After what seems like aeons of waiting, the open-ended space sim has returned to engage a new generation of gamers in exploring and exploding across the galaxy. But is Elite Dangerous the epic return we were hoping for? Read on.
Story
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Just as the movies have always told us: Asteroid fields are a great way to elude a pursuer.
When it comes to talking about the story of Elite Dangerous one really has to talk about “stories” plural. Yes, there is an over-arching story concerning the rivalries both between, and within, the various factions, but the impact of the story upon the players of Elite Dangerous is minimal. There is no main storyline in Elite Dangerous that the player can follow by completing a certain sequence of missions. Instead, the player starts life in the galaxy docked at a semi-randomly chosen space station. What she chooses to do from that point on is what will define her story within the game.
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One day, planets too will be explorable.
Characters
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It's all too easy to make the same mistake as Icarus…
As of right now, it doesn’t matter how much of the galaxy you visit on your travels, you will not see single, solitary person who you can just sit down and enjoy a refreshing Neptune Rakia with. This is due in no small part to your pilot’s confinement to the cockpit of his ship, but one would think that the technology that makes Facetime possible would have preserved alongside developments in faster-than-light travel.
Future updates promise to grant pilots the freedom to roam around their ships, and eventually gad about the various space stations in the game. In all likelihood, these updates are a long ways off, but once they do arrive, the horizons of social interaction should be extended significantly.
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The number of space stations avoiding scenic views like this is great.
In the meantime, the only “characters” in the game are the various movers and shakers you will read about on “Galnet” — a galactic news service that updates players about the ongoing story being written for the game by Frontier Developments — are the only characters in the game. For what it’s worth, a lot of these characters do seem to be quite interesting, so if Elite Dangerous ever receives something in the way of story-driven content, it certainly has a strong foundation to proceed from.
Customization
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Awesome paint job options? The game has them.
Presently, there is a total of seventeen pilotable ships in Elite Dangerous. The ships range from the glorified space-junk that is the Sidewinder, to the “might as well be a capital ship” Anaconda.
The ships vary as much in terms of power in power as they do in price. My Cobra could generously be called a “mid-tier” ship, but I’ve had a few exceptionally-skilled Eagle pilots take more than a few coats of paint off.
The less expensive ships in Elite Dangerous are most certainly lower on the cosmic food chain, but skilled pilots who know how to properly outfit their ships can turn even the most modest rust bucket into an indomitable killing machine by exploiting the advantages these ships have over the big boys: usually speed and maneuverability.
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Part of the galaxy map. A small part.
World
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The galaxy in Elite Dangerous lives up to its name.
Without a doubt, Elite Dangerous offers a bigger game world than any game before it. Most games settle with mapping a city, a country, or maybe even a continent; Elite Dangerous maps out an entire galaxy: our galaxy, the Milky Way.
And in case you needed a reminder, our Milky Way contains around 400 billion star systems. Even traveling at speeds many times faster than the speed of light, exploring the entitrety of Elite Dangerous’ galaxy is so vast that a single player has little hope of visiting every star.
At times, Elite Dangerous can be a downright eerie experience. When all that’s separating you from the infinite vacuum outside is the glass of your cockpit, and the only company you have is the low hum of your engines, it’s easy to feel like a miniscule pebble skipping across the ocean — but, in fact, you’re much smaller than that.
Knowing that every star and nebula that you can see really does exist in the game — instead of merely being part of a decorative backdrop — creates a remarkable sense of realism and immersion. The scale of the world really is one of Elite Dangerous’ best features, but it is also the one that most frequently works against it.
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This is mining. It's not as fun as it looks.
Even in the “busier” systems, where there is trade and space traffic aplenty, it is disappointingly rare to come across another human soul. In fact, I have been playing the game since release, and I would estimate that I have encountered about five or six human players in all of that time.
Frontier Developments made the right call in creating what is essentially a scale model of our galaxy for players to get up to mischief in, and I would hate for them to do anything to curtail the game’s scope after release. Here’s hoping, though, that they come up with some ingenious ideas for drawing more players to the same locales.
Gameplay
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Ever wondered what the rings of Saturn look like up close?
