1621

Short answer: Its good at what it does. Whether there is enough of what it does is entirely down to personal taste.

1622

Ooo, thanks for sharing that. That’s a useful bit of info I’m going to store away when I run into miscellaneous routing issues in the future.

1623

Would you enjoy a modern remake of the classic Elite experience, using great graphics and probably the best sound design ever to grace a video game (the soundscape of the game is just stupidly good), instead of relying on your imagination to fill in the empty wireframes? If so, this game is a no-brainer. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, just get the game.

Do you prefer a game to provide guidance or structure on what you should be doing and why? Are you looking for a “Space MMO” where you can explore the galaxy side-by-side with hundreds or thousands of other players? Are you looking for an experience where your individual accomplishments and contributions will shape the world around you? If so, I would say it’s probably going to be disappointing to mediocre.

And one other thing to note since this is a bugaboo of mine: Co-op / group play isn’t fully implemented yet, IMO. The design docs talk about slaving your drives to other players in your group so you can enter/exit jumps at the same time, but that’s currently not there yet. Group members also do not show up differently on your HUD (a different color would be nice, at least). So if you’re looking to play this co-op with friends, it’s quite rough around the edges at the moment. If that’s a requirement, I’d probably wait to see if grouping functionality gets fleshed out during Gamma (they already added voice chat, which is nice).

1624

If i buy the game now can i get into the gamma or i have to wait until the game launches?

1625

I’ve never played a Elite game so…

Do you prefer a game to provide guidance or structure on what you should be doing and why

Yes

Are you looking for a “Space MMO” where you can explore the galaxy side-by-side with hundreds or thousands of other players?

Not really

Are you looking for an experience where your individual accomplishments and contributions will shape the world around you?

Yes

If so, I would say it’s probably going to be disappointing to mediocre.

Mmm

1626

Yeah the turn away from single player/solo play is a real downer for me. Was really looking forward to good old solo space sim. Damn MMORPG taking over my solo experience.

1627

I’ve been playing primarily solo and having a great time, dunno what y’all are gripin’ about.

1628

It’s a space sim and you are a lone pilot out in the scary void, you’ve got a measly hundred credits to your name and a loaner ship. You can play it like Euro Truck Simulator 3300AD, a bounty hunter, a pirate, or smuggle illegal goods for profit. There’s also a simulated Milky Way of 400 billion stars which you can explore. You can then sell your exploration data to NPCs. Whichever path you choose, the game typically revolves around you trying to make money via the activities above so you can upgrade dozens of ship components or purchase one of ~25 or so ships (I think that’s the estimate they have for release or shortly thereafter).

What you are most definitely not is the hero of the galaxy or center of the universe. Space is really really big and you are very very small, and the game conveys that pretty well, IMO.

The combat is great and as I said before the immersion levels are quite high, so if you’re interested in the “sim” part of Space Sim or some fun space combat, I think it’s a great game. It’s a sandbox, though, so you need to enjoy setting your own goals for your own reasons, the game doesn’t provide a narrative or guide you to do certain things, and there is no story (other than what you create yourself). This is all just very much my opinion, but I hope that helps.

There’s really nothing MMO about the game. They haven’t turned away from solo play at all (that’s all I play thus far), there’s just no offline mode. There’s a huge communication issue, IMO, because so many people jump into the game expecting an MMO and are bewildered when it’s anything but that. I’ve lost count of the number of posts I’ve seen asking for global chat, Guilds, “dungeons”, and other MMO trappings. It’s just not that kind of game.

1629

I had ED up for a few hours on twitch over the last few days trying to get a feel for it. The best summary of the gameplay in it seems to be this -

NRYja8k.jpg1440×4215

It sure is beautiful and the sound is great but deep down I’m all about the gameplay. I’m still going to watch this one close but I think it’ll need a couple expansions before I consider it worthy. To be fair that seems to be the plan for ED anyways as KS backers get free expansions. ED actually reminds me a lot of Daggerfall, amazingly huge game but utterly dead and pointless in virtually everything. All you could really do is grind for Daedric gear in Daggerfall. Once that was accomplished there wasn’t any reason left to play. How many players would keep playing ED if they had all the ships?

