"Oh... my... God. Is it really you? Commander Zigglepants?"

"Yeah. Heh. Nice to meet a fan."

"I can't believe it. I've always wanted to be a space pilot like you. You've done EVERYTHING. How did you get started?"

"Well, believe it or not my first job was doing delivery runs."

"Really? That must have been tedious."

"It was. And the pay was terrible. You'd accept a mission in one star system and do nothing but hop from star system to star system for an hour or more before accepting your tiny payment.

"Sounds pretty bad."

"Yeah. I only did that for a short time before I got into smuggling."

"Oh, cool. Sneaking into heavily armed facilities with illegal cargo? That sort of thing?"

"Exactly. Although you only do the sneaking at the end bit of your journey. The rest of it was just as dull as the deliveries. And even the sneaking was only fun the first few times. After that it became pretty routine. The pay was a lot better, though."

"So how did you become a famous bounty hunter?"

"I'm afraid the stories are exaggerated. I took my first contract at my local station. It told me to fly to a nearby star and hunt down a notorious pirate."

"Did you get him?"

"No. I showed up at the star and he wasn't there. I flew around scanning promising signals, but each one turned out to be a dud. To make it worse, it took about 10 minutes to fly between each signal and there wasn't much to do in the meantime. After a few hours of this, the contract expired."

"That's too bad."

"Yeah, the next few contracts turned out the same so at that point I gave up, bought a warrant scanner, and decided to go freelance."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, it means you sit in one place next to a navigation beacon or resource extraction point, and hope to catch pirates if they show up."

"Neat. How many did you catch?"

"None. It took me about an hour to pick up the scanner and fly to a promising system. Then I waited around for a few hours scanning ships but no pirates showed up. Well, a couple did... but none of them came out of supercruise. After a few nights of this, I decided to dump the stupid scanner into the sun. When I got home, I received a strange message. Someone wanted to hire me to carry some mystery cargo to a certain sector and wait for further instructions."

"Did you take the job?"

"Of course! It seemed like the first interesting thing that had happened to me as a space commander. Yeah, I accepted the job and headed out to the sector they named. Took a lot of time to get there. Then I started waiting for my contact."

"Who was it?"

"I dunno. He never showed. I waited around for a couple hours and eventually the mission expired. I did get to fight some pirates, ironically. It seems like they really wanted that cargo, whatever it was. They should have just asked. After waiting around for a few hours, I tossed it into the sun too. Hold on, I have a customer."

Commander Zigglepants turns away and talks into his headset.

"Hello, welcome to McSpaceport. Can I take your order? Combo #2? That will be 4,000 credits. First window, please." He turns back. "Sorry about that."

"No problem. So you work a drive-through window now?"

"This is WAY more fun. Trust me."

"What about the Close Quarters Championship? You know. Arena mode? Did you ever compete?"

"Oh, yeah! I actually hold the world record."

"No way! What's it like?"

"Well, the Close Quarters Championship is a screen with the words 'Searching for Match' and a little spinning circle. The winner is the person who can sit and watch the screen the longest before closing it. I broke the previous world record with a time of 90 minutes before I got bored and went for a snack. The majority of commanders can't make it any longer than 10 minutes. It's actually not as -"

"Wait! Aren't there, like, space ships and stuff in the arena?"

"Hmm.... I doubt that very much. If there are, I never saw any."

"You know what, I still think I want to be a space commander."

"Suit yourself... but can I offer a word of advice?"

"Please!"

"You're going to spend most of your time travelling and waiting around, so bring a video game to keep yourself entertained."

"Got it."

"...and make sure it's NOT Elite: Dangerous."

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I've got 140+ hours in Elite: Dangerous. From trading in an Adder, to running drugs and guns between systems in a Cobra, to that revelatory moment when I took my beloved Asp deep into the Pleiades and saw my first black hole up-close, there have been some fantastic moments in this game.

However, once you've smuggled enough weapons to fund the next 20 years of wars, and taken your ship tens of thousands of light years deep into the galactic core, you start to realize how empty this galaxy is. It's a beautiful galaxy, but a lifeless one. The thrill of seeing your first black hole, or stumbling on a new type of exotic star, or dropping out of supercruise to surf the debris rings around a Jovian, can't overcome the vast emptiness of Elite's galaxy.

The complaint that this game is lacking content comes up so often because it's irrefutably true. There are only two general designs for starbases. Every starbase in the game has the same exact sign, scuffed in the same exact places, in every docking port.

Once you get beyond human space, you will never, ever be surprised by anything you find, you will never be in danger, and you will never encounter anything but planets, stars and astroid belts. There are no comet swarms, no dynamic phenomena, no stars going nova, This is a science fiction game, but there are no derelict starships, no long-abandoned starbases built by alien civilizations, no distant planets in far-flung corners of the galaxy with ruins suggestinig intelligent life, no Dyson spheres, no inscrutable megastructures, no ringworlds, no artilects or machine consciousnesses, no nanoswarms, no artifacts.

