Elite’s in a weird place. They have this online component, and have tied everything into that idea, what with the background simulation and such. And yet even though it’s an online game, and it’s what… 3 years since it released? You still can’t even do a mission with a friend! I fire this up with my buddy and we’re both kind of looking at each other just thinking “now what?”. There’s literally nothing to do together, aside from maybe blowing up some pirates at a RES.
It’s the weirdest damn game. The attention to detail of the audio system, of the flight systems, of the whole stellar forge thing is just mindblowing. Flying a ship is so superb that the banal tasks like launching and landing a ship are a joy. It’s like they did all the hard stuff, and then… completely neglected an actual game or game design.
To me, the resource extraction sites are a microcosm of the game. The setup is good: you have a resource-rich asteroid field that NPCs are mining. And there are NPCs attacking those miners. So that right there should set up something awesome: you can go mine for your wealth, be a pirate and steal that wealth, or maybe even play cop and go hunt down the baddies.
Yet everything is completely out of whack. The resources being mined are utter garbage and not even worth your time. Who wants to spend all that time and effort to get a ton of a mineral worth 800 credits? Worse, who wants to become a criminal to steal, at best, a few thousand credits worth of cargo from a miner? Instead, you can shoot down a pirate and get 80,000 credits in a quick bounty payment.
None of it makes any sense, just like the rest of the game. Silly bastards.