If they ever get around to adding stuff like this to ED it’ll probably be amazing:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6305 - Design Discussion Archive on Background Simulation, possible this goes live Dec. 16th!

http://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/2nclc0/the_game_is_utterly_lifeless_and_ultimately/ - found this an interesting discussion

1630

Just a quick note on those comments, only the Kickstarter backers (like myself) that paid £80 for the ‘All future expansions’ level (and upwards, as reward tiers stacked) will be getting expansions for ‘free’. So if you Kickstarted it for less than that £80 level you will have to buy the expansions separately.

I love Daggerfall, i’ve been playing it on and off with one char for over ten years now, so if ED approaches that level of hard-core overlaid ontop of that level of character detail (i like to specialize in languages in Daggerfall), then it might hold my attention.

@ TurinTur, Elite Dangerous is more a fancy graphics upgrade of the original game:

Rather than a fancy graphics upgrade of the sequels, Frontier and FFE (FFED3D + the AndyJ mod is more in that ball park):

But it adds a MP aspect to that original game design, and has no offline ability.

1631

Still can’t connect. Thanks for mentioning this, someone else in the Frontier forums suggested it as well, but I have a normal landline phone and a combined modem/router so there’s nothing to get in the way except software settings, which are all default and so logically there should be nothing blocking anything. Nothing about this makes any sense unless the router has a fault/issue that only manifests itself in Elite: Dangerous, or my ISP has something weird going on (other Internode customers are playing this fine). All I can hope is that Frontier implements a normal multiplayer setup by release so people don’t have to set up port forwarding on their routers (a common requirement judging from the forums there). I could buy a new modem/router, but that seems needlessly expensive just to play this game, and I don’t even know if that will fix it.

1632

Well, FWIW I think it’s freaking amazing. There’s all that above, plus smuggling (finding lost cargo out in space and taking it to a black market to sell, while avoiding pirates AND space cops). To be sure, it still has some bugs, but the scale of what they’ve done here (and continue working on to perfect) is impressive.

BTW, re: Twitch in a PC browser, does anyone know if the quality settings are adjustable, as with YouTube? Obviously it can’t be higher bandwidth that what the stream is putting out there, but I don’t see an option to lower it. There do seem to be such options in the Twitch apps for iPod and Android.

1633

:’(

Playing the training missions is like being given the keys to a Ferrari and only being allowed to drive around the showroom. I’m definitely not one that’s looking for MMO bells and whistles in this game. I wanted a modern Elite, and that’s what we appear to have. Having a modern Frontier is next (without the bugs this time) and that’s definitely on their post-release plans. I’d much rather have planet landing than first person stuff though, although the last newsletter implies they’re going to do it the other way around. Adding more missions, more content, more awesome out-of-the-way exploration stuff is obviously on their agenda and it’s easy to implement once the core Elite experience is there. Being able to encounter and team up with other plays is icing.

1634

I just had an OMG moment in the game! I’ve finally been figuring things out and I’m enjoying the fact I’m in the middle of BFE. The systems I explore are all Liberal but they’re being pummeled by the Federation so right off the bat I have to decide… do I want to be friends with Democrats or the Feds? Whoever I choose is my ticket out of here and I can’t choose both. So tough choice right off the bat and I can’t see anything as all the systems around me are unexplored (which is cool because I’m making good money selling cartographic’s and it’s fun discovering new places).

