Elite Dangerous

[Fixer]

From the Elite Dangerous RPG:

In the universe of Elite: Dangerous cheap and readily available faster than light travel has allowed humanity to explode across the stars, building new colonies, cities, nations and empires. The galaxy is a rich place, filled with a wealth of minerals, water and life bearing planets. The great nations of the Federation, Empire and Alliance grow wealthier every day, and such wealth attracts powerful people who scheme every day to increase their power.

Space travel is common and affordable. The middle classes of the galaxy own spaceships like twentieth-century families own cars. Owning a spaceship grants tremendous freedom – spacecraft owners are courted all across the galaxy by space stations hungry for rare goods and vital supplies. Politics seldom interferes with trade and even very patriotic worlds such as Nanomam are happy to accept goods and services from those who paint the ‘wrong’ flag on the side of their spacecraft.

For those at the bottom of the heap little has changed since the old Earth dark ages. Planet-spanning mega corporations rule unchecked in large parts of the galaxy employing entire nations of people in call centres, factories, tech support hubs or even as humble stockbrokers. On the planet of Zaonce the miserable masses slave for the planet wide Bank of Zaonce, filling tedious hours buying stocks and shares, selling high and low like robots, receiving none of the gains they make. In revolutionary Eranin the population are expected to perform in weekly parades celebrating their independence from the Federation, even while their leaders ‘redistribute’ the people’s wages into their own back pockets.

This combination of cheap space travel, terrible inequality and a laissez faire attitude towards weapon ownership makes the galaxy a dangerous place. Pirates, mercenaries and political agitators often like to fire first and seldom ask questions later. The police have a terrible arrest rate, but an excellent execution record; in space it’s hard to take prisoners and very few people even try. Add to this the many navigational hazards in space, fierce native creatures on unexplored planets, psychotic cyborg’s with faulty behaviour chips and the terrible greed of the intergalactic elite and you have a dangerous galaxy just waiting to destroy a wandering space pilot.

To survive you’re going to need the best ship, the best equipment, a strong credit account and the skills to back it all up. For in this dangerous galaxy only the elite survive…

I've noticed more that a few people with Elite Avatars hanging around the forums. So I figured I'd start a thread.

Elite Dangerous is a space simulator in the mould of classic 90s pc games. Your ship is a complicated piece of hardware and navigating the nigh incomprehensibly vast emptiness is space is a difficult affair. One that the game barely helps you with.

The first and most important lesson is that Elite Dangerous hates you. If you ever thought you were an awesome Starfighter pilot from all that video games you played and movies you watched. Elite Dangerous wants you to know that if you were ever called to jump into a starship cockpit and save the world from alien invasion mankind would be doomed before you could even figure out how to turn off the windscreen wipers.

As a simulator, Elite Doesn't cut out the general day-to-day aspects of flying a Starship or space truck. Docking is a challenge, a lot of time is spent travelling from place to place.

Outside of that though the game is beautiful. It's glorious to explore. Especially in VR where you can lose yourself in the feeling of being in a real starship cockpit which are all Richly detailed and stylised From the sleek minimalist style of Federal Core Dynamics ships, the glorious luxury of Imperial Gutamaya or the "too cheap to add cable management or paint" Falcon DeLacy. . There's a rich lore to the galaxy, one that's hidden behind a lot of obscure mechanics, and the sound design is incredible.

The best video covering the game I have yet seen is here:

youtu.be/Fa0b2Kd2xhU

So who else is a daring Space Commander?

[PerrySimm]

Unearthed Elite II recently, which is clearly a classic. Can't say why it never showed up on DRADIS before, though... either it was in and out of the game shops well before the mid-90s, or it just never made any waves on this side of the pond. Or maybe it just had bad press?


Cigarettes will take care of that retirement job, eh?

[Fixer]

Actually played Frontier Elite II when it came out.

Still have my old save game game. With my little Blue Eagle MKI registry code: FM-338.
A bit of a cheat. After I had effectively beaten the game there was a bug where you could press just below the button for rubbish on the cargo list, where a button would have been if there was more cargo there. it would jettison nothing, increasing your cargo space by one.

