Yeah, Elite Dangerous was mesmerizing for a while. Flying around, enjoying the amazing sound design, was almost hypnotic. But then the illusion breaks and you realize how shallow it actually feels. I uninstalled ages ago and I have no desire to go back - I’d rather play the excellent X4, which more than scratches whatever itch I might have for Elite.
Stellaris was… weird? Paradox promised so much. One person there suggested to me that Stellaris would make me forget Sword of the Stars. And the first few hours of the game were actually promising, but it didn’t take me a long time to realize that it was a game that borrowed ideas from everywhere without understanding what really made them work. I never looked back.
I guess, in a way, Stellaris was less of a disappointment than Sword of the Stars 2. But oh well, it was sad anyway.
I would agree that the X games like X4 are better Elite games than Elite Dangerous. Even as buggy as they are, they’re fun single-player sandboxes that get the gameplay right, and what you do actually matters in the game.
Same here. And their decision to not support VR properly anymore mattered a lot to me. Elite was glorious in VR even if there wasn’t a lot of interesting things to do.
Yeah. The VR cockpit experience was second to none. I miss that sound design and the (occasionally) enthralling visuals.
If they had just maintained their momentum from the first couple of years? It’d be pretty glorious. Navigating through lighting-wracked storms to reach a fuel processing depot hanging in the upper atmosphere of a Jovian world. Undocking your submersible to explore beneath the waves of an ocean planet. I would have been fine if they had stopped short of full-on earth-like’s, or limited the earth-likes to some narrow flight corridor to a base or whatever.
Instead, they released horizons, which was a good foundation, and then just stalled.
I don’t see why every game has to keep growing though. What’s there is great. Just ignore odyssey. It’s a great game, just don’t expect to spend 50 hours with it. Enjoy your 10-20 hour space sim experience as a single player game and be happy! And move onto the next space sim, like X4, or whatever. Just because the Elite universe is big doesn’t necessarily mean you have to spend countless hours there. There’s enough gameplay systems there to get some great fun out of the combat, the exploring of new systems, of mining, and trading via taking certain goods long distances across the galaxy.
Well, as a game I only dabbled with, my counter tells me I spent… nearly 70 hours on it.
Have to be well motivated by something, in this case the money, if you don’t get any praise from dabblers like me, and mostly angry rants from people who spent hundreds of hours if I am to trust what I read online ;D
That’s a valid point. I’ve actually been holding off on trying out E:D on the Xbox because I wanted to wait for Odyssey to be released. I guess I am no longer bound by that!
Yeah, I hit a point where I had a bunch of nice ships and some decent money from void opals, and took a break again. Then they announced the lack of vr support in the new expansion and I never had the urge to go back. Ended up uninstalling.
For me they’ve worked Stellaris into an okay game. They still are making massive subsystem changes like the Unity rework they just did. It will always be a disappointment though since it will never live up to what was wanted (or in some cases presented to us). Hoping they start off better with the next iteration.
Yeah, but for me Elite was all about VR, and there isn’t (I dont think) any other space sims at that level. I was looking forward to Elite as a platform for evolving experiences, which is why I was an early lifetime passer.
Oh, interesting. I think it’s been a couple of versions since I tried out Evochron. Didn’t realize there was a current version, much less supporting VR. The graphics were always pretty unimpressive, but I had fun with bumbling about as a crappy mercenary. Will give it a look.
Yeah I’ve got one too and I feel the same way. I reckon the game will shut down within a couple of years, as this seems like the last gasp of a drowning game.
Disappointed by this news. I enjoyed dipping in a few times a year. Exploring and immersing myself in the universe. Was never bothered about planet exploration.
On the assumption that the game is now going to die a slow death what other titles scratch the space exploration itch? X4/Everspace?
Approaching Infinity, if you don’t care at all (really, at all) about the graphics is a great game of space exploration, although it’s more in the Starflight register, not the Elite one.
Outer Wilds is all about exploration, but it is a bit freakish and much narrative driven, in a small but very intricate system.
Rodina is really an immersive little prototype, but is again in a limited system (although the distances are realistic, unlike Outer Wilds) and, well, a prototype, so not really a game.
None of those three games offer the vistas or strange feeling of abandonment as when you are exploring outside the colonized worlds like Elite Dangerous though.
Damn, I want to play ED again!
