It's been two years and the game still offers uncompelling gameplay. The vastness of the milky way, great flight mechanics and immersive atmosphere can't make up for the absolutely amateur approximation to gameplay.

Let me describe my last 4 hours of gameplay:

Got a mission to destroy a bunch of drones at a planetary station.
I arrive, I attack the station (this sends it into defensive mode where drones come out to attack you), no drones are spawned. There's no indication of where should I find them.
I decide to fly around as there're random Points of Interests that spawn randomly on planets.
To find those, you gotta fly around until you spot a big blue circle, land, get your buggy out, start driving around.
Found nothing on the POIs where there should've been something.

(Much later I'll found out on the net there's a "trick" to find the POI by approaching them with your ship from a certain heading, at a specific angle, from a specific altitude. Basically, you circumvent the boring gameplay to get to the fun part)

This is already about 2 hours.

Finally found a POI, there's a bunch of buggies with a bounty on their heads driving around.
I decide to go and engage them, the one I pursue keeps getting farther away.
I get tired, I start pursuing the other buggy.
I engage it, it aggroes me, but doesn't even fire at me.
After about 10 minutes, I get it down to 29% armor, suddenly I can't damage it anymore.
After a minute firing at it, it disappears into thin air.

I go back to my ship and I keep looking for POIs.

Finally found a POI with drones.
I destroy all of them. At last I feel I'm doing some progress.
My kills are not counting towards the mission.
Seems like destroying them from your ship doesn't work IF it's a POI, so you must be in your buggy.

Why? Because inorganic gameplay restrictions is the best way to destroy the immersive atmosphere of the game. FDev likes that as inorganic mechanic restrictions is a very common gameplay pattern in E:D.

I keep looking for another POI. I find it. I get out on my buggy.
3 drones engage me, within 10 seconds, I'm destroyed by them.
I quickly hit to rejoin my ship to have some sweet revenge.
My ship magically appears hundreds of miles above surface in the same coordinates.
I go back to where the POI was, but since this MMO has no persistence, the POI has vanished.
I can't even vent out and get some revenge.
At this point, after literally 4 hours trying to do something, anything in-game, I quit to desktop.

Yes, this all happened in a span of 4 hours. I'm a patient man and I don't mind slow games.

---

I want to love this game so much. The atmosphere, visuals, audio and flight mechanics are so compelling. But at the same time, everything else is so badly designed, it feels like the military is conducting a social experiment to test the extent of human patience.

I reached my limit.

Given the popularity of the review, I wanted to correct a few mistakes and expand a bit:

There're two motivators in-game: money and exploring the unknown. The former is self-serving, you make money to get better ships and modules that *only* allows you to make more money. To paraphrase Fight Club's Tyler Durden: "We work jobs that don't matter to buy things we don't need".
The latter can be cool but extremely lacking: There's nothing to do out there. *Nothing.* No emerging quests, plots, mysteries, hidden knowledge, stuff to research, no progression (except rank and money), surveying is literally just about aiming towards a celestial body and wait till it gets automatically scanned.

Knowing if a celestial body is worth approaching to scan (some can be really far) is about “playing” a hidden weird mini-game that lives in the system view, so, you basically LISTEN TO AUDIO CUES, like, if it’s a water world you may hear bubbles, if it’s an earth-like planet you may hear birds chirping, or if it’s a rocky world, just wind.
This is not even explained in-game, you find about it on Reddit/Forums (see meta-gaming down there).
I honestly have no idea who thought this would be fun and not a hassle, and that it wouldn’t break immersion.

You do experience being in actual places in the Milky Way (amazing!), see some really cool vistas and some crazy systems. If you love astronomy like I do, lots of very interesting places exist in game. I love this side of the game and it’s my current motivator. I unfortunately can’t recommend based solely on this since I can get the same thing from Space Engine. There’s just not enough gameplay around exploration, the monetary reward is minimal and your personal progress is almost inexistent except for a text that changes (rank) the more money you make selling your survey data.

Other terrible things:
1. You can't survive without meta-gaming (look it up). Breaks immersion immensely for me, having to jump to Chrome to check vital game data the actual game doesn't provide you.
2. It's the first multiplayer sandbox that allows almost no emergent gameplay, how they managed to achieve this is amazing to me. Only emergent gameplay I've seen in TWO years: a player-run refuel 911 service (inaccessible through the game! see point 1.) and organization of expeditions into the vast unknown (this is actually really cool, but impossible to organize within the game).

