Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter Launched

I’m surprised that they haven’t toned down the profits from mining, but I guess they figure at least it gets people doing something? I’m sitting at almost $400m now and I’ve added an alliance chieftain, a type-9, and a Krait mk II since I had the yaw issues. I’ve jumped through the last couple trade ranks very quickly and only have 5% to go for elite.

I assume the carriers are going to cost enough that the current mining profits won’t make a huge difference.

I’ll probably never get a carrier because I’m so half-assed about earning money. I just putter around. A bit of trade, a bit of exploration/scanning, a bunch of bounty hunting. If I do two million in an hour that’s a pretty good session. I like a slower progression through the ships and components.

I kinda’ don’t want to start mining because it seems like it makes everything else superfluous, money-wise. Of course, if I don’t read the guides I can probably just mine in my typical non-optimal way and have more parity with the other jobs.

I’ve enjoyed the core mining for void opals. I’m not sure that I would like the painite mining that is all the rage right now. With core mining you have to find an asteroid with the right color, shape, and fissures to bust open. From what I’ve seen on twitch it seems like with the painite mining people just randomly shoot things with prospector limpets until they find one with the material they want.

I’ve been doing a bit of exploring the past couple of sessions to see if I can finish off my explorer rank. I finished leveling felicity farseer with exploration data, and hopefully with finish this other engineer as well.

Finally checking in here for the first time in a while!

I just wanted to post this here in case it happens to anyone else (I may have already earlier… I can’t remember). It is likely it isn’t what you encountered, but I had my joystick do something similar and it was because it initialized itself with me accidentally leaning on it. This was either when my computer first booted up or when I first launched Elite; I believe it was the former as even the joystick application was showing it not aligned outside of Elite. Quick reboot while not touching anything and all was good!

May have to fire this up again too, but I admit the learning of all the controls again holds me back too.

Whatever happened to the storyline bits with the aliens?

Tons of hours in Elite, but I haven’t spent that much time out of the bubble. So, I took my Asp out to Maia, which is home to Obsidian Orbital and is a bit of a hub for Thargoid activity. Took the slow road on the way there and did plenty of scanning.

Since turning in my explorer info on the planetside station instantly leveled up my relationship with the feds and gave me some high-paying transport missions, I decided to have my Type 6 transferred over for some space trucking.

My first mission sent me to Artemis Lodge 6 LY away, and holy cow … it’s absolutely the most beautiful location for a station I’ve seen in Elite. As you near the planet, you see a set of white rings which are so bright they’re nearly blinding. The station itself is actually located right at the edge of the rings. So, it’s backdropped by that white arc, the slowly tumbling rocks, and a gorgeous, looming blue sun.

Was playing VR, so I got out of my chair (virtual and real-world) and just stood by the big Type 6 windows, watched the activity around the station, and listened to the chatter on the comms. It was probably the most immersive experience I’ve ever had in VR. If I didn’t have to shut down for the night I probably would have stood there for another half an hour, pretending to be a jaded space trucker who – every now and then – can still appreciate these sorta’ moments.

Almost fell on my face because I leaned forward to rest a hand on the ship’s console.

<3

Nice post man, thanks :)

I need to get back to this game at some point.

Looks like the much-rumored ‘space legs’ expansion may be coming to Elite in the future -

Space legs and atmospheric flight!! Super excited for this.

Always remember, however: MVP. Minimum viable product. That’s what Frontier does best.

So, space legs = being able to walk forward (and possibly backwards) on a fixed path. Some head movement, but only if you’ve ground out 5,000,000 space gazarbos.

And atmospheres: blue gradient backgrounds on moons.

Still no planet that isn’t a lifeless rock?

How is this different from a rover, onlyslower?

No interest. Still too salty after they gutted exploration. Also this looks purely combat focused. I dont care about shooting things.

Haven’t played the game yet, but curious about this comment - how did they change/gut exploration from earlier iterations?

I seem to recall some mention back in the day of barren planets with atmospheres first, then lush planets. But ED development has slowed down so much compared to those first heady years, who knows if that will come to fruition.

I’m not very excited about space legs, because I play in VR and I am all about the cockpit experience. Which is great in ED, at its core, but the gameplay updates have forgot about the fun. Like, it’s mostly just fiddly stuff. Scanning minigame, mining minigame, grindy ship upgrades, etc.

Hopefully they have some other things up their sleeves for 2021. They have great tech, good graphics and art design, amazing sound design, and pretty fun pew-pew. Just need a better game to wrap that all up in.

I hopped back in for a bit at the end of last year I think, and did some of the new mining + exploration. Bought and upgraded a number of ships, but got tired of it again. I haven’t been on since and uninstalled a while back. I’m sure I’ll jump in again at some point.

This game. The tech remains impressive, the feel of flying a ship around a solar system is fantastic, but it’s married with some of the blandest game design I’ve ever experienced. It remains such an incredibly frustrating experience for me.

I could see Frontier’s engineers making this incredible experience where you can launch from a space station, fly to another star system, enter the atmosphere on a planet, disembark in your rover, get out on foot and see a randomly generated outpost/base that is functionaly exactly the same as the unlimited number of other randomly generated outpost/bases you will encounter. And the only thing to do is either the same mission of sneaking in and stealing/sabotaging something or waiting for Outlaws to spawn that reward you with a bounty and the occasional resource that you need to grind endlessly to add various doodads to your firearm. Assuming you can kill them before the cops show up and kill them all before you can fire a shot.

The feel of sitting in a cockpit and flying around the various ships is top tier in my book but my God the game is so bland. As much as I love space games, I don’t know if I can muster up the enthusiasm especially after watching what they’ve put out over the last few years.

It’s pretty sad that this and Star Citizen are the most disappointing let downs to come out of space gaming in a long time (ever?) when if you put the good parts of each together they have the potential to make something exceptional.