cuisinart8 wrote:Elite: Dangerous is on sale for about 20 bucks until the 17th, in case anyone was waiting for a sale for it. I know I was, but even at the reduced price, is it worth it? I like the looks of the pretties, but the game's gotten so much flak over the years. The "mixed" user rating doesn't inspire a lot of hope for me, but I know a lot of you guys have played the hell out of the game.
Got it for a similar price a while earlier. I clocked about forty hours in the game before giving up. The admittedly pretty cockpit and immersive bits and bobs couldn't keep me, and after mastering small scale smuggling I just couldn't find an excuse to keep going. Take everything below as
'this is how I experienced it for forty hours, and didn't expect it to change for another hundred'.
For a single player game, everything is empty, the grind is forever, and tons of things are just locked away. X3 isn't that much different, yet I played and enjoyed those games far more for some reason. The mission system is deeply flawed, I couldn't deal with how much time I would have to sacrifice for travel for pocket change pay, in order to grind my rank up to accept better missions. This is especially true when I don't even know how far a station I have to go to is from the star: it could be a minute of supercruise, or twenty! Travel is a chore after the first hundred jumps; between your jumps you scoop fuel and get interdicted once in a while by a chump AI with an absolutely ill-fitting name some juvenile person on Kickstarter gave them. Smuggling is a bit more exciting as it requires you to get familiar with real fast flight into the inexplicable letterbox station gates, as well as running silent, but it's marred by the fact that if your illicit cargo is mission-specific, you are not allowed to panic-eject it before a scan!
The ships available for a beginner are hideous, I understand they were going for the whole 'retro' feel, but the flying polygons and cube stations with hi-detail textures just don't do it for me. My Adder is pretty cool, because it at least looks like a run-down crappy RV instead of a wedge of steel. Hard to make it feel like home either, with the pennypinching cosmetic DLCs locking that option away from poor sods like me. Upgrades are mostly numeric, I never felt like any of those were a gamechanger, just that the better jumpdrive allowed me to see fewer stars, thankfully.
For an MMO, the only interaction with other players was cussing them out as they afk'd at a small station's landing pads, denying entry, and the wing system with friends is incredibly inconvenient to use. Even so, players are tough to find, I couldn't even become a proper pirate and had to settle for bounty hunting.
I was honestly trying to have fun without any prejudice, but after the first ten hours of 'wow I'm in space' factor the game just sputtered out for me.
Wonder where all the cool stuff is hiding.