Multi Elite - Dangerous by David Braben

Two years later, I've been sucked back in by a recent visit to a Mars exhibit - the one that tours the country, where they suspend a giant printed cloth illuminated model of Mars in theatres and sports halls, and you can walk around it and inspect its surface. The conversation happened: can you visit Mars in that Elite game of yours? Why yes, I thought, you can.

But guess what? It's hidden behind another grind! You have to unlock a certain Federal Navy rank to get into Sol and see our solar system. So I'm on my way to Orochi to run courier missions until I'm allowed in...if anyone knows a faster method, be a darling and let me know.

 

I was grinding a good while back and I seem to remember doing courier runs was a good money/rank earner.

Especially evacuating people out of stations that had been attacked. This is going back a bit now and the specifics are lost to me.

Did my shoulder in and had to ditch it for a while and never went back. Yet.

Crap, yeah, not much help, sorry

 

TBH, I'm surprised to hear that people are still actively playing it regularly, I though the general consensus was that Frontier have done their absolute best to totally sabotage the game recently.

 

I went back to it when I got a VR headset, tbh most of my time was spent just looking about my ships and traveling about finding places to tag as first found.

 

I haven't bought the new expac, that's for sure. Looked baffling and naff.

Guess what tho? I got to Sol finally, and found that Mars is depicted as a terraformed atmospheric world! So you can't land on it and it's useless as a visual reference. Good sci-fi world building? Maybe. But I'm pissed off. Nobody plays this game for the sci-fi world building, cos it's just bad at that. They play it to go "oooooh" at astronomical stuff or to go pew pew in space dogfights. Mars is probably the first thing ANYONE given a space sim game/tool wants to visit and look at up close. But no, let's make it different and lo-res and inaccessible!

Sometimes a pithy saying can stick and ruin something for you, and for me, it was when someone described ED as "a swimming pool ten miles wide and one inch deep". It really is.