Then my OMG moment. I’m en-route to deliver some aluminum and I see a small solar system I hadn’t explored. It’s close so I change my destination and Warp to it. Suddenly I came crashing out of warp, alarms blaring and I am sandwiched between two massive stars! One yellow and one reddish orange. It’s crazy, my ship is crackling and melting so I try to scoot as away as fast as I can to lower my temperature. But the stars are so big, they continue to fill most of my vision. I yelled to my wife like I’d just broken my arm to have her come over and see. My wife, surprisingly, is also incredibly impressed. While still taking damage I scan the closest star and go to check the map and what I thought was a binary star system is actually a trinary star system! WOW! But for some reason I cannot find the 3rd sun. After ~10 minutes I’m far enough away my heat starts to dip to a more proper temperature so I repair the systems as far as they’ll go and I zoom in to scan the second star. Because both stars are so close this is a very dangerous task but I come away just a bit more scarred with the data intact. I look around some more and I’m befuddled with the 3rd star’s absence, but check my time and see I’d already spent some 30 minutes in the system which left me with just 10 minutes to deliver my Aluminium cargo. Thinking I can’t afford any more fines, I shoot off complete my delivery and wiped out… went to bed. Stupidly, I did not have my NVidia recording stuff setup yet, so I have nothing to show of the experience. I’m about to hop back in to look again but I’m still puzzled why I couldn’t find that 3rd star. The way it appears on the map is two stars which orbit each other, and the orbiting group orbits the master star. But they “appear’ to be right on top of each other. The binary stars sure are, as there is little distance between their rims. I really can’t describe how amazing it was to have those 2 stars filling up my 30” monitor, alarms screaming, wires crackling, heat haze effect blurring my visions and the yellow color just bursting out of my screen like a tanning bed gone berzerk.

and now to calm down a bit…

I’m dumb! I thought the current group function was a guild. But it is literally just… a group. I’ll always make sure to launch in group mode though so hopefully we can run into each other. There are 4 in iur group now, and I’m not sure what the max is yet. But if you don’t get a response from me make sure you post here.

1635

KK - do you have Amazon Prime in Australia? If so I’d suggest buying a router to see if it works with the knowledge you can always return it. Then you’d have the peace of mind to know exactly where the fault lies. If the router works you can possibly keep, if it does not, ship it back (get your money back) - and you know the fault lies either:

A. Your laptop’s communication with your router.
B. Your router’s communication to your ISP.

If you have a bigbox store that sells routers and a decent return policy I’d do the same. No reason to not know for sure if it’s a faulty router or not, and if your router has issues with this, it means it will have issues with other titles in the future as well. I’d be curious to know if you installed Elite on another person’s computer and had them over to their house if it would be the same issue. Also, can you plug in directly to bypass your router via a wired connection? Plug straight into your cable modem?

1636

Cool story about the binaries. I was born about 140 LY from Sol, and as soon as I found out how, I picked up my freagle and flew to the home planet. Just because. On the way I discovered many things, blew up some pirates and had a whale of a time. At Sol there was little to do, but I noticed I had another system listed in the permits window: ‘founders world’. I typed it into the search box in the nav map. It was out there. So off I went.

I have made the founders’ world my home base for now, making a tidy profit making trade runs in its vicinity. One of my regular haunts is a trinary system with a white dwarf as the primary. That makes for truly hairy entries because its a tiny, very hot and very heavy little bastard star. It will kick you out of warp if you do not steer vigorously right upon entry. But you can’t beat about 1k/tonne for profits ;-)

I’m now up to a cobra, slowly decking it out in C and B class gear. Once she’s all kitted out I will go a-travelling again.

1637

For anyone who needs an excellent joystick but are on a tight budget… grab this now!
T-Flight HOTAS X for $35. I doubt it will ever be cheaper and you will never get a better value.

http://www.amazon.com/Thrustmaster-T-Flight-Hotas-Flight-Playstation-3/dp/B001CXYMFS/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1417424555&sr=1-1&keywords=thrustmaster

1638

Damm you, Brian Rubin, costing me money!!! (I was at your Twitch stream.)

God I am so bad at flying my ship. I have done the canister mission several times while I come to grips with this friggin Xbox gamepad.

(edit) And yeah, I’m probably buying one of those above things too. Damm you Brian Rubin! (/edit)

1639

Oh wow! So, were you a kickstarter backer? I wish I’d known about the kickstarter before it was over. 1k/tonne per profit. Jealous! BTW, did you know there may be another wipe when the game is officially goes live?

1640

I’ve installed it on my laptop, which uses the wireless network, and my desktop, which is connected by ethernet to the router. The router is a combined router/modem, so I can’t bypass it.

We have a few big stores here, and while they tend to have returns policy they usually operate on credit notes rather than money back. However, I’ll head into a couple of them tomorrow and see what my options are.