Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter Launched

I guess it is time to break out the Lakon and make some money

I’m definitely interested in the new Material Traders feature of Engineering. If it can get me out of scanning wakes, which is about as exciting as watching grass grow, I’ll be happy.

All the trades are higher to lower rarities. So if you are trying to get a rare wake then having a thousand common ones wont help. But the other way around will, so you can trade in your rare ones for common. So its kind of a backwards designed feature. I mean it CAN be useful if you have more rares of a certain kind and need some extra middling materials, which happens, so there is that.

I switched from the VR version to the flatspace version to have an easier time working out how to play. And the flat version has made me motion sick :/

I’m not enjoying the experience though. It seems like not much game padded out with arbitrarily awkward maneuvering that my phone could handle in real life. My horse in Assassin’s Creed is smarter than my spaceship here.

Piloting, even the little details, is the core of the game. If you don’t enjoy the flying enough to play for that reason, I doubt you will like the game. Because in terms of game design and satisfying game loops, the game is pretty poor.

The game is made for types like me, who get a satisfying game loop out of taking off, flyihng around and landing a simulated craft.

Lol, you mean taking off, flying, docking? ;)

Yeah if you didn’t like piloting the ship there’s not much here for you. Mind you, it does take a little while to get the hang of it but it feels great when you do. I still dock manually every time with no computer assist, I love it so much.

Hey, Assassins Creed camel, head 8 km north to Alexandria, avoiding Roman patrols, passers-by and crocodiles, crossing rivers if you have to. I’ll fly overhead as a hawk and watch.

Hey, Elite viper ship thing, try and land over there… BANGCRASHSPINLOL.

The analogy might make sense if AC:O was an involved camel-riding sim and not much else. ;)

Though I see the point - I mean really, we have self-driving cars now, so this far in the future I should be able to ‘press X to automatically complete mission’. :)

Yeah, Elite is a space flight simulator. If you’re not interested in the details of the flight simulation or enjoying it, you’re not going to like Elite much.

It’s very very good at the core flight sim, fairly poor everywhere outside of that. Unfortunately.

Do any of the later ships have things like… external cameras? A side window?

The Asp Explorer’s cockpit has a great view.

The game itself has an external camera system, so it’s not a gameplay feature in any of the ships.

The ship cockpits are quite varied, and yes some give much better visibility than others. If you want spoilers there’s a playlist here:

There is an external camera suite built in. Its pretty cool. You can either turn on or off your ship controls while in external view. You can take some pretty neat shots as well.

And I have been looking for an excuse to stealth brag about my named nebula (I am up to 9 now) so here are some shots :)

Not very humble to to name a nebula after yourself, now is it.

By name, not nature :)

So I got this the other day.

So far it’s better than the video game.

I’m guessing the Table of Contents looks something like this:

  • 1 - 15: Taking off
  • 16 - 30: Landing
  • 31 - 60: Space Physics and Flight Mechanics
  • 61: Mission Types

There actually is a shockingly robust random mission generator.

You know what’s wild? Supposedly I won that in a drawing during one of Kate Russell’s Twitch streams around the end of 2014, but they never got hold of me to get my residence address (and I suspect that I would have had to pay shipping to the US).