I've played a lot of games. Some were so deep that not even James Cameron would think about diving in, others so shallow you didn't even need gumboots. Elite is frankly, rather shallow. There is supposed to be some emergent story, as told by the newscasts you can read at stations, and if there's a battle you can go join in, but unless you go to the system in question there doesn't seem to be any impact AT ALL. So really the ultimate goal is to make enough money to get the best equipment for doing whatever it is you want to do. There are a few ways to make money: Mining, bounty hunting, trading, exploring and missions. Mining is painfully slow, but you only need two pieces of equipment so it's good for beginners to make money. You shoot your mining laser at a rock until something pops out, you hope to hell it's something like gold or platinum which sells for several thousand credits per ton, if it is you have to open your cargo scoop and manually pick it up. Doesn't sound so bad? Well here's the fun part: what you scoop doesn't count as one ton of cargo. It's a fraction of one. I've never seen it higher than 20% and usually it's ~5-10%. So you have to do this over and over and over. It would take ages to fill a normal cargo hold. Bounty hunting is obviously a bit more fun. You go to a nav point, which is essentially a little beacon which marks where you jump to or a resource extraction zone which is amidst the rings of a planet where there are huge chunks of rock and NPC miners digging away. From there you scan everyone until you find someone who's "wanted" or just fly around until you see laser flashes. Once you do that you kill that person and depending on the ship you can get anywhere between 300-70,000 credits (maybe higher but I've only seen 70k). The problem here is the AI. Not the space pirates mind you, the local police. They don't seem to know you exist and will happily: fly straight into you if you weren't there or fly straight in front of you while you're firing on the pirate. Now when you hit a police vessel you get a bounty. It's fairly small (400 credits) but it's a bounty, not a fine. Which means as soon as the guy with the bigger bounty dies, the police will all converge on you and try to murder you. This is REALLY annoying, because while the player may be at fault sometimes, the AI will happily fly 10 metres from your bow regardless of whether or not lasers are coming out of it. What also annoys me is that half the Elite community dismisses this as a non-issue and just says "check your fire and get gud n00b". If they made it a fine instead of a bounty, it would solve the problem. I should point out that combat itself is pretty fun, managing power and flying well is important. Trading. Trading is the only way to make serious money. Normal trading is only heavily profitable with a ship with a large cargo hold. But there are items called rare commodities which can only be found at certain space stations. These items are limited. You can only buy a few at a time and then you have to wait ten minutes for more to respawn in the store. Even then there's a limit as to how many tons of it you can have (Which varies with each commodity). For example, Lavian Brandy usually sells 3-4 tons at a time and you can at most have 7, after which it won't spawn. The interesting thing about these items is that they increase in value the further you take them away from their origin. On average, it takes 150-200 lightyears until the increases in value starts to grow slower. Unless you have the best hyperdrive (which costs 1.5 million or so credits), this is going to take a very long time to travel. While you might make 600,000 on a single run it consists of nothing but: jump to star, jump to star, jump to star, refuel at station, jump to star, jump to star, jump to star, refuel at station etc. Your fuel costs will probably be covered by exploration data (fuel price depends on your ship). Exploring consists of going to a star, activating your "discovery scanner" which is essentially a 360 space sonar ping and scanning the star in front of you. You can make anywhere between 600-4000 credits from doing this (I've heard reports of 10k) but you can't sell the data unless the place you're selling it is 20+ lightyears away. There is also a "detailed surface scanner" but I don't know how much extra it gets you. Missions: Missions seem to be utterly crap. They never offer more than 20k, usually less (it's possible that they increase in reward size the more you do but I don't know), and are always either "We would love if you could bring us x tons of y!" or "go kill x amount of dastardly pirates!". There are a couple more like "psst, go to this place and pick up the black boxes so our secret stuff can be secret" but it all boils down to either killing pirates or fetch quests. Now the exceptions are the assassination missions which offer 100,000-200,000 credits. However these are always "go to systems x, y, z, look for Mr. P and kill him". So then you have to go to X, Y, and Z and aimlessly stumble around until the RNG god spawns an "unidentified signal source" which are random events. Here's the thing: These signal sources could be completely irrelevant to your mission. It could be some random pirate, a wedding barge, a funeral barge, some random trader who'll hoover up what they're interested in from your hold in exchange for credits, or random derelict wrecks with loose cargo floating around (and in this game salvage = theft). When you finally do come across something relevant it's usually "Oh yeah I've seen that guy, he's in system P!" so then you go to system P and look for those signals again. Then when you finally, finally find the guy it turns out he's flying what amounts to a small Star Destroyer which can probably one-shot you into oblivion. And aside from the suspiciously large paycheck, there is no indication of that anywhere AT ALL. But my two biggest gripes (in order) with Elite are: There is a distinct lack of lore. Apart from flavour texts in the map for the odd system here or there, the news feed at stations, and the flavour text for the ships (which is just a description of the ship really) there doesn't seem to be anything in the game, or outside it that explains the history and background of anything. This is a big problem because it makes the factions completely meaningless, the news feeds might help a bit but that really only goes for the major factions. When I asked about this on the Elite forums I got linked to a timeline which helped explain who the Empire was and who the Federation was. Apart from that there seem to be only the books. I think Star Citizen has already done lore infinitely better than Elite. Star Citizen has lore for its god-damn CRATES, Elite doesn't seem to even have lore for its own ships. It's possible I missed it and there are thousands of pages on the internet full of Elite lore somewhere but if it does exist it seems you'd need Indiana Jones to find it. Supercruise. Supercruise is an FTL mode for travelling between planets. Since Elite uses a realistic scale, this is necessary. The problem is it's really boring and you have to do it a lot. Usually it takes a couple of minutes to fly to wherever you want to go but if you need or want to go to a station that's a little further out, it starts to drag on. This is a really big problem in multi-star systems, because you can't choose which star you jump to. So if you want to go to a station orbiting the partner star, get ready to put your feet up and watch cat videos on youtube. There's an infamous station in the Alpha Centauri system called Hutton Orbital, it orbits Proxima Centauri. This means that Hutton Orbital is about 0.22 lightyears from where you jump in. It takes at least 15 minutes to get there. This is another area where a lot of the Elite community dismiss the issue saying "Elite is realistic, space is really big we don't want some handholding in-system jump drive or autopilot get gud n00b". Oh here's the really fun part: You can't actually just ignore the game while you're flying to your destination. You have to manage your speed or you'll overshoot. Also this may just be me but my ship tends to veer off course if I leave it, but I think it's just my flightstick. There are only two things to break the monotony of supercruise: Interdictions, which is when someone tries to "pull you over" so to speak, usually pirates. This is frankly more annoying than anything else. It just makes your journey even longer. You can escape interdiction by following the HUD so it's not like it's a sure thing you'll drop out of supercruise. The other break is unidentified signal sources, which are pretty much never worth stopping for. Also if you don't target a USS it seems that you will never activate the random event and drop into empty space no matter how close you are. In conclusion: Might get better with DLC, right now pretty dull, everything is a grind.
@Geers What you've just described is essentially the same problems that plague all open sandbox space games... Ms freelancer, everchron mercenary, and I bet even privateer (despite being a huge wing commander fan the one game I never played). Missions are always dull and don't vary. Evochron adds a bit more variety including stealth missions, cleaning missions and a separate military set, however once you've played them all there is no significant variation to them. Time to travel is also a pain. Freelancer had space highway conduits that greatly reduce travel time in system (though cruise was still required to get to 'off the grid' places). This is something also implemented in x rebirth (one thing that game did get right!). I imagine star citizen will also do this but I don't know for sure. Also with respect to making money, trading is always the most lucrative approach, though evochron does make mining a bit less tedious so is a good option to get started. I'm hoping star citizen opens up the options for making money a bit more (they mention being able to develop something then sell it eg a new weapon class for ship). One concern (?) I have for SC is related to time to get around / tedium... Given the level of realism I think getting around or doing anything may take considerably more time than in similar games, and this may be more annoying than anything once you've experienced it the first time...
Star Citizen won't have a one-to-one scale. The problem Elite has is it's so wrapped up in trying to copy the original and being "realistic" it forgets the one thing a game is supposed to be: FUN. If anyone's interested: Star Citizen crate lore (no I wasn't kidding): https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13953-Galactic-Guide-Stor-All Elite lore: http://www.elitegalaxy.org/?page_id=394
I mentioned it once. And as far as I can tell it's an objective fact that Star Citizen has published more lore than Elite Dangerous.
