound to have a bounty so you can ice him and collect.

*There's also a private group friends-only mode, which is like solo except you'll still see any friends that are also in that mode.

[Timbuk2]

Sounds great. Brings in a whole new level of interesting.

Just picturing what the X universe would have been like with other players buzzing around. Though I get that the Elite galaxy is many times larger.

ok - decided i'll wait till after the xmas chaos and family type shit is done with - then purchase. A major patch may have been released by then too.

[Khendraja'aro]

Mining is dangerously dull, though. Even more uninteresting than the supercruise mechanic.

[Khendraja'aro]

I think I'll come back to this game when they've refined the mechanics quite a bit. It's bordering dangerously on the boring side.

Biggest threat from pirates? That they warp away before I kill them. Before that? Aimlessly flying around, hoping for an USS which holds the proper enemy.
Trading? Yeah, well, if you have to resort to external tools then something is wrong with the game.
Mining? Can't be much duller.
Exploration? Yeah, well, it's a bit more exciting than flying around aimlessly. That's not saying much, though.


And the forum fanboys are laughable: "It's a sandbox!" Yeah, we have pretty different opinions on what makes a sandbox game. And then there are the "I played the original and I'm so elite!" Good grief.