I want so much to love this game, though. I can still dream they'll hire a talented game designer one day. Thanks for reading.

——

I’d like to expand even further on a few areas:

CQC/Arena, the game’s Deathmatch Mode, because if there’s one thing a slow-paced, contemplative highly atmospheric game can benefit from is a Doom-like Deathmatch mode. I can’t believe SCS Software didn’t add a Destruction Derby mode to Euro Truck Simulator. In any case, it can be fun but not as fun as any of the dozens of Swashbuckling Space games out there. So, what about rewards? None. It has no bearing on your in-game progression nor an impact on the game’s Universe. It’s so disconnected from the main game you access it from the game’s system main menu. Not as fun as actual Swashbuckling Space games, no tangible rewards, no motivation.

Then you have Powerplay which tries to be another motivator by letting you fight for political factions (cool!). The problem with this is that it's so disconnected from the game world that if you don't strictly participate, it might as well not be there. It has no impact on the game’s Universe. On top of that, you have little to no impact on what actually happens. So, you play something that doesn’t matter and you have very little impact on where it’s headed.

Finally, Community Goals. Every couple of weeks you get galaxy-wide goals to achieve certain things like repairing an important station on the far reaches of the galaxy, and helping establish a human presence on a remote area. And as usual, the premise is nothing short of amazing but the amateur execution kills it: These goals *can’t fail*, it doesn’t matter what players do, they can’t fail. Your actions don’t matter. You follow FDev’s script as an observer. So? What’s the point? Yep, you guessed: Money, so you can buy a better ship to make more money. We work inconsequential jobs to buy things we don’t need.

It’s hard for me to understand how such a great foundation, good and fun mechanics, one of the best game atmospheres ever conceived and an entire galaxy to exploit could produce such inane gameplay.

I love you, Elite. But I hate you.

TLDR:
Game is very pretty, immersive, and can be fun too, but it is also shallow and full of massive amounts of grinding.

Sigh… where to begin.

I guess I could start by saying I both really love and utterly hate this game at the same time. This game is perhaps the best I have ever seen as far as its ability to pull you into the game, and make you feel like a real captain flying an actual space ship. The views can be spectacular. Combat is another thing that is quite well done, with a few exceptions I will talk about later. Trade is well… about what you would expect, typically rather dull, with occasional moments of terror when you get attacked and may lose millions in uninsured cargo, and your ship. Mining is similar to the trader experience, other than you mine asteroids to sell. Exploration is also a rather popular activity (Though I really do not see why myself, but to each their own). Smuggling is a mixed bag, particularly after the recent spate of nerfs. Piracy in many ways needs a lot of work. Planetary-based stuff is also a mixed bag. On the surface, this game sounds like a dream. The problems start to show once you try to go a little deeper.

So what exactly is wrong with this game then?


The first major problem with this game is that the grind is unbelievably bad. We are talking Free to Play levels of grind. Just layers, and layers, and layers of grind. Some of it is so bad, that you will probably want to quit the game forever. In this game, everything is a grind… money, pilot federation rank, military ranks, powerplay rating, and engineers.

The worst grind has to be the grind for military ranks. Expect anywhere from 250 to over 300 hours game time, doing nothing but the same faction missions, to max out on rank for just one faction (fed or emp). These times assume that you have researched grinding rank on the internet and are grinding efficiently; otherwise, the time will be much longer. The devs made it even worse recently due to the nerfs that prevented mission stacking. This grind is so unimaginably bad that you will desperately be looking for any possible game exploit that you can use to cut the time down. Part of what also makes this grind so awful, is that the only way you can earn rank is by doing missions for factions associated with the federation or empire, and that missions vary massively as to the amount of rank points they reward, which means you will be doing the same one or two mission types for those 250+ hours. The other lousy aspect of this is that the missions that tend to give you the most rank points, also tend not to pay very well (or cost you in the case of donation missions). You might just say, why bother with it then? Well if you want any of the military ships, like the cutter or the corvette, you’re going to be stuck doing this grind.

