If ever an experience that absolutely immersed you and made the hours melt away, it's this.
User Rating: 9 | Elite: Dangerous PC
Elite: Dangerous has been on my radar ever since its crowdfunding campaign in the days of yesteryear. After the blueballs of the PC release of Arkham Knight, I wasn't about to go for a third playthrough of Witcher 3, so I needed something to play. I had been toying with the idea of E:D for quite a while, so I decided to take the plunge. That was a couple weeks ago, and I am already at around sixty hours. I got one of those fancy Saitek X52 HOTAS controllers, and I've tried my hand at trading, mining, smuggling, and I have settled into quite a lucrative career as a bounty hunter. I check the forums daily. I use Coriolis.io to mod my ship on my phone while I am waiting in line to buy groceries. It's always on my mind. And everyone who has seen my setup and seen me play it is begging me to help them build gaming PC's. I've got a potential wing of three now. So what is it about E:D that gets in your head and stays there? It has one quality in particular that is shared by Dark Souls, and it's the one thing about that series that can turn off new players as easily as it entrances them: hard knocks learning. Like in Dark Souls, players rely on the shared knowledge and experiences of the other players from all over the world to help them make decisions, and to discover the game's intricacies. Sure, there is a .pdf manual that has all the info, but just like studying accounting, what you read in a book isn't exactly what you're likely to experience in practice. Little things like setting module priority so your cargo hatch and frame shift drive don't use power when your weapon hardpoints are deployed, or binding a shield cell to a button rather than a weapon fire group to easily re-up shields in the middle of combat, or where the best bounty hunting locations are. All these things are learned both by repeated attempt and failure, and learning from the repeated attempts and failures of others. In just a few days of combing forums, reddit, player guides and manuals, I had a comprehensive (but unmistakably incomplete) knowledge of many of the game's primary systems. There are simple tutorials that familiarize you with flight, basic combat, and landing procedure, but when you're out in the galaxy after loading up for the first time in your brand new Sidewinder... well... I read it on a forum: it isn't about whether or not you'll die, just a matter of how soon. Yes, this is a game about messing up and learning from failure. Just last night I had 240,000 credits in bounties and was cruising to a station to collect when I spotted an imperial clipper. My viper is capable of taking those monsters down, but I was already a bit worse for wear from a long bounty hunting run. I got greedy. I died. I lost all that money. Wasn't the first time. Won't be the last. But you're here to read about whether or not you should buy this bizarre niche game. Space sims don't come around very often, and between this, No Man's Sky, and Star Citizen, the genre seems to be having something of a resurgence. I am going to attempt to make the case for why you should play this excellent and absorbing experience. The game starts with little fanfare. You start at a station in a Sidewinder ship that you received from a mysterious benefactor, along with a thousand credits. That's literally all the game gives you. You have a ship, and a bit of cash. You figure out what to do now, champ. one look at the galaxy map, and you realize you've got a daunting task ahead of you. I looked at the shipyard at a station early on and saw all these awesome ships you could buy. Then I saw the price tags. A few hundred thousand credits seems almost insurmountable at the beginning of the game, to say nothing of the Anaconda's 150,000,000+ price tag. But I found my way early on into some sweet smuggling contracts that saw my fortunes rise and I got myself a big rig to haul more illicit contraband. And damn it. I was having a blast. You see, how you make money is entirely up to you, and there are a lot of ways to do it. You can trade goods between stations for a nice profit, or you can engage in piracy, using a module called a hatchbreaker limpet to open the cargo bays of other ships to steal their cargo. You can equip a discovery scanner and make cash by visiting far-flung star systems and scanning the celestial bodies there and selling the information to other systems. You can be a bounty hunter, acting as de-facto lawman, protecting the small business owners of the galaxy from the ruffians that mean to destabilize the economy. You can smuggle drugs or other contraband. On and on it goes. This is part of the reason the game is always online- what you do, like trading certain commodities from one station to another, affects the galactic economy, and the local job market for other players. If one player goes to an agricultural station and drops off fifty crop harvesters, the next player who was thinking the same thing may get a lower price because that station's demand for the items just went down. And yes, this is an MMO at its heart. While I've only run into a handful of other players, it's often been interesting, with goofy comm chatter and occasionally a threat that if I don't jettison all my cargo, I'll need to be scraped off their windshield. It's a universe that makes you want to role-play, even if it's just a little. When I'm on approach to a station, I get immense satisfaction from hitting the switches on my HOTAS controller to let down the landing gear and use my lateral thrusters to land. And I imagine many other players similarly enjoy the role-playing opportunities, whether you're a trucker in space, a pirate, or a miner. And this vast world is yours to explore to your heart's content from the brilliantly designed cockpit interface. You have an intuitive three-dimensional map sensor, shield readout, navigation and targeting panel, and info panels, all projected holographically in front of you. It looks absolutely magnificent, and you can enable a free-look option that lets you look around the cabin during hyperspace or when you're just flying around, and it looks stunning. The game's art style is consistent, well-realized, and very polished. A question I've gotten a few times is about the "flow" of the game, and this is a tough one to answer because it depends on how you want to make money. In the end, that's the primary goal of the game: MAKE MONEY. Just do it. Any way you can. Any way you like. For bounty hunting, you can check the bulletin board at a space station for high-profile assassination or bounty contracts, then warp to the system where the target was last seen, and then look for them. How do you look for someone in an area the size of a star system? That sounds absolutely ludicrous, doesn't it? Well, that brings me to how you get around. When jumping from system to system (a distance of light years), you use your frame shift drive to