User Review : Elite: Dangerous

Explore the galaxy! Find new places and discover how boring it really is!

Space is the place, and I'm a huge fan of space. Always have been, and always will be. And to my delight I was recently reminded of a modern space simulator in which I could indulge my space fantasies. Elite: Dangerous, a space combat, exploration and trading simulator, the fourth release in the "Elite" series went on sale recently during Steam's Winter sale. For 15 dollars it sounded like a steal, right? Well, yes and no. The original Elite was a pivotal title in the history of video games. This modern iteration on the other hand, is a disappointing game that is as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

Elite Dangerous (now abbreviated to E:D) starts the player off in a starter class multi role ship known as a Sidewinder. You spawn in a random station with a small amount of credits and begin from there. There are no tutorials, there are no friendly guides or tips. It is just you, the npcs and the occasional player that may or may not be in the same game instance as you. From this point onward you can do what you want. Here is the first massive flaw of the game. You are taught nothing, there isn't a single tutorial on what to do. You either have to stumble through UI menus figuring everything out, look up guides on the internet or hope that a friend (or friendly player) can somehow offer their assistance to teach you.

Once you get over this hurdle, the galaxy is your oyster. You can trade, you can mine, you can bounty hunt or dog fight, or even go on smuggling missions! So as a typical new player, my first thought was to go bounty hunting. I'll make a killing taking out the criminal scum! And thus you begin your journey to one of the four or five areas in which you can actually bounty hunt. Your target? Pirates. That's it really. Pirates. So you hunt pirates for a couple hours and make a few million credits, upgrade your ship and return.

After a while you get bored. What else does the game offer you think? And here is where the wide as an ocean deep as a puddle description comes in. You have options such as mining. Unfortunately it consists entirely of you staring at a rock blasting it for a bit and tediously collecting the remnants. If you are lucky enough to know about collector limpets they do the job for you. You can always take up trading! But then in sinks the reality of trading, being that it consists of sitting in a boring menu, finding which commodities sell for the most and then tediously making the jumps from system to system before you are at your destination to repeat it all over again. Smuggling is basically the same, with a typical distance that is 100x that of what your trade route may have been.

E:D is primarily an NPC driven game, as in your main interactions will be with NPCs over players. And that is if you join an open play server, as there are three types of servers. Private in which you can play with those who are allowed in, solo in which you are by yourself, and open in which any old Joe-Schmoe can join and possibly interact with you. However, because this game primarily focuses on NPCs, you will notice the huge flaws that accompany them. Firstly, they do not abide by many of the rules players do. You can outfit a ship that is designed to travel long distances in short amounts of time, but NPCs will seemingly follow you in small combat ships that have a fraction of the jump range you do. Then there's the issue of interdiction. Interdiction is pulling a player out of supercruise (a method of travel which accelerates makes your ship go fast and allows you to quickly travel in between planets and stars). There's two basic rules to interdiction: You have to be behind the person you are interdicting and you have to keep them in your cross hairs for a set amount of time. NPCs ignore this entirely. I have had NPCs interdict me from the front, from the side, through stars, the moment I arrived into a system, you name it. And not only that, they are 100% efficient in their interdiction, to the point that I no longer attempt to fight and simply submit. It's easier to either kill them or attempt to run away. Unfortunately they can just keep interdicting you over and over if the RNG of the game has decided that this NPC spawn is meant to try and kill you. Other NPCs also have huge advantages players do not. Massive ships that can turn as nimbly as small combat focused ships. Unlimited ammunition in powerful weapons, and some seem to even get stronger weapons that the player simply cannot. Other times you may be engaged with a wanted enemy and a "system security force" or "police" unit may fly past your line of fire. This usually results in you becoming wanted immediately with a small bounty placed on your head. That massive ship you were engaging with a several hundred thousand bounty is now ignored as every police unit that was in that particular instance now begins targeting you in an attempt to brutally kill you. It has resulted in several thousand credits worth of bounties lost before, and is increasingly frustrating the more you play the game.