Engineers grind exists due to all the specialized resources you need to acquire, and the heavy duty problem RNG making you go find more of the same resources over and over and over and over due to **** RNG, supposedly this is going to be fixed in the next patch, but I remain skeptical given their history.

Powerplay is bad mainly because you lose half your merits each week, which means the grind with it never stops. While you can more or less skip the grind, be prepared to spend 100,000,000 credits to reach rating 5 with a faction, and half that each week to maintain it.

I do not have as much of a problem with the money and pilot federation ranks grind. Money is not super difficult to come by, though I think ship and part expenses need to be flattened some. Mission rewards are still all over the place reward wise. I also think the federation rank grind could be toned down a bit due to how massively it factors into potential earnings with missions.


Another big problem is that not all the information a pilot needs is not available in the game. If I want to find trade prices for systems, I need to use a website. If I want to find out where I can buy what ships or parts, I need to use a website. If I want good information on how the bloody heck powerplay works, or engineers, or any other details, I need to use a website. All of this breaks immersion in a game that tries really hard to create it (and otherwise succeeds). All of this information should be in game.


The final big problem is the game really is rather shallow and very repetitive. Combat roles don’t really change much over the course of the game, the tactics will be the same, you get more and bigger weapons, but even that doesn’t change things much other than make battles shorter. You will probably end up using the same weapons systems, because only a handful of them are considered very good. You generally won’t bother much with ammo weapons, as ammo means having to go back to a base or station reload. You will find missiles to be almost useless due to low ammo and damage, plus the excessive number of ways to jam them or shoot them down. Trading and mining is even worse, as the only thing that will change is the ship you fly, and the quantity/type of goods you trade in, and the pirates will still just try to kill you on sight (AI doesn’t believe in actual piracy, even though it likes to say words that suggest otherwise). Piracy though fun, doesn’t pay well at all for the risk and effort. Missions are also very shallow and repetitive. They frequently offer insulting pay rates, and the missions themselves are rather basic and often tedious, plus they still don’t pay as well as trading or bounty hunting. Exploration also suffers heavily from sameness, where the systems start to look all alike, planets and moons are often pointless to visit, landing and exploring is usually pointless as well, and all for the privilege of making a piddling amount of credits. In many ways, I think the grind exists to try to cover up the shallowness of the game.


This game can be recovered though, if the devs would listen to feedback and do something about it, as it has a hell of a lot of potential. The first thing that really needs to be realized is that this is not the 1980s any more. Gamers do not always have 500-1000 hours to sink into a game, or anywhere near that. Most of us have piles of other games we could be playing other than this one. So stop wasting our time with pointless grinding already. Sure players need to work at the game, but not to ridiculous levels. Increase the money potential in missions to make them worth doing, and tweak upwards the other sources of earning (trade, mining, piracy, exploration, combat). Heavily cut back the rank grind, and give us other ways to earn it, or give us special rank missions, that are harder than usual, but offer a ton of rank points (preferably military themed). I would also tone down the powerplay merit loss to ¼ per week. Try also to make the missions more interesting and diverse. The ships, systems, and weapons also are in need of a balance pass, ammo weapons need to be more useful to make up for the need to reload them frequently, or give us the ability to carry extra ammo via internal slots, make missiles worthwhile again by decreasing the effectiveness of anti-missile defenses, increasing the damage, and offering two types of warhead, EMP and high explosive (one damages shields, the other hull). All of these things would make this game so much better.

Until then, I have to give this game a thumbs down due to the insane amounts of grind, and general shallowness and repetitiveness.

Meh.
From what I understand, it runs better than No Man's Sky,
though there isn't a lot to do, so I haven't played much.

So, after about 500 hours of playtime (I had 250+ hours on Horizons before it became DLC on steam) I think I can make a more educated review on what I think of Elite: Dangerous.

I started the game about a year ago, mindlessley flying around space with no real direction to go in. This notion can confuse some people as then, there was not a clear objective, it was just you're in space so go do something. The primary directive for me or drive was to generate income and work my way up towards bigger and better ships, and I believe this applies to a majority of players. Before the engineers update however, missions were considered bland and repetitivem, with the only real ways to make money being long distance smuggling or large ship trading. For me, I didn't know what to do, and promptly left the game for nearly a year. I then came back to elite dangerous about 3 months before horizons, having an urge to give it a go. I also had a friend with me which in my opinion made the experience much more enjoyable as you had another person to explore or bounty hunt with.