My Eagle effectively became a TARDIS, packing enough shield generators to survive a flight through the sun. The large plasma accelerator fitted to it had a muzzle flare about ten times the size of the ship when it fired. Glorious

Grabbed a screenshot when the Kickstarter came out and I made my pledge.



Of course, remade it for Elite: Dangerous. An absolute pleasure to fly even when I have other more powerful ships in the hangar. I'd like to imagine that it was like a classic car handed down through the family.



Frontier was a great game. Still incredible to this day. Actual newtonian physics. Planetary atmosphere landings. You could fly from Saturn to London, and see the clock tower actually tell the time on the buildings there. An entire galaxy simulated. Must have spent days just trying to perfect gravitational slingshots and fuel scooping.

In the end, it did lose it's charm. My friends and I at School tried to unlock a secret ship called the Mirage as told in the tips guide for Amiga Format. One which required an extreme amount of rank grinding to achieve. It did of course turn out that the entire secret ship was a bamboozle and the latter level military missions which involved nuclear strikes and spy cameras were the last of the content in the game.

Sadly Elite 3: First Encounters never arrived on my system, the Amiga. The PC release was botched by GameTek and was released before it was ready and filled with bugs (so I got accustomed to game publishers ruining franchises with forced deadlines way ahead of the curve). Had to wait 20 years for a sequel.

[Riedquat]

I go back to the 1984 original (where my username and avatar comes from - drew that back when I was at school from the manual cover). Every now and then I dip back into E:D (and it looks and feels downright amazing in VR). Suffers from the usual MP problem of too many ****s, but they're avoidable (and even if you play in public dodging them at least livens things up at times, it's not even that common to run into other players outside certain honeypot locations).

I do like the modernised versions of some of the originals, still very recognisable yet still not looking out of place, the Coriolis station and the classic Cobra Mk III.

[ORCACommander]

indeed the eagle really is a pilot's spacecraft. unfortunately I maybe get fixated on it for a week at a time then ignore it for months and have to relearn my hotass every time

[Fixer]

Solo/Private does make avoiding griefers easy if there's anyone that's constantly causing you trouble. Though I enjoy open play. When you go to a community event station, you get to see all the custom player ships instead of the bland stock versions NPCs use.

It actually reminds me of Ultima Online prior to the Feluca/Trammel split. I used to hate PKers in that game but once the threat was gone I felt really bored.

[Riedquat]

Solo/Private does make avoiding griefers easy if there's anyone that's constantly causing you trouble.

I've always played in Open (barring the odd little bit where I'm trying to work things out, e.g. the last update reset all my key bindings so I went into solo to make sure I'd got everything back to normal). The griefers at least liven things up a bit, and I've had the occasional interesting cat and mouse game with them. Most of the time you never see anyone, and most of the time when you do if there's any interaction it's a "Hi!" and that's it. It's only really an issue when things glitch; the last time that happened to me I couldn't select anything from the panels (so couldn't jump away from a system with suspicious-acting hollow triangles) and I got yanked out of supercruise despite it saying I'd nearly escaped at my end. Still, it's a bad design decision when jerks can easily identify and attack lone ships with groups of more powerful vessels. There should be more uncertainty, and hence more risk (and more reward) for that sort of behaviour.

[Fixer]

You do get the occasional griefers that hang out in Shinrata Dezhra or community events who are as annoying as hell. Getting chain interdicted over and over again when you just want to ship a cargo hold of coffee.

At some point I should probably outfit a new Fer De Lance as a specific space murder revenge ship.

Might even name it the Ben Sisko's Pimp Hand.

[Fixer]

A thing of beauty.

[Riedquat]

They'd still get me anyway, just the advantage of a lot more PvP experience (and probable in-depth investigation of game mechanics and engineer's mods). I did try an FDL before I reset my commander, the seat lining up with the window strut was annoying.

I do like some of the nods back to the original Elite in E:D, such as the "Space Trader's Flight Training Manual" in a pocket in the Sidewinder (only really visible in VR, unless there's a cockpit camera angle now that shows it) and the keyboard at the side in the Cobra MkIII with the same layout as the BBC B's keyboard (the original Elite platform, and you flew the Cobra MkIII in that).