It's a kinda subtle undertone in the entire purpose of this thread. You've posted about a billion posts on SC, then you're just "here's why the closest competitor is sh*t" despite it being ya know, released, and SC being, ya know, not. For all it's waving about and writing lore, SC is stretching itself even further in terms of scope; I can very much see possibility for it being Jack of all trades, master of none. It's now over like 2 years since their Kickstarter finished and I'm just seeing a dogfight mode, a race mode and STILL more focus on "MORE STUFF! MORE SHINIES!" Elite does look hella grindy and dull and that's the main reason I've not bought it, but it's got more reason to purchase than something that's promising "Oh the actual game is coming later"
I'm starting to think you don't quite get that Star Citizen has a longer development cycle. I didn't say Elite was crap, it's ultimately just lacking in content. Fundamentally it's a solid game, fun combat, player-driven economy, a literal galaxy etc. It's just that not a lot has been done with that. Instead of being dead-set on titling me a fanboy try looking at what I actually say and the tone of what I'm saying. Because I can promise you I don't actually start drooling over my keyboard every time a new piece of Star Citizen news comes out. I just say "oh hey, cool!" and get on with my day. It's been two years, so what? GTA V was in development since 2009. It's not like there's a fixed number of years it takes for a game to come out. Elite's doing the exact same thing really "Ooh the walking around stations and actual characters that give you missions is coming later". I said what I said about Elite because that's how I feel about Elite, not because I want to sink it to make way for Star Citizen, because that's absurd. Two space games are better than one.
https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=c3849e29-c4d3-40c7-9740-844072707f92&action=buddy Currently going through the biggest change in the geo-political landscape in the past five years. Entire solar systems are changing hands every day. Find some people to hang around with and make your own story.
@Geers may I ask your opinion of Starmade? Simple game, but it's quite fun making your own little ships and stuff.
EVE takes a helluva time and effort commitment though. I've made some real attempts to get in but planning time around, working around really long time-barriers to ships and fits every time a doctrine changes... I don't find the payoff worth it really. I can see the appeal, but I can't put in what it needs.
I found that with eve, I got quite far into the game but didn't really have the will or the time. It is an awesome experience if you have the time and the skills.. Was hoping Elite might be more for me to be able to jump in and out off. Enjoying so far but I do get what geer's is saying. Am hoping for some better missions at some point.
Ok something else that I think Star Citizen has already done better than Elite. Or more accurately, seems to have done. When you play Star Citizen you will say to your friends "Hey, have you been to Spider? You know, it's that big pirate community made of derelict ships clumped together" or "Have you been to Goss yet? It's like the greatest resort system ever!" This will never happen in the current Elite because there's about four different types of space station and they all function the same way, all the UI is the same, the docking procedure is the same and there's just nothing to distinguish one from another. Obviously this could change with planetary landings but that's paid DLC, and a game shouldn't have to rely on DLC.
Well remember elite got similar amounts of funding to pa, and have followed a similar pattern including releasing a bit quickly. The dlc is a necessity for them to build planet side stuff imo. I mean there is a reason star citizen is being so ambitious, they have the money to do so. The issue of copy pasted landing areas isn't new however. X rebirth has the same problem too. Exteriors differ, however inside every station is identical. Also expect some of this in star citizen... They've already created the back story to explain why a particular type of ring station is so common (they were party of the colonisation process). They will be hubs for pirates and black market stuff as they're old and officially abandoned. Don't get me wrong I'm sure they will make them different to each other in terms of condition and content however star citizen will be reusing blocks where it can.
Also a thought, have you come across 'no man's sky' yet? I think this has the most potential for believable environments, as they've created a very very capable procedural system that creates entire biomes from scratch based on a random set of elements present in a planet, distance from star and such. It's a shame its a ps4 game, though I imagine it could quite easily make it to pc down the line...
Good because it's the type of game that would tempt me to go to the dark side if it was an exclusive....
I think Elite just needs a bit more of your time to be loved. it's the KSP of Star Citizen. it requires you to enjoy precision and neatly executed manuvering. I mean common, look at this shi t.... WELL DONE