When planetary landing came out, me and my friend were playing all day from 10am to 2am for about a month or two. I think you have to simply enjoy the fun in flying to a planet, gliding down to the surface, deploying your SRV's and then surveying the brilliant terrain laid before you. Flying through canyons, landing in huge craters and taking hours to cross with your SRV. The game did a fantastic job of giving you a scope of just how big these planets are, and there are millions to explore, which to me was great.

However, after months of us playing and repeating the same act of landing on planets, doing the occasional planetary base mission, we became quite bored with the game. This is a huge defining point for a lot of players. "Endgame". This is the stage where you have a comfortable sum of money in your account, you have tried every mission and done your fair amount of bounty hunting. What drive is there now to continue playing the game. For me and my friend there was none, and we were thoroughly dissapointed in the engineers update for a number of reasons:
-We like many others did not like the random aspect to upgrades
-It adds more grind to the already grindy game
-It didn't feel like the wait was worth it
However recentley I have gone back to the engineers and I am having a much better time. Frontier have definitley made mission boards much better and more understandable. Missions pre-update seemed broken, when stacking 10 missions only increased the rep of a faction by 1%.
I believe that the engineers update tailors well for outfitting a smaller ship as you are able to collect materials much quicker and get to places a lot faster. Overall, I've had a brilliant time with this game, and I am thoroughly nostalgic towards the first time I landed on planets or explored a nebula. I really do hope frontier adds more content to planets but I think that engineers at it's core is a step in the right direction. For players who stop playing at end game, I have been there and have done so, however what kept me into the game was the brilliant feeling when exploring space and just marvelling at the brilliance of the graphics and sounds.
-Brilliant Graphics
-Upcoming DLC which will hopefully make the game a lot more rich with content
-Huge planets with amazing terrain that you can explore for hours
-An extremely large and expansive game space which can occupy your entire day.

I'm glad that I discovered Elite and continued playing it and that's why I'd give it a reccomendation to those who would give it time.
P.S. I know this review is all over the place, it's my first proper one kek

To the point: Both a popular and notorious game, a very diverse player base. People who love space. I'll skip all controversy over price of expansions, and assume some just want to know about the game.

The game offers many things, but don't expect the market-defined checklist of features required to keep everyone hooked. This gaming era is still dominated with what I'd call: a content confetti party. To be engaged in story, action, progression, reward and social interaction within minutes and all at once is not something you'll get in Elite: Dangerous.

Other than that?



Elite delivers space.

A reproduction of the Milky Way galaxy with as many different astronomical and planetary objects as the developers have managed to implement until today.
Stations with factions.
Ships with modules.
Things to shoot, things to scan, things to buy.
Those things spawn dynamically, it's not linear.

It will take longer than a few minutes or hours for you to reach your goals, if you're not stranger to that, you'll be fine.



I'll start with sound. Sound designers did an awesome job, you'll be identifying every ship and everything that happens in and around your ship to those sounds. Nothing seems out of place.



Greatly optimised as of today, space, stations and planets are great looking. High framerate with most mainstream graphics cards of past generations with little loss in visual quality in low settings.

Overall design on human technology in Elite is very 'sober', there's a certain lack of station diversity but there's nothing crazy that seems out of place. Special effects in moderation, motion, detail and scales are those things that will make you feel immersed.

We are missing a few less common astronomical objects and phenomenons, black holes with accretion discs and planet atmospheres. But hey, patience.



The game is a balance between arcade and simulation, so it's easy to handle but with range for more advanced piloting, with lowered realism to keep things fun and close.

All players report handling their ship and the user interface easily using mouse and keyboard, game controller (XBox One), joystick and keyboard or joystick and throttle (HOTAS). You can add voice command, head tracking and VR which Elite implements very well (mind the HUD readability glitch with the VIVE).



Stat progress is generally slower in Elite, but technically you can do anything almost immediately.

But first: can you land manually? When the tutorial makes you aim, orient your ship and bring it down smoothly, you'll think this is a difficult simulation. Just go along with it, it's easy and fun in the end. You'll find out ship management and manoeuvring is very important.