Credits are the in-game currency awarded in Elite Dangerous for completing contracts and missions, selling trade goods, and collecting bounties. Maintaining a ship is costly business; with everything from repairs, to refuelling, and rearming costing a pretty penny, especially as you buy more expensive ships and hardware. If your finances bottom out, and you can’t afford to replace that Imperial Clipper you toiled so hard for, you could find yourself flying around in a ship resembling the old garbage scow you started with.
Risk vs. reward is the law of Elite Dangerous’ universe. Sure, cramming your cargo bay full of the finest gold-pressed latinum could net you a windfall big enough to net you a host of ship upgrades, and perhaps even an armed escort or two; assuming you can get your precious cargo across dozens of light years of space. It’s just as likely, however, that a couple of scurvy pirate types will sniff out your wares and proceed to peel away the tin can of your hull for the sparkly delights inside. In that scenario, the outcome will be less a windfall, and more a destitution.
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Ship hulls do a great job of displaying the damage inflicted upon them.
Say that you instead happen to be one of the pirates in the above scenario, though; is attacking the poor, defenceless transport for its cargo a risk-free venture? Hardly. Sure, the transport itself might not pose any great threat to you and your buddy, but what if the authorities should happen to show up? And what if you manage to fend off the authorities, only to have your partner decide that he’s not so keen on splitting the loot after all, and decides to unleash a volley of machinegun fire to perforate your ship and carcass alike? Again, you could be well on the way to the poor house.
Careers
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Watching the sun rise.
As the captain of your own private starship (a “privateer”, if you will) you have a number of spacefaring careers open to you. For those who prefer less violent pursuits, there’s mining, trading and exploring. For those who like littering the cosmos with the debris of enemy ships there’s piracy, bounty hunting, and assassination.
When it comes to the first three, trading is probably the most interesting right now. Mining in its present form involves little more than approaching asteroids and drilling away at them with your mining laser until you gather enough ore and minerals to fill your hold before bustling off to the highest-bidding starport. Exploring, on the other hand, is all about trying to range as far as you can into the un-known universe, and scanning every gaseous cloud and planetoid you find there. The data from those scans can be sold for a pretty penny; providing you find a space station at a good distance from where the data was collected.
Trading it not so simple, though, and that’s what makes it more interesting. It requires mapping demand curves between systems, sourcing resources at the best price, and quickly adapting to market fluctuations. Outbreak of Venusius Tuberculosis on Delta IV? Guess those plague victims are going to be willing to cough up (pun intended) the big bucks for that vaccine you bought for a steal in the Chaeron System then, aren’t they?
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Sometimes you just get lost in the beauty of it all.
Traders who are willing to delve into the black market by selling illegally scavenged or prohibited goods expose themselves to potentially greater profits, but also much greater risks. If the authorities get wise to your smuggling in a couple of tonnes of Arkanian Reefer you will be flagged as an outlaw, and quite possibly shot to pieces. If they catch you doing this in a space station… Well, let’s just say that you’ll need more than the force to make that run.
In fact, breaking the law is not generally a good idea in Elite Dangerous. Aside from generating a criminal bounty that will have every hot-shot bounty hunter eyeing you as their next big “meal ticket”, you’ll also be poorly regarded by most of the factions in whatever system you happen to be running your criminal enterprise in. Factions that hate you will be very reluctant to send any decent contracts your way, and will instead take contracts out on you. If you ever do decide to fly the straight-and-narrow path again, you may well find that redemption does not come easily.
Bounty hunting represents a much safer outlet for your murderous impulses, because it is usually sanctioned by one or more of the controlling factions of a given system. Simply hang around an area that sees a lot of space traffic — e.g. the navigation beacons you will find orbiting most stars — scan any ships that you find there, and shoot them dead if they have a criminal record. Cleaning up criminal scum in this fashion is one of the quickest ways to amass credits in the game; the more egregious the crimes of the pilots you kill, the more you get paid — and sometimes you get paid a whole lot for a single target.
Combat and Controls
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The ship interiors are a lot bigger than you may think.