Missions are another NPC oriented gameplay feature. You dock at a station and accept a mission of your choosing. Some of those involve smuggling (my current favorite due to the large sums of cash). Unfortunately, these missions can be outright broken. From asking for materials you cannot access because you didn't purchase the expansion to an NPC assassination target never showing up in the system it was meant to, to never receiving the details of where you are meant to transport some illegal goods. In regard to smuggling, the game seems to follow a simple rule. If the player is in a system, then the game will spawn xyz NPCs. Because of this, I have found myself abusing certain exploits that allow you to avoid their interactions. Because certain missions are failed the moment someone scans your cargo hold and because NPCs can instantaneously interdict you and pull you into their instance, it makes taking these missions a chore. Although I was earning 20 million credits per trip at one point, I was not having fun doing it.

In this game there are several classes of ships. Ranging from multirole ships to combat specific ones to explorers to incredibly large ships that can house multiple people (this feature isn't implemented yet but it's on their roadmap) and theoretically small fighters in them. Unfortunately the amount of ships currently accessible to the player is small. There are 31 in total, with 29 being in the base game and two featured in a combat simulator mode separate from the rest of the game. And while it seems like a decent number of ships to tide the player over temporarily, it really isn't. The main difference between most ships are the prices. While you will find some that have their quirks (Such as a Diamondback Scout being made into a stealth fighter) most are just straight upgrades over the others, giving the player almost no reason to get them. For example, a Hauler which is meant to give players a cheap solution to transporting cargo, is outclassed by a combat specific ship the Viper Mk IV. Granted, the Viper also costs nearly 10x the amount of the Hauler, a combat specific ship shouldn't be more efficient at transporting cargo compared to a designated trade ship. And while there are other ships which up the cargo hold immensely such as the Type 9 Heavy, a trade specific ship; it is severely outclassed by a multipurpose ship the Anaconda in every which way. And this is an issue I ran into when determining what ships I wanted to pilot. While I thought of buying some cheap ship to upgrade from my starter, I quickly learned I would be better off simply saving my money and buying something more expensive, like a premium grey burger bun. At the end of all of this, it feels as if there becomes a meta, in which if you do not use a certain ship you will be outclassed multi role ships but players also. And you will find that certain ships with designations just do not adequately do the job.

On the other hand, E:D gets many things right. The small amount of ships in game are well designed and look great. Ranging from the small one person multi-role sidewinder you start in to the massive corvette class war ships you can currently purchase (of which I am currently sporting an Imperial "version" of the Federation Corvette"), they all sound and feel like different, unique ships. The game is remarkably beautiful. Graphically it looks great and each time you come across some new arrangement of planets or stars that you didn't expect to see it typically will leave you in wonder. I cannot count the amount of times I have come across a star citizen in which two red giants were within hand shaking distance of one another. The game does suffer from some aliasing issues. Another aspect E:D gets right is the vastness of space. You can legitimately visit almost the entirety of the known Milky Way galaxy. On paper that sounds impressive and when you are in game it's still impressive. Flying hundreds of light years away from the primary portion of occupied space takes a long time and truly makes you feel like an explorer in the age of universal expansion.

Unfortunately, that's where my positives end. Luckily for E:D, the game is one of the few currently on the market that offers what it does, so the game can seem engrossing. There is a definite "honey moon" period for this game in which everything seems amazing, but that wears off rather quickly once you've settled into things and have to repeat the same task over and over again. I've gotten tired of doing the same smuggling run over and over to get the credits required to outfit my corvette class ship. Overall, E:D is not a game I would recommend at full price. The content they offer is just too mediocre to justify it. With so many systems that feel like place holder systems (NPC interaction, trading, black market consists of nothing but selling "Illegal" items), it makes me wonder if this game will ever be truly complete; as Frontier Developments and co have pledged to release an expansion yearly for their title. Even with the current year's expansion I would most definitely not recommend the game. For sixty dollars you can land on some planets and drive around in an SRV. Fun at first, becomes boring very quickly.

So if you have a thirst for space simulators and see this game on sale for 15 to 20 dollars and can stand the huge gameplay flaws the game has, go pick it up. Any more money and I would not recommend it. Maybe Star Citizen will fulfill the space simulator niche that we are all looking for.