Beyond that, the game doesn't exactly highlight for you what to do until you visit and check stations, if you Google the different professions you'll find many answers. Most common one "how to make money". It's part of your learning process to try and think further than money. If you do only one thing you get burned out by length and repetition but if you vary your experience, the game gets richer. Don't let credits dictate your path.



There are enough small, medium and large ships and modules, as well as module modifications to keep you busy. They are well designed on the outside and inside,

Don't think larger ships with more modules as superior in any given situation. You can still enjoy small ships as an experienced player. Although the game is full of ship specifications and stats, you will be flying, throttling, shooting, scanning, managing power, targeting, communicating and travelling.

Like for credits, don't let size dictate your path.



Very good holographic HUD in ship, easy to navigate with any controller. Many HUD elements, not much missing. The user interface in stations is OK for missions, trading market, module fitting. It's OK.

There are many stats, but also hidden stats like rank points and influence points in the game to avoid reminding you that it is just a game. Go along with it, or Google it if you need to know everything.



Humans inhabiting star systems in a bubble of 1000 light years radius. You're a dot in the galaxy with events dripping slowly in the form of additions to the news feed, systems content, some oddities (unknown artefacts, barnacles) and community goals. Themes are sci-fi and mystery, think Babylon 5 perhaps.

I'll tell everyone: ready your Shadowplay recorder or equivalent, if you see something odd: record it and show the community. The players drive a huge part of that story.

There is no "solo story" individual to yours other than what you do. There is a background simulation computing faction changes based on our activities in their systems. It's small generic changes in a huge galaxy and you'll need help to leave a mark quickly. It can be underwhelming, so manage your expectations. But if it takes a special kind of mindset to enjoy exploring the galaxy and put your name on first discovered stars and planets permanently, then I guess those small changes aren't that small to everyone.



The game allows both lone hermits and groups to find their way, but it's not what you'd expect from an MMO.

Frequency of player encounters is affected by the huge size of galaxy, but there are higher density regions and Community Goals will engage players in doing the same thing at the same place. Risk of piracy and ganking increases so beware or get away from those populated systems until you get a hang of it.

Teaming up is on players initiative. You have to talk in and out of game to find things to do together, and the in-game interface does little to engage players in flying together although the game mechanics are there, but we hope for more to keep the players busy together in future updates. There will be multi-crew, starfighter bay, character customisation, and unrevealed features that could push the game in the right direction. But you don't have to count on that.

There are interesting player groups and communities, tons of forum pages and lots of development and story discussions and player events. The game has flaws with regards to multiplayer, but the platform is rich enough to keep many players committed in different ways. The question is where you'll fit.



There are some bugs. Instancing bugs and mission bugs. Some weekly server maintenance downtime. You can get past it.

There is a combat logging exploit (to disappear during combat) and a balancing issue where harming other players can be done without reasons or consequences. It's tough to get past if you are looking for fun and positive player interactions specifically.



I am careful with recommending Elite because I can't tell exactly what everyone is looking for in a game. And you too should be careful with everything you read, take everything with a grain of salt, and know what you like in games or what you want to experience next.

Elite succeeds at delivering space, graphics, sound, ship piloting, ship customisation, exploration, combat, immersion, VR implementation and community. Elite fails at checking boxes when it comes to solo story, multiplayer mechanics, highlighting what to do next and delivering high content per hour wherever players are. But I think all that makes up Elite is still engaging, interesting, exciting, there are players looking for those things, and others who don't.

Even at its current state, I welcome Elite very much in the space sim genre. You decide what you want in a game.

No Man's Sky Alternative

1. Personally find it more enjoyable to play.
2. The attention to detail and whole atmopshere of it is more vivid and immersive.
3. Actually has multiplayer.
4. You actually have a purpose
5. Variety in things you can do
6. Actual meaningful decisions

All in all, better than No Man's Sky.

Still a better game than no man's sky

I wanted to love this game. So wanted to love it.

The grind in this game would give the most hardened gold farmer an eye twitch. It's not just grind, it's grind with newly added RNG.

The flight mechanics are awesome. The combat is fun and engaging. The balancing is very successful for an asymetric environment. The environment is vast and attractive and beautifully rendered.

Look at the time invested though of the players who've reviewed this. 400-1,000 hours isn't uncommon and that's with people who are 50/50 on positive and negative reviews. This isn't a game, it's a job. You need to clock in and grind for many hours every single day to see any sliver of progress and that progress will be small. If you want a game that's a job, this is a great game for you.