For veterans of the space-sim genre, Elite Dangerous’ various control schemes will feel immediately familiar. But there are a lot of people who have never played a space-sim before, and Elite Dangerous’ learning curve is very steep indeed. Even when enabling “flight assist” on your ship, which automatically governs the thrusters so that the ship to compensate for inertia, you will still have to become accustomed to moving along multiple axes (pitch, yaw, roll, vertical and reverse thrust). Using a keyboard and mouse, the default control scheme rolls your ship left or right according to mouse movement, rather than turning the ship left or right; making the controls a particular hurdle for gamers accustomed to looking or turning with the mouse, and strafing with the keyboard.
In fact, if you really want to strafe in Elite Dangerous you need to disable the aforementioned flight assist. Without flight assist your behaves in a completely Newtonian way: If you start spinning your ship one way, it will not stop spinning until you engage your thrusters to spin the ship in the opposite direction (called “counter thrusting). I won’t lie, flying without flight assist is incredibly challenging, and I tend to switch back and forth as the situation demands. Once you come to grips with the unintuitive flight model, however, you can, say, rocket towards an opponent before using your lateral thrusters to rotate your ship and keep your weapons trained on them — i.e. strafing your target. Pretty neat, and very effective.
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The universe is full of wonders.
Graphics
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You may be tempted to get a tan near one of these things, but they tend to attract a lot of pirate types.
Elite Dangerous is a game brimming with detail, and the developers (thankfully) keep adding more all the time. The first time you approach the planetary ring of a planet to see the illusion of a smooth, flat surface give way to the dust, ice, and other particulates that compose the rings you will probably be as stunned as I was; it’s just not something that any game has done before.
A lot of other games set in space have avoided having to go to such lengths by relegating trickier objects to static backgrounds, or setting them at distances the player is not able to traverse. Elite Dangerous, on the other hand, has no such luxury. If a player can see it, they can travel to it, and so it has to look good at every possible visible range. Take those glittering diamonds in the dark, otherwise known as stars; in Elite Dangerous you can get close to them… Real close. Close enough to collect hydrogen to replenish your fuel stores, in fact. At that distance, you can observe a given star in all its thermonuclear brilliance: Seething magnetic distortions and arcing coronal mass ejections included. The stars in the game really are a marvel to behold — just don’t marvel so long that you fail to notice your cockpit beginning to smoulder.
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Yes, hundreds of years from Earth and there's still advertising.
Speaking of the cockpit, it is yet another home run for Frontier Developments. Instead of tackling the lesser challenge that just dumping everything on a heads-up-display (HUD) represents, they elected to go all-out and model all the instrumentation and gizmos of the ship interiors in excruciating detail. Better yet, a lot of these gizmos actually correspond to real stuff that your ship is doing: Throttle up, for instance, and you will see your pilot’s hand manipulating the appropriate control stick. Looking to the left or right of the cockpit prompts a holographic display containing all sorts of handy information to appear (e.g. information about your target, the status of the various subsystems on your ship, contracts you have accepted, etc.). It’s a small touch, but one that goes a long way making the player feel like he is interfacing with a real ship, rather than just another game.
Price
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It will be a long time before you can afford one of these bad boys.
Elite Dangerous retails on Steam for $59.99 USD. Given the current state of the game, I do feel that this price is a little steep. For the same amount of money you could buy any one of a dozen more fully-fleshed out games than Elite Dangerous. On the other hand, all the updates that have been released thus far have been free, and with even more ambitious updates planned in the future Elite Dangerous is likely to become better value with time.
Verdict
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One of the sleeker ships on offer.
Elite Dangerous is a game that is both difficult to recommend, and impossible not to. When I have recommended this game to friends in the past, I have often found that I talk a lot more about what the game is going to be, rather than what it is right now. In a lot of ways, Elite Dangerous feels like an “early access” title. Yes, it is extremely polished, the combat is fun and satisfying, and it is beautiful to behold, but it is also a game sorely needs deeper, more varied missions, and more reasons for players to interact cooperatively or competitively.
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Yes, that is a flying space station.
So why am I optimistic about the game’s future? Because Frontier Developments have not only demonstrated their passion and commitment to the project, but also the ability and determination to ensure that the content and features they do implement are rock-solid. I am confident, then, that with the addition of inter-faction warfare, story-driven missions/events, and planetary flight, the skeleton that is Elite Dangerous right now will eventually be an entirely different beast.