There's that famous J.B.S. Haldane quote that's often quoted in discussions about science fiction: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

But not Elite's universe. Elite's galaxy is a lonely, lifeless place where you will never be surprised by anything.

Regarding the content, as other reviewers have pointed out, this is essentially a late stage alpha/early beta that needs a lot more content to help flesh it out. But instead of acknowledging how light the game is on content, the developers are releasing new content as expansions, condescendingly calling those expansions "Early Access," and using a pricing scheme that inexplicably punishes players who already have the base game.

So we've got devs selling a beta (at best), charging full price for unfinished "expansions" and calling them "Early Access" expansions to make up for the fact that the content expansions are lacking in content. It's essentially pre-ordering DLC for a game that isn't even close to being finished.

And what do the expansions give us? The much-heralded Horizons gives us procedurally generated, airless rock worlds and buggies. That's it. If you were hoping for waterworlds, or atmospheric worlds with teeming jungles, or bizarre alien landscapes, you'll be sorely disappointed, because all you'll get is rock with a few random outposts thrown in for good measure.


Pros:

- Beautiful visuals
- Sleek ships that all have different, realistic-looking cockpits
- Probably the best representation of space as it truly is, in any game to date
- Support for Oculus Rift
- Stunning views, like seeing starlight bent by a black hole's gravitational lensing, or a blue star bathing your cockpit in light
- The two existing starbase models are both visually stunning
- The transition between supercruise (multitudes of light speed) and standard cruise in or between star systems feels seamless and realistic

Cons:

- A galaxy completely devoid of life or anything interesting
- Strangely, the planet textures are not HD
- Only two models of starbases, with very little variety in layout
- Most occupations boil down to grind, grind, grind. Traders, bounty hunters and smugglers will grind their days away.
- Still no simple support for easily switching UI colors
- Not a hint of anything mysterious or even remnants of other intelligent civilizations
- No megastructures, derelict ships, Dyson spheres, ringworlds or other commonly hypothesized signs of alien civilizations
- No dynamic events in solar systems, no comet swarms, no stars going nova or young systems forming
- Ridiculous practice of labeling expansions as "Early Access" and forcing players to re-purchase the base game in order to buy the expansion
- Even the expansions are extremely light on content, and include things that should have been in the base game

Yes, I recomend this game. Most people who don't recomend say that the game is "Boring," "Grindy," etc. It can be, if you make it that way. E:D will be how you play it. There is no set story, there is no hand-holding (unless a buddy of your's is willing to do that, but the game sure won't), the game simply tells you: "Here's a loaned Sidewinder and 1,000 credits. Do the rest yourself." That's it. All the rest is by yourself. If you want to rush the biggest ship, go right on ahead. Fair warining: You will get incrediably bored, incrediably fast. Instead, have fun.

Find something you like doing. If you like the constant rush of combat, try becoming a Mercenary, fighting for one (or maybe both) sides in Conflict Zones, or by wiping the scum of pirates clean from the void we call space, or perhaps become a pirate yourself. Maybe you will find your calling in the rather tranquill profession of mining (sit back, start playing some music, and enjoy), maybe you can find some enjoyment in trading (kudos to you if you do, can't stand it myself, lol), or try treking out into the vastness of our Milky Way Galaxy, finding planets that you can finialy and rightfuly write "Lol, first" on. Theres so much to do. And if you get bored of one thing, try something else.

The point is this:


Hope this was some help to you who are trying to decide, but if your still wondering, look up some gameplay videos on youtube. Watch some of Scott Manley's videos, Obsidion Ant's, or someone elses, theres quite a few out there.

See ya out there, CMDRs

-CMDR Dalgin

o7

Elite: Dangerous is a difficult title to recommend. On the one hand, it delivers an amazingly immersive and atmospheric experience, truly excelling at pulling players into the game, and making them feel the awe of being in space with fantastic visuals and some of the best audio work I've ever experienced in a game. The ships handle well without being too twitchy - even with mouse and keyboard after a bit of tweaking the controls -, combat is satisfying, and its 'to scale' modeling of our galaxy offers unparalleled scope. All the core components of a great game are present, which is why it's so troubling that the game never really expands beyond those core components.

