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.

 

All the chat in another thread about HOTAS and space sims, and the impending colonisation update, has got me very tempted to jump back in…

Though I’m fairly sure the last thing I was doing was a passenger run to Sagittarius A and I was most of the way there… If that’s the case, getting back is going to be an utter pig…

Might catch up on ObsidianAnt first to try and get a handle on the current state of play, or the overall community “feeling” towards ED… I had a nose around the subreddit earlier, but, as you’d expect, it was filled with fawning praise and seemed to paper over anything that might be construed as a shortcoming. Of course, dissenting voices get downvoted to oblivion…

 

The ED community is so toxic on every level I ended up playing Solo. I discount anything they say about the game, positive or negative, because they've all lost their marbles. Endless griefers/gankers, PvP tryhards sniping you on arrival at stations, Powerplay weirdos zoning in and berating you for not aligning with whatever meaningless mission run they were doing, goblins with 5000 hours camping in the Steam Update comments moaning and wailing about every tiny change like FDev has personally urinated on their mothers' graves, minmax community elites laughing at you for not knowing how to spend a week optimising your engineered modules and having to ask, wannabe-wolf-of-wallstreet bros aggressively debating the optimal money making strats and jumping on unrelated Reddit posts to **** on amateur players for not having enough money / farming suboptimal places / using suboptimal ships. Just...the sheer, unbridled - I would once have said autism, but I know autistic people and they aren't toxic, antisocial, dogmatic or obsessive, so I'll revert to "toxicity". The sheer toxicity of it all. Why does flying a pretend ship around a pretend galaxy turn people into Lord of the Flies?

It's a shame because it's such a wonderful, lovingly made, unique game. But as so many devs have ruinously discovered over the years, you can't choose your players.

The only people I have time for in that game are the Fuel Rats. Hands down the most noteworthy and lovely thing to happen in this, or any space sim. I called on them twice and both times got emotional. They're righteous dudes.

I wish there was a fourth game mode - Solo, but the Fuel Rats are allowed in.

Anyway to answer your question, the game doesn't get worse over time but it does tend to get harder and more grindy whenever they release content (guardians, engineers, superexpensive ships, freighters, xenos) so I expect the recent changes have continued that trend. But if you do fire it up, report back how you get on, because I too have an orphaned account sat on there somewhere with an explorer ship stranded on some forgotten expedition, and I saw a Steam notification recently about a 'Cobra mk5' that made me go "oooooh..."

 

I did actually fire it up again yesterday . Although it was a very brief dalliance - I probably spent no more than 45 minutes in game, mostly just poking around various ship & starbase menus to try and re-familiarise myself...

Thankfully I'm not stuck in the arse end of nowhere. Can't remember the name of the station I'm docked at, but it's a few jumps away from Sol and has a few ships in storage. Can't remember what they all are, but it looks like there's a few different role-specific ships. The only one I do remember is the one I'm currently sat in, an Anaconda. I've got some vague memories about investing a lot of time (and in-game money) into finding the most optimal upgrades for that ship... I apparently have some 200m 'credits' in the bank and I have no idea whether that actually means anything these days - it's probably been a good 4 years since I last fired up this game!

I do want to check it out in VR again, because that really blew me away a few years back. Maybe I'll dive back in over the weekend if I get some time.

 

I thought it was supposed to be a game, not some corpo business sim.

 

That’s EVE Online you’re thinking of

 

Recently been trying to play this for the first time. I have to say I've never had my ass kicked by a game so hard. I got through the training tutorial (twice) and somehow, as if by blind luck managed to get myself set up with a mission which was to kill the pirate known as Bob. Bob is an elusive bugger it seems. First time I panicked and joined in an unrelated fight and immediately blew up, second time round I'm just going round and round a planet wondering where Bob is

edit: I have now landed on said planet, this is new.

 

Yup that's Elite Dngerous, here's your ship, have fun, whatdayamean you want to know how it all works?

Good luck with everything, I played it for over 1000 hours in the end...

 

Any sign of Bob yet?

 

After calling out the fuel rats and feeling like a right balloon I asked for some advice and yeah bob showed up and got himself killed but boy was I chasing him for a while. Kept going past him in FSD and couldn't work out how to slow down.

 

Oh yes, the have i locked onto the signal, have I matched speed oh **** it's behind me dance. That at least gets easier very quickly.

 

haha yeah, I've been doing that dance alright. I have to say though I may have been wrong about this not being for me. There IS a lot to take in but I suppose it's made it more rewarding? After 17 hours I've left the starting zone and even the lowest paid combat missions are getting me killed, I guess I should have figured out mining etc first.

I'm surprised bit-tech doesn't have some sort of group?

 

I did try to get back into this recently… But at the same time I was also trying to get through FFVII Remake before Rebirth came out…

But both of them got knocked sideways by a fresh relapse into my Vampire Survivors addiction, so now that’s all I’ve been playing for weeks.

EDIT:

There probably was in the earlier days of the game. These days I doubt you could get more than 3 or 4 people together who’d want to play it…