engage hyperspace, allowing near-instant travel between unfathomably long distances. When you're in the system, you use what's called "supercruise" to travel the vast distances between planets, stations, and activity zones. Miners will want to check out resource extraction zones like asteroid fields and the rings of giant gas planets. Pirates will also want to check these places out, because a bunch of defenseless miners with cargo bays full of refined precious metals sounds like an easy score. Bounty hunters also want to check these places out because they're full of pirates. Pirates with sweet, sweet bounties on their heads. And I'll be damned if I let those awful pirates hustle those small business owners like that. All the activities are structured so that just about any profession can get in on the action somehow, just about anywhere, provided you have the right equipment and knowledge. When out in supercruise, unidentified signal sources will pop up randomly while you're travelling. These are the equivalent of E:D's random encounters. The target of the bounty contract you have may be hiding out in one, or maybe you'll be suddenly caught in the middle of a Mexican standoff between two rival gangs. Maybe you'll come across a massive Type-9 Heavy ship offering to buy any farm equipment you have for a good price. There is always something interesting at these signal sources, and sometimes you luck into some serious cash depending on your loadout and chosen profession. Sooner or later though, you may find yourself in combat. All ships have some sort of defensive capability, though some aren't exactly built to win a fight. A viper combat ship would be a serious challenge for a hauler. It's a dangerous galaxy out there, so you'd best come prepared. That's where outfitting comes into play. Each ship has a number of components that can be upgraded for game-changing effects and abilities. Your weapons (called "hardpoints") are obviously what allow you to deal damage to other ships, and come in fixed, gimbaled (computer assisted), and turreted (auto-tracking) varieties. Lasers and beam weapons knock out shields, but kinetic weapons like multi-cannons and rockets chew ship hulls apart. Then you have full reign of under-the-hood upgrades, each of which has strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. You are limited in the modules you can install by your power plant, which has a rated mega-wattage, which you can't exceed or your ship will power down. Your frame shift drive, thrusters, weapons, shield generator, scanners.... EVERYTHING uses power, and different classes and ratings of modules allow for different benefits, like A-rated thrusters being lighter than their B-rated counterparts which allows for faster speed and tighter turning, while using significantly more power from you power plant. This can be slightly massaged by setting certain modules to have lower priority, for instance setting your cargo hatch and frame shift drive to priority 2 will only allow them to draw power when your hardpoints are retracted and not using power. Many skilled players build their ships to exceed the power rating of their power plant because they know how to set priority to ensure they can fly a ship with the absolute top-end gear. And once you're in combat, PvE takes on a whole new meaning. Every enemy is dangerous. Every enemy is clever, has a unique mix of equipment, and will target different parts of your ship. Will they try to get behind you to knock out your thrusters before you can do it to them? Will they destroy your windshield so you're forced to flee to a space station before the few precious minutes of air your life support system affords you runs out? Combat is a harrowing and nail-biting experience that feels awesome, and when you come out ahead in a tough fight, you feel like a total badass. The game's excellent audio, both for the ships and weapons, and the amazing orchestral score really sell it. Lastly, I need to talk about PowerPlay. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the game. It's a completely optional weekly turn-based metagame that actively pits player factions against each other. Essentially the backdrop is that there is a galactic conflict a-brewin'. There are ten factions, each vying for control. Each of those factions has an ethos, or a preferred method for each of the three primary turn activities: preparation, expansion, and control. Each week, players vote in-game on the systems adjacent to the control zone of their faction that they would like to attempt to expand to. These systems are then "prepped," often by players going to that system and either retrieving intelligence to bring back to their faction, or delivering information to that system to boost an intelligence network. Each faction is different. Some factions attempt to undermine local governments by bribing officials to publicly denounce them, others collect intel on how to successfully undermine the system's defenses. Next, a system that had enough "prep" at the end of the last turn is ready for expansion attempts, which involve players going to that system and completing more goals to attempt to bring the system to its heels. This can be anything from delivering/acquiring more intel or engaging in open conflict with system defense NPC's. Lastly, you have to fortify and hold the systems you've expanded to, as players from other factions may attempt to undermine that system. The point of all this? You earn Command Capital for your faction, which acts as the resource that is used for further expansion attempts, and keeps your faction running. Every week in real time, all the moves are calculated and the factions expand and contract according to the actions of the players. As you support your faction, you earn merits, which allow you to rank up within the faction, earning you more votes on which system to prep for, a weekly paycheck from the faction, and faction-specific perks and equipment like increased bounty values or cheaper repairs. It's an awesome meta-game and a lot of people are already participating. I joined Zachary Hudson, the despotic president of the galaxy. His ethos is to hit hard, hit fast, and keep hitting. For the Federation! So should you buy it? If you're thinking about it, I'd say yes. If the game appeals to you at all, then it's a solid buy. I played a lot of space sims back in the day on my old IBM Aptiva, and it's really nice to see renewed interest in the genre that really popularized and legitimized gaming a lot back in the day. If you can, get a HOTAS controller. I started playing with an Xbox controller and while the game was fun, it lacked immersion, and there are far too many controls to adequately map to a controller. With the X52, I have everything I need right at my fingertips, and I feel like a badass space captain. No matter how you choose how to play, there is a huge galaxy out there, and you can play as big or as small a part as you want. Maybe that's what this game does best of all.