Every game system in Elite: Dangerous is a rushed husk presenting virtually no depth. Its economic market is the best example of this. It is player-influenced, with supply and demand shifting prices as players ferry goods between stations, but affords the players no control whatsoever in it. There is no manufacturing, no creation, no ability to do anything beyond shipping materials from point A to point B in the hopes of turning a profit. Trade goods are never used by the players at all, an unfortunate situation that makes mining not only incredibly ineffective at making money (as it's basically a more difficult form of trading), but also deeply unsatisfying, as the ore you work towards collecting will never go anywhere, only disappearing from the economy as you convert it to credits at your station of choice. This lack of depth extends to the development of basically every other game system, much to the game's detriment.

With the simplicity of these game systems comes a simplicity in objective. Your goal, as a player, is to grind more credits so you can buy a bigger ship (which tend to be strictly better than their less expensive counterparts) to more efficiently grind credits in.

Unfortunately, this is made even worse by the game's horrifically poorly thought out reward structure, in which the missions, which at least have the potential to be mildly interesting, give laughably low rewards. In the time it takes you to complete a single mission, you could typically earn 20-100x's as much by simply sitting at nav-beacon or resource node killing pirates for their bounties. The disparity in reward of mindlessly grinding over doing the game's missions is mind boggling.

To the MMO player, the lack of depth in multiplayer is a massive let-down. There is no real reason to work together beyond the benefit of having another person nearby. Without the ability to impact the economy, players have no goals to collaborate towards. There are no multiplayer ships, and no player organizations to be a part of. What it all boils down to is that Elite: Dangerous simply should not have been a multiplayer game. Perhaps as a single-player entrant to the series, its sins would have been less numerous.

Elite: Dangerous is not a bad game, and even with its faults, it's hard to give it the thumbs down. It's certainly enjoyable in terms of minute-to-minute gameplay, but its current lack of depth and the developer's apparent focus on introducing more shallow features instead of adding depth to existing ones ultimately make the game mostly a good introduction to space sims for the newbies whose lacking features will surely have you looking to Star Citizen once the inevitable boredom sets in.

The Key Takeaway: Elite: Dangerous is, as others have so often put it, miles wide and an inch deep. Without any real multiplayer features beyond being able to group up (which was added in a patch) and shoot at things, it's better to think of the game as a single-player simulator in a shared universe than a real MMO. That said, it's aesthetically astounding, offers unparalleled immersion, and excels at providing minute to minute entertainment through solid gameplay basics. If you aren't looking for a multiplayer game with a lot of depth, you may be able to look past the game's faults to find a really enjoyable experience.

A Review Of Elite:Dangerous Using Quotes From Other Steam Reviewers Who Have Said The Game Is "Not Recommended".

"Once the novelty of that wears off you realize this game is utterly devoid of content." - 82.9 hours on record

"Not worth the time" - 90.2 hours on record

"Everything else is dull, repetitive, boring and empty, even on multiplayer." - 93.3 hours on record

"The game play however, leaves me desiring something a little less tedious and frustrating." - 97.8 hours on record

"Elite: Dangerous is a difficult title to recommend" - 125 hours on record

"I've tried over and over again to enjoy this title" - 132 hours on record

"Great fun to begin with and the combat system is pretty cool, but ED quickly becomes repetitive." - 140 hours on record

"The thrill of seeing your first black hole, or stumbling on a new type of exotic star, or dropping out of supercruise to surf the debris rings around a Jovian, can't overcome the vast emptiness of Elite's galaxy." - 142.1 hours on record

"DO NOT BUY THIS GAME, IT IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF YOUR MONEY AND TIME" - 148.7 hours on record

"When making your decision, if you like the game type, assume that you'll get 100 - 120 hrs of gameplay before it gets boring" - 177.5 hours on record

"this game sucks, one of the worst game in 35 years" - 201.8 hours on record

"Elite: Dangerous is not a good game - there are simply not enough game components for a player to actually play." - 208.2 hours on record

"It's not feature complete and it's not content complete. All existing features are bare bones, never or barely touched again after original release." - 240.5 hours on record

"10/10 would eat s**t again" - 241 hours on record

"the game gets old fast" - 259.9 hours on record

"its just too damn grindy" - 278.5 hours on record

"enjoyable in small doses" - 279 hours on record

"I wanted to like this game, I really did." - 323 hours on record

"hey goyim, give us $40 to walk on planets oy vey" - 324.1 hours on record

"Elite: Dangerous has the foundation to be a good space sim, but is completely lacking in actual content." - 333.7 hours on record

"Once you get use to the game you've seen all that it offers which isn't much!" - 347 hours on record

"Emplty, pointless" - 349.9 hours on record

"i regred every second that i've lost in this game that takes itself so seriously" - 355.5 hours on record

"A game that has all the makings to be something special, but never seems to deliver." - 375.8 hours on record

"Very gutted, even for the sale price I wouldn't reccomend this game." - 379.9 hours on record

"Will I recommend this game? No" - 542.6 hours on record

"Tedious grind that never ends" - 569.8 hours on record