The new updates to the AI ensure that no matter how good you are, most of the AI are probably as good or better with better ships and gear. Also, is your ship designed around bounty hunting or combat? You poor sorry ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! To do the latest multi-hundred hour grind advancement process (Engineer update) you need cargo bays and good jump range, or you'll spend literally several hours just rock-hunting - and I mean that. Flying around, landing and looking for rocks to put in your space ship and fly back to this one guy, 45 minutes of load screens away. That's not hyperbole; you'll spend 45 minutes just watching loadscreens of flying distance and you'll do it often in little chunks.

You can't put anything anywhere except on a ship. You can't even, say, buy a gun and put it in the storage bay on your ship - no, if you want X gun on Y ship you need to fly Y ship to where you can buy X gun, sell the gun you have there and buy X gun.

There's so much to the design of the game that exists entirely for the point of wasting your time to slow down getting something done. It's staggering. Confusing even. The amount of intentional pointless inconvenience in this game would make you think it's incomplete and there's just a bunch of critical features missing until you realize.... no. No, it's intentional. If they force you to travel long distances in a slow ship and wander around looking for rocks (because in a universe full of countless trillions of people nobody sells the raw materials needed for this. No, no merchant would or can make a fortune on it, because then you wouldn't have to spend 100 hours looking for rocks! And that's engaging gameplay!) then they can say you're 'playing the game'.

The game isn't about fighting, or trading, or mining, or exploring. It could be. It should be. But it's not. It's about wasting time grinding doing things you don't want or enjoy so you can get a short burst of doing things you do. At which point a new update comes out, the goalpost for doing what you want and what's fun gets moved way out and you're given a whole new grind of doing things you don't to get there.

For some people that's fun. They want to spend 1,000 hours of watching empty space float by and trying to find rocks so they can spend 100 hours fighting, trading and exploring interesting things. Good on them.

The reviews on this game are mixed for a reason though. If you want a game and not a job, this probably isn't going to be your thing.

This is not no man's sky.
I am positive.

I used to love this game when I got it, and clocked over 400 hours on it. I've recommended it to a number of friends, and got a few of them similarly hooked.

I've since gone off it, going as far as boycotting it completely. I also feel guilty and embarrassed of recommending it.

Reason? Developers decided that any new "features" they add to the unfinished game that was barely in beta and is in the middle of development, are actually expansions... err... I mean "DLC" that you have to pay extra to "use". I cannot think of any words that can accurately describe this level of sham, and how many things are wrong with it. It's not about the money either. I would have been happy to pay double or tripple or whatever it was when I purchased the game - the game was worth it back then, providing there was a premise to improve and develop what they had further, but on principle, I feel like I have been scammed.

Since the developers decided that their "finished product" was the game at the stage it was at before you were told you had to "pay extra if you wanted to land on planets or continue to enjoy the additional developed content", I will review the game as it was prior to that point.

Which was pretty mediocre at best. Absolutely awesome flight mechanics, smooth gameplay and great graphics. That's about it. Universe was empty and bland. Yeah it was huge, but randomly generating systems gets very repeditive once you've hit system number 294 which looks exactly the same as the prevoius 293 before it (give or take a few planets). Combat was repeditive, Trading was unprofitable, and there was not a lot of weapon selection, or selection to do anything really (missions where once again, randomly generated and repeditive). Oh and there were only ever two types of stations - that's all you would have ever seen - either a station that looked like a D12 dice from D&D, or a station that resembled what would likely exist. The second was especially cool looking and realistic than the former, but there were only ever two types in the entire universe, which made arriving in a new system that you've never been to a very "meh" experience. Oh and two types of an outpost.

Now don't get me wrong, for a game in development, and with the premise to progress it further, what it had was worth supporting, worth playing, and worth getting into. It was awesome. For a finished product, which the developers decided it would have to suffice as through their 'selling model', it was a 2 / 10 game at best.

So yeah, screw you Frontier. This is especially painful and sad due to how much potential this game had (probably still has). Your 'progressive' model is part of the great disintegration of the gaming industry over the past decade. Instead of ressurecting a genre, you've gone and crapped all over it and it's fans.